Dido bursts into tears. “We can’t just leave her. There are two of them in there!”
“Two men?” Amara is appalled.
“She was fighting so much,” Victoria says, not meeting her eye. “The other one went in to hold her down.”
Amara looks desperately at Dido, then Cressa. It seems impossible that none of them are helping, that they are all standing by uselessly, letting her suffer. Britannica’s screaming cuts through her, visceral because it is familiar. It shocks her that she has never shouted her own anguish like that, that she has been silent instead. She presses her hands over her ears, wanting to stop the horror, stop the ear-splitting sound.
“Why can’t she just shut up!” Victoria shouts, suddenly angry. “Why can’t she fucking understand? It gets the men in the wrong mood; they’re going to be violent with all of us soon if she keeps this up. Stupid fucking bitch.”
“They’re hurting her!” Cressa shouts back, distraught. “They need to stop. Not her.”
Britannica’s screaming subsides into sobs. “It’s nearly over then,” Victoria mutters, not wanting to confront Cressa. “She always fights right to the end. So that means they’ve finished. She’ll be alright soon.”
The curtain scrapes back, and the two men step out into the corridor. The women instinctively draw back, clinging together. One man gives them a contemptuous stare, spits on the floor. They swagger off. Cressa breaks from the others and rushes into Amara’s old cell. Britannica is quiet; the only crying they can hear now is from Cressa.
Another man steps into the brothel. His shape, his walk, is familiar to Amara. It is Menander.
The shock sends the blood rushing to her heart. She stares at him, unable to speak.
“I came to see you. Thraso said you were free.”
He is standing where Britannica’s tormentor spat on the floor, and it is as if the last piece of her innocence is ripped from her.
She says nothing but walks to Dido’s cell, barely waiting for him to follow, then draws the curtain behind them both. She cannot bear to look at him, to see his beautiful face, so she stands gripping the material, her back to the room.
“What do you want?”
“Timarete…”
“What service do you want?”
“Service?”
“Yes, you paid for it,” she swings round, torn between rage and heartbreak. “So what service do you want? What fuck did you pay for?”
“I didn’t.”
“Why are you here then?”
“To see you. To talk with you.”
“You wanted to talk in here?” Amara replies, her voice rising with hysteria. Even with the curtain closed, they can still hear Cressa weeping, the sound of Beronice with a customer next door, and Victoria, now rowing with Thraso, yelling at him not to let thugs into the brothel.
“Where else do we have?”
She sees the quiet sadness in his face and knows, without question, that he is telling the truth. Her relief is almost more painful than the shock before. She walks to him, puts her arms round his neck and rests the side of her face against his. “You paid to talk to me.”
“I didn’t want to wait until December,” he says, holding her tightly. “I’ve been saving for a while. Rusticus is in favour of his slaves getting some pleasure; he thinks it keeps us all more obedient.”
“But you mustn’t spend your money like that!” she says. “You need it. You need to save it.”
“I needed to see you.”
She thinks of Rufus, of all the ridiculous things she said that evening about love, of all the lies she told. “I can’t give you anything; I have nothing,” she spreads her arms out to illustrate the empty cell. “I don’t even own myself, my own body, my own life.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then what are we doing?” She sits down on the bed. “What are we doing here talking.”
“I know that you’re lonely,” he says, sitting beside her. “I’m lonely too. But I don’t feel it when I’m with you.”
“It hurts so much afterwards though,” she says, leaning her head on his shoulder, letting him hold her again. “It just hurts.”
“Because it makes you think of home, and all we lost before.”
“Not just that,” she says. “Do you know how many men I’ve been with? I didn’t want any of them, but it happened anyway, and it’s my life now, and I have to accept it. And then I see you, the only one I actually have wanted, and even though we are alone together now, and there’s nothing to stop us, even though you paid my fucking pimp for me… I just can’t. Not in this place. I can’t.”
“I know,” he says. “I won’t ask it of you. Not here.” He leans over to kiss her on the temple. “But we can belong to many places. Don’t you ever think of yourself as being somewhere else?”
Amara thinks of Pliny’s garden, the smell of jasmine and the splash of the fountain. “Yes,” she says.
Menander helps her sit further back on the bed, so that he is leaning against the wall and she is against him, his arms all the way round her. “At night, sometimes, when I’m sleeping on the floor above the shop,” he says. “I imagine I am back in Athens. I picture walking through the street in the evening, back to my old home, the shop my father used to own. But it’s not my parents or my sisters waiting there for me, it’s you. I can see you in the hall, though you’ve never been there, and we talk, we have all the time we need.”
“I think of you in Aphidnai, sometimes too,” she admits. “But mainly I imagine us being somewhere else altogether. Somewhere we don’t even know yet.” Amara stops. What can she tell him really? That she thought of him when Rufus kissed her, that she wished it was him instead? Or that she told Rufus her heart was free because she cannot afford for it to be otherwise.
“Might it not be possible?” he asks, holding her even closer. “Slaves do marry, don’t they? Or Rusticus might grant me my freedom one day; he has no heir, nobody to take over his business.”
Amara cannot even begin to imagine Felix’s reaction to the first idea, and she doesn’t have the heart to tell Menander that every unscrupulous owner since the dawn of time has duped a talented apprentice into working harder with the vague promise of freedom one day. She cannot bear to destroy the fantasy. “If I had the choice, it would only be you,” she says.
They talk together through the night, and Amara can feel her loneliness ebb with every moment in his company. The brothel even starts to feel like a less terrible place, simply because he is there. She tells him about Pliny, about how she felt having those few brief days of freedom, and he tells her about the way he feels in the shop, the moments he forgets he is a slave, caught up in the business of creating a new lamp, a new object, just as he did in his life before.
They are lost to everything but each other, until it is time for lock-up, and Thraso arrives to throw any lingering customers out.
“Fuck off now,” he says, barging into the cell. “You’ve more than had your money’s worth.”
Amara tries to kiss Menander goodbye, but Thraso comes between them, shoving her hard. She sees Menander react instinctively to step in.
“No!” she shouts. Amara looks at Menander, shaking her head. “Please.”
She cannot bear the self-loathing on his face, their shared understanding that he is powerless to protect her from Thraso, or from anything else.
When he has gone, Amara does not cry. She stands with the palms of her hands flat against the wall of her cell. She wants to scream her rage into the night like Britannica. Her anger is rising like the sea, drowning her. She has to get out.