Dorian (25 page)

‘No.’ Wotton tucked his plug away. ‘It’s
meant
for these buggers.’ He pulled open the bag at his feet to reveal a couple of large plastic bottles. ‘One full of Foscarnet, the other positively gurgling with Ganciclovir. These are the noble knights of the chemical table whom we spur into battle against the dreaded cytomegalovirus.’

‘I don’t even know what that is, Henry.’

‘Nor should you, my sweetums, nor should you. It’s a herpes of the most senior order – not the kind of thing that would ever afflict a cadet like
you
.’

They settled on Soho, and while Dorian deposited the Jag in the car-park underneath Gerrard Street, Wotton lingered up above, molesting the strange vegetables ranged in wicker baskets outside the Chinese grocer. He caressed the huge white lingams of the oriental radishes, he ruffled the cabbage and spruced up the sprouts. When Dorian finally emerged he found Wotton tenderly cradling a large, greenish lobe in his hand, a lobe that was evenly studded with spikes as if it were the head of a vegetative punk rocker. ‘What’s that?’ Dorian asked, his nose twitching with distaste. Even in the stinky inky heart of tentacular London this strange fruit imposed its own sickly and faecal odour.

Wotton introduced them: ‘Dorian, this is durian; durian, this is Dorian. You’ll find you have quite a lot in common – both of you are delicacies, both of you taste quite exquisite. However,
you
, durian, have your pricks on the outside, whereas for Dorian here it’s quite the reverse.’

They took their morning coffee upstairs at Maison Bertaux at two in the afternoon. Wotton tucked a purple lenticular pill under his greenish tongue. ‘What’s that?’ Dorian asked.

‘Morphine sulphate, twenty milligrams; it’s a good breakfast opiate. Now’ – he dusted the doughy dandruff of croissant crumbs from his fingers – ‘
why
have you brought me here?’

‘It’s Baz,’ said Dorian. ‘I want to talk to you about him.’

‘Oh,
must
you? Where is he, anyway? He spent the night before last gushing over me in hospital in the most sentimental fashion. He led me to believe that we were to be henceforth inseparable.’

‘Well, now he’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘That’s right, gone. He came back to my place and took his stupid photographs of his stupid installation. I made him up a bed on the settee, and when I got up this morning he was gone. He’d taken his bag and gone.’

‘So what.’ Wotton’s eyes wavered away to take in the pert rear end of a perfect Day-Lewis clone, who was ambling between the tables, brushing his taut, denim-sprayed buttocks against the backs of chairs. ‘Isn’t it true,’ he continued on another tack, ‘that everyone is so much more the product of their own era than they realise at the time. I suppose it would take an immortal truly to apprehend this in any given moment. I think…’ he paused, groping for his cigarettes ‘… I shall be compelled by ennui to kill another Kurd.’

‘Henry,’ Dorian insisted, ‘Baz wasn’t immortal –’

‘What d’you mean, “wasn’t”?’ Wotton snapped back. ‘Are you hiding something here, Dorian – have you brought me here to confess to murder? No no,’ – he damped Dorian down with a handful of smoke – ‘don’t interrupt me; I see it all. Basil himself told me that you really had murdered that faggot in New York, and he brought me tentatively around to the view that the way you behaved with poor Octavia was tantamount to manslaughter. What would make more sense than for you to kill him in turn, hmm? After all, why else take him back to your place – you’ve never made any secret of the fact that you can’t abide the man.’

Dorian took his time replying. He played with his cappuccino a little, dabbling with its foamy cowl. Eventually he answered, in the most subdued and choked tones, ‘All right, it’s true. I did kill him.’

‘Oh good!’ Wotton guffawed. ‘Confession is such a
bodily
relief, don’t you agree? It’s like
shitting out
guilt – no wonder the Catholics and Freudians have made an entire system of mind control out of it. I’m so
glad
Baz is dead–although I for one always found him curiously insubstantial anyway, even when his cock was in my arse.’

‘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.’