Dorian (15 page)

Shortly, the mismatched trio found themselves in a strange kind of interior. They were caught up, like three Jonahs, within the iron ribs of the miniature submarine that plied a five-minute course across the harbour to the artificial island protecting it from the Mediterranean. The submariners sat in a row, on a metal bench which spanned the hull of the vessel, swinging their legs. In truth, it wasn’t much of a submarine, more of a demi-sub dabbling its nether regions in the ocean. Through the upper portholes there were splashed-upon views of bikini-clad yacht girls and kids mucking about in inflatable boats; while through the portholes in the bottom of the hull could be seen weedy outcrops of old Evian bottles set in sludge. The Nemo who piloted this clip-joint
Nautilus
one twenty-thousandth of a league under the sea was poised on a bench up in the bow, his tanned legs dangling, his espadrilles kicking. Octavia concentrated on the straw whorls as they appeared in the green gloom, first the right, then the left. First the right, then the left.

‘Are you going to stay at the villa?’ Wotton asked Dorian conversationally.

‘I’m not sure that would be wise, Henry – can Hall or the Duchess be trusted?’

‘They can be relied upon to be dull.’

‘Why the fuck d’you put up with them?’

‘Simple. Batface likes them – they talk history and religion and politics together – and they’re good front – Hall’s a minister now – and their being here makes it curiously less punitive undergoing the necessary health regime.’

‘Are you off smack, then?’

‘I always kick in the summer hols, Dorian – you know that. No drugs at all to speak of, just a little weed, a few hallucinogens and some fine wines. Self-control is always easier to practise in the country, after all – there’s nowhere for the self to escape to.’

Octavia’s periscope spotted what was bearing down on her and she resurfaced into the conversation. ‘Hall knows Jeremy – they belong to the same club.’

‘They’re certainly both clubbable,’ Wotton said.

‘Dorian,’ she pressed on, ‘perhaps it would be best if we stayed at a hotel?’

‘Nonsense,’ Dorian huffed, ‘we’re here perfectly legitimately. We’re friends. Jeremy’s flying down to join you in a couple of days; you decided to visit Henry and Victoria with me. We’ll occupy separate rooms. For Christ’s sake, Octavia, anyone would think this was the eighteen – rather than the nineteen-eighties.’

‘You and Henry have no idea what people say about you, have you?’

But if she had been about tell them she was denied the opportunity, for the hull bumped then grated on concrete, and the Captain sang out, ‘
Nous voici, Madame, Messieurs; l’Île de Bendor. Nous sommes arrivés
.’ They ascended through a hatch, and the cinematically dim interior of the miniature submarine was eradicated by the flashbulb intensity of the afternoon sun. The three stood on the dock, teetering and momentarily stunned, while the craft bumped and grated about, before churning its way back.

Dorian and Henry adored Bendor. They often took guests there to savour its utterly chichi falsity. The islet was a mere crenellation of concrete, encrusted with mock-Moorish pavilions and implanted with palms. Tennis-court-sized courtyards were overseen by hidden balconies, and there were niches within grottoes within turrets. The folly was the creation of a pastis millionaire and it was a load of aniseed balls. But then that’s the French, simultaneously the most stylish and the most gauche people imaginable.

Not that there were any French in evidence on that particular afternoon; the trio had the pseudo-place to themselves. Which was just as well, because as they frolicked up into its tiny interior – holding hands, cavorting, the two men swinging Octavia between them as if she were a child – it became increasingly obvious that the acid was getting a grip on them. They came to a halt, giggling with the unaccustomed exertion, and propped themselves along a balustrade in an archway which looked down on a little enclosed courtyard.

‘I feel awfully peculiar,’ Octavia said.

‘So do I,’ Wotton added, getting out a packet of Boyards Maïs and sticking one of the thick, bilious cigarettes in his thin, pale lips.

‘You always feel peculiar,’ Dorian put in.

‘Excepting…’ Wotton emitted smoke and twisted self-regard in equal measure ‘… when I feel someone more peculiar than me.’

Octavia was examining her outstretched fingers intently, as if seeing them for the first time and puzzled as to their function. ‘D’you think…? My hands… they feel like skin gloves stuffed with meat…’ Even in the harsh sunlight her pupils were monstrously dilated, completely eclipsing her green irises. ‘Are we all simply skin suits stuffed with meat?’

