Dorian (35 page)

But no. His enemies were closing in. Helen suspected the truth, even if she had no chance of comprehending how it was done. And now this bastard MacLurie with his cheap insinuations. Dorian would have to act, deal with the evidence. He didn’t need
all
the tapes – why would he? He probably never had. One would be sufficient to keep him looking young and healthy. One hostage to his good fortune. As for the others, he didn’t dare burn them or remove them from the house;
she
or even
they
might get wind of it. No, no, safer to conceal them here. Conceal them without concealing them – he tittered inanely – use
Narcissus
-concealer to keep the nasty pimple helmets away. I’ll tape over them – that’s what I’ll do. Tape over them, and no one will be any the wiser.

He slotted one of the tapes back into its VCR and turned on the monitor. He tuned the monitor in so that it was displaying some daytime tat – dumb fucks talking about their dumb fucking problems while seated on foam-rubber pouffes – then hit the RECORD button that hadn’t been touched for fifteen years. He felt a jolt in his spine – was it anxiety, or age?

Dorian spent all night up in the top room taping over the Narcissi. To begin with he was selective, trying to make it appear that this was a carefully-chosen drama he intended to watch at leisure, while that was a compilation of news clippings amassed for posterity. But soon he grew tired of this subterfuge and simply hit the buttons, then sat in the Eames chair, rocking back and forth, meting out the sixty minutes until each job was done.

In the morning, when all that was left was the one, prime
Narcissus
, Dorian descended the staircase with a regal air and greeted Helen with a slight curtsy. He felt inviolable now, beyond her or MacLurie’s clutches. He felt secure as well, and altogether enfolded in the prickling glass stasis of his own vitreous insanity.

MacLurie never called to see about viewing
Cathode Narcissus
; it’d only been a throwaway suggestion. He had an idea that Dorian Gray was responsible for some bad things, but the evidence for them was sketchy. Even if such unreliable witnesses would turn up in court, it was doubtful that either they, or the strange tales they had to tell, would stand up in front of a jury.

However, Dorian didn’t know this, and insanity – as he rapidly discovered – wasn’t such a great place to hide after all. The police soon became only too familiar with the guilty gyrations of Dorian Gray. It was as if by destroying eight-ninths of
Cathode Narcissus
he had eradicated the greater proportion of himself as well. Every few days he’d burst, howling, into the Earls Court Road station and begin denouncing himself to the desk sergeant. Sometimes he’d have a map marked with the location where he swore one of his victims was buried; on other occasions his pockets would be stuffed full of polystyrene Ss – evidence, he claimed, of the murder of another. They explained to him, with considerable patience, that New York City lay beyond their jurisdiction. The first ten times it happened they put him in a patrol car and drove him back to the mews, where a solicitous older woman (in her mid-thirties, but still attractive) put an arm around his shoulders and ushered him inside.

Helen thought it was crack that was breaking open Dorian Gray’s psychic shell; she knew the symptoms from the baby’s father. Dorian had the haunted look of a crack head, and he ranted about people spying on his house who used post-boxes and plant pots for their hidden cameras and listening devices. He never seemed to sleep, only retreating to the room at the top of the staircase for the duration of the darkness. The room he kept locked and chained and bolted. She tried to calm him down, to encourage him to speak about what was troubling him. She would’ve confronted him with the evidence of his drug-using, but the truth was she couldn’t prove anything. No dealers visited the house, and Dorian no longer left it except to visit his friends the police.

The final day she spent at the mews was terrifying. In the electric lemon of a cloudless London spring dawn she found Dorian, standing at the top of the staircase, holding her baby boy aloft by his ankle, swinging the child back and forth as if he were a human pendulum. You’ve got plenty of time… Dorian was spitting, as the baby screamed. You’re so fucking young and healthy,
you’ve
got plenty of time… while I’m old and sick.

—Dorian! Helen groaned. What’re you doing? Don’t hurt him, oh please, oh God, don’t hurt him.

—Don’t worry. Dorian had never sounded closer to an absolute emotional zero. I won’t hurt him; I was only using him to tell the time.

He advanced down the stairs and thrust the upended baby into her arms. Helen sank down on the carpet, her teeth chattering, as if his coldness penetrated her. I’ve tried to help you, Dorian – what is it? Please, tell me what it is… Please?
I
don’t think you murdered anybody; I think you need help, perhaps a psychiatrist –?

