by Will Self
‘So you don’t mind?’
‘Mind? Of course I don’t mind; I can see the whole scenario: he pestered you for sex, you finally snapped. It’s a common enough occurrence among men of our ilk: the older importuning, the younger giving way to flattery at first, but eventually, consumed by resentment, lashing out. It’s only to your credit that you realised how badly the situation reflected on you and decided to act. Nevertheless, Basil’s friendship with you did have a certain artistry; it was quite an achievement for him ever to have managed to paint himself up in a good enough light for you to want to sleep with him.’
‘Is there nothing you can’t deal with rhetorically, Henry?’ Dorian asked, a trace of wonderment in his voice.
‘Nothing to do with my feelings,’ Wotton replied with some seriousness. ‘After all, a witticism is merely the half-life of an emotion. Now get the bill, there’s a good fellow; I don’t even have a half-life left any more, Dorian, and what I do have I wish to spend in a congenial, drug-full environment.’
Dorian did as he’d been bidden, but when he returned from paying downstairs and was helping Wotton to descend, he couldn’t prevent himself from returning to the subject. ‘So, you’re being completely honest?’
‘About what?’
‘About Baz – about not minding about Baz?’
‘Oh do shut up, Dorian’ – Wotton rounded on him – ‘this silliness has gone on long enough. I don’t mind how you dress yourself up but don’t try to pretend you’re a psycho killer. Violent crimes are in astonishingly bad taste, just as bad taste is a violent crime. You, Dorian, are far too comme il faut to commit a murder. I’m sorry if I ruffle your feathers by saying so…’ he stretched out a hand and rumpled Dorian’s hair ‘… but it’s a fact.’
14
Eighteen months had passed; it was early February. The gardens of the adjoining houses were stark and bare, yet the Wottons’ walled oblong exhibited a most sinister force, which through their green fuses drove the flowers into bloom. Petals exploded from their heavy heads to lie upon the knee-high grasses of this pocket steppe, and the prickly yellow casings of horse chestnuts dangling from the leafy boughs of a tree had the semblance of Pan’s own gonads, heavy with the milk of regeneration.
Two men stood in the bay window at the back of the house, looking down on to the lawn. They were watching a most bizarre game of catch. A tall, striking eleven-year-old girl, with auburn hair falling in loose waves to her shoulders, and freckles the size of petits pois squashed across her cheekbones, was standing on the area of paving that bordered the lawn. She wore the idiomatic clothing of the young; trousers and top inscribed with American catch-phrases. She flexed her knees slightly and tossed a pink tennis ball in the direction of a woman who was spreadeagled in the grass. The woman had one hand across her back, as if she were being restrained by an invisible police officer, while the other flailed in the air and missed the ball.
‘Right, Mum,’ cried the girl, ‘now you’ve got to catch the ball with your mouth!’
‘Oh Phoebe,’ gasped Batface, for it was she, ‘that’s absolutely absurd – n-n-no one can catch a ball with their m-mouth. I can’t even see because of this hayfield.’ The girl ignored her, merely swishing through the grass to gather up the ball. She knelt and pulled her mother’s free arm over so that it lay with the other. ‘Ooh-hoo-hoo,’ chortled Batface, ‘that tickles, Phoebe, hee-hee, Phoebe!’
‘One has only to watch women playing with children,’ Wotton paraphrased Schopenhauer from his enclosed pulpit, ‘to realise that they are themselves big children.’
‘D’you think so?’ The Ferret’s scepticism was understandable, as to him even children seemed like big children. ‘Y’know, Wotton,’ he continued, ‘it’s bloody strange the way all the flowers in your garden are blooming just now.’
‘It’s global warming,’ Wotton drawled, while taking a drag on the joint they were sharing; ‘it’s doing the most astonishing things to the biosphere.’ He exhaled, doing something banal to the atmosphere.
‘Hmm,’ the Ferret mused, his little head aching with the unaccustomed effort of empiricism, ‘if that’s so, why are all the other gardens perfectly dead?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Fergus, perhaps it’s only local warming – does it bother you? Is it interfering with you in some way?’ Wotton turned on his heel and shuffled back to his recliner. He lowered himself into the Parker-Knoll and, picking up a pair of glasses with lenses as thick and distorting as Coca-Cola bottles, began scrutinising a copy of the TV Times.
