Dorian Page 3

  ‘Actually,’ Dorian said, ‘that’s not something I want –’

  ‘Ah, exactly, but what is it that you do want?’ Wotton rounded on him. ‘D’you know? Do any of us? I’ve a terribly fey friend who swears that he isn’t really a faggot at all, it’s just that he has these vivid dreams of being buggered – which, as we all know, is perfectly normal, even for the most red-blooded of heterosexuals – and when he awakes he finds it terribly hard to shake them off. Now what, Mister Gray, d’you say to that?’

  It was unclear whether Dorian understood Wotton at all, or comprehended him only too well. ‘I’m happy enough…’ he replied. ‘I’ve only –’

  ‘Only what?’ This was another of Wotton’s myriad techniques of seduction, the continual interruption as a means of making up another’s mind. ‘Only spent the one white night with poor, washed-up Baz, who’s not so much hip as a hip-fucking-replacement? I congratulate you. Did he seduce you with potions and rub unguents on you?’

  ‘We smoked a bit of grass… I’m not sure about hard –’

  ‘Hard what? Hard talk? Hard cocks? Hard labour? Hard drugs? Hardly anything? You should remember, my young friend, if you don’t know what you want to do, at least do something. There’s no other cure for indecisiveness.’

  ‘Henry,’ Dorian demurred, ‘look, we’ve only just met, I don’t know why it is you’re being so intense… Actually, that’s what your mother said about you, that you’re a brilliant talker. But I don’t want to be cured of anything, any more than I’m obsessed by looks – least of all my own – they’re such a superficial thing.’

  ‘You say that Dorian, you say that, but we are in an age when appearances matter more and more. Only the shallowest of people won’t judge by them.’

  There was a terrace, of sorts, by the door to the studio – if you call twelve bird-shat-upon Portland paving slabs a terrace, which in London most do. This Wotton and Dorian now regained, still arm in arm, and both of them felt as if the interlude in the bijou jungle had been significant, although in Wotton’s case this was partly because it was the longest walk he had taken in several weeks.

  It could have been a Neapolitan terrace, because there was a small, round, metal table and two folding metal chairs. Baz had managed to assemble a tray of coffee, complete with matching white china cups and saucers, sugar bowl, cream jug. The whole ensemble was ridiculously elegant and bright in the dull, oppressive afternoon. They scraped their seats to sit, and Wotton was mother, while Dorian became his vain daughter, twirling a teaspoon between his fingers, so that he might admire the way his face ballooned then hollowed, ballooned then hollowed. ‘I’ve no idea what I’m going to do,’ he said after a few slurps. ‘I’ve come down from Oxford with an indifferent degree and too much money – hardly a recipe for success.’

  ‘Au contraire,’ said Wotton, ‘if you’ve got it – and you have it all – you must use it, and you must use it all. Before this jaded century is utterly exhausted, at least one individual should’ve pleasured it thoroughly. I’m prepared to be your pandar, I’ll take you under my ample wing…’ at last he noticed the bloodied, flapping cuffs and began to button them ‘… today!’

  ‘Today?’ Dorian saw the blood and prevaricated, but the people who had warned him about people like Wotton should, in turn, have themselves been warned about. ‘Look, I’m – I’m not sure, I said I’d drop in at this reception your mother is giving – for her donors.’

  ‘Fine.’ He was not to be deflected. ‘I’ll accompany you.’

  ‘If you’re sure…’ Dorian warmed to the idea; Wotton might be disturbing, but at least he wasn’t boring. Wotton might want to fuck him, but at least he didn’t make Dorian into an object of veneration as Basil Hallward did.

  Baz, who at this point emerged from the studio, and having overheard the last exchange, snapped at Wotton, ‘I thought you were going to Honey’s, to score?’

  ‘I am’ – Wotton was unperturbed – ‘I shall go en route to the reception and take Dorian with me; I doubt he’s seen five trouser presses in one place before –’

  ‘But I need Dorian for the sequencing.’

  ‘Really? I thought you were coming with me to score,’ Wotton sneered, ‘but anyway, Baz, no buts, I warned you about them.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Wotton – besides, I s’pose I can do without you, Dorian; Cathode Narcissus is about done –’

  ‘I want to see it!’ And the way Dorian rose from the table and headed impetuously for the door was a reminder for Baz and Wotton of how much younger he was than them. As if they needed it.

