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

None of them said any goodbyes — what would’ve been the point of that ? Nor, of course, were we required to say our farewells; we went with them all — including the kid. Went with them as they horizontally transmitted us across town.

Now the drugs were on the premises, the party in the basement was in full swing. Bev returned from the back bedroom to resume his seminar on the literature of colonialism. He and Tony sat either side of a coffee table strewn with the apparatus of derangement, and, while Tony battled to insinuate a poot of crack smoke into his lungs, Bev gently coaxed him, ‘C’mon, bruv, thass it, I’ll ’old the lighter.’

Jeremy hunched in the furthest corner of the room, his cheap gold hair wreathed in dear fumes. In between hits he interjected: ‘But don’t you see — I mean, Kurtz is — I went to Africa — once.’ Disjointed remarks, made with tremendous sincerity and not intended to be ingratiating, because he had no need to be — the brown and the white had done it for him.

Crazy intimacy frothed up from the sunken pool of the living room, then shivered along the corridor to the master bedroom, where Billy — as Hrundi — had found a new Michele. What happy mayhem as the Hollywood party descended into anarchy. Billy was still in the swimming pool with the gay young folk, overseeing the bath time, while Pandora sat atop the baby elephant; coincidentally, she was wearing the same clothes — blue jeans and a grey T-shirt — that Michele Monet had been lent after her own dress was soaked.

Yes, Pandora sat on the baby elephant in the room — her own babyishness. It was irresistible. Billy saw them leaving together — leaving the wild party saturated with crack foam, where a Russian balalaika band that had just happened by was whipping the revellers into a frenzy of dreadful dancing. It was dawn, and the LAPD were standing by their squad cars. They had no warrants out on innocent Hrundi, so he and Michele would get into the funny three-wheeler — Michele with her mini-dress back on again — then they’d bumble down the palm-lined boulevards of Kensington and Knightsbridge, searching for a cute bungalow smothered in bougainvillea, where Billy could declare his hapless love.

On a Tuesday afternoon in November?

Andy goaded his mule — ‘Going’ — and handed her the remaining rocks of crack and pellets of heroin, all wrapped up once more. She popped the stoppers in her cheeks. They exited the bedroom, Andy moving with the slow lollop of a creature that knows how to conserve its evil energy. He paused, seeing Bev by the coffee table, and snapped at Georgie, ‘No blacks. I told you no blacks. I won’t come by here if there’re blacks.’ Then he headed for the front door, Pandora walking to heel.

Before he reached it the buzzer went. The foamy, cracky vibe shuddered, then popped. Georgie squeezed past Andy to get to the intercom. ‘Who izzit?’ she demanded. ‘Jones’ crackled back at her.

Jones. She could see him on the poxy screen in his trademark, wide-lapelled velvet jacket, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Jones, partially sighted behind shades-for-all-seasons. Jones, looming on a grey day with his white black man shtick. Jones, who, like a sponging relative, invariably turned up exactly when Sunday lunch was being served. Jones, who sold powders in the West End drinking clubs. Jones, who held court at Picasso’s on the King’s Road with a big bunch of keys squatting on his crotch. Jones. but don’t fret, we’ll soon’ve seen the last of him: split ends on sharp shoulders.

‘Let him in,’ Andy commanded; then they all waited until there came a knock on the front door of the flat. Georgie heaved it open, sucking Jones and another man into the cramped vestibule. They all stood silently for several seconds — Pandora, Georgie, Andy, Billy, Jones and the new man — recompressing in the airlock of their drug paranoia. Presently, Andy — who knew Jones — said, ‘You should’ve called.’ Then he and his mule disappeared off up the carpeted mesa.

It took a while for the party to get back under way. Georgie remonstrated with Jones: no call — and who’s this, then? This was, Jones explained, Cal Devenish, the bad-boy writer, whom he’d picked up at the Plantation Club in Soho. The celebrated Plantation — where there was a wake going on for the world-famous painter Trouget. Jones related these things breathlessly, as if they were momentous: names, reputations, achievements — they meant nothing to him, although he knew they had currency.

Not much with Georgie; she wasn’t impressed by Jones dropping Trouget’s name, despite death being a career move she herself was about to make. As for Devenish, she’d heard his name in her arts programme producing days; seen him at parties as well. She knew nothing of his work, but held fast to the received opinion that it was glib, and that he was an egomaniacal pasticheur. However, his bona fides as an addict weren’t in doubt; he hovered there in the vestibule, his stringy form dangling from his swollen head, its taut, rubbery surface dimpled with acne scars, puckered up with fresh scabs. At night, in front of the mirror, Devenish picked away at what other people thought he was — distressing his public image, while destroying the private individual.

‘I, yeah — sorry,’ he said to Georgie, for he’d immediately grasped that she was the chatelaine. ‘I was looking for a bit of. gear? And Jones — ’

‘Come in, come in.’ Georgie was all scary smiles, Billy bowed and scraped, because Andy had left a little smidgen-wigeon-pigeon behind on tick, and that meant there was a mark-up to be had. The beat combo struck up again as they trooped past the Dexion shelving; the Amazonian girl with the Mary Quant crop gyrated by the poolside, the foamy beast reanimated.

Billy hustled around, making the introductions, finding Jones and Devenish seats, explaining to Bev that this was a real writer, who had written real books. Billy kept taking sidelong looks at Cal: assessing his financial potential, certainly, but also taken by the other man’s air of hopeless bewilderment.

Cal Devenish was quite drunk, a little coked up and oozing shame. Nowadays, he left a silvery trail of shame wherever he went; and, still more snail-like, he carried his bed of shame with him. He had reached a stage where seconds of euphoria cost him weeks of abject self-loathing. He was on his way to Finland, to promote one of his books that was being published there, and had only dropped into the Plantation to have a single drink and to commiserate with Hilary Edmonds on his great financial loss.

There was Jones with his white lines — and now Cal was sticky with Scotch, bristling with feathery cocaine and being ridden out of town on a rail. He took a seat next to Tony Riley, a bit disgusted by the dying man in the oxygen mask — but then that was only natural. He got out cashpoint-ironed twenties and bought into a rock of crack that Bev was crumbling into the foiled mouth of an Evian bottle pipe. All the while Billy watched.

This Devenish, could he be another Hrundi V. Bakshi? Whited up, and playing his superficial role, while inside of himself he dropped Michele Monet off at her sherbet-yellow Art Deco apartment block? Was Cal, like Billy, suggesting that Michele hang on to the cowboy hat that Wyoming Bill Kelso had given him; suggesting this, so that very soon he could call her up and, on the pretext of getting it back, ask for a date?

Oh, no, Cal Devenish wasn’t at The Party at all. With his first hit on the crack pipe all the fuzzy foam had condensed into icebergs clashing on the frozen Baltic. What would Helsinki be like, Cal wondered. He suspected exactly the same as London, except for better modern architecture, together with publishers, journalists and publicists who appeared troll-like.