by Will Self
Lifts rush down into precisely ruled courtyards where bought rocks cluster in frigid beds and water features; the animated food-stuffs waltz out of their metal doors. The double-sized figures of wholesome chaps and winsome chapesses tear themselves from the billboards, where for four seasons they’ve languished tapping little ends with huge teaspoons. These demigods and demigoddesses feel not the cruel west wind that parts their mighty terry-towelling robes; they round up the food, cajoling frozen chickens, lassoing pots of clotted cream, trawling bags of Ethiopian sugar-snap beans and arresting jars of pesto. The subdued food is shovelled into an immense cone that one young Hercules has fashioned from a sheet of corrugated iron torn from a nearby scaffold.
The billboard deities choreograph a tableau gigantesque around this horn of left-over plenty — and this, truly, is worth Another Look. Then, with no sense of movement, no crude disjunction, we’re back in the penthouse, back in the kitchen, back in the fridge — where a single slim tin of energy drink, lit by its own inner taurine and decorated with the silhouette of a naked youth that’s blazoned ‘Ganymede Up All Nite’, half bows, crunching itself a waist.
And still the vulture feeds, its frightful ruff saturated with Prometheus’s blood.
Doc Ben doesn’t, as a rule, do house calls. ‘Whadda vey fink eye am,’ he says dropping into Mockney for the benefit of his Portia, ‘a fucking tart?’ A strange denial, because that’s precisely what he is: after all, he puts himself about by the hour and deals drugs on the side — although, admittedly, not very nice ones. Doing out-calls is not the distinction between medical whoring and doctoring.
Nevertheless, Doc Ben feels differently about Prometheus: the guy is three chords short of a punk song, too crazy even to be considered as a proper patient. He revolves through the Harley Street consulting room every fortnight, his liver rotten to the core, then off he pops, it’s almost as if. But Doc Ben is way too preoccupied to make the diagnosis any open-minded practitioner would be compelled to: that Prometheus’s liver is being eaten away at, then spontaneously regenerated. Way too preoccupied by finding a parking place for his Porsche — and not just any berth. The underground car park at the wharf is way wrong; no security, poorly illuminated, and the mad axeman — who’s actually an amateurishly poor plucker — has two Gibson Les Pauls in the boot worth a cool fifteen grand.
When he eventually finds a safe on-road space, then ascends the lift, Doc Ben discovers Athene waiting for him at the front door to the penthouse. A stench of organ failure hangs in the costly void. Below the plate glass prow of the block, the woolly-brown river knits and pearls itself. Lying face down on the futon, the impassioned lover of the night before resembles a used condom stuffed with offal. There’s a large bloodstain by his latex belly.
Doc Ben thinks, there’s always more sex the morning after than there was the night before; he has a nose for these scents, and Athene hasn’t showered, only pulled on underwear, skirt and blouse, rolled-up stockings. He clocks the hot veins on the insides of her wrists as she presses her razor-thin mobile phone to her cheek. Idly wondering how the fuck does he get it up, Doc Ben kneels to give the adman a rare probe.
‘He discharged himself from the London Clinic yesterday, did he tell you?’
Athene, who has introduced herself only as ‘a friend’, blanches.
‘He was meant to have a liver shunt put in today, but it’s too late for that now. There’s massive distension here — his tummy is full of blood.’
Doc Ben is a good enough doctor, just, to notice this; although not good enough to spot the long, curved feather that’s wedged between patient and mattress. ‘I’m gonna call for an ambulance — he needs to be in an intensive-care unit as soon as possible. Do you know who his next of kin are, Ms. ’
‘Athene,’ she concedes, then asks, ‘Is he going to die?’
‘Die? I dunno about that.’ He could be speculating on poor ticket sales for a Deep Purple reunion gig, so mundane is his tone. ‘I can tell you this: if he can be stabilized — and that’s a fairly big if — he’ll need a liver transplant, deffo. His liver’s. ’ He pauses, regarding her well-used voluptuousness at the same time as he, belatedly, registers her name; then allows himself a definitive ‘fucked’.
The griffon vulture watches from the summit of the north-west chimney of Battersea Power Station as Prometheus is stretchered from Chelsea Bridge Wharf to the waiting ambulance. She’s driven away the peregrine falcons — London’s sole pair — whose nesting site is this modernist ruin: a redbrick cliff-face, saturated with sulphuric acid and carbon, the best monument possible to humankind’s transmogrification of the earth.
