Dorian by Will Self

them.
    Still, if Wotton could achieve intercourse through solid surfaces, his imaginative gifts were equally magical. It took him only a short time in his lovers’ company for him to be able to picture their doings with unbelievable accuracy. Henry Wotton could have written a brilliant book about the life and times of… Henry Wotton, but as he himself said derisively, ‘The only circumstances in which I would write a roman à clef would be if I’d lost my fucking car keys.’

    After a week’s acquaintance with Wotton, which included a single night in the blood-red-painted bedroom he kept on the ground floor of his Chelsea home, Dorian found himself suffering from a florid bout of woman-hating. He despised their shape, their smell, their genitals, their gooey secretions – lachrymal, vaginal, emotional – their hair, their faces, the lilt of their voices. All of which was particularly unfortunate for the young woman he had been been making love to during his last term at Oxford. ‘Making’ in the sense that he was making it up as he went along, while she was assembling a prefabricated illusion for herself to inhabit. ‘Love’ in no sense at all.
    She came to see him in London after a two-week lapse in phone calls. On his part. She went to his penthouse, which was on the posh, park-facing side of Prince of Wales Mansions. He let her in and she kicked off her sweaty sandals so as to feel the tiled floor cool beneath her hot soles. It was the fetid mid-morning of the same day Wotton rendezvoused with the Ferret. Dorian made tea for her in the splendidly-appointed kitchen, while she padded around the main room, combing the deep pile with her paws. She was feline and blonde, her name was Helen and she too was beautiful – if you like pudenda.
    —What’re all these monitors? she said.
    —It’s a video installation, a kind of TV sculpture.
    —I know what that is.
    —It’s by this guy Baz I met.
    Dorian went to a niche in the wall and dickered with switches. The monitors fizzed into life. On the screens the naked Dorians effervesced. Helen stared at the gorgeous bodies. Baz Hallward’s piece was most cunning; it forced all who looked upon it to become involuntary voyeurs, Laughing Cavaliers, compelled to ogle the young man with eyes pinioned open.
    —Is he a poof? she spat out.
    —What?
    —You heard. Is the man who made this a poof? You know what that is, right?
    That’s how it went, possibly. It’s a mistake altogether to write off young women of Helen’s sort, scions of the upper-middle-class Hampshire convent-school set, who go wild when they discover what’s between their dewy thighs. She was smart enough to read theology, and perceptive enough to read what was in her tea leaves once she’d drained her cup.
    —Why the Earl Grey?
    —What?
    —Why’re you drinking Earl Grey? It’s such a cliché.
    —Oh… I dunno… this guy I know… he makes it… and he says the flavour’s incomparable.
    —Is that the artist?
    —No, a friend of his, the son of the woman who’s the benefactor for the Youth Homeless Project.
    —Does he have a name?
    —Wotton… Henry.
    The silence between them wasn’t awkward – it was boorish and stupid. Like a drunk, drooling student it bumped about the trendy minimalism of the penthouse, knocking into the blocky blue divans, the huge coffee table, the varnished wood pediments that supported Cathode Narcissus ’s nine monitors. Dorian was so easily influenced – they both knew this. He took on other people’s styles, modes and even habits the way kitchen towelling sopped up spilt milk. And was there any point in crying over this? When he’d begun fucking Helen he’d taken to drinking Lapsang Souchong – now he was getting infused elsewhere. Of course she’d known he was a poof, but only in the way we all know we’re going to die.
    Still, she unbuttoned the front of her dress, which was a hundred per cent cotton, and had a pattern of loose grey and black squares,