by Will Self
—Ass y’may’ve ’fected yo’sel’ with AIDS. Y’wanted t’bring the whole fuckin’ world down widya? Was that it, Baz? added Bear, a man who justified his moniker by reason of his size, his colour and his bushiness of beard.
Ashley, a preppy Percodan abuser, felt prompted to pipe up, You say you’ve loved people, Baz – I don’t think you can have loved anyone ever, not even this Dorian guy you’re so obsessed with. I don’t think you know what love is.
Sven, the counsellor running this group, was, with his clipped sandy hair and smooth sandy beard, suitably Nordic in appearance. He looked very fit, absurdly fit, so fit it was difficult to believe that he too was a recovering addict. What substance could he possibly have abused – wood? OK, he said, that’s enough, people; we’ve heard Basil’s life story and you’ve read him your peer evaluations. What I want you to share with us, Basil, is – how do you feel about what your group is saying to you?
—What do I feel, Sven?! I feel faintly nauseous, and if it weren’t so absurd to imagine that these people are my peers, I expect I’d be offended by it. Very offended. But forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do. Baz’s bravado was belied by the tears that leaked from his eyes.
It never failed, Sven thought, the peer evaluation. It didn’t matter how smart or savvy an addict thought they might be, it was impossible for them to escape the verdict of Judge Junky. Do you think you’re like Jesus, Baz? he said. That you’re a martyr to your disease?
—And which disease would that be, Sven?
—The disease of addiction, Baz.
—Ha! That bullshit again. Where’s the fucking virus that gives it to you then?
—Not all diseases are caused by viruses, Baz, you know that.
—OK, Sven, in that case what’s the cure?
Before answering, the odious Odin flexed his mighty biceps in a luxuriant motion evocative of complete and healthy embodiment. There’s no cure, Baz, you’ve been here long enough to know that. But maybe if you got offa that cross you’re dangling on you might find what it is we here have to offer you. We can’t cure you, Baz – but we can help. Am I right, people?
‘Who knows whether any kind of treatment really works, Henry. Treatment for the disease of addiction or AIDS. I don’t want to sell you on the idea of rehab. Looking back, I’m not so sure I didn’t stay clean despite rather than because of it. But it did give me the opportunity to put things in their correct place.’ As Baz spoke, sotto voce, he was putting things in their correct place. He emptied the ashtrays into the bin and the dregs from the bottles into the sink. He stacked the hospital crockery on the hospital tray, and folded Wotton’s clothing over the trouser press. If nothing that Baz had softly said could convince a cynical onlooker of his change in character, then these actions at least spoke pleasantly of practical alterations.
‘It’s language that you’d find laughable – repugnant, even – if you were conscious, but I had a form of spiritual awakening in rehab. Naturally’ – he nearly chuckled – ‘finding out you’re going to die a fuck of a lot sooner, rather than the hoped-for hell of a lot later, does help. You also make intense friendships in those places, Henry; you’re thrown together with all kinds of people, and either you learn to like them or you end up going mad with hatred for yourself. I made friends with a guy called Bear. He’d been a fucking gangster, he’d killed, he was from the Chicago projects, he was black. Shit, he was even a straight guy who’d raped queers in Federal Pen – but he was the one who helped me when I was diagnosed.’
As in some promotional film for a cancer hospice, two men walked beside a lake, the brilliance of the sunlight on the blue water rendering them insubstantial. Baz was walking with Bear in this suitably sylvan setting, and the big black man had his arm tight around Baz’s narrow shoulders. Listen, Baz, he said, there ain’t nothin’ no one can say to make this one good.
—You’re fucking right there, Bear.
—I remember when they tol’ me, I jus’ cried an’ screamed. It called to mind every goddamn time I’d cranked up in my whole sorry life. All them spikes diggin’ inta me, like spears or arrows. I hollered so much they hadta put me in County for a night. Counsellor drove me there himsel’ –
—What? Sven?
—Yeah, an’ I tell you, Baz, that man cares. He really does.
—Yeah – whether he cares or not, we’re still gonna fucking die, Bear. We’re still gonna die – what’s the point in staying clean, working a programme, all that shit, only to die at the end of it? And Baz broke down.
