by Will Self
‘Success,’ the Martian snapped, ‘you can depend on all the way. Patients in clinical studies, overall, had a better than 50 per cent chance of achieving sustained viral response. Pegasys helps the body’s immune system fight the hepatitis C virus; Pegasys is the most prescribed medication of its kind.’ The small audience was rapt, their eyes following the Martian’s pointer as it tapped first one lurid organ, then the next. Epimetheus’s liver was brimming with bubbling water — his own clever visualization, intended to express the mortal combat of the winged horse and the viral Furies.
Understanding very well that timing was everything, Bolton, thorough professional that he was, constricted his range and enormously increased the speed of his delivery. The result was — to paraphrase Coleridge — that listening to him was like reading the index of the A — Z, while someone kept flicking a lighter that obstinately refused to ignite.
‘SeriousadverseeventsinhepatitisCtrialsincludedneuropsychiatric disordersseriousandseverebacteriologicalinfectionsbonemarrow toxicitycardiovasculardisordershypersensitivityendocrinedisorders autoimmunedisorderspulmonarydisorderscolitispancreatitisand ophthalmologicaldisorders.’
As this babbling of side effects went on, nobody noticed the flight feathers curled round the edge of the plywood door, fresh as paint. The griffon vulture sidled in along the wall, her buff wing coverts rasping against the bamboo-patterned flock. She hopped up on to the piano keyboard, her talons striking the opening chords of Chopin’s Marche Fune`bre — music oddly appropriate for an anti-retroviral advert.
The griffon hopped up again and, biding her time, pecked the Prince Consort’s sightless eyes. She didn’t have long to wait: the Martian was reaching the end of his thirty-five seconds of enlightening, his pointer, tipped with a ball of green lightning, poised over Epimetheus’s carbonated liver. The vulture flapped down and came barrelling through the audience of drinkers. Hilary swung his hornbill towards her beak. ‘Blimey!’ he exclaimed. ‘Who’s this birdy cunt?’
It was too late for Epimetheus, for, with the crazyological cutting of a TV advert, the vulture grabbed his liver in her talons, then, taking off across the bar-room, smashed through the sash window, swooped along Blore Court, banked into Berwick Street and began to climb over Raymond’s Revue Bar, up into the contusion of the London night.
It was to be a civilized drink to discuss the future of their relationship — if it had one. The venue: the champagne bar at the Savoy; here, among solid leather footstools, there would be no footsie. Then, at the final hour, Athene is overpowered by the wanting of him, so calls and suggests that Prometheus come instead to her father’s huge penthouse apartment, high above the river at Vauxhall.
He takes the call while watching a financial services advert on cab TV; he’s on his way from the City, where he’s been making a pitch for another such. Making it alone, because Epimetheus has been getting flakier and flakier in the past fortnight: dead scalp on the padded shoulders of a clerk in the offices of a building society. Perhaps.
‘Oh. OK,’ Prometheus says, ‘but what about your old man?’
‘He’s in Zürich seeing his bankers. I’ve sent the staff away for the night and the doorman’s stoned on qat.’
She’s thought of everything — except how she’ll feel when, for the first time since his boudin noir body was fed into the ambulance, she sees Prometheus. He’s so tanned, so planed, so pivoting on the moment, that all the lines she rehearsed, sitting at her dressing table clipping on Bulgari and spraying Clive Christian No. 1, evaporate. She was going to say, ‘It’s drugs, isn’t it?’ Because nothing else could begin to explain his total collapse, followed a few hours later by a blithely apologetic call assuring her he was ‘on the mend’. At the time, Athene hated him as much as the cliché; but, instead of remonstrating with him, she says, ‘I want to tell Zeus about us.’ A thought not arrived at until precisely now, for she’s in thrall to her father and knows no other life than the lifestyle that goes with compliance to his whims. Athene is used to wealth — swims in it like an element, and has no understanding of its true clagginess.
Prometheus says, ‘I’m shocked; I’d assumed I was only a bit of rough for you.’ He moves towards her, his trainers soundless on the dark marble with its liverish veins and swirls.
