by Will Self
‘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 contin
ue 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.
‘I thought this was a vernissage for Cathode Narcissus.’
‘No no, it’s a vernissage for this – this black Narcissus…’ Wotton advanced towards his quarry, hand outstretched. ‘You must be Herman – Dorian has told me fabulous things about you.’
‘Yeah?’ Herman neglected to take it.
‘Oh yes indeed. He says you are beautiful and talented, and Dorian is too wise to be foolish in such matters.’
‘Yeah, an’ he wants to fuck me.’
‘You are direct – very direct. But I rather think you’re mistaken. The way I understand it – and I hope Dorian will support me – he would far prefer it if you were to fuck him.’
‘Who cares about fucking anybody?’ Baz broke in. ‘Let’s see the fucking installation.’
To forestall any more of Wotton’s attempts at seductive badinage, Baz went over to the niche where the video recorders were stacked and began changing the tapes.
‘Whatya gonna do with the thing now it’s done, Dorian?’ Alan Campbell said. Campbell was a man it was easy to avoid bestowing attention upon. He was, Wotton averred, ‘far too evil to be seen in close-up’. Older than the others – perhaps as old as forty – wiry, dapper, with salt-and-pepper hair and a neat moustache, he was dressed conservatively in dark slacks, a brown pullover shirt and a tweed jacket. His accent was that particular kind of emotionless Australian that suggests a willingness to do anything to anyone. In Wotton’s wonky circle his notoriety rested on two, equally contaminated grounds. First, his willingness – as a medical doctor – to prescribe with great liberality; and secondly, his attempt to hang Francis Bacon.
It was in the mid-sixties. Bacon – together with the photographer John Deakin – was cruising the roughest of the West End spielers looking for the roughest of trade. They found Campbell and his crew, who abstracted the master of the figurative back to a basement in Dalston. ‘I dunno what possessed me, but I thought, if he wants it he can have it. So I flipped this length of clothes-line over a beam and went to get the end round his neck. I’ll tell ya this for nothing, when he realised it was for real he fought like a fucking tiger. Only a little bloke, but he fought like a fucking tiger…’ And got away. Campbell had been making a killing out of the murderous anecdote ever since.
Dorian gave Campbell’s question serious consideration – engendering a charming pout-and-eyebrow-cleft combination – before answering, ‘I hadn’t thought. I don’t think I shall allow it to be exhibited, not unless Baz demands it. Perhaps instead I’ll hold an exclusive vernissage like this one every decade, and we can all meet up again to see what odd lines time has inscribed on our faces, while this Narcissus has remained permanently in flower.’ As he was speaking the monitors pranged into the present, the Dorians pirouetted and pranced. The five men ranged in front of the nine monitors stared at their cathode partners. The sophisticated music of a lobby orbiting the earth floated through the lunar apartment, and Dorian, showing no aversion any more to contemplating his own loveliness, was obviously smitten.
Everyone who isn’t a pseudo-intellectual loves television – it’s so much realer than reality. That night was a television night. You could say the tempo increased when the poor sweet Herman got in on the act, but it demeans him to speak of good acting, which is such a tragi-fucking-comic oxymoron. But while sex undoubtedly melted the social ice, it was drugs that really heated the water then ripped out the thermostat altogether. You can always rely on drugs to do that, although their exigencies can be a tad extreme.
Herman understood what was required of him as linked arms became caressing hands. He moved to embrace Dorian and slid his own brown ones up under his host’s tight white T-shirt. Their tongues slid out and in, but at that point Wotton imposed himself once more as the conductor of this sinister gavotte. ‘Hold it! My dear fellows, you must desist until Alan has given us his ultimate fix. It’s absolutely key to the whole tempo of the evening.’
It was a tempo that accelerated as Campbell got out his doctor’s bag and lined up ampoules with professional precision. He snapped them open and sucked up their contents with a vast syringe, as if he were an artilleryman loading intoxicating ordnance. His delight in such gunnery extended in a continuum between work and play. It was all a bit of a blur for Alan, shooting up friends and fucking them, shooting up patients and fucking them as well. His piquant cocktail on that night was five cc of heavy derangement for five apocalyptic jockeys – although there was some bridling in the paddock.
‘I’m not sure about this, Alan,’ said Dorian. ‘I’ve never injected before.’
‘Dorian,’ Wotton admonished him, ‘no cultured man ever refuses a new sensation, and no uncultured man even knows what one is.’
‘I’m more concerned with what the cool man does.’
‘Cool is a semantic concept, Dorian – since when have you been a semiotician?’
‘What’re all those amps, anyway?’ Baz broke in.
‘There’s some methylene-dioxyamphetamine’ – Campbell rattled out the synthetic syllables – ‘it was called the love drug in the sixties; this batch is straight from Sandoz. Then there’s some ketamine, which is an analogue of phencyclidine – PCP to you guys. The main effect of the MDMA is to increase psychic empathy, while the ketamine makes you confused about whether you have a body or not. Then there’s just good ol’ diamorph’, good ol’ Methedrine, and a few dampers and buffers to make sure our rigs stay in shape.
‘We’re gonna have to share this works by way of making it a thoroughly co-operative venture,’ the bad nurse continued, ‘and that means precise flushing by everyone, gentlemen. One cc each. Now, I’ve tested you two for hep’ already’ �
� he ruled out Baz and Wotton with the needle’s tip – ‘Dorian doesn’t need testing and I know I’m clean – but I don’t know nothin’ ’bout you, soldier, no offence.’ The needle transfixed Herman.
‘I’m clean, man, I ain’t even been shooting up.’ Herman was hungry for that hit and he meant to be first. He unbuttoned his shirt-sleeve and rolled it up to show the assembled company how free of track marks his arm was.
‘We believe you, man,’ Baz said. He was hungry too – he was constantly ravenous. Shouldn’t Dorian have said something? He’d seen Herman fixing in his pox-ridden legs, he’d seen the ruckled pus-scape, which was like some miniature terrain, an awful environment perfect for viral propagation. But Dorian said nothing.
It was a strange blending of the essences of the five men. One cubic centimetre out of that arm and another into this arm, arm upon arm upon arm, black upon white upon brown, while the transparent proboscis probed. ‘It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee / And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee’. And when it was done, the tempo didn’t so much accelerate as disappear altogether around the chicanes of their collective consciousness. Like Muybridge men, the five moved to engage, each appearing to the others to trail behind him a series of more solid after-images, while the music tinkled and thrummed and howled and thudded over their bodies. Love! the doomed boy sang, Love will tear us apart!
Half-naked they swayed in a loose thicket of wavering arms, rubbing crotches. Their fluttering tongues agitated the smoky air, while the amyl-soaked rag circulated. They were all awesomely high, as Dorian eluded first one and then another’s grasp, until he manoeuvred himself into his desired position in what can only be described as a conga line of buggery. But it was to be his last contact with Herman for that and all succeeding evenings, because after a few staggering lunges, Dorian jumped out of the sodomites’ queue, then lurched across the room and in through a darkened doorway.
