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Entry — In transit, Luca
I watched the unmasking on a television in a pub in Leeds. Didn't know it was about to happen. Nobody did — that was rather the point.
I remember the particular silence of the pub in the moment after. The way the other people in the room looked at the screen and then at each other, recalibrating something. I was the only person in that room who knew what it meant, what it had cost, what that face belonged to. I didn't tell anyone. I bought another drink and watched the coverage loop for an hour and then went back to my flat.
What I keep returning to is not the unmasking itself but the years before it. Luca was Reginald's perfect instrument: invisible, masked, present at every meal and every argument and every private moment, writing it all down. He had notes on me. Years of them. He knew things about me that I've never told another person — not because I chose to share them, but because I never knew I was being observed in the first place. The sessions I failed. The nights I couldn't sleep. The small daily evidence of a person struggling that you only produce when you think you're alone.
I don't blame him for it. That conclusion took me a long time and I want to be clear that I arrived at it honestly, not charitably. He was a child given a function by an adult with authority over every aspect of his life. He didn't choose the mask. He didn't choose the assignment. He was as trapped by Reginald's design as any of us, just in a different shaped trap.
What I do carry — and I think I'm entitled to carry it — is the knowledge that the intimacy between us was never mutual. Every time I thought I was alone in that house, I probably wasn't. Every private thing I believed I was keeping to myself had an audience of one, writing it down in a journal somewhere.
There's an irony in that. I'm writing this in my journal, about a person whose whole life was a journal written for someone else. I wonder if Luca ever got to keep anything that was only his.
The rock band. The mob. The boy Reginald kept masked so the world couldn't see his face, and now he's a front man with his face on posters. I think about the specific satisfaction that must be, and I find I want it for him. Whatever he did to get there, whatever it cost — he got to be seen. On his own terms, finally. I want that for him.