Liver

by Will Self

  Soon enough, the doctor began coming into the club. On one occasion he even took Val’s blood while he was sitting on his stool. The doctor thought he could handle his drink. Needless to say, he couldn’t: alcohol is a fluid, it can never be held. He fucked the miniskirted girl from Trouget’s retrospective in the toilet, and she left bite marks on his shoulder that he explained away to his wife as those of an epileptic patient. The doctor was going down, and eventually he ended up in the same stacking-chair circle of hell as the Extra: strolling Sunday shrubbery with angry wifey; making miserable toast in a toaster that takes half a loaf; loitering on the forecourts of provincial garages, waiting for the country bus to the self-help group.

  However, this lay in the future. In the meantime he was in the Plantation, although not on the afternoon when Val quipped – apropos of a famous singer, discovered dead from an overdose that very morning by her manager-cum-fuck buddy – ‘Ah, well, I s’pose those who live by their cunt, die by one.’ Then slowly pitched forward and executed a near-perfect forward roll on to the incontinence pad of the carpet.

  For long moments nothing happened. Only the regulars were in – it was too early for the arty party – and, even though Val was lying directly at the Cunt’s feet, Bernie Jobs’s days of bending over were long gone. Val wheezed like a cat with a hair ball, chalky bubbles gathering at the corners of his mouth.

  Eventually, Hilary, who had been observing his tormentor with interest from behind the bar, while trying to assess whether this was the end game, came out and got Val back up on his stool. But even if Hilary propped Val’s Punch profile against the till, he couldn’t get him to stay upright, let alone hold a glass. The regulars pretended nothing untoward was happening. It was left to the Martian to go to the payphone and call for an ambulance.

  They came, heartily efficient young people – a man and a woman. The woman went back to fetch a stretcher chair from ‘the van’, on account of the tight manoeuvring needed to get anyone out of Blore Court, dead or alive. It wasn’t until a full quarter of an hour had elapsed since they had borne Val off – with sure tread and snappy cooperation – that anything was said.

  The members sat there: the Dog and the Poof on their stools, Her Ladyship seated, the Cunt standing. They were all resentfully nursing their glasses – the only things they had ever nursed in their lives – and waiting for the Martian to get a round in. At last, Hilary whined, ‘You silly cunts, Pete went with Val in the fucking ambulance. If you want a drink, you’ll have to stump up for it yourselves.’

  And with that, he lifted the counter, waddled through, and, assuming Val’s position at the end of the bar, pulled across his own pint of vodka-laced lager, tapped it like a gavel and reiterated, ‘Yes, if you cunts want a drink you’ll have to stump up for it yourselves. There are’, he whined on, ‘gonna be a few changes round ’ere.’

  Then he toasted the icon of Ivy Oldroyd, who looked down on the proceedings with imperial detachment, the corners of her mouth as downturned as the thumbs of a plebeian multitude.

  The next day, when the Dog came snuffling up the stairs, and swung open the ratty green baize door, he discovered that a full-blown coup d’état had taken place: not only was Hilary on Val’s throne, but there was a new ‘Boy’ installed behind the bar, dressed in a sad emulation of his master’s own sad emulation of a style.

  ‘Scotty,’ Hilary whined croakily, ‘this here is Stevie. She’ll be serving while Val’s in hospital.’ Then he went back to reading his Daily Mirror, a newspaper that told him very little about things he didn’t particularly want to know.

  Hilary had, of course, been waiting for this; and, in anticipation, had had Stevie on hold for several weeks, stashed in a cubbyhole at Her Ladyship’s Kensal Rise stately doss-house. Stevie, who Hilary had found crying underneath the arches outside Heaven, was indeed heaven-sent. Once the amyl nitrate had been wrung out of his system, he was perfectly presentable, if a bit emaciated. Hilary certainly fancied Billy, but the time-honoured ritual whereby a new goose was penned at the Plantation had yet to take place. Hilary had to wait until the Old Queen was dead, and have it confirmed that he was the sole heir.

  In the meantime, Hilary accepted tributes from the subjects of the mad realm in the form of vodka, undiluted by beer. It was too early to say whether Val Carmichael’s gavage had been a complete success; Hilary was definitely well on the way to full-blown cirrhosis, and, like his farmer, he had an impressive bosom, but, more importantly, he was swollen with pride and stuffed with arrogance.

