Dorian Read online

  It was true that his raving, rampant and still rambunctious drug addiction took up much of his energy, but he wasn’t impotent – yet; and there was a deeper, stranger ambivalence at work in him than straightforward and manly homosexual self-hatred. Henry Wotton was prone to saying – to anyone who would listen – that ‘the chameleon is the most significant of modern types’. And while his outer appearance – the suits from Savile Row, the accessories from Jermyn Street and Bond Street – would seem to belie this, the truth was that beneath Planet Wotton lay a realm of complete flux. He was a Mandarin intellect who had calluses from annihilating Space Invaders and a social climber who revelled in the most dangerous class potholing. He professed no politics other than revolutionary change – for the worse. In the context of such a comprehensively contrary temperament, his conflicted sexuality was almost superfluous. Or so he liked to imagine.

  He also liked to imagine that what he looked for in a lover was not so much this face or that figure, let alone style. (Yech! How poofy, how precious, how twee, how bide-a-wee. Style – the very word could trigger the telling of another hundred decades on his internal rosary of contempt.) No, what Wotton sought was mortal clay to be moulded and shaped with a degree of definition that he felt lacking in himself. Henry Wotton wanted only to be anybody by proxy.

  Basil Hallward, with his talk of being ‘unashamed’, his proselytising for ‘gay’ rights (another word that couldn’t exist in the Wotton lexicon, save in so far as it applied to bunting), proved all too resistant to Wotton’s project. But it wasn’t on account of his pink militancy that he’d been discarded. Wotton didn’t mind if his doppelgänger was a campaigning homosexual, in fact it suited him. It was rather because Baz clung on to such exalted notions of his own artistry that he had to go.

  Baz would keep trying to reassert himself as a flamingo when Wotton was seeking to employ him as a croquet mallet. Not that Wotton thought of himself as a player – after all, what could he possibly do were he to be an artist, save price up piss bottles, and stack more shit cans on the shelves of the personal memorabilia mart? He knew Baz was right about the direction conceptual art was taking, and as for art that depended on more than craftiness, well, he had not the craft for that. People who met him at the square cocktail parties advertised by oblongs assumed that he styled himself as some contemporary dandy, flâneur, or boulevardier, and that he saw himself as a work of art. Whereas people who met him in squats, or at underground clubs, took it for granted that he had a private income. But neither lot was correct.

  Wotton lived off his wife, Batface, and he had no other creations besides those, such as Dorian, whom he met and manipulated. Like some royal matriarch, Wotton himself displayed none of the grosser symptoms of misogyny; rather he was a carrier. No one – avant la lettre – could credit the idea that the Wottons had sexual intercourse. She seemed too vague and he too disengaged for them to bring their genitals into sufficient proximity with each other at the right time. If tumescent simultaneously, it was to be supposed there was a wall or a floor between them.

  Still, if Wotton could achieve intercourse through solid surfaces, his imaginative gifts were equally magical. It took him only a short time in his lovers’ company for him to be able to picture their doings with unbelievable accuracy. Henry Wotton could have written a brilliant book about the life and times of… Henry Wotton, but as he himself said derisively, ‘The only circumstances in which I would write a roman à clef would be if I’d lost my fucking car keys.’

  After a week’s acquaintance with Wotton, which included a single night in the blood-red-painted bedroom he kept on the ground floor of his Chelsea home, Dorian found himself suffering from a florid bout of woman-hating. He despised their shape, their smell, their genitals, their gooey secretions – lachrymal, vaginal, emotional – their hair, their faces, the lilt of their voices. All of which was particularly unfortunate for the young woman he had been been making love to during his last term at Oxford. ‘Making’ in the sense that he was making it up as he went along, while she was assembling a prefabricated illusion for herself to inhabit. ‘Love’ in no sense at all.

  She came to see him in London after a two-week lapse in phone calls. On his part. She went to his penthouse, which was on the posh, park-facing side of Prince of Wales Mansions. He let her in and she kicked off her sweaty sandals so as to feel the tiled floor cool beneath her hot soles. It was the fetid mid-morning of the same day Wotton rendezvoused with the Ferret. Dorian made tea for her in the splendidly-appointed kitchen, while she padded around the main room, combing the deep pile with her paws. She was feline and blonde, her name was Helen and she too was beautiful – if you like pudenda.

