Dorian

by Will Self

  ‘I went to your mother’s –’

  ‘To my mother’s?’

  ‘That’s right, your mother’s – to meet a kid.’

  ‘You went to my mother’s to meet a kid? Fuck, Baz, you are the one. I s’pose it was some charity-load of old douche-bags you had to make yourself presentable for…’ He rose and began ambling about the studio, still puffing the joint and leaving tedious fumes in his wake.

  ‘Yeah, I had to borrow a fucking suit – but I’d met the kid before –’

  ‘En passant?’ Wotton never used an English phrase where a French tag would do.

  ‘Literally in passing.’ Baz translated them without comment. ‘I brushed up against his butt in the hall when I last paid the rent on this place. He’s just left Oxford, and now he’s helping your ma with that Soho project.’

  ‘Silly bitch.’

  ‘He isn’t very intellectual, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘No, I meant Mama, but anyway I don’t want want to mount some encephalitic thing – its brain swelling like a bubo.’

  ‘Yeah, fuck, I dunno why I bothered with the whistle, her house is overrun with renters, tarts and social workers. But this kid is absolutely divine, he’s a true original, he’s gorgeous, he’s next year’s model – take a look at the stuff we did last night.’ Baz headed over to a bank of video recorders which were connected to the monitors by coiled creepers of cabling. He fiddled intently with these while Wotton prowled. After a while he located a spoon, a glass of water, a two-millilitre disposable syringe, and a drug wrap on a windowsill. Then the two men’s conversation assumed a common purpose.

  ‘Is this gear?’ Wotton held up the wrap.

  ‘No, give over, Wotton, it’s charlie – and it’s my last.’

  ‘Yeah, well…’ Wotton considered this proposition while unbuttoning the cuff of his overcoat, his suit cuff, his shirt cuff. ‘Ach! All this buttoning and unbuttoning. This is my last hit for this hour. This is the last summer of the dormouse. Moments, Baz, are dying out all about us, we are in the midst of a great extinction to rival that of the Cretaceous era…’ He concocted the fix precisely, rapidly and elegantly. ‘You dare to speak of your last charlie, when I am irrefutably the last Henry. The last with such a rare combination of gung-ho drugging…’ he used the bunched-up sleeves in lieu of a tourniquet, and pushed the Ray-Bans up on his forehead so as to see his swollen main line better in the green light from the window – ‘and comme il faut tailoring.’

  But this supramundane rant remained unacknowledged, just as the peculiar sight of Wotton’s aureole of red hair and flushed works full of green blood – as if he were a junky Pan – remained unobserved. Baz’s attention was wholly caught by the first monitor, which zigged and zagged into life. It showed the naked figure of a beautiful young man, posed like a classical Greek kouros: one hand lightly on hip, the other trailing in groin, half-smile on plump lips. A naked figure that turned to face the viewer as the camera zoomed in. The second monitor came to life and this displayed a closer view of the still turning youth. The third view was closer again. The sensation imparted as all nine monitors came to life was of the most intense, carnivorous, predatory voyeurism. The youth was like a fleshly bonbon, or titillating titbit, wholly unaware of the ravening mouth of the camera. The ninth monitor displayed only his mobile pink mouth.

  Wotton’s rictus responded to this as it quivered and grew a moustache of sweat. ‘Time flies when you’re watching replays, eh Baz?’ He drew the needle from his arm, licked up the gout of blood, grinned.

  ‘Whaddya think, Henry?’

  ‘I thought you’d found yet another epicene swish, Basil, but this boy looks tough –’

  ‘But tender, yeah?’ He laughed.

  ‘I like bodies better than minds, Baz, and I like bodies with no mind at all better than anything else in the world.’

  ‘If all I’d wanted was flesh, Wotton, I’d’ve gone to a butcher or a meat rack –’

  ‘Yes, well, whatever other things you can accuse my mother of being, a pimp isn’t one of them.’

  But it was Baz who was agitated now, who paced about from screen to screen, before heading over to where Wotton stood by the windowsill. ‘Your mother remains incredibly helpful, and very understanding… and as for him, he’s interested in my work, he wants to help. He’s unashamed – not like us. He belongs to a totally new generation, the first gay generation to come out of the shadows. That’s what I’ve wanted to get with this –’ he gestured towards the monitors – ‘that would be perfect.’

