Dorian (9 page)

Presumably not where Wotton currently was, namely floating upon a pink fluffy cloud of amused forbearance. He’d had
such
a good anecdotal feed, and so early in the morning. He thrust the bloodied shirts at Consuela, together with two or three rusty Spanish phrases, and turned to his wife. ‘I trust the jiggling man’s all right?’

‘No one’s murdered him, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Dorian is holding a little
vernissage
this evening, darling. For the video sculpture that Basil has made of this loveliness.’ He was standing close enough to his lover to accompany this information with a brazen caress.

Predictably, Batface ignored it. ‘Will there be talking?’ she asked her rival.

‘I dunno…’ Dorian felt childish in the face of this mature indifference. ‘I s’pose… some, at any rate.’

‘Talking. Not my thing. Must demur. You won’t mind? So kind…’ And Batface wafted away, back to the seventeenth century.

Once she was gone, Wotton lost no time bearing Dorian into the tense present of the room behind the double doors. Such was the congruity of their home with the Wottons’ relationship that this was Henry’s bedroom, or, more properly, his fuck pad. Two tall parenthetic pier-glasses made whatever was said in a big bed eminently quotable. The counterpane was red, the silk bolster was red, the walls were red, the velvet curtains were red, the lampshades of the standard lamps were red. Only the carpet had escaped the massacre.

While Dorian resumed lounging, Wotton crossed to where a tabletop fridge resided on a gilt-painted escritoire. He opened it and retrieved a hypodermic, its plunger extended, its barrel full of red blood. ‘As if in anticipation, I was actually having a hit when the constabulary called on the related matter. I popped it in here to stop it clotting… there!’ With one fluid motion Wotton commenced injecting the room’s colour scheme into his main line. ‘Ah!’ he grunted. ‘Fixing coke is the perfect modern pleasure, because even as you do it you want to do it again. It’s like powdered greed dissolved in desire. All of human striving is here – measured out in millilitres.’

Dorian affected to ignore Wotton’s moustache of chemical sweat, just as he blanked the Z of pink water that the bandit sprayed on the wallpaper with his hollow épée. He examined his cuticles and drawled, ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Henry, that the only boys worth loving are black boys?’

‘Because I’ve loved so many of the ragamuffins myself. I presume we are discussing your friend Herman?’

‘Naturally – he fills my waking hours.’

‘But he hasn’t been within your budding grove yet, now has he?’ Wotton prowled jerkily over to where Dorian lay and groped his flanks for fags and lighter. He lit up and blew a perfect smoke ring, which was curiously substantial as it trundled across the subdued room.

‘He’s uptight,’ Dorian mused. ‘He’d fuck if I paid him to, but I don’t want him to take me for just another trick. So we snog. I sort of like the idea of him, Henry, as a courtly figure. What was the fairy-tale lady in the tower called, the one with the long hair?’

‘Rapunzel.’

‘That’s it. I like the idea of Herman as a black Rapunzel.’

‘Come now!’ Wotton snorted. ‘You’re being absurd – what are you going to do, shin up his dreadlocks? My dear Dorian, if love is every man’s psychosis, you’re crying out for a major sedative.’ Wotton leant in to Dorian still more, so that the contours of their bodies fitted. ‘More pressingly,’ he breathed, ‘are you sure you want to expose Herman – sensitive renter flower that he is – to the likes of burnt-out Baz, and flame-grilled Alan, on an evening that I trust will be more than
outré
?’

‘Why not? We could help him, Henry. After all, he’s got nothing – nothing but a huge drug habit.’

‘Now that is something I can entirely sympathise with. Being poor would be an absolute tragedy. So poor that you had to be straight. The poor may take the occasional cheap day return to oblivion, but only the rich may maintain a villa there.’

Dorian struggled to keep afloat in this turbulent repartee. ‘But he isn’t straight, Henry, not at all… But – look – I do hope you won’t all be
too
decadent –’

‘
Too
decadent? Who gives a shit about being too decadent, when to be contemporary is to be absolutely so? Besides, it’s up to you whom you invite, it’s your
vernissage
.’

‘That’s why I invited the artist –’

‘I suppose you had to.’

