by Will Self
Trouget saw this — and grasped it entire. Life, properly conceived of, was not his subject, which was why he preferred to work not with life models but with pages torn from magazines, old anatomical drawings, postcards and osteopathy instruction manuals. So, now that the members of the Plantation Club had been torn out of their own era and pasted on to another, he could apprehend them for what they truly were.
‘Blimey,’ Trouget softly exclaimed. ‘You lot should get out more.’
Ten years passed.
In the thick green atmosphere of the Plantation — an aquarium filled with absinthe — time was experienced as a limpid thing, with no current, only the muted bubbling of artificial oxygenation. If a time-lapse camera had been mounted in the corner of the bar-room and left running for a decade, the film would show only the strobe of night and day, and the fishy flip of its patrons swimming in the door, to the bar, and then back to their crannies.
It was 1995, and time again for Trouget to have a major London retrospective. In the intervening years more canvases had been dealt into his collectors’ hands, just as the painter himself had been dealt more cards at the baccarat tables. More ’poo had been poured down his polished throat, more belts had been thwacked on his backside, and now he stood zipped into his Bell Star jacket, once more dealing out pasteboard invitations to the Poof, the Cunt and the Dog.
To say that nothing had changed in the Plantation would not have been strictly accurate. His Nibs and the Typist had died. Their funerals had been at Mortlake Crematorium and Kensal Rise Cemetery respectively. Although all their fellow members — looking, in full daylight, like living dead themselves — had attended, it was part of the Plantation’s voodoo that these passings away went largely unremarked. Life events — and indeed, much of the very stuff of life — were never spoken of at the club. Under the blank eyes of the Prince Consort, and the furious ones of Ivy Oldroyd, there was never any mention of the following: children, pets, kisses, food, travel (including foreign parts of any description), politics, religion, music, romance, architecture. and so, wearily, on.
Picture a Red Admiral butterfly poised on a purple spear of buddleia — a sight that can often be witnessed, even in the very stony heart of a city. See its painfully delicate wings part with a quiver, marry with another; observe their tawny tips, their backs, which become denser, more rubescent, as they curve into the plush runnel of the thorax. Then scrutinize the outsides of the wings, taking time, trying to identify the precise point at which the tawniness distorts, then explodes into vivid orange bars. All this while the Red Admiral continues to feed on the flower, perfectly poised on its legs, which are banded black and white like the finest electric flex.
This is not an experience that would ever — not even if human lives were geologic in span — be spoken of at the Plantation.
There were the deaths of His Nibs and the Typist — and there was the imminent death of Val Carmichael himself. (Or should we say ‘herself ’ of an individual who had not, to anyone’s certain knowledge, employed a masculine pronoun since the late 1960s.) Of course, Val had been moribund for years, but at some point in the early 1990s his massively engorged liver passed beyond mere macrovesicular steatosis into the irredeemably gothic realms of steatonecrosis.
We may set to one side the fact that Val was also suffering from hepatic encephalopathy — with all the brain-warping confusion that this entailed — because, after all, since he had been continuously drunk since the Macmillan premiership, it was impossible for him, or anyone else, to tell where one kind of mental discombobulation blundered into the other.
Even so, given the radical internal restructuring of Val Carmichael that those hectolitres of vodka and tonic — interspersed with the very occasional bottle of ’poo — had undertaken, it is strange to note that his view of his body remained curiously un-differentiated: a child’s conception of a plasticine blob that might be rolled into a ball, then a sausage, then a snake, yet remaining throughout the same stuff of Life.
Perhaps this is the real saving grace of chronic alcoholism? That, as the completion date is neared, and the architecture of the liver has been fatally altered — portal hypertension opening the umbilical vein to the portal venous system, so the entire property is sprayed with blood — its sitting tenant stays put, blissfully unaware.
Poised on his stool by the till, Val’s quivering wings parted, then married, as he lifted the V & T to his creased lips. His thorax had impacted, throwing into upsetting prominence his gynaecomastic tits. His alcohol-induced hypogonadism meant that he had to sit with his stick thighs parted: his soiled flies were an open incitement to. nothing. He smelt of piss and death and booze and cigarette smoke.
