Authors: Will Self
Dorian sprinted straight into this garden of unearthly delights. He not only accepted the hands grabbing at his crotch, the drinks shoved in his mouth and the tongues pushed into his ear, he revelled in them. Baz struggled to stay by his side. Don’t forget, Dorian, Bobby said he’d take us to meet some friend of his uptown if we were back at his studio by midnight.
—Don’t be ridiculous, Baz – he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of his watch! And that’s what he did: he loosed the strap of his chunkily expensive diver’s watch and thrust it into the hand of a deranged clone, who was so taken by Dorian’s beauty that he licked the face. Baz gave up; he shouldered his way to the bar and stood there contemplating his own worn features in the mirror behind it, his own runty figure crushed between flanking Visigoths.
Baz felt a tug on his trousers at the back of his knee. To begin with he ignored it, but it persisted until eventually he turned and looked down. It was a tiny leather dwarf, complete in every detail of chains and jacket and trousers, but no more than three feet tall. The leather dwarf had a five-dollar bill tucked in his hand, which he poked up towards Baz with the pathetic entreaty, Can you get me a drink?
‘Well, Henry.’ Baz paused, and with a profound shudder of relief and revulsion he took a sip of cold tea from an apparently unsullied beaker. ‘They say now that those few short years between the Stonewall Riots and the arrival of AIDS were characterised by a mounting sense of liberation, that we gay men felt the time had come to be ourselves, to express ourselves, to live as we truly wanted to live, free of guilt, free of convention, free of interference. They say now that the disease is a ghastly, one-off, one-act play. Apiece of incomprehensible dramatic irony, inflicted on us happy Arcadians by a god who doesn’t even exist. They say now that those damp bath-houses and fetid gyms, the bloody meat racks and the shitty cottages were the perfect places for the virus to fester, to replicate, to pump its own iron. The glory hole turned out to be a gory hole. They say HIV may have been present for years in the West, and that it was only this ever lengthening conga line of sodomy – with jet travel connecting cock from San Francisco with asshole in NYC, cock from NYC with asshole in London – that allowed it to get so out of control. They say a lot of things, but for those of us who were there it was simple. Simple to observe that for men who were meant to be free, how readily they draped themselves in chains…’
They were draped in chains, the men who jostled and clinked in the Stygian chambers beneath the bar-room at the Mineshaft. Dorian penetrated this sphincter of darkness. He stopped to try his cock in a glory hole, he paused to watch while two men fucked a third at either end, he moved to join a circle of happy flagellators, he critically pissed on a naked performer in a bathtub. On and on he went; darker and danker it became, as wonkily partitioned room succeeded warped vestibule, each filthier and ranker than the last with the odour of faeces and semen and poppers. All around was the thwack of flesh on flesh, with its ragged accompaniment – the grunts and groans of effortful coition.
But as Dorian progressed from one rigorous knot of men to the next, there was always a trio who peeled away to accompany him. Their leader was an ultimate leather queen, a big moon-faced man complete with the craters. With him were two snickering incubi, both chubby, both shaven-headed, who affected the same Gestapo uniform of full-length leather coat and chain choker. When at last they reached a zone of near-privacy, this trio surrounded their victim. One of the incubi offered Dorian a popper, the other caressed his crotch. The two of them helped him out of his jeans and encouraged him to his knees. While they kept his head occupied, Moonface moved in on his rear. But when one huge hand – replete with studded wristband – grasped Dorian’s golden oiled curls, he suddenly reared up and, getting hold of the incubi by their thick necks, cracked their heads together.
—Why, you piece of shit, screamed one, I’m gonna have to cut you! And he had the knife for it, an evil six-inch switchblade.
—On the contrary, Dorian snarled, if there’s to be any evisceration, I think you’ll find that you lack the guts for it. He wrenched the knife away from the man, reversed it, and in one bravura act of savagery sliced him clear across his belly. Blood gushed from flaps of cloth and flesh. The incubi retreated, keening like terrified dogs. From somewhere Dorian had got a handful of poppers; pirouetting round, he rammed these into the Moonface. Then it was the leather queen who was hobbled by his trousers, the leather queen who was being forcibly sodomised by the pretty blond boy. Dorian smashed the man’s head against the floor with his hand, again and again, until there was a pink mist of blood in the air. In Dorian’s fevered head the blood beats doubled up, tripping over one another until this cardiac timpani reached a crescendo. His whole consciousness of the world swelled and whooshed and wobbled and dilated as amyl nitrate swirled in a vast anticyclone over the face of the earth.
