Counting the Stars

  The strange thing was that during those days the loquacious Dr Philoctetes barely spoke at all, except to murmur ‘Goo-ood’ or ‘Excellent’ whenever he took a pulse, measured a fever, or spooned out a new decoction. He dominated the sickroom with the stripped-down urgency of a wrestler who has just perfected a new throw. Dr Philoctetes was going to outwit death, get him off balance and bring him to the ground.

  Catullus needed a champion. Death was very close. He knew it with mathematical certainty, and tried to say so aloud – math-e-mat-i-cal – because he needed to tell Dr Philoctetes that there was an equation which would reveal how Death and Life belonged to each other. It could all be demonstrated in a few lines, as sweet as a nut. But he couldn’t speak; he couldn’t even lift a hand. He was completely helpless and all he could hear was the gods muttering in his ears. Just then he had another revelation. Poetry and mathematics were the same thing. It was only human beings who made different words for them. When you understood it properly, everything was connected and belonged together in a pattern like the patterns of the stars. If Dr Philoctetes knew that, then he’d be able to heal anything. But no revelation could get past Catullus’ swollen tongue, and all Dr Philoctetes said was, ‘Don’t try to talk.’

  Death was in the knife that turned in his chest each time he breathed. Death was there in the pounding of his heart while he coughed. Death was in the sweat that soaked his sheets, the dizziness that swam over him when he moved his head, and the nausea he felt for everything but plain water.

  ‘Has the family been sent for?’ he heard Dr Philoctetes ask Lucius one night.

  ‘His father is being kept informed. A letter was sent to him two days ago.’

  He won’t come, thought Catullus. He won’t come because I don’t want him here. He’ll know that. His voice is too loud. He hurts my head when he says, ‘Well, my boy,’ and waits for an answer. I’ve never known the right answer to ‘Well, my boy.’ He’s afraid of illness. He was afraid of Mother when she was dying. Maybe he said, ‘Well, my girl,’ and she didn’t answer.

  His head hurt, even though his father was not there. Lucius must have written the letter to his father without telling him. He must have thought it was his duty.

  If I die, my father will be sad. He had to piece his thoughts together from a hot, confused place at the back of his head. But I don’t want him here. Why don’t I want him here? He’ll be sad if I die, so why is he never happy that I’m alive?

  For a while death waited to take him away, as if Catullus had been sold to death like a slave at market, naked as the day he was born. He lay in the familiar bedroom, on the clean sheets that Lucius kept changing day and night. But he was also slipping away into the shadows. He was in the shadow of the doorway. He was high up above his own bed, watching his own struggle as the gods watch the struggles of men. How puny he looked. His body was a husk. Why go back to it, when it was so easy to look down, free from pain?

  Without a doubt it was Dr Philoctetes who pulled him back. It hurt to re-enter his own weak, suffering flesh. He hated the doctor and tried to escape into the darkness again, away from the hands pummelling his chest, lifting him up, forcing him to take medicine. There were poultices strapped to him that burned and kept him in his body. He was trapped. And there was Lucius on the other side of the bed, propping more pillows under him, rolling him sideways to wash him with long strokes of a warm sponge that smelled of eucalyptus. Lucius carried away his shit and piss and vomit, and the doctor carried away the vessel of blood he’d taken from Catullus’ arm at the height of the fever. His body didn’t belong to him any more. He let it go, and other people looked after it.

  He thought that the opposite wall had become a tablet on which a long stylus was writing all by itself. What it wrote was better than the best lines he’d ever composed, but when he tried to read them out to Lucius, no words came. The stylus froze, teasingly, and then the writing began again. As fast as the letters formed, they melted into the wax of the wall.

  The day came when he was better. No one else spotted it, but he knew. He was lying on his back, and Lucius must have taken away some of his pillows, because he was looking at the ceiling. There was no sound, but there was light. Very slowly, with great effort, he turned his head towards the source of the light. His head still hurt, but not as much, and he didn’t become dizzy. He rested for a while, then moved again. This time he saw the candle flame, burning steadily upright. Behind the flame there was Lucius, slumped sideways on his stool, his head propped against the wall. He blinked, and Lucius’ face dazzled.

