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

For the above is by no means exhaustive; we have omitted to mention the snapshots of former patrons, the un-taken-up invitations, the press clippings and ‘outsider’ canvases — their thick surfaces compressed by awful demons — that were stuck to the walls. Nor have we fully inventoried all the World Cup Willies, stolen pub ashtrays, vintage biscuit tins, voodoo dolls, brass bells, snow globes, and several more skip-loads of useless tat that had been deposited over the decades by decorating skills that were glacial in their slow indifference.

Indeed, given that our chance wanderer, had he happened upon the Plantation Club in 1999, would have found its appearance unaltered from 1989, 1979 or even 1969, it’s questionable whether we can speak of this interior as being ‘decorated’ in any meaningful sense of the word at all; rather, the contents of the club were more akin to the symbol set gathered together by a shaman, then arranged and rearranged in the pursuit of magical effects.

With this one proviso: the shaman of the Plantation Club, Val Carmichael, had never been known to rearrange anything, and, although Maria, a Filipina hunchback, came in punctually every morning to clean, she dealt only with the wipeable surfaces, leaving all the rest of this brooding stuff to become, over the years, set not in concrete but in a far more transfixing substance, to whit: dust. ‘Dust’, said Trouget, who was only an occasional visitor to the club, yet perhaps its most revered member, ‘is peace.’

Trouget, who was a world-famous painter — and therefore known to his fellow members merely as ‘the Tosher’ — was given to such gnomic utterances, and, while he himself may have discovered a certain repose in the furry interior, he none the less never ventured that far inside, preferring to position himself midway between the stools of the Typist and the Poof, erect in his habitual, tightly zipped, Bell Star motorcycle jacket (he lacked a machine himself but was keen on motorcyclists and liked them to ride him hard), while listening to the arch badinage of the others and buying them all round after round.

When Trouget swung open the green baize door and Val saw the painter’s oddly vestigial features — which were partly innate, although also a function of liberal rouging with shoe polish — he would exclaim, ‘Cunting cunty, cunt!’ The point being that in the Plantation ‘cunt’ in its nounal, verbal, adjectival, adverbial and even conjunctive forms was the root word of an entire dialect, the main purpose of which was to communicate either extreme disapprobation or, more rarely, the opposite.

If you were in with Val, and therefore in receipt of the right kind of ‘cunt’, then you were a made man — or, more rarely, woman: you were allowed to come, or go; to remain in the Plantation for an hour, or a month. You could run up a hefty tab; you could even borrow money from the huge till, leaving a scrawled-upon coaster as an IOU. But if you had bestowed upon you the wrong kind of ‘cunt’ — and, mark well, this was an instantaneous and irrevocable decision on Val’s part — then, like the black spot, it stuck to you unto the grave. It didn’t matter if you were vouched for by the oldest of the regulars, or if you tried to ingratiate yourself with Val in the most egregious fashion: buying his Racing News from the newsagent on Old Compton Street; running his bets to the bookie on D’Arblay Street; fetching him cigarettes and meat pies; lighting those cigarettes; and, of course, standing many, many rounds — it would all be to no avail. You might be tolerated for a week, or three years, but it would only be under sufferance, and sooner or later Val’s Embassy filter would be raised at a threatening angle — like the crozier of a battling bishop in the medieval church — and anathema would be pronounced. ‘You’re barred,’ Val would whine-grate, and if you failed to obey as quickly as could be expected of the average sot, by the average sot, then he would follow this up with: ‘Get that cunt out of here.’ Which was an appeal to the cuntishness of the Cunt himself, who had boxed at Toynbee Hall in the 1950s, then served a further apprenticeship in the early 1960s, wiring car batteries to genitals on behalf of the Richardsons.

Yes, Bernie Jobs knew a thing or two about chucking people out — you don’t acquire the nickname ‘the Cunt’ somewhere as cuntish as the Plantation without special qualifications; and Bernie, with his Wermacht helmet head — shiny-bald, save a black moustache that ran from ear to ear across the back of his bulldog neck — and his squat build — a brick shithouse built to withstand a direct hit by an ICBM — was fully accredited.

Alternatively, were you in receipt of the right kind of ‘cunt’, you might, on any given afternoon between, say, 1976 and 1983 — for the procedure took this long to fully complete — have witnessed the ritualized humiliation and — this is by no means too strong a term — dehumanizing of the Plantation’s resident barman, Hilary Edmonds; who, until this procedure was completed, was denied even the consolation of a nickname, being referred to by Val and his cronies — or ordered about by them — purely by means of a specially inflected ‘she’.

On this particular afternoon — a Tuesday one, not that it matters one jot, it was always a Tuesday afternoon in midwinter in the Plantation, even if outside it was a steamy midsummer evening or a lemon-bright spring morning — ‘she’ was being teased remorselessly.

‘She’s something stuffed in her crack,’ the Dog observed as Hilary bent down to fetch a packet of crisps from one of the cardboard boxes under the bar. ‘I hope it doesn’t work its way up inside her.’

The Dog licked his chops — literally: a carpet tongue unrolled from chapped lips, touching first one of the pendulous jowls that had secured him his moniker, then the other. He had once been a tall cavalryman, the Dog, and he still dressed in regulation tweed hacking jacket and twill slacks, with a paisley cravat tucked behind the collar of his Viyella shirt. It may seem a solecism that so much whisky could have engendered a burgundy hue to his bloodhound’s muzzle — but it had.

Hilary, still at a comparatively early stage of his conditioning, felt enough shame with the Dog’s, the Cunt’s and of course Val’s eyes on him to, still bending, reach back to yank down the hem of the Breton fisherman’s jersey he wore in emulation of his controller. Losing his balance, he tipped forward and banged his head.

‘Ooh!’ cried the Cunt. ‘She’s hurt herself; clumsy girl — silly fucking girl. Won’t be giving her a china dolly.’

Val chuckled indulgently; it sounded like the first stages of emphysema. ‘Heugh-heugh, she should give that little cunt of hers a bit more of a sluice, filthy little trollop.’

Hilary straightened up and handed the crisps to the Poof, who negligently thanked him. Gillespie was the only regular male member of the Plantation who was nominally heterosexual; and, while he cast a benign eye over the taunting, he seldom joined in. As for the Martian, his sexual orientation was ambiguous, if it even existed at all.

Gillespie was a well-known photographer, the extempore chronicler of the beautiful and the damned of London’s West End.

Gillespie, who always wore a lush brown leather coat and a white silk shirt. Gillespie, thrice married but pulling behind him a string of blondes that stretched, taut with yearning, from Billericay to Barnes. Gillespie, whose gypsy-raffish good looks still as yet uncorrupted by the trays of Campari and soda he was undeveloping them in — the features becoming more blurred with every year. Gillespie, whose barrel trunk and columnar thighs every red-blooded queer in Soho wanted to feel battering against him, and who, for that very reason, warranted the ironic title ‘the Poof ’.