Titus Awakes

5

As the Spring Awakes, So Do the Two Strangers

SUNLIGHT, AN INTRUDER in the solitary room, rippled on the bare walls, mysterious and beautiful. Time had ceased to have meaning. The old woman who was both nurse and maid fed Titus and his companion. As the food became more solid, so Titus felt his strength returning.

He had ceased to call out his name, and had used the long hours of silence to return over and over again to his childhood, and to his more immediate past, conscious always of the dark beauty watching him. There was no communication, only silence, which he realised was no longer lonely. He learned to enjoy the quiet but his youthful spirit could not be damped down or put out like the dying embers of a fire. He longed to rejoin life, to tread the perilous path of the living.

There came a day when the old toothless woman placed in front of him food that he was to tackle himself. Like a clown, she mimed the movements of eating and as she watched his clumsy, inelegant jostling of food into his mouth, she nodded her head with pleasure. A great soft cream paw laid itself gently on his knees, and he saw what he must have heard when he was lifted out of oblivion: a huge but gentle dog. A soft, sensuous muzzle nudged his cheek, yelped a little and nestled under his chin.

I am me . . . I am alive . . . I am beginning again.

‘Who are you?’ he shouted, knowing that his question would remain unanswered. ‘What can I do to bring life into these limbs?’

As Titus pushed back the coverings of his pallet bed, this time his two sticks felt a quiver of sentience in them. He was careful – he knew that it was only time that would bring back to him the movements he had always taken for granted.

The dog bounced excitedly, like a child filled with joy at the promise of a feast and his eyes turned expectantly on Titus.

A door was open and through it came a world from outside, a mild sun, a small breeze, a gentle tongue that licked his cheeks and his unused legs.

Oh, I want to live. I want to be alive.

Longing to stretch from foot to crown, Titus launched himself on to the stone floor and this time he did not fall. He had somewhere to go. Although his movements were that of an old man, his brain, and all his stirrings – his body and its needs – were those of a young man, deprived for too long of its necessities.

He clung to the huge dog, his arms round its neck, as it propelled him, screaming inwardly with desire, towards the bed opposite. The limping journey from pallet to pallet seemed to take an eternity.

He lay, panting, at the foot of her bed. The dog whined as Titus tried to stand, trod on its front paw and fell across the bed. ‘I want you.’ He lay across the tiny limbs, sighing. Frustrated tears streamed down his cheeks. ‘Who are you?’ Beneath the bedclothes was the faintest stirring. Was it a hand? The flutter of a butterfly traced its wings across his eyelids, down his hollow cheeks, on to his thin lips and over his chin, and stayed itself round the unshaven neck.

Adventure had begun again. He had awakened to a new life.