  —What’re all these monitors? she said.

  —It’s a video installation, a kind of TV sculpture.

  —I know what that is.

  —It’s by this guy Baz I met.

  Dorian went to a niche in the wall and dickered with switches. The monitors fizzed into life. On the screens the naked Dorians effervesced. Helen stared at the gorgeous bodies. Baz Hallward’s piece was most cunning; it forced all who looked upon it to become involuntary voyeurs, Laughing Cavaliers, compelled to ogle the young man with eyes pinioned open.

  —Is he a poof? she spat out.

  —What?

  —You heard. Is the man who made this a poof? You know what that is, right?

  That’s how it went, possibly. It’s a mistake altogether to write off young women of Helen’s sort, scions of the upper-middle-class Hampshire convent-school set, who go wild when they discover what’s between their dewy thighs. She was smart enough to read theology, and perceptive enough to read what was in her tea leaves once she’d drained her cup.

  —Why the Earl Grey?

  —What?

  —Why’re you drinking Earl Grey? It’s such a cliché.

  —Oh… I dunno… this guy I know… he makes it… and he says the flavour’s incomparable.

  —Is that the artist?

  —No, a friend of his, the son of the woman who’s the benefactor for the Youth Homeless Project.

  —Does he have a name?

  —Wotton… Henry.

  The silence between them wasn’t awkward – it was boorish and stupid. Like a drunk, drooling student it bumped about the trendy minimalism of the penthouse, knocking into the blocky blue divans, the huge coffee table, the varnished wood pediments that supported Cathode Narcissus’s nine monitors. Dorian was so easily influenced – they both knew this. He took on other people’s styles, modes and even habits the way kitchen towelling sopped up spilt milk. And was there any point in crying over this? When he’d begun fucking Helen he’d taken to drinking Lapsang Souchong – now he was getting infused elsewhere. Of course she’d known he was a poof, but only in the way we all know we’re going to die.

  Still, she unbuttoned the front of her dress, which was a hundred per cent cotton, and had a pattern of loose grey and black squares, like a plaid drawn by a preschooler. It had a vaguely 1920s cut – mid-length, with a tight bodice and a low waist. Remember, divide the decade of the original style by the decade of its revival to discover how many times it’s been revived before. This equation holds good for the entire twentieth century, which was an arithmetic cultural progression of modal repetition. We digress.

  She unbuttoned her dress to reveal bull’s-eye breasts, brown on white on brown. Brown nipples on white flesh on brown ribcage. She hadn’t broken with her background enough, yet, to sunbathe topless. She unbuttoned her dress to reveal the gentle landscape of her body, its soft loam and softer thickets. She let the dress fall from her warm, mole-seeded shoulders, and staying in the same decade adopted an art deco pose, by running a hand through her Eton crop before swallow-diving into the here and now of the penthouse. She held her position – her arms held back, chest thrust forward, like a static bonnet mascot.

  Dorian – who appeared tightly buttoned into a Delphic charioteer’s suit even when he was stark naked – had never loo
ked more wrapped up than he did now. He propped himself against the wall, white shirt cuffs turned up over smooth forearms, tea steaming, chest gleaming.

  —You won’t see me again, then, not ever? Helen’s innocent gambit had failed and she sat with the lumpy inattention of a woman who has no modesty or allure, both having been stripped from her.

  —Yes I will. We’re friends. We were friends before we started screwing. Good friends, I hope.

  —But it means you don’t love me, doesn’t it?

  —Helen, I masturbate but it doesn’t mean I’m in love with my hand.

  —You used to do it with me and enjoy it. What is it? Aren’t I boyish enough for you?

  Exactly. She wasn’t boyish at all. Furthermore, the cropped hair, the straight lines of her period modern dress, they only hoodwinked us momentarily, and once the ruse was revealed we felt worse than cheated by Helen’s strident femininity: the ample breasts, the stippled aureoles, the healthy hips, all the generally insulting curvaceousness of her.

  —Henry Wotton isn’t boyish – Dorian spoke with some authority – he’s a man.

