Liver

by Will Self

  Their motions those of sea creatures just evolved to move on land, the lovers resume the making of it; they creep over, then under, one another. Prometheus rears back, her trapezius muscles gripped like handlebars; this is not the explosion that tore Athene’s clothing from her, hurling it across the beech flooring in the blast pattern of lust; this is ruminative lovemaking, as infinitely tender and considerately solipsistic as two geriatrics masturbating with each other’s hands.

  It is completely dark, yet seagulls are still mucking around the containers piled behind the chainlink, razor-wire and concrete fencing. Containers full of everything worth having – food, electrical goods, furniture, paper, metal, plastic, old photos, letters, locks of hair – that cannot be matched to anyone that wants it. The containers are waiting for dawn, when they will be grabbed, then winched on to barges, before being floated downriver from the Wandsworth Solid Waste Transfer Station to landfills on the Essex marshes.

  The griffon vulture flies up to the massive beam of the winch, then accepts the gulls’ mobbing as of right, smiling inscrutably out from the grey riot of their wings. Lazily, she takes once more to the sky; eighty feet up she yaws, then tacks across to the Hurlingham, then back to the Heliport, then from there to Chelsea Harbour, until her course takes her in past the Peace Pagoda to dock in one of the avenues of planes running along Battersea Park Parade.

  The feral smell they sense as fear incarnate blows through dank boughs and raggy leaves, to reach blackbirds, pigeons – crows, even – and wake them from their citified sleep, safe under sodium lights. They limp into the air. As with the Wandsworth gulls, the griffon accepts their mobbing gracefully. Trailing the scrappy little airforce, she dallies over the floodlit tennis courts, then spirals up, the smaller birds falling away, fighter cover that has failed to bring the liver-freighter down.

  Up, banking past the clapboard gasometer, soaring between the signature chimneys of the power station, then wheeling back round to approach Chelsea Bridge Wharf, not, as its developers might have wished, to take ‘Another Look’ – their own end-line for this terminally uninteresting development – but in order to land on the topmost of the curved balconies, which, in as much as they resemble jetties at all, are ones only suitable for the loading and unloading of brioche.

  So considerate, the vulture, so intuitive; she enters with the aplomb of a third lover, en route to join the two entwined on the futon. Hearing the rustle and scratch as she beaks, then necks open the sliding glass door, Prometheus stirs but does not turn over – he knows who it is. Athene’s hip is smooth and rounded in his palm, her wheaten belly rising against his finger tips. In pleasured drowse, she senses the cold air and murmurs a sing-song, ‘Y’all right, love?’ Only to be reassured by his face pressing further into the arch of her neck.

  The vulture insinuates her head under the duvet, and Prometheus bites his lips hard enough to draw blood as she makes her expert incision, reopening a wound only superficially healed. As the bird feeds, her feathers – black, buff and white alike – are suffused with the pinkish wash of the external floodlights; a colour scheme that will, its developers hope, make of the wharf a pleasing property sweetmeat. Highly edible.

  With pulp-tipped claws the grape stalk pulls itself out of the bin, while inside Prometheus’s fridge an old Roquefort rind shudders into life; then a celery stalk rocks, rolls and tips upright. For a split-second the earth stops spinning and its magnetic field is neutralized: the fridge door unsuckers itself. Rind of Roquefort, stalk of celery, four squares of Swiss milk chocolate – all sprout cartoon limbs as they jump down to the white beech floor; in the fridge light they jeté to join the pirouetting grape stalk.

  Throughout the wharf women light scented candles as they make ready to recline in tubs frothing with stress-busting bubbles, and men surf channels to rediscover the Discovery Channel. They are oblivious, seized only by relaxation, gripped by little more than reverie. So it is that the contents of their fridges and freezers are able to rustle, crack and rumble into life.

  Lifts rush down into precisely ruled courtyards where bought rocks cluster in frigid beds and water features; the animated foodstuffs waltz out of their metal doors. The double-sized figures of wholesome chaps and winsome chapesses tear themselves from the billboards, where for four seasons they’ve languished tapping little ends with huge teaspoons. These demigods and demigoddesses feel not the cruel west wind that parts their mighty terry-towelling robes; they round up the food, cajoling frozen chickens, lassoing pots of clotted cream, trawling bags of Ethiopian sugar-snap beans and arresting jars of pesto. The subdued food is shovelled into an immense cone that one young Hercules has fashioned from a sheet of corrugated iron torn from a nearby scaffold.