‘Can you see at all any more?’ the Ferret asked, with the brusque insensitivity that still passed for impeccable manners in England.
Wotton sighed. ‘Yes, well, that other queen may have found 1992 an annus horribilis, but for me it resulted in an anus horribilis. We all need bacteria, Fungus – I mean, Fergus.’
‘What on earth are you saying?’
‘I’m saying we all need a heavily forested interior to maintain life on Planet Arse, but unfortunately antibiotics have completely logged my interior, and for months now I’ve been subject to the most appalling flatulence.’
‘Oh Henry, please, spare me the detail.’
‘Why? You have only to hear the words – it’s I who must contend with what they describe. Anyway, you asked – and since you asked I can tell you my diarrhoea is the thing that keeps me fit; all those midnight dashes – most invigorating.’
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘I’m getting there… As I say, wrestling with Mr Arse has been exhausting, but my sight has settled into a beneficent state of impairment. I have my senior herpes still; I have severe viral conjunctivitis as well. There are also the post-operative cataracts, but the net effect is most satisfying. I’ll give you an example. You see the jiggling man?’ Wotton waved the joint at the window.
‘What jiggling man?’
‘Up on the fifth storey of that block of flats – see him? He’s in a fetching red woolly this month, if I’m not much mistaken.’
The Ferret went back to the bay window. ‘You mean the man who’s sort of rocking back and forth.’
‘Jiggling.’
‘Oh, all right, jiggling then.’
‘Him I see with absolute clarity – I can tell when he was last shaved to within a half-hour – whereas your foul little features are blissfully blurred, Fergus. It’s as if a veil of beauty has been thrown over the world – because, let’s face it, the closer you get to someone the uglier they become.’
‘You’re unnecessarily rude,’ the Ferret humphed.
‘At least,’ Wotton trumpeted, ‘you admit that some rudeness is necessary.
‘The fact is,’ the Wotton band played on, ‘that all of the initials they pump into me to treat my acronym are proving effective, the AZT and the DDI. I’ve been accepted for the trials of these drugs – not, you appreciate, because of my suitability, but for precisely the opposite reason: they cannot understand why I’m still alive.’
‘I can’t either,’ the Ferret sniffed. ‘Your cruelty is staggering and not at all witty any more. To think that Nureyev is dead while you continue to clump gracelessly about the world. Ugh.’
The Ferret got away with this only because at that moment Batface and Phoebe entered the room, the latter bearing a wicker basket piled with cut flowers and other garden herbage. The Ferret went up on tiptoes to kiss Batface, while Phoebe studiously ignored him by tidying the greenery with some secateurs. ‘Oh, um, F-Fergus, yes,’ Batface blethered. ‘What’re you doing here?’
‘I’ve come to meet this friend of Henry’s – he’s called London, I believe.’
‘Oh, yes, indeed, London; such a suitable sobriquet for a second-generation immigrant – Phoebe!’ she broke off. ‘Those c-clippings are going all over the c-carpet – go and ask Consuela for a vase.’ The eleven-year-old stomped out of the room.
‘Why?’ Wotton asked. ‘Why’s London a good name for a second-generation immigrant?’
‘B-
b-because presumably he’s the first of his f-family to be born in London.’
‘Oh, that’s ridiculous, Batface. It’s a street name – he wasn’t christened London.’
‘But where is the young fellow?’ The Ferret consulted his watch, a dollop of gold on a chain which he withdrew from his egregiously paisley waistcoat. ‘I have a lunch at my club.’
‘Oh no you don’t,’ Wotton put in. ‘You don’t get off so lightly; I have to go to the hospital to have my tubes done and you can accompany me. London never serves up this early; he’s a drug dealer, Fergus, not an emergency plumber. We’ll rendezvous with him later.’
‘Thank you, dear.’ Batface took a tall, flared piece of cut glass from Phoebe and began to arrange bits of this and that. ‘When will you be back, Henry?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’ They all stood in silence for a couple of minutes, watching as under Batface’s surprisingly deft fingers an anti-natural arrangement took shape, with holly berries, catkins and forsythia interleaved with roses, daffodils and snowdrops. At the centre of this thicket was the small limb of a fruiting pear tree. ‘That’s beautiful,’ Wotton said at length. ‘Very seasonable.’
