Dorian (18 page)

10

Car horns were hooting and ambulance sirens were singing from the concrete rocks in front of the Middlesex Hospital. The worn-out brakes of black cabs squealed, and pneumatic drills hammered exclamation marks into the margins of streets. The city bowed down to the east, expressing all its robust matutinal reverence – for itself. In the immediate vicinity of Henry Wotton’s little cubicle of a room there was the squeak of rubber tyres on linoleum, the rattle of crockery being stacked in plastic crates and the ‘chink-chink’ of an approaching drug trolley. Wotton ungummed his eyelids to see the doorway packed full of medical students and junior doctors, who, like any class of adolescents, were affecting the manner of their pedagogue. The pockets of their white coats bulged with radio pagers, stethoscopes, Biros and chewing gum, while their eyes were bugged out by the attempt to mask prurient curiosity with professional detachment.

As Wotton’s own eyes reached their maximum aperture, he saw that two men had ventured right inside and were louring over him. With devilish cunning they must have advanced under the cover of one of the grey patches that floated across his visual field. But now he saw them for who they were: Spittal, the consultant, an oncologist by bent, and Gavin Strood, the senior duty nurse. ‘My, my,’ Spittal purred, ‘
Mister
Wotton, how tidy it is in your lair today.’ He was tall, stooped, round-shouldered. His prognathous jaw drew charcoal grooves across his papery face. It was amazing that he believed himself enough of a pussycat to affect a purr.

Wotton stirred. ‘Is it?’ He goggled around him at the order imposed by Baz during the night. ‘Oh… It is.’

‘Did you or the auxiliary staff do this, Gavin?’

‘No, Doctor.’ Gavin folded his arms. ‘It must’ve been Henry’s visitor.’

During this exchange Wotton was heeled over, frantically opening drawers in the bedside cabinet and rummaging inside them. Evidently he found what he was looking for, because he collapsed back on to the pillows with a sigh.

‘Looking for your ssstash, are you,
Missster
Wotton?’ Now Spittal was snaky and sibilant.

‘Unfortunately, unlike you I haven’t been provided with a convenient trolley for my drugs.’

‘Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police,
Mister
Wotton?’ This threat was studiously ignored. Wotton had found a hand-mirror, in which he now examined his ravaged features. ‘I said,
Mister
Wotton, why the hell shouldn’t I have you arrested?’

‘Still here, Spittal? I’m sorry, I always find myself checking a mirror after someone’s accused me of being bad – a guilty conscience is
so
narcissistic.’ This was
so
impertinent that the students gave an anxious susurrus – what would Spittal’s vengeance be?

‘Apparently you’re to be discharged this morning. In view of this I’m going to let you go…’ a sigh of student relief ‘… to put it bluntly, you’ll be dead within weeks anyway, given your drug abuse, but otherwise I’d refuse to have you back on this ward again.’

There was a murmur of dissent – this wasn’t what the young Hippocratics were going into the healing business for, and unlike their consultant they weren’t inclined to view mass forcible castration of homosexuals and drug addicts as the solution to the AIDS epidemic. But they needn’t have worried, for Wotton merely struck a further attitude. ‘In that case you condemn me to the London Clinic, where I shall have to die beyond my means.’

‘You can die anywhere you please,’ spat Spittal, ‘so long as it isn’t on my AIDS ward.’

‘Yes, we wouldn’t want to queer your statistics, now, would we? You don’t mind that all your patients die, as long as a hundred per cent of them die pliant and contrite and stupefied on
your
morphine.’

‘What the hell are you saying, man?’ Spittal was starting to turn an unpleasant, vinous purple. ‘This isn’t some restaurant where you can bring your own bottle.’

‘Oh yes you bloody can,’ Wotton snorted, ‘but the corkage is extortionate.’

‘Are you implying’ – Spittal was now muted with barely repressed rage – ‘that you’ve been bribing my staff?’

However, visibly buoyed up by this rebarbative exchange, Wotton was content to lapse into silence, leaving Spittal, in a final metamorphosis, to gulp like a landed fish.

‘I don’t think,’ said Gavin, judiciously sensing a shift in the balance of power in the room, ‘that you can tell a patient he won’t be readmitted.’

‘What!’

‘He’ll have to be taken in here or at St Mary’s, and if he goes there he’ll tell them what happened here.’

‘Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do on my own bloody ward!’

