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

If I stay here, then what? Joyce had experienced old age, and then her final illness, as the creeping normalcy of a bad habit. You took your pills and turned up for your treatments, because that’s what people did. And, although you might have toyed with the idea of ending it all when things got too bad , what you discovered was the day didn’t seem to come when it was bad enough ; because, after all, they hadn’t been that good the day before.

Joyce had never thought of herself as a rebel, but when she realized that soon she would have no fortitude left with which to resist death’s conventions, well, this was a more nauseating abbreviation than chemo or radio, and so she did rebel — she made the call. Now Switzerland itself, with all its orderliness, had become the very creeping normalcy she had feared. With each sifting of the green, the brown and the plastic bottles, with each purchase of the state-approved plastic bags, she felt increasingly that it was this rubbish that was participating in a real life-cycle, whereas she was only a human residuum.

As she wrote the letter to her daughter, Joyce tried to imagine what a Swiss women’s prison might be like — maximally orderly, she assumed. Isobel’s letters — she had sent three — were hardly informative, consisting as they did almost entirely of protracted rants against her mother’s heartlessness, her selfishness — and so bloody, fucking on .

Joyce finished writing, sealed the letters and addressed them. She arranged the envelopes together with the cardboard folders containing her papers on the serviceable table. All this was done as night completely fell, which was just as well, because Joyce didn’t want to switch on the lights — she couldn’t switch on the lights.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Grant the dead eternal rest, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine on them. The naked walls and barely used furniture suggested a show flat, not a place of genuine habitation. Isobel could make an installation out of this , like Mr Vogel’s abandoned office. My heart as contrite as the dust that gathers on Vreni Stauben’s ledges. Dust , Joyce thought, foolish of me to not understand that it has a kind of peace .

Joyce’s panther-body lunged at her: it had never been still. It mauled her into the toilet, where the flashing tail-lights of a jet coming into land at the airport sparkled in the water of the commode. Then the panther worried her back into the living room. These, Joyce realized, were the perpetual lights: the television, always on stand-by, the limelight switch of the electric jug.

The Zwingli Singers were back, jostling Joyce with their hideous 1970s frocks — chiffon sacks, really . It had been stupid of her to believe that anything not truly believed in could — Well, it was best left unsaid, the sheer silliness of it , a magic trick, a sleight-of-mind deployed against the gaunt inexorability of Death. Babbababbada-ba-babba-daaa! What then shall I say, wretch that I am? Isobel was thrashing about in her cell, the graceless, clumsy, awkward, ungainly girl. She’s a fat puppy, who gorged on Scottie’s Liver Treats, just as I stuffed myself with hotel truffles and suicidal bonbons, then drank too deep of liqueur choccies . The only palatable meal was a symbolic one: the Leberkn del of the Lord.

Joyce’s body kept her up all night, a rambunctious teenager partying in the worn-out mind of an elderly woman. Towards dawn Trevor Howard came marching along Saatlenstrasse swinging his arms. A versatile leading man, he was playing Joyce’s father, and Derry as well. He stood in the living room in his belted leather coat, waiting for morning to harden into day, while Joyce’s body paced her up and down. Then, once office hours had arrived, he said to her: ‘I tried to tell you, Beddoes, back at the Widder: leave death to the professionals.’ There was no ‘Joyce’, no ‘Jo’, and certainly not the frank intimacy of ‘Jo-Jo’; only the clipped ‘Beddoes’.

Then, A trumpet spreading a wondrous sound. He is offering now to the people with clinical depression his poison — nothing wrong in their body, only the head . Joyce lifted the handset and dialled Dr Hohl’s number. He answered on the second ring, and their conversation was brief and to the point. Yes, he was aware, of course, of the activities of the diocese, and natürlich he understood the possible repercussions; however, so far as he was concerned a contract was — and remained — a contract, Treu und Glauben .

Ite missa est . Go, it is the dismissal.

Prometheus stands, quivering, by the water cooler in the inert core of the open-plan offices of Titan, an advertising agency renowned throughout London — and beyond — for its genius at breathing fire into the most sodden products, and the dampest services; igniting them, then fanning them up, so that their notoriety leaps and spreads from demographic to demographic, until entire populations are consumed by a mania for their possession.

Prometheus, his prematurely iron-grey hair erect on his scalp — a magnetized ruff — rubs his cloven-toed trainers on the nodulous rubber floor covering, trying to earth himself; it’s only seven thirty in the morning, yet he’s already hopelessly jazzed up at the prospect of the day ahead.

Prometheus: his cotton clothes of Japanese cut are in shades of beige and mushroom, their kimono cuffs peel away from his kinked limbs like insulation from live wiring. His wrists are bony, with thick black plaited hairs.

Prometheus, he jigs, then bends to hit the spigot of the water cooler, releasing air bubbles that swell and burst. He swigs from the waxed-paper horn and smacks his lips, which then resume their normal expression: an endearing smirk. He’s a handsome man — straightforwardly so; his Pantone 293 eyes keenly rectilinear, his smoothly shaven cheeks suggest the massaging of balms formulated by white-coated demi-virgins in the pseudo-laboratories of giant French cosmetics combines. A smattering of ancient acne pocks below each well-defined cheekbone are only grace notes, epidermal elaborations on the overall tautness of the composition.

‘Tap,’ Prometheus says. ‘Tap, tap, tap!’

‘What?’ Epimetheus is befuddled — still drunk from the night before.

‘Tap,’ his partner carries on dripping. ‘Tap, tap, tap. ’ Then he hits the spigot again.

Both creatives stare into the blue barrel of the water cooler, where another air bubble gurglingly gestates. It’s big, this bubble, it swells and swells until it displaces all the water in the cooler, then rigid plastic ripples as it morphs into the ridged barrel itself.

‘Whoa!’ the admen cry, appalled and enthralled. They back off as the bubble goes on engorging itself, schlupping up ergonomic personnel pods of brightly coloured, injection-moulded plastic; brushed-steel laptop computers; novelty waste-paper baskets; scrawled-upon whiteboards; photocopier machines and swivel chairs with cheese-grater-padded backs. With each engulfment the bubble’s transparency is momentarily occluded by the red-blue-green of these objects — but soon this clears and it resumes its awesome metastasis.

Prometheus and Epimetheus walk back towards the reception area of their agency — they’re still excited by this phenomenon, and clutch each other’s arms like little girls. A ridiculously basso voice-over begins incanting, ‘Water, water everywhere but it all costs money’, and, hearkening to this soliloquy, the bubble sends out quicksilver tongues to lap up stray biros and paperclips. ‘Why pay more’, the voice-over tells itself, ‘for fancy labels and silly-shaped bottles, when tap water tastes just as good?’