by Will Self
On this beautiful afternoon, which felt more like early spring than late autumn, the first drive was commenced by a handful of beaters who strolled through the poplars and ashes of Dunter’s Wood, smiting the underbrush. The guns lined up in a loose rank, with all the big, serious beefcake at one end, and the irregulars at the other. Dorian Gray was on the very furthest flank. His shotgun was serious rather than flashy, and his tweeds serviceable rather than chic, yet from the tip of the grouse feather stuck in his hatband to the very toes of his lace-up boots, Dorian, as ever, exuded a lethal elegance.
The Duke ran hither and thither behind the guns, bearing his own absurdist weapon, a replica Purdey lovingly carved – by Binky Narborough himself – out of a single piece of wood. Bip-bip! he cried. Bip-bip! I say, fellows, remember, kill birds if you must, but no people please. Bip-bip! Had a fellow last year, winged a beater, very bad show. Bip-bip! Better if you all had guns like mine; still, bip-bip! Won’t insist. Bip-bip! If there were to be any accidents that day, it looked as if it was the Duke himself who would cause them. But as the first pheasants whirred up into the air, levelled off, and came swooping towards the guns, he saw his son mooching along an avenue of lime trees two fields away, and cantered off to join him.
Dorian Gray loosed first one barrel, and the bird he’d drawn a bead on – a particularly fine cock – staggered in mid-air, then went into a tailless spin. It was a beautiful day, he enjoyed shooting, and last night he’d managed a particularly satisfying piece of devilry; Dorian should’ve been in his element – and yet he couldn’t rid himself of a sense of uneasiness. There were still some birds in the air and the other guns were blazing away. Dorian had plenty of time for a second shot, but a hint of colour in the trees caught his eye and he lowered the gun. It was one of the beaters, a stocky fellow with a malevolent glare – aimed directly at Dorian. Dorian registered the pudgy features of his nemesis at the same time he heard the report of David Hall’s gun by his ear. Almost unthinking, as if it were an instinctive act of self-defence, he raised his own gun and pulled the trigger. The pudgy face went bright red.
It took long seconds for the confused cries of the other beaters to silence the remaining guns, then a small bit of hell broke loose and erupted into the world above.
18
The faces of two men flickered from green to orange to blue to white in the light from a television screen. The brightness of these hues belied the tawdriness of the spectacle that provoked them. One of the watching faces was so emaciated that it had the crude features – big vertical creases, savagely undershot jaw, black button eyes – of a glove puppet fashioned from a sock. The other face was a feral little muzzle, with a pince-nez on a ribbon taking the place of whiskers.
The colours played on the two faces and spread out behind them, lighting up the serrated leaves and soaring stalks of the surrounding foliage. It was as if the two men – one wheelchair-bound and rug-wrapped, the other awkwardly poised on a cast-iron chair – were lost in a peculiar rainforest, one where electricity was available (a power point neatly implanted in a prickly pear?) so that they could scare off the animals of the night by burning an illusion.
On screen a young woman – shortish hair neatly coifed, wide eyes blackly lidded – was earnestly explaining to an earnest man how her marriage had been compromised by her husband’s mistress. ‘There were three of us in this marriage,’ she breathed, ‘so it was a bit crowded.’
‘I don’t call three that crowded, d’you, Fergus?’ Henry Wotton said. ‘Besides, if the transcripts of his mobile-phone calls to his mistress are to be believed, her old man thinks he’s a tampon.’
‘A tarpon?’ the Ferret mused; he wasn’t altogether there. ‘Is it some kind of fishing fantasy?’
‘No, you old fool, a tampon, the Prince of Wales thinks he’s a tampon. He wants to be a tampon shoved up inside Camilla Parker Bowles, so if that were the case there’d only be two full-size individuals in the marriage. Both of them, admittedly, women.’
‘I didn’t know Princess Di was a lesbian,’ the Ferret came back gamely. ‘Still, with her and the Parker Bowles woman it isn’t hard to see which is butch and which femme.’