From her lofty vantage, the vulture stares down on traffic, river, park greenery and the mop-top of Athene, who skips to the far side of the road, intent on hailing a cab to get her away from this awful wharf.
*
A fortnight later Epimetheus met up with Neil Bolton for a drink at the Sealink Club. Epimetheus didn’t bother much with the Sealink any more; the ad industry’s social interaction, such as it was, had headed east, to where the new generation of mono-nominal agencies — Mother, Naked, Poke, Dare and Titan itself — had gone to ground amidst the artists’ studios and Bangladeshi sweat shops of Whitechapel and Shoreditch.
As for Bolton, he’d never been an habitué of the Sealink, which, despite having suffered new owners and revamped decor at least twice in the past decade, still had a car-ferry ambience, what with its safety lights caught in wire basketry, three-legged triangular chairs and raised door sills. The gents’ urinal was a waterfall in a zinc trench, the stalls a storm in a space shuttle. This, the quintessence of chic circa 1980, was all far too modish for Bolton, who longed to strip the skirts from the yattering women who frequented the club, if only to put them on the table legs.
Bolton, who in recent years had become the narrator of a fiendishly successful TV sketch show — think both spin-off dolls and hagiographies of its originators in the qualities; think of catchphrases as widespread and involuntary as sneezes — now gave himself airs that would’ve been insufferable coming from Kean. When Epimetheus came in, Bolton was standing centre bar, his big fleshy face hanging in the air like a bruise, poorly bandaged with several loops of a long woollen scarf. He was holding forth to the barman, and his basso voice, like Pavlov’s tinkling bell, recalled insistently to the minds of all who were hearing it the mineral water, meat, detergent and, latterly, energy drink it had been used to advertise, as it rumbled through the bar, inexorable as waves crashing on a shingle beach.
Spotting Epimetheus, Bolton boomed, ‘My dear boy, how’s Prometheus?’
‘He’s fine, really Neil.’ Epimetheus ordered a gin and tonic.
‘That’s not what I hear,’ Bolton told everyone. ‘I’ve heard he’s in and out of hospital every few days — some sort of liver thing.’
Liver thing. Bolton managed to deliver the words with coloratura at once bloody and bilious. Liver things — Bolton knew all about these: his last decade or so had been a cellular go-round, from bar, to recording studio, to rehab, and back again.
‘Shush, Neil.’ Epimetheus went so far as to take the old thespian by his boneless arm and give it a squeeze. ‘Please, I don’t want any more talk.’
This was a futile admonition, given that Bolton was nothing but talk; besides, the cutting-edge creatives may no longer have supped at the Sealink, but their older, blunter colleagues were all there: client directors, chief strategy officers and group accountants from Abbott Mead Vickers, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, and Saatchi and Saatchi, who, while they may have lost the ability to create particular standout, still retained good noses for the bouquet of distress and the stench of failure.
‘He’s absolutely fine,’ Epimetheus continued, signalling to the barman to get them both another drink. ‘As it happens, we’ve gotta big pitch tomorrow, Hermes.’
‘Scarves?’ Bolton said, tugging on his own.
‘No, the other lot — mobile phones.’
Th
is wasn’t a work drink. At this point in his liverish life cycle Bolton was useless to Titan; he was so bloated with fine wines and TV residuals that he’d completely forgotten the voice-over he’d done for Zeus mineral water only ten days previously, and instead blethered on about his finest theatrical performances. His Falstaff (Southampton Gala), his Henry Higgins (Stamford Arts Centre) and, of course, his triumphant Hamm at the Peacock.
Epimetheus, whose knowledge of Beckett’s plays was sketchy, kept hearing Endgame as ‘end-line’, which dragged him back to advertising, and his own naive faith in luxury goods, graven images and idols with everything of clay. Which dragged him back to. Pandora, who had brought oodles of vice and insanity into his life.
The previous evening he had arrived back from Old Street to find her fucking a stranger in his own bed. Epimetheus drubbed the man from the place; his last sight of him was a bare bottom impressed with the tread of his boot. He threw the man’s clothing out the window, then had to endure Pandora’s full-fledged psychotic breakdown: handwashing without soap or water; a ‘Pakki’ called Andy beating her, who likewise wasn’t there; then the spewing of five dirty tongues with her delicious little one. And then — shameful this — he ravished her, after which they did drugs together.