Zeus’s penthouse is enormous; its twenty-foot-high windows imprison within their dark aquaria the big oily fish — Rothkos, Trougets and Freuds — that are mandatory catches for the ultra-rich. The fossilized trunk of an ancient hardwood rears up out of an equally ancient Japanese basin, its sinuous boughs embracing the plush atmosphere. Zeus’s interior decorater convinced him this feature would ‘bring the outside in, to integrate the domestic with the natural’; but what it actually does is to demonstrate that most of us are doomed.
Prometheus takes Athene in his arms, his hands in her warm hand-holds, and presses his cheek to hers. ‘I want to be with you, too,’ he says, although his mind is racing ahead. Where will we live? He sees an ugly Victorian house in Wandsworth, the sheet of grey paving in front of it punctuated by the commas of dog turds, a recycling bin hooked over the railings, evidence of a repetitive task that is all the more Sisyphean for its pretension to virtue. He sees Athene, grown plump and ordinary and matronly, no longer a fabulous deity, only another upper-middle-class woman, a function of her taste and her credit rating: a target group of one.
‘I want to be with you, too,’ he reiterates, ‘and we’ve gotta talk, but — ’ He twitches, and his skin tightens, sensing the vulturine approach, and he wonders if this, also, could be accommodated in Wandsworth. ‘First I’ve gotta use your loo, I’m busting.’
Athene wriggles out from him, frowning. He waggles the half-empty bottle of Zeus mineral water, and she points the way down a malachite passage to the third door on the gauche.
In the oasis, a clear pool beckons to Prometheus from between ferny fronds. He looks for Polynesian beauties offering him half coconut shells brimming with milk — then remembers this was a chocolate advert in his childhood. There’s no window in the bathroom, only the ceaseless moan of aircon. Prometheus frantically dithers, caught between the demands of bladder and vulture. He succumbs, unzips, relieves himself, then, using his inner Ariadne, he makes his way through a maze of smaller passageways to the service entrance, where he finds the griffon vulture already waiting for him, a superior look first in one yellow eye, then the other.
Farce ensues as Prometheus tries to smuggle the giant bird back to the toilet so that she can feed on him in peace. He has to hurry — he’s been gone a while and Athene is bound to be suspicious. The vulture isn’t helping, uttering peremptory feeding cries — pig grunts, goose hisses — as she butts at his thigh.
They gain the toilet and are about to go in, when there’s Athene, her amethyst eyes flashing, the words ‘It’s drugs, isn’t it?’ expiring on her ruby lips.
Prometheus stretches out the wings of his jacket, attempting to hide the scavenger; the griffon defeats his efforts by stretching out her own wings. Prometheus hustles right and hustles left, as if this two-step can obscure the vast span of feathers, the bony brow, the delving beak. ‘So,’ Athene says redundantly, ‘it’s not drugs.’
‘No,’ Prometheus begins. The urge is upon him to explain the griffon vulture away — to riff, to spiel, to sell himself — but for once he’s tongue-tied and can only mutter, ‘It’s not drugs.’
‘I should’ve guessed!’ she spits. ‘Your stupid Greek name.’
‘I am Greek’ — he paused — ‘ish.’
And there it was: he had subsided into a simpler past, and so discovered a different, more honest, eloquence. ‘She comes,’ he explained, ‘most days, and feeds. Obviously, I feel. like shit the next day, but then my liver — it grows back.’
‘Regenerates.’
‘Yeah, that. And when it does I feel better than ever, every time. Stronger, cleverer, too — more able to win pitches — bigger pitches with bigger spends. The first time she came I won the Zephyrca
rd account from your — ’ He faltered.
‘My father.’ Athene, despite his revelations, and the vulture’s presence — its antediluvian vibe, its reek of nitrogen and rotting flesh — was disengaged, bored.
The vulture was becoming more agitated, spluttering and chuckling, working her head up the back of Prometheus’s clothes, desperate to feed. ‘I have to. ’ He gestured hopelessly.
‘What’re you saying — that the two of you require privacy?’
‘N-No, not exactly privacy, but somewhere out of the way.’
‘I should’ve bloody realized,’ Athene mused; ‘the stains on your futon, and I thought it was my period — then that creepy doctor came.’
‘Yeah, yeah, he is a creep, isn’t he. No, we — she — doesn’t need privacy, just somewhere I can sorta bend over and be, um, braced. I normally do it on the bog.’
‘No.’ Athene was emphatic. ‘This I’ve got to see.’
