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

by Will Self

  Up close, and personally, Georgie smelt of sepsis. There were open sores under the chicken skin of her crêpe bandages; craters, really, in which bacteria, numerous as Third World miners, hacked at the exposed tissue-face. Thankfully, the day was fresh, and neither the hurrying working girls nor the strolling young ladies out shopping could smell this. However, besides looking crazy Georgie talked to herself: a twittering commentary in real time — ‘She’s crossing the road, pelican crossing, not a game bird, crossing the road’ — that kept her company as she did, indeed, cross the road at Palace Gate, stump back along the far side, then traverse the junction of Gloucester Road and turn left into De Vere Gardens.

  Why did this street — no different to scores of others in the area — feel quite so bare, so baldly threatening? On either side magnolia-painted six-storey Victorian terraces loomed in the thickening drizzle; the pavements were anthracite glossy, void of any rubbish, or even the occasional bracelet — or tiara — of costly dog shit. The kerb sides were cluttered with tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of cars — cetacean Porsches and squashed Maseratis with Dubai plates — and, as she peg-legged by these, Georgie kept up her rap, a well-spoken psychosis, ‘Maybe he’ll be there — maybe he’ll come soon. Maybe-baby, if I don’t TREAD ON THE CRACKS!’ She shied away from the spear tips of the railings, then, halfway along the street, lurched towards them and, pushing open a gate, awkwardly descended an iron staircase into a savage little area full of bullying bins.

  I — we went along for the ride — although we were also waiting inside.

  *

  Inside Billy Chobham, who, in turn, was inside the bath; which was inside the bathroom; which, in turn, was inside Tony Riley’s basement flat. The cell-like bathroom had no windows, and only a single lightbulb that dangled, unshaded, from a furred flex. The harsh light beat the limpid surface of the bath water, below which Billy’s pubic hair bloomed, silky as pond algae. The bath water had long since cooled — Billy was colder. He’d been in there for over an hour, his fair skin going blue, the ends of his fingers puckering up into corrugated pads. However, Billy was experiencing no discomfort, because, unlike the chaotic Georgie, he had had a get-up hit. Billy always had a get-up; this was part of his professionalism. ‘I’m a junky,’ he’d tell anyone unable to escape. ‘I don’t make any bloody bones about it. I don’t try an’ stop, an’ I ain’t sayin’ it’s not my fault neevah — I wanna be a junky. I like being a junky — I’m good at it.’

  It’s debatable whether it’s possible to be good at being bad, and it’s a discussion I — we — would be happy to join in. This being noted, let’s not trouble with the theory for now, and instead present the actuality. Billy had jeans that stood up straighter without him in them, and a red mohair pullover given to him by a girl in East Sheen. If he was shod it was in prison-issue trainers. He had no fixed abode, but throughout London — and still further afield, in Reading, Maidstone and Bristol — there were small caches of his belongings: a T-shirt here, a paperback there, an exercise book full of mad ballpoint drawings of invented weaponry way over there. Billy never asked the occupants of the flats and houses where he crashed if he could leave these things; he just shoved them down the back of shelves or into cupboards, so that he could return days or months later and clamour to be readmitted, on the basis that ‘I’ve gotta get me fings.’

  There were warrants out for Billy from Redbridge to Roe-hampton for crimes beneath petty: kiting ten-quid cheques, exchanging shoplifted underwear at Marks and Spencer, forging methadone prescriptions. There was nothing aggressive in Billy’s felonies; he took no part in the great metropolis’s seven and a half million fuck-offs, the abrasive grinding of psychic shingle on its terminal beach. Be that as it may, wherever Billy went, doors came off their hinges, baths overflowed and fat-filled frying pans burst into flame. His life was a free-pratfall, as, flailing, head over tail, he plunged through year after year, his fists and feet — entirely accidentally, you understand — striking mates, siblings, the odd — very odd — girlfriend, but mostly his old mum, who, while fighting depression, did the payroll for a chemical plant in St Neots and remained good — or bad — for a loan.

  Billy, the career junky, always had his get-up: the brown-to-beige powder in the pellet of plastic, which — after being tapped into a spoon, mixed with water and citric acid, heated, then drawn off through the cellulose strands of a bit of a cigarette filter — was thrust inside his veins, making it possible for the muzzy show to go on. Locked in bathrooms with taffeta mats, crouching in back of couches, planted in the bushy corners of conservatories — Billy stayed in these spaces for as long as it took, watching for the bloom in the hypodermic syringe, his gift of a houseplant.

