by Will Self
—Really? Basil found it impossible not to be flattered.
—Yes – I did a foundation course at St Martin’s; my tutor was an admirer of your installations. You’ve become very influential, a sort of British Viola – but I’m sure you knew that.
—Well… yes… Baz blustered. Still, it’s different hearing it to reading it in some mag. So, what happened to your art?
—Oh, I dropped out. Gavin affected the inertia common to all drop-outs at all times and in all places.
The Ferret said, To care for me, the love.
—No, that’s not right, Fergus, and you know it. I left to do nursing, but the NHS doesn’t pay a living wage, so I take on the odd private patient.
Very odd, Baz thought, then remarked aloud, You seem altogether more sprightly than I remember, Fergus.
—Yes, the homunculus tittered; nowadays I have no difficulty in being distinctly chipper and alive to the world – why, I’m always up at the dawn of crack.
—D’you see much of Dorian?
—Oh, no no… My dear boy, Dorian is far too popular for leathery old queens like us; frankly, I’ll be amazed if he turns up this evening. Which is just a little bad of him, because Henry quite created him. Still, how the butterfly despises the pupa, hmm?
There was a little hubbub by the door to the drawing room, and Wotton and Batface loomed up from their respective pits of conversation to welcome in David Hall, who was limping heavily, despite being supported on the one hand by a three-pronged aluminium walking stick, and on the other by a willowy, fortyish blonde.
—Ah, said the Ferret, the Minister for Housing, you know him of course, Baz?
—No, not really. What’s wrong with him?
—Oh, he had a stroke last year. You could say a lucky stroke, since it’s done wonders for his popularity. Now the way he limps towards the future makes him the perfect personification of the regime.
—Isn’t that Hester Wharton with him?
—Yes – they say she married him for his crippled cachet as much as his bulging portfolio. Pity is a beastly perversion, wouldn’t you agree?
Despite himself Baz found he was being swept away by this snide cataract, for it was exactly as it had always been in the vicinity of Wotton, with quipsters vying for opportunities to torpedo meaningful conversation with their bons mots, and stooges such as himself providing them with the set-ups for their cheap shots. When I knew her, Baz said, she’d slept with half the men in New York –
—And now she’s sleeping with half a man in London, said a silky-voiced interloper, whereupon all three men turned to confront –
—Dorian! Baz despised himself for his enthusiasm.
—My dear, dear Baz… It took until the second ‘dear’ for Baz to realise that this salutation wasn’t dripping with venomous sarcasm, that in fact it was genuinely affectionate. Baz had also forgotten how charming sheer beauty could be; or rather, he had done his level best to recondition his sensibility, so that it could no longer affect him. However, this availed him naught – he was caught once more in Dorian’s seductive web… Enchanté, breathed the beauteous one, kissing him on either cheek; he then confirmed the specialness of this intimacy by merely turning to the Ferret and Gavin and saying, Fergus, Gavin.
Baz stared at Dorian, who was resplendent in the sharpest of à la mode suiting, his lapels mere stilettos, ready to cut to the quick whosoever might grasp them. Dorian’s hair was a golden cap on his flawlessly brown brow. Set beside the Ferret – whose skin was so wrinkled it appeared as if his eyes were peering out through a shattered windscreen – or even Gavin – whose stripped-pine features nevertheless exposed his own peculiar dendrochronology – Dorian’s complexion was porelessly smooth. It’s been nearly five years, Dorian, Baz exclaimed, and you haven’t changed a bit!
—Oh, the product has changed, Baz, believe me; it’s only the packaging that remains the same. But you – you’re altogether a different man. My informants tell me that like crystal dunked in Fairy Liquid you’re squeaky clean. Congratulations.
—I didn’t do it by myself, Dorian.
