An Episode of Remnants.

Episode Content Warnings

Please bear in mind that this work has content some listeners may find distressing, including themes of war, violence, and grief. This episode contains:

Violence and coercion

Recovering from serious injuries

Memory loss – retrograde amnesia

Depictions of dissociation

Descriptions of PTSD symptoms: panic attacks; dissociation; catatonia

Implications of financial abuse and exploitation

Discussions of use of sex as a coping mechanism

Mentions of use of alcohol as a coping mechanism

Mentions of other drug abuse (opium)

Violent murder

Mentions of blood

Existential suicidal ideation

Transcript

APPRENTICE
Is it about meaning, then?

SIR
Oh, you’re awake.

APPRENTICE
Yeah. The remnants, though. Is it about if people’s lives had meaning?

SIR
I am not sure I understand the question.

APPRENTICE
When we judge them, is it about the meaning of people’s lives? Like if they had enough meaning, is it about that?

SIR
Curious proposition. Can you elaborate?

APPRENTICE
Well. I don’t know, really. The jeweller you showed me, he was bad, but it was complicated. Harry Dhairya, he was… I don’t know. He seemed nice but he didn’t do much to help people or anything. Evelina, she seemed nice but she never had chance to do much that was meaningful.

SIR
Please explain what you mean by ‘meaningful’. You spoke of very different criteria in your assessment of each one.

APPRENTICE
Well, yeah. It’s like you said; they’re individual. So the judgements should be too.

SIR
Hmm. If that is so, then how can it be ‘about’ anything?

APPRENTICE
We’re here, aren’t we, we’re doing this?! So there must be something meaningful about it.

SIR
Was there meaning at all in Evelina’s life?

APPRENTICE
I– I don’t know what you mean?

SIR
You speak of this as though you are assessing people in regard of meeting some… divine purpose. Was there meaning in Evelina’s life, or not?

APPRENTICE
Of course there was meaning.

SIR
But you implied her life was not a meaningful one. Would you not think her brother might disagree? Her mother? The pilot from the barn?

APPRENTICE
I– I don’t–

SIR
And if meaning is achieved, good or bad, do you suppose that means a remnant ought to be re-shelved or discarded?

APPRENTICE
Re-shelved.

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
You said shelved before but just then you said re-shelved. Like they’ve been shelved before.

SIR
Ah. This again.

APPRENTICE
Why say it differently this time? What do you mean re-shelved, what is… what is this place?

SIR
It is the First and Last Place. I have already explained this, this time.

APPRENTICE
But what does that mean?

SIR
I think this is going to be unproductive.

APPRENTICE
What is?

SIR
You.

APPRENTICE
What do you mean?

SIR
This time around, you’ve been fearful but insolent. Violent combination. And that’s not all, there’s something… off. With you. Almost as though some part of you lingers. You’ve not strayed from me, though it’s been increasingly common in your last hundred or so iterations. This time you have hardly woken without my say so. And yet.

APPRENTICE
And yet what?

SIR
A moment.

A FAINT WHOOSH.

APPRENTICE
Sir? Where did you–

SIR
Here.

THE APPRENTICE GASPS IN SURPRISE

SOMETHING METAL CLATTERS ONTO THE GROUND

SIR
Take it.

APPRENTICE
What is it.

SIR
A remnant. Take it.

APPRENTICE
I don’t want to.

SIR
Take the remnant, Apprentice.

APPRENTICE
I don’t want to!

SIR
You lift the palette knife in your hand.

THE APPRENTICE INTERRUPTS. SIR SPEAKS OVER HIM.

APPRENTICE
I don’t– I can’t! Sir, please I won’t–

SIR
You feel the warm, worn wood of the handle–

THE APPRENTICE YELPS. SIR STILL SPEAKS OVER HIM.

SIR
–the cool steel of the joint that leads to the almost triangular blade. The end is rounded off, softened, but the edges are sharp–

THE APPRENTICE GASPS, IN PAIN OR HORROR. SIR IGNORES HIM.

