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

Despite her legendary acerbity — wit as quick and bitter as a salted lemon hurled in your eye — Ivy had suffered the same humiliation at the hands of Val Carmichael, as was now, just as unwittingly, being perpetrated upon him by Hilary Edmonds. She, too, had taken a shine to a young man from the provinces whom she had discovered drifting in the London streets. In the photograph Ivy was standing, jade cigarette holder held upright, with Val beside her, looking ineffably young and handsome and manly. His hair was thick and blond, his tie (yes, tie!) was straight — but can she really ever have convinced herself that he was, too?

We will never know; the only certain thing is that when, eventually, he rejected her advances, far from rejecting him, Ivy Oldroyd clamped Val to her Ben Nevis of a bosom, suckled him with wormwood and resolved that he would never be weaned.

As it had been with Val, so it was to be with Hilary. They were both brainwashed into becoming the tireless workers for their respective Queen Bees, and fed with increasing doses of alcoholic royal jelly until they were no longer willing — or even able — to buzz off.

Although ‘brainwashed’ hardly caught it at all, for, once a new barman had been installed at the Plantation, the process by which he was turned into an alcoholic was more akin to the force-feeding — or gavage — whereby a poultry farmer in the Dordogne transforms the liver of a duck or a goose into foie gras. Hilary had no great predilection for drinking; it was only that even to stand in the Plantation for a matter of hours was a health risk.

A tipsy hepatologist, who was once stranded in there for an afternoon, later claimed that he could actually feel his liver cells mashing into steatosis, as drink after drink was augered into him, the spirit scarring his oesophagus, the fluid swelling his abdomen. While mixed with the liquor there was also — he said — an undiluted and poisonous anger.

Anger is what Val Carmichael supplied by the sixth of a gill from the optic of his psyche; shot after shot of spiritous rancour, distilled from his copper full of humiliation. And, as the years engorged with resentment prolapsed into decades, so this rage grew as well, until it obscured the bamboo-patterned wallpaper of the Plantation quite as much as the miasma of cigarette and cigar smoke.

Bernie Jobs — lest we forget, the Cunt — said, ‘My gaff, Sadus, is reopening today after its refurb. The boss-man is gonna make an appearance.’

(I make no apology for plunging you straight back into the highly provisional, yet simple, past tense of our narrative; this is congruent with what it was like to be in the club. Blubbing to the surface of the boozy pool, he — or rather, she — would become aware of her rescuers, speaking with the cold intimacy of paramedics and firemen: Are you all right, dearie? Or laughing with the falsified yelps of whores faking orgasm: Ha, ha, ha! )

‘Oh, yes,’ Val said, ‘and who’s she when she’s at home?’

‘Oh, y’know, Denny Wilson.’

‘Brrrr,’ Val shivered. ‘The big brute, she is.’

Two things: 1. To describe Denny Wilson as a ‘big brute’ displayed a casual attitude in the face of human depravity that was almost laudable, because at this time Wilson still had West End Vice tucked in his crombie pocket, and, had he so much as suspected that pond life like Val was denoting him with a feminine pronoun, would have unhesitatingly instructed some other cunt to do to Val what the Cunt used to do at the behest of the Richardsons. 2. That female pronoun itself requires a little further elucidation. Hilary wasn’t the only one so called; it was the sole pronoun in common usage at the Plantation. There were no male members in this club, only shes and cunts.

‘Well, Val,’ Bernie said, waxing philosophic, ‘what you say about Denny may well be true, but she’ll be mightily offended if we don’t troll round to Old Compton Street and wet the baby’s head.’

‘With what ?’ Val sneered, darting feverish looks around the bar-room as if the most obvious thing was that it was empty of liquor. ‘I’ve told you cunts already that I’ve nanti-fucking-dinary!’

The Dog, for many years the London stringer for some Scottish rags, moved to calm him: ‘Now, Val, don’t take on so.’ But his ministrations were unnecessary, because at that moment the baize door wheedled open and Trouget inched in, followed by His Nibs.

‘Cunty, darling!’ Val cried. ‘It’s been a bloody age. Cunty, my sweet,’ he hurried on, ‘that fucking bruiser Wilson is pitching up at the Cunt’s smut shop on Old Compton, and we’ve all got to go down and hob-fucking-nob. You’ll stand the ’poo, now won’t you, cunty?’

Trouget, whose canvases were already selling for substantial five-figure sums, was notoriously profligate. He orbited the economic sphere of mere solvency, casting bills upon the darkness of its waters. Long before, he had done a deal with his Cork Street gallery — at that time a considerable punt for them — whereby he supplied x number of daubs per year, they took the entire sale price and paid him an annuity of £100,000.

It was a bet that Trouget, a dreadful gambler, lost in the longer term. As his prices rose and rose, and his art became the bamboo-patterned wallpaper of the Met, MoMA and the Tate, his annuity, proportionately, was reduced to a derisory payout. However, it was an arrangement that meant the Maî tre was free to work all day, then gamble, get soused and flogged all night, which is what he enjoyed more than any splendoured thing.

‘Cuuuunty?’ Val appealed again, and the Tosher puckered up his polished brown boot of a muzzle in acquiescence — he hardly ever spoke.

‘Thank goodness!’ Val screeched — although goodness had nothing to do with it. ‘Get down half a dozen of ’poo, you,’ he ordered Hilary, ‘and put it on the Tosher’s tab. C’mon, you lot,’ he called to the other members, ‘hands off cocks and on socks’ — this an epithet from his National Service. ‘We’ll all go round and toast her gaff.’

And so they all did. McCluskey, who was a genius at such things, even managed to insinuate a small item concerning the reopening into his column, which disguised the nature of the enterprise that a party was being thrown for — with drink supplied by the famous painter — from those of his readers who wouldn’t have been able to stomach it, while artfully exposing it to those who were potential customers. This was a favour that Denny Wilson didn’t forget.

He was a big brute, and Sadus, while not a small shop, was dominated, after its refurb, by the two new long racks holding its merchandise; goods that were brown-paper camouflaged so that our hypothetical wanderer — remember her ? — on slapping through the multicoloured plastic strips that dangled in the doorway, might think she’d chanced upon a stationer’s with a single product line.

In point of fact, Sadus (est. 1978) was a new kind of porn vendor. Wilson had seen the future — and it wanked. No longer need onanists be separated by mere orientation; the important thing was what got you off, not who you got off with. If beating, whipping, bending, masking, gagging or twisting was your thing, then Sadus was your one-slap-shop. Cause, indeed, for celebration.

And if, to begin with, the party was divided — the Plantation members, looking raggle-taggle and out of place, squatted in one aisle, while Wilson and his heavies prowled up and down the other — then after the first five bottles of Trouget’s champagne had been drunk, a definite common purpose emerged; humiliating Hilary.

Not that Trouget himself participated. He stood in the corner by the riding crops, an enigmatic crease in his boot-browned features, his Bell Star jacket zipped to his chin, while Hilary was passed from one suedehead in a Harrington to the next, his feet stamped upon at every step, his ribs poked as he poured the ’poo. Yes, the heavies cruelly goosed him, and Val, who had been furnished with a stool by the till, cackled fiendishly.