  Inside the dark studio the nine monitors were sharply outlined. Across their faces, hissing with static, the fluid images of Dorian presented a cascade of motion. There was a soundtrack as well, an insistent thrumming beat entwined with a breathy fluting. Dorian was transfixed for a few moments, but then he moved closer and began to sway in time with his own televisual images. Nine naked Dorians and one clothed. In synchrony, youth and the images of youth waltzed to the heavenly and eternal music of self-consciousness.

  ‘Well, whaddya reckon?’ Baz blurted out from the shadows, and Dorian turned to see him and Wotton, their faces soiled with lust.

  ‘He’s absolutely superb,’ Wotton answered, ‘and this afternoon has become remarkable since I encountered your faun.’

  ‘I think I’ve caught him at just the right point –’

  ‘Oh, indeed you have, Baz, he’s like a ripe grape dusted with yeast.’ Wotton made as if to pluck one of the monitors and eat it.

  Dorian felt uncomfortable with the way the older men were speaking; was it at cross-purposes, or did they regard him and the video installation as entirely interchangeable? ‘How long will these tapes last, Baz?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s hard to say… Certainly years, if not decades, and by then they can be transferred to new tapes, and so on – for ever, I guess.’

  ‘So, these’ – Dorian gestured – ‘will remain young for ever, while I grow old, then die?’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Baz snorted derisively. ‘You can’t copy bodies – yet.’

  ‘I wish it was the other way round,’ Dorian said, and to support the throwaway nature of the remark, he picked up a black windcheater which was slung over a chair and headed for the door, calling over his shoulder, ‘You coming, Henry?’

  ‘Er… yuh.’ Wotton stirred himself, as did Baz.

  ‘What about the piece, Dorian?’ he pleaded. ‘I need to do two more recordings for the soundtrack. I must do them.’

  ‘Well, if you must.’ Dorian’s whole tone had hardened since he’d seen the installation. ‘Personally I’m jealous of the bloody thing – it’s already hours younger than me.’

  Baz took this as the acceptable petulance of the patron who’s also a model. He smoothed his hair, hooking strands behind his ears, and began moving from monitor to monitor, switching them off. ‘As soon as the recordings are done,’ he told Dorian, ‘and the sequencing and editing are finished, I’ll bring Cathode Narcissus round to your apartment and set it up. Then you can do whatever you want to your several selves. Scratch their eyes out, or jerk off with them. Whatever.’

  ‘OΚ.’ Dorian paused in the doorway, and Baz, thinking of him at dawn – screaming with delight, trussed in a sheet, his erect cock arched like bow, a pearl of his semen on Baz’s tongue – couldn’t play it cool any longer.

  ‘Come tomorrow, Dorian, please, at around noon?’

  ‘All right, Baz.’ And withdrawing the psychic knife from between Baz’s ribs without troubling to twist it, Dorian left.

  It was, apparently, a tactical withdrawal, as if he wanted his rivals to fight over him forthwith. This they obliged him by doing: ‘For fuck’s fucking sake, Wotton!’ Baz howled. ‘How long are you gonna go on shooting me down like this?’

  ‘Only as long as you go on shooting up at my expense’ – Wotton was straightening his tie, patting down his clothes – ‘and poncing this studio off my mother.’

  ‘I like
him,’ Baz near screeched.

  ‘And I like him too.’

  ‘You don’t like anything, Wotton, you’re poison running in the gutter.’ Baz walked over to Wotton and taking a wad of currency from his jeans pocket, peeled ten notes off and stuffed them into the top pocket of his friend’s overcoat. ‘Get us one of each, willya?’ he snarled.

  ‘What’s this – in funds, are we Baz?’

  ‘Dorian paid me for it – for the piece. Cash down.’

  ‘Oh really?’ Wotton sniggered unpleasantly. ‘Something makes me think he’ll have to go on paying indefinitely.’ And without waiting for Baz’s reply, the vile fop turned on his heel and departed.

  2

  Henry Wotton drove his five-litre Jaguar around central London as if he were at the wheel of a powered lawnmower, and the city itself but a rough oblong of lawn, to the rear of a romantically ruinous country house. A lawn planted with stucco models of famous metropolitan buildings, perhaps one-tenth scale, between which he piloted his vehicle at once lazily and wildly. He seemed to have no concern for either the Highway Code or the sensibilities of other drivers. Indeed, if there was the remotest awareness of a danger, it was merely that he might tip over the ha-ha.

