Liver: A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes

Foie Humain

Val Carmichael credited Pete Stenning — who was always called ‘the Martian’ — with getting him off the gin and on to the vodka.

‘Clever cunt, the Martian,’ Val said to the assembled members, who were grouped at the bar of the Plantation Club in their allotted positions. Left to right: Val on a stool by the till, Scotty Henderson (‘the Dog’) on the one next to him, Dan Gillespie (‘the Poof ’) on the one after that — a tricky position, since, if the Poof tipped back, which he often did, he would be struck by the door if someone happened to come in.

In the second row were Bernie Jobs (‘the Cunt’) and Neil Bolton (‘the Extra’). While the other nicknames were mostly referential, as in, ‘Poof bin in?’, Bolton was called ‘the Extra’ to his rubbery-handsome face. He was a leading British character actor, and Val, who had known Bolton the longest, had issued one of his draconian decrees, to the effect that, having prostituted himself on the West End stage — and in a number of hugely successful Hollywood filmed musicals — the Extra was no longer entitled to any more familiar form of address. Bolton took this in good part.

At the back, completing this scrum of drinkers, was Phillip McCluskey (‘His Nibs’). McCluskey was the diarist on a mid-market tabloid, and celebrated on Fleet Street for the McCluskey Manoeuvre, which consisted of his putting a drunken hand up a young woman’s skirt, then falling unconscious with it clamped, vice-like, around her knickers, the waistband a yanked communication cord in his sweaty hand.

The success of the Manoeuvre rested, in part, on McCluskey’s saintly demeanour: until he made his move he looked — and behaved — like a choirboy who had stayed on in the stalls for five decades, ageing but never growing up. Besides, at the beginning of McCluskey’s long career such behaviour was pretty standard, while latterly he was protected by his proprietor, who, as well as appreciating the reliably incendiary gossip the diarist poked through the letter-boxes of Middle England, was also an enthusiastic molester himself.

His Nibs wasn’t in the Plantation that often; long lunches at Langan’s or Bertorelli were essential to his métier, and this was an afternoon club. His frequent absences meant that the three other solidly dependable members were usually able to join in free intercourse with the barflies, even though their stations were some way off.

The Martian himself, and Margery De Freitas (‘Her Ladyship’), sat at a small, round, melamine-topped table, set against the bit of wall that separated a niche where an upright piano lurked from the sloping embrasure that terminated in the bleary eye of a sash window. Meanwhile, on a stool midway between the piano niche and the main door, perched the Honourable Sarah Mainwaring, who, having more rightful claim to a title than Her Ladyship, was instead known as ‘the Typist’, a nod to the fact — not obvious from her county-set manner, her twin set and her solidly set hair — that she was the senior commissioning editor for an august — and famously high-brow — publishing house.

‘See,’ Val went on, ‘the Martian says that all the juniper berries in the gin make it an impure spirit. Toxins build up. Cunts. Too many vitamins. Gotta stop it. But vodka’s completely fucking pure: just grain — nothing else. It’s a well-known fact’ — Val cupped his elbow in his hand and pointed out indecipherable smoke slogans with the tip of his cigarette — ‘that vodka drinkers — and I’m talking absolutely fucking pure stuff — can live for bloody ever. Ain’t that so, Marshy?’ He turned on his stool to acknowledge his life coach, and the Martian raised his glass of vodka and orange in salute.

The other members were sceptical and expressed it in their several ways: the Dog (Scotch) snuffled; the Poof (Campari and soda) tittered; the Cunt (Scotch also) sniggered; the Extra (lager) openly guffawed. Neither the Typist (gin and bitter lemon) nor Her Ladyship (gin and tonic) gave voice, although both evinced dissent, the former puckering her long top lip so that her thick foundation cracked, the latter pulling at one of her hideous novelty earrings, which were in the shape of bunches of red grapes.

‘It is so,’ the Martian pronounced. His voice was at once low and nasal, so that each carefully enunciated syllable vibrated. ‘That’s why I drink vodka myself, although with orange juice as a mixer, rather than tonic, on account of certain. health issues.’ Then he took a swig of his drink, replaced it on the table and ran his stubby fingers through his greenish hair.

It was this greenish hair that had given the Martian his moniker — the hair, and a slightly other-worldly manner that, although difficult to pin down, was none the less there. The Martian lived by himself in a large and mouldering house on Melrose Avenue in Kilburn. The house was damper in than out; sodden rendering flopped from the façade, and on one occasion a lump narrowly missed the postwoman.