SIR
— not enough to cut your fingers if you touch them, but if you were to…

SIR’S VOICE FADES INTO NOTHING AS THE APPRENTICE GIVES ANOTHER PANICKED YELP

WHOOSH. THE RUSH OF

Lucio wakes and wants to scream, but finds he can’t. Above him, lights. He’s swimming in sounds. The memories eke back. Fire outside. The building is collapsing. Trying to breathe and choking on the smoke and dust-thick air. The pain is fire, and it’s everywhere. His face, his limbs, his head. Relentless, aching, and he can’t scream, cannot open his mouth even to try.

People come, they speak but he cannot hear them, and he is aware in some distant kind of way of the pain being smothered, as flames by a blanket, and then the world is gone again.

It is like this for a long time. Later he will learn that it is months. In scraps and pieces, he remembers only pain, only the distant pale reflections of fire in the windows above his bed, the smell of disinfectant. Beyond it, things burning.

Mostly he cannot think, and what thoughts he has are loose and disconnected. He is sat behind the wall at the orphanage, hoping the other boys will forget he exists. He is making himself smaller and smaller so nobody will see. There is a gun in his hand. He is squirming in the rubble and he cannot see the sky.

He wakes, he sleeps, he drifts as though on a tide. Sometimes there is screaming and shouting. The smell of burned flesh.

Lucio wakes. The pain is there, but it’s swaddled away. He struggles to sit up, but it’s as though his limbs are hung with lead weights. He manages to lift an arm. It’s wrapped in a thick, heavy cast.

Tentatively, Lucio lets awareness spread through the rest of his body. The pain is there, but it’s far away, and he can stand to be in his body long enough to know all of his limbs are in casts. He cannot move. His attention turns to his mouth, then. His tongue twitches behind his teeth, feels harsh wire, sharp enough to cut his tongue.

His breath speeds up; he cannot open his mouth.

Somewhere in the horror of it, he falls asleep again.

WHOOSH

It is like emerging from a fog. The world is reconstructing itself around him. They play the radio sometimes in the canteen at the hospital, and they talk about trials, about horrors Lucio can barely conceive of. Thousands of people, tortured, starved, murdered. The world sounds cruel and strange, and every day doctors and nurses force him to try to go out and meet it.

He cannot reconcile this idea in his head. All he remembers is that he was a small boy at an orphanage, trying so hard not to exist, and even the edges of this idea are woollen when he tries to grasp at them. Everything else is gone.

At some point in the haze, he starts to draw. He finds he’s good at it. The nurses and the other patients compliment him. Mostly he draws them, going about their daily business. But sometimes he draws the things he thinks he might remember.

A low wall in courtyard. A field of flowers. The face of a woman he can’t quite place. There is a sadness to her expression, a mournfulness. He tries to but he can’t remember her smiling. Only like this.

When he’s well enough to leave the hospital, they tell him it’s time to go home, but he does not know where that is. He stays in Milan because there is nowhere else for him to go.

A charity finds him a little room in a shared house. It’s so small he can lay his palms flat on each of the side walls when he stands in the middle. It’s long enough for a little bed and a wooden stool at the end, which he keeps by the window.

After they move him in, he does not leave for weeks. He’s frightened he’ll forget where it is, that he’ll wake up somewhere new and unfamiliar. As soon as he starts to leave it, he can hardly stand to be inside his room at all, with its tiny wire bed and its uncomfortable stool and all of the nothing else that he owns.

So instead he sits out on the city streets and he draws passersby, and from time to time he sketches the face of the only person he remembers from before, her eyes closed, her head tilted, stars shining behind her.

‘She’s beautiful,’ says a woman, standing over him. Her hat is blocking the sun. ‘You’re the artist people have been telling me about?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Lucio.

The woman frowns. ‘Give that to me.’

