Liver: A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes

by Will Self

  del of the Lord.Joyce’s body kept her up all night, a rambunctious teenager partying in the worn-out mind of an elderly woman. Towards dawn Trevor Howard came marching along Saatlenstrasse swinging his arms. A versatile leading man, he was playing Joyce’s father, and Derry as well. He stood in the living room in his belted leather coat, waiting for morning to harden into day, while Joyce’s body paced her up and down. Then, once office hours had arrived, he said to her: ‘I tried to tell you, Beddoes, back at the Widder: leave death to the professionals.’ There was no ‘Joyce’, no ‘Jo’, and certainly not the frank intimacy of ‘Jo-Jo’; only the clipped ‘Beddoes’.

  Then, A trumpet spreading a wondrous sound. He is offering now to the people with clinical depression his poison — nothing wrong in their body, only the head. Joyce lifted the handset and dialled Dr Hohl’s number. He answered on the second ring, and their conversation was brief and to the point. Yes, he was aware, of course, of the activities of the diocese, and natürlich he understood the possible repercussions; however, so far as he was concerned a contract was — and remained — a contract, Treu und Glauben.

  Ite missa est. Go, it is the dismissal.

  Prometheus

  Prometheus stands, quivering, by the water cooler in the inert core of the open-plan offices of Titan, an advertising agency renowned throughout London — and beyond — for its genius at breathing fire into the most sodden products, and the dampest services; igniting them, then fanning them up, so that their notoriety leaps and spreads from demographic to demographic, until entire populations are consumed by a mania for their possession.

  Prometheus, his prematurely iron-grey hair erect on his scalp — a magnetized ruff — rubs his cloven-toed trainers on the nodulous rubber floor covering, trying to earth himself; it’s only seven thirty in the morning, yet he’s already hopelessly jazzed up at the prospect of the day ahead.

  Prometheus: his cotton clothes of Japanese cut are in shades of beige and mushroom, their kimono cuffs peel away from his kinked limbs like insulation from live wiring. His wrists are bony, with thick black plaited hairs.

  Prometheus, he jigs, then bends to hit the spigot of the water cooler, releasing air bubbles that swell and burst. He swigs from the waxed-paper horn and smacks his lips, which then resume their normal expression: an endearing smirk. He’s a handsome man — straightforwardly so; his Pantone 293 eyes keenly rectilinear, his smoothly shaven cheeks suggest the massaging of balms formulated by white-coated demi-virgins in the pseudo-laboratories of giant French cosmetics combines. A smattering of ancient acne pocks below each well-defined cheekbone are only grace notes, epidermal elaborations on the overall tautness of the composition.

  ‘Tap,’ Prometheus says. ‘Tap, tap, tap!’

  ‘What?’ Epimetheus is befuddled — still drunk from the night before.

  ‘Tap,’ his partner carries on dripping. ‘Tap, tap, tap. ’ Then he hits the spigot again.

  Both creatives stare into the blue barrel of the water cooler, where another air bubble gurglingly gestates. It’s big, this bubble, it swells and swells until it displaces all the water in the cooler, then rigid plastic ripples as it morphs into the ridged barrel itself.

  ‘Whoa!’ the admen cry, appalled and enthralled. They back off as the bubble goes on engorging itself, schlupping up ergonomic personnel pods of brightly coloured, injection-moulded plastic; brushed-steel laptop computers; novelty waste-paper baskets; scrawled-upon whiteboards; photocopier machines and swivel chairs with cheese-grater-padded backs. With each engulfment the bubble’s transparency is momentarily occluded by the red-blue-green of these objects — but soon this clears and it resumes its awesome metastasis.

  Prometheus and Epimetheus walk back towards the reception area of their agency — they’re still excited by this phenomenon, and clutch each other’s arms like little girls. A ridiculously basso voice-over begins incanting, ‘Water, water everywhere but it all costs money’, and, hearkening to this soliloquy, the bubble sends out quicksilver tongues to lap up stray biros and paperclips. ‘Why pay more’, the voice-over tells itself, ‘for fancy labels and silly-shaped bottles, when tap water tastes just as good?’

  Far from addressing the two Titans, the godlike voice pulls at that liquid part of them; besides, they’ve scrambled out of a Crittall window and are dangling off an old cast-iron fire escape: the bubble has sucked up the entire office.