  Georgie, who had forgotten her key, tapped on the glass panel of the kitchen door. Her face was a sharp, feline triangle, tabby with dirt and misapplied make-up; her taps were as diffident as the blows of velvet paws. No one heard her. In the cold bath, Billy gouched out, sunk in the hot Mojave desert of his habitual reverie, a corny old Blake Edwards vehicle for the comedian Peter Sellers called The Party.

  Billy had first seen the film on television when he was four or five years old; but even then — it was originally released in 1968 — its depiction of flowery fun was painfully dated: the beautiful people of Hollywood cavorting the night away. Besides, it was a crap film with a dumb script — no plot to speak of, only a series of farcical sight gags for Sellers, browned up to play Hrundi V. Bakshi, a useless Indian who haplessly destroys the house where the eponymous party is being held, a party he has been invited to in error, and that is being thrown by the producer of a movie he’s already sabotaged with his stupid mistakes and brainless antics.

  It was on the location for that movie-within-a-movie that Billy habitually began his drug-dreaming. So I — we — were inside Billy, who was inside the bath inside Tony Riley’s flat. In there with us was a ravine, somewhere out beyond Barstow, chosen for its superficial similarity to the Hindu Kush; and in the ravine were Hispanic extras playing Pathan tribesmen, together with more Hispanic extras playing sepoys. A detachment of Hispanics marched along the bottom of the ravine, accompanied by an Hispanic pipe band miming their instruments. The Hispanics playing the tribesmen — and a few light-skinned, Caucasian-featured blacks — reared up from the rocks above and made ready to fire. Frantic to frustrate the ambush, the half-Jewish Sellers — who, presumably, had been sent ahead as a scout — reared up as well, blasting a bugle. The Hispanic Pathans turned their rifles on him and he was struck by their volley. The bugle notes flattened into farts, Sellers collapsed, then reared up again, crazily tootling.

  This was where Billy, as Peter Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, made his entrance: a junky in a bath in a fantasy of a film. He had seen The Party next in his teens, again on television; this time he was banged up in a secure hostel on the Goldhawk Road. This second viewing confirmed for Billy that this was ‘his’ film: an acid-pastel ball, in which he could perceive his dull childhood transmuted to the plinkety-plunk beat of a Henry Mancini soundtrack. Eventually Billy had acquired his own videotape of The Party. It was wrapped in a pair of bloodstained combat trousers and pushed behind the hot-water tank in a bungalow near Pinner.

  Billy’s white body, fishily flattened by refraction, undulated in the cold water as he mimicked the flips and flops of the comedian; who died in 1980 of a heart attack — his third — brought on by the amyl nitrate he huffed on the sets of movies such as The Party. Billy’s wide mouth — which could be described as generous only if what you wanted was more plaque — stretched into a rictus. Outside, Georgie’s taps increased in volume as the drizzle percolating De Vere Gardens bubbled into rain.

  Along a gloomy corridor that ran the length of the basement flat, between Dexion shelving units stacked with papers and paperbacks waiting to be burnt, then between a thicket of cardboard tubes that sheathed old point-of-sale materials and posters, then in through an open door, the minute sound waves pulsed, to where Tony Rile
y, the Pluto of this underworld, sat on a sofa in his boxer shorts, his unshaven muzzle clamped by the transparent obscenity of an oxygen mask, while the cylinder lay on the cushion beside him, steely and fire-engine-red.

  I — we — were in Tony, too, not that this mattered; the catch, then gush, as his own febrile inhalation triggered the valve and yanked a gush of oxygen into his defeated lungs, drowned out everything: hearing, thought, intention, feeling. Tony was hanging on to life by his teeth, which were sunk in the plastic mouthpiece. Shitty disease, emphysema; shitty paradoxical condition. Tony sat in a stale closet, into which every small sip of air had to be dragged down a long corridor wadded with cellulose, while beneath his rack of ribcage his lungs were already abnormally distended.

