Dorian (23 page)

—What? What marvellous thing?

—When I saw
Cathode Narcissus
for the first time, Baz, in your studio, the day you introduced me to Henry, well, I’m sure you can’t remember but I wished it could be the installation that aged rather than me. I wished it could be the Dorians you videotaped who displayed all the scars of dissipation, and the marks of immorality that I already suspected my life held in store for me. Had I known about it then, I bet I would’ve wished that it could be those multiple images of me prancing and dancing that succumbed to AIDS.

—What’re you saying, Dorian? Oh fuck, I’m too wasted to take this on board.

—Have another bump. Dorian got out a wrap and spilled a shiny white pile on top of one of the grey monitors. He handed Baz a ready-rolled note. Go on, he said, it can’t make any difference now.

—S’pose not, Baz snuffled as he took a hefty snort.

Dorian guided Baz into the Eames chair, and while his solo audience looked on he continued his exposition of the supernatural: What I’m saying is that it’s happened. It’s
Cathode Narcissus
that has aged and suffered, while I remain pristine. Look at me, Baz, look at me! I’m thirty-one years old. I’ve fucked hundreds of men and women – thousands, even. I’ve never used a condom in my life. Some nights I’ve taken it in the arse from twenty heavy-hitters. I’ve never stinted myself on booze or drugs, never. I take what I want when I want it. Yet I bear no marks; I look exactly the same as I did a decade ago when I came down from Oxford.

—Either you’re mad, Dorian, or you’re acting mad.

—I’m not mad, Baz, I’m the sanest person you’ll ever meet. I tell you – it’s
true
. That girl you spoke of, Octavia, it’s true what Henry said… I can show you the letter if you like. She wrote it to me when she was dying, abandoned by her family, in the public hospital in Marseille. She maunders on about being buggered by me when she was tripping… and it’s all true, it’s all true… just as it’s true what happened that night at the Mineshaft. Yet I don’t bear a mark. I don’t look like a cruel man, do I, Baz? An immoral man? I’m a dew-picked piece of innocence, a plump cherub, the springiest of chickens – wouldn’t you say? And it’s you,
you
, who’ve never looked more than skin-deep at me, or penetrated any further than my rosebud of an arsehole. It’s you who’re the superficial one, Baz. You.

—That’s not true, Dorian, Baz managed to say. I’ve always loved you. I loved you when I made
Narcissus
. If you really look at it it’s obvious that I loved you then – and I still do now. It’s a love letter, that piece, a fucking love letter, it’s not some mad fetish that keeps you looking young. I dunno what you’re talking about, Dorian.

—Oh, is that so, Dorian sneered, reaching for the remote. He picked it up and pushed a button. Well, look on your love letter now, Baz; I’m returning it to sender.

The monitors whined and zigged and zagged and sprang jaggedly to life. But was it life? In place of the unchanged Dorian who stood before Baz, as fresh and youthful as the first evening he’d met him at Phyllis Hawtree’s, was the Dorian Baz had for years now suspected he ought to be – an anguished figure, his face, neck and hands covered with Kaposi’s, his mouth wet with bile, his eyes tortured by death and madness, his bald pate erupting with some vile fungus. And there were nine of these animated pathology plates, nine of them, haltingly disporting themselves. Concentration-camp victims forced by an insane Nazi doctor to dance.

—Ach! Baz spat involuntarily and thought he might vomit again. This is revolting, Dorian! A sick travesty – where’d you get them?

—It’s all yours, Baz, all your own work. You have such a mastery of the superficial.

—Where are the tapes?! Baz shouted. Where are the fucking tapes?!

—In here… Dorian slid open a panel in the wall and there, neatly shelved, were the VCRs.

Baz got up and went over. He scrutinised them, ejected the tapes and examined them. He even, futilely, checked the connections between the VCRs and the monitors – but all was exactly as he remembered it. So… it is from within… he murmured in wonderment, staring once more at the moribund Dorians. How fucking bizarre… these images have been corrupted… it’s almost as if sin itself were eating away at them.

—I congratulate you, Baz, you’re responding to your masterwork as any artist should. Baz slumped back down in the Eames chair. When I did the original, he said, I guess I was catching the briefest moment in time, that kind of androgynous New Romantic look of the early eighties. I dunno… he ran sweaty hand across sweaty brow… maybe this version of
Cathode Narcissus
is of its time too.

