Liver

by Will Self

  On a Tuesday afternoon in November?

  Andy goaded his mule – ‘Going’ – and handed her the remaining rocks of crack and pellets of heroin, all wrapped up once more. She popped the stoppers in her cheeks. They exited the bedroom, Andy moving with the slow lollop of a creature that knows how to conserve its evil energy. He paused, seeing Bev by the coffee table, and snapped at Georgie, ‘No blacks. I told you no blacks. I won’t come by here if there’re blacks.’ Then he headed for the front door, Pandora walking to heel.

  Before he reached it the buzzer went. The foamy, cracky vibe shuddered, then popped. Georgie squeezed past Andy to get to the intercom. ‘Who izzit?’ she demanded. ‘Jones’ crackled back at her.

  Jones. She could see him on the poxy screen in his trademark, wide-lapelled velvet jacket, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Jones, partially sighted behind shades-for-all-seasons. Jones, looming on a grey day with his white black man shtick. Jones, who, like a sponging relative, invariably turned up exactly when Sunday lunch was being served. Jones, who sold powders in the West End drinking clubs. Jones, who held court at Picasso’s on the King’s Road with a big bunch of keys squatting on his crotch. Jones … but don’t fret, we’ll soon’ve seen the last of him: split ends on sharp shoulders.

  ‘Let him in,’ Andy commanded; then they all waited until there came a knock on the front door of the flat. Georgie heaved it open, sucking Jones and another man into the cramped vestibule. They all stood silently for several seconds – Pandora, Georgie, Andy, Billy, Jones and the new man – recompressing in the airlock of their drug paranoia. Presently, Andy – who knew Jones – said, ‘You should’ve called.’ Then he and his mule disappeared off up the carpeted mesa.

  It took a while for the party to get back under way. Georgie remonstrated with Jones: no call – and who’s this, then? This was, Jones explained, Cal Devenish, the bad-boy writer, whom he’d picked up at the Plantation Club in Soho. The celebrated Plantation – where there was a wake going on for the world-famous painter Trouget. Jones related these things breathlessly, as if they were momentous: names, reputations, achievements – they meant nothing to him, although he knew they had currency.

  Not much with Georgie; she wasn’t impressed by Jones dropping Trouget’s name, despite death being a career move she herself was about to make. As for Devenish, she’d heard his name in her arts programme producing days; seen him at parties as well. She knew nothing of his work, but held fast to the received opinion that it was glib, and that he was an egomaniacal pasticheur. However, his bona fides as an addict weren’t in doubt; he hovered there in the vestibule, his stringy form dangling from his swollen head, its taut, rubbery surface dimpled with acne scars, puckered up with fresh scabs. At night, in front of the mirror, Devenish picked away at what other people thought he was – distressing his public image, while destroying the private individual.

  ‘I, yeah – sorry,’ he said to Georgie, for he’d immediately grasped that she was the chatelaine. ‘I was looking for a bit of … gear? And Jones –’

  ‘Come in, come in.’ Georgie was all scary smiles, Billy bowed and scraped, because Andy had left a little smidgen-wigeon-pigeon behind on tick, and that meant there was a mark-up to be had. The beat combo struck up again as they trooped past the Dexion shelving; the Amazonian girl with the Mary Quant crop gyrated by the poolside, the foamy beast reanimated.

  Billy hustled around, making the introductions, finding Jones and Devenish seats, explaining to Bev that this was a real writer, who had written real books. Billy kept taking sidelong looks at Cal: assessing his financial potential, certainly, but also taken by the other man’s air of hopeless bewilderment.

  Cal Devenish was quite drunk, a little coked up and oozing shame. Nowadays, he left a silvery trail of shame wherever he went; and, still more snail-like, he carried his bed of shame with him. He had reached a stage where seconds of euphoria cost him weeks of abject self-loathing. He was on his way to Finland, to promote one of his books that was being published there, and had only dropped into the Plantation to have a single drink and to commiserate with Hilary Edmonds on his great financial loss.

