THE WARREN CUP
By Richard Kerr
Copyright 2012 Richard Kerr
Smashwords Edition
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THE WARREN CUP
David sat on a plastic chair facing the stage. He’d split the Year 11 class into groups of four.
“Remember,” he told the groups before they went to huddle in their corners, “the skill in improvisation is to feed someone a situation they can add to. And, in turn, take what you’ve been given. That way you’ll build a story.”
He rested a notepad on his knee and watched the first group begin.
Tammy walked onto the stage wearing a pained expression, clutching her stomach. Josh followed looking equally troubled.
“Josh, I’ve something to tell you. I’m pregnant.”
“Why are you bothering me?” replied Josh, kicking Tammy’s line into touch. “Can’t you see I’ve got my own problems?”
“I think you’re the father.”
“That could be anybody. Remember I told you I smoked dope? Well, it wasn’t dope. It was heroin. I can’t stop it!”
“But the baby!” implored Tammy.
Lee walked onstage, anguished.
“Lee,” said Tammy, troubled. “I think this is your baby.”
“But,” said Lee, steering the story his way, “I’m gay.”
“Uh? We slept together, remember?”
“I think... that’s what turned me. It better not be my baby. I’ve just found out: I’ve AIDS.”
“Oh Jesus! That means the baby...”
Tammy was interrupted by Ellie running on stage with her arms out wide and her mouth open. She would have looked at home on a breezy alpine mountainside. Yet she didn’t bring joy.
“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god! There’s been a car crash!”
“Who?” asked Josh.
“Kelly, Jolie, Johnny, Tammy, Lee Ann, Mickey. They’re all...” Ellie searched the lights above for inspiration. “They’re all dead!”
Tammy said. “But I’m here.”
There was, what they call in show business, a pregnant pause.
“What do we do now?” moaned Lee, imperilled.
David glanced at the notes he’d scribbled on his pad and thought, “You said it, buster.” He had written, “Try to bounce off other people more. Be less self-involved. Take the situation given to you and go with it.”
“OK, who here is thinking of taking drama as part of this year’s exam module?”
Slowly, timidly, four hands were raised. David stifled a sigh. This was going to be another long term. Just like the last one. “Right, can we have the next group please?”
The bell at the end of the day finally rang. David, and his colleagues in the staff room, seemed more relieved than the pupils. The school was soon to be under inspection and the general feeling was the Principal was going be axed. David found his chair and his coffee mug. He sat quietly trying to fill in as much paperwork as he could before leaving. The less work he brought home the better. He could then spend the evening trawling the internet guilt free. Eventually at 5.30 he put his finished work into his locker, took out his coat and, carrying the remainder of his marking, ambled out of the staff room. Someone noticed him and said, “Bye, David.”
As David walked down Liverpool Road he saw a guy he thought was quite good looking. This happened often enough. The guy was a bit dishevelled which he always found appealing. He also seemed distracted, which meant David could gawp at him for a few seconds without attracting eye contact. So he did, and as he walked closer the guy suddenly became involved in a scene. He stepped, without appearing to think, out onto the road in front of a speeding white van. David jumped forward, shouted “Oi!”, grabbed the guy’s sleeve, pulling him back. The van swerved, blared its horn, and just missed.
The stranger noticed his rescuer and seemed to take a moment before he realised what had happened. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
David studied the handsome guy in distress he’d just rescued. Missing the romance of chivalry he said, “You probably need a cup of tea.”
They walked down Liverpool Road to a cafe David had often passed. He got a name out of the stranger; Owen, but little else. When they sat at a table, and David put the tea down in front of him, Owen spoke. “I hope you didn’t think I was doing that deliberately.”
It was a telling remark. “Why do you hope I don’t think that? Would that make you feel stupid?”
“I’ve been going through a rough time. I’m not concentrating.”
“Is it so rough you think about killing yourself?”
David kicked himself for saying this. Not for being too forward, but because he sounded like a teacher counselling a problem pupil.
“I discovered a few weeks ago I’m HIV,” Owen said, and he breathed out. “I haven’t actually told anyone that.”
“That is rough,” said David. “I don’t know how I’d cope. But these things are manageable. It’s not a death sentence.”
“There are people I need to tell. I can’t face that.”
“A boyfriend?”
“No. He’s an ex. I think I got it off him.”
“He wasn’t as monogamous as you thought? That’s not your fault.”
“Oh no,” said Owen looking up from his tea. “I’m sure he was faithful. But he took drugs. He lied about how what type though. I think he used dirty needles.”
David watched the dishevelled stranger to check he wasn’t being wound up. A near car crash. An HIV diagnosis. A drug addict boyfriend. Where had heard all of this recently? He ventured cautiously, fearing the worst. “Who do you have to tell?”
