Dorian (38 page)

Busy, busy, busy. In May alone there were 2,456,707 hits on the
Cathode Narcissus
website (
www.cathodenarcissus.com
). Visitors to the site could view Baz Hallward’s original installation, together with other examples of the late artist’s work. Sponsored and maintained by the Gray Organisation, the site featured links to
Gray
magazine, as well as a photo-file of Dorian’s own career in modelling. All of the images and the text were available for downloading free of charge. ‘
Cathode Narcissus
Belongs to Us All’, the slogan on the homepage proclaimed; ‘Download Some Perfection Today’. Dorian wanted Baz’s work to become synonymous with male beauty at the end of the twentieth century. Male beauty and a new mature pride in homosexual identity – not a pride based on militant identification with an underclass, or a persecuted ethnic minority, but the true pride that came with assuming the responsibility proper to an era, when for the first time gay men and lesbian women were openly assuming positions of power.

Dorian was nothing but pleased when sequences of
Cathode Narcissus
were pirated for television advertisements and pop videos. During the first few months of 1997, the cathode Narcissi spread throughout the virtual metabolism of the culture, like a digital virus. Pulling on his trousers in the early morning, ready for another busy, busy, busy day, Dorian marvelled at the taut perfection of these limbs that had carried him thus far. True, he ruminated as he ran sharp steel over smooth chin, his moderation and carefulness had always been in marked contrast to the excess and recklessness of his peers. But none the less, to find himself, at thirty-six, looking not too much older than he had when Baz made the recordings… well – he smiled at himself in the mirror – anyone could be forgiven for finding this a tad… uncanny.

Busy, busy, busy – but not busy enough. As he bickered over the bill with friends – some gay, some straight – in a Greek restaurant by Primrose Hill one Sunday afternoon, it hit Dorian Gray with sickening suddenness, like the lintel that smacks you in the forehead as you scrupulously avoid the step. All of us childless, Dorian thought, looking about him at the edgy bantering of his social sibling-substitutes. All of us – relatively speaking – rich, all of us unencumbered with any true, organic responsibility. What’s it all for?

—You’ve been living under an assumed identity, said Henry’s voice, back again.

—I’m sorry?

—You’ve been living under an assumed identity, but your real name. And you’re finding it
unheimlich
, if I’m not much mistaken.

—Dorian, is there anything wrong? Angela asked, her hand on his arm, her beads clicking. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.

—Dorian kneaded his perfect features with a galvanised hand, as if trying to remove his Dorian Gray Horror Mask. No no, there’s nothing wrong.

But there was everything wrong. As Dorian trotted with Wystan along Fulham Road, Henry’s voice was now strident and hectoring. It wouldn’t let him alone. Whaddya want this fucking tat for? Henry sneered, as Dorian swayed by a display of miniature designer chairs in the Conran Shop. Unless, he wheedled on, you’d like to purchase that cute model Eames chair and fashion yourself a Baz dolly to sit in it for some pin-sticking.

—What are you talking about? Dorian gasped. A little wet-look assistant came trotting up: Is there a problem, sir?

—No, no.

No problem – only a fucking disaster. Out in front of Michelin House, Dorian cursed Henry roundly. The sour, bitter old bastard – wouldn’t even let me have my dog; gave my dog to fucking Binky Narborough. Wystan is
my
dog, he sobbed, all my dog. He crouched on the stone floor by the caviar stall and hugged the whippet’s lean grey muzzle. Yes – he kissed the velvet ear – you’re my dog, aren’t you, Wystan, aren’t you, old boy?

—Pity his slitty little mouth’s too small for you to stick your cock in, Henry cackled from beyond the grave. Dorian lunged upright, reeled across to the flower stall on the other side of the building. ‘Say it with flowers’ – Henry savoured the aperçu exactly as he would have had he been standing there by Dorian, his death’s-head grin surmounting the velvet collar of his Crombie – what an absurd slogan it is, when all that people ever say with flowers is ‘I like flowers’.

