Liver

by Will Self

  Prometheus’s voice, that’s his weapon. What he says? Well, on the page it looks like any other copy for the same old pitch: nothing for money. But his voice – it dips and soars and writhes its way into his listeners. His notes are deep or high, his tone rough or smooth, his accent posh with a street edge, or street with a layer of posh tar.

  ‘One per cent of GDP! One poxy per cent! We can do way better than that; after all, we’re growing all the time, mutating – business to business, virals, naming rights ferchrissakes. One day soon …’ He pauses all eyes on him; his aptitude is such that once you’re fixed on Prometheus you cannot look away. You covet him. ‘… one of us – and I’m not necessarily saying it’s gonna be me – is gonna figure out a way of selling advertising directly to the consumer –’ His ceaseless movement, his jiggling and darting, suggests not nervousness but unbridled potency. ‘Social networking is only the beginning – some time soon, every man, woman and child is gonna become their own agency. Then it’ll be 2 per cent, 5 per cent – way more than defence spending; the billings, my friends, will be astro-fucking-nomical!’

  The whiplash of his upper body reels them in, while Prometheus’s piercing, square eyes give those that look upon him the paradoxical feeling that it’s he who is searching for the best angle from which to view them.

  But that was now – and this, also, is now. Athene’s heart-shaped face is annotated by her black curls; her torso is armoured in gold lamé. Even from forty feet away, glimpsed among cotton trunks and woollen boughs, Prometheus experiences a voyeuristic thrill. Oh! To be her friend, to be privy to those girly secrets and party to that caressing mockery.

  Athene stands and whips the cloth from her table so swiftly that plates, glasses and cutlery all remain in place. She slings the cloth around her shoulders and shimmies up the aisle. Other women arise in her train, whip off their tablecloths and don them. Their abandoned lunch companions drum on the tables and howl a Bacchanalian jingle: ‘Oooh-ooh, you can’t stop the children of the revolution!’

  Athene slips the linen off her shoulder and arm – they’re naked; her high-kicking legs are bare as well. All the sashaying women are naked beneath their robes, robes they hold up in front of themselves to make targets for the cannonade of food the sous-chefs are firing from tiny tungsten mortars. Tripe splodges, langoustines clatter, kedgeree disintegrates into rice shot and fishy shards.

  The maître d’ pushes forward a washing machine, and, as Athene sheds her soiled raiment, the other dancers strike arty poses to preserve her modesty. She stuffs the tablecloth into the machine, it hums, shudders and spits it out – all within seconds. It’s cleaner than a void.

  A plastic container fifteen feet square crashes through the ceiling and bursts open, scattering detergent capsules with muscular arms and legs. These bounce into the arms of the dirty tablecloth dancers, the couples go into twirls, magically cleaning the stained linen. The basso voice-over rumbles above the chorus: ‘When you use Ceres, it’s as if your washing machine spins faster than the earth itself! Gods and mortals all agree …’ Athene’s perfect red lips suck on your eyelids, her flawless white teeth nibble your earlobes; she cries out in ecstasy, ‘Ceres biological washing capsules are truly revolutionary!’

  Shaking the drooping Prometheus by his shoulder, Epimetheus says, ‘You’ve gotta go and see the doctor, mate.’

  ‘I’m going to have to put a shunt in,’ Dr Ben Macintyre says; ‘otherwise you’ll drown in your own blood.’

  ‘A shunt?’

  ‘A transjugular, intrahepatic, portosystemic shunt …’ What kind of a cunt, thinks Prometheus, could even begin to say that in these circs. ‘… is a tube. We’ve got to bypass your liver with a tube – there’s a mass of scar tissue in there, and it’s increasing the pressure here.’ He has a scan clipped to a lightbox and lays his hands on these representations of the affected parts – it’s as near as he ever gets to touching his patients. The tips of his thumb and forefinger are callused, dead skin of which Doc Ben – as he styles himself – is inordinately proud.

  Prometheus is leaning against a snowy rampart of pillows on top of an examination couch. His top half is naked, his flesh so meagre and jaundiced it looks like a yellow cloth slung over a birdcage.

  ‘I don’t have the results of your bloods yet.’ Doc Ben moves away from the lit-up interior of Prometheus and turns his back on the exterior man himself. He cannot forbear from caressing the machine-head of an original Fender Stratocaster that’s propped on a stand. ‘But my guess is that more than half of your liver is now severely damaged.’

