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

‘Uh, yeah,’ he says eventually. ‘We’ve met — did she tell you?’

‘Some charity bullshit,’ the tycoon says dismissively. ‘I mean, I’m as philanthropic as the next man, but I don’t want a badge for it, or a round of applause from wankers in penguin suits.’ But all Prometheus hears is: He doesn’t know about you and her, and everyone says they’re close — too close. Bit paedo in fact. Mummy’s gone — she’s his walker; either she thinks he won’t approve, or she isn’t sure. Besides, what about me? If he finds out I might lose the pitch.

‘Aren’tcha having the marrowbone?’ Zeus resumes sucking on his own skeletal little columns, the architectural salvage from a temple of beef.

‘No.’ Prometheus gestures with his fork. ‘I’m on the eel.’

‘Probably wise,’ Zeus says. ‘This stuff ’s as dodgy as fucking fugu — swarming with prions. Metabolic time-bomb.’

Prometheus, despite having pitched to Zeus twice before, and running into him at half a dozen industry pissfests, still can’t read the man. He’s insecure, certainly, and who wouldn’t be with those freckles and that ginger scrub, those tiny hands and that stocky peasant’s build? Not that Zeus has come from nowhere; there are solid antecedents ranged behind him: moon-faced gentry execrably rendered in oils, staring down from the striped walls of airless parlours.

However, Zeus’s Formula 1 racing team and his financial services company, his record label and his airline, his Premier Division football club and his cable TV network, his cranberry-flavoured vodka and his luxury leather goods range, his condoms and his cola — Zeus’s products (or, rather, his brands , for every surface of his empire has a red z zigzagged across it) were a peasant’s conception of what youthful Midases desire, plaster props from which the gold leaf was always flaking. Perhaps it was for this reason alone that he was so successful, that the all-consuming wannabes had taken him to their wallets.

‘So,’ Zeus says, taking a slug of his Haut-Médoc, ‘whaddya got for me?’

It’s one of the little great man’s foibles that he takes such a close interest in the minutiae of his manifold enterprise. He has as many brand managers as Achilles has Myrmidons — and they’re easily as ruthless — nevertheless, Zeus overrules them as a matter of course. He tinkers with the products, but in particular he mucks with marketing. Nothing seems to give him more pleasure than hiring and firing advertising agencies. He also loves to haggle with the media houses, calling the planners and buyers into his office to chew it out with them, muzzle to muzzle.

No bus T-side, billboard site, Adshel, display page in a provincial free-sheet or fifteen-second segment on an FM radio station escapes his attention. Zeus has been known to cost out a single instance of a pop-up ident on a webpage. He even gets between the media buyers and the salesmen. ‘Take you to Chamonix, did they?’ he barks at the pushy boys in their penny loafers, patterned braces and Hackett suits. ‘I’ll fly you to fucking Gstaad!’

And he does, just for the merry hell of it: winching them up over slushy corries to where his ski chalet squats, a megalomaniac’s lair bought sight unseen, which looks like a mail order conservatory. There the boys frolic in hot tubs, the plugholes of which are choked with a thousand, thousand pubic hairs, shaved from the monses of models, actresses — whoever.

‘I got this,’ Prometheus says. ‘I got this.’ And he beckons to Epimetheus, who’s nose down in a plate of chitterlings.

Epimetheus bestirs himself, pulls out a laptop and cracks open its brushed-steel slate. It’s gloomy in the restaurant, despite white paint and yellow light, and, as the computer fires up, its sharp glare plays on the three faces gathered round: brain workers at a brazier.

Zeus goggles at the rusty spigot. ‘Better than tap,’ he snaps. ‘What the fuck’s that about?’

Prometheus laughs. ‘Well, it is, isn’t it? I mean, if it isn’t as good as tap it’s gotta be a total fucking rip-off, yeah?’

Zeus sticks a stubby finger in his own glass of mineral water and noisily stirs the ice cubes. Then he splashes water across the keyboard as he punches through the PowerPoint. ‘Taps, taps, more fucking taps — what’s it all about?’

‘Bus bums,’ Prometheus counters, ‘two, maybe three hundred of ’em. The biggest programmable signboard in the ’dilly, all the arterial route Adshels — maybe some TV — ’

‘TV!’ Zeus expostulates. ‘For a bloody mineral water! Anyway, you don’t buy my media, you’re s’posed to be some hot-shot creatives. Better than tap — can’t you do better than that ? I mean, what does it mean?’

Prometheus isn’t fazed — he never is, that’s the essence of his charm — that and the gab. ‘Exactly what it says. Look, Zeus, people are fed up with mineral water. You couldn’t’ve chosen a worse time to launch one — it’s a drag on the market. Eco-shit, recession chic — whatever. Besides, punters mostly know it’s a con. Half the time when you order still, there’s a bus boy down in the kitchens filling up the bottles from a fucking tap. That’s why the waiters make such a palaver about cracking the screw top. This is a nod to that — a nod to the punters’ sophistication. They’ll like that; it’s surreal, counter-intuitive — ’

‘Counter-intuitive!’

‘And downbeat — it cuts through the crap, all that malarkey about purity. I mean, look at that.’ He points at the tycoon’s mineral water.

‘This?’

‘Yeah, that. Knowing this gaff it’ll be kosher, but you’ve paid a quid-fifty for it, and they’ve bunged in a load of ice cubes. Did they make those outta the same mineral water, or what?’

‘You’ — Zeus picks up one of the ice cubes and pops it in his froggy mouth — ‘have gotta point there.’ Then he crunches ruminatively on the chilly bones of water.

*

Only a couple of birding office workers, whose chance itches throw their heads back on their collars, spot the griffon vulture as she dallies down over the Holborn Viaduct. It’s not a day for tilting skywards in London — nothing encourages it. The cloud carpet’s pile has thickened, and the Londoners are woodlice trundling beneath it. One of the irritated twitchers recognizes the vulture as a griffon; the other misidentifies it as a Ruppell’s. Neither thinks much of it, after all; the city harbours so many aliens: refugees from the tyrannies of men and the market, Gastarbeiters , Russian oligarchs, black widows ridden in on a hand of bananas — why not this scavenger, too?

Who flies arrow-straight through the central arcade of Smithfield meat market, her scholarly gaze not deviating to the right — halved cattle, rigid as boards, anatomy like a drawing of same; nor to the left — scores of fowl, plump as eiderdowns slung over a washing line. She swoops up again, then drops down into the ancient court behind St John Street, where cigarette butts and dead leaves mulch the flags, and pigeon droppings ice every ledge. Hunched up, with folded wings, the vulture squeezes past the wheelie-bins and enters through a fire door that’s been left propped open with a mop.

She works her way unerringly into the backstage of the restaurant, avoiding the staff by tucking herself into recesses or flattening herself behind equipment. She quests for the only foody aroma that interests her: the liverish thread. Prometheus is already waiting in the gents, snibbed into a cubicle, back bared. He hears the rustle and scratch of the bird’s approach, admits this late luncher, then bites down on another toilet roll.

For luncheon the griffon vulture takes another fifth of Prometheus’s liver. She clamps the hepatic artery and duct with one talon, the portal vein with the other. With almost half of the organ already missing she has to be scrupulously careful. The soles of her lunch’s shoes beat a tattoo on the floor. When Prometheus returns to the table he’s shaky and leached of colour.