Dorian (29 page)

But if they’d filled out, the Dorians had also chilled out. They now moved languidly, adopting a series of stylised postures. Their eyes were glacial with indifference, their corrupt mouths twisted with sadistic moues. Whereas the Narcissi of 1991 had been passionate marionettes, these ones were calculating killers.

The flesh-and-blood Dorian sighed, rose from the Baz-stained Eames chair, went over to each of the monitors in turn and canoodled with his own corybantic zombies. It was a Dorian x 10 Love-in. The tracking on the tapes was deteriorating, and their registration as well. Bands of prickling static appeared at the top and bottom of the screens; the images were more indistinct. But it was possible, Dorian supposed, that this very corruption of the representational medium was helping to make
him
more embodied, more at home in the world. He stretched, sighed again and drew in a great breath. He never caught cold, he never had a headache, he never experienced the slightest physical discomfort save that caused by obvious abrasions of the physical world. He hummed with vigour as a high-tension cable sings with electricity. He would go out tonight, Dorian decided, and have some serious fun.

16

‘Most nights,’ Gavin was concluding, ‘he’s to be found at that Chinaman’s weird den down on the Limehouse Causeway; he picks young gay guys up in the clubs. He’ll even cruise Actup or Queer Nation meetings looking for prey. Whether a chicken’s high on Ε or ideology – it’s the same to him. You know the Chinaman’s, Henry?’

‘I’m familiar with its whereabouts. I can’t say I’ve ever bothered to go there myself.’

‘I have,’ squeaked the Ferret, his creased face parting at last from the creased linen of the tablecloth, the images of Dorian (and the images of his images) still whirling in his mind. ‘I’ve
seen
Dorian down there. He likes to take straights with him and get them terribly confused. It’s really
quite
sordid. Are we going this evening?’

‘I don’t see the point.’ Wotton lit a Sullivan’s Export and held the big white dirigible of a cigarette aloft as if it were a stupid bomb targeted at his morose mouth. ‘After all, we’ve no one square enough in our party to be worth doing
origami
with.
You’ve
been as bent as a five-bob note all your life, haven’t you, Fergus?’

‘Well…’ so seldom was the Ferret offered an opportunity to talk about himself that he was taken aback, but the amphetamine kicking into the flanks of his nervous system urged him on ‘… of course, when I was a lad,
Grecian
love was an absolute taboo. My father, y’know, such a
savage
man, he… he caught me with one of the stable lads when I was sixteen, near flayed me with a horsewhip –’

‘Balls.’ Wotton put in succinctly.

‘No no, I
assure
you it’s true.’

‘My dear Ferret…’ Wotton savoured his smoke, allowing an extravagantly curled beard of Assyrian ringlets to gather on his chin ‘… I don’t doubt the paternal chastisement, I merely question whether it truly hurt you. Your taste – as you’ve often had cause to tell me, and with which Gavin is
thoroughly
familiar – does incline to painful pleasures.’

‘Henry, you don’t understand – my masochism came later on. In the thirties, desperate to conform and wishing to marry, I consulted a prominent sexologist, Professor Hilversum. This man reported great success in
curing
inversion. You young men nowadays, you can have no conception of the shame then attached to such practices.’

‘Oh no?’ the gay plague dog softly barked.

‘Hilversum
swore
by aversion therapy; his methods were crude – vicious even – but he guaranteed success. We were put in hospital gowns and our pubic areas were shaved – rather brutally by a burly Australian sheep-shearer. Some of my fellow patients told me he would perform other services for a consideration, but I was serious about seeking a cure.

‘So, once shaved, we were strapped to examination couches. An electric belt was fastened around us. There were all the trappings of medical orthodoxy at Hilversum’s clinic.’

‘And then?’

‘Then we were shown films and photographs of naked boys and young men. It was tame enough material by today’s standards, but to us then it was quite sufficient to effect arousal. However, the second we became aroused we received an almighty electric shock through the belt. And this happened even if there was no
visible
evidence – I think they must have been monitoring our heartbeats.

