Dorian (34 page)

‘I hate having stopped smoking, Dorian. My renewed sense of taste is useless to me, and as for my enhanced sense of smell, that only seems to bring unpleasantness wafting into my nostrils, like the odour of your fear. You said “pleb”, which rather implied that you knew the dead man was an urban type. Still, let’s not bicker, I’ve no time left for that. I’ll tell you something, though, Dorian, this shooting accident confirms me in my opinion. It’s true that you’re the spirit of the age, but it’s drunk so much of you it’s become cirrhotic. Drive me home, Dorian – I’m in a hurry.’

Despite hurrying home to die, Henry Wotton lingered until the following spring. He was right in what he’d said to Hester Hall, for although the anti-retroviral treatments introduced in the following twelve months were so effective that even very ill AIDS patients got up from their beds and walked, Wotton was not to be one of them.

In truth, Henry Wotton had always understood – at an intuitive, cellular level – that drug addiction and sexual obsession, besides being ways of making time’s amorphousness measurable, were also methods of amortising the future. That for each minute or hour or day or week of abandonment purchased
now
, you would have to pay
later
. Pay with physical dissolution and mental disintegration. On this actuarial basis alone it did not surprise him in the least to wind up dead at forty.

He had this boon: terminal illness had suited him only too well. The indisputable existence of a cut-off point meant that recklessness was to be fully enjoined. Along with the drip-drip of limpid minutes, the opaque, flowing droplets of hours, the slow-moving, turbid course of days, came an unconsciousness of anything save the possibility of pain, the pain itself, and the relief at its abatement. It was, Wotton thought, like a reprise of his entire life. It was, he knew perfectly well, what everyone was waiting for. It was only that in this – as in everything else – he had demanded instant gratification.

In his last months Batface and Phoebe moved his Parker-Knoll recliner over into the bay window of the drawing room. He hadn’t the sight left for his beloved television-watching, but that didn’t matter because all the entertainment he required was live. They set up a high-powered telescope on a stand, and this, in combination with a centimetre-thick lens for his left eye, meant that Wotton was able to see the jiggling man’s head entering and then departing the ragged grey patch of vision remaining to him. It seemed to soothe Wotton, who no longer had the inclination for anything much. No drugs save those prescribed to him, no drink save mineral water – a beverage that, in the not so distant past, he wouldn’t have cleaned his car with.

He watched the jiggling man’s pendulum progress. He watched the bubbles in his glass of mineral water stagger obliquely to its surface, like the rough lads with poor impulse control he used so to adore. He would sometimes take a puff on his pentamidine nebuliser in a desultory way, but apart from the most obvious palliatives, one by one he abandoned the pills and salves and potions. He preferred to await death quietly, reverently. What form, he wondered, would it take? Would it be Old Father Rim who stood by the half-open steel door and beckoned him into Hades? Possibly – although at times he thought he could hear the Latin chanting of the Brotherhood of Misericordia, as they carried his coffin along the street outside, their rubber safety vestments making a hideously lubricious noise. Or might the jiggling man himself fire a ship-to-ship rocket which payed out a rope, then come shinning down it, so he could drag Wotton’s sad corpse back across to his foolish vessel?

Batface and Phoebe had his leave to get on with life – and this they did. Wotton was ministered to by people who were financially rewarded for their strong stomachs and acting ability. He didn’t want for companionship, either, because the Ferret had now accepted the inevitable himself. He no longer paid to be beaten up by the lower orders, nor did he resist the waters of Lethe with the powders of Peru. Instead, he came each day to the Wottons’, and in this house – which had always been out of time – he found it easier to endure his fugues. So they reclined, in armchairs side by side, long stringy Henry and short tubby Fergus. The one dying prematurely, the other in a suspended animation that might see him enduring well into the next millennium. The Ferret had no need of cryonics; he was plenty cool enough already.

They reclined and they watched the jiggling man, or else they slept and dreamed. As he nodded into nothingness, so Wotton’s subconscious inland sea expanded, sending out rivulets of reverie towards the great ocean of the collective unconsciousness. In the paradoxical expanse that now lay between his narrow temples, there were the predictable white mountain ranges of crack cocaine and terminal moraines of brown heroin. There were also the inevitable lakes of Champagne around which the centaur boys cantered – so lovely! – with their thoroughbred breasts knotted with muscle, their hooves shiny, and their human countenances at once wise, farouche and trusting. And my dear… they’re hung like
horses
.

But into this realm came other, more curious visions: scenes built, then struck with unearthly speed. This was due to the presence of the Ferret who snored alongside Wotton. Caught within the gravitational field of a far more sophisticated and accomplished dreamer, his very imaginings fell under the little man’s influence. Like the Ferret, Wotton now came to inhabit a dreamscape more enduring and coherent than his waking life. Also, the Ferret brought news of the outside world, specifically Dorian Gray, and if his powers of description were unequal to the task, Wotton’s subconscious more than compensated for the deficiency.

Dorian returned from Narborough and blithely resumed his life as before. With Ginger dead, he no longer had any need of Helen and her baby for cover, but he decided he liked having a woman in the house, and for a few weeks he was nice enough to them both to convince her that she should stay.

