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Authors: Will Self

Dorian (26 page)

BOOK: Dorian
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‘Well,
really
! And furthermore,’ the Ferret huffed, ‘why did you keep me waiting at your house? You know I can’t abide having to talk with the womenfolk.’

‘Yeah,’ Wotton replied, ‘because you’re old woman enough for anyone. But shut up now’ – he switched on the ignition and the ageing car groaned into life – ‘and help me drive. If anything gets too near on your side, sing out. Other than that, tell me what you know about Dorian; I’ve said my piece.’

‘But did you believe him?’ the Ferret said, fastening his seat belt and composing his little limbs on the car seat in a stoical fashion. ‘Did you think he had murdered Baz?’ He took a pillbox from his other waistcoat pocket and extracted two yellow five-milligram Dexedrine. He passed one to Wotton and they both dry-swallowed.

‘Of course not; he was merely striking an attitude. I assumed you saw them both out on the west coast – an American who was passing through town told me he’d run across you and Dorian there.’

‘No no. I
did
see a bit of Dorian, that’s true, but I haven’t seen Baz since he was last here. D’you think he might have died?’

Wotton took a while to answer; he was involved in the tricky manoeuvre of pulling out on to the King’s Road with less than twenty per cent peripheral vision. ‘Lorry coming!’ the Ferret piped up, and Wotton floored the accelerator, lurching directly into its path. There was a klaxon’s bellow and a blare of abuse, but Wotton merely lowered the window and blew a kiss in the general direction of seven tons of ire. ‘I love you!’ he fluted. ‘I love you all.’ Then, turning to the Ferret, he resumed. ‘For Baz to have died once would have been unfortunate; for him to die twice looks like carelessness.’

‘No, I mean you don’t think Dorian
did
actually murder him?’

‘If he did, you’d have to
congratulate
Dorian, Fergus. After all, in the course of disposing of Baz’s body, just like Nilsen, Dahmer and all those other queer serial killers, Dorian would’ve had to
put him back
in the closet.’

‘Why are you so flip about this, Henry?’

‘Three reasons. First, I don’t believe he did it; secondly, even if he did, his victim wouldn’t have had long to live in any case; and thirdly, Baz is so insubstantial anyway, to murder him would have all the actuality of rubbing out a bad fictional characterisation.

‘I myself would
thrill
to being dispatched by Dorian. I can’t imagine my nearest and dearest would behave as tediously as Basil’s brother, a certain Marius Hallward, a solicitor in Nottingham – wherever
that
may be – who has written to me several times asking if I know his brother’s whereabouts.

‘Enough of Baz, Fergus, tell me about Dorian, tell me about LA. Paint me a picture on a taut, tan skin canvas, using only the brightest and wateriest of colours. Make it a Hockney, with sunshine yellows and swimming-pool aquamarines. I want your words to buoy me up, to lift me above all this.’ He pointed at the grim outdoors. The Jag was passing the Albert Memorial, where the eponymous consort sat in his rococo rocket looking colossally constipated, as if he were about to evacuate himself into space. By the side of the road a variegated pack of dogs rootled at the frozen ground, while a professional dog-walker stood in attendance. ‘Just think’ – Wotton gestured in their direction – ‘hundreds of thousands of years of co-evolution, and we end up paying for them to be taken out for a pee.’ Beyond the dogs, on the dead brown winter grass, a small child stood fending off a kite. ‘Please, Fergus’ – Wotton’s voice had an unaccustomed note of desperation – ‘take me away from all this.’

And the Ferret obliged. ‘Despite being cocooned in First Class, supine on a seat so padded and horizontal it no longer deserved the name, I still couldn’t sleep. It’s ironic, Henry: with this affliction of mine – not that I expect or receive any sympathy – precisely when an inability to stay awake might be deemed most useful, I find myself tossing and turning. Yes, when I’m flying, repose is as remote from me as the ground. I cruise thirty-five thousand feet above it in a jet stream of turbulent wakefulness. I try to think of the plane as an enormous
membrum virile
, absolutely full of little Ferguses, but somehow this isn’t at all reassuring.

‘I
yearned
for that chorus of distressed babies from steerage that meant we were coming into land. Their little Eustachian tubes are
so
sensitive they ought to invent a cockpit instrument that uses them. Were I technically minded I might devise it myself.

‘Descending into LAX is like entering a vast aquarium where no one has troubled to change the water for some time. The atmosphere, Henry, it’s absolutely
green
with pollution. Yet once the plane is on the ground and clunking towards the terminal one finds one’s eyes have adjusted, that outside it’s deliciously sunny.

‘I was quite privileged that autumn (I don’t like to say “fall” – it’s such a brutal name for a season), because Dorian met me at the airport in one of those laughably long cars, the ones with a bar inside. He had cocaine and all sorts of other goodies, but I was only too happy to curl up in a little ball on the big seat and sleep all the way to the hotel. I knew Dorian and Gavin had met a couple of times before, but this was the first time they’d spent really
talking
with each other. I suppose’ – he sniffed – ‘I should’ve seen it coming, but one doesn’t, does one? And Gavin had been so terrifically
loyal
.

‘Ah well, Henry, I know you don’t
do
America, but I expect you can picture the scene well enough.’

The Jag had won the race and lurched to a halt at the single yellow finishing line on Rathbone Place. Outside in the mizzle, raincoated men with the serious miens of classical-music buffs were queuing to enter a popular pornographer’s. ‘Oh I can,’ Wotton said softly, ‘I can picture it only too well, Fergus.’ He lit a cigarette, and the smoke rolled out of his saturnine mouth like tiny temporal waves breaking on the beach of the present. He pictured the scene.

