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

All at once, the party was in full swing. Jeremy stood and, locating a mirror, held it up so that he could comb his hair. It was as if he were courting drugs. Gary got up, rolled his shoulders and then, leaning against the wall with his arms held out, stretched first one leg then the other, just another bloke in a tracksuit limbering up.

David tottered off up the corridor. He tapped on the bathroom door. ‘I know you’re in there, Tanya.’ Knew, and didn’t really mind; theirs, like all drug economies, was a hard scrabble for subsistence: you did what you had to. ‘Lissen,’ he continued, ‘Andy’s coming — I’ve put in our order, but I’m gonna get Poppy from the car, so you better come out.’

Why would anyone bring their small child into this miserable place at the precise moment when the drug dealing — and taking — was about to begin in earnest? Answer: risks incalculable for those to whom responsibility is a given. The child had been in the parked car for over an hour, the rain was slackening off, traffic wardens and dog-walkers would be out on the street. There were these factors, and also the screenwriter’s naive faith in the capacity of a little girl to summon up compassion — credit might be forthcoming.

But not with this little a girl, and not from Andy, who was riding the clutch at the pelican crossing beside the De Vere Hotel. Riding the clutch and holding Pandora’s crotch, as any other sales rep might fondle the Mondeo’s controls, its gearstick or steering wheel. He knew she was eight days shy of her sixteenth birthday — and felt both more and less secure because of it. Bertram had warned Andy off Pandora sternly; but his business partner pointed out that the girl’s mouth was multipurpose. With the wipers slicing semicircles of London out of the drabness, Pandora sat behind the windscreen, a chipmunk with cheeks stuffed full of Class As.

We were in Pandora all right — in her for the duration. When those hateful anti-retrovirals became widely available, she wouldn’t have the modicum of self-discipline needed to administer them. Yes, we’ll be in and out of her for decades — and, given what she gets up to, and who gets up her, we have reason to be grateful to this air terminal of a girl, through which our kind transfer with conspicuous ease.

We were in Pandora — but we weren’t in Andy. I know, I promised you a victim at the outset; but, sad to report, it isn’t Andy. No matter how deserving the dealer may’ve been of a debilitating and progressive disease, he was in no danger of contracting this one. As has been remarked, he didn’t take drugs — except for a joint when a girl was sucking him limp; and for the purposes of fellation, he wore not one but three condoms. Andy didn’t subscribe to the African idiocy that a sweet wasn’t worth having with a wrapper on it; because it wasn’t a sweet for Andy at all, it was a grim staple, sexual sorghum that he had to shovel down because famine might come at any time.

He parked the Mondeo at the far end of De Vere Gardens. Parked it scrupulously, sending Pandora to fetch a ticket from the machine, while he scoped out the other parked cars, then looked up and down the street for possible tails. Sometimes Andy carried a scanner that flipped automatically through the police frequencies, but mostly he didn’t bother: he knew that when the bust came — and come it would, eventually — he would’ve been set up by a fuck-wit junky.

No screenwriter, no matter how inventive, could have got down on the page the scenario that unfolded as Andy and Pandora, together with David and his daughter, were buzzed in. As the plausible quartet took the short lift ride down, the junkies crowded into the corridor. Tanya emerged from the bathroom, with Billy snuffling in her train. Georgie came limping at a run along the corridor and herded them all back towards the living room. ‘Get in there! Keep outta Andy’s way!’ Answered the door, then hustled the dealer and his jailbait away. David’s daughter said something fivish, like, ‘How long’re we gonna stay here, Daddy?’ And Billy, as Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, took a direct hit in the forehead with the sucker dart fired by the Clutterbucks’ kid, who was romping in his plaid pyjamas in his toy-stuffed room. ‘Howdie, pardner,’ Billy mugged, reprising his embarrassing encounter with Wyoming Bill Kelso, and the little girl — traumatized by an hour alone in a parked car in a London residential street on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in November — started to cry.

Slapstick is, in essence, the ritualized worship of causation, something humans place more faith in than they do their gods. Post hoc ergo propter hoc — ‘after this, therefore because of this’. Anyone watching a comedian attempting to do two things at once — or even one — will be familiar with this instinctive belief: of course you would try to stop the toilet overflowing by shutting the lid; of course you would stuff all that toilet paper down the pan; of course you would — given your state of shock — allow yourself to be fed with liquor, despite having been refusing drinks all evening; and naturally your obeisance before the great god Necessity would be rewarded with the vestal virgin Michele Monet; she in nothing but a towel, you in an orange jumpsuit because you’ve had your trousers pulled off you by Fred Clutterbuck and Herb Ellis. Of course .

These effects follow their causes far more surely than night follows day; and so it went: Hrundi decried the desecration of the sacred Ganesh, and the hip protesting young folk decided to wash the slogans off the baby elephant in the pool. Then the drunken Hrundi climbed out of an upper window and rolled down a projecting roof into the deep end, and people dived in to save him. Then the crapulent waiter messed with the controls and the dance floor slid back, dumping more jolly guests into the water — water that was frothing with the washing-up liquid used on the baby elephant. A great glinting-white mass, such as children of all ages delight in, began steadily, like some beautiful and alien organism, to creep up on the band, who kept right on laying down the groove, despite the suds that spattered across the snare drum, each multicoloured bubble — caught by the adequate cinematography of Lucien Ballard (died 1988) — a world. Possibly.

*

Post hoc ergo propter hoc — but Billy’s gofering was a triumph of the will. Andy sat at a kneehole desk, banknotes piling up in front of him as he took pellets from the stoppers Pandora had removed from her gob. Georgie fluffed, then stammered, ‘I h-hope y’d-don’t mind, Andy, it’s just that B-Billy was crashing here last night, and he’s a help — what with Tony being so ill. He keeps them in line, and better they pitch up here — doncha think?’ However, this was a conversation that, having only one participant, was going nowhere.

Billy gave Andy the orders in monosyllables — ‘Two brown, one white’ — while Andy uttered profundities such as ‘Here’. Billy darted back into the living room, distributed the goods, watched them being unwrapped, took his cut, returned to the bedroom and did the same again.

David and his dysfunctional family left at once; as did Yami, Gary and the estate agent. They tucked their stoppers into their gobs and put on workaday faces. They took the lift back up to the lobby of the mansion block, walked past the console table neatly stacked with junk mail, then stepped out the weighty oak door, with its brass fittings, and took the tiled steps down to the geometric street.

Yami turned right, towards the Brompton Road, moving with the pantherish totter of a tall woman on too-high heels. Gary splashed over to a van that was amorphous with dents and bashes. David, his daughter, and his abetter in her criminal neglect, climbed down into an MG Midget that wasn’t theirs.