—’Cause you’re worth more than that, Baz, you’re worth more. We’re all worth more… He cradled Baz’s head in his big hand, as a mother might protect the skull of a baby… I’m gonna do what they say, he continued, I’m gonna stay clean. I ain’t gonna die hatin’ mysel’ for jus’ another dumb motherfuckin’ junky.
Done with the housekeeping, Baz sat on the chair beside the bed, looking down at his friend. In keeping this vigil Baz was freed to speak of earlier vigils, because that was the temper of the time. Wotton himself lay sinisterly calm. But maybe he wasn’t sleeping, merely lying stock-still, for fear any admission that he could hear what Baz Hallward said would make his own bravura in the face of death quite untenable.
‘He did die, Henry. I was there. It wasn’t in a ward like this one either, with hip nurses and halfway decent doctors. It was a run-down Medicare ward on the south side of Chicago. A joint where the orderlies zipped guys with pneumonia, and covered with fucking KS, into body-bags days before they died, because they knew they were going to and they didn’t want to fucking touch them. Those guys wailed and screamed, lying in their own piss and shit. But I and guys from Bear’s group sat vigil with him, we cleaned him up, we hassled the medics for pain relief. We looked after him. And I tell you, Henry, that man died with dignity. He died with grace. A fucking no-hope ghetto boy, an addict, a fucking crack dealer, a killer. He died with dignity because he could love himself a little – and let others love him too. I wonder if it can be like that for us, Henry? I have my regime. I spend an hour and a half every fucking day boiling up Chinese herbs and drinking the vile broth. I shove selenium suppositories up my arse – the only thing that gets shoved up there nowadays. I do the acupuncture, I take other prophylactics. But every year the virus gets a little stronger, outwits me a little faster. Every year I end up in hospital for longer, like you, with a drip pumping AZT and DDC and DDI into me. And every year the mollusca – as you so coyly put it – proliferate, while the shingles sprout in my fucking colon and my weight falls. We’ve been lucky enough already Henry, you and I, but no one dies lucky.’ He leaned forward and snapped off the light; the room was plunged into the unquiet grave of a night-time hospital. ‘Well, goodnight, Henry. I’d like to say I don’t envy you at all, smacked out of your fucking gourd, but at times like this… I do.’ And at last, Baz left the room. But perhaps if he’d paused outside for a few moments he would have heard some snuffling, evidence that his words had been heard. Perhaps.
10
Car horns were hooting and ambulance sirens were singing from the concrete rocks in front of the Middlesex Hospital. The worn-out brakes of black cabs squealed, and pneumatic drills hammered exclamation marks into the margins of streets. The city bowed down to the east, expressing all its robust matutinal reverence – for itself. In the immediate vicinity of Henry Wotton’s little cubicle of a room there was the squeak of rubber tyres on linoleum, the rattle of crockery being stacked in plastic crates and the ‘chink-chink’ of an approaching drug trolley. Wotton ungummed his eyelids to see the doorway packed full of medical students and junior doctors, who, like any class of adolescents, were affecting the manner of their pedagogue. The pockets of their white coats bulged with radio pagers, stethoscopes, Biros and chewing gum, while their eyes were bugged out by the attempt to mask prurient curiosity with professional detachment.
As Wotton’s own eyes reached their maximum aperture, he saw that two men had ventured right inside and wer
e louring over him. With devilish cunning they must have advanced under the cover of one of the grey patches that floated across his visual field. But now he saw them for who they were: Spittal, the consultant, an oncologist by bent, and Gavin Strood, the senior duty nurse. ‘My, my,’ Spittal purred, ‘Mister Wotton, how tidy it is in your lair today.’ He was tall, stooped, round-shouldered. His prognathous jaw drew charcoal grooves across his papery face. It was amazing that he believed himself enough of a pussycat to affect a purr.
Wotton stirred. ‘Is it?’ He goggled around him at the order imposed by Baz during the night. ‘Oh… It is.’
‘Did you or the auxiliary staff do this, Gavin?’
‘No, Doctor.’ Gavin folded his arms. ‘It must’ve been Henry’s visitor.’
During this exchange Wotton was heeled over, frantically opening drawers in the bedside cabinet and rummaging inside them. Evidently he found what he was looking for, because he collapsed back on to the pillows with a sigh.