  The billboard deities choreograph a tableau gigantesque around this horn of left-over plenty – and this, truly, is worth Another Look. Then, with no sense of movement, no crude disjunction, we’re back in the penthouse, back in the kitchen, back in the fridge – where a single slim tin of energy drink, lit by its own inner taurine and decorated with the silhouette of a naked youth that’s blazoned ‘Ganymede Up All Nite’, half bows, crunching itself a waist.

  And still the vulture feeds, its frightful ruff saturated with Prometheus’s blood.

  Doc Ben doesn’t, as a rule, do house calls. ‘Whadda vey fink eye am,’ he says dropping into Mockney for the benefit of his Portia, ‘a fucking tart?’ A strange denial, because that’s precisely what he is: after all, he puts himself about by the hour and deals drugs on the side – although, admittedly, not very nice ones. Doing out-calls is not the distinction between medical whoring and doctoring.

  Nevertheless, Doc Ben feels differently about Prometheus: the guy is three chords short of a punk song, too crazy even to be considered as a proper patient. He revolves through the Harley Street consulting room every fortnight, his liver rotten to the core, then off he pops, it’s almost as if … But Doc Ben is way too preoccupied to make the diagnosis any open-minded practitioner would be compelled to: that Prometheus’s liver is being eaten away at, then spontaneously regenerated. Way too preoccupied by finding a parking place for his Porsche – and not just any berth. The underground car park at the wharf is way wrong; no security, poorly illuminated, and the mad axeman – who’s actually an amateurishly poor plucker – has two Gibson Les Pauls in the boot worth a cool fifteen grand.

  When he eventually finds a safe on-road space, then ascends the lift, Doc Ben discovers Athene waiting for him at the front door to the penthouse. A stench of organ failure hangs in the costly void. Below the plate glass prow of the block, the woolly-brown river knits and pearls itself. Lying face down on the futon, the impassioned lover of the night before resembles a used condom stuffed with offal. There’s a large bloodstain by his latex belly.

  Doc Ben thinks, there’s always more sex the morning after than there was the night before; he has a nose for these scents, and Athene hasn’t showered, only pulled on underwear, skirt and blouse, rolled-up stockings. He clocks the hot veins on the insides of her wrists as she presses her razor-thin mobile phone to her cheek. Idly wondering how the fuck does he get it up, Doc Ben kneels to give the adman a rare probe.

  ‘He discharged himself from the London Clinic yesterday, did he tell you?’

  Athene, who has introduced herself only as ‘a friend’, blanches.

  ‘He was meant to have a liver shunt put in today, but it’s too late for that now. There’s massive distension here – his tummy is full of blood.’

  Doc Ben is a good enough doctor, just, to notice this; although not good enough to spot the long, curved feather that’s wedged between patient and mattress. ‘I’m gonna call for an ambulance – he needs to be in an intensive-care unit as soon as possible. Do you know who his next of kin are, Ms …’

  ‘Athene,’ she concedes, then asks, ‘Is he going to die?’

  ‘Die? I dunno about that.’ He could be speculating on poor ticket sales for a Deep Purple reunion gig, so mundane is his tone
. ‘I can tell you this: if he can be stabilized – and that’s a fairly big if – he’ll need a liver transplant, deffo. His liver’s …’ He pauses, regarding her well-used voluptuousness at the same time as he, belatedly, registers her name; then allows himself a definitive ‘fucked’.

  The griffon vulture watches from the summit of the north-west chimney of Battersea Power Station as Prometheus is stretchered from Chelsea Bridge Wharf to the waiting ambulance. She’s driven away the peregrine falcons – London’s sole pair – whose nesting site is this modernist ruin: a redbrick cliff-face, saturated with sulphuric acid and carbon, the best monument possible to humankind’s transmogrification of the earth.

  From her lofty vantage, the vulture stares down on traffic, river, park greenery and the mop-top of Athene, who skips to the far side of the road, intent on hailing a cab to get her away from this awful wharf.

  ★

  A fortnight later Epimetheus met up with Neil Bolton for a drink at the Sealink Club. Epimetheus didn’t bother much with the Sealink any more; the ad industry’s social interaction, such as it was, had headed east, to where the new generation of mono-nominal agencies – Mother, Naked, Poke, Dare and Titan itself – had gone to ground amidst the artists’ studios and Bangladeshi sweat shops of Whitechapel and Shoreditch.