In the ten days since she had moved into his loft, Pandora had begun to abstract Epimetheus’s goods. They were bizarre thefts — a single cuff link one day, a solo stereo speaker the next. The smooth materiality of his existence was being peppered with holes — yet still he cleaved to her; they would, he avowedly hoped, be together in old age, snuggling down into the soft ruin of their bodies.
Hence this get-together with Bolton, for advice on where Epimetheus could send his love so that she could ‘get better’. Who better than Bolton, who’d done ’em all? Primary treatments, secondary ones; halfway houses, three-quarter ones; then first-through-third-stage sojourns. Bolton, slobbing out in front of wonky tellies watching fake dramas, while the real tragedy of his life was right to hand — at his feet, where poorly laid carpet tiles curled up from the carpet tiles that had been poorly laid by the last batch of recovering alcoholics.
Ach! Bolton! So washed away by the longshore drift of his alcoholism that he could no longer tell which group he was not a part of. Were these stacking chairs circled for talking or drinking therapy? How should he pitch this old tale of derring-tipsy-do, as pathos, bathos or self-flagellating realism? In his old haunt, the Plantation Club, Bolton was nothing but a joke — and a bad one. To abandon his drinking comrades once was a betrayal; to do it again and again was their equivalent of a war crime. Hilary, the Plantation’s commanding officer, had stripped Bolton of his old moniker and given him a new one; he was no longer ‘the Extra’ but only ‘the Prop’; because, despite having been barred, he still insisted on coming back and propping himself against it. The bar, that is.
Epimetheus was drunker than Bolton, and the actor did indeed have to prop the adman up, as, wavering in and out of blackout, they proceeded to Blore Court by way of Piccadilly Circus.
Sony PlayStations and Nicorette patches; Halifax mortgages and Nokia mobile phones; Coca-Cola and depilatory cream; the giant girlies of a mythic present — apple-cheeked Hesperides, star-fucking Pleiades, Hyades suffering with water retention — rode juggernauts and scaled the sides of buildings in their armour of lights. Cars transformed into robots and duelled down Lower Regent Street, while Eros fired arrows that were tipped with soft-centred milk chocolates.
Epimetheus reeled through the throng, each face a semitransparent pop-up ident swelling in his monitors: clay faces, not yet set, gashes for mouths, indentations for eyes, slick with the water they swigged from plastic bottles, each labelled with a rusty tap-tap-tap graphic. Overhead, the electronic signboards bellied out, their surface tension a deliquescent blare. Clay and water, flesh and.
Blood and bile flowed through the veins of the liverish city; coiled conduits that merged, then branched out into the biliary tree of Soho. In Blore Court the two drunks tumbled through the visceral peritoneum, before being sucked into the porta hepatis. They staggered on the stairs, slammed against the door of Mr Vogel’s long-dormant import business, recovered themselves, fell up the next flight, collapsed through the filthy plywood door — its baize long since gone — and, partially recovering themselves, entered the bar-room with all the nonchalance of five-year-olds stealing biscuits.
Hilary was on his stool by the cash register, an illegal cigarette between washing-up-glove fingers, a vodka and tonic in front of him. Behind the bar, Stevie was slotting a new bottle of Bacardi into an optic, while on the other side the Cunt and the Poof raised their animalistic faces from small pools of alcohol.
The smoking ban had been in force for only a few months, yet witnessing someone smoking in a bar was like seeing an old film. Epimetheus’s lazy eyes rolled down the blue-grey grooves of smoke to where these merged with the inflamed veins networking Hilary’s swollen nose. He looked away, and discovered the Martian deep in conversation with Isobel Beddoes, who, since she had been released from jail in Switzerland, had assumed the position formerly occupied by Her Ladyship. Margery De Freitas, dead drunk for years; now simply dead.
Isobel — known in the Plantation as ‘Come-to-Beddoes’ — was tolerated by Hilary because she had an inheritance to squander. Her miserable devotion to him was another bad joke. Sometimes he made her fuck Jones, the resident cocaine dealer, in return for a gramme for them to split — he and Jones, that is.
