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

If the runners used up too much of their stock, they were compelled to sell more; if they grew flaky they were brushed off like the dead skin they were fast becoming. At least, that’s how it was all supposed to work; in practice Bertram and Andy weren’t good managers, and they lacked a Human Resources department. They had their weaknesses — Georgie being one of them. Once the holes in her shins had become too large, and her tinkling accent a church bell that tolled the knell of her; well, by rights she should’ve been given her limping orders, but Bertram had some strange affection for her. Was it sexual, or still more venal? Best not to start out in that direction — let alone go there.

Aquila non capit muscas — ‘The eagle does not hunt for flies.’ Georgie was pensioned off to this queer care home in De Vere Gardens, and instead of running drugs she sat still and waited for them. The gloomy basement, squishy with dust, barbed with Tony’s PR tat, was a carnivorous plant into which the flies spiralled, only to trigger the sensitive hairs that ensured their gooey absorption. Eagle-eyed Andy — neither he nor Bertram were fools enough to touch their stock — had only to wait until the trap-flat was full.

Piles of discarded clothing, together with the previously alluded to black plastic bags, smoothed the corners of the master bedroom. The brocaded drapes muffled the hammering of the rain in the basement area. A bedside lamp illumined the altar of pillows and cushions that had to be constructed just so, then mortared with smaller pillows and cushions, each time that Tony tried to sacrifice himself to sleep. It was Georgie who built the altar, and who had to arrange the stiff loops of Tony’s oxygen line so they wouldn’t kink and block during his provisional oblivion.

This was a boudoir — we always felt — that, with its huge old water bed, exerted a lunar pull on body fluids, encouraging their wanton exchange. We swing from ape to ape by pricking stick, but sex — especially low down and dirty sex, sex with lesions — will do.

Georgie picked up the receiver of the antiquated Bakelite phone on the bedside table and made The Call. Georgie never had a get-up; she was lucky if there were a few sugary sips of methadone linctus to stave off withdrawal. The dialling alone was torment to her hurting fingers, with each circuit feeling as if her entire body were being pulled apart on a torturous wheel. Georgie made The Call, and listened with the acuity of great suffering as the impulses nattered away under the London streets.

To a recently completed block of studio flats in Brook Green, where Andy was lying with a nearly sixteen-year-old girl called Pandora, whom he’d liberated from a pimp called Bev, so that she could be pressed, by his hand, into the bondage of his thighs. Pandora, who, at this early stage in her misfortunate life, despite the miseries that boxed her in, was still given to the giggles and hair-flicks of girls her age, girls who’d never seen the (men’s) things that she had.

The mattress sat on a carpet that stank of rubbery underlay. Pandora sprawled across Andy’s thighs and smelt the ghee that Meena, his wife, used liberally in her cooking. The ghee and the traces of urine in his sparse pubic hair. It was taking Andy a long time to get aroused; Pandora’s mouth was available to him whenever he wanted it, so such congress had the ordinary sensuality of squeezing a blackhead. He groped for the chirruping mobile phone without troubling to shuck Pandora off.

‘Any poss’ of getting over here firstish?’ Georgie said without foreplay. ‘We’re gagging for some albums — soul and reggae.’ This was the kids’ club encryption they used: heroin was ‘soul’, crack cocaine ‘reggae’. Only if the interceptor of their calls had been a complete ingenue could crew and clients have escaped decoding; of course, such naivety was a given.

‘Is anyone else there?’ Andy asked.

‘Er, no, not yet — but they probably will be soon. Please, Andy, I — ’

‘Not now. I haven’t got any albums. I’m busy — it’ll have to be. ’ He searched his sparse mental terrain — rancorous swamps, low hills of contempt, the isolated crag of violence — for the name of the runner currently serving Tony’s patch. ‘Quentin. Yeah, give Quentin a call in a couple of hours.’

Georgie knew it would take at least two hours for Bertram to see the Jamaicans and the Turks, then another for Andy to do the portioning, packaging and distributing. It wouldn’t be until late afternoon that Quentin came padding down the stairs of the mansion block, the complexion of his motorcycle leathers clearer than the hide they hid. It’ll be too late by then! Georgie’s body yowled, I’ll be mush!

‘P-Please,’ she sobbed into the phone. ‘Andy, I know you’ve got one or two, you’ve always — ’

‘Can’t talk now.’ He cut her right off. It was true, Andy held a small stash, enough to keep Pandora. busy, but this was the way it was: the eagle does not hunt flies. The flies would be buzzed into Tony Riley’s trap-flat, and by mid-afternoon Andy would relent and make the drop himself.

Andy liked to keep Georgie and Tony on a tight leash, feel them tugging as they walked to heel. It was all in the desperate doggy tug of their need and their obedience that Andy’s mastery inhered. Back in Southall he was a nothing, the bad third son who’d been to jail for thieving; but in the Royal Borough it was white women like Georgie who bowed down before him.

Billy, still slow in the syrupy glow of his get-up fix, enjoyed this time: the elongated hours before the dealer came. It was when the party got under way. The hack combo in the matching blue nylon jackets picked up the beat and strolled with it; the drunk waiter circulated with his drinks tray; the cowboy actor with steer-horn shoulders mock butt-fucked his starlet date, as he pretended to teach her pool; Clutterbuck and his cummerbunded cronies drank cocktails and smoked cigars — ‘I still have a few left over from the pre-Castro days.’ Hrundi V. Bakshi leant on pillars or hid behind bamboo, and shyly observed the gay scene.

As the guests trickled in, alliances were made and concordats formed. These weren’t minor Hollywood players pretending to be slightly less minor Hollywood players, but the flies who congregated at Tony’s flat and waited for the eagle.

‘Oh, my goodness, it is you! Wyoming Bill Kelso!’ Billy said to Bev, Pandora’s old pimp — a big Yardie bulked out still more by a puffa jacket. ‘I am the biggest fan of your movies — ’

‘What the fuck,’ Bev said, pushing past Billy, who had answered the door. Billy fell back, muttering, ‘Howdie pardner.’

Bev could pick up where he lived, in Harlesden, but the gear Bertram and Andy’s crew served was reliably better; besides, his girls worked in Earl’s Court. Bev had intellectual pretensions. He was reading Heart of Darkness , and, plonking himself down in an armchair opposite Tony, engaged the suffocating ex-PR man in a conversation about the impact of colonialism.

Between chuffs on his oxygen Tony was eager to participate; he was wobbly-bubbly, oscillating in his start-the-day steroid high. That he’d never read Conrad’s novella himself didn’t matter in the least.

Billy, wearing a trim maid’s uniform, checked the video intercom, then buzzed in Jeremy, who came ambling through the upstairs lobby and down the stairs. Jeremy, in Oxfords, jeans, and with a silk handkerchief snotting from the top pocket of his tweed jacket. He appeared every inch the scion of a minor squirearchical house — which is what he was. However, his account at Berry Brothers and Rudd had been stopped and his Purdey pawned; Jeremy’s career in stocks was irretrievably broken, yet still he brayed, such was his sense of entitlement — to drugs.