‘Don’t tell that to poor Jane,’ Wotton chortled; ‘she wouldn’t like the idea at all. Far better that you tell her we’re stuffed with grain – then she can slit our bellies, decant the stuff into sacks and send it to the poor Ethiopians.’

‘Yes, that’s what they need…’ Dorian had pulled up the front of Octavia’s dress and was blatantly caressing her naked belly ‘… belly-aid.’

‘I feel so strange…’ she moaned. ‘Everything’s too big or too small, and it’s all sliding in and out of itself, as if the world were a trombone.’

‘That’s very good, my dear’ – Wotton also patted her belly – ‘a very nice image.’

‘I never knew before’ – she slumped a little, groping for Dorian’s hand – ‘that the world has a pulse.’

‘Perhaps, Henry’ – Dorian fastidiously removed Wotton’s hand from Octavia’s belly – ‘it would be sensitive of you to leave us at this point?’

‘Perhaps…’

It would have been entirely in character for Wotton to have insisted at this juncture on a grotesque form of
droit de seigneur
, as if, having brought Octavia to Bendor, he had first claim on her hallucinogenic hymen. Instead, he wandered off without a backward glance, strolling through the deserted courtyards, past the mini-minarets, and down some steps to a rocky shoreline, where he squatted and, clearly hallucinating madly, became wholly focused on the wavelets breaking at his feet. In Wotton’s inner ear great whirls and skirls of electric guitar slashed and meshed and crashed, as if a vast orchestra of Jimi Hendrixes were playing the
Siegfried Idyll
.

Back at the balustrade, events took a nauseating course:

—Most people are dead, aren’t they, Dorian?

—They’re certainly a rotten bunch. He was still caressing her, but at the same time encouraging her out of her silk briefs. He wound her dress up around her armpits and fastened it there with a firm twist. He lightly touched her exposed breasts, as if they were objects.

—But you’re not dead, Dorian; you’re so beautiful – you’re so alive. She was fixated by his face – seemingly his beauty was the one thing checking the very dissolution of her ego. Which was why it was all the more cruel when Dorian turned her away from him, and bent her upper body over until she was face down across the balustrade. Her vacant visage was now in a position to babble at some lichen, You’re green and small and slow and so old, so very old.

But then, as Dorian did things at the other end of her, Octavia’s face became contorted with awareness, and her spaced-out vacancy was overwritten with the most earthy of violations.

It was twilight in the hospital. Wotton stubbed out his umpteenth cigarette, twisting the stub as he twisted the end of his tale. ‘It certainly wouldn’t have been my wish to bridle Dorian’s instincts in any way. I concede, she did seem distressed, but there was nothing untoward about that – it was bloody righteous acid. You have to remember, Baz, at that time the disease was very much the new kid on the viral block. There’d only been a few score actual deaths in Britain, and as far as we knew they were all renters and street junkies. I had no reason to connect her demise – it was pneumonia, I believe – with Dorian.’

‘But it
was
connected, wasn’t it?’

‘
And
we never made it to Aqualand that day. I had to dose the poor waif up with brandy and Valium before we could even get her into the mini-sub.’

A large plump Rastafarian came into the cubicle, bearing a Fortnum & Mason’s bag in one hand, while the other clamped a handkerchief across his nose and mouth. His dreadlocks were fastened in a tricoloured sweatband (red, yellow and green); he sported dark glasses with Lion of Judah hinge bosses and wore a lucent tracksuit.

‘Ah, Bluejay!’ Wotton exclaimed delightedly. ‘Come here and show me what you’ve brought for my little picnic.’ He yanked the Anglepoise round so that it shone down on to the apron of covers between his parted legs.

But Bluejay displayed a marked unwillingness to advance any further than the door; instead he merely tossed the bag over. It fell limply on to the bed. Seizing it, Wotton emptied out five or six nodules of heroin and crack cocaine, all tightly wrapped in plastic. Baz rose and went over to the ghastly little window, the better to ignore the transaction.

‘Excuse me, my dear Bluejay, while I arise from this semi-recumbent position.’ Wotton struggled up on an elbow.

‘Don’ get nowhere near me, man!’ He warded Wotton off with a be-ringed hand and partially retreated out of the door.

‘Oh come now, Bluejay, you cannot be so credulous as to believe that I’ll infect you with my touch or…’ he gently exhaled ‘…
poof
… my breath?’