  ‘Five sixths of the earth’s surface is covered by water, and the same fluid makes up 90 per cent of the human body.’ Stated with such omniscience these schoolboy factoids take on the character of cosmic truths; the bubble, meanwhile, has engrossed London, then the south-east of England, then the whole British Isles, and is now vacillating over the Atlantic, Prometheus and Epimetheus soaring high above its leading curve: mythological man-birds with Muji wings.

  ‘So why compromise on the stuff of life? Drink Zeus Mineral Water, it may be a little dearer, but it’s definitely better than tap.’

  ‘Tap, tap, tap!’ With this Olympian endorsement the surface of the ocean condenses into a 3,000-mile-wide droplet that hammers the bubble back down: ‘Tap!’ It’s country-sized. ‘Tap!’ It’s regional. ‘Tap!’ It’s a dome over the conurbation. ‘Tap!’ With the last hideously amplified blow of liquid on solid, it’s driven back into the water cooler, and disappears in a milky cloud of its own tiny selves. All is as before: Prometheus whipping like an antenna, Epimetheus, bemused, saying, ‘What the hell kind of fucking end-line is that?’ Not that his mind is really on the pitch for Zeus Mineral Water at all — it’s still on, or even in, the girl he picked up — or who picked him up — the night before.

  It was in Soho House. She was blonde, bright-eyed, no more than twenty-five. Epimetheus was stunned when she agreed to go home with him, because he’s no looker. Short, with bandy legs and an egg-shaped torso, no matter how much he spends on a haircut, Epimetheus always steps from the salon a 1980s footballer with a crap perm. Still, this was better than leaving his black waves to their own devices: flicking grease on to his griddle of a face, which was dominated by the fleshy T-shaped ridges of his nose and brows.

  ‘Tap,’ Prometheus keeps on, ‘that’s what punters ask for now: ‘‘I’ll have a glass of tap’’, as if it were totally fucking exotic. It’s getting like the States here — waiters’ve started pitching up with it before they’re asked!’

  A killer end-line should be like a garrotte applied to any consumer’s faculty for making a rational calculus of price and benefit — and these lethal ligatures were plaited in Titan’s offices, in conversation pits of the kind favoured by imprisoning reality TV shows, in the pods where creatives were coddled by a warm albu-menof piped-in pop culture. It was Prometheus who’d had the water cooler installed; his colleagues mostly eschewed it, preferring the hot froth dispensed from the coffee bar by the agency’s own barrista, and then, by mid-afternoon, the cocktails that were shaken, without let or hindrance, by the agency’s barman. For, as Menoetius, the chief exec — and Titan’s founder, together with Prometheus and Epimetheus — was always at pains to point out: ‘We’re not in business to stifle appetites; we’re all about satisfying them.’

  ‘So what if punters ask for tap water?’ Epimetheus snarls. ‘It don’t mean they wanna shell out for it.’

  He feels like a Bloody Mary — right now. A Bloody Mary followed by a trip to the steam baths on Ironmonger Row, followed by a therapeutic wank in bed, then sleep for a week — or as long as it takes to shake this brain ache and liver jab. Prometheus is still bobbing and weaving; he yanks two waxed-paper horns from their holder, lifts them to his brow and paws at the rubbery turf with his cloven hoofs.

  ‘Yes, indeedy — better than tap,’ he snorts. ‘And as for the graphic — on the labels, the PoS shit, the posters, whatever — that’ll be a big fucking tap.’

  This, Epimetheus grimly reflects, is the tap-tap-tap of water torture: wrenched from a bed in which he’d scarcely rested to slosh through dirty puddles and overflo
wing gutters, for what Prometheus hokily referred to as ‘a blue-sky session’.

  ‘C’mon, man. We’ve done the broadband stuff for him; we jiggled his insurance bollocks, too; if we luck out with this pitch we could make it on the roster, become his agency of fucking record. Think of the billings — then double ’em!’

  This was Prometheus’s voice, ever seductive, always with an undercurrent of laughter, as it sounded issuing from Epimetheus’s mobile phone an hour or so earlier; the mobile he’d found girded with the silky scrap of the girl’s abandoned knickers — for Pandora herself was gone.

  Now Prometheus chivvies him towards the plastic face of the Macintosh with flirty pinches and punches. ‘He’s lunching us at St John at twelve sharp, and I want something to show him.’