—Nonsense, Baz, you’re a true artist, and artists always create themselves to begin with; then the more wildly inventive you are, the more you feel called upon to reinvent yourselves –
He would have gone on, but at this point a rental major-domo entered via the double doors at the furthest end of the room and declaimed, Ladies, Gentlemen, dinner is served. Without more ado the guests unfroze their heraldic poses and began to make their way out. Baz hung back, watching as Dorian encountered first Wotton and then Alan Campbell, who was struggling up from a large leather hassock. Campbell, while as dapper and bloodless as ever, bore the fatal taint upon his smooth features. Baz noted that his now scraggy neck was wrapped in a voluminous cravat, and suspected that beneath such a sartorial solecism would be found embarrassing KS medallions. Put next to Wotton and Campbell, Dorian appeared to belong to a different order of being. While he might not have been able to acknowledge this at any conscious or rational level, Baz sensed that Dorian had not only escaped the clutches of the virus, he had also freed himself from all the dreary claims of the body. Pausing in the doorway, Dorian offered his arm to the ever absurd – but always pitiable – Batface. He turned briefly towards Baz and smiled in a cheesy, feline manner, such that his grin remained after the rest of him had passed on through.
An hour later one course had been served, chewed and removed, and a second had taken its place and been half consumed. The Wottons’ board was long and serpentine; it snaked awkwardly along the length of the basement-cum-dining room, kinking here to avoid a buttress, and over there to skirt a chimney breast or a fitted bookcase. White damask was thrown over this concatenation of sub-tables, which meant that adjoining diners found themselves sitting at slightly different heights, as if the one were set up on a small stage for the other’s entertainment. The cutlery, the crockery and the glassware were as rented as the major-domo, who, assisted by two other hirelings, was charging glasses and circulating platters.
Perhaps the most surprising thing for a visitor unfamiliar with a milieu such as this would have been the discovery that the Wottons were one of those upper-class families who tended towards being hypertrophied bourgeois. Down here in the basement there were kiddy daubs and snapshots pinned on cork boards, while the furniture was the same overstuffed and spindly freak show that had been mounted in the drawing room. There was some unavoidable mingling, but mostly it was Wotton and his pals who occupied the dining-room end of the table (warped old boys flanked by upstanding tallboys), while Batface and her friends resided in the more rational and uncomfortable milieu of the kitchen.
All along the length of the table limped a procession of Badoit bottles, wine bottles, beer bottles, flower vases and candlesticks, as if they were soldiery fleeing the mouths of the diners, which, like the barrels of guns, sent forth volley after volley of conversation. ‘Nowadays,’ said Wotton to Jane Narborough, who was sitting on his right, ‘I want my sins to be like sushi – fresh, small and entirely raw.’
‘I shouldn’t imagine you’d say that, Henry, if you looked at some sushi through a microscope.’ She spooned up a blob of her individual cheese soufflé for emphasis. ‘They’re absolutely crawling with bacteria.’
‘So am I,’ he replied succinctly.
Meanwhile Dorian was putting his even bite on the new Mrs Hall, Hester Wharton. She was a distinctly chilly and exiguous blonde in a grey silk shift dress the consistency of water vapour. Her nipples stuck through the material like chilled glacé cherries in a freezer cabinet. ‘Of course,’ he drawled, ‘the Gulf War never really happened…’
‘What the hell d’you mean?’ She had married Hall for his apparent straightforwardness and was finding his compatriots’ extreme facetiousness very hard to take.
‘Please,’ Dorian damped her down, ‘I can see I’ve offended you –’
‘You haven’t! I just wanna know, what the hell d’you mean?’
‘I bet you wouldn’t say that,’ she said, ‘if it was one of your kids who’d died in the Allied bombing, or been wiped out by one of Saddam’s Scuds.’ Like all liberals she had a goat-like ability to gain the high moral ground of other people’s suffering.
‘Do you know anyone who lost a kid in the war?’
‘Whaddya mean?’
‘As I say, do you know anyone who lost anyone in this war?’
‘Uh – no, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’
‘D’you know anyone who knows anyone else who lost someone in the war?’
‘Ferchrissakes –’
‘For anyone’s sake. Look, the point is, Mrs Hall, you may well be at more than six degrees of separation from this “conflict”, and that means it barely exists at all so far as you’re concerned.’