Lucio hands her his notebook. She turns through the pages. Most of them are people he has seen on the streets. They’re fast, moving sketches. A man wipes off his daughter’s hand with a handkerchief. A boy stoops to pet a dog. Young lovers argue at the side of the canal. Sometimes Lucio sells the drawings, makes a few coins as he goes. Mostly he keeps them for himself.

‘You drew all of these?’ says the woman.

‘Yes.’

‘You have more?’

Lucio nods.

The woman smiles. She reaches into her linen jacket. ‘You drew this of my friend the other day, I think.’

He looks at the sketch. He recognises it at once. ‘Yes. By the canal. She was reading,’ he says. ‘But something caught her attention down the road.’ It was the recline of her neck that caught his eye, how it made her hair fall over her shoulder. Unusual, to let it hang so loose. She spotted him across the water, sketching. At first he was afraid that she would shout, but then she smiled. She walked down, crossed the bridge, came to see the drawing. Lucio gave it to her for a handful of coins.

‘She said she liked it,’ says Lucio.

‘It’s quite remarkable,’ says the woman. ‘I’d like you to come with me.’

WHOOSH

Lucio wakes up in his new bed, cutting off his own scream. He shrinks back against the pillows, blinking at the small lamp on his desk which he’d failed to turn out. For a horrible moment, he’s out of place, out of time. He rubs his eyes, swallowing hard. He wraps the sheets around himself and sits on the edge of the bed, gulping water from the jug left beside it, ignoring the glass. Water drips from his chin and onto the rug between his feet. He watches the fabric darken as it soaks in.

He wanders over to his new desk, touches the sketches he has already started in his large sketch pad. The pages are made of heavy paper, creamy white, soft under his finger tips.

Yesterday trickles back to him as his heart rate slows. Miss Bianca has bought all this for him. This new space, these new rooms. She has an interest in the arts, she says, and Lucio has a gift. In the corner of the room is an easel. Beside it, a set of paints in a wooden tray. Lucio trails his finger over the paper labels on the metal tubes, naming the colours.

He sits on the raised stool, and something in him. Shifts.

The paints are set on a low cabinet. He opens the drawers, inside finds brushes, tools, palette knives. Each one, he knows what they’re for. He knows what to do with them. He laughs delightedly.

WHOOSH

Lucio had hoped, in the beginning, that because he could remember how to paint, it might bring back more from his past. That rush of memory a nurse had mentioned to him years before now, one which he’d hunted for and never found. He doesn’t find it between the brush strokes, either.

Mostly he paints what Miss Bianca tells him. Portraits of her friends, her dogs, her children. He doesn’t mind, of course, but there is something he misses about sitting on the canal, sketching passersby. He stands out too much, now, in his fine clothes, with his polished cane Miss Bianca bought for him to use when he can’t bear weight on the screws in his legs for too long.

In his reflection, Lucio looks like a gentleman, and this seems to be what everyone else sees when they look at him, too. Nobody blinks when Miss Bianca takes him to fancy restaurants. The tailors don’t sniff when she takes him to have new suits cut. Still, he stares in the mirror. Is this what he is? A gentleman.

‘Well you’re clearly educated,’ says Miss Bianca. He’s the talk of all her friends.

‘Perhaps you’re a long-lost lord,’ one of them suggests, giggling.

Lucio wishes Miss Bianca had not told them he had no memory. When they look at him, he feels naked, despite the expensive suits. Even though there is money in his fine leather wallet which he can use to buy everyone drinks, it was Miss Bianca that put the money there, and everyone else seems to know it.

Sometimes as he’s walking through the city, he tries to take photographs in his mind. A woman stopping to check her headscarf and her lipstick in the window of a parked car. A boy inspecting his bicycle tyre, trying to find a puncture, his friend looming behind him, arms crossed. A little girl crying, wiping her nose on her mother’s skirt.

When he gets home, he paints them. He keeps them stored behind his commissions so Miss Bianca will not see them when she breezes in and out of his rooms. He shows them to nobody except himself.