There were two or three other members in the club — a Scots sculptor who specialized in Holocaust memorials, a fashion writer for a mid-market tabloid, Cal Devenish, the ailing television personality and one-time literary enfant terrible — but even to Epimetheus’s untutored eye they were an irrelevance. He saw only the old ads for cable-knit cardigans tacked to the bamboo-patterned wallpaper; the gibbous letters of an ancient flyer that bellowed BLACK SABBATH AT THE MARQUEE CLUB; and a tin hoarding showing two cloth-capped kids, their nostrils flared to suck in a meaty ribbon, which had had its slogan customized to read ‘Ah! Cunto’.
‘ ’Allo,’ Hilary said after an age, ‘it’s the fucking Prop — and oo’s this ugly cunt ’e’s got viv ’im, eh?’
Billy tittered and took a slug of his vodka-spiked lager. Bolton swept off his mohair fedora and addressed the company magnilo-quently. ‘Ladies, gentlemen, my residuals are far from negligible, courtesy of this fine and principled advertising executive. I’m in a position to offer you and your leader’ — he half bowed to Hilary — ‘many libations.’
Paper cuts an already raw mucous membrane. Insufflation: the shrapnel blast of cocaine granules. Jostled by flying blood boulders, the tiny colourless creatures embark on the next leg of their fantastic voyage.
Abruptly, in the still, sweaty eye of his drunken storm — and after a score of nights the same — Epimetheus remembered that last night was especially not right. In the small hours, while Pandora whimpered beside him, crazy little grunts falling from her parted lips, he was gripped by an ague so intense that the chains of his dangling bed clinked. He knew it then — he knows it now still more — his body had new visitors, and, unlike so many of the others, these would stay.
The eggy reek of a forehead drenched with feverish sweat, the watery flux of the bowels; if only, Epimetheus thought, this was some earlier era when such supernatural rumblings could be propitiated, when there was a gross, yet effective, match between anatomy and belief. Instead, he would have to make an appointment to see Doc Ben — this, too, impinged, a rock in the maelstrom of alcohol — so that those callused fingers could prod the buttons, make the calls, arrange the further appointments at which Epimetheus’s organs would be peered into by X- and gamma-rays.
‘Oi! You! Ugly cunt — bonehead.’ It was Hilary.
‘Me?’ Epimetheus beheld the ancestral nose.
‘Yeah, you. What’re you ’aving?’
He was having a nervous breakdown — drowning in the splenetic fluids of the Pla
ntation, a hepatocyte in a lobule in a lobe in a liverish city. London, a metropolis that had itself been breaking down cultural toxins and processing rich nutrients for two millennia, yet could only do so by manufacturing hectolitres of bile.
Never before had Epimetheus been so transported by all the rough and scumble of lived life: the blurring of feeling and texture that lay below the slickery of his visuals — an icy surface that human desire skated over, describing figure eights, pound and dollar signs.
‘I said, what’re you FUCKING ’AVING!’
A frozen moment, indeed. Nowadays, Hilary was prone to lashing out, and Stevie was a girl who walked into doors. The Cunt said, ‘Shall I give ’im the old ’eave-’o ’ilary?’ But the Martian, who was fetching his and Come-to-Beddoes’s drinks, took the matter in hand, picking Epimetheus up and lifting him on top of the bar.
For the art director was nothing but a perspex torso, such as are used in pharmaceutical advertisements. His transparent outer layer would allow a camera lens to discover green gall bladder, pink pancreas, blue guts, brown stomach and red liver; all the better to convince the superstitious peasantry — for whom medicine remains a cadet branch of magic — that they should leave their innards to the professionals.
The Martian slipped on a crisp white coat and brandished a pointer; Stevie hurried around arranging the chairs and bar stools for the presentation. The neon tube on the ceiling spluttered, then flared solar, annealing every scumbled thing until it was white-tile-hard and bright. The audience put on the same expressions of serious concern. The Martian picked up a jug of water from the bar and poured some into Epimetheus’s reopened fontanelle; it trickled down, a silver stream that the Martian followed with his pointer, while saying, ‘Pegasys is an injectable form of pegylated interferon alpha. ’The water coursing through his veins and converging on his liver felt icily dangerous — not that Epimetheus, object lesson that he had become, could do a damn thing about it.