8
The mid-afternoon sun beat down on a small but perfectly-formed Riviera harbour. Within the semicircular quay there was the brittle rasping sound of the mistral agitating metal rigging on the yachts, flapping their canvas and slapping wavelets against their hulls. Light rays bounced off the aquamarine water and coruscated from every reflective surface – windows, glasses, bottles and forks.
Specifically the upheld forks of some late lunchers at an opulent party. A repast that had been set out a long while before, on white linen, on the terrace of a restaurant which was exclusive in the way that only a French restaurant can be, namely, by virtue of content as much as form. True, there was a hefty
prix fixe
and a haughty maître d’, but it was in the great middens of Crustacea shells that the evidence of full-blown luxury lay. In these, and in all the myriad shiny implements required to poke, probe and scour the flesh from them; and in all the ice buckets containing bottles of
premier cru
white wine and Champagne; and in all the overflowing ashtrays; and, of course, in all the diners themselves. Diners who, while hailing from more northern climes, still looked considerably better than they did in their usual habitat, once they’d been tanned and masked with sunglasses, then draped in cream linen and creamier silk.
‘I’m absolutely certain, Batface,’ said Henry Wotton, who was sitting at the head of this table, ‘that I have no inclination to visit the Principessa. Why ruin a perfect day by hammering in this heat all the way into Toulon on the bloody
péage
? Besides,’ he continued, puffing expansively on a Cohiba, ‘what’s a Medici doing in Toulon? Nobody
lives
in Toulon, it’s where the French Navy
docks
.’
‘Um… w-well… yes, you say that, Henry,’ Batface replied from the foot of the table, ‘but she’s not at all what you expect from a M-Medici, no… er… air of power about her at all. Incorrigibly bourgeois, in fact. Lives in a little apartment with far too many cats. Incorrigible gossip as well… but only about her neighbours. I did say to Mummy that I would look her up –’
‘Well, you do that then. But I’m going to Aqualand. No, correction, I’m going to drop some acid, then I’m going to go on that mini-submarine trip over to the island,
then
I’m going to Aqualand, where I shall ride the big twister chute. What’s it to be, Dorian’ – he turned to his protégé – ‘the revolutionary big twister chute or the
petit bourgeois
Principessa?’
For Dorian Gray’s European sojourns he still needed Henry Wotton – or perhaps that was something his one-time lover imagined. Maybe Dorian simply liked Wotton, or had the need of a refresher course in the older man’s mastery of
bons mots
, which, like boomerangs, invariably returned to his mouth, so that they might be hurled forth once again on some later occasion. Certainly, by the mid-eighties Dorian was moving in the most elevated and catholic of circles – Claus and Sunny, Mick and Jerry, Donald and Ivana – whomever he wanted to associate with wanted to associate with him. None of these luminaries could have said exactly what it was that they found so agreeable about Dorian Gray, because to have mouthed ‘money’ and ‘beauty’ would have had the prosaic character of the truth, something they avoided at all costs. As for Dorian’s charm, it existed, true enough, but then there’s nothing more charmless, ultimately, than charm alone.
Whatever the reason, during those years when the Wottons retreated for the summer to a villa set among the dusty vineyards in the back of the Côte d’Azur, Dorian would often happen along. Usually he’d have a titbit on his arm, a beautiful straight boy he was in the process of subtly warping, or a respectable wee wifey whom he’d encouraged to slip the noose. In the course of becoming who he truly was, Dorian had reacquired a prodigious sexual omnivorousness.
He told Wotton about the man he had killed in the Mineshaft, except ‘killed’ wasn’t how he put it; rather he asserted that he’d murdered him. This Wotton was disinclined to believe. While he considered that Dorian was one of those unusual beings who make a reality out the fictions they cannot write (so much more diverting than those poseurs who write the fictions they dare not realise), he very much doubted that the incident was anything more than some rough-housing gone wrong. Wotton liked to think that Dorian intended his boasts to be found out for what they were, and that like him, his protégé had far too much
amour propre
not to thrill to being ridiculed.
That particular afternoon at Cassis, in his summery incarnation, Dorian affected the palest nicotine shade of linen suits, the softest of silk shirts, the floppiest of spotted foulard ties. With his golden hair frothing from beneath an immaculate panama, and his profile imperious yet elegant, he sipped a glass of wine, cracked the claw of a lobster and thrust the filament of white meat at his companion, who was an ethereally lovely thing, all ash-blonde locks, scattered freckles, tip-tilted nose. ‘Suck it!’ he exclaimed.