  ‘Unashamed? Gay? What the fuck’re you talking about?’

  ‘Of being a faggot, Wotton. A queer, a bum boy, an iron-bloody-hoof. Of that. And in your case, as a result, of being married to a Duke’s daughter who you treat like a convenience store. That.’

  Wotton, despite his snobbery and his affectation, liked nothing better than a proper joust. ‘Baz, Baz,’ he cooed, ‘our proximity makes it essential that we be strangers to each other, Batface and I.’

  ‘Whatever. Perhaps you can’t see the hypocrisy you’re mired in, but don’t you have some responsibility for your wife’s feelings?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, I’ve never misled Batface for an instant concerning my sexual inclinations.’

  ‘Maybe not – so I s’pose she just goes along with the fraud because she finds it perfectly natural. But I want a different kind of relationship. I want truth and beauty and honesty, but the world wants to destroy that kind of love between men. I think Dorian could be these things for me – but he’d probably mean nothing to you.’

  ‘That’s too many buts,’ Wotton sneered. ‘Better stick to buns – Dorian’s buns. What is this, Baz – in love with Dorian, are we?’

  To Wotton’s surprise Baz shovelled up this facetiousness with great seriousness. ‘I dunno. Y’know what I’m like, Henry, always getting hurt, and Dorian already seems to sense this. He’s sweet and charming and naïve on the surface, but I expect he’ll turn out to be a vicious little bitch like all the others.’

  ‘He’s here now, isn’t he? Not that I give a shit, it’s just that if he’s making you into this much of a bore I’d better leave – it must be serious.’

  ‘Yeah, well, serious enough for the work, at any rate.’ Baz waved at the televisions. ‘It’s called Cathode Narcissus, and it’ll be the last video installation I make. The whole fucking medium is dead. Fuck, it was born decadent, like all the rest of conceptual art. First it was Nauman, then Viola and me, now it’s finished. From now on, conceptual art will degenerate to the level of crude autobiography, a global village sale of shoddy, personal memorabilia for which video installations like this will be the TV adverts.’

  Wotton, grinning, stoked up his friend’s little furnace of ire. ‘What, with special offers on bottled piss, canned shit and vacuum-packed blood –?’

  ‘That’s all been done already!’ Baz expostulated. ‘When I was with Warhol –’

  ‘When I was working at the Factory with Drella – with Andee…’ Wotton was a superb mimic, a master of the accented caricature, and his Baz was a whining, preening, mid-Atlantic hipster. ‘Well, maan, and Billy Name and Edie and – oh gosh! Doc-tor Robert – well, we all did speed, you know… It was part of the scene, maan.’

  More unexpectedly, Basil Hallward could do Henry Wotton just as well, exaggerating the lisp, turning up the affectation as if it were the contrast knob on one of his television monitors. ‘We ate at Harry’s Bar and then wepaired to the Gwitti Palace, where I quaffed quails’ eggs from her carefully coifed cunt –’

  And he would’ve gone on and on and on with this, had it not been for Wotton breaking back in with another impersonation – complete with acoustic air guitar – of Baz doing Bowie doing ‘Andy Warhol’: ‘Baz Hallward looks a scream, standing on his silver screen/ Baz Hallward looks a scream, can’t tell him apart at all, at all, at all…’

  In a cubbyhole of a bedroom hidden behind successive dark, membranous curtains, the object of Baz
’s affections and his latest muse lay, only just now awoken from the easeful slumber occasioned by weed and wine and mutual wanking. Dorian Gray had been seduced thus far by Baz Hallward but no further. He’d been impressed by his connections and excited by his air of debauchery. He’d been beguiled by Baz’s suggestion that he model for this video installation, but there were limits. So during the videoing it was weed not coke, and afterwards he let Baz take him in hand, not mouth or arse. For now, Dorian was just young enough to want to go to bed with his elders out of a sense of being flattered by their attentions.

  Dorian could hear the two older men hooting and railing. He stirred himself and thought he perhaps ought to find out what was going on, but it was difficult to get motivated and so much more pleasant to lie in a tatty pile of sheets and blankets, stretching luxuriously and admiring the way the tendons and arteries writhed in his own wrists, or the way his brown legs – twined in white cotton – assumed this or that angle.