In the small hours of the morning, when the light is cold and he has not yet gone to bed, wine drunk and with a head already throbbing, he pulls them out, lines the against the wall, and stares at them from where he lies curled on his side on his mattress. These little moments are caught forever, not just the image, like in a photograph, but the feeling of the moment, too.

Amidst these frozen moments, four, five, six canvases of the face of the woman peering down at him in his memory. Lucio calls her mother. In one image he tried to paint her skin but he hated so much that he almost tore the thing to shreds, so he always paints her in shades of grey, the sky dark and rich behind it, with dozens of golden stars.

WHOOSH

There is a knock on Lucio’s door. He’d been sleeping on the rug, laid out flat. So many hours hunched over hurts his back. The only thing he’s found that helps is lying out as flat as he can. The best place for it is the rug.

The knocking comes again.

Lucio gathers himself up, pulls his dressing gown on, and opens the door. It’s Miss Bianca.

‘Oh, are you well, Lucio?’

He blinks at her. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were coming today,’ he says. He starts moving things around. He keeps the space clean and tidy, usually, but he painted for 18 hours straight, barely stopping for water and food, let alone to organise himself.

‘She’s beautiful,’ says a voice Lucio does not recognise. His attention snaps around.

A young man is staring at the painting on Lucio’s easel. It’s the woman from his memory, under her sky.

‘Thank you,’ says Lucio.

‘Santa Maria del Fiore?’ he asks, inquisitively.

It feels as though the floor has collapsed under Lucio’s feet. ‘What? What was that?’

‘Your painting, that’s who it is, isn’t it?’

Lucio shakes his head. ‘You know this woman?’

The man smiles oddly. ‘Why, yes, I do? I suppose? As well as one can.’

‘Who is she?’ asks Lucio, fiercely.

‘Lucio!’ Miss Bianca gasps, hand on her chest in horror.

The young man’s expression falters, but his smile doesn’t entirely break. ‘Mary, mother of Christ? This is the statue of her in the cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore, Saint Mary of the Flowers, in Florence, isn’t it?’

Lucio sinks down onto the edge of the bed. He’s breathing fast and shallow. His heart is in his throat.

The other people in the room are speaking but he can’t hear them over the ringing in his ears. ‘You need to go,’ he says. They try to speak to him again. ‘You have to leave!’

They do.

Lucio’s whole body is shaking, the tension making his muscles scream. He rocks gently back and forth on the rug, trying and failing to think about what happened, about why he feels so wretched, and manages only to sob until he falls asleep.

WHOOSH

Lucio is so stiff it takes him a whole hour to climb from the floor into his bed. He stays there until the sun begins to set, unwilling and unable to move. Miss Bianca comes to visit. She collects some of the portraits he’s finished, and compliments the secret art he had hidden behind them.

‘You should hold an exhibit,’ she says.

Lucio doesn’t reply. He can’t. Miss Bianca strokes his hair, and leaves him alone.

Finally, he can convince himself to be out of bed for longer than it takes to relieve himself. He washes, moaning in pain as he moves, the weeks of inertia a rough punishment on each fragile, bolted together part of him.

Afterwards, he bundles himself up and sits by the fire in his little room, with a whole bottle of brandy.

There’s a knock at the door.

‘Come in,’ he calls.

The door opens.

‘Sorry to trouble you.’

It is not Miss Bianca’s voice. Lucio is too stiff and washed out to care.

‘Mary mother of Christ?’ says the man.

Lucio looks up. ‘Yes.’

The man is staring him down, with his dark eyes. There is something off about him. Had he looked this way when he visited with Miss Bianca? Lucio is too tired to think too hard about it. He looks back at the fire.

‘Bianca told me about your shell shock.’

Lucio laughs a single note.

‘Do you want to know what I think?’ says the man.

‘No.’ says Lucio.

‘Okay then,’ says the man. ‘I would like you to paint me.’

