by Will Self
Yes, Bernie Jobs knew a thing or two about chucking people out — you don’t acquire the nickname ‘the Cunt’ somewhere as cuntish as the Plantation without special qualifications; and Bernie, with his Wermacht helmet head — shiny-bald, save a black moustache that ran from ear to ear across the back of his bulldog neck — and his squat build — a brick shithouse built to withstand a direct hit by an ICBM — was fully accredited.
Alternatively, were you in receipt of the right kind of ‘cunt’, you might, on any given afternoon between, say, 1976 and 1983 — for the procedure took this long to fully complete — have witnessed the ritualized humiliation and — this is by no means too strong a term — dehumanizing of the Plantation’s resident barman, Hilary Edmonds; who, until this procedure was completed, was denied even the consolation of a nickname, being referred to by Val and his cronies — or ordered about by them — purely by means of a specially inflected ‘she’.
On this particular afternoon — a Tuesday one, not that it matters one jot, it was always a Tuesday afternoon in midwinter in the Plantation, even if outside it was a steamy midsummer evening or a lemon-bright spring morning — ‘she’ was being teased remorselessly.
‘She’s something stuffed in her crack,’ the Dog observed as Hilary bent down to fetch a packet of crisps from one of the cardboard boxes under the bar. ‘I hope it doesn’t work its way up inside her.’
The Dog licked his chops — literally: a carpet tongue unrolled from chapped lips, touching first one of the pendulous jowls that had secured him his moniker, then the other. He had once been a tall cavalryman, the Dog, and he still dressed in regulation tweed hacking jacket and twill slacks, with a paisley cravat tucked behind the collar of his Viyella shirt. It may seem a solecism that so much whisky could have engendered a burgundy hue to his bloodhound’s muzzle — but it had.
Hilary, still at a comparatively early stage of his conditioning, felt enough shame with the Dog’s, the Cunt’s and of course Val’s eyes on him to, still bending, reach back to yank down the hem of the Breton fisherman’s jersey he wore in emulation of his controller. Losing his balance, he tipped forward and banged his head.
‘Ooh!’ cried the Cunt. ‘She’s hurt herself; clumsy girl — silly fucking girl. Won’t be giving her a china dolly.’
Val chuckled indulgently; it sounded like the first stages of emphysema. ‘Heugh-heugh, she should give that little cunt of hers a bit more of a sluice, filthy little trollop.’
Hilary straightened up and handed the crisps to the Poof, who negligently thanked him. Gillespie was the only regular male member of the Plantation who was nominally heterosexual; and, while he cast a benign eye over the taunting, he seldom joined in. As for the Martian, his sexual orientation was ambiguous, if it even existed at all.
Gillespie was a well-known photographer, the extempore chronicler of the beautiful and the damned of London’s West End.
Gillespie, who always wore a lush brown leather coat and a white silk shirt. Gillespie, thrice married but pulling behind him a string of blondes that stretched, taut with yearning, from Billericay to Barnes. Gillespie, whose gypsy-raffish good looks still as yet uncorrupted by the trays of Campari and soda he was undeveloping them in — the features becoming more blurred with every year. Gillespie, whose barrel trunk and columnar thighs every red-blooded queer in Soho wanted to feel battering against him, and who, for that very reason, warranted the ironic title ‘the Poof ’.
Descending from her bar stool as if it were a glittering rostrum on the stage of the Windmill, and she was still the statuesque brunette she had been during the last war, the Typist sashayed up to the bar and placed her empty glass on a mat. Leaning forward, she gazed down the back of Hilary’s orange loons and remarked in clipped, headmistressy tones, ‘Isn’t that the string of her Tampax poking out? I think she must have the curse, poor thing.’
General sniggering.
Val said, ‘In that case she probably needs a drink, eh? Pity I’ve nanti dinary, or I’d stand her one.’