  There was Jones with his white lines – and now Cal was sticky with Scotch, bristling with feathery cocaine and being ridden out of town on a rail. He took a seat next to Tony Riley, a bit disgusted by the dying man in the oxygen mask – but then that was only natural. He got out cashpoint-ironed twenties and bought into a rock of crack that Bev was crumbling into the foiled mouth of an Evian bottle pipe. All the while Billy watched.

  This Devenish, could he be another Hrundi V. Bakshi? Whited up, and playing his superficial role, while inside of himself he dropped Michele Monet off at her sherbet-yellow Art Deco apartment block? Was Cal, like Billy, suggesting that Michele hang on to the cowboy hat that Wyoming Bill Kelso had given him; suggesting this, so that very soon he could call her up and, on the pretext of getting it back, ask for a date?

  Oh, no, Cal Devenish wasn’t at The Party at all. With his first hit on the crack pipe all the fuzzy foam had condensed into icebergs clashing on the frozen Baltic. What would Helsinki be like, Cal wondered. He suspected exactly the same as London, except for better modern architecture, together with publishers, journalists and publicists who appeared troll-like.

  Georgie came into the room and passed the writer a pellet of heroin. Billy scampered to fetch the mirror and, placing it on the coffee table in front of Cal, said, ‘Any chance of a little bump, mate?’ Then added, ‘D’you want me to get you some works?’

  Cal looked up and then around at the drugged bedlam: Tony, huffing and puffing and blowing his body down; Bev, talking arse about Conrad of all things; Jeremy, squatting in the corner, his eyes saucers that needed washing up. He thought of the late Trouget’s paintings – what might they be worth now? Those solid bourgeois and yelping dogs, upended and gibbeted by his barbed brush, their faces either obscured or rendered far too vividly.

  ‘No,’ Cal told Billy. ‘No, thanks, I’m gonna snort some, but you can take enough for a hit if you want.’

  Billy could take some, because Cal knew there would never be enough to sate himself. He was going to be hungry for ever. Cal tapped some of the beige powder on to the smeary mirror, had elves been skating on it? Billy, by way of being a good egg, rolled up his one remaining fiver and passed it to the writer. The parrot of addiction – unlike the owl of Minerva – will fly at any time of the day or night; so it flapped across the clearing from the serving hatch to land on Cal Devenish’s shoulder.

  If Cal had troubled to unroll the banknote, he would have seen the fresh bloodstain that wavered along its edge: an EEG that plotted a fine madness. Whose blood was it? Does this matter? I – we – told you at the outset, this was never a mystery, or a crime procedural – this was never to do with who done it, only who got it. Or us.

  Cal bent to rub noses with his doppelganger at the same time as he shoved the rolled-up note into his already raw nostril. ‘Slap’, the sharp paper edge, struck the mirror at one end, while ‘stick’, the other end, burrowed into his mucus membrane. Snuffling, feeling the numbing burn, Cal dabbed at the blood that dripped from his nose, then asked Billy, ‘You couldn’t get me a tissue, could you?’

  As if he could blow us – me – out!

  Where is the redemption in all this? Where is the reformed character on day-release from prison, teaching kids with learning difficulties and through them rediscovering his shared humanity? We don’t know. I’ll tell you one thing, though, our flight’s been called – and we simply love flying. C’mon, Cal, up you get. That’s OK, you look perfectly presentable – apart from your messed-up face. Still, not much chance of any official interest in a flight to Helsinki.

  If he were to get a pull? We’re not bothered – we like prison as much as flying. Possibly more. C’mon, Cal, Gate 57, one foot in front of the other, there’s a good chap. Past the windy horse of a cleaner in the shafts of his disinfecting cart; past Dixons and Wetherspoon’s; past
W. H. Smith’s and the Duty Free hangar.

  No, Cal, that’s not the way to approach a travelator – anyone who’s anyone walks along it, doesn’t just stand there. Ho-hum, we’re going to be with you for a long time – years in all likelihood – so I suppose we better get used to your petty vagaries, your inability to do one thing properly at once.

  At least we’re well cushioned in here, buffered by blood and bile in our basket of lobules, ducts and veins. Foie humain, Leberknödel Suppe, Scottie’s Liver Treats – we love ’em all. But most of all we relish birdy num-num. Birdy num-num. Num-num. Num.