  Val had cleverly utilized the masochistic tendency he had first intuited in the young Hilary when he saw him through the window of the Wimpy Bar. Thereafter, Val had forced Hilary to swallow so much humiliation that it had stuck in his craw, in much the same way the poultry farmers of the Dordogne made use of their geese’s natural tendency to store grains in their oesophaguses.

  At the St Charles, the gloomy Victorian hospital in back of Ladbroke Grove where Val ended up, a junior registrar had to give him a shot of Ativan to stop him fitting. She was no expert on this spectacular form of self-abuse, which involved relentless terrorist attacks on the temple of the body; but then few are. However, even a cursory examination of Val’s dropsical body was enough to tell her that: ‘This, uh, man – Mr Carmichael, is so close to suffering a portal haemorrhage … Well, I don’t suppose …’ She looked up from the bed, where Val’s head, a crushed grape, lay on the pillow. ‘Mr?’ she queried.

  ‘Stenning,’ the Martian replied matter-of-factly. ‘Peter Stenning. Val – Mr Carmichael – is my cousin. And, yes, I do know what a portal haemorrhage is.’

  Although while in the dusty confines of his adoptive habitat the Martian was notable for his tranquillized manner, strange to relate that here in the St Charles he appeared studiously efficient. And while in the tawny interior of the club his garb and even skin had a tinge that matched his greenish hair, in the cold-old light of the general ward he didn’t look like anything much: just another late-middle-aged, middle-class man wearing slightly anachronistic spectacles and a suede jacket.

  There was little to be done with Val, so the medical staff did nothing: there was no heroism in giving this spavined old nag a painless trip to the knackers. The Martian, however, did plenty. He had told the junior registrar that he was Val’s cousin, and, since he was so willing to undertake the palliative care that they couldn’t be bothered with, they saw no need to inquire any further when he signed the relevant paperwork as next of kin.

  The Martian had Val moved to a private room. He gently petitioned the doctors for all the medication necessary to make the dying man comfortable. All agreed that in the case of this most determined waster of it, it was only a matter of time. A matter of time before pancreatitis, hepatorenal syndrome, hepatitis, cancer and, of course, cirrhosis jostled together in Val’s engorged liver, kidneys and gall bladder, and, finding a common pathway out, ruptured the walls of his weakened arteries, so that blood gushed into his throat and drowned him.

  It was only a matter of time, but, despite waiting for decades now, the Martian was succumbing to a mounting impatience. He went down to the convenience store on the corner of Cambridge Gardens and bought quarter-bottles of vodka; a tacky brand called something mock-Slavic like ‘Gogol’, but that hardly mattered at this stage. It was also a hot summer, but that didn’t matter a damn either.

  The Martian fed Val tiny sips of the burning spirit through a straw, and the patient croaked his gratitude. No one else came to see him – not that he would have been able to recognize them if they had. The Plantation Club members had a well-justified fear of hospitals, given that any self-respecting mental health practitioner would’ve sectioned them more or less on sight.

  Her Ladyship, escorted by Hilary, did make it as far as the main lobby of the St Charles; there, upon seeing an immunization flyer that depicted a doting mother and her winsome baby, she was utterly overcome by her own pathological self-pity and had to adjourn to the nearest pub for much need
ed medicinal gin.

  Hilary himself couldn’t have given a toss about Val. He would only have entered the queerly shaped nook where Val lay – the result of eras of partitioning – in order to press a pillow over Val’s horror mask and extinguish his flame-red nose for ever.

  But he didn’t have to, because the Martian was doing the job for him. Between trips to the offie, the Martian sidled about the St Charles. In an environment at once hurried and yet desultory, the staff barely noticed this nondescript figure; while if a clamp went missing here, and a scalpel there, then they barely noticed that either.

  Over several days the Martian assembled all the equipment he wanted and stashed it in the cupboard in the corner of Val’s nook. Each evening, when visiting hours were over, he went back to his house on Melrose Avenue, off Shoot Up Hill. If our chance wanderer – last seen lurking in the vicinity of Blore Court – had happened to creep through the overgrown front garden to the bay window, he would have seen a curious spectacle through its scummy panes: the Martian, standing stock-still in the middle of a completely empty room, waiting, hour upon hour, for the dawn.