‘You’re crazy’ – Hester grabbed for her wine and took a bar-room slurp – ‘we could get up from this table, go to the airport, get on a plane, fly there and see the actual evidence of this war in the goddamn flesh.’
‘Could we? I rather think that all the parties concerned have conspired to prevent that from happening. But anyway, let’s talk no more about it; if one doesn’t talk about a thing it never happened. It’s simply expression – as Henry says – that gives reality to things.’
Meanwhile, further along the table, the Ferret was brightly declaiming, while poking at the blunt lapel of his own sharp suit, ‘I don’t always wear this AIDS ribbon, y’know.’
‘Because what?’ snapped his companion, Manuela Sanchez, a Hispanic art dyke of formidable sterotypy, complete with cheroot, monocle, red huntsman’s coat and black tie.
‘Because, my dear Manuela, it sometimes doesn’t quite go with what I’m wearing – you can appreciate that.’
‘I am thinking this ribbon has nothing to do with the fashion – it is a political statement, yes?’
‘Ah, but Manuela, the late-twentieth century requires of us that all political statements be fashionable, just as all fashion statements must be political. In time I predict there will be a whole spectrum of these little ribbons, each one professing the wearer’s solidarity with this or that cohort of the diseased, or tribe of endangered indigenes.’
‘Pah!’ She spat cigar smoke at him. ‘You English never say what you mean.’
‘On the contrary,’ he sniffed, ‘I say what I mean, although I seldom mean what I say.’
Still further along the table, Gavin was telling Baz about life and death on the wards. ‘His gut,’ he said of one patient, ‘was punctured by some guy fist-fucking him.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Baz exclaimed. ‘Did this character have talons, or what?’
‘No,’ Gavin sniggered grimly, ‘unless you believe that marriage makes you soar like an eagle. The fister was married and hadn’t thought to take off his wedding ring.’
And at the far end of the table from Wotton, his wife was addressing David Hall on matters of more global import. ‘Great nations aren’t established b-b-by n-negotiation, M-Minister,’ she spluttered claret, ‘b-but by f-f-fiat. History tells us this.’ Her hands waved in the air so as to express the idea of vast empires collapsing into the dust of ages.
‘So, what are you saying, Lady Victoria?’ He moved a cruet towards her as if it were a battalion of bureaucrats. ‘That the EU should send an expeditionary force into the Balkans?’
‘Golly, no, I mean, golly, no, mine is not a p-prescriptive statement – merely an observation.’
‘Well, it is perhaps your right as a historian to indulge in such observations, but my colleagues and I have to decide what it is that we, as a nation, should actually do in this conflict. That the Balkans are revolting is not, any more…’ he paused to give emphasis to one of his biannual witticisms ‘… a matter of taste.’
Batface, out of politeness, affected not to notice. ‘I’d r-rather thought that i-i-inertia was deciding the i-i-issue,’ she clumsily iterated.
It would have been interesting to remain with this exchange (which was the most interesting dialogue at the table by far), but like any other circumnavigation this one cried out to be completed. Beside David Hall sat Chloë Lambert, who wasn’t so much a girl-who-painted (as were so many of her high class and low ability) as a girl who rag-rolled skirting boards. She was tête-à-tête with Alan Campbell, describing for him the location of a friend’s weekend retreat. ‘I like his place; it’s absolutely isolated in a wood at the far end of the estate. I think it was built as a folly or something.’
‘And didja say there were two roads into this place?’ Coming from Campbell’s mouth, twisted with ill will, this sounded like an unpleasant insinuation, as if he were planning a murder and had lighted upon this as a good place to dump the victim.
Next to Campbell sat two highly disparate characters, yet they both sported dreadlocks and were discussing a region of common interest. One was Angela Brownrigg, another posh foal soused in privilege, who, in a misguided attempt to appear hip, had braided her lank yellow locks with multicoloured wooden beads. ‘Yes, I love Jamaica,’ she trilled, ‘although there’s hardly anywhere to stay in the Caribbean nowadays, so if you do open your hotel… Mr…?’
‘Bluejay,’ said her dour and heavyset neighbour, upon whom dreadlocks appeared far more convincing, ‘jus’ Bluejay.’