  Prometheus says nothing. What is there to say?

  Doc Ben is a stocky man in his mid fifties; clever features are clustered on the front of his mostly bald head. He isn’t a liver specialist but rather a medical generalist with a nice drip of honey for the moneyed. When he says, ‘We’ve got to bypass your liver with a tube’, what he really means is that a technician at the Portland Clinic, the London Clinic or University College Hospital will be subcontracted to do so. These artisans of the body are essential for the likes of Doc Ben, the interior decorators of health in their Harley Street showrooms.

  ‘I told you months ago that if you didn’t change your lifestyle you’d be in serious trouble.’

  ‘I don’t drink – at least not alcohol.’

  Doc Ben can’t hear this: it’s nonsensical. There are only two possible reasons for a man of Prometheus’s age having such extensive liver damage – and he doesn’t have hepatitis C; besides, Doc Ben is picking out the riff of ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’ on the steel strings. He hasn’t picked the guitar up, he’s hunched over it in his magenta flannel blazer, a dreamy expression on his realist’s face.

  In his heart Doc Ben is an axeman – one of the greatest ever. He once treated Dave Knopfler, and the grateful Dire Straits guitarist gave him a silver disc awarded to the band for selling 150,000 copies of ‘Money for Nothing’ in Lithuania. They also used to jam together in Doc Ben’s consulting room. Happy days.

  Doc Ben wrenches himself away from the guitar stand. ‘You’re bringing up blood from your tummy’ – this juvenile term is a very considered piece of medical jargon – ‘you could have a portal haemorrhage. I’ll book you in somewhere overnight; the TIPS is a relatively simple procedure, there’s no surgery required. It goes in through the jugular vein – a roadie can do it under a local.’

  ‘A roadie?’ Prometheus groans.

  ‘Sorry, I mean a radiologist.’

  It’s warm in Doc Ben’s consulting room. There’s a lot of tapestry on the walls: bold swathes of red, blue and jaundiced woolliness that he’s brought back from his travels; trips he takes to record traditional gourd-strummers, with a view to writing a primitivist rock opera. There are these tapestries and an intricately patterned Afghan rug, two ottomans, five hassocks and four Moroccan floor cushions. Patients, Doc Ben finds, are softened up by all this padding.

  Prometheus accedes readily enough to the room up the road in the London Clinic, and is driven the few yards there by some Portia or other; a blue-blood thickie in an Alice band who works for Doc Ben, providing a constant background hum of unrequited lust and workaday erections.

  In Prometheus’s wake Doc Ben sends a pinging of emails, detailing all the thinners, lacquers and zappers that his patient should’ve been taking: drugs, the prescriptions for which lie curling on the floor of Prometheus’s riverfront penthouse on the south side of Chelsea Bridge.

  The clinic smells inappropriately of buttered asparagus and bœuf en croûte. Nurses dressed like maids and maids dressed like nurses process in and out of Prometheus’s room. They offer drugs, which he accepts, and buttered asparagus and bœuf en croûte, which he refuses. He languishes, watching through bleary eyescreens as animated flyposters paste themselves over every available surface – walls, floor, ceiling. They’re copy-heavy adverts for a Kentucky bourbon, one he wrote himself. The dense lettering describes a slow day in the long life of a grizzled stillman
stirring sour mash in a dry county.

  Posters have just furled over the windows and door when Doc Ben arrives, tearing a ragged hole in the outsized label of the bourbon bottle. He’s swapped his blazer for a leather motorcycle jacket that is padded in such a way as to give him an implausible musculature. ‘Taking the pills?’ he asks, although his mind is on other, more rhythmic things. Prometheus moans affirmatively. Doc Ben goes to the bedside cabinet, picks up Prometheus’s mobile phone and footles with it, trying to see if it’ll play chords.

  ‘I’m off to the Roundhouse tonight,’ Doc Ben remarks. ‘Playing with Glenn Branca and his orchestra of a hundred guitars … Y’know, Prometheus, I’m really excited about this gig, a hundred axes – it’s a big rush, but I doubt I’ll have more than a bottle of Becks all night. You should think about that.’ Adroitly, he leaves.