  — What – what d’you do with him? Does he… does he sodomise you? She did her best, but the term still sounded ridiculously technical when uttered in her plummy, pony-club accent.

  —Actually, I bugger him. He prefers that. It’s amazing, Helen – and this animality animated Dorian – when I fuck him he becomes completely pliant and emotional, like a strait-laced lady who’s lost her head. It’s an astonishing transformation.

  It was an astonishing transformation in Dorian as well, but paradoxically the utter callousness with which the intimacies of her successor were flourished won Helen over. She realised – as so many women have before in such circumstances – that this new liaison was of a different order altogether – non-equivalent, inaccessible – and that the change wrought by this in Dorian was irrevocable.

  —It all sounds perfectly revolting to me. Yucky.

  —Oh believe me, Helen, it isn’t, it just isn’t.

  Later the same day Dorian fetched up in Soho. Soho was, at that time, just gay enough but not yet the flagrant village it was to become. Janus the flagellators’ boutique had recently opened, while the Swiss Pub was going strong, and other brittle, night-time hangouts clustered like snails beneath the flat, stony sky of the city.

  Dorian Gray felt this. He also sensed the quivering shaft of Eros’s arrow as it was loosed and flew up Shaftesbury Avenue, a deathly love missile aimed by the renters straight at the junkies who huddled outside Hall’s the chemist. The junkies caught it, transformed it into a hypodermic and flung it right back down again.

  Dorian Gray stood outside the shabbily inconspicuous door of the Youth Homeless Project. It was late afternoon and the commuters clattered past him on their way home. However, Dorian wasn’t going home, he was coming for the homeless youth he’d spent most time talking to, mucking around with, fancying. Coming to prey on this black chicken. But just as his hand reached for the buzzer, the door slammed open and out he came – at speed – pushing past Dorian.

  He was unstoppable, as twitchy as an antelope – and as swift. His hair bounced on his electric head like a neat hank of black flexes, his bed-roll was slung over his shoulder and his elbows and knees stuck out, pumping. He was a conical mop-top of dusky fury, in among the piecrust white cotton collars of sub-Sloane Ranger office girls. Dorian managed to snag the black man as he paused to let the 19 bus plunge past.

  — Herman…! Man! Where you going, man?

  —What the fuck’s it t’you? He rounded on Dorian. He was belligerent, this Herman. Terribly aggressive. He was also the same height and build as Dorian. Lither, true, and more effeminate as well. Like a queer Oedipus, always threatening to scratch either your eyes out or his own.

  —I’m sorry, I don’t mean to piss you off. It’s just – we were talking, and I thought you were staying –

  —I can’t stay in the fucking shelter, I can’t stay in it. Herman wrenched himself away from Dorian and resumed weaving down Shaftesbury Avenue.

  —But isn’t that the whole point of the place –

  —What? What!

  —To stay the night.

  —Listen. He stopped again. I can’t stay in the shelter ’cause I can’t fucking score in the shelter, an’ I can’t have a hit in the fucking shelter, an’ if I can’t have a hit I can’t work, an’ if I can’t work I can’t score. An’ if a ponce like you, Dorian, is crawling up my fucking arse I can’t do fucking either. Now walk, man – you’re in my light.

  —I don’t mean to be – I thought we were getting on. We were talking.

  —Shit! Talking.

  —Look, if it’s money you need, I’d be happy –

  Dorian couldn’t have spoken at a more opportune moment, for at that very moment, limping down the road came a pedlar legendary on the Front Line, and so closely associated in his clientele’s minds with his produce (which, when you come to think of it, is exactly the same as with many retailers, fishmongers in particular), that he was known simply as the Dikes and Rits man. Or even just DR, or the Doctor.

  This was eminently suitable, for the Dicanol and Ritalin that the Doctor sold were stolen or defrauded – or even received on legitimate prescription – by addicts, who used them as a cut-price version of the heroin and cocaine they craved. How fitting too that Ritalin should have become, in another decade, the drug of choice for pacifying those the medico-education establishment deem to have ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’. Does speed really calm these hyperactive children, or does it merely allow them to become healthily fixated by the minutiae of our tiny society, with its toy cars and play buildings? Taking the long view, perhaps the West End junkies with their Dikes and Rits were the obsessive psychic abscess that, once burst, spread this poison throughout the body politic. Surely socialised medicine has always been a covert means of ensuring that all society is medicated?