“This woman, a lesbian friend. She wanted a baby last year. I helped her out. It was seriously just jerking off into a turkey baster. Now she’s the mother she always dreamed of. Unfortunately I’m the dad...”
“Well, that’s tricky. But the odds are she and the baby are fine. I don’t know the statistics but it mightn’t be what you think.”
“So what if it isn’t? How would you even begin that conversation?”
Some people invite trouble, David concluded. And that idea makes me a bitchy old net-curtain twitcher. What about: this guy’s life is like a bad soap opera. Here am I, an English teacher, and the only words I have for his troubles are some pop culture derivative. Why does this happen to some people? Rational people have ex-boyfriends who are addicts. Normal men donate sperm to lesbian friends. And many people still get HIV. So why has it become such an ordeal for this guy? It’s like a domino display where the first domino falls and it sets off a chain reaction. Yet, in some people’s lives, a domino can hit the deck and it misses all the others with no knock-on effect. Is it the way people arrange things in their lives? Perhaps some people have everything interconnected while others keep things separate at arms length. Or maybe some people don’t have that much stacked up in their life? David reckoned the most self-righteous people were the ones who never did anything and so had nothing to go wrong for them. As David never did that much himself the challenge, he admitted, was not to be self-righteous.
Owen leaned forward, perhaps wondering where David had drifted off too.
“Can I ask you to do me a favour? Help me out with one thing.”
“I’m not sure,” David replied, suddenly feeling uncomfortable at Owen’s closeness.
“Just asking. You’ve done more than enough already. I should give you a reward.”
“Don’t worry,” said David, wanting to end the subject.
There was a pause. Owen pointed to the topmost paper of David’s homework.
“Is that some kind of New Year’s resolution for yourself?”
David looked down. It was the note he’d written earlier: “Try to bounce off other people more. Be less self-involved. Take the situation given to you and go with it.” Sadly, it did read like a note to himself. It had been a critique of bad drama and it struck a nerve.
“This reward,” David said, finally. “I hope you weren’t thinking money.”
“Oh, no,” Owen replied, smiling. “I have accumulated a lot of things along the way; antiques and bits of art. I want to completely get rid of most of it. I don’t need it anymore. I was thinking of EBay. Come back to my place and pick something you fancy. You’d be helping me offload stuff and you might see something you really like.”
That actually seemed a nice idea. So David found himself walking through Islington’s long Georgian streets and squares to Owen’s flat. As they went Owen described the cheap antique paintings, the little Shinto shrines, the sailor’s scrimshaw, the stuffed ferret and more, all crammed into his meagre attic flat. When Owen finally opened his front door David saw it all and confessed he had hardly any stuff in a place three times the size. The things were neatly arranged in mismatched Welsh dressers and bureaus like cabinets of curiosity. He quite fancied an oil painting of a path through a forest. It was probably a 1950s paint-by-numbers. It had a forlorn, homespun appeal. Then something shiny caught his eye. It was a silver goblet with figures embossed on it. They were clearly men, classical men, having sex.
“The Warren Cup. From the British Museum,” said Owen.
“It’s stunning,” David commented. “They do a good reproduction.” It seemed a bit risqué compared to the other jewellery and artefacts sold in the museum shop.
“It’s not a reproduction,” confessed Owen, sheepishly. “Remember that favour I asked of you? It involves that cup. I need someone to return it to the museum.”
“You mean,” said David, slowly, “it’s real? You stole this: from the freaking British Museum? Are you a nutter?”
“Sit down, please. I’ll explain.”
David found a chair and Owen told his story.
He did turn into a bit of a nutter after he was diagnosed as positive. He just needed to do something daring to feel alive. He had seen the Warren Cup many times and always coveted it. It seemed, with nothing to lose, he’d go for it. It took a bit of planning and a lot of boldness, but after that it was all quite easy. He dressed in a white coat, which he bought in a hardware store. “That’s the priestly robes of the intellectual and people are deferent to it.” He also wore glasses and let his beard grow. He brought a hardcover dispatch case filled with deep foam and he’d cut a hole in the foam to fit the shape of the cup. He opened that out in the gallery. He also set out a neat row of cotton buds and paint brushes - what would pass for curator’s tools. People expect thieves to be furtive. He even filled a bottle of poppers with formaldehyde. The smell evoked memories of chemistry labs and preservation jars. That, he reckoned, was probably the most potent of the disguises.
“I’m actually quite good at picking locks,” Owen admitted. “I normally do it if friends lose keys. I learnt it all on Youtube. There are no secrets anymore. Anybody can become anything these days.” After getting the display cabinet open he donned white gloves and gingerly put the goblet into the dispatch case. The hardest part was avoiding to be seen diving into the toilets afterward to ditch the disguise. He managed it and once out of the white coat he just walked out of the museum.