‘Looking for your ssstash, are you, Missster Wotton?’ Now Spittal was snaky and sibilant.
‘Unfortunately, unlike you I haven’t been provided with a convenient trolley for my drugs.’
‘Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police, Mister Wotton?’ This threat was studiously ignored. Wotton had found a hand-mirror, in which he now examined his ravaged features. ‘I said, Mister Wotton, why the hell shouldn’t I have you arrested?’
‘Still here, Spittal? I’m sorry, I always find myself checking a mirror after someone’s accused me of being bad – a guilty conscience is so narcissistic.’ This was so impertinent that the students gave an anxious susurrus – what would Spittal’s vengeance be?
‘Apparently you’re to be discharged this morning. In view of this I’m going to let you go…’ a sigh of student relief ‘… to put it bluntly, you’ll be dead within weeks anyway, given your drug abuse, but otherwise I’d refuse to have you back on this ward again.’
There was a murmur of dissent – this wasn’t what the young Hippocratics were going into the healing business for, and unlike their consultant they weren’t inclined to view mass forcible castration of homosexuals and drug addicts as the solution to the AIDS epidemic. But they needn’t have worried, for Wotton merely struck a further attitude. ‘In that case you condemn me to the London Clinic, where I shall have to die beyond my means.’
‘You can die anywhere you please,’ spat Spittal, ‘so long as it isn’t on my AIDS ward.’
‘Yes, we wouldn’t want to queer your statistics, now, would we? You don’t mind that all your patients die, as long as a hundred per cent of them die pliant and contrite and stupefied on your morphine.’
‘What the hell are you saying, man?’ Spittal was starting to turn an unpleasant, vinous purple. ‘This isn’t some restaurant where you can bring your own bottle.’
‘Oh yes you bloody can,’ Wotton snorted, ‘but the corkage is extortionate.’
‘Are you implying’ – Spittal was now muted with barely repressed rage – ‘that you’ve been bribing my staff?’
However, visibly buoyed up by this rebarbative exchange, Wotton was content to lapse into silence, leaving Spittal, in a final metamorphosis, to gulp like a landed fish.
‘I don’t think,’ said Gavin, judiciously sensing a shift in the balance of power in the room, ‘that you can tell a patient he won’t be readmitted.’
‘What!’
‘He’ll have to be taken in here or at St Mary’s, and if he goes there he’ll tell them what happened here.’
‘Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do on my own bloody ward!’
Wotton observed the way the conflict was widening with considerable satisfaction. ‘When the doctors disagree,’ he mused aloud, ‘the patient is in accord with himself.’ He would have said a lot more on the subject, but at that moment Baz appeared, his cropped head nodding along the corridor. ‘Ah!’ Wotton exclaimed. ‘This looks like my lift.’
Taking this as an opportunity for face-saving, Spittal drew himself up to his full height and stalked out of the room. The little herd of future physicians trotted dutifully after him.
‘Have you come to take me away, ha ha, ho ho, hee hee?’ Wotton said to Baz once they’d gone.
‘Yeah, I called Batface this morning and she asked me to – she has a seminar at the University. I went and got the Jag from Chelsea; it’s outside.’
‘Well, let’s be off then.’ Wotton began dumping drugs and cigarettes from the bedside cabinet into an exaggerated sponge bag. ‘My wife is a better doctor than this lot.’
‘Yes, but her PhD’s in history.’ Baz gave Wotton the feed line as he helped him up out of the bed.
‘Indeed, but neither death nor vulgarity is likely to be cured by modern medicine.’
A decade is a long time in hubcaps, and three of the Jag’s hadn’t made it. The exposed bolts gave the car a constructivist air, as if a mechanically-minded child might at any moment pick it up from the roadway and remove the wheels with sticky fingers. Possibly the same child had been playing with the Jag in a sandpit, because the car, once merely unkempt, was now filthy, covered not only with the action splatter of bird-shit, but also by another hardened and excremental substance. An envious, infantile person (although envious of whom exactly – the imaginary child?) had savagely keyed the Jag’s flank, gouging out long streaks of the paintwork. Inside the car, ten years had flowed over the upholstery, depositing several further layers of silt. The poor Jag, once as securely proud of its era as a portly Edwardian gentleman sporting a shotgun and standing behind a mound of fresh game, was now stuck at traffic lights by the Dorchester on Park Lane (lights that hadn’t existed in 1981), and hemmed in on all sides by boxier, sleeker, more modular vehicles. It was as if cheap and flashy mafiosi had joined the pheasant shoot.