‘No no no, really, Fergus, if you can’t be bothered to concentrate there’s no point in talking to you at all. Don’t you realise this is a historic television moment, and therefore, a fortiori, an event of worldwide significance?’
The Ferret, who felt he’d been making a perfectly constructive contribution to the evening’s entertainment (after all, it was he who’d wheeled the television all the way into the conservatory), lapsed into a sulky silence. But after a while he stirred himself and whined, ‘You’re not the only one who has an illness y’know, Henry.’
‘Is that so.’
‘It is. It may’ve escaped your attention, but I have severe narcolepsy.’
‘I don’t think it’s escaped anyone’s attention, Fergus; we’ve all been awake all the time – it’s you who’ve been missing out on things.’
‘I realise that many people find my condition risible, but it was never funny to begin with and now I’m getting old it’s becoming a lot worse.’
‘Getting old?’ Wotton was incredulous. ‘You’re eighty if you’re a day.’
‘That’s as may be, but this hormone deficiency is increasingly severe. You know all about drugs, Henry; can’t you find some hypocreton 2 for me on the black market?’
‘Hypocreton 2 – what the fuck’s that?’
‘The hormone I’m lacking. If I had enough I wouldn’t sleep so much.’
‘Oh please! That’s priceless. Hypocreton 2 – d’you think that’s what Fatty Spencer’s on…?’ (In the background the Princess of Wales murmured, ‘I would like to be a Queen in people’s hearts… someone’s got to go out there and love people and show it…’) ‘She certainly appears to be loved-up on something, and hypocreton 2’s more plausible than E, don’t you think?’
‘I’ve no idea, Henry,’ the Ferret miffled, ‘and I’ve had quite enough of your ragging; I’m rather regretting letting you have any of my medication. I wonder what’s happened to the rest of the party – what time is it?’
‘Oh I don’t know, nineish.’
‘The guns must have got back hours ago. Why hasn’t anybody been to see us? There’s no sign of Batface or Jane, either.’
As if they were poltergeists summoned up by the petulant old man’s piffle, there came a flurry of footfalls in the tunnel connecting the conservatory to the house; footfalls that announced the arrival – some minutes later, for it took him a while to locate their jungle clearing – of Dorian Gray.
‘Stupid squad!’ he expostulated. ‘They never get any smarter, do they.’
‘I assume’ – Wotton, sensing Dorian’s dramaturgical desires, adopted a measured tone – ‘that is a rhetorical question.’
‘Yeah, fucking rhetorical. I’ve been with the morons for nearly five hours. Five hours over a lousy fucking shooting accident!’ He looked around for a patch of earth to ground his live wire, but the only vacant space in the clearing was occupied by Wotton’s wheelchair and the Ferret’s seat – in which the latter had, with Newtonian predictability, fallen asleep.
‘A shooting accident?’ Wotton killed the Princess of Wales’s calculating confession with the remote. ‘Who’s been shot?’
‘One of the beaters.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Wotton breathed, ‘that’ll be more trouble for Jane; the estate workers are almost in open revolt as it is.’
‘Oh, he wasn’t a local man.’ Dorian produced a silver cigarette case and a lighter, and lit up. ‘Nobody knows who he is at all. The head keeper only took him on for the day – found him in the pub in Narberton. What’s more, his face was turned to mush by the blast, so unless someone was travelling with him it’s going to take the rural plods a while to identify him.’
‘How convenient.’
‘For whom?’ Dorian snapped.
‘For whoever shot him.’
> ‘Well, they’re saying I did that, but it could just as easily have been David Hall – he was being bloody wild with his shooting. I don’t care if he’s a fucking Minister; it’s insane allowing a cripple to shoot.’
‘They’ll find out in due course, Dorian – ballistics and so forth. Still, isn’t it funny how people get dead around you.’
‘What’re you implying, Wotton?’
‘No implication, merely an observation.’
‘It was an accident – I don’t know who the disgusting pleb was. I’ve never had any truck with anyone who has ginger hair in my entire life.’
