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

Pandora, whose honeyed skin is intensified by the application of much Piz Buin — and sunlight; for every third week she jets away to a pimp’s timeshare in Las Palmas. Pandora, whose every seam and join is caulked with commercially applied saliva. Pandora, whose body is a box for which her pretty head is the lid.

A prostitute never kisses a client — mouths are so much more intimate than genitals. And mouth-on-mouth, well, that will resuscitate those memories, open up Pandora’s box; then, out will fly all the misfortunes of the world: the stepfather who put his penis in her when she was eleven; the glue bags she huffed in the park shelter; the orange-collared hypodermic needles her first pimp poked between her toes, so as not to damage ‘the goods’. Inside, Pandora is as crushed and smeared and broken as roadkill, but for now the box still looks tip-top, eminently desirable, knick-knack-sado-whack.

Epimetheus was sitting in his simple past when Pandora rang. Sitting in his simple past, and sitting also in his loft, a dwelling that mimics a past assumed to be simple, when people — natives — bought and sold simply quantified goods that could be simply stored, instead of the maddening complexity of the present, when an adman sits in an apartment designed to look like a warehouse in another city.

Epimetheus was sitting and worrying a little about Prometheus, whom he hadn’t heard from since he dropped him off at Doc Ben’s in Harley Street. However, this anxiety was nothing much, a teaser for a campaign that never got going. Epimetheus had seen it tens of times before: his partner, bilious, black at the edges, sliding like a banana skin from the back seat of a cab into the converted townhouse, only to show up again the following morning, more than ready for that all-to-play-for pitch, as electrifying as ever, his spiel a never-ending webpage that scrolled up and up and up.

‘It’s me,’ Pandora said, and her voice grabbed him by the scruff and dragged him to the full-length windows. Epimetheus pressed his eye against the wickerwork basketry of the city as a child stares into a hedge.

‘You swiped my fucking leather jacket — have you any idea how much it’s worth?’

‘Like, duh, I wouldn’t’ve if I didn’t.’

But is it a pity she’s a whore? He didn’t think so. He had been sitting there, in his underwear, nursing a restorative beer and casting back a decade to the lager of male bonding. Menoetius, Prometheus and him, out on the town; pubs dissolving into clubs dissolving into after-hours bars; the flow of their ideas seeming as smoothly inevitable as the passage of a hoppy droplet through the condensation on a glass.

‘Would you like me to come over?’

‘How much is it gonna cost me this time?’

Casting back to his time at art college, Epimetheus remembered a collage he’d made, a griffon vulture soaring, its feathers so many carefully selected bits of black vinyl, buff sacking and white plastic; its beak and talons chrome trim scavenged from verges and gutters. His tutor asked, ‘Is it a mind-child, m’dear?’ And Epimetheus set him right: ‘No, you see them in Cyprus.’

Flapping like airborne Turks over the carcasses of Greek houses, the walls of Nicosia bleached bone-white in the Mediterranean sun. In the hurly-burly of his parents’ exile — in Newington Green, the Stroud Green Road, Green Lanes, all those London greenings — these abandoned properties remained, unusable annexes to their walk-up flats and tumbling-down terraced houses.

The three Greek Cypriot lads fought running battles with the Clapton Turks. Menoetius, Prometheus, Epimetheus — Titans, almost, especially when they were reinforced by hulking Atlas, who, unlike the others, dropped out of school. When Epimetheus had last run into him — a colossus in a crombie — Atlas was a bouncer at the Hippodrome. He said he still saw the Clapton Turks occasionally: ‘Blue-metallic Mercs, profile tyres, personalized-bloody-number plates. iss smack, ’course, that cunt Osmun is up to his bloody elbows in the shit. Saw ’im giving it large in China White wiv a couple of tarts. I tellya, Epimetheus, we’re well out of it, mate.’

Sadly, all Epimetheus thought was, what happened to that simple, uncomplicated male friendship — that bond? Thought this, and also — hearing the buzzer go, then seeing Pandora’s old-girl face in the video intercom — envied Osmun his 2:1 ratio of prostitutes to consumer.

A certain savvy, skill sets and creative DNA are necessary to satisfy clients’ service demands. The first pitch may’ve gone well, but the second still needs to be won on the bounce — in this case of Epimetheus’s swinging bed. Last night it was toxic-induced impotence; tonight it’s premature ejaculation.

Pandora copes — she can think on her feet, her back, her haunches. She eases herself off him as he slithers out of her, then slobbers down to do what is required. Later on, she teases out of Epimetheus exactly how his mother used to do him an egg, then coddles him one.

Recently, Pandora launched her own campaign: press ads with simple slogans, scanty body copy, end-lines that are an email address, no colour or graphics, and buried in an assortment of publications — Private Eye , the London Magazine , the Daily Telegraph — that her research department of other, smarter tart friends tell her are most likely to reach her target audience: hommes d’un certain ge ready to be led by the cock to be fleeced.

Pandora is violently tired — not even remotely curious. She knows what it will be like to be a mistress: humiliation on hire purchase, a drip-drip-drip of acid semen eating away at her soul instead of these corrosive gushes. ‘Me, blonde poetess who needs to be kept in Krug. You, a cultured gentleman who knows the difference between a sommelier and a sun visor. Temptress@demon.co.uk.’ She has a number of these prospects on the go, but is yet to close a sale. So, if she gets sent this one, why not? He’s both younger and uglier than she’d hoped for, but he looks as if he may be able to withstand all the misfortunes.

Four miles upriver, a grape stalk struggles to escape the lid of an aluminium swing-bin; besides a couple of humans, this is the sole organic thing to be found in this penthouse apartment. It’s a fancy absence — a thousand square feet of bleached beech floorboards, the same again of walls so perfectly plastered they could be in an art gallery — so long as its curator was defiant enough to exhibit nothing. There are no pictures in Prometheus’s home, no sculptures, mementoes or curios. His few personal effects are jammed in walk-in closets; the fitted kitchen is sealed in white units. A plain white futon lies in the middle of the floor; on it lies Prometheus, and on him lies Athene.

‘I was worried,’ she says; ‘you didn’t answer your phone — and, at the restaurant, you looked so ill.’

‘It was nothing,’ he husks into her neck, ‘just indigestion.’

‘You looked like you were dying.’

Her pulse is against his lips; he inhales the hydrogenated wholeness of her. Belly to belly, breast to breast, they are grouted by their spent passion; their hearts and lights and livers are the shared organs of conjoined twins. Prometheus has never felt better.

Athene rears up, is captured for a moment by those colour-chart eyes, then falls to defining his face with her kisses. ‘Huh, well’ — she’s abashed — ‘you’re so beautiful — so healthy.’

It’s true: Prometheus has a marvellous glow. And, while committed entirely to this moment — and to this goddess — he is also looking forward to an attainable future, one in which video clips of celebrities drinking Zeus mineral water infest social networking sites; a virus leaping from PC to laptop across the only world that’s worth being known.