Читать книгу Dorian - Уилл Селф - Страница 11

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 Glynde-bourne 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 Dead 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.

The interior of the restaurant was vernal in the extreme: great tubs full of blooms stood about, connected by troughs full of shrubbery. The carpet was floral-patterned, the drapes the same, the lighting in this painforest was noonday equatorial. From between two pointy-shouldered PR girls – their dumpling bodies unsuitable for such sharp suiting, their blonde sausage curls and retrousse noses making them altogether spaniel-like – came Phyllis Hawtree. She set off gamely towards Dorian and her son across the trackless waste of carpeting, but the distance was so great they had plenty of time to appreciate quite how mad and ethereal she appeared, with her coiffure so stiff it vibrated with each arthritic step, and her knee and arm both surgically braced. As she drew nearer they could see that her creviced cheek was so powdered that a careless air kisser might find themselves tumbling into her face.

‘My mother,’ Wotton whispered, ‘is an intelligent woman who views the distressing of the social fabric with the very real emotion she withholds from all those around her. Like Schopenhauer, the more she loves mankind, the less she loves men.’ Dorian was going to say he thought this was unfair, but it was too late, he was caught in her bony talons.

‘Oh Dorian,’ she fluted, ‘I'm so glad you're here, there are so many people who want to meet you.’ She ignored her son and he took this as his familial due, merely following in her wake as she led Dorian into the throng of superannuated debs, professional faggots and off-the-peg suits – a flat company leavened only by a handful of the requisite donkey-jacketed roll-up smokers (just as a charity event for multiple sclerosis sufferers would have its wheelchair users, or for sickle-cell anaemia its blacks).

Eventually, after traversing the trench between two buffets, where glistening kiwi fruit cascaded and miniature sausage rolls were piled up like some novel form of ammunition, they reached their target. He was a florid politico in a suit with wide chalk stripes and a yellow waistcoat. He had an impressive lick of chocolate hair over a bulbous brow, and those out-of-control eyebrows which only men firmly within the British Establishment can carry off.

‘Dorian,’ Phyllis cooed, ‘this is David Hall, the Member for Bexleyheath, he's on the Housing Committee. David, this is Dorian Gray, the young man I told you about, the one who's putting the shelter on a computer … And this is my son,’ she added as an afterthought. Then she evaporated, leaving only the stench of her perfume.

‘Are you working voluntarily at the shelter, Mr Gray?’ Hall's accent was as fruity as the buffet.

‘Dorian, please – and yes, there wouldn't be money to pay me, and I've no need of it anyway.’

‘What're you doing, exactly?’

‘Oh, this and that, computerising the client list, the donors and so on. I also muck around a bit with some of the regulars … muck about with art materials.’

‘Is it a career path for you’ – Hall was amazed – ‘social work?’

‘I dunno – I shouldn't think so.’

‘There's obviously a need for such people, but I wouldn't have imagined you one of them –’

‘Which is all by way of saying,’ Wotton scythed in, ‘if you sympathise too much with pain, you become one.’

‘I'm s-sorry?’ Hall spluttered.

Dorian wasn't surprised that the MP was taken aback, but more shocking than Wotton's intervention was his appearance. He looked entirely at ease, his complexion warm, his hair neat, his cuffs shot. It was as if he were a chameleon, assuming the protective coloration of respectability simply by standing in front of it. ‘Bluntly,’ Wotton continued, ‘I'm trying to warn Dorian off this man-of-the-people act. Hypocrisy won't suit his nature.’

‘Do you think … ?’ Hall left a gap that begged for the insertion of a name.

‘Wotton.’

‘Mr Wotton, that all philanthropy can only be for show? Surely it's only an “act” when viewed with an eye for acting, a cynical eye.’

‘I'm sure, Mister Hall, you would agree that the most honest of socialists couldn't give a toss being poorer, so long as nobody else is richer.’

‘D'you think there were any such honest socialists among the youths rioting the other week?’

‘Probably, but I know there were definitely some ballet dancers manque – marvellous, lithe young black guys. I saw them on the news, shattering the windows of shoe stores with the most delicate of high kicks, then selecting the training shoes they wanted, then off they went through the wreckage en faisant des pointes –’ Wotton broke off as a thin, nervous woman approached their group. She was in her forties, prematurely grey, wearing loose trousers and a top which appeared to be woven from a fine hessian. ‘Hello, Jane,’ he said.

‘I'm sorry,’ she replied through cracked lips, her brown eyes downcast.

The apology was not just for the interruption – it was for everything. For colonialism and racism and sexism; for the massacres of Amritsar and Sharpeville and Londonderry; for introducing syphilis to Europe and opium to China and alcoholism to the Aboriginals; for the little Princes in the Tower and the Tower itself. This was manifestly a woman who viewed sackcloth as de rigueur. But Hall saw her as an opportunity to escape, and grabbed on to her with both hands. ‘That's all right, Jane – we need to talk. I'm sure these blokes won't mind …’ And he whisked her away.