—A psychiatrist? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. He laughed long and mechanically. A psychiatrist wouldn’t know where to begin – you’d be better off getting me a witch doctor. But on second thoughts, your best bet is to get the fuck out of here! Get out – go on, get out! Get! Out! He began darting here and there, picking up items of her and the baby’s stuff and chucking them in a heap in front of her.

As soon as she stopped quaking enough to move, Helen got out. She hugged her child to her breast and ran up the sloping deck of this, her most titanic mistake in love.

In the final week, Dorian Gray sat and stared. For the first couple of days, ever fastidious, he left the room to piss and shit, but latterly he didn’t bother, until, unfed and dehydrated, he had no need to. So he sat and stared, sinking down deeper and deeper into the mineshaft of his own insanity, where flesh slapped against flesh and the cloacal air was rent by the groans of the abandoned. He was left alone with the last of the Narcissi whose magical lives had guaranteed his charmed one.

He looked surprisingly good, this once beautiful, thirty-five-year-old man, who had been through a decade and a half of serious illness and survived. The new treatment was working for him, and if his skin was yellowed and smudged, it was at least unscarred. His wary eyes and mean lips betrayed the truth about the things he had done in order to survive, but weren’t these things anyone would do if they absolutely had to? If they – as he had – found themselves transported to the cellular Auschwitz of AIDS?

From somewhere the
Narcissus
had got hold of a grey cardigan, which he wore over his hollow chest and swollen joints. He sat cross-legged and stared at Dorian staring at him. Occasionally – or so it seemed to his viewer – he smiled, as if remembering high old times.

On the seventh day of sitting and staring at the hated cardigan-wearer, Dorian got the switchblade out and opened it. It was the one he’d used to kill the creator – it would do for the creation as well. No, don’t! the ninth
Narcissus
begged. Don’t do anything foolish, Dorian… He backed away into the corner of his screen, looking pitifully vulnerable as, like a young girl, he tried to tuck his naked limbs up inside his woolly breastplate. Dorian chose this moment to lunge straight at the screen.

They took another week to find him, and by then, decomposition had begun. Firemen broke down the door, policemen went inside, ambulance men removed the corpse. They were all the sort of people who were disposed to play down the macabre – they saw enough of it in their work. They dealt with the naked bloated body on the floor in a straightforward way, and they dealt with the naked
Narcissus
equally directly.

—Look how old these tapes are, a member of not-so-stupid squad said; they must be from the early eighties. Who knows, maybe Gray knew this lad – maybe he was his boyfriend. The detective took another look at the monitor before turning it off. Or, it’s even possible that this chicken is Gray himself. You know how poofs can’t bear the whole ageing process. Perhaps he looked at the old tape of himself obsessively, loving it and hating it, and when the hate outweighed the love he killed himself.

—Creepy up in this gaff, isn’t it, his colleague remarked.

—I’ll say.

The post-mortem was succinct: deceased was thirty-five and suffering from manifold secondary infections associated with AIDS. Any one of them might have killed him in the long term, but instead he was cut short by a switchblade. Verdict: suicide.

The funeral was minute. The Ferret and Helen were the only mourners. Apart from utilitarian blooms provided by the undertakers there was only one tribute, an expensive but unostentatious bundle of spring flowers. The attached card – a thick slab of black-bordered pasteboard topped off with a crest of three feathers – read simply ‘In fond memory’, and was signed ‘Diana’ so girlishly that Helen expected there to be a heart instead of the dot over the ‘i’. I thought, she said to the Ferret, it was part of his psychosis when he went on about knowing her.

—Oh no, he was very much the
homme du monde
for a while, m’dear. Seen everywhere – with everyone.

—What happened, then? Where are all his friends?

—‘Friends’ might be putting it a little strongly. When I say he was
seen
with people, I in no way mean to imply that he was
liked
by them.

If social calls had still been an option, the Ferret would have been inclined to suggest that Helen speak with Henry Wotton, but they weren’t, so he didn’t. They parted at the cemetery gates on the Harrow Road; she headed back to Turnham Green on the tube, while his driver whirled him south through the terraces of Notting Hill and Kensington, to Chelsea.

