Dorian (19 page)

‘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 himself 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?