Lucio looks up. ‘Fine. Come back tomorrow. Miss Bianca will discuss—’

‘I would like to discuss my own fees with you. In private. This is a very specific request. You may wish to ask for more than usual, and I would also offer extra in the form of… discretion.’

Lucio frowns. ‘Who do you want me to keep this from?’

‘Everyone. I should like this painting for myself, that’s all.’

Lucio shakes his head. ‘Miss Bianca comes as she pleases, she owns the place, I can’t very well shut her out of it.’

The man smiles. ‘You shall paint me at my own apartment. It’s quite charming, and the light is good, I’m sure you’ll agree when you see it. I’ll buy you new supples so Bianca won’t know anything is missing.’

Lucio frowns deeper. ‘What do you want me to paint?’

The man smiles wide. ‘Me.’

Lucio narrows his eyes. ‘Why such secrecy?’

‘Ah. That’s the thing. I should like you to paint me and nothing else. Just me. All of me.’

Lucio turns this over in his mind for a moment. ‘You mean… disrobed?’

‘Yes,’ says the man.

Lucio sits up. He looks the man up and down, tries to picture him naked. It is shock how easily the image comes to him. How little apprehension he feels.

‘What do you make of my proposal?’ asks the man.

Lucio nods. ‘I should know your name, first.’

The man smiles. ‘Call me Perry,’ he says.

WHOOSH.

Lucio meets Perry at his apartment every three days. When he arrives, he prepares Lucio a drink, wearing only his robe. He chatters as he does this, speaking about his day, about his life. He’s an art collector, or he’s establishing himself as one. He only recently come into the money, he says. And then, still talking, as though it is as natural as anything, he slips out of his robe, and lays down on the chaise in the middle of the drawing room.

Lucio sits at his canvas, quiet. When Perry has laid himself out, Lucio stands, moves his arms and legs into the positions they are supposed to be in. Perry watches him intently, dark eyes always full of questions he does not ask.

When Lucio touches Perry’s skin, he breathes more quickly.

Painting Perry, Lucio learns more about him than their conversation teaches him. He learns the places Perry holds tension, the slope of his inner thigh, the precise lay of the hair on his groin. In his clothes, when he talks, Perry seems a gentleman, but, naked he’s something else. Not a stitch on him, no clue to who he is, where he’s come from. He has as little of a past as Lucio himself.

After the month is up, the portrait is done. Lucio tells him so.

Perry gets up, puts on his robe, and comes to look at it. He stares for a long time, then he turns to Lucio, puts his hands on his jaw. With his wide, coffee coloured eyes, he stares into Lucio.

‘Thank you,’ he says. He leans close, and kisses him hard and slow.

Lucio huffs in surprise at first, but then pulls Perry into his lap. They fuck on the chaise Lucio has been painting him on, Lucio positioning Perry beneath him, posing him, touching the skin he’s been eking brushstroke by brushstroke from the canvas. He wants to bite him, to swallow him whole.

Perry lets himself be ravished, lets Lucio plant kisses over every inch of him.

When they’re done, they lie sweating, panting on the ground beside the chaise.

‘Who are you?’ says Lucio.

‘I told you,’ says Perry. ‘I’m Perry.’

Lucio laughs. ‘And I’m Lucio.’

Perry smiles crookedly. ‘You understand.’

Lucio snatches his gaze away, suddenly feeling small and far away despite the man sprawled naked next to him.

WHOOSH

Miss Bianca’s friends have spread the word about Lucio’s skill as a portrait artist. He has more and more customers, paying higher and higher rates. He’s running out of space in his rooms to keep all of his works in progress, so Miss Bianca hires him a studio space downtown. Lucio starts to instruct strict rules; the clients are not to come to his rooms, and he does not go to theirs. He paints them only in the studio.

Perry flits at the edges of Lucio’s life.. He hears he’s got married and then a year later that he’s fathered a child. None of this is much of a surprise to Lucio, nor is it exactly his expectation. He expects nothing of Perry, and Perry seems to revel in it.