  Liquid blobs of light shimmered on the wall above Dorian’s tawny head. On the bedside table stood a half-empty glass of whisky and beside that was a metallic cigarette lighter, and beside that a pair of nail-clippers. Like the rest of the studio the cubbyhole was oak-panelled. Here and there a bronze-effect spotlight had been insensitively inserted. In each of these reflective surfaces Dorian Gray sought himself out, while lip-synching to the narcissistic soundtrack that played in his empty head. ‘She’s a model and she’s looking good, I’d like to take her home it’s understood… She plays hard to get, she smiles from time to time… It only takes a cam-er-a to make her mine…’

  The cackling voices of the two older men in the studio kept cutting into Dorian’s reverie. So, in one sinuous movement, he arose from the bed. From the floor Dorian retrieved white boxer shorts; he pulled these on and then sheathed them in white chinos which he fastened with a snake-buckled belt. Cathode Narcissus was no contrivance; this young man moved with the performer’s zeal which assumes an observer even when none is present.

  Dorian jived a little as he pulled on a T-shirt. He began to pay attention to the voices in the next room. ‘She’s a one’ – Wotton was in raconteur mode – ‘a real card. Have you seen her back room?’

  ‘Yeah, man.’ Baz was only half-listening.

  ‘It’s worth scoring off her just to see it – row upon row of new clothes, all still wrapped in polythene. Then electrical goods stacked up – all still in their boxes. She’s even got five fucking Corby trouser presses – showed them to me with great pride.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, man.’

  ‘It really proves that drug-dealing should be legal – not, you understand, for any of the usual reasons, but simply because the likes of Honey don’t know how to dispose of such outrageous profits tastefully…’ Baz Hallward may have heard about the trouser presses, but Dorian hadn’t. He wanted to know more, and to see who was describing them. On bare feet he padded towards the drawl, which continued, ‘I don’t suppose you have anything much more than a list to contribute to this shopping expedition, eh Baz? Everything gone on trying to pump yourself up enough to satisfy little Dorian, hmm?’

  Dorian stood in the doorway, swivel-hipped, blank-faced, floppy-fringed. Wotton fell silent, feeling new eyes upon him. The two older men turned to regard this Adonis, and in their heated appraisal and Dorian’s cool appraisal and their more fervid reappraisal of this and his more frigid reappraisal of that was the most exacting and timeless of triangulations: Baz would always love Dorian, Wotton would never love Dorian but would want him consistently, and Dorian would betray Baz and would never love anyone at all.

  ‘I’m incredibly sorry’ – Wotton, misinterpreting Dorian’s disgusted pout, began secreting charm – ‘you must have heard that. I didn’t mean anything by it at all – I only said it because I was hoping to upset Baz, I do so like him when he’s aggrieved… I’m sure that if your association persists you’ll soon find out how comical it can be to wind him up until he positively twangs with stress and indignation…’ Wotton advanced, his hand out, his many flopping cuffs adding to the cavalier impression ‘Ça suffit. You must be Dorian Gray. I understand you know my mother; I’m Henry Wotton.’

  ‘D’you mean Phyllis Hawtree?’ Dorian took the hand, held it for second while exerting no pressure and would’ve let it fall, but it held on to him.

  ‘Quite so,’ Wotton snapped. ‘She will insist on changing her name every time she changes her bed partner.’

  ‘I’m sorry…’ Dorian floundered ‘… I’ve just woken up… Um, yeah, I’ve… Your mother –’

  ‘Warned you against me in no uncertain terms, told you of profligacy, drug addiction, sodomy, and even more exotic vices? Am I right? Of course I am.’ Wotton, still retaining Dorian’s hand, led him to the centre of the room and drew him round so that they faced each other, like dancers frozen in a minuet.

  Baz smiled at this exchange in a twisted way, while Dorian summoned himself to play his part. ‘No no, she said you were a brilliant –’

  ‘Mistake? I daresay I am, but we weren’t talking of me, we were discussing you, your hopes, fears and most intimate, most quavering desires. Tell them to me. Now. All of them. But make it snappy!’

  ‘Wotton –’ Baz began a teeny admonition.

  ‘ “Wooot-ton,” he cries, like a fucking maiden aunt with a maidenhead the size of Maidenhead! But I mean it! I want to know your intentions now you’ve been exiled from the groves of academe. Your willingness to associate with my philanthropic mother suggests that you’re well on your way to becoming a man of the people, Mister Gray.’ He let Dorian’s hand fall as if the very idea were contaminating. ‘Or have I got it wrong, do you intend devoting yourself to Baz’s bizarre art fetishism? He’s been showing me Cathode Narcissus.’