—How prettily you put it, said Dorian, who, unnoticed by Baz, had withdrawn a switchblade from his pocket, snapped it open, and begun paring his fingernails. It’s
so
important nowadays that an artist be able to speak well of his work.

—No – it’s not my work, Dorian, it’s nothing to do with me. I dunno where you got hold of it… S’pose it might be one of those German guys’, they do pretty wiggy stuff, but maybe it’s what I’d do now, if I could… if I – if I had the guts, the courage to stare death in the face.

—There’s no need for that, Baz… Dorian put down the knife on a monitor and came over to the chair, put both his hands on the arms and, bending down, breathed sweetly into Baz’s face. I want you to stay here with me. I’ll give you anything you want; all I want from you in return is a little technical assistance.

—Whaddya mean?

—The tapes, Baz, the tapes. They’re wearing out. I need someone to transfer them all to new ones. I need the work to be maintained. Call me superstitious, but I have an idea that my life may depend on it.

—I don’t think so, Dorian.

—You
do
think so, Baz, you do. Stay here, look after it! This is your life’s work.

—No… I don’t think so, Dorian… It’s not mine, anyway… I’ve gotta… I’ve gotta go. This evening was a mistake… the whole thing… an awful fucking mistake… He struggled to rise from the Eames chair, but the poor old bull was penned in by its modernity. Dorian had ample time to retrieve his knife and – exhibiting all the balletic grace of a matador – plunge it deep into Baz’s neck, cleanly severing the carotid artery. However, the golden boy then spoilt it all by carrying on, delving into the dying man again and again with the gory implement, as if it were a spade and the thrashing Baz unyielding ground. Blood spurted and sprayed around the two figures as the starveling ghouls on the screens cavorted and leered. Dorian howled and even lapped at the splatter.

But what of Basil Hallward in all of this? So much more attention tends to be lavished on the murderer than on his victim. Murderers remain always with us,
n’est-ce pas
? – whereas victims have a disgraceful way of creeping off into the shadows, only re-emerging in the guise of actors, who play their part for the purposes of reconstructing the crime on television. You’d have to agree that,
faute de mieux
, you would rather invite murderers to a drinks party than their victims, even if a pathetic preoccupation with self-preservation led you to hide everything sharp, including the cocktail sticks.

I’ve led you astray. The life-force pumped out of Basil Hallward, while the face he had loved for over a decade hovered above. It was twisted with hatred, true, but can we not say that to him it appeared as if Dorian were in ecstasy, transported by this grisly consummation? Why don’t we also assume that in his final throes dear Basil was gifted that procession of precise and intimate recollection that those who have experienced ‘near-death’ assure us accompanies the dying of the light?

Basil aged nine, in short-sleeved Aertex shirt and wide-legged flannel trousers, tenderly nuzzling the crotch of a boy similarly attired. Or Basil aged fifteen, naughtily absconding to Paris and wandering the dappled cobbles of St-Germain, until ushered into a beat hotel to be ceremoniously sucked off by an old roué. Or Basil five years further on, sharing lodgings above a dentist’s surgery in Stanmore with a merchant seaman – see him, this dull afternoon, flick through the pages of
Jeremy
(a mag for newly liberated chaps), looking for adventure while his friend is away at sea. Or see Baz the hunger artist take his first hit of Methedrine from Captain America in a closet at And
ee
’s Factor
ee
. Not intimate enough to convince? Too emblematic? Would the gland Baz found that morning when shaving – a gland where no gland should be – do the job better? Or a dust mote in Detroit or Droitwich, or a paperclip in Pretoria or Prestatyn? Many people – let’s be frank – have lived too long, and of those, rather a lot have gone too far.

No. Cocaine got the upper hand even at this terminally late stage. And despite all the death he had already witnessed, the thanatos he was steeped in, Baz discovered that he’d rather not take a permanent nap. The poor sick withered Dorians danced in the darkening periphery of his vision as he grappled with this hellcat Dorian who was stapling him to the present. Oh to get away! To get back! Get off me! Baz wanted to shout, supremely irritated to be dying in such a lousy frame of mind.