This rare lapse into his native Polari was a sign that Val was in an uncommonly good mood. There was nothing quite like humiliating Hilary to cheer him up. His rubbery face mask stretched with amusement, pushing his beaky nose into still greater prominence.
Ah! Val Carmichael’s nose — a treatise could have been written on it; indeed, it looked as if an unseen hand had begun to do exactly that — poking with steely nib at its sub-surface blood vessels and pricking them into the raised, purplish calligraphy of spider angiomas, a definitive statement that the Plantation’s owner was already in the early stages of cirrhosis.
Now, quietly, unobtrusively, the Martian joined the torturers at the bar, murmuring so casually, ‘I’ll stand everyone a round’ that the others barely registered his largesse, even when, with a loud ‘ting’, Val fed his twenty-pound note into the till.
Then. A hiatus. Drinks were poured by Hilary and guzzled — as something for nothing so often is.
This interlude gives me the opportunity to admonish you, gentle reader, not to sit in stern judgement of the Plantation’s members and their decadent airs. Weren’t, aren’t, won’t Soho’s denizens always be thus? More truly subject to an almost mathematical recursion than any other cultural grouping in the world?
This 5 × 6 grid of streets has been a quartier specializing in the division of the human spirit for decades — centuries, even. Since Marx burst his boils and buried his kids on Dean Street; since Hazlitt expired from his ‘happy life’; since Johnson’s club strutted; since young Wolfgang tinkled the ivories and Casanova got his oats on Frith Street. Back and back, the same divisors have been applied to each term of the series: alcohol and insouciance.
Back and back, until Huguenots destroyed their eyes with needlepoint, while Billy Blake bunked off from his dad’s drapery to trip, off his head, down to the satanic mills of Farringdon. Soho! Your very name a cry thrown over the shoulders of hunting noblemen. Is it any wonder that generation after generation of your inhabitants have been brought to bay, then stood — or slumped, or lain legs akimbo — frozen, waiting to be dispatched by the hounds of time?
If the Plantation Club (est. 1948) was still lost in the foggy forties, with its members aping the mores of Maclaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas, and lapsing into the secret language of formerly outlawed inverts, then this was only as it should be. And yet. And yet. there was a deeper timelessness to the bar-room above Blore Court, a holier stasis. For, while the black plastic bags piled up in the streets during the Winter of Discontent, and then, come spring, were hauled away, the trash in the Plantation remained. As the upper echelons of West End Vice ran amok and the streetwalkers became entire formations, the Plantation stayed just as whorish. While the social revolution of the 1980s raged, and merchant bankers sprayed every surface matt black, in the lavatory of the Plantation Club the toilet paper was still the consistency of Formica.
No change at all was wrought in this sequestered cell. To say of any of its members that they were ‘gay’ would be a nonsense, for, while outside in Old Compton Street everyone became openly gayer and gayer, inside the club they only grew sadder and sadder. No popper was ever popped, no T-shirt was tightened, there was no house music in da house.
To apply the epithet ‘gay’ to Val Carmichael would have been worse than ridiculous; while to say of him — or of any of the rubbery plants in the Plantation — that they were ‘queer’ would have constituted a gross understatement. The term ‘homosexual’, if it was taken to imply that Val sought intimacy with — or simply ingress to — to a member of his own sex, was also no longer applicable, and hadn’t been for two or three years now; not since Val had discovered Hilary Edmonds in the Wimpy Bar at King’s Cross.
The young man was too old and too unmissed to be described as a runaway; he was rather a stroll-off, who had sauntered away from the repression of his home town — some Market This or Thatminster — much as a dazed passenger staggers, fortuitously unharmed, from the smoking wreckage of
a car crash.
Hilary had no money and knew no one in London. For three nights he had been scratched under a holly bush in Bloomsbury Square. When Val spyed him, sitting in the window of the burger bar, Hilary was consuming his last few pence in the form of a sweet bun seamed with beef. His collar-length brown hair lay in dangleberries on his spotty neck — an imperfection that the older man found particularly arousing.