In common with the Red Admiral’s wing tips, all the extremities of Val’s body were tawny; a good match, if it could have been contrived, to the dappled beige-brown, russet-yellow of his liver. Kirrhos, the Greek for ‘tawny’, is the root of ‘cirrhosis’, and as the absinthe light from the sash window spilt on to the dusty carpet and spattered the bamboo-patterned wallpaper, it turned the whole interior of the Plantation tawny. Thus Val was superbly camouflaged: all of him but the dreadful beak, as bright and hollow and heavy as a hornbill’s.
Hilary stood behind the bar smearing glasses and swapping cunts with the Dog, the Poof, the Cunt and the Extra. The years had not been kind to the Boy either, extinguishing every last glint in him of party-time attractiveness, while helping him into the whole-body fat-coat of alcoholic middle age, then showing him, firmly, to the door.
Perversely, it was only now that it was too late, that Hilary dared to assert some independence, abandoning his striped jersey for a woeful bovver boy costume of cropped Levis, white T-shirt and red braces. However, it wasn’t much of a breakaway, because the Boy remained in sync with the older members, whose butterfly collars, flowery ties and Fair Isle tank tops were once again in fashion. In sync with them, and also with the replacements for His Nibs and the Typist; newborn members, who, well lubricated, had slid into the cauls of their predecessors.
They were so hip that it hurt: a posse of young conceptual artists, whose bloody flux of creation — preserved animal carcasses, shit-daubed canvases, inflatable wank dollies — was at that very moment coagulating into a big scab of success on the cultural body that would be picked away at by the critics for decades to come.
It had been Hilary himself who had reached out to these Soho apprentices and invited them to join the Plantation’s death cult. Voodoo Val thrust his Embassy filter in their downy faces, and, pronouncing proscription, whined, ‘Look what the cunt’s dragged in’, once, twice, three times an afternoon, but they paid no attention. There was a new wind blowing through the trompe l’oeil bamboo, an awareness that soon enough the old overseer would be gone.
In the meanwhile, the Martian sidled up to the bar and got a round in: a Campari and soda for the Poof, whose nights in white satin were now over. Instead of scaling legs-up-to-her-arse, he was reduced to summitting a mountainous mixed-race girl called Berenice, who lived in a council flat on Brick Lane. His leather coat hung on his shoulders, the flayed skin of a vanquished sex-warrior.
The Martian got a Scotch for the Dog, who, the preceding month, had been offered voluntary redundancy by his one remaining rag, in the way a real dog is ‘offered’ being put down. The Dog snarled at the injustice, and yapped of a cottage outside Dundee, but he was never going to go walkies further than the Coach and Horses, and he died the following year.
‘Bernie?’ the Martian needlessly inquired, and the Cunt growled an equally redundant assent. Hilary poured a second Scotch for the hard man, whose days of intimidation weren’t over, although now it was he who was on the receiving end. Tottering back to his flat at World’s End, he was mercilessly ragged: ‘Look atcha, yer pissed old cunt!’ Everyone on the estate knew him, true enough, but nobody feared him any more.
The Extra was in rehab, emoting in the round of plastic chairs. He had written a letter of amends to Val, apologizing
for the nine hundred-some quid he’d racked up on his tab, and asking for the Bard’s Complete Works to be sent into him, the text adapted to contain a half-bottle of vodka. Val used the missive to light a fag, then told the other members it would be better if ‘the cunt were dead’.
Hilary shook hands with the optic and set the highball glass half full of vodka down in front of Val. While the Boy turned to get the tonic — and still, after nearly twenty years, Her Ladyship spluttered, ‘She should mind her back!’ — Val added half the contents to the Boy’s lager.
No doubt Hilary Edmonds no longer knew what lager should taste like; after all, this mixture of grains had been pumped into him for so long now that uncontaminated pints were as the brown remembered ponds he had splashed in as an ugly gosling. And if we calculate a day of a goose’s gavage to be a year of a human’s, then the job was almost done. Entier, cuit or mi-cuit — which cut of Hilary would Val consume? Or, instead of Hilary frais, would he send the inferior Boy off to be turned into mousse, parfait or even pâté en bloc?