  The Doctor had the old street junky’s trick of being able to project his voice directly into one’s inner ear, so that his sales pitch was tossed several yards in front of the man himself.

  —Dikes an’ Rits, Dikes an’ Rits, Dikes an’ Rits, five’ll get you three of one, ten’ll get you two of the other, twenny gets you lucky dip. Dikes an’ Rits – there’s no gear on the Front Line, jus’ Dikes an’ Rits…

  A folk dance of concealment then followed, as Dorian and his new sweetheart promenaded in the Doctor’s trench-coated train, listening intently to his sleight-of-mind commentary, which was improvised for their sessile ears.

  —I see you there, young Herman my lad, I see you there, I see you hungry. Hungry for Dikes an’ Rits. Back from the West Coast, Cal-i-for-ni-a, an’ wiv a massive fuckin’ habit wot your sugar daddy given you. I see you there. Wot you want, eh? Gear? There’s no gear on the Front Line. No amps neevah – jus’ Dikes an’ Rits. Thass all there is if this little chicken don’t wanna do turkey. Cluckin’ already, are you? Wossat, forty? Forty gets you twenny. Kosher, very kosher. Nice doin’ business with you Herman, very nice indeed… Dikes an’ Rits, Dikes an’ Rits…

  So it was that Dorian learned the facts about his bit of rough, and they only endeared Herman to him the more. After Helen and Oxford and sub-flapper dresses and japes and diving off bridges in the May morn and sucking dicks under dining society tables and all of that. This… this… he figured was life as it must be lived. Life as Henry Wotton lived it, foreshadowed by death. By death and degradation as well, for within minutes Dorian and Herman were ensconced in the room of another of the black renter’s admirers, a pudgily unthreatening skinhead dubbed ‘Ginger’ for his unpleasant furze.

  Ach! Such astonishing filth and mess in this place. To have said ‘room’ would’ve been to dignify it, would’ve been to assume a recognisable floor, walls and ceiling in place of this peculiar, upended shoebox, which was poised atop four storeys of grime and grout, while being slowly strangled by rusty external drainage. Dorian reclined beside a half-open sash windo
w on a bank of organic detritus. Filthy clothes, rotting banana skins, used syringes, stale crusts of bread. He stared up past the wan sun of a forty-watt bulb, dangling on its furred fifteen-foot length of flex, to a postage stamp of ceiling which sweated toxins.

  Dorian had known that there was squalor like this in London, but never conceived of himself as part of it. Beside this – this stinking entropy – the mere messiness of Henry Wotton and Baz Hallward was just that: the wilful refusal of naughty boys to tidy up their rooms. This – this infective moraine upon which he lay was, Dorian realised, truly sordid. And this – this ringside seat as he watched Herman first do the laborious home chemistry required to synthesise a fix of Dikes and Rits, and then – then punch holes in his suppurating calf as he searched for a vein. This – this was something emphatically not to write home about. Not that there was anywhere to write to, unless you consider a Palm Beach hotel homy; nor anyone to read the missive who wasn’t too addled by vanity and Valium to comprehend it.

  Dorian watched Herman and Ginger watched Dorian.

  —Aww fuck, that’s evil shit, that is, said the gingerhead.

  —I’ve no money for gear.

  —I gave you the money. Dorian staked his claim. You could get some gear with that.

  —Oh yeah? An’ who’s gonna get the nex’ fix, anna one after that, an’ that, an’ that? What’re you, a fucking chemist?

  —Nah, he’s another fuckin’ sugar daddy Herm. Where you taking him to, pretty boy? He’s done the United States of Arsehole already.

  What an awful compression they all experienced as Herman thrust the plunger of the huge five-millilitre syringe home, sending chalk and poison and Christ knows what other crud into his leg. They all felt it – Dorian, Herman, Ginger – the giant plunger of darkness pushing down the weeping sides of the space over their heads, the pressure boiling their blood, then popping their skins, so that their puréed bodies mingled with the grime and muck and the shit to concoct an ultimate fix: the filthy past injected into the vein of the present to create a deathly future.