She led Prometheus back to the main room of the penthouse and pointed to the tree trunk. ‘How about there? You can brace yourself against that.’
‘It’s hardly private, Athene. This is a glass box — anyone could see.’
‘Bullshit!’ Her colour was up: two burning spots in the centre of each olive cheek. ‘No one can see in here — unless they’re sitting on top of Tate Britain with a fucking telescope. Now, get on with it — that bloody bird’s starting to nauseate me.’
Which was fair enough, because there was something not right with the vulture; her talons scrabbled on the marble floor, her wings hung limp, and her deep chest spasmed. Prometheus stepped towards her, then, arrested by Athene’s furious scowl, retreated to the columnar tree trunk. He took off his sorrel jacket, then began to pull his mushroom shirt over his head. The bird was sick — that much was obvious. He was gripped by dread: if she couldn’t feed, then what of him? He knew that what they had was a compact: her liverish treat gave him his gift of the gab, and so won Titan their new business; deprived of it, he’d be only another pedlar, crying his wares without the city walls.
Prometheus turned his back on the bird, and, bending over, shackled himself to the petrified wood with his own arms. He willed the vulture to be peckish.
Athene cried, ‘Oh my God!’ Prometheus whipped upright as the vulture arched her long neck and began to wretch. Together they watched, appalled, as a lump travelled up the bird’s gullet; she coughed, then evacuated rubbery red chunks across the liverish marble floor. Blood and bile splattered the legs of Athene’s sky-blue satin lounging pyjamas — she leapt for the shelter of the dead tree. But Prometheus went forward.
And knelt. How could this be? He sensed recognition in the regurgitated carrion: it knows me, he thought, and — more to the point — I know it. He picked up a chunk between thumb and forefinger, then held it to his nostrils; the vulture made a lunge for it with her imperious beak. Prometheus beat her off. ‘You fucking murderer!’ he shouted. ‘I know whose this is — I know.’
Athene was no longer repulsed — it was all too strange for that. In lieu of repulsion she felt that overwhelming need for comfort that she remembered from mummyless childhood; so, like any other hurting little girl, keeping the tree between them, she backed away from bird and man and blood, and ran to her bedroom. Atop the dais of her bed, curled up on a tasselled cushion, lay a cute Scottish terrier, a tartan ribbon tied round its furry white neck. ‘An-gus!’ Athene sang. ‘An-gus, come to Mama!’
The puppy raised himself up on his paws, his tufty eyebrows twitching; with his bearded muzzle and squared-off head, he had the angrily seraphic expression of Nietzsche after the philosopher’s syphilitic breakdown. ‘Come to Mama,’ Athene called again; however, the Scottie had other, more significant impressions: a line of fresh meat aroma had been cast into the bedroom, and the hook had caught in his nose. He sprang from the bed, went wide to avoid Mama’s open arms, and was gone.
‘Epimetheus, oh Epimetheus — you poor guy!’ Back by the framed hyper-realist paintings of night-time London, Prometheus sobbed over the chunk of liver. ‘I should’ve paid attention — I should’ve listened to you.’
An absurd spectacle, no? A man, stripped to the waist, and addressing a bit of meat as if it were his boyhood friend. Not so, for Prometheus, so long a stranger to the backward look, now saw the whole terrain revealed. He saw the futile obsession that Epimetheus had for Pandora — a mad love that would lose him most of his liver, and perhaps also his life — and he surveyed the delusive hope that blanketed all human affairs, blanketed them like a toxic miasma, a smog over a city. Tightly woven, thickly piled hope, beneath which trundled millions of lice, buying and fucking, eating and sleeping, loving and working; hope, which hid them from the godlike perspective of their own, evolved consciousness.
Yes, Prometheus recognized that this was Epimetheus’s liver, and realized also what it contained: it was he who was the technician able to analyse the biopsy the bird had performed. Every human misfortune was in Pandora’s box, but the worst of all was delusive hope — and it was this that Prometheus had been feeding on. The delusive hope that this purchase, that sex act, those shoes, this person, another meal. would make it all right; and so, fashioned from mortal clay and shaped with costly bottled mineral water, they would go on and on until the big firing.
