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

Might be surmised — but not by Billy; Billy was never disabused. True, on TVs in the association areas of remand centres, then latterly, on those clamped in the top corners of cells, he had glimpsed these other, more stylish domains. There had also been times, on the out, when, like an anthropoid tapeworm, Billy had lodged himself in the entrails of others’ evenings — usually because he’d sold them a blob of hash or a sprinkling of powder — and so ended up in their fitted flats or architect-designed houses.

While his unwitting hosts grew maudlin and clumsy in the kitchen, Billy roamed the other chambers, examining such innovations as rag-rolling and glass bricks with an aficionado’s eye. When he left he’d take with him a silver-framed photograph or leather-bound book in lieu of a going-home present. He’d seldom been invited in the first place — and he was never asked back.

So, Billy — he wasn’t disabused; for him, Chez Clutterbuck remained the acme of warm and sophisticated hospitality, to which he was invited back again and again, despite the fact that each and every time he arrived with mud coating one of his white moccasins. Oops! What should he do? Billy, as Peter, as Hrundi, had trodden in the oily gunk in the parking area, and then tracked black footprints along the pristine walkway, a dull single-player version of that quintessential sixties party game Twister.

Billy and Hrundi — they’re both peasants, basically. A stream of water in a house must be for washing arse or hands, so the dabbling of the muddy shoe in the stream was only — like all slapstick — logical. Basic physics. It floated away, a jolly little boat, leaving Billy to encounter that stock character, the drunken waiter, while hopping on one bare, browned-up foot.

The waiter was young, with sandy hair, and in full fig: tailcoat, high white collar. He dutifully presented his tray of cocktails. Then Billy — as Peter, as Hrundi — got to deliver one of his favourite lines in The Party . Recall, he was a career junky, a professional. Heroin, morphine sulphate, pethidine, methadone — all opiates, synthetic and organic, these were his stock in trade; but alcohol, apart from when he needed it to sedate himself because he couldn’t get any junk and his chicken bones were splintering in his turkey skin, well, ‘Thank you, but I never touch it.’ And so, unsullied, Hrundi hopped off to retrieve his moccasin that, like Moses’s basket, had grounded in some rushes. Behind him the waiter, who was every straight-living hypocrite Billy had ever known, took a glass from his own tray and knocked it back.

All this — the fragments of remembered dialogue, the off-cuts of scenery, the comedian’s fatuous mugging — was projected on to Tony Riley’s blank basement, while the other two parties to the ill-lit production got set up for the day’s shoot.

Once wiped down and medicated, ornamental Tony was replaced on his sofa with a cup of tea; and Georgie, having done the surfaces, retired to the bathroom, where, under the bare bulb, she put a bird leg up on the bath and unwound four feet of crêpe bandage to expose the open-cast bacteria mine. In the enamel ravine below lay strewn the rubble of Billy, his horny nail clippings and fuse-wire pubic hairs, the frazil of his dead skin left high and drying on crystalline ridges of old suds.

Georgie winced as she dusted the gaping hole in her shin with fungicidal powder. It was perhaps a little bizarre that, given the exactitude with which she measured, then administered, palliatives to Tony, she so woefully mistreated herself; but then, by sticking to her story that these septic potholes were ‘just something I picked up’, she could maintain the delusion that she was ‘run down’ and ‘a bit stressed out’, so necessitating certain other medications, which the authorities, in their infinite stupidity, saw fit to deny her.

The truth was that Georgie was dying as well — and she knew it. She’d been clean for long enough, before relapsing back into the pits, to no longer be able to cloak her mind — once swift, airborne, feathery and beautiful — in the crude oil of evasiveness. She had resolved to die with Tony, to go with him into the ultimate airlessness of the emphysemic’s tomb, as a handmaiden for the afterlife.

Be that as it may, in the time left to her there was work to be done; so, once the pits had been powdered and crêped, Georgie retreated to the inner sanctum she shared with Tony, the master bedroom, in order to make The Call.

Georgie had met Tony when she was a runner for Bertram and Andy’s crew. Bertram, at one time a paper-bag manufacturer in Leicester, had been lured down to London ten years before. No one’s saying Bertram’s paper bags were any good: he didn’t maintain the machinery, skimped on glue and abused his Bangladeshi — and largely female — workforce. His bags often split. I know, because I was also in Leicester, in some of Bertram’s workers; remember, I am legion — and non-unionized. Bertram also knocked his own wife around.

Bertram liked whoring — and he liked whores still more. He panted down the M1 to London on the expensive scent. While in town, he treated his ‘ladies’ like. ladies, just as back home he treated his women like whores. He particularly cherished nice girls from good families who had fallen on to his bed of pain. He bought the fucked-up Tiffanies and Camillas he hired — at first by the hour, then by the night — as if they were nobility, dressing them up so he could take them to Fortnum’s for tea, or to Asprey’s for ugly silver fittings.

Bertram was a medieval miller of a man, complete with jowls and an extra brace of chins. His great girth suggested the washing down of capons with many firkins of ale. His thick thighs cried out for hosiery, his paunch bellowed for a codpiece. On his first chin was stuck a goatee the approximate size and shape of a Scottie dog. The beard looked as if it had flung itself at Bertram’s face to get at the liverish treat of his tongue.

Bertram didn’t do drugs — but his ‘ladies’ were clopping about in the muck. He soon realized he could secure himself cheaper favours if he took up dealing. During a brief sojourn in Pentonville — the result of a contretemps involving an electric kettle lead, his pivotal arm and a girl who wasn’t a ‘lady’ — Bertram met Andy (real name, Anesh), who dissimulated about everything, including his skin colour. At night, even in the nick, he rubbed whitening powder into his tan cheeks — an inverted Hrundi V. Bakshi, playing Peter Sellers. Andy was small Asian fry, but he had big Jamaican and Turkish connections. When they got out, the paper-bag manufacturer and the fraud went into partnership.

The viral quality of vice, well, we have to stop and admire it — for an instant. Bertram and Andy’s business plan was simplicity itself. This was the early 1990s and crack cocaine, a recent arrival, was stupendously dear. Most of Bertram’s whores used crack with their clients, as it made everything go — if it went at all — quicker; and the clients, many of whom had been as ignorant of hard drugs as Bertram, ended up using smack, too. Through nose-shots and cold-vagina-calls Bertram cemented his client list with blood and mucus.

They never wrote anything down, and the crew was built up on a cellular basis: Bertram made the wholesale buys; Andy portioned out; the Tiffanies and Camillas brought them runners, addicts who were unemployable, yet still presentable. Best practice was straightforward: they wanted only white clients in good standing — no blacks, no Social Security jockeys. Their delivery area was exclusively the West End, Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham. None of their crew would cross the river — although, like motorized rats, they’d make a skulking meet in Oakley Street. Late each morning, Bertram and Andy rendezvoused with their four top runners at an hotel by the Hammersmith flyover, in a room held vacant for them by a compliant and heavily addicted manager. Those four, in turn, subdivided their allocation among other runners, and so on, for as many links as were necessary — drugs rattling in one direction, cash in the other, the entire saleschain cranked by desperate need.