by Will Self
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 Maître 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.
‘Thank goodness!’ Val screeched – although goodness had nothing to do with it. ‘Get down half a dozen of ’poo, you,’ he ordered Hilary, ‘and put it on the Tosher’s tab. C’mon, you lot,’ he called to the other members, ‘hands off cocks and on socks’ – this an epithet from his National Service. ‘We’ll all go round and toast her gaff.’
And so they all did. McCluskey, who was a genius at such things, even managed to insinuate a small item concerning the reopening into his column, which disguised the nature of the enterprise that a party was being thrown for – with drink supplied by the famous painter – from those of his readers who wouldn’t have been able to stomach it, while artfully exposing it to those who were potential customers. This was a favour that Denny Wilson didn’t forget.
He was a big brute, and Sadus, while not a small shop, was dominated, after its refurb, by the two new long racks holding its merchandise; goods that were brown-paper camouflaged so that our hypothetical wanderer – remember her? – on slapping through the multicoloured plastic strips that dangled in the doorway, might think she’d chanced upon a stationer’s with a single product line.
In point of fact, Sadus (est. 1978) was a new kind of porn vendor. Wilson had seen the future – and it wanked. No longer need onanists be separated by mere orientation; the important thing was what got you off, not who you got off with. If beating, whipping, bending, masking, gagging or twisting was your thing, then Sadus was your one-slap-shop. Cause, indeed, for celebration.
And if, to begin with, the party was divided – the Plantation members, looking raggle-taggle and out of place, squatted in one aisle, while Wilson and his heavies prowled up and down the other – then after the first five bottles of Trouget’s champagne had been drunk, a definite common purpose emerged; humiliating Hilary.
Not that Trouget himself participated. He stood in the corner by the riding crops, an enigmatic crease in his boot-browned features, his Bell Star jacket zipped to his chin, while Hilary was passed from one suedehead in a Harrington to the next, his feet stamped upon at every step, his ribs poked as he poured the ’poo. Yes, the heavies cruelly goosed him, and Val, who had been furnished with a stool by the till, cackled fiendishly.
If what Hilary was being subjected to in the Plantation was indeed a protracted gavage – taking place over months and years, not days and weeks, with the force-feeding of alcohol, not grain – then these excursions were those periods in the life of Val’s captive goose when the creature was kept outside, voluntarily grazing on the tougher grasses of humiliation, so that his throat became sufficiently toughened to withstand the finition d’engraissement.
Val cackled, the heavies assaulted Hilary, the Plantation members were so many plaster casts propped against the Artex walls. Trouget slipped away into the rainy night. The Typist and Her Ladyship, who might, by reason of their sex alone, have been expected to object to the long-drawn-out assault that was being perpetrated right under their noses, did nothing of the sort. Although their antagonism to one another was legendary, there came a point in a long session (especially one where fresh air acted as a catalyst to their intoxication) when they rediscovered their sisterhood, and so they hung round each other’s neck, blabbing emotional confidences that the following morning’s hangovers would ruthlessly send to the dustbin of herstory.
It was left to the Martian to resolve things: he called off Wilson’s attack dogs and unobtrusively shepherded the members off down Old Compton Street to the Admiral Duncan, where he equally unobtrusively bought them all a drink – two for Val – before herding them on to the Swiss for the same again – two of the sam
e for Val – and so, by easy stages, home to the Plantation, where everything terminated in a welter of drunkenness.
They were all, of course, alcoholics – every last one of them. But it would be a mistake to equate that alcoholism with unruly behaviour, incontinent emotion or wholly unmanageable lives. The welter of drunkenness that ended the Festival of Sadus would have been barely discernible to an outsider; even an habitué of the club could only tell when consumption was peaking due to an added dankness in the atmosphere, an extra film of dirt on the sash window and a multiplication of ‘cunts’, until they were not only the most frequently employed words but also their punctuation.
No, the members of the Plantation led lives of remorseless continence: deeply trammelled, painfully organized. They had chosen this mode of existence and bowed down to its limiting constraint: that for the greater portion of their waking lives their forebrains would be completely sedated. If they had work, then their performance was characterized by its stereotypy; if they had a family, then home life was typified by their absence, for on the rare occasions that they were in the vicinity, it was as a Tupperware Moloch in a suburban Gehenna.