  Dorian Gray understood this about his new admirer as soon as he buckled himself into the car’s cream interior. Clearly, to be in Henry Wotton’s Jaguar was to be in Henry Wotton’s capricious and cruel embrace. At first he stole the occasional sidelong glance at his chauffeur, who guided the car with three fingers of his left hand on the lower rim of the steering wheel, while trailing his cigarette hand out of the window and lolling his reddish curls against the headrest. But soon Dorian surrendered to the lurches, surges and drifts of the big car. He began peering at the detritus on the car’s floor, a veritable midden of discarded material from which much information on the Wotton culture could, undoubtedly, be gained. Pop music purled from the car radio, as if a sonic brook were running between the two men.

  The car was at the traffic lights at the top of Exhibition Road when Dorian exhibited his first find, a brace of opera programmes. ‘D’you like the opera?’

  ‘My wife does,’ Wotton drawled. ‘My main pleasure at Glyndebourne is counting the homosexuals in the audience and seeing if they outnumber those on the stage.’

  ‘What about these?’ Dorian held up a flyer for a stock car race at the White City Stadium. An old drug wrap was stuck to it.

  ‘I adore destructive spectacles; they are the last refuge of the creative.’ The lights changed and a loafer came down on the accelerator; the big car gathered its massy inertia under its whale’s back of a bonnet, and then slid smoothly past the Albert Memorial. By the time the Jag reached the bridge over the Serpentine it was travelling at sixty. It swiped to the left, then to the right, weaving between two lumbering vans, before tucking into the chicane that led up towards Lancaster Gate.

  Dorian knew intuitively that it was profoundly uncool to mention Wotton’s driving, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘How d’you manage to get away with it?’ he asked. ‘You had no way of knowing if there was a car in the oncoming lane.’

  ‘I have an aerial view, Dorian. I see the whole situation from above.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Never more so.’

  ‘But how? It’s not possible.’

  ‘I don’t expect you to comprehend it’ – Wotton peeked slyly out at him from under his four brown lenses – ‘but my father buggered me relentlessly when I was a young child. While he was doing it I found myself becoming curiously disembodied, floating up to the ceiling of the room where my child-self lay as he heaved and panted. I occupied this point of view – in the region of the cornicing, although occasionally revolving around the chandelier – on a regular basis between the ages of five and eight. For so long, in fact, that I have retained it into adulthood.

  ‘You, my dear young friend,’ he continued, ‘are condemned to a seventy-millimetre, windscreen view of the city. You are a mere corpuscle, travelling along these arteries, whereas I have a surgeon’s perspective. I float above it all, and see Hyde Park as but a green, gangrenous fistula in London’s grey corpse!’ And with this flourish he yanked on the handbrake, for they had arrived in Marylebone High Street.

  Henry Wotton adored drugs and he adored buying them. He understood, of course, that the aesthetics of drug-dealing left much to be desired. This painfully petit bourgeois little flat, marooned eight storeys above Marylebone High Street, its chintz-wrapped windows looking out over the Westway flyover, was no mud-bricked stall in the walls of an ancient citadel. No, this was no caravanserai, or souk, and nor was Honey – a stringy blonde, in loose white smock and tight black leggings – a noble spice merchant, with a scented beard and indigo robes. Her conversation with her customer displayed no elaborate courtesies, nor alluded to prices with great subtlety, hiding them in invocations of the Prophet. On the contrary, the two of them sat rapping in front of a glass-topped coffee table, upon which she unceremoniously weighed up the product using jewellers’ scales.

  ‘Yes,’ said Wotton, ‘I remember that fifty quid owing, but I sorted it out with you the day before yesterday.’

  ‘Nah,’ Honey sniffed, ‘your mate came by and racked up a g on your slate yesterday evening.’

  ‘Christ – I’ve got to take more drugs than I want just to keep up with that bastard. All right, here’s a hundred and seventy.’

  Dorian turned from his careful examination of a modular wall rack, which contained compartments for picture books, pot plants, pen pots and potpourri, to see Wotton laying notes down on the table, while Honey poured powders into envelopes and neatly folded them.

