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

Prometheus grabs the neck of a 1.5 litre plastic bottle, pulls its hard mouth to his soft lips, drinks awkwardly and points the bottle to the face of Athene, who arches her neck. Chilly spillage ungums the lovers, arousing them once more. Athene takes a mouthful of water and, moving down him, sleeves Prometheus’s penis in this coolant.

Their motions those of sea creatures just evolved to move on land, the lovers resume the making of it; they creep over, then under, one another. Prometheus rears back, her trapezius muscles gripped like handlebars; this is not the explosion that tore Athene’s clothing from her, hurling it across the beech flooring in the blast pattern of lust; this is ruminative lovemaking, as infinitely tender and considerately solipsistic as two geriatrics masturbating with each other’s hands.

It is completely dark, yet seagulls are still mucking around the containers piled behind the chainlink, razor-wire and concrete fencing. Containers full of everything worth having — food, electrical goods, furniture, paper, metal, plastic, old photos, letters, locks of hair — that cannot be matched to anyone that wants it. The containers are waiting for dawn, when they will be grabbed, then winched on to barges, before being floated downriver from the Wandsworth Solid Waste Transfer Station to landfills on the Essex marshes.

The griffon vulture flies up to the massive beam of the winch, then accepts the gulls’ mobbing as of right, smiling inscrutably out from the grey riot of their wings. Lazily, she takes once more to the sky; eighty feet up she yaws, then tacks across to the Hurl-ingham, then back to the Heliport, then from there to Chelsea Harbour, until her course takes her in past the Peace Pagoda to dock in one of the avenues of planes running along Battersea Park Parade.

The feral smell they sense as fear incarnate blows through dank boughs and raggy leaves, to reach blackbirds, pigeons — crows, even — and wake them from their citified sleep, safe under sodium lights. They limp into the air. As with the Wandsworth gulls, the griffon accepts their mobbing gracefully. Trailing the scrappy little airforce, she dallies over the floodlit tennis courts, then spirals up, the smaller birds falling away, fighter cover that has failed to bring the liver-freighter down.

Up, banking past the clapboard gasometer, soaring between the signature chimneys of the power station, then wheeling back round to approach Chelsea Bridge Wharf, not, as its developers might have wished, to take ‘Another Look’ — their own end-line for this terminally uninteresting development — but in order to land on the topmost of the curved balconies, which, in as much as they resemble jetties at all, are ones only suitable for the loading and unloading of brioche.

So considerate, the vulture, so intuitive; she enters with the aplomb of a third lover, en route to join the two entwined on the futon. Hearing the rustle and scratch as she beaks, then necks open the sliding glass door, Prometheus stirs but does not turn over — he knows who it is. Athene’s hip is smooth and rounded in his palm, her wheaten belly rising against his finger tips. In pleasured drowse, she senses the cold air and murmurs a sing-song, ‘Y’all right, love?’ Only to be reassured by his face pressing further into the arch of her neck.

The vulture insinuates her head under the duvet, and Prometheus bites his lips hard enough to draw blood as she makes her expert incision, reopening a wound only superficially healed. As the bird feeds, her feathers — black, buff and white alike — are suffused with the pinkish wash of the external floodlights; a colour scheme that will, its developers hope, make of the wharf a pleasing property sweetmeat. Highly edible.

With pulp-tipped claws the grape stalk pulls itself out of the bin, while inside Prometheus’s fridge an old Roquefort rind shudders into life; then a celery stalk rocks, rolls and tips upright. For a split-second the earth stops spinning and its magnetic field is neutralized: the fridge door unsuckers itself. Rind of Roquefort, stalk of celery, four squares of Swiss milk chocolate — all sprout cartoon limbs as they jump down to the white beech floor; in the fridge light they jeté to join the pirouetting grape stalk.

Throughout the wharf women light scented candles as they make ready to recline in tubs frothing with stress-busting bubbles, and men surf channels to rediscover the Discovery Channel. They are oblivious, seized only by relaxation, gripped by little more than reverie. So it is that the contents of their fridges and freezers are able to rustle, crack and rumble into life.

Lifts rush down into precisely ruled courtyards where bought rocks cluster in frigid beds and water features; the animated food-stuffs waltz out of their metal doors. The double-sized figures of wholesome chaps and winsome chapesses tear themselves from the billboards, where for four seasons they’ve languished tapping little ends with huge teaspoons. These demigods and demigoddesses feel not the cruel west wind that parts their mighty terry-towelling robes; they round up the food, cajoling frozen chickens, lassoing pots of clotted cream, trawling bags of Ethiopian sugar-snap beans and arresting jars of pesto. The subdued food is shovelled into an immense cone that one young Hercules has fashioned from a sheet of corrugated iron torn from a nearby scaffold.

The billboard deities choreograph a tableau gigantesque around this horn of left-over plenty — and this, truly, is worth Another Look. Then, with no sense of movement, no crude disjunction, we’re back in the penthouse, back in the kitchen, back in the fridge — where a single slim tin of energy drink, lit by its own inner taurine and decorated with the silhouette of a naked youth that’s blazoned ‘Ganymede Up All Nite’, half bows, crunching itself a waist.

And still the vulture feeds, its frightful ruff saturated with Prometheus’s blood.

Doc Ben doesn’t, as a rule, do house calls. ‘Whadda vey fink eye am,’ he says dropping into Mockney for the benefit of his Portia, ‘a fucking tart?’ A strange denial, because that’s precisely what he is: after all, he puts himself about by the hour and deals drugs on the side — although, admittedly, not very nice ones. Doing out-calls is not the distinction between medical whoring and doctoring.

Nevertheless, Doc Ben feels differently about Prometheus: the guy is three chords short of a punk song , too crazy even to be considered as a proper patient. He revolves through the Harley Street consulting room every fortnight, his liver rotten to the core, then off he pops, it’s almost as if. But Doc Ben is way too preoccupied to make the diagnosis any open-minded practitioner would be compelled to: that Prometheus’s liver is being eaten away at, then spontaneously regenerated. Way too preoccupied by finding a parking place for his Porsche — and not just any berth. The underground car park at the wharf is way wrong ; no security, poorly illuminated, and the mad axeman — who’s actually an amateurishly poor plucker — has two Gibson Les Pauls in the boot worth a cool fifteen grand .

When he eventually finds a safe on-road space, then ascends the lift, Doc Ben discovers Athene waiting for him at the front door to the penthouse. A stench of organ failure hangs in the costly void. Below the plate glass prow of the block, the woolly-brown river knits and pearls itself. Lying face down on the futon, the impassioned lover of the night before resembles a used condom stuffed with offal. There’s a large bloodstain by his latex belly.

Doc Ben thinks, there’s always more sex the morning after than there was the night before; he has a nose for these scents, and Athene hasn’t showered, only pulled on underwear, skirt and blouse, rolled-up stockings. He clocks the hot veins on the insides of her wrists as she presses her razor-thin mobile phone to her cheek. Idly wondering how the fuck does he get it up , Doc Ben kneels to give the adman a rare probe.