  Tony Riley’s legs were kite struts in the flattened cloth of his boxers; his sweaty T-shirt hung on him like a scrap of polythene on a barbed-wire fence; his dirty-brown hair was painted down on to his canvas scalp; his grey eyes streamed behind once fashionable Cutler and Gross glasses. Up above him, on the purple and taupe striped wallpaper, hung a Mark Boxer cartoon of Tony in his heyday. It was a prophetic casting of inky sticks: the Roman profile and laurel wreath of hair simplified to a few thin and thick lines. Two decades on, the caricature was as good a likeness as any photograph — perhaps better. No photo could have captured the way Tony’s breathless need for heroin simplified the awesome clutter of the large, low, subterranean living room — its middle-aged armchairs and smoked-glass coffee tables, its Portobello Road floor cushions and swampy Turkish kelims, its portable commode and novelty coat tree — into two white dimensions of nothing.

  Beside Tony’s meagre thigh there lay a scrap of tin foil, on which trailed burnt heroin. Chasing the dragon? For Tony it was more akin to staggering after a snail: he huffed, he puffed, he struggled to exhale, so that he could carve a tiny pocket in the necrotic tissue of his lungs to fill with the narcotic fumes.

  Tony spat out the mouthpiece, snatched up the foil and, from the coffee table in front of his sofa, a gold Dupont lighter; then he grabbed a rolled-up tube of tin foil, poked it between his lips and hunched to his labour.

  ‘In the primitive environment,’ Lévi-Strauss wrote, ‘the relevant is the sensational.’ But really, in Tony Riley’s basement flat, it was too primitive even for that; here, sensations were muffled and numbed by mould and opiates; the rain falling on the roof five storeys above penetrated the slates, then joists, plaster, paint, carpet, floor boards and more joists, until it pattered on to the jungly floor between the chief ’s bare feet. The parrot of addiction flapped across the dank clearing to perch on the edge of a serving hatch. Oh, that noble psittacine! Longer lived than humans, perfectly intelligent, and well able to imitate the squawks of their most awful mental pathologies.

  Outside, Georgie’s tapping had finally risen to a determined rapping. It was only 12.20; nevertheless, the most dissolute of establishments still have their routines. There were chores to do, calculations to be made, the supplier to be contacted; then, soon enough, the customers would begin arriving. She rapped, the glass bruising her clenched knuckles. She had once had a body that, like any affluent woman’s, was a gestalt of smell, texture and colour — but now that had all flown apart: she was as dun as a cowpat, you wouldn’t want to touch her, her smell was in your face.

  ‘Whereis’e? Stupid Billy. Fucking Billy. Open up. Gotta do Tony’s meds. Call Andy. Gotta do Tony’s fucking meds. Call Andy. Gotta do Tony’s meds — ’ This aloud, the narrative of her staggering thought replacing the saga of her limping walk along Kensington Road.

  Skin pancaked between bone and glass; the raps marched through the kitchen, along the sepia corridor, and into the room where Tony was trying to recapture the thrill of the chase. He left off, let fall his impedimenta, stood and lurched to the doorway. ‘Billy!’ he shouted in a crepitating whisper. ‘It’s her — get the fucking door!’ Then he crumpled up as thoroughly as any scrap of tin foil.

  ‘Brill-ll-llerowng! Brill-ll-llerowng! Brill-ll-llerowng!’ Billy had discovered that if he plugged his ears in a certain way and pressed his mouth against the side of the bath, his submarine ejaculations sounded — to him — like sitar chords. Billy, as Peter Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, sat cross-legged on the floor of his Los Angeles bungalow, wearing a long-sleeved, collarless linen shirt. The big bole of the instrument was cradled in his lap, his browned-up face concentrated in mystic reverie. ‘Brill-ll-llerowng!’ When the letter-box flap lifted, a letter fell on to the mat, and the flap clacked shut. Clacked shut. Clacked shut again. It wasn’t meant to do that — this was the invitation to the paradisical party, and he, Billy-as-Hrundi, was simply meant to pick it up, open and read it; but the fucking flap wouldn’t stop clacking!

  Billy lunged up in the bath, in time to hear ‘—king door!’ in the calm after the splash. Then he was all action: out on the wet lino, twisting a thin towel round his nethers, then into the corridor. He knelt over Tony. ‘All right, mate? Y’all right, mate?’ A ghastly simulation of Cockney mummy concern.

  ‘Juss, juss, juss — ’ Tony shudderingly inhaled, then sputtered, ‘Get the fucking door.’

