Will Self - Liver - A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes

We may set to one side the fact that Val was also suffering from hepatic encephalopathy — with all the brain-warping confusion that this entailed — because, after all, since he had been continuously drunk since the Macmillan premiership, it was impossible for him, or anyone else, to tell where one kind of mental discombobulation blundered into the other.

Even so, given the radical internal restructuring of Val Carmichael that those hectolitres of vodka and tonic — interspersed with the very occasional bottle of ’poo — had undertaken, it is strange to note that his view of his body remained curiously un-differentiated: a child’s conception of a plasticine blob that might be rolled into a ball, then a sausage, then a snake, yet remaining throughout the same stuff of Life.

Perhaps this is the real saving grace of chronic alcoholism? That, as the completion date is neared, and the architecture of the liver has been fatally altered — portal hypertension opening the umbilical vein to the portal venous system, so the entire property is sprayed with blood — its sitting tenant stays put, blissfully unaware.

Poised on his stool by the till, Val’s quivering wings parted, then married, as he lifted the V & T to his creased lips. His thorax had impacted, throwing into upsetting prominence his gynaecomastic tits. His alcohol-induced hypogonadism meant that he had to sit with his stick thighs parted: his soiled flies were an open incitement to. nothing. He smelt of piss and death and booze and cigarette smoke.

In common with the Red Admiral’s wing tips, all the extremities of Val’s body were tawny; a good match, if it could have been contrived, to the dappled beige-brown, russet-yellow of his liver. Kirrhos , the Greek for ‘tawny’, is the root of ‘cirrhosis’, and as the absinthe light from the sash window spilt on to the dusty carpet and spattered the bamboo-patterned wallpaper, it turned the whole interior of the Plantation tawny. Thus Val was superbly camouflaged: all of him but the dreadful beak, as bright and hollow and heavy as a hornbill’s.

Hilary stood behind the bar smearing glasses and swapping cunts with the Dog, the Poof, the Cunt and the Extra. The years had not been kind to the Boy either, extinguishing every last glint in him of party-time attractiveness, while helping him into the whole-body fat-coat of alcoholic middle age, then showing him, firmly, to the door.

Perversely, it was only now that it was too late, that Hilary dared to assert some independence, abandoning his striped jersey for a woeful bovver boy costume of cropped Levis, white T-shirt and red braces. However, it wasn’t much of a breakaway, because the Boy remained in sync with the older members, whose butterfly collars, flowery ties and Fair Isle tank tops were once again in fashion. In sync with them, and also with the replacements for His Nibs and the Typist; newborn members, who, well lubricated, had slid into the cauls of their predecessors.

They were so hip that it hurt: a posse of young conceptual artists, whose bloody flux of creation — preserved animal carcasses, shit-daubed canvases, inflatable wank dollies — was at that very moment coagulating into a big scab of success on the cultural body that would be picked away at by the critics for decades to come.

It had been Hilary himself who had reached out to these Soho apprentices and invited them to join the Plantation’s death cult. Voodoo Val thrust his Embassy filter in their downy faces, and, pronouncing proscription, whined, ‘Look what the cunt’s dragged in’, once, twice, three times an afternoon, but they paid no attention. There was a new wind blowing through the trompe l’oeil bamboo, an awareness that soon enough the old overseer would be gone.

In the meanwhile, the Martian sidled up to the bar and got a round in: a Campari and soda for the Poof, whose nights in white satin were now over. Instead of scaling legs-up-to-her-arse, he was reduced to summitting a mountainous mixed-race girl called Berenice, who lived in a council flat on Brick Lane. His leather coat hung on his shoulders, the flayed skin of a vanquished sex-warrior.

The Martian got a Scotch for the Dog, who, the preceding month, had been offered voluntary redundancy by his one remaining rag, in the way a real dog is ‘offered’ being put down. The Dog snarled at the injustice, and yapped of a cottage outside Dundee, but he was never going to go walkies further than the Coach and Horses, and he died the following year.

‘Bernie?’ the Martian needlessly inquired, and the Cunt growled an equally redundant assent. Hilary poured a second Scotch for the hard man, whose days of intimidation weren’t over, although now it was he who was on the receiving end. Tottering back to his flat at World’s End, he was mercilessly ragged: ‘Look atcha, yer pissed old cunt!’ Everyone on the estate knew him, true enough, but nobody feared him any more.

The Extra was in rehab, emoting in the round of plastic chairs. He had written a letter of amends to Val, apologizing for the nine hundred-some quid he’d racked up on his tab, and asking for the Bard’s Complete Works to be sent into him, the text adapted to contain a half-bottle of vodka. Val used the missive to light a fag, then told the other members it would be better if ‘the cunt were dead’.

Hilary shook hands with the optic and set the highball glass half full of vodka down in front of Val. While the Boy turned to get the tonic — and still, after nearly twenty years, Her Ladyship spluttered, ‘ She should mind her back!’ — Val added half the contents to the Boy’s lager.

No doubt Hilary Edmonds no longer knew what lager should taste like; after all, this mixture of grains had been pumped into him for so long now that uncontaminated pints were as the brown remembered ponds he had splashed in as an ugly gosling. And if we calculate a day of a goose’s gavage to be a year of a human’s, then the job was almost done. Entier, cuit or mi-cuit — which cut of Hilary would Val consume? Or, instead of Hilary frais , would he send the inferior Boy off to be turned into mousse, parfait or even pâté en bloc ?

The Martian headed back to his stool, his vodka and orange in one hand, Her Ladyship’s gin and tonic in the other; there he resumed his position. Even in an environment characterized by stasis, he was the stillest of things. The black rims of his spectacles were more mobile than his watery blue eyes; his greenish hair was no more likely to fly away than a barnacle.

Unlike the other shivering denizens of King Alcohol’s mad realm, the Martian seemed always to keep his head. Some three years before, in an unguarded moment, he’d confessed to Her Ladyship that he’d had to let go of the print shop. ‘Health and Safety cunts,’ he’d muttered; but she was as incurious as a dead cat, and since he kept on getting them in, everyone else assumed he was still working.

Hilary poured the Tosher a flute of ’poo from a freshly opened bottle. ‘Thank you, cunty,’ the painter said and handed him the stack of invitations. ‘Pass them on, will you, Boy?’ Then he was gone. Hilary lifted the flap and stepped between the Dog and the Poof. He headed for the toilet, passing out the invitations as he went.

Trouget seldom stuck it out in the Plantation for long nowadays: the sycophancy of the younger piss-artists sickened him, and, like Val, he professed to be appalled by their cocaine-sniffing. Val grew depressed by the painter’s departures; he knew that whatever élan his era at the Plantation possessed was derived from Trouget’s massive profile alone. In too short a time all cunty witticisms would be forgotten; all that would remain of three decades of barring and bitching, belching and kvetching, would be a blue and white English Heritage plaque at the Wardour Street end of Blore Court that read: Louis Trouget, 1922–1998, was Pissed Here .