Dorian (10 page)

‘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.

Herman was abandoned and he was deranged. His eyes were vacant, his blue-black cheeks flecked with white foam. The host having departed the proceedings prematurely, it was left for his guests to essay the many different and pleasing combinations that occurred to them. Which they did – indeed they did – until that busy old fool the unruly sun arose, and Cinderella’s carriage turned into… a Jaguar.

Just as Herman was picked up, so was he dropped off at the end of Meard Street in the crap gloaming that was his natural lighting. Wotton sat at the wheel of the car, his sharp profile etched against glass, awful rheum at the corners of his saturnine mouth. He turned to Herman. ‘Since Dorian appears to have taken on the role of your patron, I think it only civil to reward you handsomely for an evening of such enchanted theatricals.’ From his waistcoat pocket Wotton withdrew a drug wrap that was fatter than it was broad.

‘Yeah, whatever.’ Herman took it and quit the car. Before shutting the door he leant down to say ‘Fuck off’ to Wotton – in the most robotic and unfeeling voice the older man had ever heard.

After Herman had gone, dragging his sore, stinging legs off up the alley, Wotton sat for a few minutes, savouring the desperation. Then he flicked the car into drive.

Back at Ginger’s upended room, the tenant had been driven away, leaving behind his static car seat. The remains of last night’s supper – Tuinal and Special Brew – were scattered on the festering mulch like strange fruit. Herman crouched down unsteadily on this jungly floor. As he got out his works and cooked up a fix, an observer would have been acutely aware of the harsh noises floating up through the open window – traffic, sirens, shouting – and the harsh light in the trashed room. Wotton had tipped him with a big mound of beige heroin, and Herman was intent on taking it all. He didn’t even bother to mix citric acid – or even vinegar – with the gear, so it wouldn’t dissolve properly, and he siphoned it out of the cruddy spoon without troubling to filter it.

When he rolled up his sleeve to take the fix in the main line, his whole attitude was one of broken despair. An observer would’ve noted at this point the glimmer of tears on his cheeks and realised that he was intent on suicide. But what could any observer have done? It was too late already, surely? If Herman wasn’t to die that day, he was to die another not long thence. It would be folly, wouldn’t it, for a hypothetical onlooker to blame himself for this inevitable – and not even premature – demise. Wouldn’t it?

The mammoth syringe-load was rammed home and Herman pitched forward into his final abyss. The blood rushed and thudded in his inner ear, like the electronic beat of a synthesised drum machine. Herman’s death – was it a peculiar form of tocsin? Instead of London calling – was this something calling it?

At home, in Chelsea, Wotton was already ensconced, such was the insane alacrity of his driving. He was in the drawing room, morning fruit juice in hand, staring up at the jiggling man. In the mid-distance a power tool was drilling holes so as to attach the world more securely to the present. ‘Death,’ Wotton mused aloud, ‘is first and foremost a career move.’

Beached on a futon, on the far side of the river, lay Dorian in all his loveliness. Could he hear the thudding blood in Soho? Certainly his face twitched in time with its awful rushing rhythm. If only it would stop – but it wouldn’t; instead it woke him up. He rose, with the pained recognition of last night’s fun smeared over his handsome chops. He stalked into the main room: the blinds were wide open, the detritus of druggery and buggery spread across the carpet brightly illumined. What a night! His guests had departed without remembering to turn the nine monitors off. Yes, there they were, so many cathode Narcissi, all prancing and pirouetting in time with the gross thumping of his hangover. He moved towards the screens, and the banging against his temples rose to a crescendo, as if some soul burglar were attempting to escape. Then Dorian saw it: the faces on the screen had all changed – and for the worse. An exaggerated moue twisted his formerly flawless mouth. A distortion of a perfect symmetry such as his was far worse than a harelip on an ordinary face. He grimaced and drew closer – surely there must be some grease or fluid on the screens? But no. Closer and closer he drew, until all he could see were lines of dots leading into the future. His temples rang like a bell as his conscience clapped at their insides.