The Martian was a printer by trade. The others never asked him about his work — shop talk was derided at the Plantation — but it was generally assumed, from the closeness he enjoyed with the Cunt — who managed Sadus, the sadomasochistic porn shop on Old Compton Street — that the Martian spent his mornings and evenings checking the registration of tormented flesh.

‘Course, tonic water’, the Martian continued, ‘has quinine in it — even that Schweppes piss Val flogs — and quinine’s what they used to take out to the colonies for malaria. Used to be more valuable than fucking gold by far. Lowers the body temperature, see, stops the malarial parasites getting into yer red blood cells, then fetching up in yer bloody liver.’

This was a long speech for the Martian, whose remarks were usually one-liners, and the other members remained silent, stunned by his verbosity.

It was left to the final occupant of the Plantation to essay a reply. Hilary Edmonds (‘the Boy’) stood behind the tiny semicircular bar — no more than an apostrophe of wood and cloth, denoting the absence of some far more solid thing — facing the front row of the scrum and rubbing dirt into a dirty glass with a dirty cloth. ‘B-But, P-Pete,’ he charmingly stuttered, ‘you ain’t gonna get malaria in Soho, are you?’

Perhaps not, although the Soho the miasmal Plantation Club floated above was certainly a swamp: pools of urine and spilt drink reflected the low grey skies, while for its slithering denizens the solid four-storey terraces had all the insubstantiality of reed beds.

Not that any of this was immediately apprehensible from the confines of the Plantation, which was a world entire, accessed via two flights of stairs from Blore Court, a grimy alley that linked the filmic commerce of Wardour Street to the sweetly rotten fruit and veg market in Berwick Street.

Blore Court was a time portal, a fossilized trace of a thoroughfare around which the living city had continued to grow. If a passer-by noticed this four-foot-wide crevice in the brick bluffs and ventured inside, he would be transported back to the era when a huge rookery of slums roosted here, its smoke-blackened hovels, festooned with smutty laundry, over-toppling a maze of alleyways that, as thin and dark as ruptured veins, wormed their way crazily through the face of the drunken city.

The right-hand side of Blore Court was a single sweep of brickwork sixty feet high, and unrelieved by window or door. Behind this were the offices of a film distributor, where men in shirtsleeves shouted down phones at space salesmen, and runners panted as they waited for their tin discuses.

If our hypothetical flâneur had the temerity to venture deeper into Blore Court, he might — not being one of the prostitutes’ clients, who scurried, heads down, their turgid cocks dowsing for moisture — look up and notice that the left-hand side of the alley had a queerer aspect: these were the snub façades and sawn-off porticoes of a row of late-nineteenth-century retail premises, erected presumably during an odd hiatus, when the right wall of the court was temporarily lower-rise, or absent altogether.

In subsequent years these once prosperous drapers and mercers had been worked over, again and again, by the troubled genius of enterprise. Their windows had been smashed, boarded up, reglazed, then smashed again; their sign boards painted over and over, as business after business infested the light-starved showrooms, while artisan after artisan lost his — or her — eyesight in the dingy flats and garrets up above.

During the period that our story takes place — the second great epoch of the Plantation Club — Blore Court was on the skids. Chipboard covered most of the former shop windows, except for a single ‘boutique’ — as anachronistic as this designation — that struggled on at the Berwick Street end, trying to flog ‘gear’ that hadn’t been ‘fab’ since the publication of the Wolfenden Report.

Elsewhere along the alley multiple door bells studded the flaky pilasters, tangled wiring connecting those that pushed them to a multiplicity of sole traders, the bulk of whom had put their pudenda on the market. Yet there were also dental mechanics and hat blockers, Polish translators of French and French polishers, furriers whose customers were as elusive as sable and knife grinders who were none too sharp.

At 5–7 Blore Court there was one bell push labelled, quaintly, ‘French Lessons’, and a second offering the services of a ‘Model’, presumably for an artist who required neither natural light nor a subject that appeared particularly lifelike. If our wanderer had stood outside Nos. 5–7 and looked up, he would have seen the whores’ red lights cheerily illuminating the two topmost windows, and casting their russet glow on the opposite wall.