  As for Bolton, he’d never been an habitué of the Sealink, which, despite having suffered new owners and revamped decor at least twice in the past decade, still had a car-ferry ambience, what with its safety lights caught in wire basketry, three-legged triangular chairs and raised door sills. The gents’ urinal was a waterfall in a zinc trench, the stalls a storm in a space shuttle. This, the quintessence of chic circa 1980, was all far too modish for Bolton, who longed to strip the skirts from the yattering women who frequented the club, if only to put them on the table legs.

  Bolton, who in recent years had become the narrator of a fiendishly successful TV sketch show – think both spin-off dolls and hagiographies of its originators in the qualities; think of catchphrases as widespread and involuntary as sneezes – now gave himself airs that would’ve been insufferable coming from Kean. When Epimetheus came in, Bolton was standing centre bar, his big fleshy face hanging in the air like a bruise, poorly bandaged with several loops of a long woollen scarf. He was holding forth to the barman, and his basso voice, like Pavlov’s tinkling bell, recalled insistently to the minds of all who were hearing it the mineral water, meat, detergent and, latterly, energy drink it had been used to advertise, as it rumbled through the bar, inexorable as waves crashing on a shingle beach.

  Spotting Epimetheus, Bolton boomed, ‘My dear boy, how’s Prometheus?’

  ‘He’s fine, really Neil.’ Epimetheus ordered a gin and tonic.

  ‘That’s not what I hear,’ Bolton told everyone. ‘I’ve heard he’s in and out of hospital every few days – some sort of liver thing.’

  Liver thing. Bolton managed to deliver the words with coloratura at once bloody and bilious. Liver things – Bolton knew all about these: his last decade or so had been a cellular go-round, from bar, to recording studio, to rehab, and back again.

  ‘Shush, Neil.’ Epimetheus went so far as to take the old thespian by his boneless arm and give it a squeeze. ‘Please, I don’t want any more talk.’

  This was a futile admonition, given that Bolton was nothing but talk; besides, the cutting-edge creatives may no longer have supped at the Sealink, but their older, blunter colleagues were all there: client directors, chief strategy officers and group accountants from Abbott Mead Vickers, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, and Saatchi and Saatchi, who, while they may have lost the ability to create particular standout, still retained good noses for the bouquet of distress and the stench of failure.

  ‘He’s absolutely fine,’ Epimetheus continued, signalling to the barman to get them both another drink. ‘As it happens, we’ve gotta big pitch tomorrow, Hermes.’

  ‘Scarves?’ Bolton said, tugging on his own.

  ‘No, the other lot – mobile phones.’

  This wasn’t a work drink. At this point in his liverish life cycle Bolton was useless to Titan; he was so bloated with fine wines and TV residuals that he’d completely forgotten the voice-over he’d done for Zeus mineral water only ten days previously, and instead blethered on about his finest theatrical performances. His Falstaff (Southampton Gala), his Henry Higgins (Stamford Arts Centre) and, of course, his triumphant Hamm at the Peacock.

  Epimetheus, whose knowledge of Beckett’s plays was sketchy, kept hearing Endgame as ‘end-line’, which dragged him back to advertising, and his own naive faith in luxury goods, graven images and idols with everything of clay. Which dragged him back to … Pandora, who had brought oodles of vice and insanity into his life.

  The previous evening he had arrived back from Old Street to find her fucking a stranger in his own bed. Epimetheus drubbed the man from the place; his last sight of him was a bare bottom impressed with the tread of his boot. He threw the man’s clothing out the window, then had to endure Pandora’s full-fledged psychotic breakdown: handwashing without soap or water; a ‘Pakki’ called Andy beating her, who likewise wasn’t there; then the spewing of five dirty tongues with her delicious little one. And then – shameful this – he ravished her, after which they did drugs together.

  In the ten days since she had moved into his loft, Pandora had begun to abstract Epimetheus’s goods. They were bizarre thefts – a single cuff link one day, a solo stereo speaker the next. The smooth materiality of his existence was being peppered with holes – yet still he cleaved to her; they would, he avowedly hoped, be together in old age, snuggling down into the soft ruin of their bodies.

