Dorian (2 page)

‘Gaaa…! Christ – Christ!’ Wotton fought for breath while lighting an outsize filterless Virginia cigarette. Even this suffocating outside was too exterior for him. He longed for the night, for confining drapes, for silky sheets and silken cuddles. He pushed himself up, and like a tree falling in the forest collapsed towards the door of a dark-green late-model Jaguar saloon, which was parked near to – but not exactly by – the kerb. It was a filthy luxury vehicle, the green paintwork furry with dust-upon-sap and maculate with bird-shit. Having finally located the keys in his waistcoat pocket, Wotton admitted himself to the car as if it were a vault, then pulled the door to with a moneyed clunk. The whisky bottle he aligned carefully between the upholstered grooves on the passenger seat.

Wotton organised his two pairs of shades, and stabbed at the ignition with the key. Despite being half-blinded by his ridiculous eyewear, he still adjusted the mirror so that he could see his own face. Turning this way and that he seemed to take a particular satisfaction in observing the white rheum that had gathered at the corners of his cruel mouth, like sea froth on anfractuous rocks.

Once Wotton had shackled the Crombie to the car’s cream leather and begun dickering with the controls of the radio, he realised how muted the world’s soundtrack had been. His wife’s voice, his own footfalls, the avian din, and even the distant roar of the traffic on the King’s Road, all were muffled. When he depressed a button on the car radio he recoiled from a blast of pure, stentorian, ordinary news. Information concerning a parallel world in which people walked and talked and brawled and died. A radio announcer blurted, ‘In the wake of the disturbances the Government is considering setting up an inquiry under the chairmanship of Lord Scar –’ and Wotton – having had quite enough – punched another button, which brought synthesised pop music, thudding and peeping into the car’s interior.

Vigorously tapping, Wotton’s black loafer burrowed into a slurry of opera programmes, discarded cocaine wraps, biffed cigarette boxes and empty hip-flasks, beneath which his sole felt for the accelerator, so he could jam it to the floor. The Jag pulled away and raced up the nearside lane of the straight residential road. After four hundred yards it veered back to the kerb and stopped. Inside the smoke-filled booth, Wotton extinguished one Sullivan’s Export and lit another. The pop still peeped and he sang along with the mincing front man, ‘Oh-woh-woh tainted love!’ for a few bars before summoning himself, killing the engine and exiting the car. The Scotch went along for the ride.

Entering a narrow door in a brick wall, Wotton followed a path that ran obliquely through a patch of thick shrubbery to the door of a two-storey, purpose-built Victorian artist’s studio. Using another of his keys, Wotton opened the door of this charming building, still yodelling, ‘Take my love but that’s not really all!’

It was dark inside. Very fusty. Terribly gloomy. The shrub-choked windows and leaf-pressed skylight of the studio admitted hardly anything of the day, as if this were – bizarrely – of little importance to the artwork undertaken here. And what creation could this have been? For this studio was patently a disordered realm in the midst of an objective insurgency. Good pieces of old furniture were under attack from a rabble of trash. Here a Chippendale dresser fell victim to a slew of dirty plates and piss-filled mugs, while over there a Moroccan divan was inundated beneath a dirty dune of discarded clothing. The same bottles and ashtrays massed and jostled as at the Wottons’.

But in the middle ground there was at least some evidence of an operative intelligence. A series of nine television monitors were ranged in a semicircle confronting Wotton. All of them were on, but eight displayed static, while the ninth was tuned to an Open University programme on physics. ‘In which case, the free-ranging electron will combine to form a new nucleus…’ a white-coated geek said on screen, while tipping his bald patch at the viewer as if it were a hat. The background to this pedagogy was provided by a mixture of tapestry wall hangings and photographer’s flats. A minstrels’ gallery was devoid of musicians, but instead packed out with old tea-chests, their sides stencilled with exotic Eastern destinations: Colombo, Shanghai, Manila.

Wotton loafed and squeaked about, hopping awkwardly from rug to parquet like a flightless bird, pecking here at some abandoned underwear, there at a grubby mirror. ‘Baz?’ he called out after a while. ‘You here?’ Then, spying a joint stubbed out next to the televised physics tutorial, he knelt, picked it up and relit it using a Ronson recovered from a waistcoat pocket. Still squatting, he ejaculated croakily, ‘Baz?’

‘In the cloud of particles formed after the impact new alignments will soon occur –’

‘Baz, are you
here
?!’