The Martian headed back to his stool, his vodka and orange in one hand, Her Ladyship’s gin and tonic in the other; there he resumed his position. Even in an environment characterized by stasis, he was the stillest of things. The black rims of his spectacles were more mobile than his watery blue eyes; his greenish hair was no more likely to fly away than a barnacle.
Unlike the other shivering denizens of King Alcohol’s mad realm, the Martian seemed always to keep his head. Some three years before, in an unguarded moment, he’d confessed to Her Ladyship that he’d had to let go of the print shop. ‘Health and Safety cunts,’ he’d muttered; but she was as incurious as a dead cat, and since he kept on getting them in, everyone else assumed he was still working.
Hilary poured the Tosher a flute of ’poo from a freshly opened bottle. ‘Thank you, cunty,’ the painter said and handed him the stack of invitations. ‘Pass them on, will you, Boy?’ Then he was gone. Hilary lifted the flap and stepped between the Dog and the Poof. He headed for the toilet, passing out the invitations as he went.
Trouget seldom stuck it out in the Plantation for long nowadays: the sycophancy of the younger piss-artists sickened him, and, like Val, he professed to be appalled by their cocaine-sniffing. Val grew depressed by the painter’s departures; he knew that whatever élan his era at the Plantation possessed was derived from Trouget’s massive profile alone. In too short a time all cunty witticisms would be forgotten; all that would remain of three decades of barring and bitching, belching and kvetching, would be a blue and white English Heritage plaque at the Wardour Street end of Blore Court that read: Louis Trouget, 1922–1998, was Pissed Here.
The toilet properly stank.
When the Typist died in St Tom’s it had been a deeply disinfected expiration: she was surrounded only by the ample flesh of the Filipina cleaner from the Plantation. After the funeral Maria had drunk her own bleach. No one had known they were that close, let alone ‘Minge monkeys!’, as Val had spat. He neglected to hire another.
As for Hilary, he didn’t bother with the wiping of wipeable surfaces — except with his index finger. Bending to tap the creamy granules on to the dirty tiling, he admired the way the young piss-artists’ fingers had mixed a gouache from the residue of previous snorts and left smeary contrails on this tiny inverted sky.
They only just made it to Trouget’s retrospective that night. The same corte`ge pulled up on Belvedere Road, and, scattering pork scratchings from the folds of their clothes, the members crept up under the concrete skirts of the Hayward Gallery. It was the last time that Val Carmichael was seen out in public. No matter the hogsheads of vodka and the butts of tonic; no matter the muffling of the sound and the fading of the light; no matter the high dive his psyche was taking into the pool of total oblivion — he could still hear it perfectly when a young woman (young enough, in a parallel world, to have been his granddaughter), wearing a miniskirt that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Plantation the year Val took the club over, cried out: ‘Eurgh! Look at that old woman’s disgusting nose.’
She was drunk, of course.
Those last few months the Martian came in from Kilburn by minicab to pick up Val from his flat in King’s Cross. It was summer, and the Martian chose to ignore the flies dogfighting over the dirty dishes in the sink, and the soiled underwear that, each night, was torn from Val’s rotting body by the impact of sleep. Once a week the Martian brought fresh underwear for Val: seven pairs of Y-fronts.
Twice a week they called in at the Parkside Medical Centre on Dean Street, where Val’s bandolier of pill pots was refilled by an idealistic young doctor, who felt himself — with his clientele of street sleepers, junkies and drunks — to be performing noble triage on the urban battlefield. This general practitioner — who himself liked to smoke dope in front of foreign cinema — would have regarded it as the most reactionary paternalism to have in any way implied, let alone said, that he thought Val should stop, or even moderate, his drinking.
Instead, favouring an ‘interpersonal’ approach, Val’s doctor embraced the fetor and the cunty chatter, as if these were, respectively, the odour of good food and the table talk of a sagacious wit. Inscrutable, the Martian propped himself by the door and fiddled with the Velcro on a blood-pressure cuff. Then, to fill in time until the Boy opened up the club, Val stopped at the Coach and Horses, while the Martian went to fill his prescriptions at Bliss on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Soon enough, the doctor began coming into the club. On one occasion he even took Val’s blood while he was sitting on his stool. The doctor thought he could handle his drink. Needless to say, he couldn’t: alcohol is a fluid, it can never be held. He fucked the miniskirted girl from Trouget’s retrospective in the toilet, and she left bite marks on his shoulder that he explained away to his wife as those of an epileptic patient. The doctor was going down, and eventually he ended up in the same stacking-chair circle of hell as the Extra: strolling Sunday shrubbery with angry wifey; making miserable toast in a toaster that takes half a loaf; loitering on the forecourts of provincial garages, waiting for the country bus to the self-help group.
