#entry.

There’ll be a point in his life, Octavian promises, where his time won’t be measured in Julius Caesar’s calls. For now, that’s only a calcified threshold. A barometer of rust and grassroots, campaigns and fossilized ideals. Between him and it stands a world of interference.

He sets to scrubbing it like polishing your inheritance—which is to say, like earning it back.

It’s to do with semantics, after all: steel-capped pen, steel-wool sponge. The lunch comes and goes. Octavian is ready to rinse it off with hot water. A part of him wants to render Antony’s indifference sterile. As if antiseptic ever meant harmless; as if he hasn’t had his share of lessons of contagion, textbooks of public policy on containing and deterring. As if it didn’t plant something in his skin. Like all grand memorandums of disaster, Octavian turns his face away from it. Prepares his odds for better days.

Julius will have him cut the same cards for other people. He’ll get the in on this, won’t he? He was good. He can be. Cinna is far from stable—the balance is the rabble’s for the tipping. He’ll get other rooms. Which means... Jesus Christ, it means there is no need to recall the oil and gloom of that one. The Gallery, the table, the thick rumble of Antony’s speech.

People like Marcus Antony, much like tadpoles, he’s found, move in a dark and treacly lake. Everything is slower; everything is magnified. Its joys, if there’s fuck-all to it, are inscrutable to the likes of him. He leaves Westminster feeling not just dirty, but drowned under.

(How was it? Did he bite off your head? Forced-fed you those charts? Horace, from the kitchen. The quizzing pelted him like horseflies diving home. Octavian swerved by, shifting out of reach. Water. Cheap wood creaked where he moved. Good God, he thought. The man just begets these metaphors, does he not? Devotion and devouring. They should put him up at Toussaud.)

A few days after that lunch, his phone rings again. Octavian slathers a smile over the tone. Julius likes his congeniality to be just room temperature; obedient enough, but not febrile. Not saccharine. Nothing to tint the enamel on his teeth, when they sink into it.

A car is up front, Julius says. His voice is tired; scrubbed to a pallor of a different sort. If this was another moment, if the barometer tipped a tad closer, Octavian might ask him how he’s coping.

It’s a moot concern. No, worse; a weak one. It disgusts him, to feel it slop and spill. He asks how many days he needs him for.

He packs a clean shirt, double chargers, a blister foil of Advil.

Nothing stronger? Can you face up to Father Caesar in this wretched state? Horace; the common area, this time. Octavian wonders if it’s a skill you learn at public school, pissing all over people’s business. Murena left some Ritalin over. 

The hell of it is... he considers that. His tongue runs over his lips; chapped and cold. He’s betraying all the gaping scars of late deadlines. Except he’s never late. Except they’re not his deadlines. (He’d dare say he fares better, when it’s his skin on the bloody rack).

He wrote Antony’s draft over night. That left him two more days to brush up to snuff with Switzerland’s medical industry, then with the pitfalls of their own (snakes and fucking ladders). Then it was on with Cornelia’s past. Her ancestral squabbles, particularly aimed at her brother Lucius, and Lucius’ ex, and just about everyone in London who isn’t a Harrods attendant.

That left him one more day to send in the essays for Pompey’s youngest. A tiny illegality, as far as upstreet favours went. The twat was just an undergrad house plant, as fatalistic during mid-terms as he was trigger-happy to paypal him after each close shave.

How had Horace put it? Oxbridge boot, right primed for the dining.

It was a stupid use of his time. He knew it, back then. He knows it all the more now. It splatters with all the velocity of delayed realizations. Do I not give you enough? Julius would ask him.

That answer, of all, is the easiest in his mouth. Maybe even the truest.

No. Never.

The thing with money is—

The thing with money is that there’s people who say sentences like that and believe it, people who dig for the hidden crick, the doorstop, the pulley—and people who never do.

Octavian takes two pills. Cheating. Wasn’t this your scene? 

It no longer sounds like Horace’s voice.

He knows too well whose voice it is.