The spiral became tighter and its angle steeper. Dorian stopped going to work. It was next to impossible – driving across town with Henry Wotton second-guessing every turning he made, and forcing his foot down on the accelerator. Instead Dorian went out at night to the clubs under the railway arches at Vauxhall, where he’d lose himself in the throng of his
alter egos
, all bumping and grinding and voguing their way towards the twenty-first century. But no matter how far he threw himself into the K-hole, Wotton would always be waiting for him when Dorian crawled out again the following morning.

—No need for those biologists to bother with genetic engineering, eh Dorian.

—Why’s that, Henry?

—Because you boys have beaten them to it. You’re all completely interchangeable: cocks, arseholes, jeans, brains. That joint you were in last night was like a swap shop at the end of the world, wouldn’t you agree?

—Shut up! Shut up!

In the middle of July, Gianni Versace was murdered in Miami, and this did penetrate Dorian’s purple haze enough to make him think that maybe he should look for some help. He’d known the self-styled King of Glitz – or had he only imagined knowing him? Was it rather that he had flown to Miami and done the shooting himself? Cunanan – what kind of a fucked-up pseudonym was that? Utterly implausible.

The office had given up calling him. Dorian left the door to the backyard open and filled Wystan’s food and water bowls when he remembered to. The whippet left streaks and blobs of diarrhoea on the carpet. When Dorian staggered by, the dog sprang out of his path. Yet no matter how hard he tried, Dorian didn’t seem to be able to make an impression on his plastic-encapsulated perfection. He still looked fabulous, so regular and machined it was difficult not to imagine that there was a seam running down the back of his blond head.

Then, at the very end of August, he came back one early morning from across the river. He paid off the cab at the entrance to the mews and hobbled over the cobbles to his front door. Letting himself in, he kicked at the grey wraith that tried to twine itself between his denim knees. For no reason that he could discern – for he could discern nothing save the neon streaks and blotchy after-images of synthetic ecstasy – he lurched up the stairs instead of heading for his bedroom. The door to the attic room was ajar, and inside he saw the nine monitors ranged in their precise crescent, with the Eames chair in prime viewing position. The central monitor was on, and displaying the twenty-four-hour news channel: ‘… entered the underpass on the
périphérique
hotly pursued by paparazzi…’ the announcer was intoning. In the background was the underpass in question, an enfilade of oil-stained concrete pillars, like the nave of the First Church of Autogeddon. Dorian slumped down in the squishy leather and tried to take it in.

And was still trying to take it in five hours later, when the same footage of ambulances speeding to the
Salpêtrière
had been shown over and over again, and the same onlookers interviewed, and the same crumpled-up Mercedes lovingly dwelt upon by the caressing camera. No, Dorian Gray couldn’t take it in. Princess Diana. Dead. Impossible.

—Oh, but it isn’t
impossible
… Henry Wotton’s air of arch affectation filled Dorian’s nostrils with the mephitic stench of a mass grave. On the contrary, this is one of those public events that confirms that history is nothing more or less than the confused wet dream of a humanity yoked to its own adolescent erotic fantasies.

—W-what are you saying? Dorian groaned and thrashed.

—Only this: that so perfect is this marriage between fact and fiction, so ideally
mythic
, this royal huntress slain by the paper hounds of the press, you could be forgiven for summarising the whole story with a single proposition.

—Which is?

—She had to die… because her name was Di.

In the mid-morning the phone downstairs began ringing, and wouldn’t stop. Dorian had long since ceased to pick up his messages, and when callers heard the hideous bip-bip-bip of a full tape they gave up. But this one wouldn’t. Whoever it was rang and rang and rang.

Dorian slumbered in the shocked stupor that followed months of debauchery and hours of grief. When he awoke in the early evening the phone was still ringing. Intending to disconnect it, he found himself picking the receiver up instead.

—Dorian Gray? a voice said.

—What?

