Dorian

by Will Self

  ‘He doesn’t look it, Baz – that’s the point. Time may have etched our faces, like acid biting into copper, but Dorian’s visage is an Etch-a-Sketch; no smear of dissipation or leer of venality – let alone marks of ageing – remains upon it for long. De temps en temps I wonder who’s twiddling the knobs and then shaking away the Dorians they draw.

  ‘But you also have to remember, Baz, that along with HIV another plague hit our sceptred isle in the mid-eighties, courtesy of your American friends. This was a pandemic of pecs and an outbreak of deltoids. Every underemployed faggot in town began to “work out”, as if to raise a sinewy standard against the wasting disease. No one was more adept at aerobics than our Dorian – he positively glowed, as if he spent nights disco dancing in a wind tunnel. And in the season he’s always to be seen schussing in the vicinity of Klosters, where the House of Windsor swaps their speedy decline for a spot of downhill racing. Yes, he has his legs tightly wrapped around the greasy pole, does Dorian. His social and his sexual promiscuity have had the same bewildering effect – that of making him incomprehensible and unknowable. Is he gay or straight? Is he nob or yob? Incidentally, how old is he, exactly?

  ‘He’s carried all of this off with a most astonishing sang-froid, Baz. I might’ve wanted to view Dorian as my protégé, but he far exceeds anything I could have dreamed of creating. After all, it was widely touted that the homosexual community were in danger of dying of ignorance, but in Dorian’s case he was more likely to expire from being too knowing. Yes, he’s always been in the right place at the right time. I remember being at some avant-garde event and watching Leigh Bowery mimic a miscarriage on stage. It struck me then that it was Dorian who was truly orchestrating the mental couvade male homosexuals felt they were enacting in the late eighties. If Bowery was the mother, then Dorian was the mother of all mothers, showing us how to give birth to our own images.’

  Fittingly, as this speech concluded they arrived. Baz squidged the Jag’s wheels against the kerb, then switched off the engine. It was silent save for the deathwatch ticking of contracting metal, and utterly oppressive. Outside the car, the impossibilist season that always embowered Chez Wotton was in full budding, flowering, fruiting and falling swing. Supernature’s own couvade. Cherry and apple blossom drifted across the pavement, while everything in the gardens – from snowdrops to roses, to lilacs and delphiniums – was in bloom. The wistaria, which ten years previously had only sprouted halfway up the first storey, now covered the entire façade like a vegetative beard. The grey clowns sat in the green car, quietly contemplating this harlequinade.

  ‘C’mon now,’ said Wotton, ‘let’s get inside. I didn’t discharge myself from the Middlesex to sit in a car.’

  ‘In good time, Henry –’

  ‘This is good time – I want to go in the bloody house. I w –’

  ‘Henry, you’re holding out on me.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You’re not telling me everything – everything about Dorian.’

  ‘I thought I’d made myself tediously plain, Baz; I don’t know everything about Dorian. Hardly anyone knows that much. I know a bit, you know a bit, doubtless others know bits, but no one knows the lot. Probably not even Dorian himself.’

  ‘Does Dorian know about Herman – about what happened to him?’

  ‘Herman?’

  ‘Don’t come the fucking ingénu with me, Henry.’ Without asking, Baz took the pack from where it lay between them and shook one out. ‘You know bloody well who I’m talking about. Herman, the black kid Dorian was carrying a torch for, the one who fucking burnt us all!’

  ‘Ah, that Herman. Yes, well, I believe he’s no longer with us.’

  ‘The virus, right?’

  ‘Erm… no, not exactly. As I understand it from Dorian, young Herman, seeing his personal defeat in the War Against Drugs, took the noble, Roman way out.’

  ‘Henry! What’re you saying, that the kid killed himself?’

  ‘Precisely – shortly after the vernissage for your installation. Now give me my cigarettes back.’

  The two men sat in angry, pained silence and smoked. They smoked a lot. Baz would’ve liked to cry for Herman, but this death was a decade old, and there were so many others jumbling up the intervening years, so many skeletal young men shot with each other’s guns, their corpses shovelled into time’s trenches. ‘How,’ he muttered eventually, ‘did Dorian find out?’

