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

‘I dunno. ’ Tanya muttered. She was chubby-cheeked with gingerish hair — not at all like Michele Monet.

‘C’mon,’ Billy said, insistent, ‘meet me in the karzy in five.’ He wandered off, avoiding the sandy-haired waiter, who, having downed most of the drinks on his tray, was now completely pissed.

But at first the bathroom was locked, and when the synthetic cockatoo who’d been using it emerged — a woman who, earlier in the evening, Billy’s antics had gifted with a roast chicken for a hairpiece — there was a second waiting her turn. Ever gallant, Billy let her go in front of him.

Hrundi V. Bakshi climbed up a spiral staircase to the second storey of the Clutterbucks’ extensive and ugly dwelling, crept into a bedroom that was an atonal symphony of nylon and velour, then finally found his way into the en suite bathroom. By now he was risibly pigeon-toed, his knees half crossed to sustain his full bladder. He’d been refusing alcoholic drinks throughout the party — but he’d drunk a lot of water. Then there was the strawberry soup he’d sipped sitting on a daft low stool, while to either side of him the sophisticated Hollywood types exchanged banter.

The Clutterbucks’ bathroom was intimidating to a fake Indian. There was shag-pile carpeting, tiled steps up to a shower and pot plants everywhere; still, at least there was the comic relief, the slackening of Sellers’s funny face.

Tanya came in. She was wearing a ribbed sweater, one of David’s; the sleeves covered her hands except for her gnawed-upon fingers. She sat on the edge of the bath and peered down at Billy’s silt. Billy busied himself at the sink, setting out works, spoon, wraps of smack and citric acid on the shelf.

‘I won’t fuck you, y’know,’ Tanya said dully. Through his filmy lens Billy saw Michele Monet singing of love, while accompanying herself on an acoustic guitar.

‘It is good to be having a good time,’ Billy said in his stupid golly-gosh Indian accent, heating the spoon with a Bic lighter. Tanya sighed — she was used to idiots and snapped, ‘Gimme that.’

But Billy thought this precipitate; he whipped his belt from the loops of his jeans, half garrotted his arm and dowsed for a vein. When, eventually, he handed the syringe to Tanya, the barrel was full of blood. Or should we say blood? The sucked-up back-flow of his circulatory system. Billy’s viral load wasn’t particularly high, and it was only a one-mil’ syringe, yet there we were, a Varanasi’s worth of virions, our isocahedral capsids jostling together in the tube like so many footballs floating down the Ganges.

Not that Tanya didn’t have plenty of us, too. When she kicked off her flip-flop — in the fashion industry they dubbed this ‘heroin chic’, but, trust me, it was only junky déshabillé — pulled her foot up in front of her on the bath and, taking the syringe, bent to tend it between her toes, she paused to remark, ‘I can’t have a hit in my arm — they check there.’ Then asked Billy, ‘Are you negative?’ To which the only realistic reply would’ve been, are you fucking joking? This guy is nothing but negation piled upon negation! But once he’d gruntaffirmed ‘Finkso’, she let herself have us.

How was it for me? Think of that numinous — but, for all that, real — moment in any party, when it all begins to slide into mayhem. The guests are tipsy; the band are getting looser, louder and funkier; darkness has come to press against the picture windows, and shadows swell in the swimming pool; sensual possibilities tickle everyone’s extremities; and the drunken waiter falls backwards into the kitchen, where he knocks off the chef ’s toupee.

That’s when the influx comes: younger, crazier, happier gatecrashers, prancing and dancing, and twisting their minds off, a gay cavalcade with a baby elephant they’ve liberated from the zoo and daubed with corny hippy slogans: ‘The World is Flat!’, ‘Love is a Sugar Cube!’ and ‘Go Naked!’

That’s what it was like for us as we gatecrashed Tanya.

No, they didn’t fuck, but they were slung together by the plush impact of the heroin, ribbed pullover against mohair woolly. Tanya thought of little else, and Billy, as Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, flushed the toilet once, twice, a third time; then, fool that he was, lifted the lid of the cistern and fiddled with the ballcock. One of Alice Clutterbuck’s vile daubs fell off the wall into the cistern; Hrundi pulled it out and jerked the end of the toilet roll for some paper to wipe it. The roll began to spin, disgorging loop after skein of toilet paper on to the fluffy floor of the bathroom. Alarmed, Hrundi stooped to gather up an armful and, in so doing, predictably, dropped the cistern lid. Down below a lump of plaster fell on to the snare drum. The band played on. Hrundi rubbed the blotchy purple painting with the toilet paper; it smeared, but he put it back on the wall anyway, then stuffed the bundle of toilet paper into the toilet, shut the lid and flushed it. The toilet began to overflow; the bidet turned into a fountain. Billy watched — numb, enthralled — as a new interior rill formed a course across the Clutterbucks’ bathroom.

Five minutes previously, in the catacomb of the master bedroom, cadaverous Georgie was strung up upon the wire for eternity when she heard ‘I’m coming myself.’ Andy had cut through the static, then broken the connection.

Andy slid through the chicane on Kensington Church Street and stopped at the lights opposite the Polaris bulk of Barker’s. When the feeder light changed, he turned into Kensington Road. This junction had no resonance for him: he thought not of Biba hippies and Kensington Market honking of patchouli; nor, as the Mondeo headed east, did he ruminate on William and Mary’s big move. The previous August, Andy hadn’t so much as registered the cut-flower embankments that, overnight, had piled up along the railings of Kensington Palace — the most expensive compost heap in history.

For Andy, those strange August days had been business as usual; the same plus c’est la m ê me chose of pick-ups and divvying-ups, of driving and serving, of screwing ruined under-age girls in empty flats, then heading back to Southall to play the overbearing and abusive paterfamilias — a role that Andy performed magnificently.

There was no prescience for this man, either; he could not sense the future, the coming Muji-Bouji’s-woojie of dizzy dancing on ceaseless credit. No, Andy saw what was there in front of him: sheikhs, transplanted desert blooms, their pot bellies tenting their robes, their masked womenfolk ambling along behind. He saw men in shirtsleeves boring themselves to death in the overheated conference rooms of the Royal Garden Hotel. He saw cabs and buses and a faux-vintage Harrods delivery van. He didn’t feel, as anyone else might, the vapid cosmopolitanism of this quarter of London, where the corner shops sold Swiss watches and the postmen knew no one’s name.

Back in Tony Riley’s flat, the chord that seemed as if it might sustain for ten thousand years was chopped off. Georgie jerked into action: all must be as the grim little god wanted it. Bev must cut short his seminar and, together with Yami, go into the small back bedroom, where more relics of Tony’s gift for public relations were stacked and piled. The two black people came to rest on a large leather pouffe, sitting at the feet of a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Tony dressed as Wyatt Earp, his six-shooters blazing from the hip, a speech bubble poking from the side of his Stetson. 2-D Tony was saying, ‘Meet me at the OK Corral on Old Brompton Road for fun that should be outlawed!’ Bev and Yami didn’t have speech bubbles.

Georgie fluttered among the remaining whites. ‘C’mon, get up.’ She ordered the sedated screenwriter: ‘Giss yer money. Tell me what you want — Andy’s coming.’ The junkies dug out their linty notes — Gary even had the shame of change. The binary listing, brown/white, began. Tony left off his oxygen to do the count.