Getting the money to spend on drink, getting to the Plantation, leaving the Plantation, and – in the case of the majority – getting on to other pubs and clubs, until they beat the night to death in some chthonic shebeen deep beneath the West End, required a steadiness and fixity of purpose that militated against any reckless behaviour whatsoever.
If the club had had a motto, it would have been – to paraphrase Suetonius: ‘Make waste slowly.’ The huge volume of alcohol poured into the wonky vessel of the Plantation was as formaldehyde decanted into a specimen jar, with this distinction: these spirits preserved everything but the flesh.
Hilary Edmonds had for years now rented a cupboard in Kensal Rise from Margery De Freitas, aka Her Ladyship. De Freitas, who once shared Mandy Rice-Davies with Peter Rachman, had followed the slum landlord’s trajectory rather than the whore’s, moving straight on to a brief stint as a madam, before finding the management of the girls too onerous. So, she dispensed with the chickens but kept their coops; verminous Victorian houses, subdivided and subdivided and partitioned again, in which she incubated as many blacks and Irish as she could lay her fat bejewelled hands on.
She had skipped the prime of life, cutting straight from slim, angular, Mediterranean good looks to a dropsical version of them: mountainous hair, vulturine beak, tits avalanching into her lap. Her legs plagued her, and, as if the treatment he received in the club wasn’t enough for the poor boy, when they got back of an evening Hilary was ordered to remove Her Ladyship’s support hose, unwind fathoms of crêpe bandages, then bathe the porphyritic columns in salt water.
Promptly at noon each day, the two left Kensal Rise and took the Bakerloo Line to Piccadilly Circus. Her Ladyship stumped up Shaftesbury Avenue to the French, where Gaston helped to correct the balance of alcohol in her blood. Meanwhile, Hilary opened up at the Plantation: checked the Filipina had done her wiping, supervised deliveries, re-stocked the shelves; all in all enjoying his hour or so alone, dabbling in the dusty peace, before Val Carmichael dragged himself in from King’s Cross, and the long dark sousing of the afternoon began.
On this particular afternoon – one in May, not that you’d feel merry buried in Blore Court – the regulars trickled in, in their usual order: first the Cunt, crowing over this scam or that rip-off; then His Nibs, immaculate in suit, tie and puce face mask, with dry talk of lubricious scandal. Next came the Dog, the only member who took the stairs to the second floor at a bound, a gesture to his Highland boyhood that cost him long minutes heaving on his stool, slobbering on a cigarette as he battled with his necrotic lungs.
Then up came the Poof, frowsty from a young girl’s perfumed bed and snapping at Hilary to make haste with his Campari, as he hid his shakes by patting his curly locks. The Typist and Her Ladyship arrived within seconds of each other, separated by leagues of hatred; then, finalement, the Extra made his entrance. Bolton, narrow of skull, sandy of hair, his malleable features writhing with the effort required to corral six personae into the role of a single actor. The Extra, whose big day this was, for, together with a jejeune TV comedian in the role of Clov, while he himself – perhaps inadvisedly – attempted Hamm, they were opening in a production of Endgame at the Peacock Theatre on Portugal Street.
Oh, yes – and then there was the Martian, although to say of Pete Stenning that he had ‘come in’ to the Plantation at any given time was difficult. He seemed always to have been there, sitting at his little table between the piano nook and the window embrasure, his greenish hair shining faintly in the pallid light, his glasses tilted forward and the lenses holding two orange saucers, the reflections of the drink he held in his ink-stained fingers.
Even in an establishment where stasis was the prevailing mode, the Martian stood out for his refusal to be moved by the times. He was still wearing the same serviceable suede jacket in 1983 that he had been sporting in 1980, and 1973. The same yellow shirt, too. He spoke seldom, and when he did his interventions had a surgical character, as, sidling up to the bar, he got right to the point: ‘What’re you having, Val?’ As if he didn’t know.
So Hilary built the bubbly edifice of another vodka and tonic, and another Campari and soda, and another whisky, and another lager. Round and round it went, the drinking in the Plantation, a perpetual motion of alcoholic fluid like a water feature with a concealed pump.
At some point during the afternoon Bolton handed out the tickets – even Hilary got one – and at 5.30 he left the club, admonishing them to ‘Be on time, you cunts. There’s only one act and no admission after curtain up.’