In the car, he allows himself the hope that Antony isn’t there. He walks in through the lobby, coat draped over. He tries to come up less tenderfoot, less led by the throat, but light doesn’t hold its own, in Fitzrovia. He can practically feel his head peering round like a terrier’s.

A pulse rings in his soft tissue, each inch and ply of it. It should be grounding, but instead it sets a gong. A sense of urgency is cooking from the ground up. The house knows it.

A flock of suits he can’t recognize tells him two things—soundlessly, as all real lessons carry. The first is that Cinna will have about a few days before he goes the way of the political dodo. If not in flesh, then in the party. The other thing matters slightly less, and slightly more.

As well as the red iPhone, Apple also increased the storage in the iPhone SE. That has been doubled, meaning that the largest one can now hold 256GB in its tiny body.   It was unveiled alongside an update version of the smaller iPad Pro, and the removal of the old iPad Air in place of just a cheaper tablet going by the name of iPad. The new iPad Pro features a brighter display and improved performance, as well as being sold at an even cheaper price.

Lucius Cinna is hospitalized on a Saturday. His pacemaker fails, or he barrels down the stairs, or he chokes on a fucking oyster—it doesn’t matter what the truth is, because the truth is still immaterial.

On Sunday morning, Octavian is called to create it.

(Spurious fact. Julius doesn’t call. Julius rings him up like the click of a heel, like the leather flap on a falconer’s wrist. Octavian goes).

The first question is not why me?, because that’s a rookie error. Caesar needs his neutral onlooker. He wants the impartial hand of Empire to sink in the mire, the muddy media water, and stir it about. On that hand, Octavian is the best knuckle.

He has no dogs in the fight; low birth, high morals. A Procrustes bed of a thing. That makes truth his prerogative. That makes him the nation’s blind spot. An unofficial account, a pal at The Times (Vergil, Oxford fraternity), a debt over a Twitter journalist (Horace, cashed out of a scandal) and so the story forms. So are the blinkers saddled on the consortium gentium.

The first question, the right question he has to ask, is what hospital? The NHS has come a cropper, which everybody knows; which nobody concedes to. If they went private, if they went abroad—God, unless Cinna croaks, the opposition will maim them on it.

(It’s Switzerland. It’s very bad).

The second question must be: who’s inside on this? He expects Brutus; or Pulcher, maybe, if they’re soft-soaping it. Then Julius says Antony, and Octavian’s body seizes up in the chair. He’ll never sit down with me. Sir, he won’t... why not—why not send him to Cicero?

A frown. Displeased, or perhaps disappointed; he can’t tell what’s worse. He has no grip on Julius’ hierarchy of human folly. Octavian looks away.

(He should’ve known better than to ask that. The last time Cicero and Antony were in a room together, the NASDAQ for free speech dropped five percent).

Antony does agree to sit down. Or maybe Caesar forces him into it, which... oh, he can’t tell what’s worse here, either. The pity or the penance of it.

The business club he chooses was practically named in Cinna’s honour, so privacy is supposed to be a given. (It’s never a given. He wishes someone told Julius that).

At the door, the maître d' won’t let him in.

It’s not the first time this happens. Of course, the fact that it’s not the first time this happened doesn’t make it easier. It makes it so, so much worse.

Octavian forces a smile, and forces it too fast. It catches his tongue between his teeth. “I have a reservation for The Gallery. Please, will you do me the favour of checking again?” A breath, clipped. “It’s on the tab of Julius Caesar. Or Marcus—”, he thinks he’s gonna spit the name with blood on it, and so he swallows, “Or Marcus Antony.”

The waiter doesn’t even open the book. “Sir, if you will be so kind as to step out. Our seats are at full capacity today. You can contact us through—”

“Sure, yes, I understand”, Octavian cuts in, because he has to be quicker than him, because if that weasel-eyed fuck finishes his sentence—yes, it’s a matter of diffusing. It’s a matter of getting the drop on your own murderous impulse. He can spot ten empty seats right in the sight-line. That’s fine. That’s how these things go. He’ll just dip outside and message Julius.