Beyond this Hilary was no great catch. He was tall, scrawny and had features that, cruelly, already bore a mean-spirited impress exactly the same as his father’s, although Edmonds Senior had taken thirty-odd years of rankling behind the grille of a bank branch to acquire them.
Val took Hilary home, which was a third-storey walk-up on the old LCC estate off Harrison Street. At that time these redbrick warrens had been overrun by punks, who lolloped furtively along their balconies, halting in the stairwells to nibble amphetamines, their soap-stiffened mohicans twitching like rabbit ears. Val noticed none of this; it belonged to a parallel universe.
If anything, the flat was even more time-locked than the club. Unhemmed yards of blackout cloth kept out the day; a plush-covered sofa slumped on the herringbone wood block floor, twenty-six inches in front of a black and white television. In the tiny kitchen, the tea cups were kept in a broken Baby Belling. In the bathroom the porn was kept in the bath.
Strictly speaking it wasn’t all porn. There were early German magazines of the burgeoning homosexual community, such as Die Insel; there were the homoerotic leaflets of proto-Nazi hiking clubs; there were even bound volumes of the works of Magnus Hirschfeld. This was heavy water at the bottom of the bath; above it was half a fathom of health and fitness magazines, together with outright penis-in-anus stuff brought from Copenhagen. However, the froth on top of this was touchingly innocent: underwear advertisements cut out of Titbits and Reynold’s News that showed men in navy Y-fronts with white piping. There were a few knitting patterns featuring chaps posing in cardigans, and even bobble hats, which Val now found oddly affecting; for, as his ability to construct a viable erection declined, so the objects of his desire became more and more remote: a typology of the masculine, rather than the man himself.
On this exceptional evening Val did try to have sex with Hilary. Being obliging, and a complete ingenue, Hilary was more than happy to lower his dirty polyester houndstooth check trousers — with the stylish flat front — and allow Val’s doughy face to knead his crotch. But once the foreplay had been completed — a matter of seconds — and Val was about to munch on the poisoned apple of Hilary’s behind, his worm turned and bored back inside him.
Behind the bar at the Plantation, in a votive niche hollowed out between the liquor bottles, so that she was surrounded in death by the alcohol she had worshipped in life, there stood a framed photograph of Ivy Oldroyd, the self-styled ‘Queen of Soho’. (An absurd pretension: Soho was, is, and always will be a republic of queens governed by a parliament of whores.) Ivy, even in the sepia tones of the old photo, had a face that recalled Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas; she had been a whale of a woman, whose blubber was still constrained by whalebone when she died — of liver failure — in 1966.
Despite her legendary acerbity — wit as quick and bitter as a salted lemon hurled in your eye — Ivy had suffered the same humiliation at the hands of Val Carmichael, as was now, just as unwittingly, being perpetrated upon him by Hilary Edmonds. She, too, had taken a shine to a young man from the provinces whom she had discovered drifting in the London streets. In the photograph Ivy was standing, jade cigarette holder held upright, with Val beside her, looking ineffably young and handsome and manly. His hair was thick and blond, his tie (yes, tie!) was straight — but can she really ever have convinced herself that he was, too?
We will never know; the only certain thing is that when, eventually, he rejected her advances, far from rejecting him, Ivy Oldroyd clamped Val to her Ben Nevis of a bosom, suckled him with wormwood and resolved that he would never be weaned.
As it had been with Val, so it was to be with Hilary. They were both brainwashed into becoming the tireless workers for their respective Queen Bees, and fed with increasing doses of alcoholic royal jelly until they were no longer willing — or even able — to buzz off.
Although ‘brainwashed’ hardly caught it at all, for, once a new barman had been installed at the Plantation, the process by which he was turned into an alcoholic was more akin to the force-feeding — or gavage — whereby a poultry farmer in the Dordogne transforms the liver of a duck or a goose into foie gras. Hilary had no great predilection for drinking; it was only that even to stand in the Plantation for a matter of hours was a health risk.