Wotton observed the way the conflict was widening with considerable satisfaction. ‘When the doctors disagree,’ he mused aloud, ‘the patient is in accord with himself.’ He would have said a lot more on the subject, but at that moment Baz appeared, his cropped head nodding along the corridor. ‘Ah!’ Wotton exclaimed. ‘This looks like my lift.’

Taking this as an opportunity for face-saving, Spittal drew himself up to his full height and stalked out of the room. The little herd of future physicians trotted dutifully after him.

‘Have you come to take me away, ha ha, ho ho, hee hee?’ Wotton said to Baz once they’d gone.

‘Yeah, I called Batface this morning and she asked me to – she has a seminar at the University. I went and got the Jag from Chelsea; it’s outside.’

‘Well, let’s be off then.’ Wotton began dumping drugs and cigarettes from the bedside cabinet into an exaggerated sponge bag. ‘My wife is a better doctor than this lot.’

‘Yes, but her PhD’s in history.’ Baz gave Wotton the feed line as he helped him up out of the bed.

‘Indeed, but neither death nor vulgarity is likely to be cured by modern medicine.’

A decade is a long time in hubcaps, and three of the Jag’s hadn’t made it. The exposed bolts gave the car a constructivist air, as if a mechanically-minded child might at any moment pick it up from the roadway and remove the wheels with sticky fingers. Possibly the same child had been playing with the Jag in a sandpit, because the car, once merely unkempt, was now filthy, covered not only with the action splatter of bird-shit, but also by another hardened and excremental substance. An envious, infantile person (although envious of whom exactly – the imaginary child?) had savagely keyed the Jag’s flank, gouging out long streaks of the paintwork. Inside the car, ten years had flowed over the upholstery, depositing several further layers of silt. The poor Jag, once as securely proud of its era as a portly Edwardian gentleman sporting a shotgun and standing behind a mound of fresh game, was now stuck at traffic lights by the Dorchester on Park Lane (lights that hadn’t existed in 1981), and hemmed in on all sides by boxier, sleeker, more modular vehicles. It was as if cheap and flashy mafiosi had joined the pheasant shoot.

At least Wotton himself, although emaciated, still affected three pieces of tweed, even if today he couldn’t quite manage the driving. ‘You’ll see
him
tonight,’ he confided to his chauffeur from the front passenger seat.

‘Tonight?’ Baz didn’t require a name.

‘Absolutely, together with the old crowd – the Ferret, Campbell, Jane Narborough… It was to have been a little homecoming party for me, but
you
may share it…’

‘I – I don’t know.’

‘Oh, come on, Baz, you said there was a favour you needed to ask him. Besides, I’m sure you’re intrigued to see him in his current manifestation.’

‘What will that be, then?’ The lights changed to a flashing orange; Baz shifted into drive, and with laudable caution piloted the expensive wreck down to and around Hyde Park Corner, then off along Knightsbridge.

‘Who can say?’ Wotton said. ‘The late eighties were a real efflorescence for Dorian; his petals fluttered in the breezes that blew during that hot, hot summer of love. He’s so capacious that the new bagginess of the era suited him just fine. He yakked on the mobile phones, he twirled the baseball hats, he twitted the teenagers and, of course, he took a muckle of ecstasy. You have to hand it to our Dorian, Baz, he threw on the sweaty threads of contemporaneity with his usual casualness, exposing himself to all the same risks as his impulsive peers. I believe he even adopted the moniker “Dor”, and encouraged them to believe him incubated in a perspex carport and born of Maidstone. A child of the London periphery exactly like themselves.

‘He told me of diabolical nights beneath the sodium glare of the streetlamps around the Oxford ring road. Together with his hooded posse he would stake out the forecourts of petrol stations, waiting for the foolishness of a key left in an ignition. A sprint, a scrabble, a squeal of tyres and they’d be gone, leaving the idiotic previous owner screeching in their wake. They’d drive for hundreds of miles around the Midlands, from this field full of fucated flamingos to that marquee of madness, always accompanied by the tweet and thud and thrum of techno.

‘Ah, Baz, we were born too early,
n’est-ce pas
? Would that we too could have swum among the bodies of a thousand sweaty youths, as they synchronously waved like seaweed fronds beneath the sea of pheromones and sweat. Like Dorian, we too could have whirled in the solid mandala of flesh, sweat arcing from our brows like the sperm of a Hindu deity!’ Wotton timed this rhetorical flourish to coincide with a slim cigarette’s being tucked between his thin lips.