In the cloud of particles wreathing Wotton’s head, all was, once again, muffled. He could hear the proximate hiss of the monitors, the distant gibber of an educated voice. In the minstrels’ gallery the tea-chests scraped. Something was up there, something that then dropped like a big cat to the floor, eight feet below. ‘Hi!’

It was a man in his early thirties – perhaps five years older than Wotton. His dark, collar-length hair was mussed, while his tanned and wizened face suggested that he surfed a lot – using a sunbed as a board. The black drainpipe Levis, the white shirt open to the waist, the Egyptian amulet on a leather thong around his leathery neck, all implied guitar-strumming around beach fires and youth gilded by golden sunsets. But up close his vigour was entirely chemical, and all that glistered was sweat.

Baz advanced, his bare feet slapping the floor, while Wotton conspicuously ignored him. This was the very essence of the relationship between the two: Baz Hallward the wayward acolyte, seething with energy and bumptiousness, while the younger man played the part of his mentor, consumed with cool, eaten up with indifference. That they had once been lovers and Baz had assumed the active role meant nothing now. Nothing whatsoever.

‘Late night?’ Wotton drawled through the smoke.

‘What time is it now?’ Baz squatted down to Wotton’s level. ‘Uh-huh, taping. Lotta taping. Didn’t finish until four, got the model comfy, did some editing, sequencing…’ he shat these phrases out ‘… and now you’re here.’

‘Were you out?’ Wotton cared more about where the people he knew had been than where he himself was at any given time.

‘I went to your mother’s –’

‘To my mother’s?’

‘That’s right, your mother’s – to meet a kid.’

‘You went to my mother’s to meet
a kid
? Fuck, Baz, you are the one. I s’pose it was some charity-load of old douche-bags you had to make yourself presentable for…’ He rose and began ambling about the studio, still puffing the joint and leaving tedious fumes in his wake.

‘Yeah, I had to borrow a fucking suit – but I’d met the kid before –’

‘
En passant?
’ Wotton never used an English phrase where a French tag would do.

‘Literally in passing.’ Baz translated them without comment. ‘I brushed up against his butt in the hall when I last paid the rent on this place. He’s just left Oxford, and now he’s helping your ma with that Soho project.’

‘Silly bitch.’

‘He isn’t very intellectual, if that’s what you mean.’

‘No, I meant Mama, but anyway I don’t want want to mount some encephalitic
thing
– its brain swelling like a
bubo
.’

‘Yeah, fuck, I dunno why I bothered with the whistle, her house is overrun with renters, tarts and social workers. But this kid is absolutely divine, he’s a true original, he’s
gorgeous
, he’s next year’s model – take a look at the stuff we did last night.’ Baz headed over to a bank of video recorders which were connected to the monitors by coiled creepers of cabling. He fiddled intently with these while Wotton prowled. After a while he located a spoon, a glass of water, a two-millilitre disposable syringe, and a drug wrap on a windowsill. Then the two men’s conversation assumed a common purpose.

‘Is this gear?’ Wotton held up the wrap.

‘No, give over, Wotton, it’s charlie – and it’s my last.’

‘Yeah, well…’ Wotton considered this proposition while unbuttoning the cuff of his overcoat, his suit cuff, his shirt cuff. ‘Ach! All this buttoning and unbuttoning. This is my
last
hit for this hour. This is the
last
summer of the dormouse. Moments, Baz, are dying out all about us, we are in the midst of a great extinction to rival that of the Cretaceous era…’ He concocted the fix precisely, rapidly and elegantly. ‘You dare to speak of your last charlie, when I am irrefutably the last Henry. The last with such a rare combination of gung-ho drugging…’ he used the bunched-up sleeves in lieu of a tourniquet, and pushed the Ray-Bans up on his forehead so as to see his swollen main line better in the green light from the window – ‘and
comme il faut
tailoring.’

But this supramundane rant remained unacknowledged, just as the peculiar sight of Wotton’s aureole of red hair and flushed works full of green blood – as if he were a junky Pan – remained unobserved. Baz’s attention was wholly caught by the first monitor, which zigged and zagged into life. It showed the naked figure of a beautiful young man, posed like a classical Greek kouros: one hand lightly on hip, the other trailing in groin, half-smile on plump lips. A naked figure that turned to face the viewer as the camera zoomed in. The second monitor came to life and this displayed a closer view of the still turning youth. The third view was closer again. The sensation imparted as all nine monitors came to life was of the most intense, carnivorous, predatory voyeurism. The youth was like a fleshly bonbon, or titillating titbit, wholly unaware of the ravening mouth of the camera. The ninth monitor displayed only his mobile pink mouth.

