Dorian by Will Self Read Free Book Online Page B

married Dorian’s mother – Francesca Mutti – for what? Show, certainly, and I daresay issue as well. Although he already had an heir from a previous marriage, these types like a spare. I’ve heard it said he was vicious to the boy before a friendly aorta took him from us.’
    ‘And the mother?’
    ‘You’ve never heard of her, my dear! She was a thinner, more elegant Lollobrigida. Very beautiful, very sexy – if you like a pudendum, that is…’

    For much of the time Henry Wotton wasn’t altogether sure which human gender he preferred, or even if he liked sex with his own species at all. Pudenda? Pricks? Petals? What now?
    It was true that his raving, rampant and still rambunctious drug addiction took up much of his energy, but he wasn’t impotent – yet; and there was a deeper, stranger ambivalence at work in him than straightforward and manly homosexual self-hatred. Henry Wotton was prone to saying – to anyone who would listen – that ‘the chameleon is the most significant of modern types’. And while his outer appearance – the suits from Savile Row, the accessories from Jermyn Street and Bond Street – would seem to belie this, the truth was that beneath Planet Wotton lay a realm of complete flux. He was a Mandarin intellect who had calluses from annihilating Space Invaders and a social climber who revelled in the most dangerous class potholing. He professed no politics other than revolutionary change – for the worse. In the context of such a comprehensively contrary temperament, his conflicted sexuality was almost superfluous. Or so he liked to imagine.
    He also liked to imagine that what he looked for in a lover was not so much this face or that figure, let alone style . (Yech! How poofy , how precious , how twee , how bide-a-wee . Style – the very word could trigger the telling of another hundred decades on his internal rosary of contempt.) No, what Wotton sought was mortal clay to be moulded and shaped with a degree of definition that he felt lacking in himself. Henry Wotton wanted only to be anybody by proxy.
    Basil Hallward, with his talk of being ‘unashamed’, his proselytising for ‘gay’ rights (another word that couldn’t exist in the Wotton lexicon, save in so far as it applied to bunting), proved all too resistant to Wotton’s project. But it wasn’t on account of his pink militancy that he’d been discarded. Wotton didn’t mind if his doppelgänger was a campaigning homosexual, in fact it suited him. It was rather because Baz clung on to such exalted notions of his own artistry that he had to go.
    Baz would keep trying to reassert himself as a flamingo when Wotton was seeking to employ him as a croquet mallet. Not that Wotton thought of himself as a player – after all, what could he possibly do were he to be an artist, save price up piss bottles, and stack more shit cans on the shelves of the personal memorabilia mart? He knew Baz was right about the direction conceptual art was taking, and as for art that depended on more than craftiness, well, he had not the craft for that. People who met him at the square cocktail parties advertised by oblongs assumed that he styled himself as some contemporary dandy, flâneur , or boulevardier, and that he saw himself as a work of art. Whereas people who met him in squats, or at underground clubs, took it for granted that he had a private income. But neither lot was correct.
    Wotton lived off his wife, Batface, and he had no other creations besides those, such as Dorian, whom he met and manipulated. Like some royal matriarch, Wotton himself displayed none of the grosser symptoms of misogyny; rather he was a carrier. No one – avant la lettre – could credit the idea that the Wottons had sexual intercourse. She seemed too vague and he too disengaged for them to bring their genitals into sufficient proximity with each other at the right time. If tumescent simultaneously, it was to be supposed there was a wall or a floor between