by Will Self
One after another, they swoop into the kitchen and land on the table, their reptilian feet sullying the tablecloth. The happy family’s grins somersault into girns — then they recover themselves; for these aren’t real vultures, they’re cartoon figures that link wings-for-arms and dance up and down, skilfully avoiding the dishes of roast potatoes and carrots, the beakers full of fruit juice and the sturdy earthenware plates.
The vulture chorus sings: ‘Don’t give Dad ’n’ the kids fat ’n’ bones, fat ’n’ bones, fa-at ’n’ bo-o-ones! Only give ’em a tummy fulla flesh, a tummy fulla flesh, a tu-mmy fulla fle-esh!’
One of the vultures breaks from the line-up and hops into the air to hover over the roasting pan. It grabs the meat with its talons — a scraggy half-burnt shank; the frame contracts to the vulture’s pawky beak. ‘Ooh!’ it camps. ‘What a dog’s dinner!’ The frame contracts still more, until only the bird’s unblinking eye is visible, and the familiar basso voice-over urges: ‘C’mon, Mum, don’t serve your family carrion this Sunday, when prime beef from Olympus is only two ninety-nine per five hundred grammes!’
‘You know my daughter, Athene?’ Zeus says, employing a marrowbone as a pointer. On the far side of the restaurant a bounteous young woman is in deep giggly conversation with another not the same. Allowing himself some moments within which to consider strategy, Prometheus watches the frond of marrow plipping dark spots across the white cloth.
‘Uh, yeah,’ he says eventually. ‘We’ve met — did she tell you?’
‘Some charity bullshit,’ the tycoon says dismissively. ‘I mean, I’m as philanthropic as the next man, but I don’t want a badge for it, or a round of applause from wankers in penguin suits.’ But all Prometheus hears is: He doesn’t know about you and her, and everyone says they’re close — too close. Bit paedo in fact. Mummy’s gone — she’s his walker; either she thinks he won’t approve, or she isn’t sure. Besides, what about me? If he finds out I might lose the pitch.
‘Aren’tcha having the marrowbone?’ Zeus resumes sucking on his own skeletal little columns, the architectural salvage from a temple of beef.
‘No.’ Prometheus gestures with his fork. ‘I’m on the eel.’
‘Probably wise,’ Zeus says. ‘This stuff ’s as dodgy as fucking fugu — swarming with prions. Metabolic time-bomb.’
Prometheus, despite having pitched to Zeus twice before, and running into him at half a dozen industry pissfests, still can’t read the man. He’s insecure, certainly, and who wouldn’t be with those freckles and that ginger scrub, those tiny hands and that stocky peasant’s build? Not that Zeus has come from nowhere; there are solid antecedents ranged behind him: moon-faced gentry execrably rendered in oils, staring down from the striped walls of airless parlours.
However, Zeus’s Formula 1 racing team and his financial services company, his record label and his airline, his Premier Division football club and his cable TV network, his cranberry-flavoured vodka and his luxury leather goods range, his condoms and his cola — Zeus’s products (or, rather, his brands, for every surface of his empire has a red z zigzagged across it) were a peasant’s conception of what youthful Midases desire, plaster props from which the gold leaf was always flaking. Perhaps it was for this reason alone that he was so successful, that the all-consuming wannabes had taken him to their wallets.
‘So,’ Zeus says, taking a slug of his Haut-Médoc, ‘whaddya got for me?’
It’s one of the little great man’s foibles that he takes such a close interest in the minutiae of his manifold enterprise. He has as many brand managers as Achilles has Myrmidons — and they’re easily as ruthless — nevertheless, Zeus overrules them as a matter of course. He tinkers with the products, but in particular he mucks with marketing. Nothing seems to give him more pleasure than hiring and firing advertising agencies. He also loves to haggle with the media houses, calling the planners and buyers into his office to chew it out with them, muzzle to muzzle.
No bus T-side, billboard site, Adshel, display page in a provincial free-sheet or fifteen-second segment on an FM radio station escapes his attention. Zeus has been known to cost out a single instance of a pop-up ident on a webpage. He even gets between the media buyers and the salesmen. ‘Take you to Chamonix, did they?’ he barks at the pushy boys in their penny loafers, patterned braces and Hackett suits. ‘I’ll fly you to fucking Gstaad!’