The Scottie raced across the marble floor yapping madly; the vulture, hissing, stretched out her fearsome wings and back-flapped from the mess of adman. The Scottie leapt to snap the meaty titbit from Prometheus’s fingers — ‘Tap!’ The steel frame of Zeus’s penthouse shuddered, then shrank. And why, thought Prometheus, haven’t I noticed before now that here in Zeus’s own home, there’s no branded thing? ‘Tap!’ The half-naked man bending over to pet the cute puppy — at least, that’s what any lazy viewer would think, seeing this single image graven for all eternity. ‘Tap!’ It would’ve been so reassuring to have been able to think of it all as a myth, a fable or a dream, but, as Neil Bolton’s portentous voice-over came rolling upriver — ‘Give your dog Scottie’s Liver Treats and show him you love him as much as he loves you’ — Prometheus was gnawed at by the most excruciating end-line conceivable.
It was all an advert.
Birdy Num Num
What’s my name? My name is legion, for I — we — are many. Many and colourless. I’m in him — and her, and them; I’m in some of those over there, the ones shopping for travel adaptors in Dixons. The pair of semi-whores — squeaking on high stools in leather skirts, eating caviar with their sour daddy at the granite lip of the seafood bar — I’m far deeper in them than he’ll ever be. As for that one, I’m most definitely in him, I’m loaded into him, the windy horse of a cleaner who, emaciated in his worn blue-denim fatigues, is invisible to these fervent believers in universal healthcare: the African, pulling his cartload of bleach and plastic bags from one village-sized toilet to the next.
I am not death, for death has no persona; death is only an absence — not even a mask. True, for some I am death’s helpmeet, but I’m not a psychopath, only a cytopath. I, too, am alive. I, too, have feelings — ethics as well. If I am known at all, it’s by my effects rather than my causes; in this I am antithetical to humans’ gods. Be that as it may, I am powerful, I am ancient, I am constantly changing, and I — we — are, if not omniscient, privy to a lot.
Y’know, some bio-theologians think I’m the First Cause, a primitive form of all the life on this dirt ball — that every animal evolved from an organism like me; others take the contrary view, that I — we — are fallen angels, cast out from the heaven of advancement, deselected and so become parasitic and unsexed.
I say, surely it’s a question of scale? Looked down on from a mile up in the sky — the holding pattern of a god — this air terminal is a body, the living tissue of which is bored into by bacterium planes, subterranean trains and hissing buses. Humans swarm through its concourses, virions with credit cards.
Soon, I — some of us — will be thrust into that steep vantage, the sky, then pro
pelled over land and sea to another city; Helsinki, as it happens. Before I go, let me — us — tell you how this has come to pass; let me tell you about this generic Tuesday afternoon — because, let’s face it, it’s always Tuesday afternoon. Allow me to assemble a cast of characters, as well or as woodenly drawn as any in a whodunnit. They were all my accomplices; your task is to identify the victim.
November 1998, a Tuesday — the day teetering on noon’s fulcrum. Georgie Maxwell was walking along the first stretch of Kensington Road; she passed the gates at the end of Kensington Palace Gardens and then the driveway of the Royal Garden Hotel. In the fluffy onset of a fine drizzle, the hotel doormen moved smartly to marshal brass luggage carts and beckon taxis beneath the jutting portico with its inset lights haloed in the damp gloom. Over the shoulder of the hotel — a 1960s thing, granite-faced and angular — stretched the late autumn brownery of Kensington Gardens, and beyond them, Hyde Park, its black tree spars rigged with dead and dying leaves. In the middle east a dark mauve sky, its fundament coiled with ashen clouds, squatted over Bayswater.
Walking is perhaps an overstatement. Georgie’s progress was halting, despite her being encumbered with no more than a tabloid newspaper, a pint carton of semiskimmed milk and a packet of milk chocolate HobNobs, all in a plastic bag. She clunked from stiff leg to stiff leg, swinging them from her hips as if they were stilts. The hem of her skirt rose first above one thickly bandaged shin, then the other. The skirt, eh? Well, it had a Minoan motif worked into it — geometric designs embroidered with gold thread; once pale green, it was now stained and blotchy. People walking in the other direction, from Kensington Gore, didn’t take in the skirt, or the rusty raincoat, or the espadrilles unravelling from both swollen feet. They merely checked her against their internal list of street people — alcoholics, junkies, schizos and dossers — made a positive identification, then dismissed her from view.