‘Of course,’ the Ferret continued in the face of his listeners’ slightly stunned silence, ‘the treatment was
not
a success in my case. Far from associating homosexuality with pain and rejecting the former, I came instead to enthusiastically embrace the latter and regard it as an indispensable part of homosexual love.’

There was another silence at their end of the table. A tall, gaunt man in his early thirties, short greasy hair plastered down on his spotty brow, detached himself from the drunken baying around the sculptor and came to join them. Wotton noted that he was wearing a once good Armani suit over an open-necked Thomas Pink shirt. ‘I couldn’t ’elp over’ earin’ ya,’ the man drawled in fluent Mockney, ‘but surely homosexuality – as in the “gay lifestyle” – is a sorta category error?’ He paused and sniff-snuffled the cocaine juice around his muzzle. ‘If I were in gaol, doubtless I’d become a sodomite, but as it stands I prefer invagination –’

‘Hey, look!’ On cue, a supremely vaginal young woman – shadow-filled cleavage, swollen red lips, minuscule dress more slits than silk – came and draped herself around the Mockney’s neck. ‘Are we fucking off, Cal, or
what
?’ she gasped with exasperation.

‘D’you know one another?’ Ignoring the intervention, Gavin connected the three men with a diagram fingered in the air. ‘Henry Wotton, Fergus Rokeby, this is Cal Devenish, the novelist.’

Wotton inclined his head half a degree. ‘I’ve heard of you… vaguely.’

‘And I of you.’ Devenish took a great pull on a tumblerful of whisky. ‘You’re a pal of Dorian Gray’s, aren’t you?’

‘D’you know him?’

‘I was at Oxford with him. Different set to me, of course – ex-public-schoolboy dining-club wankers. Laughably crass. He hadn’t even come out then, but I believe
that’s
changed.’

There was another interruption, this one far more intrusive. The sculptor – like a statue of Stalin surplus to requirements – toppled across the table. ‘Yairsh!’ he slurred. ‘We’re gonna Chinaman’s – you gonna Chinaman’s, y’fuckin’ poofs, eh?’ A couple of his fabricators – who knew which side of the genocide memorial had butter on it – winched him upright and hauled him off. ‘I wonder,’ Cal Devenish said when they’d gone, ‘if you three would like to come back to my house?’ He slid a nicotine-stained hand up the dress of the girl and continued, ‘I can offer you fine wines, enough MDMA powder for you to put it under your foreskins –’

‘Cocaine?’ Wotton entered a bid.

‘Some, certainly – and believe me, anything not immediately available can be readily obtained. I have a source very close to hand.’

‘In that case…’ Wotton tipped his eye patch as if it were a small black hat ‘… who’s a pretty boy, then?’

On the eastern fringes of that metropolitan prairie Wormwood Scrubs, Cal Devenish inhabited a small house which burrowed into the embankment of a railway line. In the dead of night, wired out of his head on cocaine, or smacked out, or sloppily drunk, or funky with skunk, Devenish would lie, wonkily tiger-striped by orange streetlights strained through Venetian blinds, and feel the shake, rattle and roll of passing trains bearing nuclear waste, while praying fervently that one would divert into his sweaty masonry pit. In the cold light of another morning, wincing from the pain of toxic bile corroding his ulcerated throat, he would clutch the sides of the bathroom sink and peer distantly into his own Chernobyl eyes, as if the disaster he could see happening in them was in a country a long way off, of which he knew very little.

Devenish had had a fair success with his third novel,
Limp Harvest
. It had gained him a major prize and reasonable sales. The kudos was sufficient to garner advances for a further five years of dissolution, but as his behaviour grew wilder and the next manuscript became more elusive, so he moved from being a young writer with promise towards the fulfilment of middle-aged failure.

In the railway house Devenish did drugs and fucked young women. Occasionally he’d invite clever people back and make himself feel tougher by drugging them under the table (there was one), and cleverer by talking them into the ground.