  Seated at the machine, Epimetheus goes down into the pixel mine and commences searching, picking and grabbing, shakily assembling a series of images that can be used for a PowerPoint presentation.

  ‘So,’ Prometheus chortles as his partner grafts, ‘who was she? Some tart, I s’pose.’

  ‘Why d’you say that?’ Epimetheus counters, but it’s a flaccid denial; there’s never any dissimulation between them, at least, not on his part. ‘Oh, I dunno,’ he groans on, ‘she didn’t swipe me card, but. ’ When he’d got up, he’d discovered that, while she’d left her underwear, she’d taken some of his outerwear. ‘She took that Forzieri jacket I got in Milan.’

  Prometheus whistles appreciatively. ‘She’s gotta nose, then, ’coz it don’t look like jack, but it must’ve cost — ’

  ‘A couple of grand,’ Epimetheus concedes. ‘It’s camel suede shearling — so she’s either a tart or a thief.’

  ‘C’mon,’ Prometheus laughs again, ‘same diff.’

  He’s still drinking water, but now it’s San Pellegrino he’s swigging from its dumpy green bottle. He’s always drinking water. ‘To keep me pure,’ he tells anyone who asks why.

  The madhouse of the bar, limbs contorted in seeming intimacy. Next, the big clatter-whoosh of the doors as they’d bolted into the gents and bolted themselves into a cubicle. Then the tiny rasp and teensy clatter as she had chopped and ground and swept the granules of cocaine.

  The certainty that he was going to see her naked was unbearably sweet for Epimetheus, syrup poured into this golden cubicle. He wanted this to have happened already, so that he could be looking back on it. She was a natural blonde, her hair a perfect bell, the rest of her as smooth and rounded. Her skin had a furring of white-blonde down. Her features were worryingly pretty, and there was more than a hint of the catty in her slanting green eyes. And the nose? Too small, too snub. She wore a chocolate-brown dress of 1950s pattern — full skirt, tight bodice — and her breasts were pushed up high in its low-plunging neckline. When she bent down to feed, Epimetheus could see their pink snouts pressed into the fabric trough.

  He finds a big steel tap on a photo library site; it looks capable of hosing away offal. ‘Rustier,’ Prometheus commands. ‘Keep looking.’

  He had haggled with the African minicab controller — but only for form’s sake. The tarnished rain dashed Epimetheus’s cheeks and the neon curdled on the slick pavement. Meanwhile, Pandora stood, her coat held up to protect her hair: a glamorous widow in an insurance advert. Epimetheus’s cock, his balls — all the meat of him was engorged with the present; packed into skin and scrotum were cars and bars, commissionaires and au pairs, cycle rickshaws and ticket touts, ’roided clones and voided dossers.

  In the vinyl glove of the minicab he put his hand up those full skirts and felt neat fleece through silkiness; then, dipping down, he walked his fingers into the clammy cleft, and Pandora eased herself on to these, at the same time as she pushed her tongue into Epimetheus’s grotty mouth.

  ‘That’s the one!’ cried Prometheus. ‘That rusty fucking tap is gonna spurt out dosh — you’ll see. Whack it down on a clear black field.

  Do it dripping — then pouring, then fucking gushing. Always the same line. Big type: BETTER THAN TAP. Got it?’

  Epimetheus gets it. He gets it bad.

  There had been no preambles at his flat — a purpose-built New York loft next to Tate Modern. Pandora walked in, slung off her coat, shucked off her dress, stepped down from her shoes and fell out of her bra. Over her bare shoulder the floodlit dome of St Paul’s boiled up: the mushroom cloud of the baroque. A split-tailed mermaid in her metallic tights, she flipped over the thirty-five feet of varnished floorboards to where Epimetheus’s bed — a post-industrial slab of bolted-together railway sleepers — dangled by chains from the rafters and, without any ado, mounted it.

  Then she had to mount Epimetheus, who, on joining her, discovered that he had no equilibrium at all. If he sat up, the bed’s modest revolution threatened to topple him; even supine he couldn’t keep his balance sufficiently to lay his hands on her. Pandora didn’t appear to mind. She fetched the cocaine wrap from her bag and administered another line to them both. Then she coaxed his irrelevant nub with scarlet lips and delved with trowel of tongue, until it was significant enough — just — to penetrate her labia.