  Prometheus thinks about what Doc Ben has said for a few minutes. When a nursemaid comes in a little later, carrying a reader so she can swipe Prometheus’s credit card, the patient has decamped.

  It’s a hobby for him, sort of, but Zeus works in money the way a gifted sculptor shapes clay, deftly changing it from amorphousness into this, or that. He squeezes, rolls, smooths and indents money – then he sends glazed examples of his modelling all over the world.

  An offshore bank in which a blind trust has a controlling interest, lends to a cardboard-box manufacturer in Tampa, Florida, the non-executive directors of which are also managers of a chain of fast Indian food outlets in the north-east of England. Their buyout is financed by the same Cayman Islands bank that – off the balance sheet – sends seed capital to one of these men, to enable him to establish a series of off-the-shelf companies in Douglas, on the Isle of Man. One of these companies is a convenient entity through which to funnel the profits from AABA Escorts, an atomized brothel – the client book, office lease and website are its only assets – a net woven from electro-financial strands, within which to catch sexual cannibals so they can feed on each other.

  One such is Pandora – 22, 5’5”, 34DD, English. This stunning young lady is not only available for in and out calls, but will also, seemingly happily – in tabloid parlance – ‘romp’ with you and your partner, whether you be male, female or both.

  Pandora, whose honeyed skin is intensified by the application of much Piz Buin – and sunlight; for every third week she jets away to a pimp’s timeshare in Las Palmas. Pandora, whose every seam and join is caulked with commercially applied saliva. Pandora, whose body is a box for which her pretty head is the lid.

  A prostitute never kisses a client – mouths are so much more intimate than genitals. And mouth-on-mouth, well, that will resuscitate those memories, open up Pandora’s box; then, out will fly all the misfortunes of the world: the stepfather who put his penis in her when she was eleven; the glue bags she huffed in the park shelter; the orange-collared hypodermic needles her first pimp poked between her toes, so as not to damage ‘the goods’. Inside, Pandora is as crushed and smeared and broken as roadkill, but for now the box still looks tip-top, eminently desirable, knick-knack-sado-whack.

  Epimetheus was sitting in his simple past when Pandora rang. Sitting in his simple past, and sitting also in his loft, a dwelling that mimics a past assumed to be simple, when people – natives – bought and sold simply quantified goods that could be simply stored, instead of the maddening complexity of the present, when an adman sits in an apartment designed to look like a warehouse in another city.

  Epimetheus was sitting and worrying a little about Prometheus, whom he hadn’t heard from since he dropped him off at Doc Ben’s in Harley Street. However, this anxiety was nothing much, a teaser for a campaign that never got going. Epimetheus had seen it tens of times before: his partner, bilious, black at the edges, sliding like a banana skin from the back seat of a cab into the converted townhouse, only to show up again the following morning, more than ready for that all-to-play-for pitch, as electrifying as ever, his spiel a never-ending webpage that scrolled up and up and up.

  ‘It’s me,’ Pandora said, and her voice grabbed him by the scruff and dragged him to the full-length windows. Epimetheus pressed his eye against the wickerwork basketry of the city as a child stares into a hedge.

  ‘You swiped my fucking leather jacket – have you any idea how much it’s worth?’

  ‘Like, duh, I wouldn’t’ve if I didn’t.’

  But is it a pity she’s a whore? He didn’t think so. He had been sitting there, in his underwear, nursing a restorative beer and casting back a decade to the lager of male bonding. Menoetius, Prometheus and him, out on the town; pubs dissolving into clubs dissolving into after-hours bars; the flow of their ideas seeming as smoothly inevitable as the passage of a hoppy droplet through the condensation on a glass.

  ‘Would you like me to come over?’

  ‘How much is it gonna cost me this time?’

  Casting back to his time at art college, Epimetheus remembered a collage he’d made, a griffon vulture soaring, its feathers so many carefully selected bits of black vinyl, buff sacking and white plastic; its beak and talons chrome trim scavenged from verges and gutters. His tutor asked, ‘Is it a mind-child, m’dear?’ And Epimetheus set him right: ‘No, you see them in Cyprus.’

  Flapping like airborne Turks over the carcasses of Greek houses, the walls of Nicosia bleached bone-white in the Mediterranean sun. In the hurly-burly of his parents’ exile – in Newington Green, the Stroud Green Road, Green Lanes, all those London greenings – these abandoned properties remained, unusable annexes to their walk-up flats and tumbling-down terraced houses.