And he does, just for the merry hell of it: winching them up over slushy corries to where his ski chalet squats, a megalomaniac’s lair bought sight unseen, which looks like a mail order conservatory. There the boys frolic in hot tubs, the plugholes of which are choked with a thousand, thousand pubic hairs, shaved from the monses of models, actresses — whoever.
‘I got this,’ Prometheus says. ‘I got this.’ And he beckons to Epimetheus, who’s nose down in a plate of chitterlings.
Epimetheus bestirs himself, pulls out a laptop and cracks open its brushed-steel slate. It’s gloomy in the restaurant, despite white paint and yellow light, and, as the computer fires up, its sharp glare plays on the three faces gathered round: brain workers at a brazier.
Zeus goggles at the rusty spigot. ‘Better than tap,’ he snaps. ‘What the fuck’s that about?’
Prometheus laughs. ‘Well, it is, isn’t it? I mean, if it isn’t as good as tap it’s gotta be a total fucking rip-off, yeah?’
Zeus sticks a stubby finger in his own glass of mineral water and noisily stirs the ice cubes. Then he splashes water across the keyboard as he punches through the PowerPoint. ‘Taps, taps, more fucking taps — what’s it all about?’
‘Bus bums,’ Prometheus counters, ‘two, maybe three hundred of ’em. The biggest programmable signboard in the ’dilly, all the arterial route Adshels — maybe some TV — ’
‘TV!’ Zeus expostulates. ‘For a bloody mineral water! Anyway, you don’t buy my media, you’re s’posed to be some hot-shot creatives. Better than tap — can’t you do better than that? I mean, what does it mean?’
Prometheus isn’t fazed — he never is, that’s the essence of his charm — that and the gab. ‘Exactly what it says. Look, Zeus, people are fed up with mineral water. You couldn’t’ve chosen a worse time to launch one — it’s a drag on the market. Eco-shit, recession chic — whatever. Besides, punters mostly know it’s a con. Half the time when you order still, there’s a bus boy down in the kitchens filling up the bottles from a fucking tap. That’s why the waiters make such a palaver about cracking the screw top. This is a nod to that — a nod to the punters’ sophistication. They’ll like that; it’s surreal, counter-intuitive — ’
‘Counter-intuitive!’
‘And downbeat — it cuts through the crap, all that malarkey about purity. I mean, look at that.’ He points at the tycoon’s mineral water.
‘This?’
‘Yeah, that. Knowing this gaff it’ll be kosher, but you’ve paid a quid-fifty for it, and they’ve bunged in a load of ice cubes. Did they make those outta the same mineral water, or what?’
‘You’ — Zeus picks up one of the ice cubes and pops it in his froggy mouth — ‘have gotta point there.’ Then he crunches ruminatively on the chilly bones of water.
*
Only a couple of birding office workers, whose chance itches throw their heads back on their collars, spot the griffon vulture as she dallies down over the Holborn Viaduct. It’s not a day for tilting skywards in London — nothing encourages it. The cloud carpet’s pile has thickened, and the Londoners are woodlice trundling beneath it. One of the irritated twitchers recognizes the vulture as a griffon; the other misidentifies it as a Ruppell’s. Neither thinks much of it, after all; the city harbours so many aliens: refugees from the tyrannies of men and the market, Gastarbeiters, Russian oligarchs, black widows ridden in on a hand of bananas — why not this scavenger, too?
Who flies arrow-straight through the central arcade of Smithfield meat market, her scholarly gaze not deviating to the right — halved cattle, rigid as boards, anatomy like a drawing
of same; nor to the left — scores of fowl, plump as eiderdowns slung over a washing line. She swoops up again, then drops down into the ancient court behind St John Street, where cigarette butts and dead leaves mulch the flags, and pigeon droppings ice every ledge. Hunched up, with folded wings, the vulture squeezes past the wheelie-bins and enters through a fire door that’s been left propped open with a mop.
She works her way unerringly into the backstage of the restaurant, avoiding the staff by tucking herself into recesses or flattening herself behind equipment. She quests for the only foody aroma that interests her: the liverish thread. Prometheus is already waiting in the gents, snibbed into a cubicle, back bared. He hears the rustle and scratch of the bird’s approach, admits this late luncher, then bites down on another toilet roll.