‘We know that,’ Val snarled, although heretofore he had never evinced any familiarity with the joyful pessimism of the Irish Nobel Laureate’s œuvre. ‘Don’t get yer lavender scanties ridden up yer crack.’
In the weeks running up to this big day, Val had been finding the Extra’s increasingly thespian airs altogether intolerable. As Bolton pulled open the green baize door, his fellow members croaked ‘Break a leg’ (perhaps a superfluous remark, given that had any ordinary man drunk as much as the Extra had that afternoon, he might well have broken a leg descending the kerb of Wardour Street), but Val only sneered, ‘He oughta stick to choccie bars.’ A put-down occasioned by the fact that in the last year the Extra would have gone under, were it not for the residuals from a TV advert for Crunchie that settled his bar tab.
An hour later Val said to Hilary, ‘C’mon, Boy, let’s shut up shop.’ A remark that while commonplace to almost anyone, was to Hilary a warm gush of the sweetest, most nurturing intimacy.
No one knew who had first started calling Hilary ‘Boy’, or, if he were absent, referring to him as ‘the Boy’, but gradually the nickname had begun to stick. Initially, Val was having none of it. If the Dog barked, ‘Where’s the Boy?’, his bloodhound eyes too myopic to see that Hilary was emptying one of the heavy cut-glass ashtrays into the bin under the bar, then Val would snarl, ‘Boy? Boy? There’s no fucking boys in here, girlie, only you bunch of cunts.’ Yet, as time stalled, and Hilary became as much a fixture of the Plantation as the bust of Prince Albert on the piano, so even Val was driven to moderate his sneeringly impersonal shes and hers.
Hilary locked the till; Val pocketed the key. Hilary checked the toilet to see that no one had collapsed in it (a common occurrence with members’ guests, who, invited in for a singular ‘drink’, found themselves indoctrinated by a cult of libations); Val finished his V & T. The members slopped down the stairs into Blore Court, sniffing the astringent bouquet of the early-evening piss left there by the dossers. Hilary switched off the lights and locked the door of the Plantation; Val pocketed the key.
Crossing Wardour Street, then rounding the corner by the Vintage House and proceeding up Old Compton Street, the Plantation members – who appeared in public, en bloc, perhaps only once or twice a decade – presented a curious spectacle: over
grown children, their clothes a lustrum or two out of date, holding hands to form a crocodile that swam upstream against the current of fluvial time.
Out in front was the Dog, sniffing the route ahead, then darting back – if an overweight Scots drunk can ever be said to ‘dart’ anywhere, unless, that is, he’s actually playing darts – to round up the others.
Val and Hilary had linked arms – but out of desperation, not defiance. Val had a spotted silk scarf knotted around his scraggy throat; dark glasses pinched his ruby nose with its bloody filigree. In his free hand a walking stick wavered over the paving; he looked like a sick old man – he was forty-six. Alcohol had done ageing’s business – psychically as well as physically. Val was so long accustomed to the furred tranquillity of the Plantation that rush-hour London had a furious, insect intensity for him; as he proceeded among them, the pedestrians buzzed and flitted, settling in the food-spattered roadway, then taking flight when a lumbering lorry tried to crush them.
Up to Cambridge Circus, then dazedly across and on to the Seven Dials. Hilary staggered over the cobbles of Neal Street; he needed Val’s support almost as much as vice versa. The slim hips that Val had once impotently coveted were now pulpy. Beneath his Breton fisherman’s jersey Hilary’s liver was swelling, as fatty globules accumulated in its cells. Already the macrovesicular steatosis was under way, and, to confirm further still that Hilary warranted the feminine personal pronoun, a spongy mass was building up in concentric rings around his nipples; a foretaste – for the paps that ne’er gave suck – of alcohol-induced gynaecomastia. Val’s clawed hand, its nails striped with the paired bands of hypoalbuminemia, dug into the soft underside of Hilary’s wing. He guided his fattened goose past the ugly pile of the Freemasons’ Hall on Great Queen Street – possibly the pre-eminent club among the many who would never have accepted these members as members.
Her Ladyship was flagging on the long march, while the Typist collapsed hopelessly on the lip of a concrete cup spiky with greenery. A passer-by, confused by her two pieces of tweed and general air of respectability, leant down to inquire if she was ‘all right’, then recoiled from her gin breath and hurried on.