‘Yes,’ his daughter muttered into the chewed-up cuff of her sweatshirt, ‘but which bloody season?’
‘Very good, Phoebe,’ said her father, whose hearing was acute; ‘now look for my car keys for me, will you, I can’t find them anywhere.’ He began to struggle into his new winter coat, a modish, full-length, kapok-padded number, which had the air about it of a whole-body blood-pressure cuff.
Later, in the Jag, the Ferret was outraged. ‘You got me here on false pretences, Henry. First you say “now”, then you say “later” – eventually you concede you’re going into hospital overnight.’
‘Look.’ Wotton was brusque. ‘If you want the crack connection you’ll have to oblige me; otherwise by all means go and score by yourself on the Mozart Estate.’
‘Well, really! And furthermore,’ the Ferret huffed, ‘why did you keep me waiting at your house? You know I can’t abide having to talk with the womenfolk.’
‘Yeah,’ Wotton replied, ‘because you’re old woman enough for anyone. But shut up now’ – he switched on the ignition and the ageing car groaned into life – ‘and help me drive. If anything gets too near on your side, sing out. Other than that, tell me what you know about Dorian; I’ve said my piece.’
‘But did you believe him?’ the Ferret said, fastening his seat belt and composing his little limbs on the car seat in a stoical fashion. ‘Did you think he had murdered Baz?’ He took a pillbox from his other waistcoat pocket and extracted two yellow five-milligram Dexedrine. He passed one to Wotton and they both dry-swallowed.
‘Of course not; he was merely striking an attitude. I assumed you saw them both out on the west coast – an American who was passing through town told me he’d run across you and Dorian there.’
‘No no. I did see a bit of Dorian, that’s true, but I haven’t seen Baz since he was last here. D’you think he might have died?’
Wotton took a while to answer; he was involved in the tricky manoeuvre of pulling out on to the King’s Road with less than twenty per cent peripheral vision. ‘Lorry coming!’ the Ferret piped up, and Wotton floored the accelerator, lurching directly into its path. There was a klaxon’s bellow and a blare of abuse, but Wotton merely lowered the window and blew a kiss in the general direction of seven tons of ire. ‘I love you!’ he fluted. ‘I love you all.’ Then, turning to the Ferret, he resumed. ‘For Baz to have died once would have been unfortunate; for him to die twice looks like carelessness.’
‘No, I mean you don’t think Dorian did actually murder him?’
‘If he did, you’d have to congratulate Dorian, Fergus. After all, in the course of disposing of Baz’s body, just like Nilsen, Dahmer and all those other queer serial killers, Dorian would’ve had to put him back in the closet.’
‘Why are you so flip about this, Henry?’
‘Three reasons. First, I don’t believe he did it; secondly, even if he did, his victim wouldn’t have had long to live in any case; and thirdly, Baz is so insubstantial anyway, to murder him would have all the actuality of rubbing out a bad fictional characterisation.
‘I myself would thrill to being dispatched by Dorian. I can’t imagine my nearest and dearest would behave as tediously as Basil’s brother, a certain Marius Hallward, a solicitor in Nottingham – wherever that may be – who has written to me several times asking if I know his brother’s whereabouts.
‘Enough of Baz, Fergus, tell me about Dorian, tell me about LA. Paint me a picture on a taut, tan skin canvas, using only the brightest and wateriest of colours. Make it a Hockney, with sunshine yellows and swimming-pool aquamarines. I want your words to buoy me up, to lift me above all this.’ He pointed at the grim outdoors. The Jag was passing the Albert Memorial, where the eponymous consort sat in his rococo rocket looking colossally constipated, as if he were about to evacuate himself into space. By the side of the road a variegated pack of dogs rootled at the frozen ground, while a professional dog-walker stood in attendance. ‘Just think’ – Wotton gestured in their direction – ‘hundreds of thousands of years of co-evolution, and we end up paying for them to be taken out for a pee.’ Beyond the dogs, on the dead brown winter grass, a small child stood fending off a kite. ‘Please, Fergus’ – Wotton’s voice had an unaccustomed note of desperation – ‘take me away from all this.’
