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

Descending from her bar stool as if it were a glittering rostrum on the stage of the Windmill, and she was still the statuesque brunette she had been during the last war, the Typist sashayed up to the bar and placed her empty glass on a mat. Leaning forward, she gazed down the back of Hilary’s orange loons and remarked in clipped, headmistressy tones, ‘Isn’t that the string of her Tampax poking out? I think she must have the curse, poor thing.’

General sniggering.

Val said, ‘In that case she probably needs a drink, eh? Pity I’ve nanti dinary, or I’d stand her one.’

This rare lapse into his native Polari was a sign that Val was in an uncommonly good mood. There was nothing quite like humiliating Hilary to cheer him up. His rubbery face mask stretched with amusement, pushing his beaky nose into still greater prominence.

Ah! Val Carmichael’s nose — a treatise could have been written on it; indeed, it looked as if an unseen hand had begun to do exactly that — poking with steely nib at its sub-surface blood vessels and pricking them into the raised, purplish calligraphy of spider angiomas, a definitive statement that the Plantation’s owner was already in the early stages of cirrhosis.

Now, quietly, unobtrusively, the Martian joined the torturers at the bar, murmuring so casually, ‘I’ll stand everyone a round’ that the others barely registered his largesse, even when, with a loud ‘ting’, Val fed his twenty-pound note into the till.

Then. A hiatus. Drinks were poured by Hilary and guzzled — as something for nothing so often is.

This interlude gives me the opportunity to admonish you, gentle reader, not to sit in stern judgement of the Plantation’s members and their decadent airs. Weren’t, aren’t, won’t Soho’s denizens always be thus? More truly subject to an almost mathematical recursion than any other cultural grouping in the world?

This 5 × 6 grid of streets has been a quartier specializing in the division of the human spirit for decades — centuries, even. Since Marx burst his boils and buried his kids on Dean Street; since Hazlitt expired from his ‘happy life’; since Johnson’s club strutted; since young Wolfgang tinkled the ivories and Casanova got his oats on Frith Street. Back and back, the same divisors have been applied to each term of the series: alcohol and insouciance.

Back and back, until Huguenots destroyed their eyes with needlepoint, while Billy Blake bunked off from his dad’s drapery to trip, off his head, down to the satanic mills of Farringdon. Soho! Your very name a cry thrown over the shoulders of hunting noblemen. Is it any wonder that generation after generation of your inhabitants have been brought to bay, then stood — or slumped, or lain legs akimbo — frozen, waiting to be dispatched by the hounds of time?

If the Plantation Club (est. 1948) was still lost in the foggy forties, with its members aping the mores of Maclaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas, and lapsing into the secret language of formerly outlawed inverts, then this was only as it should be. And yet. And yet. there was a deeper timelessness to the bar-room above Blore Court, a holier stasis. For, while the black plastic bags piled up in the streets during the Winter of Discontent, and then, come spring, were hauled away, the trash in the Plantation remained. As the upper echelons of West End Vice ran amok and the streetwalkers became entire formations, the Plantation stayed just as whorish. While the social revolution of the 1980s raged, and merchant bankers sprayed every surface matt black, in the lavatory of the Plantation Club the toilet paper was still the consistency of Formica.

No change at all was wrought in this sequestered cell. To say of any of its members that they were ‘gay’ would be a nonsense, for, while outside in Old Compton Street everyone became openly gayer and gayer, inside the club they only grew sadder and sadder. No popper was ever popped, no T-shirt was tightened, there was no house music in da house.

To apply the epithet ‘gay’ to Val Carmichael would have been worse than ridiculous; while to say of him — or of any of the rubbery plants in the Plantation — that they were ‘queer’ would have constituted a gross understatement. The term ‘homosexual’, if it was taken to imply that Val sought intimacy with — or simply ingress to — to a member of his own sex, was also no longer applicable, and hadn’t been for two or three years now; not since Val had discovered Hilary Edmonds in the Wimpy Bar at King’s Cross.

The young man was too old and too unmissed to be described as a runaway; he was rather a stroll-off, who had sauntered away from the repression of his home town — some Market This or Thatminster — much as a dazed passenger staggers, fortuitously unharmed, from the smoking wreckage of a car crash.

Hilary had no money and knew no one in London. For three nights he had been scratched under a holly bush in Bloomsbury Square. When Val spyed him, sitting in the window of the burger bar, Hilary was consuming his last few pence in the form of a sweet bun seamed with beef. His collar-length brown hair lay in dangleberries on his spotty neck — an imperfection that the older man found particularly arousing.

Beyond this Hilary was no great catch. He was tall, scrawny and had features that, cruelly, already bore a mean-spirited impress exactly the same as his father’s, although Edmonds Senior had taken thirty-odd years of rankling behind the grille of a bank branch to acquire them.

Val took Hilary home, which was a third-storey walk-up on the old LCC estate off Harrison Street. At that time these redbrick warrens had been overrun by punks, who lolloped furtively along their balconies, halting in the stairwells to nibble amphetamines, their soap-stiffened mohicans twitching like rabbit ears. Val noticed none of this; it belonged to a parallel universe.

If anything, the flat was even more time-locked than the club. Unhemmed yards of blackout cloth kept out the day; a plush-covered sofa slumped on the herringbone wood block floor, twenty-six inches in front of a black and white television. In the tiny kitchen, the tea cups were kept in a broken Baby Belling. In the bathroom the porn was kept in the bath.

Strictly speaking it wasn’t all porn. There were early German magazines of the burgeoning homosexual community, such as Die Insel ; there were the homoerotic leaflets of proto-Nazi hiking clubs; there were even bound volumes of the works of Magnus Hirschfeld. This was heavy water at the bottom of the bath; above it was half a fathom of health and fitness magazines, together with outright penis-in-anus stuff brought from Copenhagen. However, the froth on top of this was touchingly innocent: underwear advertisements cut out of Titbits and Reynold’s News that showed men in navy Y-fronts with white piping. There were a few knitting patterns featuring chaps posing in cardigans, and even bobble hats, which Val now found oddly affecting; for, as his ability to construct a viable erection declined, so the objects of his desire became more and more remote: a typology of the masculine, rather than the man himself.

On this exceptional evening Val did try to have sex with Hilary. Being obliging, and a complete ingenue, Hilary was more than happy to lower his dirty polyester houndstooth check trousers — with the stylish flat front — and allow Val’s doughy face to knead his crotch. But once the foreplay had been completed — a matter of seconds — and Val was about to munch on the poisoned apple of Hilary’s behind, his worm turned and bored back inside him.

Behind the bar at the Plantation, in a votive niche hollowed out between the liquor bottles, so that she was surrounded in death by the alcohol she had worshipped in life, there stood a framed photograph of Ivy Oldroyd, the self-styled ‘Queen of Soho’. (An absurd pretension: Soho was, is, and always will be a republic of queens governed by a parliament of whores.) Ivy, even in the sepia tones of the old photo, had a face that recalled Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas ; she had been a whale of a woman, whose blubber was still constrained by whalebone when she died — of liver failure — in 1966.