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

Next to the party was Yami, a Sudanese princess as tall, elegant and unexpected in these dismal surroundings as a heron alighting in a municipal boating pond. She stalked along the corridor of the flat, so leggy her legs seemed to bend the wrong way. Everyone assumed that Yami whored, yet her almond eyes, salted with contempt, held no promise of anything.

Billy followed at her high heels, chuckling, and when Yami rounded on him, Hrundi V. Bakshi said, ‘I missed the middle part, but I can tell from the way you are enjoying yourselves it must have been a very humorous anecdote.’ Yami looked at him with regal hatred.

Then Gary arrived, a bullocky little geezer, with his hair damped down in a senatorial fringe, and a thick gold chain encircling his thick neck. Gary, who was in jail garb — immaculate trainers, pressed tracksuit and freshly laundered T-shirt — touched fists with Billy as he came in. ‘Safe,’ they said — although it was anything but.

And so the party filled up. David arrived, a failing screenwriter of spurious intensity, his face dominated by a gnomon nose, its shadow always indicating that this was the wrong time . With him was Tanya, his stylist girlfriend, a jolie laide who had to drop cocaine solution into her blue eyes in order to dilate her pinprick pupils, so her colleagues couldn’t tell she was doing smack. As if.

Finally, there was an estate agent with boyish bad looks, who tore at the sore in the corner of his mouth with a ragged thumbnail. While he was cluttering up the living room of Tony Riley’s flat, his own prospective buyers were getting soaked in Acton.

They parked their arses and groaned the same old addict myths: how far they’d shlepped, how hard they’d fought, how the fucking Greeks kept pushing wooden horses within their justifiably guarded walls. They slumped on chairs, floor cushions and couches, a layer of cigarette smoke slow-swirling above their vaporous heads, waiting for Circe and lotus leaves at forty quid a bunch.

Tony Riley still had a smidgin of heroin left, and each time he spat out his mouthpiece to take up his foil buckler and suck pipe, the double-bores of their withdrawing eyes followed his every move. Tony compounded their anguish by sharing with Bev; they were, after all, far up the River Congo together, with the pimp bamboozled by Conrad’s semantics: ‘Yeah, I mean, like, when ’e calls ’em ‘‘niggers’’, ’e don’ mean it like ‘‘niggaz’’ do ’e? I mean, ’e weren’t a bruvva, woz ’e?’

Tony, taking a chuff, aspirated ‘ho’, by which he meant ‘no’.

On the lesser of the two sofas — an intimate two-seater, deep and softly upholstered — the screenwriter and the stylist were struggling not to touch. From moment to moment they became more mutually repulsed: he could not stand to look upon her needy face, while she was appalled by his pores — so very big, they threatened to engulf her.

Gary slumped on a floor cushion by the radiator, his fists held in front of him. The knuckles were scrawled upon in blue ink: God, Elvis, Chelsea — the council flat trinity. Scrawled upon with pins, in prison, which for men of Gary’s ilk was only the continuation, by other means, of double maths on a wet Tuesday afternoon.

Tired of propping herself on a skimpy windowsill, Yami commanded, ‘Shift yersel’ ’, and Gary hunkered over, so that she could curl herself round his back, assuming a child’s nap posture. He may’ve found himself cupped by Yami’s thighs and belly, her breasts snuggling against his back, but Gary experienced no arousal. Like all the other waiters, his libido was further underground than the tube line from Knightsbridge to Hyde Park Corner: they could sense sex rumbling through the earthy element above them, but down here it was frigid and still.

Georgie kept nellying in and out of the room to check that her meal ticket was all right: Tony was as thin and translucent as a potato crisp, and might crunch into powder at any time. Every three minutes she nellied down the corridor to the bedroom and called Andy again. ‘This number is currently unavailable, please try again later.’ Georgie sat, the phone cradled in her rotten lap, picturing with ghastly clarity the dealer journeying across the city in his metallic-green Ford Mondeo, a car so anonymous that to look upon it was to see nothing. Her feverish imagination summoned up cops and crooks and tidal waves on Scrubs Lane; anything, in fact, that might get between her vein and the needle.

Thunder bumped over the rooftops as Billy went from one huddled waiter to the next, asking if they wanted a cup of tea. It was all he could bring to the party. In the kitchen he clicked on the electric jug and lost himself in his reverie. Through the serving hatch he could see the pompous Clutterbuck and his stuffed-dress-shirt pals, while he, Hrundi V. Bakshi, tiptoed along the margins, concealing himself behind shrubberies, pressing himself against fake veneer walls, lurking artlessly below the watery amoebae that were evidence of Alice Clutterbuck’s awful taste in abstract painting. If he approached the guests with ‘Oh, hello, hello, good evening — what a beautiful evening it is, to be sure’, they turned their backs on his naked gaucherie.

The jug clicked off. Billy slung bags in cups and rained hot death down on them. The rejected Hrundi had found a parrot in a cage. The parrot gave him a hungry look, and the borstal boy playing the manic-depressive comedian playing the washed-up Indian actor cocked his head charmingly, then said, ‘Hello.’

‘Num-num,’ the parrot clucked. ‘Birdy num-num.’

‘Num-num?’ Billy queried aloud, and from the living room came ‘What the fuck’re you on about?’ It was Jeremy, whose well-tailored accent was finally fraying, along with the cuffs of his Turnbull and Asser shirt.

‘Birdy num-num,’ the parrot reiterated and rattled its claws in the bars. Looking down, Billy spotted a dish on the floor. He picked it up so that we all could see: it was full of bird food and printed on the side was birdy num num. ‘Oh, my goodness,’ Billy chortled, ‘birdy wants num-nums does he? I’ll give him num-nums — I’ll give you your num-nums.’He began spooning sugar into the mugs lined up along the gleaming counter — squat, fine bone, chipped. ‘Here, birdy, here!’ The parrot pecked at the grain strewn on the bottom of its cage, while Billy poured milk into the mismatched tea set. ‘Num-nums, num-nums, birdy num-nums,’ he continued muttering, as he fetched down from a cupboard the packet of milk chocolate HobNobs.

Hrundi V. Bakshi was hugely enjoying feeding the parrot; in the ecstasy of interspecific contact he forgot the stuffy Clutterbucks and their snobby guests. His browned-up face glowed with boyish enthusiasm as he sowed the bottom of the cage; but then, ‘Num-num is all gone!’ The num-num was indeed all gone. He had nothing more to offer, so had to put down the bowl and walk away, dabbing his damp palms on his linen jacket, glancing round to check he hadn’t attracted attention.

Billy lined the teas up in the serving hatch and knocked on the wooden frame. He popped his satchel lips and made a ‘pock-pock’ sound, as a techie does when checking to see that a microphone is working. The waiters strewn across Tony Riley’s living room ignored him; they were listening to something else: the music of their agonized nerves, tortured by craving the way a heavy-metal guitarist tortures the strings of his instrument; they heard their nerves screech — a chord that seemed to have been sustained for ten thousand years.

Hrundi V. Bakshi had found a control panel sunk in a wall. The array of buttons and dials was connected to he knew not what, but he pressed one anyway, then, hearing a speaker crackle, spoke into a grille: ‘Birdy num-num ‘‘pock-pock’’. Howdie, pardner.’ This latter an allusion to his cringeworthy encounter with Bev, the Yardie pimp playing the B-actor playing Wyoming Bill Kelso, the cowboy actor.