When he’s in Milan, he calls at Lucio’s apartment. He does not call ahead, never lets Lucio know that he will be in town. He rings the bell in the early hours and stands in the street, silent, looking up at the window, waiting for Lucio to pull the curtain back, look down and see him there.

Sometimes he arrives drunk, others high on opium. Always he slams wordlessly into Lucio’s body in the hallway, kissing him deep and hungry, and Lucio kisses him back with just as much force.

It is invigorating, strange, casts a new light on what Lucio thought he knew of himself, of Perry, of the world. When he goes out with Miss Bianca he notices people noticing him, now. He sits in front of the mirror naked, staring at himself. Is his face a handsome face? Is that why they look at him as they do? What is the meaning in it, if there is a meaning in it at all?

Sometimes he goes with other people back to their apartments. They run their hands all over him, but they are not touching him to learn him. Sometimes he feels their fingers hesitate on the scars he’s covered in, on his thighs, on his chest, the puckered burn scars on his stomach, the white line on the underside of his jaw.

Heart pounding in his chest, he looks down at each enraptured face and wonders what they see when they look at him.

Lucio fucks them and he leaves, and it thrills him to do it. Sometimes when he gets home, he sketches them before he goes to sleep.

He tries to draw them as his hands remember them, rather than trying to render them accurately like he would in a portrait. This isn’t about representing their bodies, though they are always on full display in the sketches. It is about something else. Trying to get beneath the surface. He knows nothing about them, not really, and tries not to sleep with the same person twice. These sketches are like those moments, bottled. All the distortions of memory and pleasure rendered neatly on the page.

An older woman, a windowed countess, sits smoking in her bed as he dresses again to leave. He never stays the night.

‘Was it your father who put out cigarettes on your belly?’ the woman asks.

Lucio looks at her, aghast. He runs his hands over the whorls on his stomach. He had assumed that, like everything else, they’d happened when the building fell on him during the war. ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

The woman frowns. ‘How curious,’ she says.

Lucio shakes his head.

When he gets home it’s almost dawn. He stands in front of the mirror, runs his hand over his stomach, feeling each of the marks left there. He takes his box of cigarettes out of his coat. He rarely smokes himself, but it’s always good to have them on hand to seduce a pretty stranger.

He lights up. He takes a few drags, then lowers the cigarette to the side of his naval. He can feel his heart thrumming. A sweat breaks on his back. He feels the heat of the cigarette’s cherry even an inch from his skin. He holds it there, feeling panic mount inside of him.

He throws the cigarette out of the window and gulps the cool night air. Yes, he thinks. Someone burned him that way. He does not know who, he does not know how, but it happened.

WHOOSH

Miss Bianca introduces Lady Charlotte Chatterly in the spring. Her accent reminds Lucio of Perry, somehow, but nothing else about her does. She comes to his studio, as she’s supposed to, and he paints her.

The evening after their second session, though, there is a ring on Lucio’s doorbell.

He looks down. It’s Lady Charlotte. There is a man standing beside her.

‘I don’t see clients at my house,’ says Lucio.

Lady Charlotte smiles. The man beside her does not. ‘I’m not just a client, Lucio. I should like to be your friend.’

There is something in her manner which unsettles Lucio. He pulls on his shirt and grabs his cane. He’s about to suggest they walk down the canal, but the moment he opens the door, the man accompanying Lady Charlotte shoves Lucio back against the wall. The breath is shoved out of him at once.

‘Forgive my companion,’ says Lady Charlotte. ‘Elio’s brilliant at what he does, but he’s never been very temperate, I’m afraid, if you get in the way of what he wants.’

‘What does he want?’ Lucio gasps, desperately.

‘To get into your apartment, I’m afraid. I’m looking for someone, you see,’ says Lady Charlotte. She follows Elio up the stairs. It is a moment before Lucio is able to follow them.