‘Why are you so down on Baz? He’s really in quite a bit of trouble now. He says his habit’s out of control.’

‘Ridiculous.’ Wotton set off on a prowl around the room, picking up and adjusting drug paraphernalia the way a dowager dusts picture-frames. ‘And I’m not down on Baz, I simply object to his wasting things – you boys, my drugs, his talents – he should take more pleasure in these things. Pleasure is Nature’s credit rating. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.’ He fetched up back by Dorian.

‘Baz said he thought he might die for love of me.’ Dorian sounded entranced… by himself.

‘
Encore ridicule
, but so what, to die for the love of boys would be a beautiful death.’ However, immediately after saying it Wotton realised that this had been a
mal mot
, an anathema, or worse some reflexive juju. He felt the breath go out of himself as if he’d been punched in the solar plexus. He staggered, reached for Dorian, grabbed for the lapels of the robe as if they were the ropy rails of a makeshift bridge swinging over an abyss.

‘Henry!’ Dorian grasped the slick-suited shoulders, felt the cold, damp weight of the man against his own bare chest. ‘Are you all right?’

In pulling himself upright Wotton succeeded in pulling the robe off Dorian altogether. They stood, the one clothed, the other naked, and in becoming aware of this contrast both became lascivious – hands groped for groins, fingers grasped, throats groaned. With one arm Wotton stripped off his tie, shrugged out of his jacket, peeled away his shirt, all the while tightly embracing Dorian. His kisses were avid, his movements precise and clinically sexual. But as soon as he had entirely disrobed – to reveal a body surprisingly slight, its marbled skin pebbledashed with red freckles – Wotton transformed, becoming pliant. Dorian assumed the dominant role, led him to the big bed, peeled back the covers, pushed Wotton down, reared above him. Dorian’s penis was curved, red and gnarled with veins like the dagger of an alien warlord.

In Soho ten hours later, the deathly and dying boy ran up Old Compton Street, breasting the solid citizens as if they were a fluid element. They scattered – these plump Americans in search of musical theatre – but in Herman’s wake came Ginger, singing out discordantly, Her-man!

On the corner of Dean Street he caught him, and Herman rounded, spitting, Get off, man!

—What you doin’?

—Get off!

—What you doin’? Ginger wouldn’t let go. Passers-by assumed it was a racial assault and hurried on.

—I’m going somewhere –

—You’re fucking meeting ’im – aren’tcha?

—What if I am?

—He’s a sicko, a perv, a fucking nonce.

Herman shucked Ginger off and plunged up Dean Street, shouting back, He said he was gonna help me – he’s an artist, after all. He’s gonna introduce me to his friends.

—Oh yeah, like fuck; it’ll jus’ be another gang of rich poofs who wanna fuck you.

—Yeah, and that’ll be a first.

—I’m warning you Herm, the pudgy skin sob-shouted, If you go with this one I’m not gonna fucking be here when you get back. That’s it mate – it’s fucking over!

At the corner of Meard Street, Ginger gave up. He stood in stolid pain, his suety face shredded with the love of Herman, as his lover escaped down the narrow passageway between the old house fronts. Halfway along, Herman realised he was alone and turned back.

—Don’t go, Herman! Ginger choked on the words, and his cheeks, his brow, his lips shifted and twisted as anger vied with pain. Herman turned back the other way, to see, across the far end of Meard Street, a substantial limousine pulled up by the kerb. The door was open, and seated in the back, his gold hair effulgent in this jewel-box setting, was Dorian Gray. I’ve seen you, Prince-fucking-Charming! I’ve seen you!

This outburst decided Herman. Propelled by the force of Ginger’s emotion he ran towards the car, jumped in and immediately embraced Dorian. The door clunked and the car pulled away. Ginger was left screaming after them in the gathering London dusk. Her-man! Her-man! Her-man!

5

The soles of your feet snagged and scratched by twigs, sap smearing your calves, you proceed on tiptoes over the treetops of Battersea Park. Occasionally your passage disturbs a nesting pigeon, which burbles with sleepy alarm. This portion of London is an old shambles, where stagnant water once lay and gypsies encamped to render horseflesh down for glue, which is why bad air so adheres to the place. No amount of imperial landscaping can cover up this malodorousness, the swamp that lies beneath the pleasure gardens and the miasma percolating up through the run-down ornamental terraces.