  Hence this get-together with Bolton, for advice on where Epimetheus could send his love so that she could ‘get better’. Who better than Bolton, who’d done ’em all? Primary treatments, secondary ones; halfway houses, three-quarter ones; then first-through-third-stage sojourns. Bolton, slobbing out in front of wonky tellies watching fake dramas, while the real tragedy of his life was right to hand – at his feet, where poorly laid carpet tiles curled up from the carpet tiles that had been poorly laid by the last batch of recovering alcoholics.

  Ach! Bolton! So washed away by the longshore drift of his alcoholism that he could no longer tell which group he was not a part of. Were these stacking chairs circled for talking or drinking therapy? How should he pitch this old tale of derring-tipsy-do, as pathos, bathos or self-flagellating realism? In his old haunt, the Plantation Club, Bolton was nothing but a joke – and a bad one. To abandon his drinking comrades once was a betrayal; to do it again and again was their equivalent of a war crime. Hilary, the Plantation’s commanding officer, had stripped Bolton of his old moniker and given him a new one; he was no longer ‘the Extra’ but only ‘the Prop’; because, despite having been barred, he still insisted on coming back and propping himself against it. The bar, that is.

  Epimetheus was drunker than Bolton, and the actor did indeed have to prop the adman up, as, wavering in and out of blackout, they proceeded to Blore Court by way of Piccadilly Circus.

  Sony PlayStations and Nicorette patches; Halifax mortgages and Nokia mobile phones; Coca-Cola and depilatory cream; the giant girlies of a mythic present – apple-cheeked Hesperides, star-fucking Pleiades, Hyades suffering with water retention – rode juggernauts and scaled the sides of buildings in their armour of lights. Cars transformed into robots and duelled down Lower Regent Street, while Eros fired arrows that were tipped with soft-centred milk chocolates.

  Epimetheus reeled through the throng, each face a semitransparent pop-up ident swelling in his monitors: clay faces, not yet set, gashes for mouths, indentations for eyes, slick with the water they swigged from plastic bottles, each labelled with a rusty tap-tap-tap graphic. Overhead, the electronic signboards bellied out, their surface tension a deliquescent blare. Clay and water, flesh and.

  Blood and bile flowed through the veins of the liverish city; coiled conduits that merged, then branched out into the
biliary tree of Soho. In Blore Court the two drunks tumbled through the visceral peritoneum, before being sucked into the porta hepatis. They staggered on the stairs, slammed against the door of Mr Vogel’s long-dormant import business, recovered themselves, fell up the next flight, collapsed through the filthy plywood door – its baize long since gone – and, partially recovering themselves, entered the bar-room with all the nonchalance of five-year-olds stealing biscuits.

  Hilary was on his stool by the cash register, an illegal cigarette between washing-up-glove fingers, a vodka and tonic in front of him. Behind the bar, Stevie was slotting a new bottle of Bacardi into an optic, while on the other side the Cunt and the Poof raised their animalistic faces from small pools of alcohol.

  The smoking ban had been in force for only a few months, yet witnessing someone smoking in a bar was like seeing an old film. Epimetheus’s lazy eyes rolled down the blue-grey grooves of smoke to where these merged with the inflamed veins networking Hilary’s swollen nose. He looked away, and discovered the Martian deep in conversation with Isobel Beddoes, who, since she had been released from jail in Switzerland, had assumed the position formerly occupied by Her Ladyship. Margery De Freitas, dead drunk for years; now simply dead.

  Isobel – known in the Plantation as ‘Come-to-Beddoes’ – was tolerated by Hilary because she had an inheritance to squander. Her miserable devotion to him was another bad joke. Sometimes he made her fuck Jones, the resident cocaine dealer, in return for a gramme for them to split – he and Jones, that is.

  There were two or three other members in the club – a Scots sculptor who specialized in Holocaust memorials, a fashion writer for a mid-market tabloid, Cal Devenish, the ailing television personality and one-time literary enfant terrible – but even to Epimetheus’s untutored eye they were an irrelevance. He saw only the old ads for cable-knit cardigans tacked to the bamboo-patterned wallpaper; the gibbous letters of an ancient flyer that bellowed BLACK SABBATH AT THE MARQUEE CLUB; and a tin hoarding showing two cloth-capped kids, their nostrils flared to suck in a meaty ribbon, which had had its slogan customized to read ‘Ah! Cunto’.