‘There’s nobody in here.’

‘Nobody living,’ says Lady Charlotte.

Elio is moving paintings aside. He’s clearly looking for something. Finally, he yanks one of the sketchbooks out from under Lucio’s bed.

‘Those are private,’ he says.

Elio is flicking through the pages, regardless. He raises an eyebrow, looks up, looks Lucio dead in the eye.

He hands Lady Charlotte the book. Lady Charlotte takes it, gasping softly. ‘Oh my. It’s quite a likeness.’

Lucio snatches the book back. It’s open on his last sketch of Perry.

‘Except for the eyes of course,’ says Lady Charlotte. ‘But he never does seem quite able to keep all of that straight. I suppose when you’ve that many identities, it’s easy to lose track of who is who.’

‘I’ve not hurt him,’ says Lucio.

Lady Charlotte smiles indulgently. ‘Has he hurt you?’

Lucio opens his mouth, closes it again. He clears his throat. ‘You know him.’

Lady Charlotte smiles even wider. ‘Yes. This is my young friend. You might know him as Perry Wiseman, or Theodore du Perier. Those are the names he usually adopts in the circles you move at the edge of. When I knew him, he was Edward Pocket.’

Lucio shakes his head. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Lady Charlotte sighs. ‘Listen, Lucio, I hear you have a problem. I’m going to help you fix it, if you’ll let me. As soon as my good man Elio has tracked down my dear friend Mr Pocket, I shall help you find out who you are.’

Lucio gapes at her. ‘What?’

‘Elio’s a private detective, you see. Remarkable at his job, though he’s been called unorthodox. That is all to his advantage, in my opinion.’

Lucio shakes his head. He traces the edges of the sketch of Perry. ‘What do you want with him?’

Lady Charlotte smiles again, but it’s different this time, there’s nastiness at the edges. ‘I just want to have a little chat with him, that’s all.’

WHOOSH

Lucio does not see Perry for months after he turned down Lady Charlotte’s offer.

When he comes, he arrives as he always does, in the dead of night, wide eyed, looking up from the street below. Lucio lets him inside, lets him kiss him. They tumble their way upstairs, already half way out of their clothes.

Perry is sticky with sweat from walking in the summer heat. Lucio runs his hands all over him, feeling every notch, every scar. Perry, as he always does, gasps and moans at these feather light ministrations across every inch of him, more so even than he moans when Lucio fucks him.

‘Why do you like this so much?’ Lucio asks, in a whisper.

Perry’s eyes snap open, shocked that Lucio has spoken. ‘You’re good at it. Don’t stop.’

‘I’m just touching you, there’s nothing… it’s just my fingers on your skin, it shouldn’t be erotic, but it is. For you. You like this. Why?’

Perry shakes his head. He sits up, turns away, fishes around in his abandoned trousers for his cigarettes. He does not speak again until he’s halfway through one. ‘You don’t usually do this,’ he says. You’re normally better than this. You’re being remarkably dull.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

Perry gets up. He looks at the paintings. ‘There’s a woman I know. You may have met her, she comes to Milan often on business. She sells fake paintings. Forgeries. She paints them all herself, she’s marvellous at it, too. I think I’ve spied a piece of hers in a museum. The thing with her, you see, is she can’t resist these little flourishes. She forces herself into those paintings, subconsciously, I think, but she does. Hardly anyone can see it, but she’s in there, screaming out at me to be noticed.

‘The great tragedy of it is that I think more than anything she wants someone to spot it. She wants someone to look the painting and see it is a fake. Do you know why?’

Lucio is quiet for a moment. He studies the slope of Perry’s back, the old scars across his buttocks, pale, thin, barely visible. ‘You like it because I see you.’

Perry’s attention snaps onto Lucio at once. ‘You know what I see in your work?’

Lucio shakes his head.