Dorian was left with a spluttering Wotton. ‘Christ, he's awful, a serial realist – the very worst kind.’ He got the capsule out, fiddled, took a snort, then passed it to Dorian.

Dorian followed suit then asked, ‘What about her?’

‘The Duchess? Not that she uses the title – she's extraordinary. She wove those drabs herself in some godforsaken mud hutment in Uttar Pradesh. She has the finest Palladian house in the world, Narborough, and she's trying to throw it – along with the rest of her husband's staggering wealth – into the void.’

The void?’

‘Nirvana, that which is beyond all illusion, the eternal substratum. It's true that the best kind of woman has an empty head and donates it willingly, but that isn't Jane's particular vapidity; she's genuinely lost in Turgenev's white void, the only alternative Buddhism offers to the black void of Christian damnation, or materialist extinction. And her house – which would offer a great deal of shelter for a great many youths – is in the process of going the same way.’

‘But is she happy?’

‘Happy? My dear Dorian, she's fucking furious. The Buddha is the patron saint of the passive-aggressive.’

‘Does she go out in society much?’

‘Of course, she's a fucking duchess. No amount of eccentricity debars her from her own kind. Aristo punks sniff glue together, just as aristo Buddhists meditate together. She'll be in the Abbey next month, along with the rest of them. She'll probably be wearing a special Royal Wedding hair shirt.

‘I hate this doghole.’ Wotton suddenly changed tack.

‘This’ – he made as if to spit out a gulp of the white wine they'd acquired – ‘is the decoction of the bile of the livers of splenetic Communist Party bagmen in Lyon. These people’ – he gestured at the debs, the suits, the faggots – ‘can't even make proper use of their own homes, let alone provide shelter for anyone else. That cunt over there is screwing me out’ – it was true, an intense type with spiky hair and wire-rimmed spectacles was staring at Wotton – ‘I want to break free!’ He turned on his heel and made for the distant double doors.

Dorian remained where he was, and the intense man – who was the volunteer coordinator at the project – joined him. Who's he? the man spat in the direction of Wotton's retreating back. His own name was a classless John.

—‘Enry Wotton, Dorian sneered, despising himself for the way he automatically dropped into Mockney. ‘E's Phyllis's son.

—Why're you hanging out with him?

—Friend of a friend.

—He looks fucking dodgy – John looked Dorian in the eye – like a junky as well as a toff.

—And a queer – you forgot to say queer.

—What?! John was nonplussed, but Dorian was gone.

* * *

Meanwhile, Wotton had run into the Ferret, an old crony, by the entrance. The Ferret was staring at Dorian. ‘He's amazingly beautiful, the one natural flower in this plantation of artifice.’ The Ferret himself was small, and his wrinkled pinhead was liver-spotted. He wore an obvious toupee.

‘Yes, well’ – Wotton gave a bashful moue – ‘I'm going to mount him like a butterfly until he whimpers like a hog.’

‘You'll do no such thing,’ the Ferret giggled indulgently. ‘All that heroin and cocaine and alcohol and nicotine and marijuana makes your penis very small and completely limp.’

‘I tell you, Fergus,’ Wotton said with some seriousness, ‘I'd give up doing drugs altogether, if I wasn't afraid of other people taking them without me.’

A waiter was passing and the Ferret took a glass of Perrier before replying, ‘No one's suggesting that you stop dissipating yourself for one minute, Henry. The IMF are being called into Rome – fiddle on. How's Baz?’

‘I don't mind discarding any lover – as long as they stay discarded.’

‘You're unnecessarily cruel –’

‘And you're ridiculously old.’

‘And he …’ the Ferret chose to disregard the insult, preferring instead to ogle Dorian, who was hovering nearby ‘… he is most lovely. He reminds me of somebody … Can he talk?’

‘Who cares. Dorian, this is Fergus; Fergus, this is Dorian. That's all that it's necessary for either of you to know now. You'll both know everything else so soon it's sickening. Bye.’ And he strode out, obviously expecting Dorian to follow.

Dorian – with a feeble ‘Excuse me’ to the Ferret – complied.

In the street, feeling stoned and strange and oddly exalted among the office fodder, Dorian found himself loitering with Wotton in front of a tailor's window. They contemplated a model gentleman, who was perfect in every way save for being headless. ‘Who is Fergus?’ Dorian asked, for want of any other thought to enunciate.

The Ferret is immensely rich,’ Wotton obliged, ‘from property deals. He's also immensely queer; he has his own resident catamites. He's fairly posh – his father was Lord Rokeby. He's also nearly psychopathic – he killed a man once in an alleged skiing accident. Quite a feat, as I'm sure you can imagine.’

And with this, Wotton took his now somnolent and opiated acolyte by the arm and guided him in the direction of the Jag. It was time to take Dorian Gray somewhere else for more intimate and mysterious instruction.