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

Far from addressing the two Titans, the godlike voice pulls at that liquid part of them; besides, they’ve scrambled out of a Crittall window and are dangling off an old cast-iron fire escape: the bubble has sucked up the entire office.

‘Five sixths of the earth’s surface is covered by water, and the same fluid makes up 90 per cent of the human body.’ Stated with such omniscience these schoolboy factoids take on the character of cosmic truths; the bubble, meanwhile, has engrossed London, then the south-east of England, then the whole British Isles, and is now vacillating over the Atlantic, Prometheus and Epimetheus soaring high above its leading curve: mythological man-birds with Muji wings.

‘So why compromise on the stuff of life? Drink Zeus Mineral Water, it may be a little dearer, but it’s definitely better than tap.’

‘Tap, tap, tap!’ With this Olympian endorsement the surface of the ocean condenses into a 3,000-mile-wide droplet that hammers the bubble back down: ‘Tap!’ It’s country-sized. ‘Tap!’ It’s regional. ‘Tap!’ It’s a dome over the conurbation. ‘Tap!’ With the last hideously amplified blow of liquid on solid, it’s driven back into the water cooler, and disappears in a milky cloud of its own tiny selves. All is as before: Prometheus whipping like an antenna, Epimetheus, bemused, saying, ‘What the hell kind of fucking end-line is that?’ Not that his mind is really on the pitch for Zeus Mineral Water at all — it’s still on, or even in , the girl he picked up — or who picked him up — the night before.

It was in Soho House. She was blonde, bright-eyed, no more than twenty-five. Epimetheus was stunned when she agreed to go home with him, because he’s no looker. Short, with bandy legs and an egg-shaped torso, no matter how much he spends on a haircut, Epimetheus always steps from the salon a 1980s footballer with a crap perm. Still, this was better than leaving his black waves to their own devices: flicking grease on to his griddle of a face, which was dominated by the fleshy T-shaped ridges of his nose and brows.

‘Tap,’ Prometheus keeps on, ‘that’s what punters ask for now: ‘‘I’ll have a glass of tap’’, as if it were totally fucking exotic. It’s getting like the States here — waiters’ve started pitching up with it before they’re asked!’

A killer end-line should be like a garrotte applied to any consumer’s faculty for making a rational calculus of price and benefit — and these lethal ligatures were plaited in Titan’s offices, in conversation pits of the kind favoured by imprisoning reality TV shows, in the pods where creatives were coddled by a warm albu-menof piped-in pop culture. It was Prometheus who’d had the water cooler installed; his colleagues mostly eschewed it, preferring the hot froth dispensed from the coffee bar by the agency’s own barrista, and then, by mid-afternoon, the cocktails that were shaken, without let or hindrance, by the agency’s barman. For, as Menoetius, the chief exec — and Titan’s founder, together with Prometheus and Epimetheus — was always at pains to point out: ‘We’re not in business to stifle appetites; we’re all about satisfying them.’

‘So what if punters ask for tap water?’ Epimetheus snarls. ‘It don’t mean they wanna shell out for it.’

He feels like a Bloody Mary — right now. A Bloody Mary followed by a trip to the steam baths on Ironmonger Row, followed by a therapeutic wank in bed, then sleep for a week — or as long as it takes to shake this brain ache and liver jab. Prometheus is still bobbing and weaving; he yanks two waxed-paper horns from their holder, lifts them to his brow and paws at the rubbery turf with his cloven hoofs.

‘Yes, indeedy — better than tap,’ he snorts. ‘And as for the graphic — on the labels, the PoS shit, the posters, whatever — that’ll be a big fucking tap.’

This, Epimetheus grimly reflects, is the tap-tap-tap of water torture: wrenched from a bed in which he’d scarcely rested to slosh through dirty puddles and overflowing gutters, for what Prometheus hokily referred to as ‘a blue-sky session’.

‘C’mon, man. We’ve done the broadband stuff for him; we jiggled his insurance bollocks, too; if we luck out with this pitch we could make it on the roster, become his agency of fucking record. Think of the billings — then double ’em!’

This was Prometheus’s voice, ever seductive, always with an undercurrent of laughter, as it sounded issuing from Epimetheus’s mobile phone an hour or so earlier; the mobile he’d found girded with the silky scrap of the girl’s abandoned knickers — for Pandora herself was gone.

Now Prometheus chivvies him towards the plastic face of the Macintosh with flirty pinches and punches. ‘He’s lunching us at St John at twelve sharp, and I want something to show him.’

Seated at the machine, Epimetheus goes down into the pixel mine and commences searching, picking and grabbing, shakily assembling a series of images that can be used for a PowerPoint presentation.

‘So,’ Prometheus chortles as his partner grafts, ‘who was she? Some tart, I s’pose.’

‘Why d’you say that?’ Epimetheus counters, but it’s a flaccid denial; there’s never any dissimulation between them, at least, not on his part. ‘Oh, I dunno,’ he groans on, ‘she didn’t swipe me card, but. ’ When he’d got up, he’d discovered that, while she’d left her underwear, she’d taken some of his outerwear. ‘She took that Forzieri jacket I got in Milan.’

Prometheus whistles appreciatively. ‘She’s gotta nose, then, ’coz it don’t look like jack, but it must’ve cost — ’

‘A couple of grand,’ Epimetheus concedes. ‘It’s camel suede shearling — so she’s either a tart or a thief.’

‘C’mon,’ Prometheus laughs again, ‘same diff.’

He’s still drinking water, but now it’s San Pellegrino he’s swigging from its dumpy green bottle. He’s always drinking water. ‘To keep me pure,’ he tells anyone who asks why.

The madhouse of the bar, limbs contorted in seeming intimacy. Next, the big clatter-whoosh of the doors as they’d bolted into the gents and bolted themselves into a cubicle. Then the tiny rasp and teensy clatter as she had chopped and ground and swept the granules of cocaine.

The certainty that he was going to see her naked was unbearably sweet for Epimetheus, syrup poured into this golden cubicle. He wanted this to have happened already, so that he could be looking back on it. She was a natural blonde, her hair a perfect bell, the rest of her as smooth and rounded. Her skin had a furring of white-blonde down. Her features were worryingly pretty, and there was more than a hint of the catty in her slanting green eyes. And the nose? Too small, too snub. She wore a chocolate-brown dress of 1950s pattern — full skirt, tight bodice — and her breasts were pushed up high in its low-plunging neckline. When she bent down to feed, Epimetheus could see their pink snouts pressed into the fabric trough.

He finds a big steel tap on a photo library site; it looks capable of hosing away offal. ‘Rustier,’ Prometheus commands. ‘Keep looking.’

He had haggled with the African minicab controller — but only for form’s sake. The tarnished rain dashed Epimetheus’s cheeks and the neon curdled on the slick pavement. Meanwhile, Pandora stood, her coat held up to protect her hair: a glamorous widow in an insurance advert. Epimetheus’s cock, his balls — all the meat of him was engorged with the present; packed into skin and scrotum were cars and bars, commissionaires and au pairs, cycle rickshaws and ticket touts, ’roided clones and voided dossers.

In the vinyl glove of the minicab he put his hand up those full skirts and felt neat fleece through silkiness; then, dipping down, he walked his fingers into the clammy cleft, and Pandora eased herself on to these, at the same time as she pushed her tongue into Epimetheus’s grotty mouth.