  ‘Not these two.’ Wotton stayed her hand, took two of the envelopes, deftly married their contents, withdrew a small capsule from his capacious pocket, unscrewed it, poured in a tiny dun cascade, screwed it up again, and dropped it in a waistcoat pocket; the drug wraps were tucked in another. All these actions were neat, precise, focused. They spoke of concomitant thought processes – fold, wrap, tap, snort, shoot, walk, pay – going on in the Wotton psyche, while the sweat simmered on his brow. ‘Right,’ Wotton rapped, ‘that’s that. But before we go, chère Miel, my young friend would love to see your splendid collection.’

  Honey rose, and, gums smacking, nails scratching, she led them out of the room, down a short corridor stinking of air freshener and into a back bedroom. The entire room had been crammed full of stuff. On three freestanding Dexion shelving units reposed irons, televisions, stereo units, tape recorders, kettles, food blenders, and all – as Wotton had said – still in their packaging. There were also rails hung with polythene-wrapped clothes, and many many stuffed animals. Honey garbled a wired commentary on this materialistic superfluity, while massaging the shoulders of a trouser press. ‘Not that I need all of ’em, yuh, but these Corby ones only have three pressing settings, whereas these Danish ones have five…’ While she rattled on, Wotton felt for Dorian’s hand and took it, a gesture the younger man found simultaneously tender and subversive.

  Back in the car, as they barrelled down Park Lane, Wotton yanked the little capsule out, fiddled with it, stuck it up his nose, honked noisily, repeated the fiddle, then passed it to Dorian. ‘Just hold it up your nostril and sniff – go on.’

  ‘I’m not sure –’

  ‘Go on, I insist. It would be bad manners not to.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ And he did, he sniffed. Dorian had decided to absorb as much of Henry Wotton as possible through whichever membrane presented itself. He knew his own limitation: he had money but no real style. His upbringing had been here and there, on the fringes of film sets, in foreign hotels, in transit, sitting at tables with hired, pan-European staff. It had given him polish but no shine. He lacked the deeper lustre of someone like Wotton, who by remaining in situ had acquired cultural verdigris.

  The Jaguar coasted to a halt at some traffic lights. The stereo was cranked right up and belting out ‘Too Drunk to Fuck’ by the Dea
d Kennedys. It was amazing that the duo weren’t in the process of being righteously busted, so flagrant were their activities, but through the tinted windows, surrounding drivers could be seen, stalled in every sense, eyes front, sitting mindlessly, eating a late lunch out of their noses.

  ‘Hnghf – oof! That stings.’ Dorian passed the capsule back.

  ‘But you’re not losing your nasal virginity?’

  ‘What?’ Dorian near shouted, frantically rubbing his nose.

  Wotton killed the Dead Kennedys. ‘You’ve done gear before?’

  ‘Gear?’

  ‘Horse, scag, smack, H, he-ro-in.’

  ‘Oh, I thought that was charlie.’

  ‘I always add the merest whisper of smack to take the edge off. The merest.’

  Dorian changed tack. He pulled down the sunshade to reveal a vanity mirror, and spoke while observing his own pupils. It was as if he’d been snorting vanity mixed with cocaine and heroin. ‘I thought you liked Baz.’

  ‘I love him. He’s a fucking genius.’

  ‘But back there?’

  ‘I love him, but he’s becoming sentimental – that’s bad. That means he isn’t simpatico – and that’s worse. That I can’t abide. Worse still, he repeats himself – all that avant-garde bullshit, the hamster wheel of the Manhattan art world, how he scored with Burroughs on Avenue B, and “William” threatened the spade with a sword-stick – you’ve heard all that, yuh?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘That was me.’ Wotton flashed an unexpected smile. ‘With the fucking sword-stick, you fool – although it wasn’t New York, it was Marseille. I don’t do America.’

  Wotton parked the Jag in Savile Row and they walked around the corner into Piccadilly. The afternoon heat was fierce, so Dorian took off his jacket, but Wotton ploughed on in his overcoat regardless. Dorian resolved to be measured for a three-piece suit as soon as possible.

  The charity reception for the Youth Homeless Project was being held in the restaurant of a cavernous hotel which had grown seedy and unprofitable in the recession. Its grey flanks were pitted, its reception rooms smelly and its staff surlier than ever. ‘Naturally we’re extremely late,’ Wotton declaimed, leaving his coat in the cloakroom, ‘but then punctuality is the fucking thief of time, burgling precious seconds which we could’ve spent getting higher.’ The woman behind the counter scowled at him, and he smiled back while handing her a pound note.