You pause in the clearing between one stand of trees and the next, hovering above the boating lake, looking down on its brown lapping of pondweed and sweet-wrappings. No, this is not an era for municipal grandeur. The city, feeling itself to be moribund, is simplifying its routines, deaccessioning its most solid and durable possessions in favour of sentimental trinkets and plastic gewgaws. It wants to move into a gigantic granny flat, where – while still preserving the illusion of independence – it can have all of its practical needs taken care of.

In the mid-distance, bright yellow pinpricks indicate the dark liner of the Prince of Wales Mansions, as it slides through the inky urban night.

In memory arrivals were always made of this: the oblique and the impossible, as one tunnelled up from below into the brightly-lit burrow, or swung in through a skylight on a flying trapeze. But even if it cannot be recalled, it must be assumed that Henry Wotton arrived for Dorian Gray’s
vernissage
by means of his car. Because that was how he arrived almost everywhere in those days, the car being, he said, a kind of mobile potting shed in which he might sit and muse and infuse. Smoke, mostly.

Wotton drove south over Chelsea Bridge, circled the roundabout once, looking for the exit, but decided not to take it for magical reasons. He circled it again and again and again, until forced off by dizziness and fear of the police.

Despite being extremely late – the result of car keys hopelessly lost in the domestic forest – Wotton parked the Jag in Lurline Gardens and sat there for a full three Sullivan’s Exports. He smoked the unnaturally fat and white cigarettes while grimacing into the rear-view mirror, squeezing blackheads and smearing their yellow-white lode across the piebald areas of the windscreen the wipers had failed to reach. Eventually he got out, locked the car and walked up the street. Fifty yards further on he couldn’t remember whether he had locked the car, so he returned to check it. He repeated this exercise five more times before he realised that if he were to continue in this fashion for much longer he would,
de facto
, be insane. So he wrenched himself around the corner to the front door of the block, and pressed the buzzer. He muttered into the intercom, entered the vestibule and ascended in the lift.

Ah yes! But in Wotton’s recollection it was always an ambulatory arrival that he’d made, sixty feet up in the sky, sliding smoothly from the dark verglas without on to the icy pile of the carpet within.
Vernissage
– such a great, glissading word – literally ‘a varnishing’. It was, in every sense. That night, every encumbered soul in the minimalist apartment was completely stripped and then thoroughly coated.

Wotton took the view that such orgies were no less than the shucking off of the threadbare constraints of contemporary morality, and yet, even at the time, he also understood that in some crucial yet indefinable way (was it for solace alone?), a slave’s morality
might
be preferable to the whips and chains of a mastery that was already becoming little more than attitudinising.

Perhaps it was this division within himself that explains why Wotton was so dilatory in even arriving. As the brass booth rattled up five floors, he thought of fascistic chic, and how his companions’ sense of history was savagely concertinaed, like a speeding limousine that’s hit a concrete pillar. Was it any wonder that in place of any real ceremonial or culture of their own, they’d sooner watch the expensive charades invented for a German ruling house by a nineteenth-century popular novelist? Namely:

‘The royal-fucking-wedding! What’s this?’ He had found the door on the latch and banged through it to confront Dorian, Baz, Herman and Alan Campbell grouped around one of the
Cathode Narcissus
monitors, watching a videotape of the ceremony.

‘I think it’s quite amusing,’ Dorian drawled. ‘I love all this ancient pomp.’

‘Ancient pomp! Repro charade more like it. The whole ghastly business was dreamt up by these Krauts when they got the regime in the last century. Perhaps a more honest ceremonial would’ve been for them to broadcast the results of the virginity test the future brood mare was compelled to undergo.’ And Wotton, sloughing off his overcoat as a lizard abandons his skin, grabbed for a Champagne flute from a tray that stood atop the monitor. He would’ve continued – having warmed to his theme – but Baz, who was sweating and twitching, saw fit to add complaining to his roster of active verbs.