The nightmare had come true. There before me was the same image of James, golden, glowing, white, brilliant, naked and crucified. Arms and legs wide, head lowered, the remembered fall of blond hair tumbled, trussed in an aura of shimmering light, a gleaming naked Jojo kneeling before him, one black hand placed on a white thigh, the other holding a thick whip. All in vivid Technicolor. Eight by ten.

There was no sign of a Jojo in my nightmare, only the hideous image, glowing, pulsating, it had seemed, in an explosion of light. But otherwise what I presently held in my hand was precisely what had awakened me in a sweating terror of hatred. The unfinished crossword puzzle of my life finished by the tidy filling in of the final word.

Hate.

And I sat there on my bed, slumped, exhausted by ugliness, by the shock of discovery, of revelation.

How had this come about? How had a photograph, taken years before it seemed by the look of his youthful body, suddenly been imprinted into my sleeping brain?

Here I was looking at the darker side of a golden moon: and dark, God knew, it was.

There was a little scatter of black-and-white photographs in the file. Postcard size, some almost sepia with time. Some taken, it would appear, in the early days of the ‘Paris sequence’, when James’s body was more supple, slender; others, and there were only a sparse half dozen or so altogether, were far later. He had become adult, muscular, firm.

I held the gathered photographs in my hand like a loser’s hand at a bad game of poker. Weary with distaste. Brent Millar had, indeed, a great deal to be ashamed of: his quiet remark to me at L’Hermitage, ‘Don’t hit me, I’m a cripple’, was well said. Of course I should have struck him. Too bloody English to do that. His corruption was clear in every line of the sordid little Agendas, every one of the photographs held in my hand.

But why panic and settle such a sum for blackmail? No magazine, wherever it was, would contemplate the stuff.

Would they?

Perhaps they might just keep him ‘in sight’, as it were; he’d be followed about, wheelchair or no wheelchair.

My sad, funny little brother ranged before me in a series of very unfunny situations of extreme degradation. Humility, humiliation, bondage. Why? Florence had said that I would find the results, at L’Hermitage, and indeed she had been right. But she had said that I would never find the reason. I wonder?

I wonder if the reason for this extreme, abject desire for punishment, for pain, for abuse, was because as a golden ‘ewe lamb’, as a creature adored, cosseted, spoiled, pampered, treasured from unexpected birth, he suddenly felt the desperate need to be brutalized, to be treated savagely, dragged from adoration and defiled before witnesses. For, it would appear, his degradation had to be observed. A form of public vandalism: sullied perfection. Rip the Frans Hals, smash the Michelangelo, defecate on the altar. The uglier, more profane, the better. Punishment for the years of being too well loved.