‘Is that so.’ Wotton held the image of Dorian’s injured innocence in his viewfinder eye, and dipped his eyelid to record the moment for posterity.
‘Yes it bloody is.’ Dorian ground his cigarette out on the floor. ‘Look, Wotton, are you going to stay out here all night?’
‘Me? No… no, I don’t think so. Tell me, are you free to leave Narborough, Dorian?’
‘They say I can go where I please as long as I tell them; they haven’t charged me or anything ludicrous like that.’
‘In that case, you can drive me back to London.’
‘To London, tonight?’
‘That’s right. I rather think it’s the place of a patrician – as it is of a plebeian – to die in the eternal city, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘What do you mean by that?!’ Dorian’s eyes flashed and he made as if to grab at Wotton, but the dying man merely laughed.
‘I hate having stopped smoking, Dorian. My renewed sense of taste is useless to me, and as for my enhanced sense of smell, that only seems to bring unpleasantness wafting into my nostrils, like the odour of your fear. You said “pleb”, which rather implied that you knew the dead man was an urban type. Still, let’s not bicker, I’ve no time left for that. I’ll tell you something, though, Dorian, this shooting accident confirms me in my opinion. It’s true that you’re the spirit of the age, but it’s drunk so much of you it’s become cirrhotic. Drive me home, Dorian – I’m in a hurry.’
Despite hurrying home to die, Henry Wotton lingered until the following spring. He was right in what he’d said to Hester Hall, for although the anti-retroviral treatments introduced in the following twelve months were so effective that even very ill AIDS patients got up from their beds and walked, Wotton was not to be one of them.
In truth, Henry Wotton had always understood – at an intuitive, cellular level – that drug addiction and sexual obsession, besides being ways of making time’s amorphousness measurable, were also methods of amortising the future. That for each minute or hour or day or week of abandonment purchased now, you would have to pay later. Pay with physical dissolution and mental disintegration. On this actuarial basis alone it did not surprise him in the least to wind up dead at forty.
He had this boon: terminal illness had suited him only too well. The indisputable existence of a cut-off point meant that recklessness was to be fully enjoined. Along with the drip-drip of limpid minutes, the opaque, flowing droplets of hours, the slow-moving, turbid course of days, came an unconsciousness of anything save the possibility of pain, the pain itself, and the relief at its abatement. It was, Wotton thought, like a reprise of his entire life. It was, he knew perfectly well, what everyone was waiting for. It was only that in this – as in everything else – he had demanded instant gratification.
In his last months Batface and Phoebe moved his Parker-Knoll recliner over into the bay window of the drawing room. He hadn’t the sight left for his beloved television-watching, but that didn’t matter because all the entertainment he required was live. They set up a high-powered telescope on a stand, and this, in combination with a centimetre-thick lens for his left eye, meant that Wotton was able to see the jiggling man’s head entering and then departing the ragged grey patch of vision remaining to him. It seemed to soothe Wotton, who no longer had the inclination for anything much. No drugs save those prescribed to him, no drink save mineral water – a beverage that, in the not so distant past, he wouldn’t have cleaned his car with.
He watched the jiggling man’s pendulum progress. He watched the bubbles in his glass of mineral water stagger obliquely to its surface, like the rough lads with poor impulse control he used so to adore. He would sometimes take a puff on his pentamidine nebuliser in a desultory way, but apart from the most obvious palliatives, one by one he abandoned the pills and salves and potions. He preferred to await death quietly, reverently. What form, he wondered, would it take? Would it be Old Father Rim who stood by the half-open steel door and beckoned him into Hades? Possibly – although at times he thought he could hear the Latin chanting of the Brotherhood of Misericordia, as they carried his coffin along the street outside, their rubber safety vestments making a hideously lubricious noise. Or might the jiggling man himself fire a ship-to-ship rocket which payed out a rope, then come shinning down it, so he could drag Wotton’s sad corpse back across to his foolish vessel?