However, this lay in the future. In the meantime he was in the Plantation, although not on the afternoon when Val quipped — apropos of a famous singer, discovered dead from an overdose that very morning by her manager-cum-fuck buddy — ‘Ah, well, I s’pose those who live by their cunt, die by one.’ Then slowly pitched forward and executed a near-perfect forward roll on to the incontinence pad of the carpet.
For long moments nothing happened. Only the regulars were in — it was too early for the arty party — and, even though Val was lying directly at the Cunt’s feet, Bernie Jobs’s days of bending over were long gone. Val wheezed like a cat with a hair ball, chalky bubbles gathering at the corners of his mouth.
Eventually, Hilary, who had been observing his tormentor with interest from behind the bar, while trying to assess whether this was the end game, came out and got Val back up on his stool. But even if Hilary propped Val’s Punch profile against the till, he couldn’t get him to stay upright, let alone hold a glass. The regulars pretended nothing untoward was happening. It was left to the Martian to go to the payphone and call for an ambulance.
They came, heartily efficient young people — a man and a woman. The woman went back to fetch a stretcher chair from ‘the van’, on account of the tight manoeuvring needed to get anyone out of Blore Court, dead or alive. It wasn’t until a full quarter of an hour had elapsed since they had borne Val off — with sure tread and snappy cooperation — that anything was said.
The members sat there: the Dog and the Poof on their stools, Her Ladyship seated, the Cunt standing. They were all resentfully nursing their glasses — the only things they had ever nursed in their lives — and waiting for the Martian to get a round in. At last, Hilary whined, ‘You silly cunts, Pete went with Val in the fucking ambulance. If you want a drink, you’ll have to stump up for it yourselves.’
A
nd with that, he lifted the counter, waddled through, and, assuming Val’s position at the end of the bar, pulled across his own pint of vodka-laced lager, tapped it like a gavel and reiterated, ‘Yes, if you cunts want a drink you’ll have to stump up for it yourselves. There are’, he whined on, ‘gonna be a few changes round ’ere.’
Then he toasted the icon of Ivy Oldroyd, who looked down on the proceedings with imperial detachment, the corners of her mouth as downturned as the thumbs of a plebeian multitude.
The next day, when the Dog came snuffling up the stairs, and swung open the ratty green baize door, he discovered that a full-blown coup d’état had taken place: not only was Hilary on Val’s throne, but there was a new ‘Boy’ installed behind the bar, dressed in a sad emulation of his master’s own sad emulation of a style.
‘Scotty,’ Hilary whined croakily, ‘this here is Stevie. She’ll be serving while Val’s in hospital.’ Then he went back to reading his Daily Mirror, a newspaper that told him very little about things he didn’t particularly want to know.
Hilary had, of course, been waiting for this; and, in anticipation, had had Stevie on hold for several weeks, stashed in a cubbyhole at Her Ladyship’s Kensal Rise stately doss-house. Stevie, who Hilary had found crying underneath the arches outside Heaven, was indeed heaven-sent. Once the amyl nitrate had been wrung out of his system, he was perfectly presentable, if a bit emaciated. Hilary certainly fancied Billy, but the time-honoured ritual whereby a new goose was penned at the Plantation had yet to take place. Hilary had to wait until the Old Queen was dead, and have it confirmed that he was the sole heir.
In the meantime, Hilary accepted tributes from the subjects of the mad realm in the form of vodka, undiluted by beer. It was too early to say whether Val Carmichael’s gavage had been a complete success; Hilary was definitely well on the way to full-blown cirrhosis, and, like his farmer, he had an impressive bosom, but, more importantly, he was swollen with pride and stuffed with arrogance.