  A Swiss Railways clock blooms on a silver stalk that bends over the rubbery allotment of the Titan offices. Its hands shiver to 10.57. The rest of the work spore have wafted in by now — account planners, researchers, secretaries and those eponymous heroes, the creatives. The creatives take to their pits and pods, and there they’re brought printouts, or publications, or croissants — all by way of nourishment.

  Prometheus says, ‘I need a leak.’

  ‘I’m not bloody surprised,’ Epimetheus mutters.

  Titan’s toilets are well appointed: the floors covered with quarry tiling, the sinks hewn from granite blocks, the urinals old Corporation of London horse troughs. The stalls, walled floor to ceiling, are equipped with the oak doors that once graced a Wren church in the City. Prometheus goes directly to the one at the far end, which is in the corner of the building and has its own window. Once locked inside, he takes out a key, unscrews the window locks, places them carefully on the sill and pulls up the bottom panel. He takes off his sack of a jacket and hangs it from the hook on the back of the door, then he drops his baggy trousers and his baggier silk boxers. He sits down on the commode and yanks up his jersey shirt, baring his narrow, almost hairless chest. He half turns to the window and bends forward, warping his long back.

  Prometheus’s ribcage expands under taut white skin; piss hisses in the bowl. His face is aimed at the stall’s corner: he stares where tile, wood and masonry join.

  Twenty-five thousand feet above Old Street a griffon vulture circles in the freezing air; twenty thousand feet below her a grey-brown lagging of cloud covers the city. The vulture’s gyre takes her from Ilford in the east to Hayes in the west, from Potters Bar in the north to Carshalton in the south. Her bald white head, skull-like brow and double-curved beak are angled not down — for there is no carrion to be seen — but straight ahead. The bird is in a holding pattern; her buff wing coverts and darker flight feathers riffle in the slipstream; her short, stubby tail is tilted, rigid as a rudder.

  Way down there Prometheus strains, shackled to his ceramic rock. Mysteriously, the vulture responds to this contortion from eight miles away. She tucks in her huge wings and slides sideways, plummeting to cloud level in less than a minute, then slicing through the vaporous wrinkles as surely as a surgeon’s scalpel cuts through skin.

  At once, the city is torn open for the vulture’s gaze: a mass of viscid interiority, with its vital organs of governance and commerce, its sinews and arteries of communication, its intestinal retail concourses and media glands, and surrounding them all its myriad cells of human habitation.

  Down and down the vulture swoops, then brakes, her wings wide and cupped. She sees the tumour of the Swiss Re tower, the tapeworm of the Thames, the fatty deposits of Broadgate and the Barbican, the sphincter of the Old Street roundabout. Buffeted, slipping to right and left, the vulture slides through phone and power lines,
manoeuvres beautifully between a fire escape and a wall, then glides up to stoop on the sill of the window Prometheus opened five minutes before.

  The creative stares at the vulture, and she examines him in return with eyes that have black pupils and yellow irises. Her countenance is utterly inhuman, yet possesses calm wisdom and complete understanding. The vulture’s manifestation is terrifying: her wingspan is fully eight feet, and she stands as tall as a toddler. Her beak is perfectly designed to scythe, then rip; her ruff of white feathers cannot be anthropomorphized into Elizabethan courtly apparel and looks exactly like what it is: a sponge to sop up the blood of carrion.

  She arches her muscular neck to gain entrance and comes into the toilet stall with dispatch, although careful not to create any noise or disturbance: a busy surgeon walking into a confined and cluttered operating theatre. Prometheus cants forward still more, so that every vertebra is clearly delineated. He bites the toilet roll. The griffon vulture spreads her wings with a scratchy rustle — the avian stench, musty, nitrous, is gassily pervasive — then abruptly lunges, plunging her beak under the lip of Prometheus’s costal cartilage. With a sawing motion of her head, the vulture opens a ragged tear in him, revealing the glossy maroon mass of his liver. Then, without ado, she starts gnawing.

  The adman makes no sound except a faint groan, easily interpretable, from without, as the labour of excretion.

  *

  He’s visualizing a Sunday lunch in Middle England. Dad and two kids are at the table, while through the French windows we can see a trampoline standing on two tones of green lawn. Mummy gets up from the oven, her floral mitts gripping a sizzling pan. Dad and the kids are telegenically salivating, cutlery at the ready, when the French windows burst inwards. What’s up there in the blue, blue sky? A swarm of bees? A cyclone? No it’s a squadron of vultures in close formation.