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

Georgie came into the room and passed the writer a pellet of heroin. Billy scampered to fetch the mirror and, placing it on the coffee table in front of Cal, said, ‘Any chance of a little bump, mate?’ Then added, ‘D’you want me to get you some works?’

Cal looked up and then around at the drugged bedlam: Tony, huffing and puffing and blowing his body down; Bev, talking arse about Conrad of all things ; Jeremy, squatting in the corner, his eyes saucers that needed washing up. He thought of the late Trouget’s paintings — what might they be worth now? Those solid bourgeois and yelping dogs, upended and gibbeted by his barbed brush, their faces either obscured or rendered far too vividly.

‘No,’ Cal told Billy. ‘No, thanks, I’m gonna snort some, but you can take enough for a hit if you want.’

Billy could take some, because Cal knew there would never be enough to sate himself. He was going to be hungry for ever . Cal tapped some of the beige powder on to the smeary mirror, had elves been skating on it? Billy, by way of being a good egg, rolled up his one remaining fiver and passed it to the writer. The parrot of addiction — unlike the owl of Minerva — will fly at any time of the day or night; so it flapped across the clearing from the serving hatch to land on Cal Devenish’s shoulder.

If Cal had troubled to unroll the banknote, he would have seen the fresh bloodstain that wavered along its edge: an EEG that plotted a fine madness. Whose blood was it? Does this matter? I — we — told you at the outset, this was never a mystery, or a crime procedural — this was never to do with who done it, only who got it. Or us.

Cal bent to rub noses with his doppelgänger at the same time as he shoved the rolled-up note into his already raw nostril. ‘Slap’, the sharp paper edge, struck the mirror at one end, while ‘stick’, the other end, burrowed into his mucus membrane. Snuffling, feeling the numbing burn, Cal dabbed at the blood that dripped from his nose, then asked Billy, ‘You couldn’t get me a tissue, could you?’

As if he could blow us — me — out!

Where is the redemption in all this? Where is the reformed character on day-release from prison, teaching kids with learning difficulties and through them rediscovering his shared humanity? We don’t know. I’ll tell you one thing, though, our flight’s been called — and we simply love flying. C’mon, Cal, up you get. That’s OK, you look perfectly presentable — apart from your messed-up face. Still, not much chance of any official interest in a flight to Helsinki .

If he were to get a pull? We’re not bothered — we like prison as much as flying. Possibly more. C’mon, Cal, Gate 57, one foot in front of the other, there’s a good chap. Past the windy horse of a cleaner in the shafts of his disinfecting cart; past Dixons and Wetherspoon’s; past W. H. Smith’s and the Duty Free hangar.

No, Cal, that’s not the way to approach a travelator — anyone who’s anyone walks along it, doesn’t just stand there. Ho-hum, we’re going to be with you for a long time — years in all likelihood — so I suppose we better get used to your petty vagaries, your inability to do one thing properly at once.

At least we’re well cushioned in here, buffered by blood and bile in our basket of lobules, ducts and veins. Foie humain, Leberkn del Suppe , Scottie’s Liver Treats — we love ’em all. But most of all we relish birdy num-num. Birdy num-num. Num-num. Num.