To his surprise, Baz said, ‘I’ll have one of those, Henry.’

‘What? I assumed you no longer smoked, either.’

‘Well, perhaps I need at least one cheap kick.’ He took the pack.

‘There’s nothing cheap about those, Baz; they’re Turkish State Monopoly cigarettes, the most morally costly tobacco in the world. Every time you light one up – a Kurd dies.

‘I digress. Dorian was perfectly tailored for this off-the-peg youth cult, with its pre-millennial cocktail of stimulant drugs and dance music. How he cavorted, how he smarmed, like a cat in a thicket of knees… So much of a fixture did he become on this “scene” that its other tenants imagined he had no other. But that’s the way of smooth diamonds like Dorian; every face they show to the world is simply a different facet. Think of him, Baz, lying on a disordered duvet, in some parental bedroom at the end of a Barratt cul-de-sac, garlanded in teen flesh! Who could begrudge him this – when, after all, youth is no stranger to friction.’

They were at the lights, alongside Harrods, that vertical Babylonian souk. Baz stared into the inert eyes of a mannequin squeezed inside a thousand-pound tube of Versace. Its rigid digits beckoned to him, summoning him behind the plate glass. He turned back to Wotton, handed him the cigarette packet, took the lighter with his own rigid digits. Lighting up, he tried hard not to think of himself as setting a touch-paper to his own explosive nature. ‘You mean to say, Henry…’ he concentrated on the matter in hand, although the cigarette smoke made him feel as if a pyre had been ignited in his mouth, and he didn’t dare inhale ‘… that none of these kids ever found it creepy – this man, in his late twenties, fiddling with their flies?’

‘He doesn’t
look it
, Baz – that’s the point. Time may have etched our faces, like acid biting into copper, but Dorian’s visage is an Etch-a-Sketch; no smear of dissipation or leer of venality – let alone marks of ageing – remains upon it for long.
De temps en temps
I wonder who’s twiddling the knobs and then shaking away the Dorians they draw.

‘But you also have to remember, Baz, that along with HIV another plague hit our sceptred isle in the mid-eighties, courtesy of your American friends. This was a pandemic of pecs and an outbreak of deltoids. Every underemployed faggot in town began to “work out”, as if to raise a sinewy standard against the wasting disease. No one was more adept at aerobics than our Dorian – he positively glowed, as if he spent nights disco dancing in a wind tunnel. And in the season he’s always to be seen schussing in the vicinity of Klosters, where the House of Windsor swaps their speedy decline for a spot of downhill racing. Yes, he has his legs tightly wrapped around the greasy pole, does Dorian. His social and his sexual promiscuity have had the same bewildering effect – that of making him incomprehensible and unknowable. Is he gay or straight? Is he nob or yob? Incidentally, how old is he, exactly?

‘He’s carried all of this off with a most astonishing sang-froid, Baz. I might’ve wanted to view Dorian as my protégé, but he far exceeds anything I could have
dreamed
of creating. After all, it was widely touted that the homosexual community were in danger of dying of ignorance, but in Dorian’s case he was more likely to expire from being too
knowing
. Yes, he’s
always
been in the right place at the right time. I remember being at some avant-garde event and watching Leigh Bowery mimic a miscarriage on stage. It struck me then that it was Dorian who was truly orchestrating the mental couvade male homosexuals felt they were enacting in the late eighties. If Bowery was the mother, then Dorian was the mother of all mothers, showing us how to give birth to our own images.’

Fittingly, as this speech concluded they arrived. Baz squidged the Jag’s wheels against the kerb, then switched off the engine. It was silent save for the deathwatch ticking of contracting metal, and utterly oppressive. Outside the car, the impossibilist season that always embowered Chez Wotton was in full budding, flowering, fruiting and falling swing. Supernature’s own couvade. Cherry and apple blossom drifted across the pavement, while everything in the gardens – from snowdrops to roses, to lilacs and delphiniums – was in bloom. The wistaria, which ten years previously had only sprouted halfway up the first storey, now covered the entire façade like a vegetative beard. The grey clowns sat in the green car, quietly contemplating this harlequinade.

‘C’mon now,’ said Wotton, ‘let’s get inside. I didn’t discharge myself from the Middlesex to sit in a car.’

‘In good time, Henry –’

‘This
is
good time – I want to go in the bloody house. I w –’