For luncheon the griffon vulture takes another fifth of Prometheus’s liver. She clamps the hepatic artery and duct with one talon, the portal vein with the other. With almost half of the organ already missing she has to be scrupulously careful. The soles of her lunch’s shoes beat a tattoo on the floor. When Prometheus returns to the table he’s shaky and leached of colour.
‘Are you OK?’ Epimetheus whispers, but Zeus booms, ‘You look like shit! What’s wrong with you?’ Other late lunchers peer up from their tripe and their oysters.
While his partner was away it’s been a difficult five minutes for Epimetheus. At first, he tried to divert Zeus with talk of other accounts the agency handles: Devo, the giant Korean electronics corporation; Prosser and Beadle, tea merchants by Appointment; Lickstep Sportswear — but the tycoon wasn’t impressed. Nor was he impressed by Epimetheus’s talk of ‘meaningful effectiveness data’ and ‘household penetration’. Epimetheus may art-direct, but his real passion is the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of advertising: looking back to the immediate past and judging how true has been the flight of cupidity’s dart.
Zeus is so ineffably bored that he examines his nails. For the first time he takes in his companion’s shady cheeks and the raw circles under Epimetheus’s eyes. This, he troubles to conclude, is not merely the creative dishevellment of adland; this scumbag looks like he was up all night snorting coke with some whore. Epimetheus is on the verge of making a complete fool of himself, blethering on about ‘interacting via text, phone or red button’, when Prometheus is back, and gulping down water.
‘It’s nothing, really,’ he gulps up. ‘I’m fine.’
It’s always like this in the first few minutes after the vulture has been feeding on him. There’s a near-catastrophic collapse of Prometheus’s system. His blood pressure plummets; the remaining portion of his liver, his gall bladder and his pancreas all swell with bile, threatening to rupture. Then comes a spasm, as of an anaconda choking down its own tail. Then the adman’s internal organs right themselves and he begins to spiel, talking better than ever, quip after riff after sly dig, all accompanied by charming jerks of his handsome head.
Ah, Prometheus, he has the great salesman’s knack of being able to convince whomever he transfixes in his charm-beam that he really does want to be their friend; and, moreover, that his amity is something keenly to be desired, a passport to carefree sunny uplands — a larger commercial featuring baking-hot pool surrounds, convertibles sweeping along a generic corniche, tipsy dawn serenades beneath the balconies of rapacious Rapunzels. and more — much more.
‘OK,’ Zeus silences Prometheus. ‘You can do the fucking water, and you jokers can come on the roster.’
Both admen begin to thank him, but Zeus chops them down: ‘Yeah, yeah, don’t get overexcited, there’s a poxy spend on this one, and you’re gonna have to deal with my people, who’ll cut the deal with the media house. There’s no percentage in it for you shysters. And, while we’re at it, I don’t want one penny wasted — and I want results!’
Then he’s up and toddling among the tables — there is no other word for the muleless rider — towards the glassed partition separating the restaurant from the bar-cum-bakery, where bankers with unsustainable levels of personal debt dab at olive oil with cubes of bread. Zeus pays the bill en route, standing by the maître d’s plywood podium punching digits into the card-reader.
Next he’s gone, and it isn’t until then that Prometheus realizes the tycoon hasn’t so much as nodded to his own daughter.
In recent weeks Prometheus has found himself contemplating this fine madness: that he was born out of Athene’s head, in a wobbling caul, from which his features — like the bonnet of an implausibly high-performing mid-range saloon car — stretch towards the future. But this is absurd. He was fully formed when they met; thirty-five, well educated — no mere Hoxton haircut with a grab-bag of thefts masquerading as creativity. And yet. her energy, the kissing slap of her buttocks against his thighs, the report of her thought in his mind. She was yet quicker than him, she had twists of phrase that left him spinning, unable to retort — how could this be?
In private members’ clubs and minimalist bars, in restaurants with anorexic decor, and at plumply uncomfortable country house hotels in the Cotswolds where horse brasses neigh from the walls, Prometheus applies the bellows to his soul-forge. There’s no tight-mindedness in him at all, no ability to guard his ideas, he gives of all and to all freely.