A tipsy hepatologist, who was once stranded in there for an afternoon, later claimed that he could actually feel his liver cells mashing into steatosis, as drink after drink was augered into him, the spirit scarring his oesophagus, the fluid swelling his abdomen. While mixed with the liquor there was also — he said — an undiluted and poisonous anger.
Anger is what Val Carmichael supplied by the sixth of a gill from the optic of his psyche; shot after shot of spiritous rancour, distilled from his copper full of humiliation. And, as the years engorged with resentment prolapsed into decades, so this rage grew as well, until it obscured the bamboo-patterned wallpaper of the Plantation quite as much as the miasma of cigarette and cigar smoke.
Bernie Jobs — lest we forget, the Cunt — said, ‘My gaff, Sadus, is reopening today after its refurb. The boss-man is gonna make an appearance.’
(I make no apology for plunging you straight back into the highly provisional, yet simple, past tense of our narrative; this is congruent with what it was like to be in the club. Blubbing to the surface of the boozy pool, he — or rather, she — would become aware of her rescuers, speaking with the cold intimacy of paramedics and firemen: Are you all right, dearie? Or laughing with the falsified yelps of whores faking orgasm: Ha, ha, ha!)
‘Oh, yes,’ Val said, ‘and who’s she when she’s at home?’
‘Oh, y’know, Denny Wilson.’
‘Brrrr,’ Val shivered. ‘The big brute, she is.’
Two things: 1. To describe Denny Wilson as a ‘big brute’ displayed a casual attitude in the face of human depravity that was almost laudable, because at this time Wilson still had West End Vice tucked in his crombie pocket, and, had he so much as suspected that pond life like Val was denoting him with a feminine pronoun, would have unhesitatingly instructed some other cunt to do to Val what the Cunt used to do at the behest of the Richardsons. 2. That female pronoun itself requires a little further elucidation. Hilary wasn’t the only one so called; it was the sole pronoun in common usage at the Plantation. There were no male members in this club, only shes and cunts.
‘Well, Val,’ Bernie said, waxing philosophic, ‘what you say about Denny may well be true, but she’ll be mightily offended if we don’t troll round to Old Compton Street and wet the baby’s head.’
‘With what?’ Val sneered, darting feverish looks around the bar-room as if the most obvious thing was that it was empty of liquor. ‘I’ve told you cunts already that I’ve nanti-fucking-dinary!’
The Dog, for many years the London stringer for some Scottish rags, moved to calm him: ‘Now, Val, don’t take on so.’ But his ministrations were unnecessary, because at that moment the baize door wheedled open and Trouget inched in, followed by His Nibs.
‘Cunty, darling!’ Val cried. ‘It’s been a bloody age. Cunty, my sweet,’ he hurried on, ‘that fucking bruiser Wilson is pitching up at the Cunt’s smut shop on Old Compton, and we’ve all got to go down and hob-fucking-nob. You’ll stand the ’poo, now won’t you, cunty?’
Trouget, whose canvases were already selling for substantial five-figure sums, was notoriously profligate. He orbited the economic sphere of mere solvency, casting bills upon the darkness of its waters. Long before, he had done a deal with his Cork Street gallery — at that time a considerable punt for them — whereby he supplied x number of daubs per
year, they took the entire sale price and paid him an annuity of £100,000.
It was a bet that Trouget, a dreadful gambler, lost in the longer term. As his prices rose and rose, and his art became the bamboo-patterned wallpaper of the Met, MoMA and the Tate, his annuity, proportionately, was reduced to a derisory payout. However, it was an arrangement that meant the Maî tre was free to work all day, then gamble, get soused and flogged all night, which is what he enjoyed more than any splendoured thing.
‘Cuuuunty?’ Val appealed again, and the Tosher puckered up his polished brown boot of a muzzle in acquiescence — he hardly ever spoke.