But having a woman in the house soon gave Dorian the opportunity to be vile in new and exciting ways. There was this benison, and also he looked forward to the time when she’d become symptomatic. Already, lying next to her one sweaty December night, a night when there was no cause for perspiration, he fancied she’d seroconverted. It would only be a matter of time, and that was a commodity he had in inexhaustible supply.

He began to betray Helen with a casual uncaring that was far worse than malevolence. He’d come back at three a.m. and let her interrupt him sucking some chicken off in the front seat of the MG. Or else he’d deliberately leave evidence of his amours – condoms, lubricants, poppers – lying around for her to find. Soon enough he stopped coming back at night altogether, and when he encountered her in the daylight, he laughed derisively in her puffy old face.

However, Helen didn’t prove to be as satisfyingly distraught as he’d hoped. Unlike previous abandoned lovers, she seemed not to yearn for his honeyed flesh and his dew-picked charms. On the contrary, she began to be as repelled by him as he was by her. He awoke early one morning to find her examining his naked, prone form with a forensic eye. Jesus, she said wonderingly, you really are an arrested adolescent, Dorian.

—Whaddya mean by that! he cried, pulling the sheet over his slim, tanned torso.

—What I say, she smirked; you have the body of a young lad. She sat up on her knees in the bed, and after fifteen years he noted once again the way she held her nude self – without modesty or allure, yet with a new kind of dignity, a mature dignity. At first, she continued, I found your silky hair and smooth skin a turn-on, but to be frank, Dorian, they give me the creeps now. In part it’s because I know you’re putting it about everywhere you can, but I also find your baby body revolting in itself. Tell me… she picked up a pack of cigarettes from the bedside table, shook one into her mouth, lit it and took a drag… are you doing weird drugs? Is this a treatment of some kind, a blood change, whatever? Because one thing’s for sure, it isn’t natural.

He shot up off the pillow, gathered his clothes together, ran to the bathroom, dressed himself with trembling hands. In the bedroom he could hear the foul old harridan laughing and coughing and farting.

It wasn’t a good day for stupid squad to come calling, but being the sort of people they were, they did. A rather too smooth cop – Detective Inspector MacLurie – came from the Earls Court Road station. There was the smoothness, there was the condescension of height, there was the high rank, there was a tailored suit. It took Dorian far longer to summon up his charm that it ever had before, and even then he wasn’t at all certain it had the required impact on MacLurie, who smiled only once, when Helen gave him a cup of tea.

MacLurie had a lot to say for himself. His colleagues in Worcester had identified the man killed at Narborough, and witnesses had confirmed that the shot had been fired by Dorian’s gun. While there was nothing at this stage to suggest that Dorian had fired with malicious intent, there were a number of things about the case that didn’t add up. Dorian had said that the murdered man wasn’t known to him, and yet there were certain people whom MacLurie’s enquiries had turned up to whom the deceased
had
been known, and who also held the view that Ginger and Dorian Gray were no strangers to each other.

These same people, the Inspector had continued, also had interesting things to say about Dorian’s relationship with a man called Alan Campbell. A struck-off doctor, whose corpse had been discovered in the early part of last year, stuffed in the cupboard of his bedsit, the apparent victim of an act of autoerotic asphyxiation that had gone badly wrong. And there was more – he sipped his tea – a fair bit more; however, there was no need to discuss it now. He’d be entirely happy to come back another day – he could see that Dorian was agitated; presumably he was a busy man with things to do? No, there were no restrictions on him, but they’d be grateful if he called the station if he was thinking of going away for any length of time.

As soon as MacLurie had gone Dorian went to the phone. He had a very fucking good idea who was grassing him up in this fashion, very fucking good indeed. Are you all right? Helen asked. You look green. He shooed her away. Should he call Gavin Strood right away and try to put the frighteners on him? It had to be Gavin – the Ferret could never stay awake long enough to yap that much. Gavin, and also that grotty little novelist Devenish. He knew Gavin had been hanging round with him a bit, and Devenish had hated Dorian for years, ever since they were at fucking Oxford together. Maybe – and the thought occurred to Dorian as any other might think of having a bath – it would be best if he were to kill them both?

The phone rang before he could pick it up. It was MacLurie. One more thing, he said. Our sources told us about another man you were close to, a Basil Hallward.

—I knew him, Dorian admitted.

—Apparently he’s been missing for several years now.

—I believe so.

—And you were the last person to see him alive.

—I don’t know anything about that.

—Well, according to our information he came back with you one night to see a video installation of his that he’d given you. A video installation featuring tapes of you yourself – is it called
Cathode Iris
?

—
Cathode Narcissus
. Dorian couldn’t keep the contempt out of his voice.

—Is that so. Narcissus, eh. I’m not a gardening man myself, Mr Gray. To get to the point – I’d very much like to take a look at the installation if I could.

—What for? Dorian crumpled into the chair by the desk.

—Oh, nothing specific – I’m suppose I’m intrigued.

—It’s all packed away in boxes; it’d be a bloody nuisance setting the thing up.

—Well, no matter, in your own time, when you feel you can. I’ll call before I come over. No pressure. MacLurie hung up.

Dorian went upstairs and locked himself in. He stared at the nine monitors on their brushed-steel plinths. He strode to the cupboard where the VCRs were kept and opened it. He ejected each of the tapes in turn and shook them one by one, as if in their plastic rattle he could discern some prophetic advice. They’d protected him all these years – surely they’d continue to do so?