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

A plastic container fifteen feet square crashes through the ceiling and bursts open, scattering detergent capsules with muscular arms and legs. These bounce into the arms of the dirty tablecloth dancers, the couples go into twirls, magically cleaning the stained linen. The basso voice-over rumbles above the chorus: ‘When you use Ceres, it’s as if your washing machine spins faster than the earth itself! Gods and mortals all agree. ’ Athene’s perfect red lips suck on your eyelids, her flawless white teeth nibble your earlobes; she cries out in ecstasy, ‘Ceres biological washing capsules are truly revolutionary!’

Shaking the drooping Prometheus by his shoulder, Epimetheus says, ‘You’ve gotta go and see the doctor, mate.’

‘I’m going to have to put a shunt in,’ Dr Ben Macintyre says; ‘otherwise you’ll drown in your own blood.’

‘A shunt?’

‘A transjugular, intrahepatic, portosystemic shunt. ’ What kind of a cunt, thinks Prometheus, could even begin to say that in these circs. ‘. is a tube. We’ve got to bypass your liver with a tube — there’s a mass of scar tissue in there, and it’s increasing the pressure here.’ He has a scan clipped to a lightbox and lays his hands on these representations of the affected parts — it’s as near as he ever gets to touching his patients. The tips of his thumb and forefinger are callused, dead skin of which Doc Ben — as he styles himself — is inordinately proud.

Prometheus is leaning against a snowy rampart of pillows on top of an examination couch. His top half is naked, his flesh so meagre and jaundiced it looks like a yellow cloth slung over a birdcage.

‘I don’t have the results of your bloods yet.’ Doc Ben moves away from the lit-up interior of Prometheus and turns his back on the exterior man himself. He cannot forbear from caressing the machine-head of an original Fender Stratocaster that’s propped on a stand. ‘But my guess is that more than half of your liver is now severely damaged.’

Prometheus says nothing. What is there to say?

Doc Ben is a stocky man in his mid fifties; clever features are clustered on the front of his mostly bald head. He isn’t a liver specialist but rather a medical generalist with a nice drip of honey for the moneyed. When he says, ‘We’ve got to bypass your liver with a tube’, what he really means is that a technician at the Portland Clinic, the London Clinic or University College Hospital will be subcontracted to do so. These artisans of the body are essential for the likes of Doc Ben, the interior decorators of health in their Harley Street showrooms.

‘I told you months ago that if you didn’t change your lifestyle you’d be in serious trouble.’

‘I don’t drink — at least not alcohol.’

Doc Ben can’t hear this: it’s nonsensical. There are only two possible reasons for a man of Prometheus’s age having such extensive liver damage — and he doesn’t have hepatitis C; besides, Doc Ben is picking out the riff of ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’ on the steel strings. He hasn’t picked the guitar up, he’s hunched over it in his magenta flannel blazer, a dreamy expression on his realist’s face.

In his heart Doc Ben is an axeman — one of the greatest ever. He once treated Dave Knopfler, and the grateful Dire Straits guitarist gave him a silver disc awarded to the band for selling 150,000 copies of ‘Money for Nothing’ in Lithuania. They also used to jam together in Doc Ben’s consulting room. Happy days.

Doc Ben wrenches himself away from the guitar stand. ‘You’re bringing up blood from your tummy’ — this juvenile term is a very considered piece of medical jargon — ‘you could have a portal haemorrhage. I’ll book you in somewhere overnight; the TIPS is a relatively simple procedure, there’s no surgery required. It goes in through the jugular vein — a roadie can do it under a local.’

‘A roadie?’ Prometheus groans.

‘Sorry, I mean a radiologist.’

It’s warm in Doc Ben’s consulting room. There’s a lot of tapestry on the walls: bold swathes of red, blue and jaundiced woolliness that he’s brought back from his travels; trips he takes to record traditional gourd-strummers, with a view to writing a primitivist rock opera. There are these tapestries and an intricately patterned Afghan rug, two ottomans, five hassocks and four Moroccan floor cushions. Patients, Doc Ben finds, are softened up by all this padding.

Prometheus accedes readily enough to the room up the road in the London Clinic, and is driven the few yards there by some Portia or other; a blue-blood thickie in an Alice band who works for Doc Ben, providing a constant background hum of unrequited lust and workaday erections.

In Prometheus’s wake Doc Ben sends a pinging of emails, detailing all the thinners, lacquers and zappers that his patient should’ve been taking: drugs, the prescriptions for which lie curling on the floor of Prometheus’s riverfront penthouse on the south side of Chelsea Bridge.

The clinic smells inappropriately of buttered asparagus and boeuf en cro û te . Nurses dressed like maids and maids dressed like nurses process in and out of Prometheus’s room. They offer drugs, which he accepts, and buttered asparagus and boeuf en crou te , which he refuses. He languishes, watching through bleary eyescreens as animated flyposters paste themselves over every available surface — walls, floor, ceiling. They’re copy-heavy adverts for a Kentucky bourbon, one he wrote himself. The dense lettering describes a slow day in the long life of a grizzled stillman stirring sour mash in a dry county.

Posters have just furled over the windows and door when Doc Ben arrives, tearing a ragged hole in the outsized label of the bourbon bottle. He’s swapped his blazer for a leather motorcycle jacket that is padded in such a way as to give him an implausible musculature. ‘Taking the pills?’ he asks, although his mind is on other, more rhythmic things. Prometheus moans affirmatively. Doc Ben goes to the bedside cabinet, picks up Prometheus’s mobile phone and footles with it, trying to see if it’ll play chords.

‘I’m off to the Roundhouse tonight,’ Doc Ben remarks. ‘Playing with Glenn Branca and his orchestra of a hundred guitars. Y’know, Prometheus, I’m really excited about this gig, a hundred axes — it’s a big rush, but I doubt I’ll have more than a bottle of Becks all night. You should think about that.’ Adroitly, he leaves.

Prometheus thinks about what Doc Ben has said for a few minutes. When a nursemaid comes in a little later, carrying a reader so she can swipe Prometheus’s credit card, the patient has decamped.

It’s a hobby for him, sort of, but Zeus works in money the way a gifted sculptor shapes clay, deftly changing it from amorphousness into this, or that. He squeezes, rolls, smooths and indents money — then he sends glazed examples of his modelling all over the world.

An offshore bank in which a blind trust has a controlling interest, lends to a cardboard-box manufacturer in Tampa, Florida, the non-executive directors of which are also managers of a chain of fast Indian food outlets in the north-east of England. Their buyout is financed by the same Cayman Islands bank that — off the balance sheet — sends seed capital to one of these men, to enable him to establish a series of off-the-shelf companies in Douglas, on the Isle of Man. One of these companies is a convenient entity through which to funnel the profits from AABA Escorts, an atomized brothel — the client book, office lease and website are its only assets — a net woven from electro-financial strands, within which to catch sexual cannibals so they can feed on each other.

One such is Pandora — 22, 5'5'', 34DD, English. This stunning young lady is not only available for in and out calls, but will also, seemingly happily — in tabloid parlance — ‘romp’ with you and your partner, whether you be male, female or both.