  ‘Ah well’ – Wotton visibly brightened at the opportunity for anecdote – ‘there lies a tale. Dorian went to enquire after Herman at the hole he slunk into occasionally to shoot up, but it turned out there was a snake in this hole. A skinhead snake, a vicious little fucker who also had a thing for our Herman. He didn’t so much tell Dorian about Herman’s demise as scream it at him while giving chase through Soho brandishing a knife. After that Dorian was very circumspect. This character – his name is Ginger – had no way of finding Dorian, but he averred that if he could he would wreak all sorts of mundane nastiness on that heavenly body.

  ‘The thing is’ – Wotton flicked his butt out through the car window – ‘that wasn’t the last Dorian saw of Ginger.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Oh no, he’s seen him around, on the scene, as it were. In clubs, at raves, here and there. Every time Ginger claps eyes on Dorian, he goes for him like a Rottweiler… Dangerous dogs are all the rage in Britain at the moment, Baz. I myself have thought of acquiring one, if only in order to add a little frisson to my relationship with Bluejay… Suffice to say, if this Cerberus ever catches up with our Orpheus that’ll be the end of him. Not even Dorian is immune to a knife, or a fist or a gun.’

  If Wotton had sought to provoke Baz, he was disappointed. The prospect of Dorian being done did nothing for Baz. He stared out through the windscreen at the mid-morning calm of this moneyed embayment. A crocodile of schoolboys in antiquated corduroy knickerbockers passed by, shepherded by a teacher with an umbrella for a crook. A postwoman slogged up the steps of the Wottons’ house, unlimbered her canvas sack, withdrew a sheaf of oblongs, stuffed them in the brass slot and then withdrew herself.

  Without a word, Baz got out of the Jag and went round to the passenger side. To tug Wotton up and out by the velvet lapels of his Crombie, to feel his body like a bundle of struts sheathed in tweed, to smell the sick sweat on his stippled cheek – none of this was bearable. Baz levered him upright and leant him, like a coat-tree bought at an antiques fair, against the furry haunch of the Jag. ‘Jesus, Henry,’ he panted, ‘I’m no stronger than you, I shouldn’t be dragging you about. You could do this yourself if you’d. Just. Stop. The. Fucking. Smack.’ Each word was another heave in the direction of the front door.

  ‘Steady, Baz…’ Wotton addressed him as if he were a groom – or a horse ‘… steady – we’re not late for a business meeting.’

  ‘Really? I would’ve thought you’d already arranged for a morning conference with Jah Bluejay. When I put your stuff away last night you only had a couple of rocks and a trace of smack. That’s not going to last you for long, is it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Baz, even my flesh feels a little unwilling nowadays. As for Bluejay – he’s no Rastafarian; he affects all that clobber – the dreadlocks and what have you – so that stupid squad will think he’s a holy ganja smoker.’

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘You say that, but it seems to work. Still, you’re right, he’ll be here soon enough. I am his oldest customer – and seniority has its privileges. Last year he baked me a cake for my birthday.’ They’d gained the front door and Wotton was groping under the skirts of his coat for his keys. ‘Bloody keys!’ he expostulated. ‘Fucking bloody stupid keys! Always the keys!’ He was more distressed by this than he’d been about anything else, and seemed close to weeping.

  ‘Calm down, Henry,’ Baz admonished him. ‘I’ve got the keys, I drove.’ He admitted them to the house and, dropping Wotton’s bag in the hallway, followed him as he limped on into the drawing room
. Wotton slumped down on the chaise-longue and Baz settled awkwardly by his slippered feet.

  In the ten years since Baz had last seen the room it had changed, although not as much as could have been reasonably hoped for. The uncomfy seating areas had been winnowed out a little, as if subjected to a decade-long game of musical chairs, and in their place two separate cultures had emerged at opposite ends of the long room. One was centred on an ornate Second Empire escritoire and had an advanced paper economy comprising piles of books, file cards, and yellow legal stationery. The counter-culture was based around a modern reclining armchair and was devoted to entertainment and medicine in equal measure. A huge television and VCR cabinet was set six feet in front of the recliner, its top and shelves stacked with tapes. By contrast, the mantelpiece above the fireplace and the shelves of two adjoining bookcases were lined with medicaments of all descriptions, both conventional and alternative, prescription and proscribed. In between these two sites wended a trail of children’s toys, here a teddy or a doll, there a picture book.