  Calcium hydroxide, calcium chloride, calcium hypochlorite. In a word: bleach. We don’t altogether fear it — there are too many of us, and we’re too small. Far too small. I’m small even for my kind — maybe fifty nanometres across, which is fifty billionths of a metre. That’s smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so why should I fear bleach? For I can have no colour. Anyway, Georgie doesn’t apply bleach to the insides of syringes or spoons, nor does she dunk razors or toothbrushes in it. All her bleaching activities are confined to the laminated surfaces of Tony Riley’s kitchen. In the days when the disorder in her life was a tea mug unwashed up for the odd hour, or a book left face down on the arm of a chair, Georgie used to say, ‘It doesn’t matter how messy things get so long as you have clean kitchen surfaces.’

  Of course, that was when things weren’t really messy at all. That was during the eight clean years, when Georgie attended her self-help groups, built a career as a television producer, had a couple of happy-then-unhappy relationships, visited her parents, paid her taxes. That was before the craters full of sepsis and the shrinking of her head; that was when she had her own studio flat in Chiswick, not two black plastic bags in the dark corner of Tony Riley’s damp bedroom.

  Now the clean kitchen surfaces were the only ordered thing in the mess that was notionally her life. After cooing, billing and heaving Tony back to his oxygen cylinder, Georgie adjusted her dressings — fallen down around her ankles, obscene crêpe parodies of old women’s stockings — before setting to with bucket, hot water, brush and bleach. She didn’t stop until the Formica was lustrous and the aluminium draining board gleamed.

  Shitty disease, emphysema. Admirably shitty: chronic, progressive, degenerative — a bit like civilization. And here we have the gerontocracy of late capitalism that Sam Beckett — himself a sufferer — would undoubtedly have recognized. With their faces — one browned by neglect, the other blued by anoxia — Georgie and Tony were typecast as Nell and Nagg. He nagged her, wheezing demands, while she nellied about the flat, fetching his anti-cholinergics and bronchodilators, administering his steroids and checking the levels on his oxygen cylinder. Setting to one side the ghastliness of a carer almost as sick as her patient, there was a ritualized and stagy desperation to their relationship; because, of course, there is no more painkiller, the little round box is empty, and everything is winding down.

  Yes, a stagy desperation heightened only by their cloying affection and their treacly endearments: Chuckle-Bunny, Sweetums, Little Dove, Ups-a-Boy and Noodly-Toots for each other; and for the drugs: smidgen, pigeon, widgeon and snuff-snuff. To behold them, passionately engaged in the chores of moribundity, was to intrude upon the intimacy of a couple so old, so long together, so time-eroded into a single psychic mass, that they seemed ancient enough to have had children that must’ve grown up, gone away, formed partner
ships of their own, had their own children, grown older, then themselves died. Of old age.

  Tony was fifty-three, Georgie forty-one. They had known each other for six months.

  From time to time, Georgie would break out of her stagy desperation and peremptorily order Billy to fetch this or do that. This may have been a ship of fools, but it was a tight one. There was no room on deck for shirkers. Billy had shed his moist breech-clout in favour of a neatly pressed tan linen suit, white shirt and red tie — perfect protective colouring for a hapless Indian actor attending a Hollywood party. The ‘plink-plink-brill-ll-llerowng!’ of his sitar had snagged the twang of an electric guitar; now a snare drum brushed up the tempo, as Billy, in a dinky three-wheeler car, pulled out of the driveway and buzzed off down the boulevard lined with palms. It was an iconic image of Los Angeles, undercut, if only he knew it. Ach! Fuck it! If only he knew anything; and if only he didn’t behave as if his entire life were a pre-credit sequence.

  Because here it was: Ars Gratia Arts captioned a lion roused from torpor and petulantly roar-yawning. But a better motto for Billy would’ve been Pro Aris et Focis; for, as he piloted the joke car of his narcotized psyche down the corridor of Tony Riley’s flat — a boulevard lined with the drooping fronds of old advertising flyers and press releases, the domesticated foliage of Tony’s once wildly successful career in public relations — Billy was reverencing his deity and preserving this hearth.

  The order of the credits for the production was this: Tony, the hotshot producer whose mortgage arrears couldn’t now catch up on him before the repossession of Death. He had the De Vere Gardens flat and a few more quid in the bank to chuck on the pyre. Every day he re-erected the set upon which the film of the party was shot — but he couldn’t do it without Georgie. Georgie was the director: she assembled cast and crew, rehearsed their lines, consulted with script editors and cameramen — without her there would’ve been no action. Since her legs had started to rot — abscesses from shooting up, did you really want to know? — she could no longer act as a runner for a different production, the big one, overseen by Bertram and Andy’s crew.