Suddenly my father scrambled out of the wreckage of his stand. He was clutching the auction cash box and looked a nasty reddish colour. 'Not them! Not them!' I ignored him. (The traditional filial response.) 'Go for the other lot, you idiot-' The big chaps I had been attacking must be muscle Geminus had hired. Things must be desperate if he actually paid for protection.
I grabbed his arm and pulled him upright while he still mithered on at me. 'Settle down, Pa. I haven't damaged your bouncers-' Well, not much.
His frustrated cry was cut off as one of the supposedly innocent customers rammed him in the chest with a rolled carpet. Still breathless from his previous fall, he could not resist the blow.
One of the bouncers grabbed the 'customer' who had felled Geminus. Seizing him round the waist, he swung the fellow, carpet and all, so that he belted another troublemaker sideways with his woven load. Struggling to realign my loyalties I whammed my curtain-pole into the second man, and batted him back again. It cleared a path for my father to escape with the cash box (his main priority), while I launched myself into the midst of another fracas. Someone had a reading-couch completely up-ended on one of its sphinx-shaped ends and was turning it towards a group of bystanders. I managed to lean on him while another came at me. The end of my pole painfully settled that one, though I lost my weapon in the process. The couch crashed down, leaving one sphinx with a broken wing and several folk with badly squashed toes. Somebody came at me from behind. Applying my shoulder as I spun round, I knocked my assailant on to his back on the citron table; I gripped his belly and with a wild shove skidded him along the polished wood. His belt stud scoured out a livid white scar. My father, reappearing at exactly the wrong moment, hollered with anguish; he would rather have seen ten men butchered than witness fine wood being damaged.
The leather boys were slow learners. They still regarded me as part of the organised rumpus. I was fighting back, while I tried to remember to hit the big lads gently in order to lessen Father's compensation claim. Even so, if they charged him by the bruise, he would soon be digging deep.
It was no time for finesse. I aimed a large stone pestle at someone's neck; it missed, but the sensational crack as it hit the ground stopped him short in his tracks. I managed to shut another's man arm in a heavy box so that he screamed out with pain. I saw my father ramming someone against a column as if he were trying to demolish the whole Porticus. At this point the porters grew tired of protecting the silverware and raced in ready to break teeth. The little old chaps were tougher than they looked. Soon wiry arms were flailing and bald heads were butting people as the auction staff took a hand. The giants had finally grasped that I was family and lined up with me. The opposition decided their hour was up and fled.
'Do we follow them?' I yelled at Gornia, the whiskery chief porter. He shook his head.
A mop of grey curls appeared again as my father brought his presence to bear on the wreckage of his sale. 'This won't encourage the buyers. I think we'll call it a day!'
'That's shrewd!' I was busy reassembling a fold-up chair that had been unfolded rather too drastically. 'Strikes me, someone else blew the trumpet on this sale:' When I got the chair back together, I sat down on it like a Persian king surveying a battlefield.
Geminus had clapped a consoling arm around one of the muscle-men; he was holding his eye after a particularly well-aimed blow from me early on in the fight. Several of the others had shines that would be glowing by tomorrow. I was well bruised myself, come to that. They gave me what I hoped were admiring looks; I started to feel exposed.
'Those are big lads. Do you buy them by the yard?'
'Trust you to attack the hired help!' grumbled Geminus through a split lip.
'How was I to know you had your own cohorts? I thought your old lads were on their own with it. I'd have stepped aside if I'd realised these lummoxes were being paid to get their knuckles grazed!'
Coughing with exertion, Geminus fell on to an unsold couch. He was showing his age. 'Jupiter, I could do without all this!'
I stayed silent for a while. My breathing had already stabilised, but my thoughts were running fast. Around us the toughs made a feeble show of helping the porters tidy the mess, while the old chaps worked with their usual uncomplaining zeal. If anything, the fight had perked up their spirits.
My father let them get on with it in a way that made me think this had happened before. I gazed at him, while he pointedly ignored my interest. He was a solid man, shorter and wider than I always remembered him, with a face that could pass for handsome and a nature some folk found attractive. He annoyed me-but I had been brought up by schoolmasters who declaimed that Roman fathers were stern, wise and models of humane ethics. This high-minded philosophy made no allowance for those who drink, play draughts and womanise-let alone for mine, who did most of those things sometimes, and never seemed to have read the elegant grammarians who said a Roman boy could expect his papa to spend all day thinking noble thoughts and sacrificing to the household gods. Instead of taking me down to the Basilica Julia to explain what the barristers were arguing about, mine took me to the Circus Maximus-though only when the ticket gate was being manned by his cousin, who gave us cheap rates. When I was a child, sneaking into the Games at a discount was a source of deep embarrassment to me. It never happened to Livy.
'You were expecting trouble,' I tackled my father. 'Want to talk about what's going on?'
'All in a day's work,' replied Geminus, through his teeth.
'This was a set-up-organised disruption. Is it a racket? Who's responsible?' I had been drawn into the argument, and I wanted to know its cause.
'Somebody, no doubt.' Dear gods, he could be an awkward mule.
'Well sort it out yourself then!'
'I will, boy. I will.' Wondering how such a miserable old groucher could have fathered such a reasonable character as myself, I leaned back my head and closed my eyes. I had only just noticed I was beginning to stiffen all over, and had gone deaf in my left ear. 'Anyway,' retaliated my father, 'you took your time arriving. I expected you two hours ago.'
I opened my eyes again. 'No one knew I was on my way.'
'That right? I was told that you wanted a fatherly chat.'
'Then you were told wrong!' I worked it out. 'Helena's been here.' She was incorrigible. It was not enough to leave her outside her father's house; I should have pushed her right in through the door and told the Senator to put the bar across.
My father leered. 'Nice girl!'
'Don't bother telling me she could do better for herself.'
'All right, I won't bother to tell you: So how's the love life coming along?'
I grunted. 'Last time I saw her, she kneed me in the groin.'
'Ouch! Thought you'd filched a demure one!' he scoffed, wincing. 'What bad company taught her that trick?'
'Taught her myself.' He looked startled. I felt tetchy suddenly, and launched off against old grievances. 'Listen, you may live among the sleek cats now, but you must still remember what it's like to be holed up in an Aventine tenement-all men with evil thoughts and no door locks. I can't protect her all the time. Besides, if today is anything to go by, I'll never know where she is. Women are supposed to stay at home weaving,' I grumbled bitterly. 'Helena pays no attention to that.'