‘Bluejay, then – well, tout le monde will flock there, believe me. Mustique is so uncool now.’
‘I dunno no fucking Lamonde, but if ’e toot, well, thass easy done.’
‘And tell me,’ Angela said, persisting in her life at cross-purposes, ‘will you have an arboretum?’
A small head bobbed by Bluejay’s tracksuited shoulder. It was Phoebe, who cowered away from the lugubrious gaze of a whole monkfish which lay across her plate.
‘It’s not looking at you, Phoebe,’ said her nanny.
‘It is, Claire,’ the little girl protested, ‘even though its eyes are all dull and dead – it’s still looking at me!’ Holding it at arm’s length, she prodded the fish with her knife.
‘Well, you would’ve done better to have nursery supper this evening.’
‘But I wanted to see Daddy and Mummy’s guests.’
‘You’ve seen them now and it’s a schoolday tomorrow, so unless you’re going to try with the fish, it’s up to bed.’
‘You should’ve had a soufflé like me, Phoebe,’ Jane Narborough said. ‘It’s quite all right to think of all animals as your friends, y’know. I do.’
‘You can afford to, Jane,’ said Wotton; ‘you’ve a big enough establishment to maintain an ark-load on full board.’
‘You say that, Henry’ – she manifested the weary resignation of those who have to bear the awful burden of great wealth – ‘but truthfully, running costs at Narborough simply get higher and higher.’
‘Unlike that’ – he gestured at her soufflé – ‘which looks distinctly soggy. I’m sure even zero-rate inflation would be no compensation for a collapsed soufflé.’
‘C’mon, Phoebe.’ Claire rose up, a solid bulwark against all of this brittle persiflage. ‘It really is your bedtime now.’
‘Oh, all right,’ the little girl conceded, ‘but I want to kiss everyone goodnight first.’
Round she went, from her father to Hester to Dorian to Manuela to the Ferret to Gavin to Baz to Batface to Hall to Chloë to Campbell to Angela to Bluejay to Claire to Jane and back to her father. Round and round, kiss after kiss, the imprint of lewd lips, lascivious lips, leftover lips, pink-lipsticked lips, all on her
white brow. Eventually Claire persuaded Phoebe to peel off and head upstairs, but the giddy rondo continued after she was gone, the mouths pouting and opening and closing, expelling smoke and babbles while the candles guttered; faster and faster until all there was was this sociable blur. Then, at last, the fateful wheel slowed down as the gravity of true night-time exerted itself.
It was way past everyone’s bedtime now. The candles had melted down to Gaudíesque finials. Plastic crates full of the rental ware were stacked in a barricade by the stairs. The hired men had long since departed. The dinner party had completely resolved itself into the two cliques that were at its core, and these had repelled each other, so that they ended up inhabiting either end of the long table. Around Batface were gathered David and Hester Hall, Jane Narborough and Gavin. Their talk was earnest, full of the names of people not personally known to them – Yeltsin, Gorbachev and Rajiv Gandhi – and referring to places they would be disinclined to visit, such as Moscow, Sarajevo and New Delhi.
At the other end of the table, grouped around Wotton, were the Ferret, Alan Campbell, Bluejay, Dorian and Baz. The latter – for reasons of self-preservation – was keeping an empty place between himself and the rest, but really the Urals would have done the job better. The chatter among this little posse was perverse, cynical and brittle, incorporating the names of people they knew only too intimately and referring to places where they would far rather be.
‘Have some more brandy, Baz,’ Dorian said provocatively, offering a slopping decanter. Whatever enthusiasm he’d evinced earlier in the evening for Baz’s sobriety seemed to have evaporated.
‘I can’t have any more because I haven’t had any at all,’ Baz replied.
‘You’re an awful prude now, aren’t you, Baz,’ said Wotton. ‘Since you’ve swapped one kind of needlework for another and become a Victorian miss, you can help me with Quilty.’
‘Quilty?’
‘It’s my AIDS quilt.’ He pulled a tattered bit of cloth about the size and shape of a bar-mat out of his pocket and waved it aloft.