Bluejay recoiled still further. ‘I dunno nuffin’ ’bout that Henry, I jus’ don’ want you near me, man. Take the fuckin’ gear an’ gimme the dosh. Dis place gives me the fuckin’ ’orrors.’

‘I don’t think you’d find many who’d dissent from that. So be it, here’s your
dosh
…’ he chucked a sheaf of notes on to the bed and Bluejay retrieved them with a flinch ‘… and I trust when we meet again it will be in more salubrious circumstances.’

‘I ain’t comin’ here again, Henry.’

‘Well, you and my medical gaolers are in concurrence then.
A tout à l’heure
.’

As soon as the Rasta had left, Wotton, with trembling hands, began to unpick one of the nodules. Baz turned from the window. ‘I can’t believe you’re still using drugs, Henry – don’t you realise how severely they compromise your immune system?’

‘Compromise? What an absurd expression – how can my immune system be compromised? It’s not an adulterous husband caught with its trousers down in a bedroom farce. Really, Baz.’

‘Listen Henry, your only chance of staying alive is to live as healthily as possible, eat organic food, drink pure liquids, exercise regularly. You must understand that.’

‘Oh, but Baz, I assure you, I
do
regard my body as a temple. It just happens to be one where the ceremonies are orgiastic and conducted using mood-altering drugs.’ Wotton remained a punctilious officiating priest at these ceremonies: despite his tremors he’d already managed to chop out a couple of lines of smack on a handy plate. ‘Baz, you’ll indulge?’ He looked up at his old friend with an eyebrow arched interrogatively.

Basil Hallward shuddered. ‘I haven’t touched the stuff for five years, Henry; I’m not about to now.’

‘I see; well, I suppose it would be remiss to chide you for a sin of omission. You’ll have a drink, though?’ He sloshed the remains of the ’poo.

‘I haven’t drunk alcohol for five years either.’

‘That’s absurd…’ he snarfed up first one line ‘… incomprehensible…’ and then the other.

Baz pressed on with his inquisition. The only way – he reasoned – to keep his sobriety in this den of disease and derangement was to focus on what mattered. ‘But you didn’t see Dorian only on the Riviera, did you, Henry?’

‘Oh no no, I saw him in town as well. Not that he’s
always
been pleased to see me. As I know you appreciate, Baz, Dorian is a social chameleon, adapting himself perfectly to whatever background he finds himself standing against. In London that Christmas – as he has been for every subsequent one – Dorian was at the very epicentre of what passes for a season. He’d moved to a mews house off the Gloucester Road, and acquired a silly little sports car to jiggle over the cobbles. He drives it with superb recklessness – as if he were immortal – and with the top down whatever the weather. But his real
coup de théâtre
has been to infiltrate the select little circle of faggots who stack themselves around the Windsors’ stake. Not, you understand, that Dorian’s on anything but curtsying terms with the Queen herself, but he has managed to ingratiate himself with Her Royal Regurgitation, the Princess of Clothes.

‘Dorian has always been a harlot high and low. Whether he’s in the darkness of a box at Covent Garden, or the darkness of a toilet stall underneath the Strand, his behaviour remains the same, intriguing and besmirching. He’s developed a particular affinity with Thickie Spencer, because like her he’s a psychological parvenu. After all, both of them have bona fides aplenty to be themselves in the beau monde, yet they prefer to act. They find acting so much more
real
than reality.

‘Personally, I’d never allow myself to kowtow to the Windsors. Ridiculous. But Dorian’s intent on being the ultimate fag – and she’s the ultimate fag hag. There’s that, and also, to his credit, he understands how her particular act – her grazed heart crying out for a Band-aid, while she shops ’til every last equerry drops – constitutes the very
Zeitgeist
itself. Remember, Dorian can be whatever you want him to be – a punk or a parvenu, a dodgy geezer or a doting courtier, a witty fop or a City yuppy. I tell you, Baz, the eighties was Dorian’s decade – he revelled in every opportunity that London offered him to assume an imposture. Sometimes I think,’ he snorted, ‘that it’s Dorian who’s the true retrovirus. Because throughout everything, his true self has remained inviolate… Yes… If Dorian has a heart, I envision it as being like this… this dear little iceberg of… crack… cocaine.’