  He remembered everything. Clodia’s eyes.

  I’ve been ill, he thought carefully. I’ve been ill for a long time.

  He was better, he knew it. His fever was gone. He felt happiness rise in him, so intense that the only word for it was ‘bliss’. He must have muttered something because the next moment Lucius snapped awake.

  ‘What? What’s that?’

  But Catullus couldn’t answer. He was too weak. He just gazed at Lucius as the anxious eyes in the lined face came closer, hanging over him, reading him. He wanted to smile but it was beyond him.

  ‘You’re awake?’ asked Lucius, and his voice sounded frightened. A hand came down and touched Catullus’ forehead. Then the face did something strange. It twisted, and the eyes almost disappeared in a fold of lines. A harsh coughing sound came from him.

  He thinks I’m dead, thought Catullus. He wanted to make a sign, lift a finger, smile, do something to show Lucius that he was still there; but he couldn’t stir. Lucius swung the candle up, and Catullus’ eyes must have shown that he was alive. The light hurt, and he blinked. He felt Lucius seize his hand. He wanted to speak but the distance between them was still too wide to be crossed. But he could move a finger now. If he summoned up all his energy he could move his hand a little inside Lucius’. And then Lucius was kissing his hand all over.

  He must have fallen asleep again. When he woke something had shifted decisively. Dr Philoctetes was there. He held out a drinking vessel with a long silver spout. Catullus swallowed a little: it was wine and water mixed. Dr Philoctetes gave him a little more and then Lucius bent over with a sponge soaked in water and moistened his lips.

  I can do that for myself, Catullus thought. Slowly he moved his tongue, and licked his lips. They felt dry and cracked. Lucius applied the sponge again.

  He’d be able to speak to them now. They weren’t far away on the opposite shore of a wide river. They were with him, in the same room, and time wasn’t slipping about any more. No, it would move only in one direction now, creeping slowly forwards. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his ragtag of visions fade.

  ‘I’m better,’ he said.

  He has had a letter from his father, welcoming news of his recovery. There are only two sentences in it that seem at all personal.

  ‘Remember, my son, not to usurp my place as your father. I am counting on you to demonstrate filial respect by outliving me.’

  He read that sentence many times, and it still seemed possible that his father had made a joke, a stiff, creaking joke perhaps, but a joke nevertheless. He rolled up the letter carefully, and put it away.

  This is the first day he’s sat at his desk. He still can’t recall a single line that the stylus wrote on the wall while he was ill, but he does remember something. The poem wants to hide from him. As soon as he tries to look at it directly, it vanishes. It’s to do with Clodia and her sparrow.

  He buried Clodia’s sparrow, but he left Clodia sitting on the floor. His girl. She needed him, and he didn’t help her. It was a moment that wouldn’t come again. Clodia grieving, Clodia alone and looking for consolation. She’d even sent for him. What a chance that could have been if he’d stayed there with her, instead of wanting to get away. Yes, he’d buried the sparrow, but his offer to do so had been a pretext. Really, he’d wanted to escape from her red, swollen eyes and the black cloud of grief that had swallowed her.

  All the things that he hated about h
er had crowded the Clodia he loved out of his mind. Now he remembered her, sitting in the little courtyard of Manlius’ villa while her sparrow hopped in and out of her lap, pecking up crumbs of the honey-cake that Clodia scattered for him.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid he’ll fly away?’ he asked.

  ‘He won’t fly away. He knows I love him.’

  It sounded so simple; so gentle. How his friends would laugh if he said that Clodia Metelli was gentle, in her secret self. They thought she was as hard as she was gorgeous. He was deluding himself while she manipulated him. She was never going to give up her status or her husband. She was playing with Catullus, couldn’t he see that?

  ‘He won’t fly away. He knows I love him.’

  He’s got to write about Clodia and her sparrow. He can’t write about her without finding that she’s in his heart again, folded away and nestling there. He hears her words so clearly, and sees her red eyes on the day the sparrow died; the day when he didn’t know how to comfort her. He’s got to write about her, but not as Princess of the Palatine, calculating sex goddess, or imperious mistress. Not as a lady lapped in Koan silk, not as a whore dancing for cash and attention.

