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

If what Hilary was being subjected to in the Plantation was indeed a protracted gavage — taking place over months and years, not days and weeks, with the force-feeding of alcohol, not grain — then these excursions were those periods in the life of Val’s captive goose when the creature was kept outside, voluntarily grazing on the tougher grasses of humiliation, so that his throat became sufficiently toughened to withstand the finition d’engraissement .

Val cackled, the heavies assaulted Hilary, the Plantation members were so many plaster casts propped against the Artex walls. Trouget slipped away into the rainy night. The Typist and Her Ladyship, who might, by reason of their sex alone, have been expected to object to the long-drawn-out assault that was being perpetrated right under their noses, did nothing of the sort. Although their antagonism to one another was legendary, there came a point in a long session (especially one where fresh air acted as a catalyst to their intoxication) when they rediscovered their sisterhood, and so they hung round each other’s neck, blabbing emotional confidences that the following morning’s hangovers would ruthlessly send to the dustbin of her story.

It was left to the Martian to resolve things: he called off Wilson’s attack dogs and unobtrusively shepherded the members off down Old Compton Street to the Admiral Duncan, where he equally unobtrusively bought them all a drink — two for Val — before herding them on to the Swiss for the same again — two of the same for Val — and so, by easy stages, home to the Plantation, where everything terminated in a welter of drunkenness.

They were all, of course, alcoholics — every last one of them. But it would be a mistake to equate that alcoholism with unruly behaviour, incontinent emotion or wholly unmanageable lives. The welter of drunkenness that ended the Festival of Sadus would have been barely discernible to an outsider; even an habitué of the club could only tell when consumption was peaking due to an added dankness in the atmosphere, an extra film of dirt on the sash window and a multiplication of ‘cunts’, until they were not only the most frequently employed words but also their punctuation.

No, the members of the Plantation led lives of remorseless continence: deeply trammelled, painfully organized. They had chosen this mode of existence and bowed down to its limiting constraint: that for the greater portion of their waking lives their forebrains would be completely sedated. If they had work, then their performance was characterized by its stereotypy; if they had a family, then home life was typified by their absence, for on the rare occasions that they were in the vicinity, it was as a Tupperware Moloch in a suburban Gehenna.

Getting the money to spend on drink, getting to the Plantation, leaving the Plantation, and — in the case of the majority — getting on to other pubs and clubs, until they beat the night to death in some chthonic shebeen deep beneath the West End, required a steadiness and fixity of purpose that militated against any reckless behaviour whatsoever.

If the club had had a motto, it would have been — to paraphrase Suetonius: ‘Make waste slowly.’ The huge volume of alcohol poured into the wonky vessel of the Plantation was as formaldehyde decanted into a specimen jar, with this distinction: these spirits preserved everything but the flesh.

Hilary Edmonds had for years now rented a cupboard in Kensal Rise from Margery De Freitas, aka Her Ladyship. De Freitas, who once shared Mandy Rice-Davies with Peter Rachman, had followed the slum landlord’s trajectory rather than the whore’s, moving straight on to a brief stint as a madam, before finding the management of the girls too onerous. So, she dispensed with the chickens but kept their coops; verminous Victorian houses, subdivided and subdivided and partitioned again, in which she incubated as many blacks and Irish as she could lay her fat bejewelled hands on.

She had skipped the prime of life, cutting straight from slim, angular, Mediterranean good looks to a dropsical version of them: mountainous hair, vulturine beak, tits avalanching into her lap. Her legs plagued her, and, as if the treatment he received in the club wasn’t enough for the poor boy, when they got back of an evening Hilary was ordered to remove Her Ladyship’s support hose, unwind fathoms of crê pe bandages, then bathe the porphyritic columns in salt water.

Promptly at noon each day, the two left Kensal Rise and took the Bakerloo Line to Piccadilly Circus. Her Ladyship stumped up Shaftesbury Avenue to the French, where Gaston helped to correct the balance of alcohol in her blood. Meanwhile, Hilary opened up at the Plantation: checked the Filipina had done her wiping, supervised deliveries, re-stocked the shelves; all in all enjoying his hour or so alone, dabbling in the dusty peace, before Val Carmichael dragged himself in from King’s Cross, and the long dark sousing of the afternoon began.

On this particular afternoon — one in May, not that you’d feel merry buried in Blore Court — the regulars trickled in, in their usual order: first the Cunt, crowing over this scam or that rip-off; then His Nibs, immaculate in suit, tie and puce face mask, with dry talk of lubricious scandal. Next came the Dog, the only member who took the stairs to the second floor at a bound, a gesture to his Highland boyhood that cost him long minutes heaving on his stool, slobbering on a cigarette as he battled with his necrotic lungs.

Then up came the Poof, frowsty from a young girl’s perfumed bed and snapping at Hilary to make haste with his Campari, as he hid his shakes by patting his curly locks. The Typist and Her Ladyship arrived within seconds of each other, separated by leagues of hatred; then, finalement , the Extra made his entrance. Bolton, narrow of skull, sandy of hair, his malleable features writhing with the effort required to corral six personae into the role of a single actor. The Extra, whose big day this was, for, together with a jejeune TV comedian in the role of Clov, while he himself — perhaps inadvisedly — attempted Hamm, they were opening in a production of Endgame at the Peacock Theatre on Portugal Street.

Oh, yes — and then there was the Martian, although to say of Pete Stenning that he had ‘come in’ to the Plantation at any given time was difficult. He seemed always to have been there, sitting at his little table between the piano nook and the window embrasure, his greenish hair shining faintly in the pallid light, his glasses tilted forward and the lenses holding two orange saucers, the reflections of the drink he held in his ink-stained fingers.

Even in an establishment where stasis was the prevailing mode, the Martian stood out for his refusal to be moved by the times. He was still wearing the same serviceable suede jacket in 1983 that he had been sporting in 1980, and 1973. The same yellow shirt, too. He spoke seldom, and when he did his interventions had a surgical character, as, sidling up to the bar, he got right to the point: ‘What’re you having, Val?’ As if he didn’t know.

So Hilary built the bubbly edifice of another vodka and tonic, and another Campari and soda, and another whisky, and another lager. Round and round it went, the drinking in the Plantation, a perpetual motion of alcoholic fluid like a water feature with a concealed pump.

At some point during the afternoon Bolton handed out the tickets — even Hilary got one — and at 5.30 he left the club, admonishing them to ‘Be on time, you cunts. There’s only one act and no admission after curtain up.’

‘We know that,’ Val snarled, although heretofore he had never evinced any familiarity with the joyful pessimism of the Irish Nobel Laureate’s oeuvre. ‘Don’t get yer lavender scanties ridden up yer crack.’