And the Ferret obliged. ‘Despite being cocooned in First Class, supine on a seat so padded and horizontal it no longer deserved the name, I still couldn’t sleep. It’s ironic, Henry: with this affliction of mine – not that I expect or receive any sympathy – precisely when an inability to stay awake might be deemed most useful, I find myself tossing and turning. Yes, when I’m flying, repose is as remote from me as the ground. I cruise thirty-five thousand feet above it in a jet stream of turbulent wakefulness. I try to think of the plane as an enormous membrum virile, absolutely full of little Ferguses, but somehow this isn’t at all reassuring.
‘I yearned for that chorus of distressed babies from steerage that meant we were coming into land. Their little Eustachian tubes are so sensitive they ought to invent a cockpit instrument that uses them. Were I technically minded I might devise it myself.
‘Descending into LAX is like entering a vast aquarium where no one has troubled to change the water for some time. The atmosphere, Henry, it’s absolutely green with pollution. Yet once the plane is on the ground and clunking towards the terminal one finds one’s eyes have adjusted, that outside it’s deliciously sunny.
‘I was quite privileged that autumn (I don’t like to say “fall” – it’s such a brutal name for a season), because Dorian met me at the airport in one of those laughably long cars, the ones with a bar inside. He had cocaine and all sorts of other goodies, but I was only too happy to curl up in a little ball on the big seat and sleep all the way to the hotel. I knew Dorian and Gavin had met a couple of times before, but this was the first time they’d spent really talking with each other. I suppose’ – he sniffed – ‘I should’ve seen it coming, but one doesn’t, does one? And Gavin had been so terrifically loyal.
‘Ah well, Henry, I know you don’t do America, but I expect you can picture the scene well enough.’
The Jag had won the race and lurched to a halt at the single yellow finishing line on Rathbone Place. Outside in the mizzle, raincoated men with the serious miens of classical-music buffs were queuing to enter a popular pornographer’s. ‘Oh I can,’ Wotton said softly, ‘I can picture it only too well, Fergus.’ He lit a cigarette, and the smoke rolled out of his saturnine mouth like tiny temporal waves breaking on the beach of the present. He pictured the scene.
—Is he asleep? asked Dorian, chopping out a line on a mirror balanced on his knees.
—Yeah, I think so. Gavin did the necessary with the Ferret’s eyelids. Yeah, he’s out. I’ll wake him when we get there. Where are we staying?
> —I’ve booked you into the Château Marmont for the first week – but you’re staying a while, right?
—Oh, I dunno – I s’pose it’s up to him. He says he wants to buy a few properties; I’ve no idea how long that takes. Gavin took the mirror and rolled-up bill. He honked up the line, then took a slug from the Champagne flute and put it back in its plastic socket of a receptacle. I mean, he is technically speaking my boss.
—Why the fuck d’you stick with it?
—Jesus, you know nothing, Dorian, fuck all. You haven’t a fucking clue what it might be like to be without money or connections or looks, even –
—You have the looks, Dorian said, and ran a finger along the smooth grain of Gavin’s handsome face. Gavin grabbed it, selected a finger, bit it hard. Ow! Dorian cried. That hurt!
The Ferret stirred in his sleep. He cooed in a singsong voice, Fergus babies in the cloudy playpen.
Gavin laughed, sucking Dorian’s finger. I wanted to see if you had any nerves at all. Look, I need a little time in the sun. Fergus is no trouble – all he wants is to be fed his drugs and his other luxuries, and a couple of times a week I slap him around and give him a wank. What could be easier?
—It sounds perfectly vile to me; I can’t imagine how horrible his body is underneath that little suit.
—Well, it’s very muscly, if wrinkled and misshapen. I’m sure you’ll have the opportunity to witness it for yourself; he likes to strip off in the sun.
Oof! The Ferret ejaculated a spout of atomised saliva. He lay horizontal, on his back, at the Venice Beach open-air gymnasium. All about him bobbed balloon sculptures of the male human form; they stretched and puckered and pumped. He would’ve looked altogether at odds with this Olympian company – by virtue of size, age and texture – had it not been for a helper he’d acquired: a stocky little dwarf with a head disproportionately large even for his kind. From his cleft bum of a chin an oiled trowel of goatee dug into the sweaty air. The dwarf, nude save for a cache-sexe, had built his body into a veritable cylinder of sinuosity. He was helping the Ferret by adding two kilo weights on to the bench pressing bar. That’s twenty keys, he said. Are you sure you can do it?