  On the morning of the day Pete Stenning killed Val Carmichael, he left his house as usual and travelled by minicab to Lidgate’s, the organic butcher’s on Holland Park Avenue. Here he collected a pig’s liver that he had ordered by telephone.

  The Martian doubted that the pathologist at the St Charles would wish to conduct a post-mortem: the uncertainty, in Val’s case, would concern not the cause of death but how his life had been maintained for so long. Even if they did perform an autopsy, the pig’s liver might still fool them.

  There was also the undertakers to be considered. Embalming was not an issue – Val’s cadaver was to be cremated forthwith – but the Martian knew some of them could be sharp-eyed; and some liked to handle corpses – that’s why they took on the job. They left it to colleagues to honour the dead and comfort the living, while they poked about in the cremulator.

  The Martian wasn’t too bothered if his subterfuge was discovered. He was not an entity characterized by a sense of humour, let alone irony, but he did like to leave his mark. Much as Trouget blobbed three dots of paint in the bottom-right-hand corner of his canvases – thereby increasing their value ten-thousandfold – so the Martian considered his transplants a form of signature.

  The Martian had a good feel about this morning, believing he had got his timing exactly right. He stopped at the convenience store for a bottle of Gogol that he concealed in the inside pocket of his suede jacket. Even this late in the procedure there was still the possibility of discovery and that would make things … awkward.

  The pedestrians hurrying towards Ladbroke Grove tube station swarmed past the Martian not like flies – such an image suggests fat and hairy bluebottles – but midges fizzing over a puddle; while the vehicles coursing in the roadway had all the mass and heft of mosquitoes dallying above diaphanous netting. It was the same at the St Charles, where the medical and auxiliary staff swarmed through the corridors much as termites pullulate in a mound, while the patients lay in their beds: black and white grubs, nourished with pap.

  The Martian moved through all this mini-beastliness decisively. If our chance wanderer had been back on hand, and noticed that this otherwise forgettable man, with his greenish hair – the result, no doubt, of a duff dye-job – seemed out of joint with his surroundings –or, more specifically, out of time with them: jibing the underlying biological rhythms of human life – then that would have been a very fine piece of observation.

  For, while one of the reasons the Martian had chosen the Plantation as his sphere of activity, and Val Carmichael as the subject of his attentions, was that the very stasis of the club – where it could take the best part of an afternoon for a member to make it from bar to toilet and back again – made it easier for him to calibrate to the behaviour of creatures who were, to him, as mayflies are to us, none the less, he had disciplined himself so well that he could not only communicate with them – a prerequisite, all would agree, of any successful animal husbandry – but also engage in intercourse with those creatures who were, to humans, as frenetic and transitory as we are to him.

  The Martian could catch a fly in his nicotine-stained fingers – and talk to it.

  Speeding up, slowing down, but mostly in sync – as a computer-generated effect is edited into an early silent film – the Martian went about his work. Once in Val’s nook he became a blur: feeding Val sips of vodka through the straw; putting a frame beneath the bedclothes to give himself ease of access to the abdomen; removing the instruments and further equipment he required from the cupboard, then arranging these under the bed.

  Timing was crucial: for the product to have the highest possible value, it had to be removed, entire, at the precise moment when the portal haemorrhage occurred. Too early and there would be too much blood in the liver; too late and there would be too little.

  In the centuries since the Martian – or another of his kind – had nudged humans in the direction of ‘discovering’ the distillation of alcohol, there had been a few scores of them at work during any given epoch. All sorts of methods had been tried in order to perfect this gavage. The Martian had himself developed many different techniques, from performing ‘split-liver’ transplants of cirrhotic organs into the bodies of São Paulo street urchins, then tending them until harvest, to working with hebephrenic living ‘donors’. He had force-fed his human geese with fine burgundies, arrack, poteen and cider; he had soused them with Marsala and drenched them with ale. But, after centuries of experimentation, he had decided that the best possible results were achieved when the gavage was undertaken at a natural pace, with voluntary subjects.