  The three Greek Cypriot lads fought running battles with the Clapton Turks. Menoetius, Prometheus, Epimetheus – Titans, almost, especially when they were reinforced by hulking Atlas, who, unlike the others, dropped out of school. When Epimetheus had last run into him – a colossus in a crombie – Atlas was a bouncer at the Hippodrome. He said he still saw the Clapton Turks occasionally: ‘Blue-metallic Mercs, profile tyres, personalized-bloody-number plates … iss smack, ‘course, that cunt Osmun is up to his bloody elbows in the shit. Saw ‘im giving it large in China White wiv a couple of tarts. I tellya, Epimetheus, we’re well out of it, mate.’

  Sadly, all Epimetheus thought was, what happened to that simple, uncomplicated male friendship – that bond? Thought this, and also – hearing the buzzer go, then seeing Pandora’s old-girl face in the video intercom – envied Osmun his 2:1 ratio of prostitutes to consumer.

  A certain savvy, skill sets and creative DNA are necessary to satisfy clients’ service demands. The first pitch may’ve gone well, but the second still needs to be won on the bounce – in this case of Epimetheus’s swinging bed. Last night it was toxic-induced impotence; tonight it’s premature ejaculation.

  Pandora copes – she can think on her feet, her back, her haunches. She eases herself off him as he slithers out of her, then slobbers down to do what is required. Later on, she teases out of Epimetheus exactly how his mother used to do him an egg, then coddles him one.

  Recently, Pandora launched her own campaign: press ads with simple slogans, scanty body copy, end-lines that are an email address, no colour or graphics, and buried in an assortment of publications – Private Eye, the London Magazine, the Daily Telegraph – that her research department of other, smarter tart friends tell her are most likely to reach her target audience: hommes d’un certain âge ready to be led by the cock to be fleeced.

  Pandora is violently tired – not even remotely curious. She knows what it will be like to be a mistress: humiliation on hire purchase, a drip-drip-drip of acid semen eating away at her soul instead of these corrosive gushes. ‘Me, blonde poetess who needs to be kept in Krug. You, a cultured gentleman who knows the difference between a sommelier and a sun visor. Temptress@demon.co.uk.’ She has a number of these prospects on the go, but is yet to close a sale. So, if she gets sent this one, why not? He’s both younger and uglier than she’d hoped for, but he looks as if he may be able to withstand al
l the misfortunes.

  Four miles upriver, a grape stalk struggles to escape the lid of an aluminium swing-bin; besides a couple of humans, this is the sole organic thing to be found in this penthouse apartment. It’s a fancy absence – a thousand square feet of bleached beech floorboards, the same again of walls so perfectly plastered they could be in an art gallery – so long as its curator was defiant enough to exhibit nothing. There are no pictures in Prometheus’s home, no sculptures, mementoes or curios. His few personal effects are jammed in walk-in closets; the fitted kitchen is sealed in white units. A plain white futon lies in the middle of the floor; on it lies Prometheus, and on him lies Athene.

  ‘I was worried,’ she says; ‘you didn’t answer your phone – and, at the restaurant, you looked so ill.’

  ‘It was nothing,’ he husks into her neck, ‘just indigestion.’

  ‘You looked like you were dying.’

  Her pulse is against his lips; he inhales the hydrogenated wholeness of her. Belly to belly, breast to breast, they are grouted by their spent passion; their hearts and lights and livers are the shared organs of conjoined twins. Prometheus has never felt better.

  Athene rears up, is captured for a moment by those colour-chart eyes, then falls to defining his face with her kisses. ‘Huh, well’ – she’s abashed – ‘you’re so beautiful – so healthy.’

  It’s true: Prometheus has a marvellous glow. And, while committed entirely to this moment – and to this goddess – he is also looking forward to an attainable future, one in which video clips of celebrities drinking Zeus mineral water infest social networking sites; a virus leaping from PC to laptop across the only world that’s worth being known.

  Prometheus grabs the neck of a 1.5 litre plastic bottle, pulls its hard mouth to his soft lips, drinks awkwardly and points the bottle to the face of Athene, who arches her neck. Chilly spillage ungums the lovers, arousing them once more. Athene takes a mouthful of water and, moving down him, sleeves Prometheus’s penis in this coolant.