‘What?’ She was charmingly aghast.
‘Suck it – suck the claw, it’s the only way to get out all the flesh.’
Jane Narborough, whose white beach weeds and prematurely grey hair gave her a shipwrecked air, broke in, ‘I shouldn’t do any such thing, my dear. These creatures are sea rats, complete scavengers –’
‘But nevertheless,’ Dorian baited the vegetarian, ‘scavengers with souls, Jane, that’s what you believe?’
‘Yes, of course, with soul substance.’
‘Is that like soul food?’ said Wotton, who liked nothing better than a good tease.
Dorian refused to admit him and continued, ‘D’you think, Jane, that lobsters have the soul substance of human scavengers with bad karma?’
‘I’m not… er… I don’t…’
Batface came to her rescue. ‘I don’t think metem-metem-metempsychosis works quite like that, Dorian.’
But Dorian had never intended this to be a discussion. He addressed himself once more to his companion, thrusting the white prong right into her mouth. ‘Suck it, Octavia… suck it and find out.’
‘I rather think’ – Batface began collecting up her impedimenta – ‘I better
had
go and see the Principessa. Why don’t you come with me, Jane? We can stop at Cap Ferrat on the way back –’
‘Oh yes, if you say so, Victoria.’
‘And you, Octavia?’
‘I’ll stay with the boys.’
The florid figure of David Hall, the politician, was set down next to Batface, his lick of chocolate hair gently irrigating his bulbous brow, his barely-in-control eyebrows dewy in the afternoon heat. For his transplantation to the Côte d’Azur he had managed an MCC blazer and cricket whites. He swilled, then swigged the remains of his wine and said, ‘I’ll come with you, Lady Victoria. I haven’t been to Cap Ferrat for twenty years.’
Wotton muttered to Dorian, ‘Not since he gave Willie Maugham a blowjob on his deathbed.’
‘In that case I shall have to take the Jag, Henry – will you three fit in the Volkswagen?’ Batface looked down at her husband with genuine concern.
‘Of course, if Dorian doesn’t mind sitting on Octavia’s lap.’
‘Good, well, we’ll see you back at the house for drinks then.’
Hall and the two women left the table, strolled along the terrace and were gone. Wotton beckoned to a waiter and ordered three glasses of
marc de champagne
, three double espressos and the bill. He studiously relit his Cohiba. When the drinks arrived, he and Dorian knocked them back with gusto, but Octavia was more ruminative – so far as that was possible for a young woman like her, who looked as if a strong breeze might carry her off. ‘Are you and Batface in love, Henry?’ she said at length.
‘When you fall in love, Octavia, you join the league of the self-deceived’ – Wotton waited a beat – ‘and by the time it’s all over you’ve enrolled everyone else.’ She didn’t understand what he said, though, merely hearing it as a neutral sort of burble.
‘I thought I was in love with Jeremy,’ she mused, ‘but perhaps I don’t have the right kind of personality to be successful at marriage.’ And in return Wotton didn’t pay any attention to the substance of what she said, merely listening for his cue.
‘Marriage has definitely been good for my personality,’ he drawled. ‘Since marrying I’ve acquired at least four more personae.’
‘D’you love me, Dorian?’ Octavia touched his dimpled chin with the tips of her fingers.
‘I’d like to make love to you right here’ – he took them and buffed them with his lips – ‘right now. I adore you.’
‘
Quelle bonne idée
,’ Wotton put in, ‘but why not wait until these kick in?’ He had three acid blotters tucked in the palm of his hand, which he exposed to the other two as if they were stigmata. ‘They’re Tetragrammatons – see, the name of God is written on them in Greek, Latin and Hebrew. They’re incredibly strong – but mellow too. Just the thing for Aqualand.’
‘Oh, I don’t know…’ she prodded the cardboard squares as if they were alive ‘… it’s acid, is it? I’ve never taken it before.’
‘Have half, then.’ Wotton was emollient. ‘Half of anything never hurt anyone. Trust me.’ To almost anyone who knew Wotton even slightly this would have been an absurd proposition, but Octavia knew nothing at all about anyone whomsoever, so she took the proffered half that Wotton tore off, while Dorian had the other. Needless to say, Wotton himself washed a whole blotter down with the dregs of his
marc
.