David looked around at the other things in Owen’s flat. “Are you a kleptomaniac?”
“No, not at all! That’s the only time I’ve stolen anything. I was nuts at the time.”
“I’m gobsmacked. If it hadn’t been so staged you wouldn’t have pulled it off. There was nothing about this in the News.”
“I guess the museum’s embarrassed. I did revisit the scene of the crime. They put a card inside the display case saying the cup was on loan.”
“But you aren’t brave enough to return it yourself?”
Owen looked guilty. “I’m less crazy now.”
“Just mail it back.”
“I was hoping someone would do that for me. You, maybe? If it was done by a complete stranger then there’s no way they could trace you; even if they caught me.”
David turned the ancient silver cup around in his hands. It was beautifully intact after two thousand years. The naked figures were idealised and handsome. On one side a man with a deep brow and broad shoulders was lying against cushions with a youth sitting on his lap. The silversmith had carefully formed the young guy’s butt and the base of the man’s dick going up it. No sexual ambiguity there. Yet it wasn’t porn. The figures were on couches draped with soft fabrics. The youth’s hand rested intimately on the older man’s arm; who, in turn, had his face pressed into the younger back. David could feel the warmth of their bodies coming out of the metal. He would gladly have been either of the two figures. Round the side a servant was poking his face through a door. A voyeur? “Would that have been me?” he thought, ruefully. The other side showed a youth getting his leg, literally, over a boy. These were a bit too young for David but their entwined contortions were a perfect illustration of innocent pleasure. It showed a world a gulf away from David’s life. And it was world David suddenly desired. Even the cup’s recent adventure was an exciting providence. Owen’s daring burglary was far removed from anything David thought rational. Here was Owen owning such a beautiful, precious object – even for a few days - whereas he never would do. David sighed inwardly. If he kept tredding the same path he would never experience something as opulent, intense and carefree as the men on little trophy did. As he held the cup it began to hold his hand back. It tugged at him, gently, wanting to lead him down new avenues in life. Perhaps it would, at some time, point the way to bridges that could span gulfs.
“Now you know what the favour is,” Owen continued, “do you think you could do that for me?”
“You know nothing about me,” said David. “You have no way of contacting me or of knowing where I live.”
“That, I think, is for the best. As I said, if the police trace the theft back to me I don’t want any leads to you, or whoever helps me return it.”
“That’s very trusting of you.”
“You saved my life. You don’t strike me as the sort of person who do anything, well, weird.”
That clinched it for David. “Sure,” he said, decisively. “In a few minutes I’ll walk out of your life. I’ll take the cup and I’ll do as you ask.”
“You’ll return it to the museum? Oh thank you! That’s a load off my mind.” Owen grabbed David’s hand and beamed.
David smiled back. “Don’t worry. The cup will be perfectly safe with me.”
The End
--oOo--
What is the Warren Cup?
This extract comes from the British Museum website:
A silver cup with relief decoration of homoerotic scenes, this object takes its name from its first owner in modern times, the art-lover and collector Edward Perry Warren (1860-1928).
After Warren's death the cup remained in private hands, largely because of the nature of the subject matter. Only with changing attitudes in the 1980s was the cup exhibited to the public, and in 1999 the British Museum was able to give this important piece a permanent home in the public domain.
The cup was originally made up of five parts - the thin-walled bowl with its high relief scenes, raised by hammering; an inner liner of thicker sheet silver with a solid rim, which would have made both drinking and cleaning easier; a pair of handles (now lost) and a cast foot soldered to the base.
The scenes on each side show two pairs of male lovers. On one side the erastes (older, active lover) is bearded and wears a wreath while the eromenos (younger 'beloved', passive) is a beardless youth. A servant tentatively comes through a door. In the background is a draped textile, and a kithara (lyre) resting on a chest.
In the scene on the other side the erastes is beardless, while the eromenos is just a boy. Auloi (pipes) are suspended over the background textile, and folded textiles are lying on a chest. The surroundings suggest a cultured, Hellenized setting with music and entertainment.
Representations of sexual acts are widely found in Roman art, on glass and pottery vessels, terracotta lamps and wall-paintings in both public and private buildings. They were thus commonly seen by both sexes, and all sections of society.
The Romans had no concept of, or word for, homosexuality, while in the Greek world the partnering of older men with youths was an accepted element of education. The Warren Cup reflects the customs and attitudes of this historical context, and provides us with an important insight into the culture that made and used it.
--oOo--
For further information visit the BBC website (I sincerely hope this functions outside the UK as this is a great page).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/about/british-museum-objects/
The Warren Cup is object number 36. When on the cup’s own page there is a download link on the right. Right-click on it to save or listen to the mp3 audio.
--oOo—
To contact the author, me, directly email: rychurd@btinternet.com
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