  She sits on the floor with her hair tangled and her face bare. She has torn her tunic in grief. Her dead sparrow lies in her lap. That’s what he wants. He can begin in the high style, but then bring it down, as the grey, intimate light of dawn replaces the flare of torches. Only the simplest words fit her now: mea puella. My girl.

  Mourn, all goddesses of love, and love’s children

  on earth and in the heavens, put on mourning,

  for my girl’s sparrow lies dead

  my girl’s sweet sparrow, her darling

  for whom she’d have torn out her own eyes

  and left herself blinded;

  He was her honey-familiar, he knew her

  as a child knows its mother,

  and as a child lives at his mother’s skirts

  he hopped and peeped this way and that

  chirruping only for her.

  But now he hops and peeps by way of shadows

  into that darkness which returns nothing,

  dark devouring death

  has torn our small sparrow from us

  beautiful as he was.

  Poor little pipsqueak! – and now my girl’s eyes

  are red with weeping, almost blind

  with what death has done.

  … flendo turgiduli rubent ocelli… It’s finished. He sits back. There he is, Clodia’s little sparrow, hopping away into the dusk of death’s shadow, pecking this way and that, hoppity-hopping with a sparrow’s small concentrated cheerfulness. He cheeps as if Clodia can still hear him. He doesn’t know that death’s path has already closed up behind him.

  Enough. He rubs his eyes to wipe away the sight of the bird. He’s still so weak that writing drags the guts out of him. He leans forward, and rests his head on his folded arms.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  It’s Lucius, coming up swiftly behind him.

  ‘I’m fine. Just resting.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be trying to write. You need complete peace. A change of scene. Remember what Dr Philoctetes said. You must accept that a full recovery takes time. You have to recuperate properly, if you want to root out the disease rather than leave the seeds of it dormant in the system.’

  ‘Yes, I know, Lucius. I’ve heard quite enough of Dr Philoctetes and his mixed metaphors. Don’t fuss.’

  Even as he speaks, he remembers something else Dr Philoctetes said: ‘After an illness of this type, irritability is a regrettable but alas an all-too-common – indeed an unwelcome but yet unavoidable – symptom of a particular stage in the relationship between our patient and his malady. Or, as I should say, his recovery.’

  The double-barrelled adjectives were back in force. He really must be getting better. And so Dr Philoctetes had been proved right: he’d just snapped at Lucius, who would give the blood out of his body for either of his boys.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lucius. I’m tired and it makes me cross.’

  ‘Just think how delighted your brother would be if you went out to Bithynia to visit him,’ says Lucius, striking while the iron is hot. ‘The voyage would do you good, too. Dr Philoctetes was talking about the beneficial effects of sea air.’

  ‘I tried sea air at Baiae, and look where it got me.’

  ‘It wasn’t the air that did you harm,’ says Lucius.

  ‘Have there been any messages for me?’

  ‘There’ve been inquiries all morning. Gaius Licinius Calvus called, but when I told him you were writing he told me not to announce him. Two more baskets of fruit from the Camerii. Oh, and a slave came from the Metelli house.’

  ‘From the Metelli? Who?’

  ‘No one we know. He wouldn’t leave a message. Wanted to speak to you but I told him you weren’t to be disturbed.’

  ‘Lucius, you know that’s not what we agreed –’

  ‘When a child puts his hand in the fire, and gets burnt, he doesn’t do it twice.’

  ‘I may have been ill, Lucius, but I haven’t regressed to childhood. You’d like us both tucked up in our cosy beds before sunset, wouldn’t you? Me first, and then Marcus because he’s older. It was perfect then, wasn’t it? – go on, admit it, you don’t have to pretend with me.’

  ‘At least you were safe. But “perfect”? I don’t know.’ Lucius stares down the years, his face clouded.

  What had he wanted, thinks Catullus suddenly, wanted and never had? Lucius had never married, although of course he’d had women, discreetly, none of them lasting very long. No wife, and no children either: only his boys. He didn’t approve of Clodia.