  ‘So,’ said Baz, ‘no one here to greet you at all?’

  ‘Well, as you know, Batface is at her seminar – she’s teaching part-time now at University College and writing a book as well, about Madame de Sévigné…’

  ‘You’re proud of her?’

  ‘Of course. I respect knowledge; its possessors are usually a little less stupid than the ignorant.’

  ‘You’re weird, Henry. Totally weird. What’s mellowed you? Are you happy together?’

  ‘A man can be happy with any woman as long as he doesn’t love her.’

  ‘Ha! No – still the fucking same bitter man. Still slicing everything up with your bloody epigrams.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do it, Baz, if life weren’t a chance meeting upon an operating table between a sadistic surgeon and a patient with Munchausen’s.’

  Baz looked about at the toys. ‘And Phoebe, who you care about just enough to get her HIV-tested – how old did you say she was? Six? Seven?’

  ‘Perhaps minus sixty or seventy would be closer to the truth, since Batface seems intent on raising her in the inter-war period, complete with ringlets, singlets and a Norland-fucking-nanny.’

  As if responding to this rantlette, the nanny in question came into the room. She was following the trail of toys, picking them up as she went. She certainly looked the part, with her thick blonde hair cut in a dead straight fringe, across a brow of such pink clarity that every single one of her eyebrow hairs was distinctly visible. In the middle of each plump cheek glowed a warm red spot, and every item of her apparel – velvet Alice band, pleated skirt, powder-blue tights, quilted sleeveless anorak and candy-striped blouse – could have been chosen with parodic intent. ‘Oh golly!’ she brayed upon noticing them. ‘Henry… Mr Wotton… sorry… I didn’t realise you were back.’

  ‘Yes, Claire, I’m back, back from my exciting sojourn in town, to this charming but parochial backwater. This is Mr Hallward.’

  ‘How d’you do.’ She offered a hand well shaped – for a trowel – and well used to mucking out, both horses and humans.

  ‘Oh, all right I s’pose –’ Too much time spent in the States meant Baz took her greeting as a genuine request for information.

  ‘He means,’ Wotton put in, ‘all right given that like me he has the dreaded lurgy. Better not get too close, Nanny Claire; he might get you with his death breath.’

  If Wotton had hoped to freak Claire out with this sally, he was gravely disappointed, for she merely clapped a trowel hand to his forehead and observed brusquely, ‘You’re running a fever, Henry, I’ll help you into your chair. Is the medication from the hospital in that overnight bag in the hall?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Baz, ‘I packed it.’

  ‘I’ll get that first then.’

  While she was gone, Wotton tried to give Baz a conspiratorial look, which said, can you believe this sham caring? But Baz was comforted by Nanny Claire’s competent manner and ignored him. He got up from the chaise-longue and wandered over to the bay window, where he stood, looking up and away from the sickroom. Behind him he dimly registered another bout of nannying.

  ‘C’mon now… that’s right… honestly, your shirt is wringing wet, I’ll help you out of it. Is it still the Cidofovir three-hourly?’

  ‘I’m not having that shit – it’s evil. Bluejay will sort me out when he arrives.’

  ‘Not with anything that’ll deal with the herpes virus in your eyes.’

  ‘I don’t want to be so sick that I shan’t enjoy my dinner party.’

  ‘You won’t be having any dinner party at all if you don’t take your medication.’

  It was astonishing, Baz mused, how Henry managed to maintain the most compliant set of people around him. Any other gay man who’d lived his life in this fashion – sham marriage, rampant drug addiction and now the virus – would’ve found himself at best abandoned. But Henry simply carried on as before; he seemed to view the whole deathly débâcle as merely another opportunity to épater the bourgeoisie he so detested. Was there perhaps a certain nobility in this? Or at any rate a level of philosophic detachment? Yes, Henry had always been detached, not only from society but from the entire epoch as well. It wasn’t merely because of his sexuality and his drug addiction, either. What was it that he had adopted as a fetish of time itself? Something – or rather someone – whom he used to view from this very window? ‘That was it,’ Baz muttered as his gaze zeroed in on the fifth storey of the flats opposite, ‘the jiggling man.’ It was the jiggling man and he was still at it, rocking and hopping from side to side like an autistic imprisoned in his own head, or a disturbed bear trapped in a zoo cage.