—You don’t know me… It was a deep voice, a cold voice, a harsh voice not compromised by the least vestige of humanity. My name’s Peter.

—What do you want?

—No, it’s a case of what
you
might want. I’m a friend of Alan Campbell’s.

—Campbell? What the fuck – he’s been dead for years…

—Yeah, you’d know all about that, Gray, all about that – but that’s not what I’m calling about. I’m calling about a video you might like to buy off me.

—I don’t know what you’re talking about.

—You remember dropping Alan off in Bournemouth all those years ago, dropping him off to see me?

—I never did any such thing.

—Issat so? I remember it well enough. I looked down at you from my window – you were driving a natty little MG, as I recall.

—An MG? Don’t be absurd – I’ve never driven one –

—Look, it doesn’t matter about your fucking car, Gray – I’ve got the tape. The tape Alan gave me. If you want it, you can buy it. I want fifteen grand. Get the money ready in used notes. I’ll call in a couple of days.

The connection was severed. Dorian raced back upstairs and went straight to the cupboard where the nine VCRs that played
Cathode Narcissus
were kept. He checked each one in turn: eight of the tapes were there, but the ninth was gone. Dorian had a moment of clarity in the chaos – Campbell must have taken one the night they got rid of Baz’s corpse. That was what he’d meant when he said he had a present for his friend Peter. It wasn’t that loser Hallward’s teeth – it was the tape. Campbell had the fucking tape. He must have got it copied and left one with this Peter character. No wonder he was so smug on that drive – he was laughing at me! He even tapped his breast pocket and I heard the fucking hollow sound the thing made.

When darkness had altogether fallen, Dorian Gray put Wystan on the lead and they walked up towards Hyde Park. In the damp darkness of a late-summer night, a silent throng was converging on Kensington Palace. The throng numbered both workers and drones, but they were all animated by the same homing instinct – to zero in on the pollen of hysteria.

—She had to die… because her name was Di, Wotton muttered conversationally.

—Quite so, Dorian replied.

—We’re all inventions of one sort or another, Dorian, Wotton vouchsafed. I don’t think you should feel
too
bad about the way things have turned out.

—Oh, I don’t.

He turned in through the iron railings. There were a lot of police about, but they stood with eyes downcast, or else directed the mourners towards the ornate inner fence that divided the gardens from the precincts of the palace itself. Even from a hundred yards away Dorian could smell the sickly perfume of a thousand thousand bunches of cut flowers, and drawing closer he arrived, together with scores of others, at the gold-crested gates. Here Dorian watched while the infantry of grief threw up a cellophane-wrapped rampart to protect themselves from the bombshell that had already fallen. Primroses, lilies, roses, carnations, daffodils, tulips, sunflowers, irises, poppies, nasturtiums, pansies, snowdrops, foxgloves, desert orchids. That they were all simultaneously flowering made of it an impossible late August.

—And yet I feel so empty, Dorian whispered to Wystan, I who actually knew her. But Wystan didn’t respond, because he didn’t properly belong in this context, having been Binky Narborough’s dog all along.

—
She
had to die… because her name was Di, Henry Wotton said, but your dog was a badly-drawn touch – no one would’ve believed that you had one; you aren’t the faithful type. And as for the
Gray Organisation
, frankly, Dorian, your fantasy of business prowess is – well – laughable.

—You – you look so different, Henry, Dorian said, staring in wonder.

—Do I? Oh well, needs must. In his new incarnation Henry Wotton stood about five foot eight inches. He was wearing light-blue jeans turned up over shiny, sixteen-hole Doc Marten boots, and a bright-red Harrington jacket. He was entirely bald save for a light ginger furze at the back of his pudgy head. Walk with me, he said to Dorian, offering his arm, and they strolled off together.

Back down the Broad Walk and then left along the Flower Walk, between the formal gardens and shrubbery. It was comfortable, walking arm in arm with Henry, now that they were a similar height. What’s it like being dead? Dorian asked, but Henry merely smiled and placed a fat finger to his plump lips.