  Pure grain alcohol imparted the most nodulous appearance to the necrotic tissue – a finish that was highly sought after by the Martian’s gourmet clients.

  Feeling the cold metal of the frame press his flesh, Val surfaced from the mire of his moribund brain. Seeing the concern on the Martian’s face mask, he whined, ‘Giss some acqua, Marshy’, and when his carer obliged with the Gogol, Val sank back on the pillow, sighing, ‘I’m croaking, Marshy, you cunt.’

  The Martian nodded sympathetically to indicate that this was indeed true.

  ‘Lissen.’ Val’s eyes, stripped of their shades, glittered unnaturally. ‘I ain’t got long, Marshy, but you’ll grant an omi-paloni ’is final wish – won’cher?’

  Again, the Martian nodded.

  ‘Juss yer lapper, cunt.’ Val groped for the Martian’s hand. ‘I ain’t after a bloody jarry – only a fucking sherman.’

  Even if the Martian hadn’t understood Polari – which he did, perfectly – the dying man’s feeble motions would have instructed him. As it was, Val’s desires coincided perfectly with his own: with his hand on Val’s penis, the Martian could both increase Val’s sluggish heart rate, and sense the precise moment when the rotten wall of his portal vein ruptured.

  Culinary savants differed on the question of how an animal’s state of mind affected the quality of its liver, but most agreed that fear and disillusionment engendered a pleasing deliquescence to the fat-engorged tissue. With the more philosophically inclined beasts, it was even worth while giving them a snapshot – as much as their limited minds could take in – of the wider picture.

  As he masturbated Val, the Martian spoke to him urgently. It would be onerous to translate from the Cockney, the back-slang and the Polari he employed, but the substance of what he had to relate was that Val’s entire life had been leading up to this: at the very instant of his expiration, he, the Martian, would cut out Val’s rotten liver.

  So it was that Val Carmichael died, eyes wide with astonishment and horror, a final valedictory ‘Cuuuunt’ rattling between his bluing lips.

  At once the Martian set to work properly, his hands a blur beneath the covers as he made the incision in the upper abdomen, then clamped and sutured with machine rapidity. A passing nurse – a wanderer in this city of death – chanced to pok
e her nose into the nook and, noting that Val’s own nose was losing its angry hue, taxed the Martian: ‘Is Mr Carmichael all right?’

  And even though at that precise moment the Martian was speedily dividing all the ligamentous attachments – common bile duct, hepatic artery, portal vein – that held Val’s liver snug in his abdominal cavity, he had also had the foresight to close the dead man’s eyes and was able to say, with believable sincerity, ‘He’s just resting, sister, I think he had a difficult night.’

  Convinced, the nurse moved off, leaving the Martian to complete in twelve minutes an operation that would have taken a skilled human surgeon – were he minded to transplant a pig’s liver into a man – some five or six hours.

  Pausing for a fragment of a second to admire the perfection of the foie humain entier that he had removed – its pleasing heft, its bloody-beige marbling, its glistening wartiness – the Martian wrapped it in the greaseproof paper Lidgate’s had provided and popped it into his string shopping bag.

  Instruments wiped and stashed, bed rearranged and cadaver rearranged in it, the Martian left the nook without a backward glance. No poultry keeper in the Dordogne – no matter how mimsy or sentimental – sticks around to mourn a goose; and I think we can all concur that, as geese go, Val Carmichael was one of the least endearing.

  Dear, perceptive reader, you will have grasped by now that Peter Stenning, aka ‘the Martian’ (and aka, for that matter, ‘Peter Stenning’), was an extraterrestrial – an ‘alien’ in common parlance. To see him wend his way through the mid-morning traffic on Ladbroke Grove – resisting a strong impulse to break into a run faster than the 100-metre World Record holder – would have been enough to confirm this for an acute observer; no sixty-something on earth has such a swift and supple gait.

  But were I to tell you that, should he have wished to, the Martian could have taken to the air, flipping, rolling and weaving through the power lines, and between the chimney pots, at twice the speed of sound, I would, perhaps, stretch your credulity; or, rather, invite you to speculate on the nature of the Martian’s real appearance, shorn of the fleshly overall of his assumed humanity.