  ‘I did my best,’ says Lucius at last, slowly and a little heavily. ‘I promised your mother I’d stay with you.’

  ‘Did you?’ Everything that Catullus has believed about his own past shifts slightly, as if there’s been an almost imperceptible earth tremor. He’s always thought that Lucius grew into the family like a graft to a living tree. But perhaps it hadn’t been inevitable. His mother had asked Lucius to stay with her children. Had she not trusted his father to love them? ‘Did she ask you that when she was dying?’

  ‘Yes, when she knew it. No one else was by. We were alone.’

  He says those three words, and Catullus knows. We were alone. Alone, but not alone, because with Catullus’ mother Lucius was ‘we’ not ‘I’.

  And he’d never known it. Never even begun to guess it. He almost doesn’t know how to begin to feel. Affronted – curious – No. Stop all that. Leave Lucius with his three words. Say nothing.

  ‘Listen, Lucius, if anyone else comes from the Metelli house – anyone – they’re to be admitted. I want to see them.’

  Ten

  Even before he hears the news, he realizes that something big has happened. Knots of people are gathering around the shops outside the Basilica Sempronia. They’re not even looking at the displays. Passers-by lock on to the clusters like bees joining a swarm. Someone brushes against him, and apologizes.

  ‘Oh – I didn’t expect to see you out and about. I’d heard you were ill. Good to see that you’ve recovered.’ But the look doesn’t match the words. A furtive, appraising head-to-toe sweep, and a nervous flash of dazzling teeth.

  ‘What’s up, Egnatius?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’

  ‘Evidently not, since I’m asking you.’

  ‘The word is, Metellus Celer has been taken ill, suddenly. Very ill.’ Egnatius pauses theatrically for the reaction. A punch of feeling hits Catullus’ stomach. Metellus Celer is a pillar, as tough as they come. Men like him don’t fall sick.

  ‘Who says so?’

  ‘I heard it from Arrius.’

  ‘Since when has he been worth listening to? H’Arrius doesn’t h’even know where ’is h’aitches h’are.’

  ‘He was at the Clivus Victoriae this morning, just by chance, to pay his respects. He had the news from the Metelli st
eward himself. The whole household’s devastated.’

  Catullus glances around. Faces are tense, excited and fearful. The bad news is flying from mouth to mouth, like dust in the bitter January wind.

  ‘And he was seen in perfect health at the Senate yesterday,’ adds Egnatius. In case Catullus hasn’t got the point, he adds with heavy emphasis, ‘From the Forum to death’s door in less than twelve hours, that’s what they’re saying.’

  Catullus pulls his cloak more closely around him. How he dislikes this man, with his teeth as white as a pipe-clayed toga, and his habit of flashing them into a grin on every occasion, just so no one misses the sight. White flash: saliva spray: white flash again. Someone’s mother has just died: grin. Best friend loses a fortune when his ships go down: grin.

  ‘I see you’re still following the old Spanish custom of swilling your mouth out with urine, Egnatius. It certainly whitens the teeth – but perhaps it doesn’t do as much for the breath.’

  Egnatius’ face mottles with temper. ‘Don’t blame the messenger, my dear boy, just because you don’t like the message. Our Clodia’s tearing her hair out, naturally.’

  ‘Don’t call her that,’ he snaps.

  ‘No offence meant, old chap, as you know it’s just an affectionate little soubriquet we all use.’

  Catullus fights down his temper. Don’t let this buffoon get under your skin, for fuck’s sake. ‘What kind of illness is it?’

  ‘Who knows?’ says Egnatius dramatically. ‘Illnesses like this, which come on so very unexpectedly, are always alarming – don’t you think? Especially when the victim – the patient, I mean – is well known to be as strong as an ox. Perhaps it’s something he ate.’

  ‘Food poisoning wouldn’t cause this kind of panic, Egnatius. It must be something more serious.’

  ‘I don’t believe I mentioned food poisoning.’ Egnatius raises his eyebrows and flashes another smile. No doubt he imagines that he looks the perfect man-about-town, with his carefully draped toga and nicely curled fringe. Such lovely thick hair. No doubt he washes that in piss as well. ‘But don’t take my word for it. Ask around.’