At least Wotton himself, although emaciated, still affected three pieces of tweed, even if today he couldn’t quite manage the driving. ‘You’ll see him tonight,’ he confided to his chauffeur from the front passenger seat.
‘Tonight?’ Baz didn’t require a name.
‘Absolutely, together with the old crowd – the Ferret, Campbell, Jane Narborough… It was to have been a little homecoming party for me, but you may share it…’
‘I – I don’t know.’
‘Oh, come on, Baz, you said there was a favour you needed to ask him. Besides, I’m sure you’re intrigued to see him in his current manifestation.’
‘What will that be, then?’ The lights changed to a flashing orange; Baz shifted into drive, and with laudable caution piloted the expensive wreck down to and around Hyde Park Corner, then off along Knightsbridge.
‘Who can say?’ Wotton said. ‘The late eighties were a real efflorescence for Dorian; his petals fluttered in the breezes that blew during that hot, hot summer of love. He’s so capacious that the new bagginess of the era suited him just fine. He yakked on the mobile phones, he twirled the baseball hats, he twitted the teenagers and, of course, he took a muckle of ecstasy. You have to hand it to our Dorian, Baz, he threw on the sweaty threads of contemporaneity with his usual casualness, exposing himself to all the same risks as his impulsive peers. I believe he even adopted the moniker “Dor”, and encouraged them to believe him incubated in a perspex carport and born of Maidstone. A child of the London periphery exactly like themselves.
‘He told me of diabolical nights beneath the sodium glare of the streetlamps around the Oxford ring road. Together with his hooded posse he would stake out the forecourts of petrol stations, waiting for the foolishness of a key left in an ignition. A sprint, a scrabble, a squeal of tyres and they’d be gone, leaving the idiotic previous owner screeching in their wake. They’d drive for hundreds of miles around the Midlands, from this field full of fucated flamingos to that marquee of madness, always accompanied by the tweet and thud and thrum of techno.
‘Ah, Baz, we were born too early, n’est-ce pas? Would that we too could have swum among the bodies
of a thousand sweaty youths, as they synchronously waved like seaweed fronds beneath the sea of pheromones and sweat. Like Dorian, we too could have whirled in the solid mandala of flesh, sweat arcing from our brows like the sperm of a Hindu deity!’ Wotton timed this rhetorical flourish to coincide with a slim cigarette’s being tucked between his thin lips.
To his surprise, Baz said, ‘I’ll have one of those, Henry.’
‘What? I assumed you no longer smoked, either.’
‘Well, perhaps I need at least one cheap kick.’ He took the pack.
‘There’s nothing cheap about those, Baz; they’re Turkish State Monopoly cigarettes, the most morally costly tobacco in the world. Every time you light one up – a Kurd dies.
‘I digress. Dorian was perfectly tailored for this off-the-peg youth cult, with its pre-millennial cocktail of stimulant drugs and dance music. How he cavorted, how he smarmed, like a cat in a thicket of knees… So much of a fixture did he become on this “scene” that its other tenants imagined he had no other. But that’s the way of smooth diamonds like Dorian; every face they show to the world is simply a different facet. Think of him, Baz, lying on a disordered duvet, in some parental bedroom at the end of a Barratt cul-de-sac, garlanded in teen flesh! Who could begrudge him this – when, after all, youth is no stranger to friction.’
They were at the lights, alongside Harrods, that vertical Babylonian souk. Baz stared into the inert eyes of a mannequin squeezed inside a thousand-pound tube of Versace. Its rigid digits beckoned to him, summoning him behind the plate glass. He turned back to Wotton, handed him the cigarette packet, took the lighter with his own rigid digits. Lighting up, he tried hard not to think of himself as setting a touch-paper to his own explosive nature. ‘You mean to say, Henry…’ he concentrated on the matter in hand, although the cigarette smoke made him feel as if a pyre had been ignited in his mouth, and he didn’t dare inhale ‘… that none of these kids ever found it creepy – this man, in his late twenties, fiddling with their flies?’