He and Wotton were made for each other. Wotton strode in through the front door, which opened directly into a room dominated by a great hayrick of papers. It was fully four feet cubed, and contained many thousands of pages of miscellaneous writings. Whenever a publisher sent Devenish a pre-publication proof for an encomium, or an article by him or about him appeared in a newspaper, or he received a flyer for an art exhibition, or he even completed a piece of work himself, the paper was added to this mound of pulp-in-waiting. Every couple of months, Devenish would go hunting for the manuscript of his as yet unwritten novel in this paper chase, hoping that as in a grandiose biological experiment, an alternative world might have been spontaneously generated out of these fictive enzymes. ‘Haven’t you heard of the paperless office?’ Wotton sneered, aiming straight for the most salient chair in the room, a bizarre thing which looked like a Belle Époque throne. Gavin and the Ferret disported themselves on a sofa that had been beaten into submission.

‘Drinks?’ the host asked, and picking at his crusty forehead he stomped to the kitchenette at the back of the house to slop out tumblers of whisky, vodka and wine. The girl, whose moniker was Zippy (short for Zuleika, she vouchsafed, although no one could care less), brought them through and handed them round. When he re-entered the room, Devenish picked up the thread of their conversation as if seconds – rather than almost an hour – had elapsed; while filleting powdery white fish on a willow-patterned plate, he continued, ‘It’s been the misfortune of people who prefer sex with their own gender to be forced to regard this as some essential part of themselves. After all, homosexuality was only defined as a pathology in response to the alleged healthiness of heterosexuality. It’s the great mistake of you… erm… you
gays
to mistake a mere attribute for an essence.’

‘Do I look
gay?
’ Wotton expostulated, taking the plate and honking up a line.

‘
I’m
not gay,’ the Ferret chimed in.

‘Nor me,’ Gavin added, and the Ferret gave his hand a little squeeze; it was so nice to see the dear boy again.

‘When you have a terminal pathology like mine, Devenish’ – Wotton spoke with the full authority born of a lifetime’s anomie – ‘the question of whether your predilections are innate or merely assumed becomes more rarefied than any academic dispute. Call me self-obsessed, but since I’ve been unable to have anal sex myself, other people’s arseholes seem like
hell
.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Devenish finished up the coke and squeegeed the plate with his finger. ‘I’m being tactless.’

‘No, merely a plagiarist; not everyone knows fuck all about Foucault.’

‘You could try shooting up testosterone – I’ve heard that can have remarkable results.’

‘It’s too late for that, I fear.’ Wotton lit a Sullivan’s Export with a long kitchen match, which he waved in the air a couple of times and then threw down on the mound of paper. ‘This medication I’m on puts paid not simply to the inclination, but even to the inclination to the inclination.’

‘Are you on the Delta trial?’

‘That’s the thing.’

‘I’ve heard’ – Devenish took a gulp of his drink and began building a monumental joint – ‘that it’s a drug combination that significantly cuts mortality rates.’

‘You seem to know rather more about it than I do…’ Wotton sneered. ‘Where’s your loo?’

After he’d stomped off upstairs, those remaining sat goggling at the conflagration beginning at their feet, as match lit phone bill, phone bill ignited postcard, postcard flared up in the face of a photograph of Devenish looking younger and even spottier. At this point Gavin intervened by pouring half of his wine on the blaze. ‘Thanks,’ Devenish muttered, not even looking up from his craftwork.

Upstairs, Wotton had an odd encounter. As he limped out of the bathroom, trousering his sad prick, he ran into a plump, middle-aged man, bald save for a patch of ginger furze between his ears, who was exiting the room opposite with a kitbag over one shoulder. He was dressed in proletarian subfusc – jeans, trainers, sweatshirt – and had a furtive air about him. The two men stood on the gloomy scrap of landing staring at each other for some seconds, before Wotton introduced himself, saying, ‘I’m Henry Wotton. I’m visiting… Col?’

‘It’s Cal,’ said the ginger man, ‘and,’ he continued, spurting venom up into Wotton’s uncovered eye from his ulterior position, ‘I know you.’