‘Everything you paint is a self-portrait. You show up to a client and you ask them to tell you who you are, and that’s what you paint. An imagined life, caught on the canvas. Every stroke asking desperately, again and again, who am I? Each one unable to answer. It brings this richness, this energy to everything you make. It’s why your work has such life. It’s also pathetic.’

‘Who am I?’

Perry scoffs. ‘You’re nobody. Just like me.’

‘Someone told me you were Edward Pocket, actually,’ says Lucio. He feels small and hurt, like a kicked dog.

Perry turns. His expression is utterly unreadable. ‘Who?’

‘Lady Charlotte Chatterly,’ says Lucio, without pause.

Perry crosses the room. He takes Lucio’s jaw in his hand, forcing him to look up at his face.

Lucio’s body responds before he has time to think, yanking Perry’s grip aside and shoving him backwards. Perry staggers, his heels knocking into the canvases stacked against Lucio’s walls. Lucio is breathing fast and heavy. His body feels like a live wire. It’s frightening.

Perry moves to shove Lucio aside, but Lucio can’t let him. He grabs him by the hair and throws him onto the floor. He strikes it with a sickening slap. When he looks up, there’s blood on his chin. He’s shimmying on the ground now, cowering back and away from Lucio.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Lucio.

Perry scrambles upright, his back against the wall. Lucio, panicking, steps closer, breathing fast, hands shaking.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ he begins, but the words are cut off.

The air is whooshed out of him. Both he and Perry look down.

Perry’s hand is clasped around the handle of a palette knife, which he has plunged up into the bottom Lucio’s ribcage. He coughs and sprays Perry’s face with blood.

‘Fuck,’ Perry hisses. ‘Oh, fucking fuck.’

Lucio staggers back, knocking the canvas down. He collapses back onto the bed, still damp with sweat. He pulls the knife out. Every breath is agony. His vision is clouding at the edges. He’s aware of Perry’s voice, but he doesn’t know what he’s saying. He is sitting on the cobblestones behind a low wall, hoping the other boys will not notice he exists.

WHOOSH.

WHOOSH. BUT IT DISTORTS, SHIFTING, CHANGING.

THE APPRENTICE IS PANTING

APPRENTICE
I know what I’m doing here.

SIR
I see.

APPRENTICE
Perry. The murderer. The liar. I’m him, aren’t I?

SIR
Ah, there you are.

APPRENTICE
I killed him, and I– mmhhh, fuck! My head.

SIR
Yes indeed.

APPRENTICE
You’re keeping me here to punish me.

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
You– you hurt me and you– AH! — you wipe my memory, over and over, but I— I– I remember.

SIR
Apprentice, you do not–

APPRENTICE
NO!

A SOUND OF EFFORT. RUNNING.

SIR
Where are you going?!

APPRENTICE
It’s here, somewhere, it’s here. It has to be here.

WIND HOWLS. FOOTSTEPS SLOW.

SIR
(exasperated)
Where are you going?

APPRENTICE
It’s here.

THE WIND IS HOWLING SO LOUDLY NOW. A FEW FOOTSTEPS. THE APPRENTICE TRIES TO CATCH HIS BREATH.

APPRENTICE
(whispering)
This is enough. I’ve had enough. Discard me.

SIR
You misunderstand!

APPRENTICE
I’m bad, I’m wrong! Discard me! DISCARD ME!

SIR
NO!

THE APPRENTICE GASPS. A WHOOSH OF AIR, CLOTHES FLAPPING IN THE WIND.

SIR
What have you done?!
Fool, you fool!

QUIET WHOOSH. THE SOUND OF FLAMES.

A HISS, LIKE SAND RUNNING THROUGH FINGERS.

SCAMPERING, SCRABBLING SOUNDS

SIR
I KNOW.

SCAMPERING STOPS.

SOMETHING THUDS ONTO THE GROUND.

SIR
There now. No need to worry. Much rest will be needed, but you will be well again. And then we will begin. Yes. We will begin again. This can be remedied.

It will just take…

Yes.

It will just take.

END

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