Henry Wotton lasted another fortnight after hearing the particulars of Dorian Gray’s death. It was as if he was worried that purgatory had the character of a waiting room, one he didn’t wish to tenant with his former protégé. Best to wait until Dorian was finally on the train and then make his own way down.

The end, when it came, was curiously unexpected. For days he’d had no real awareness of the comings and goings of the Macmillan nurses, who changed his outsize nappy, or the bandages on his pressure sores. The occasional contact of wifely or daughterly lips was unacknowledged, and even the Ferret’s whispered revelations were experienced as little more than a rodent-like squeaking. All Henry Wotton could apprehend was the head of the jiggling man as it entered his remaining tiny allotment of vision and left it. In and out, in and out, in and out, in and out. The poor fellow’s rictus seemed more like a death’s-head than his own. No, the
fin de siècle
was proving to be a killing zone for them both. In and out, in and out, in and out. Then, one afternoon, when the house was utterly silent, he stopped. The jiggling man stopped. His face entered Wotton’s view and remained there.

Wotton stirred and groaned, jerking away from the eyepiece of his telescope. What the fuck was going on? He felt an arm on his shoulder and surged up in his recliner to confront… the jiggling man.

—Wotcher cock, he said.

—I’m sorry? Wotton was perplexed.

—I said, ‘Wotcher cock,’ the jiggling man repeated; it’s a sort of colloquial Cockney greeting.

—Yes, yes, I suppose that’s right. Wotton was rubbing his one naked eye with bewilderment, amazed that he could see clearly once again, and astonished by what he was seeing.

—I look good, don’t I? Up close, the jiggling man was handsome and rugged, with the granite-outcropping features of an old-time sea captain. His woolly was beautifully intact and featured an anchor motif knitted into the weave. You were right about one thing. The jiggling man put a hand on Wotton’s shoulder in an avuncular fashion.

—What’s that, then?

—It was I who was meting out the seconds, minutes and hours. But I was meting them out solely for you.

—For me?

—That’s right – I am, after all, your jiggling man. Now come along, old chap… He reached out a hefty hand and helped Wotton to rise. We’d best get under way; we’ve got a tricky bit of sailing left to do if we’re to make port before nightfall.

—And where’s that? Wotton held back a little, but the jiggling man urged him on.

—Olympia – we’re sailing to Olympia.

—Oh, goody! I’ve always wanted to abide with the gods.

—What a shame you’ll merely be with the other exhibitionists, then, sneered the jiggling man. But he sneered
sotto voce
and Wotton didn’t hear him. The jiggling man opened the french window and, still grasping his charge by the arm, shinned up the line, back to the bridge of his block of flats. Wotton looked over his shoulder once at the Ferret, who lay curled up in his armchair, whimpering his way through the afternoon, then set his sights on the future.

When Batface came into the room half an hour later, her husband had gone and his corpse was already cool to the touch. Without waking the Ferret she went to the phone and dialled a number. The automatic switchboard put her on hold and she listened to the
Four Seasons
for what felt like three of them. While she waited she felt an odd apprehension, and turning to the window she saw that the unnatural force field that had surrounded the house and its environs for so long had been ruptured. Outside in the garden, as she watched, the profusion of plants, flowers, shrubs and trees adjusted themselves to the correct stage in their growing season for the early spring. Some leaves and stalks shrank, while superfluous petals and blossoms withered away altogether. A number of birds flew off to the south, and the grass darkened several shades. It was as if the deity were tweaking the contrast controls of the very biota itself. Then the doctor picked up his extension and Batface told him the news.

Epilogue

‘She had to die…’

The fingers holding the typescript were exceedingly well manicured, the cuticles tucked up, the hangnails executed, and rough patches of skin emery-boarded out of existence. A discreet gold ring, on the right-hand pinky, had an even more discreet diamond set in it. The backs of the hands were tanned the pleasing colour of freshly baked cookies, although if one were to have sniffed them one could be certain they would have smelled of bergamot or sandalwood or some other expensive balm. The skin on these hands was smooth and taut, but in such a way as to suggest effortful maintenance rather than easeful youth. They were the hands of a man of thirty-five, a man called Dorian Gray.