  Baz stared at the jiggling man with horrified pity, while the bickering continued behind him. Christ! It had been a long time, a long, long, lonely time for the jiggling man. It would’ve been comforting if this urban anchorite hadn’t aged as quickly as the outside world, but the reverse was the case. Jiggling for the past decade had really taken it out of him. His hair had gone grey, his face had become lumpy and blotched, his V-neck pullover was sadly raddled. Baz stared and stared as the jiggling man simply jiggled. What was it that Henry had said? That the jiggling man was meting out the very seconds allotted to the world? That he was a sibylline metronome prophesying the day they all would die? Well, judging by his worsened appearance, this now lay in the not too distant future.

  11

  Dusk fell over the summertime city like a hunter’s net weighted with the threat of night-time. London mewled and thrashed, then, becoming completely entangled, lay still, awaiting its chance to lash out again. In the Wottons’ asynchronous establishment lights were switched on prematurely, in order to ward off fear of darkness as much as darkness itself. Basil Hallward, after distracted hours of watching Wotton ride the rollercoaster of intoxication, found himself back in front of the bay window.

  The jiggling man’s lights were also on, and although Baz hadn’t been watching him the whole time, he still found it difficult to believe that he’d stopped jiggling for long enough to gain the switch. How did he eat or sleep or shit? How did he incorporate any of the normal functions of life into this ceaseless motion? Was there a ministering angel, a Nanny Claire who was always there for the jiggling man? Who would darn his unravelling woolly or twine together the frayed ends of his unravelled psyche? One thing was for certain, guests were assembling for a party at the Wottons’ house and the jiggling man wasn’t invited.

  Baz turned away from the window. Standard lamps and wall brackets, dangling fitments and daringly unshaded bulbs, all gushed wanness. The guests stood about in a variety of heraldic conversational poses, from couchant to rampant. It was the cocktail tourney and Baz felt highly vulnerable. He had failed to pack his character armour. What was he doing? He had intended to spend at most a day with Henry Wotton, to pass on the message of recovery and discuss their mutual friend. He knew that this environment was poison to him – one dose might just be bearable, but to expose him
self further was to risk the most dangerous emotional anaphylaxis. And he was smoking cigarettes again! He huffed. How absurd was this? He puffed. The most useless, damaging and addictive of drugs – what was the point? He huffed again.

  A smallish girl of eight or nine, wearing an old-fashioned muslin frock and with her brown hair in ringlets, materialised by Baz’s elbow. She broke the surface of his pool of self-recrimination with her alarmingly undershot jaw and goofy teeth. She was skilfully bearing a tray of Champagne flutes. Would you like a glass of shampoo, Mr Hallward? she piped.

  —No thanks, Phoebe, I don’t drink, you see.

  —What d’you mean – are you a robot?

  —No no, I mean I don’t drink alcohol.

  —My father says that fizzy drinks don’t count as booze.

  —Perhaps not for him, but they do for me. Can you find me an orange juice?

  —Oh, all right then, if you insist.

  She tripped away, to be replaced by another figure almost as diminutive. But this one was mannish and old, wrinkled and psychically malodorous. It was the Ferret. Well, Baz, long time no see. I understand from our host that you’ve become quite the clean-liver queen.

  —I’m dying, Fergus, just like Henry, and I’ve no time left for being stoned.

  —Ah yes, Baz, but you’ve always insisted on calling a spade a spade, so it’s no wonder that you’ve managed to dig your own grave.

  —Are you suggesting it’s my literalism that’s killing me rather than AIDS? Even as he did it Baz regretted being drawn into this banter.

  —I wouldn’t know, the Ferret snuffled; I haven’t qualifications in either philosophy or medicine. Have you met Gavin?

  It was the nurse from the Middlesex Hospital, which explained to Baz his air of familiarity with the whole Wotton coterie. With his blond good looks and affable manner, he was an altogether planed-down version of the Ferret’s usual bits of rough. Now that he was suited and booted as well, he floated in the prevailing social current rather better than his two interlocutors. I’m pleased to meet you again in a social context – he addressed Basil – I know your work.