Wotton’s rictus responded to this as it quivered and grew a moustache of sweat. ‘Time flies when you’re watching replays, eh Baz?’ He drew the needle from his arm, licked up the gout of blood, grinned.

‘Whaddya think, Henry?’

‘I thought you’d found yet another epicene swish, Basil, but this boy looks tough –’

‘But tender, yeah?’ He laughed.

‘I like bodies better than minds, Baz, and I like bodies with no mind at all better than anything else in the world.’

‘If all I’d wanted was flesh, Wotton, I’d’ve gone to a butcher or a meat rack –’

‘Yes, well, whatever other things you can accuse my mother of being, a pimp isn’t one of them.’

But it was Baz who was agitated now, who paced about from screen to screen, before heading over to where Wotton stood by the windowsill. ‘Your mother remains incredibly helpful, and very understanding… and as for him,
he’s
interested in my work,
he
wants to help. He’s unashamed – not like us. He belongs to a totally new generation, the first gay generation to come out of the shadows. That’s what I’ve wanted to get with this –’ he gestured towards the monitors – ‘that would be perfect.’

‘Unashamed?
Gay?
What the fuck’re you talking about?’

‘Of being a faggot, Wotton. A queer, a bum boy, an iron-bloody-hoof. Of that. And in your case, as a result, of being married to a Duke’s daughter who you treat like a convenience store. That.’

Wotton, despite his snobbery and his affectation, liked nothing better than a proper joust. ‘Baz, Baz,’ he cooed, ‘our proximity makes it essential that we be strangers to each other, Batface and I.’

‘Whatever. Perhaps you can’t see the hypocrisy you’re mired in, but don’t you have some responsibility for your wife’s feelings?’

‘Don’t be absurd, I’ve never misled Batface for an instant concerning my sexual inclinations.’

‘Maybe not – so I s’pose she just goes along with the fraud because she finds it perfectly natural. But I want a different kind of relationship. I want truth and beauty and honesty, but the world wants to destroy that kind of love between men. I think Dorian could be these things for me – but he’d probably mean nothing to you.’

‘That’s too many buts,’ Wotton sneered. ‘Better stick to buns –
Dorian’s
buns. What is this, Baz – in love with
Dorian
, are we?’

To Wotton’s surprise Baz shovelled up this facetiousness with great seriousness. ‘I dunno. Y’know what I’m like, Henry, always getting hurt, and Dorian already seems to sense this. He’s sweet and charming and naïve on the surface, but I expect he’ll turn out to be a vicious little bitch like all the others.’

‘He’s here now, isn’t he? Not that I give a shit, it’s just that if he’s making you into this much of a bore I’d better leave – it must be serious.’

‘Yeah, well, serious enough for the work, at any rate.’ Baz waved at the televisions. ‘It’s called
Cathode Narcissus
, and it’ll be the last video installation I make. The whole fucking medium is dead. Fuck, it was
born
decadent, like all the rest of conceptual art. First it was Nauman, then Viola and me, now it’s finished. From now on, conceptual art will degenerate to the level of crude autobiography, a global village sale of shoddy, personal memorabilia for which video installations like this will be the TV adverts.’

Wotton, grinning, stoked up his friend’s little furnace of ire. ‘What, with special offers on bottled piss, canned shit and vacuum-packed blood –?’

‘That’s all been done already!’ Baz expostulated. ‘When I was with Warhol –’

‘When I was working at the Factory with Drella – with And
ee
…’ Wotton was a superb mimic, a master of the accented caricature, and his Baz was a whining, preening, mid-Atlantic hipster. ‘Well,
maan
, and Billy Name and Edie and – oh gosh! Doc-tor Robert – well, we all
did speed
, you know… It was part of the scene,
maan
.’

More unexpectedly, Basil Hallward could do Henry Wotton just as well, exaggerating the lisp, turning up the affectation as if it were the contrast knob on one of his television monitors. ‘We ate at Harry’s Bar and then wepaired to the Gwitti Palace, where I quaffed quails’ eggs from her carefully coifed cunt –’