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

The toilet properly stank.

When the Typist died in St Tom’s it had been a deeply disinfected expiration: she was surrounded only by the ample flesh of the Filipina cleaner from the Plantation. After the funeral Maria had drunk her own bleach. No one had known they were that close, let alone ‘Minge monkeys!’, as Val had spat. He neglected to hire another.

As for Hilary, he didn’t bother with the wiping of wipeable surfaces — except with his index finger. Bending to tap the creamy granules on to the dirty tiling, he admired the way the young piss-artists’ fingers had mixed a gouache from the residue of previous snorts and left smeary contrails on this tiny inverted sky.

They only just made it to Trouget’s retrospective that night. The same corte`ge pulled up on Belvedere Road, and, scattering pork scratchings from the folds of their clothes, the members crept up under the concrete skirts of the Hayward Gallery. It was the last time that Val Carmichael was seen out in public. No matter the hogsheads of vodka and the butts of tonic; no matter the muffling of the sound and the fading of the light; no matter the high dive his psyche was taking into the pool of total oblivion — he could still hear it perfectly when a young woman (young enough, in a parallel world, to have been his granddaughter), wearing a miniskirt that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Plantation the year Val took the club over, cried out: ‘Eurgh! Look at that old woman’s disgusting nose.’

She was drunk, of course.

Those last few months the Martian came in from Kilburn by minicab to pick up Val from his flat in King’s Cross. It was summer, and the Martian chose to ignore the flies dogfighting over the dirty dishes in the sink, and the soiled underwear that, each night, was torn from Val’s rotting body by the impact of sleep. Once a week the Martian brought fresh underwear for Val: seven pairs of Y-fronts.

Twice a week they called in at the Parkside Medical Centre on Dean Street, where Val’s bandolier of pill pots was refilled by an idealistic young doctor, who felt himself — with his clientele of street sleepers, junkies and drunks — to be performing noble triage on the urban battlefield. This general practitioner — who himself liked to smoke dope in front of foreign cinema — would have regarded it as the most reactionary paternalism to have in any way implied, let alone said, that he thought Val should stop, or even moderate, his drinking.

Instead, favouring an ‘interpersonal’ approach, Val’s doctor embraced the fetor and the cunty chatter, as if these were, respectively, the odour of good food and the table talk of a sagacious wit. Inscrutable, the Martian propped himself by the door and fiddled with the Velcro on a blood-pressure cuff. Then, to fill in time until the Boy opened up the club, Val stopped at the Coach and Horses, while the Martian went to fill his prescriptions at Bliss on Shaftesbury Avenue.

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.