weathered. The shops looked even more out of place, like stalls set up around a beached, dying whale, but they had become integral to its structure. Red and purple graffiti tags looped across the remaining stone of the surface. In fact, almost every spare inch, to a height of around seven feet, was filled with names and pictures. Above the graffiti, the Colosseum began properly: brown and crumbly as tilled soil. It looked like a breeze would damage it; as though a heavy wind might redistribute two thousand years of history as dust across the old city around it.
I paid the entrance fee, peeling off more notes from my thinning bundle, and was allowed through a clicking turnstile onto a stone walkway, overlooking the skeletal, overgrown remains of the Colosseum’s guts. It was like looking into an old beehive, with most of the middle scooped out to reveal the layers of honeycombs inside: a husk of a place. A great ellipse of stone terraces curled around the central floor of the arena, which had been stripped away over time to uncover underground cells, tunnels and passageways. Grass was stuttering out of the rock. Nature seemed to be reclaiming the place, even as it was being branded, franchised and hollowed out: robbed of its original meaning even as it was traded on. And all the time, the sun was pressing down hard upon it, like a hot amber palm. Tourists were taking whirring, flashing snapshots. There was the trudge of feet, and the sucking, scratching sound of bored straws exploring the bottom of cardboard cartons.
Half the people in the world: if you told them to take a pilgrimage to a public toilet, they would – cameras and fat fucking children and all. The other half would go and daub graffiti on it when they thought nobody was looking. And all of them would imagine it meant something.
I found a place by the barrier and slid my backpack off with a mixture of relief and revulsion. The air – although warm – instantly chilled the back of my T-shirt, which had been stained beige by a mixture of sweat and dust. At least I was clean. The night before, I’d bedded down at a campsite two bus journeys out of the city centre, and I’d managed to get a shower and tidy that morning. But I’d last washed a T-shirt a few weeks ago, if you could call that a wash: standing at a dirty outdoor sink, squinting in the sun, mashing it up in grey, foamy water.
Now, uncaring of my appearance, I unclipped the side pocket of the backpack and drew out my notebook. The stone barrier, although rough on my elbows, provided a good place to lean as I took the top off the pen, opened the notepad at the scribble page and tested the nib with a few blue curls of ink. It was working fine. I flipped back to the first free page in the pad.
And then I looked up at the Colosseum – which had once held fifty thousand Romans, screaming for blood – and I started to write.
‘Impressive piece, isn’t it?’
I turned away from the picture to see Walter Hughes, moving into the room. Once again, I was surprised by how easily he got around for such an old man – carrying his cane with a swing, like some kind of dapper toff, but not really requiring it. His bodyguard followed him in, closing the door behind. I wondered if he’d gone to a school where they taught you to do that. Not really.
Hughes poured himself a brandy, or whatever the fuck it was.
‘In fact, it’s one of my favourites. Would you like a drink?’
‘No,’ I said, feeling confused. ‘What the hell is that?’
I looked at the writing again. When I didn’t try to take in the words, it just seemed like a sheet of paper with some text scrawled upon it. But the moment my eye caught a sentence and started to follow it, my head was filled with images of the Colosseum. The heat on my skin and the sweat on my back. Hughes moved over beside me, appraising the picture. I forced myself to look at him instead, but he remained focused on the writing.
‘I particularly like this bit, here.’ He gestured with his drinks hand; the brandy rocked in the glass. ‘The attention to detail.’
I looked where he was pointing, and could immediately see a fuzzy spray of red graffiti over rough brown rock. The right-hand side of my face felt warm, and I could hear somebody saying something in Italian behind me.
Hughes’ voice pulled me back into the study.
‘The graffiti adds such an unexpected element, don’t you think? There’s contrast between the old building and the new shops – obviously – and then somewhere in-between you have this graffiti. This vandalism of both, with the youth of the city claiming the space as their own. I find it poetic.’
I didn’t say anything; I just looked at him. He was one of those men who looked thoughtful by looking blank.
After a second, he turned to me and smiled.
‘You’ve never seen anything like this before, I take it?’
I shook my head.
‘What is it?’
‘Come and sit down.’
He gestured over to the seats in the centre of the room, and we moved across. Before I could sit down, however, he picked up a towel from the side of the nearest chair, unfolded it and laid it out over my seat.
‘There.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. I’d never realised that my ass was potentially that damaging.
‘You’re sure you won’t have a drink?’
‘No. Thanks anyway.’
I glanced back over at the picture, almost nervously, and saw Hughes smile, his face creasing quickly from one position to the other.
‘You’re stunned, aren’t you? Obviously, you are. It happened to me the first time I encountered his work. I have been addicted ever since.’
Summing things up to perfection for once, I said:
‘I don’t understand what just happened.’
‘Neither do I,’ Hughes admitted, ‘in that I can’t explain it. All I know of the artist in question is that he is a man of genuine talent, which isn’t anything you don’t now know for yourself. I was first exposed to his work some time ago – by chance – and I’ve spent the intervening years collecting all I can find.’
I shook my head, still feeling strange.
‘It was like I was there.’
It had been, too. The words had seemed to turn into sights, sounds and smells as they passed through my eyes. My mind had flipped them over, moulding them into what had felt like an actual experience. I could still feel the sun on my face, and hear the sounds of the city; the sensations were fading, but my skin was still tingling.
‘It’s incredible, isn’t it?’ Hughes said. ‘They say a picture paints a thousand words, but in this young man’s case, his words paint a thousand pictures. And he is young, from what I can gather.’
He swirled the brandy around in his glass thoughtfully, and then looked back up at me.
‘You must excuse me. My passion for art – I will speak for hours if people let me. And of course-’ he glanced at his bodyguard, who had positioned himself by the door, ‘- people tend to. What brings you here, Mr Klein? What is it that you imagine we can do for each other? Interest me quickly, or I might talk about art again.’
I said, ‘I might have what you are looking for.’
He paused, and then took a sip of brandy.
‘I see.’ The glass went around once between his fingers. He studied it, and then frowned. ‘You didn’t think that last night, though, did you?’
‘I didn’t have it then. But I think I may have it now. It depends.’
He still wasn’t looking at me.
‘What does it depend on? Whether I let you out of this room alive?’
He glanced up at his bodyguard, who eased himself away from the wall, his eyes fixed on me. Startled by the speed in which the encounter had flipped, I still managed to stand up pretty quickly, moving into the centre of the room to gather some space around me. All the training I’d done felt like nothing.
The man circled me slightly, relaxed, and I took him in again, trying to strip away that intimidating glare – and the sheer fucking size of him – leaving only a bunch of areas I wanted to either hit or avoid.
But before we could do anything, Hughes held up a hand.
‘This is such a nice room,’ he said, peering at his glass intently. ‘And I would hate to see anything get broken. Books dislodged – anything like that. Furniture overturned.’ Finally, he looked up. ‘So perhaps you should tell me what’s on your mind.’
I didn’t take my eyes off Hughes’ bodyguard. He paid me the compliment in return.