The pain was bigger than Manhattan. It was as if he were being flung down on all the dagger spires and needle aerials of its skyscrapers, cut to pieces by very the city he’d so loved. So it was with acute relief that Baz realised he was dead, and stepped away from the lolling gargoyle of his corpse. He joined the wraith-like Dorians, who had stepped down from their plinths to meet him, and in the null space in the middle of the null room, the ten of them linked hands, formed a ring, and commenced a stately dance.

At last Dorian stopped, and instantly his hot face froze over. He lifted himself off the broken body, moving with his usual fluidity, as if quite unaware of the bits of Basil all down his front. He went to the door, undid the locks and disappeared down the stairs. From above could be heard the sound of a telephone receiver being lifted and digits being punched into a keypad. But of course there was no one to see him go and no one to listen to the call being made. No one save his
alter egos
, who paced around their cathode vitrines like caged beasts, returning again and again to stare out with insane eyes at the corpse of their creator.

Dorian stood with the plastic prong nuzzling his china ear. Alan? Dorian… Listen, I’m glad you’re home, I wondered if you could come over here… Yuh, I appreciate that, I know it’s late… It’s just that I have some garbage that needs disposing of and it can’t wait until morning.

PART THREE
Network

13

An area of Chelsea rocked back and forth as if it were a seascape viewed from the tilting deck of a ship. But this wasn’t a ship – it was a building. A building of some ten storeys, seemingly caught in a gathering urban storm. As yet this was only a force 7 gale, but it was enough to allow foam sheets to form around the chimneys and television aerials of the terraces, sheets that streamed with the wind.

Up and down the deck tilted, up and down. Given that he was the captain of this vessel, it was incumbent on him to maintain his station at the bridge, his hands thrust casually in his trouser pockets to show that nothing untoward was happening. As the deck reared up below his right foot he retracted it, while allowing his left to extend. Then, when the deck tilted the other way, he reversed the process. Only for the split second when the deck became level was he able to consult the compass (a very old issue of the
Reader’s Digest
), which stood upon the binnacle (an old music stand, its metal chipped and worn).

It was vital that he maintain the ship’s north-westerly course through the peaks and troughs of urbanity. Due west were the chimneys of the gasworks at Lots Road, while nor’-nor’-west he could discern the shiny cliffs of the Kensington Hilton. For many years now they had not drawn any closer, but that didn’t discount the possibility that one day they would. No, he must keep the MV
Block of Flats
on course towards the humped, awkward bulk of Olympia, even if she never arrived.

He had stayed at the helm through worse gales than this, force 10s and 11s, that had produced such violent pitching he could barely keep to his feet. Then he could hear nothing save the scream of his own shredded psyche through the taut steel rigging of consciousness. He knew from experience that when his own encephalogram grew spikier – with both the amplitude and the frequency of his brain waves mounting – he also observed the strange weather in the streets deteriorating. Tight isobars were ruled across the shopfronts on the King’s Road and Fulham Road, while the frightening vortices of low-pressure cyclones formed over Redcliffe Gardens and Edith Grove.

Still, eventually the gales would blow themselves out. His orderly would change his trousers and underwear, wringing wet with salty urine. Some nutriment would be taken, together with the vitamin pills he needed for sustenance during this gruelling voyage. His orderly would withdraw, and he would take the helm once more, his gaze first fixed on the crenellated horizon, then falling to the heavy swell of bricks, mortar, concrete and steel that the
Block
’s prow breasted, throwing up a spume of garden greenery. With the practised eye of the mariner, he could detect and analyse the ever changing properties of this view, an urban doldrums which would, to the untutored, appear quite static: the rear of a substantial, late-Victorian terraced house set in its oblong of walled garden.

‘The jiggling man’s looking obscurely satisfied with himself this morning,’ Henry Wotton called over his shoulder, from where he lay in his armchair peering up at the fifth storey of the block of flats through a pair of opera glasses. He drew torpidly on his Cohiba and leaked smoke, while waiting for this remark to bounce off the walls of the drawing room and enter his wife’s large, pointed ears.

‘What!?’ Batface jerked upright, but none the less continued writing at her ugly escritoire.