  ‘Isn’t it fantastic –’

  ‘Fantastic, absolutely. Quite fantastic that any medium – let alone one as shallow and transparent as Baz’s – should be allowed to traduce your beauty.’

  ‘I dunno.’ Dorian moved off, gifting the two older men a view of his feral prowl. ‘I try not to be hung up on the looks thing –’

  ‘Hung up? “Looks thing”? I reel with the impact of these heresies.’ And, as if choreographing such a reel, Wotton pivoted, stooped, yanked up his Scotch bottle from the floor, uncorked it with a ‘plop’, hoisted it to his mouth, drained it, gasped, lit a cigarette, then continued, ‘You should remember, Mister Gray, a nude body requires no explanation, unlike a naked intellect.’

  Dorian shrugged, unimpressed. ‘People are always coming on to me about acting or modelling or whatever. But I think it’d be chronically dull. You may think your mother’s ridiculous, but there’s nothing funny about the Youth Homeless Project she’s fundraising for.’

  ‘There’s certainly nothing funny about youth’ – Wotton smiled, replete, for he loved a good feed line – ‘a youth is the one thing worth hanging on to.’

  ‘It’s not much, but I feel I’m doing something. I go into this place in Soho three afternoons a week and talk to the guys there about art. It’s as good a use as any for an art history degree, and I get to meet some amazing characters… Even if I’m just turning them on to a different way of seeing things, surely that’s worthwhile?’

  But Wotton wasn’t thinking of value judgements – he was still feeding. ‘Art for the underdog, eh? Thrown like a titbit from your high table. Pity they can’t jump up enough to reach it –’

  ‘Look, Wotton,’ blurted Baz, who’d been agitating to get in, ‘d’you wanna sit on the terrace and have a coffee with Dorian, or what?’

  ‘Terrace? Coffee? We’re not in fucking Naples, y’know –’

  ‘I know. What I’m trying to say is I want to get on with the editing and sequencing, Dorian’s moving into a new pad and this installation is the centrepiece for it, right? Now I don’t object to you two rapping but it’d be cool if you gave me some space…’ And as if responding to the doggy way Wotton and Dorian were sniffing around each other, Baz Hallwar
d began to shoo them out of the studio. ‘C’mon – scat! I’ll bring you some coffee out. I’ll come to Honey’s with you in a bit, Wotton; for now, keep the client entertained.’

  Outside in the garden, Wotton took Dorian’s arm. He could do this – casually take someone’s arm. It was odd that such a caustic character should have such an easy physicality – but no odder than the garden itself, for here, as in the street, the dense and overgrown foliage was oppressively, queerly diverse. The presence of so many different plants and flowers from so many different regions of the world would in and of itself have been disorienting, but since they were all simultaneously in flower and in fruit, the effect was deranging.

  Not that Dorian Gray noticed; he allowed Wotton to lead him by the arm into this upsetting thicket. They paused in front of a carnation and Wotton pointed out the peculiar green shade of the flowers. ‘My mother cultivated plants before she moved on to humanity,’ he drawled. ‘I’m not altogether sure which is the higher life form.’ With a flourish he lit yet another cigarette and blew brown scrolls of smoke among the green leaves and brilliant blossoms. In the mid-distance traffic rumbled, while at their feet insects pulsed and chafed and buzzed. ‘You see that man?’ Wotton snapped after a while.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘There…’ His naked arm – cuffs still flapping – hailed the sky overhead, and the tip of his fag pinpointed a window five storeys up in a block of flats next to the garden. ‘You see the jiggling man?’

  ‘He’s more swaying back and forth like a metronome,’ Dorian corrected him. And it was a better description of the odd sight, this ordinary man in a V-neck sweater and an open-neck shirt, hands stuck in his pockets, rocking sideways, from foot to foot.

  ‘He does it all day,’ Wotton continued, ‘and all night… and in the early morning. I once came out here at five-thirty a.m. just to make sure he hadn’t knocked off. I’m convinced that it’s he who’s really meting out the minutes. He’ll probably cease when the apocalypse begins. I call him the jiggling man, and I suggest that if you want to dub someone “metronome man” you find your own fucking loony!’