Batface and Phoebe had his leave to get on with life – and this they did. Wotton was ministered to by people who were financially rewarded for their strong stomachs and acting ability. He didn’t want for companionship, either, because the Ferret had now accepted the inevitable himself. He no longer paid to be beaten up by the lower orders, nor did he resist the waters of Lethe with the powders of Peru. Instead, he came each day to the Wottons’, and in this house – which had always been out of time – he found it easier to endure his fugues. So they reclined, in armchairs side by side, long stringy Henry and short tubby Fergus. The one dying prematurely, the other in a suspended animation that might see him enduring well into the next millennium. The Ferret had no need of cryonics; he was plenty cool enough already.
They reclined and they watched the jiggling man, or else they slept and dreamed. As he nodded into nothingness, so Wotton’s subconscious inland sea expanded, sending out rivulets of reverie towards the great ocean of the collective unconsciousness. In the paradoxical expanse that now lay between his narrow temples, there were the predictable white mountain ranges of crack cocaine and terminal moraines of brown heroin. There were also the inevitable lakes of Champagne around which the centaur boys cantered – so lovely! – with their thoroughbred breasts knotted with muscle, their hooves shiny, and their human countenances at once wise, farouche and trusting. And my dear… they’re hung like horses.
But into this realm came other, more curious visions: scenes built, then struck with unearthly speed. This was due to the presence of the Ferret who snored alongside Wotton. Caught within the gravitational field of a far more sophisticated and accomplished dreamer, his very imaginings fell under the little man’s influence. Like the Ferret, Wotton now came to inhabit a dreamscape more enduring and coherent than his waking life. Also, the Ferret brought news of the outside world, specifically Dorian Gray, and if his powers of description were unequal to the task, Wotton’s subconscious more than compensated for the deficiency.
Dorian returned from Narborough and blithely resumed his life as before. With Ginger dead, he no longer had any need of Helen and her baby for cover, but he decided he liked having a woman in the house, and for a few weeks he was nice enough to them both to convince her that she should stay.
But having a woman in the house soon gave Dorian the opportunity to be vile in new and exciting ways. There was this benison, and also he looked forward to the time when she’d become symptomatic. Already, lying next to her one sweaty December night, a night when there was no cause for perspiration, he fancied she’d seroconverted. It would only be a matter of time, and that was a commodity he had in inexhaustible supply.
He began to betray Helen with a casual uncaring that was far worse than malevolence. He’d come back at three a.m. and let her interrupt him sucking some chicken off in the front seat of the MG. Or else he’d deliberately leave evidence of his amours – condoms, lubricants, poppers – lying around for her to find. Soon enough he stopped coming back at night altogether, and when he e
ncountered her in the daylight, he laughed derisively in her puffy old face.
However, Helen didn’t prove to be as satisfyingly distraught as he’d hoped. Unlike previous abandoned lovers, she seemed not to yearn for his honeyed flesh and his dew-picked charms. On the contrary, she began to be as repelled by him as he was by her. He awoke early one morning to find her examining his naked, prone form with a forensic eye. Jesus, she said wonderingly, you really are an arrested adolescent, Dorian.
—Whaddya mean by that! he cried, pulling the sheet over his slim, tanned torso.
—What I say, she smirked; you have the body of a young lad. She sat up on her knees in the bed, and after fifteen years he noted once again the way she held her nude self – without modesty or allure, yet with a new kind of dignity, a mature dignity. At first, she continued, I found your silky hair and smooth skin a turn-on, but to be frank, Dorian, they give me the creeps now. In part it’s because I know you’re putting it about everywhere you can, but I also find your baby body revolting in itself. Tell me… she picked up a pack of cigarettes from the bedside table, shook one into her mouth, lit it and took a drag… are you doing weird drugs? Is this a treatment of some kind, a blood change, whatever? Because one thing’s for sure, it isn’t natural.
He shot up off the pillow, gathered his clothes together, ran to the bathroom, dressed himself with trembling hands. In the bedroom he could hear the foul old harridan laughing and coughing and farting.