‘What we advertise’, he says, ‘is nothing much — things, and the things people do. But what we do, matey, that’s the real McCoy, the full-fucking-monty. See, when a punter sees what we do, likes what we do, he begins to desire our ads more than the things — and the things people do — that they’re selling. At that exact moment the whole fucking gig catches fire, because now the punter wants ads — covets them; wants to be in that mytho-bloody-logical realm where a guy can strap on a pair of homemade wings and fly, or a chick can comb snakes outta her hair — real ones! — with the right kind of conditioner.’
Prometheus’s voice, that’s his weapon. What he says? Well, on the page it looks like any other copy for the same old pitch: nothing for money. But his voice — it dips and soars and writhes its way into his listeners. His notes are deep or high, his tone rough or smooth, his accent posh with a street edge, or street with a layer of posh tar.
‘One per cent of GDP! One poxy per cent! We can do way better than that; after all, we’re growing all the time, mutating — business to business, virals, naming rights ferchrissakes. One day soon. ’ He pauses all eyes on him; his aptitude is such that once you’re fixed on Prometheus you cannot look away. You covet him. ‘. one of us — and I’m not necessarily saying it’s gonna be me — is gonna figure out a way of selling advertising directly to the consumer — ’ His ceaseless movement, his jiggling and darting, suggests not nervousness but unbridled potency. ‘Social networking is only the beginning — some time soon, every man, woman and child is gonna become their own agency. Then it’ll be 2 per cent, 5 per cent — way more than defence spending; the billings, my friends, will be astro-fucking-nomical!’
The whiplash of his upper body reels them in, while Prometheus’s piercing, square eyes give those that look upon him the paradoxical feeling that it’s he who is searching for the best angle from which to view them.
But that was now — and this, also, is now. Athene’s heart-shaped face is annotated by her black curls; her torso is armoured in gold lamé. Even from forty feet away, glimpsed among cotton trunks and woollen boughs, Prometheus experiences a voyeuristic thrill. Oh! To be her friend, to be privy to those girly secrets and party to that caressing mockery.
Athene stands and whips the cloth from her table so swiftly that plates, glasses and cutlery all remain in place. She slings the cloth around her shoulders and shimmies up the aisle. Other women arise in her train, whip off their tablecloths and don them. Their abandoned lunch companions drum on the tables and howl a Bacchanalian jingle: ‘Oooh-ooh, you can’t stop the children of the revolution!’
Athene slips the linen off her shoulder and arm — they’re naked; her high-kicking legs are bare as well. All the sashaying women are naked be
neath their robes, robes they hold up in front of themselves to make targets for the cannonade of food the sous-chefs are firing from tiny tungsten mortars. Tripe splodges, langoustines clatter, kedgeree disintegrates into rice shot and fishy shards.
The maître d’ pushes forward a washing machine, and, as Athene sheds her soiled raiment, the other dancers strike arty poses to preserve her modesty. She stuffs the tablecloth into the machine, it hums, shudders and spits it out — all within seconds. It’s cleaner than a void.
A plastic container fifteen feet square crashes through the ceiling and bursts open, scattering detergent capsules with muscular arms and legs. These bounce into the arms of the dirty tablecloth dancers, the couples go into twirls, magically cleaning the stained linen. The basso voice-over rumbles above the chorus: ‘When you use Ceres, it’s as if your washing machine spins faster than the earth itself! Gods and mortals all agree. ’ Athene’s perfect red lips suck on your eyelids, her flawless white teeth nibble your earlobes; she cries out in ecstasy, ‘Ceres biological washing capsules are truly revolutionary!’
Shaking the drooping Prometheus by his shoulder, Epimetheus says, ‘You’ve gotta go and see the doctor, mate.’
‘I’m going to have to put a shunt in,’ Dr Ben Macintyre says; ‘otherwise you’ll drown in your own blood.’
‘A shunt?’
‘A transjugular, intrahepatic, portosystemic shunt. ’ What kind of a cunt, thinks Prometheus, could even begin to say that in these circs. ‘. is a tube. We’ve got to bypass your liver with a tube — there’s a mass of scar tissue in there, and it’s increasing the pressure here.’ He has a scan clipped to a lightbox and lays his hands on these representations of the affected parts — it’s as near as he ever gets to touching his patients. The tips of his thumb and forefinger are callused, dead skin of which Doc Ben — as he styles himself — is inordinately proud.