—Is he asleep? asked Dorian, chopping out a line on a mirror balanced on his knees.

—Yeah, I think so. Gavin did the necessary with the Ferret’s eyelids. Yeah, he’s out. I’ll wake him when we get there. Where are we staying?

—I’ve booked you into the Château Marmont for the first week – but you’re staying a while, right?

—Oh, I dunno – I s’pose it’s up to him. He says he wants to buy a few properties; I’ve no idea how long that takes. Gavin took the mirror and rolled-up bill. He honked up the line, then took a slug from the Champagne flute and put it back in its plastic socket of a receptacle. I mean, he is technically speaking my boss.

—Why the fuck d’you stick with it?

—Jesus, you know nothing, Dorian, fuck all. You haven’t a fucking clue what it might be like to be without money or connections or looks, even –

—You have the looks, Dorian said, and ran a finger along the smooth grain of Gavin’s handsome face. Gavin grabbed it, selected a finger, bit it hard. Ow! Dorian cried. That hurt!

The Ferret stirred in his sleep. He cooed in a singsong voice, Fergus babies in the cloudy playpen.

Gavin laughed, sucking Dorian’s finger. I wanted to see if you had any nerves at all. Look, I need a little time in the sun. Fergus is no trouble – all he wants is to be fed his drugs and his other luxuries, and a couple of times a week I slap him around and give him a wank. What could be easier?

—It sounds perfectly vile to me; I can’t imagine how horrible his body is underneath that little suit.

—Well, it’s very muscly, if wrinkled and misshapen. I’m sure you’ll have the opportunity to witness it for yourself; he likes to strip off in the sun.

Oof!
The Ferret ejaculated a spout of atomised saliva. He lay horizontal, on his back, at the Venice Beach open-air gymnasium. All about him bobbed balloon sculptures of the male human form; they stretched and puckered and pumped. He would’ve looked altogether at odds with this Olympian company – by virtue of size, age and texture – had it not been for a helper he’d acquired: a stocky little dwarf with a head disproportionately large even for his kind. From his cleft bum of a chin an oiled trowel of goatee dug into the sweaty air. The dwarf, nude save for a cache-sexe, had built his body into a veritable cylinder of sinuosity. He was helping the Ferret by adding two kilo weights on to the bench pressing bar. That’s twenty keys, he said. Are you sure you can do it?

—Well –
oof-oof
– if I can’t manage it
you’ll
stop it
garrotting
me, won’t you, Terry?

—Sure, Fergus.

—So –
oof-oof-oof-oooaaay
! – obliging. The Ferret performed the feat, sat up and took the towel Terry held out. Mopping the teensy crannies of his tiny head, he turned to his workout buddy. Um, tell me, Terry, have you always been a muscle dwarf?

—Nope, Fergus, I used to be a leather dwarf back in NYC, but that scene was so crazy and then everyone got sick, so I came out here. People are much more accepting in LA – he smirked – and I get a
helluva
lot of offers. Where are your friends?

—Oh,
them
– they’re strolling along the esplanade.

—Fergus, are they, like – an item?

They certainly appeared to be an item, Dorian and Gavin, as they breasted the throngs along the roadway at the top of the beach – both of them in khaki shorts and white T-shirts, both of them in shades, both of them with the smooth, clipped haircuts of gays in the military. Yes, they looked like an item of coupled normality, while all around surged a mêlée of singular mutations: ancient hippies, with bells on their fingers and rings on their toes; snake priestesses entwined with their hissing disciples; tattooed primitives nouveaux, their patterned faces two-dimensional; punks jangling with the metal threaded through their scabrous flesh; soul dudes muffling the world with their Afros.

—I’ve never seen so many freaks in one place, said Gavin; these people are unbelievable! He was enjoying himself hugely. Dorian, whom back in London Gavin found arrogant, distant and hopelessly narcissistic, had been applying his formidable charm.

—Well, Gavin, in my experience it’s often the most outrageous outsides that harbour the most prosaic insides, while those of us who appear fresh-faced and beautiful contain a most rotten and disgusting core.

—What about you, Dorian – what’s your disgusting core?

—It’s just that: a disgusting core. My looks are unnaturally preserved. Eleven years ago, immediately after I left university, Baz Hallward made his video portrait of me, and while I have remained a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old, the installation has suffered the onslaught of the past decade. All my debauchery is now inscribed on my cathode features, while these ones… he broke step, turned to Gavin, took his hands, looked into his eyes… remain pristine.

Gavin laughed. Nice conceit, Dorian, he said; sounds like some of the conceptual works these young artists at Goldsmiths’ have been working on. Maybe you should do it rather than talk about it.

—What d’you mean?

—Take Baz’s installation and customise it. I know what his stuff is like – incredibly fey, laughable really. Everything’s a lot more hard-edged now. You should meet some of the newer crowd – you’d like them.

—Plenty of time for that, as I’m immortal. Even if this sympathetic magic with Baz’s piece doesn’t carry on working for ever, I’m going to have my body frozen so that when the scientists of the future have discovered the secret of perpetual life they can boot me up again and then upgrade me.

—Are you serious, Dorian? You mean get those cryonics people to freeze you?

—Why not? That’s part of the reason the Ferret is here – I said I’d introduce him to my immortalist friends; he’s very keen on the idea.

In the hospital waiting room Wotton stirred. He grasped the Ferret’s firm shoulder in his febrile fingers. ‘I don’t say hello to inverts any more, Fergus.’

‘Oh no?’

‘No, I say, “Welcome fellow sufferer,” which is how Schopenhauer thought everyone should be greeted. Tell me, Fergus, why don’t
you
have the virus?’

BOOK: Dorian
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