However, had he stepped in through the heavy door — an original feature, much assaulted and always ajar — he would have been assailed by the nutty odour of roasted coffee — a domestic aroma, at odds with the grimy vestibule, that was the sole legacy, besides their defunct sign, of Vinci Brothers Neapolitan Coffee Importers, who had decamped some years previously. The Brothers’ ground-floor tenancy had been taken over by a Mr Vogel, whose name plate advised that he, too, was an importer, although of what none of the other tenants had the slightest idea, never having clapped eyes on him.

Climbing the stone steps, our wanderer might well gain a sense of purpose from the ring of his steel Blakeys alone. Passing by Oswald Spengler, Rare Books, and Veerswami the locksmith on the first floor, he might detect a certain ‘come on’ in the cartoonish sign that beckoned him up the next flight: a bulbous gloved hand with The Plantation Club, Private Members painted on its index finger. To succumb would be a grave mistake, for, were he to ascend these stairs — the treads worn wood, the runners long since fled — and push open another heavy door — this one with shreds of green baize drooling off it — he would only have been confronted by the faces of the Poof, the Dog, the Extra, etc., their fleshy convolutions trapped in the gelatinous atmosphere like whelks in aspic. Then his ears would be smitten by the discord of Val’s voice — at once a whine and a grate — speaking English with an intense affectation, suggesting it was only his second language, while his mother tongue had been the now defunct theatrical — and latterly gay — argot, Polari, and enunciating the salutation that was at once a damnation: ‘Who’s this cunt, then?’

Although, to be fair, Val’s greetings even for the most staunch of his members — and they were his members, since the club was a business, and Val its only owner — were hardly more welcoming: ‘Look what the cunt’s dragged in’; ‘Managed to hoik her cunt up the stairs, has she’; and even the paradoxical ‘Hello, cunt.’

As the stage upon which these cunts strutted and fretted was now fully revealed to our imaginary wanderer, it would be — as De Quincey, another habitual Soho boulevardier once remarked — as if the ‘decent drapery’ had been twitched away, and an elderly maiden aunt were caught struggling into her Playtex 24-Hour Girdle.

A single room, twenty-four feet by seventeen; to the immediate right of the door, which was set obliquely, was the bar; behind it the expected shelves of bottles and glasses, together with a small set of optics holding the gin, whisky, vodka and rum. The dusty glasses and faded labels — Bass Ale, Merrydown, Harp — had been interposed with novelty postcards sent by roving members. At the far end of the bar sat Val, beside a large and ornate, old-fashioned cash register; sometimes he sported a collared shirt and a silk cravat, but mostly a Breton fisherman’s jersey plotted blue and white contour lines on to his hillock of a torso. However, Val’s costume was of absolutely no significance when set beside the horror mask of his face — but more of that later.

On a tall table beside Val there was a money plant, its leaves coppery in the homely light of a standard lamp with a flock shade that was always on; behind his head an orange plastic modular shelving unit had, circa 1973, been pinioned to the ancient wallpaper — wallpaper that, with its oppressively vertical bamboo motif, was the cause, not, as most neophytes assumed, the result of the club’s name. The rounded slots of the unit were crammed with girlish tat: sequinned purses; dyed peacock feathers nicked from Biba; gonks, dolls and trolls all looking faintly surprised by the pencils rammed up their jacksies. Propped on top of this excrescence there was a single artefact that summed up the desperately puerile and frantic ironizing of the establishment: a framed gold 45 rpm disc, the label of which read ‘Chirpy-Chirpy-Cunt-Cunt by Middle of the Cunt’.

On the bar-room floor was a carpet the colour of middle-aged shit, while in the opposite corner to the door an ancient partition concealed, behind its plaster and laths, a lavatory the size of a draining board: an antediluvian crapper with cracked eggshell enamel and a bird-bath sink, both reeking of ammonia.

Since nobody ever said anything in the Plantation that wasn’t facetious, there was a punning fittingness to the way the toilet intruded into the main body of the club; what little daylight leaked from the sash window to splash against its prow provided the only indication of the passage of time in this static universe. Which brings us back to the table habitually occupied by the Martian and Her Ladyship, beside the niche like a rock-cut tomb, in which stood the melody-devouring casket of the piano.

The Poof dabbled his fingers on its keys from time to time, so that it spurted out old show tunes that the others would join in massacring. On top of its lid there stood a china bust of Albert, the Prince Consort. It still had the bright glaze applied by the Royal Doulton pottery in the 1850s, but had been customized during the Punk era with a safety pin nose ring and a length of toilet chain.

This entire compromised space — at once private and public, intimate and horribly exposed — was illuminated solely by sash window, standard lamp, a few candles stuck in old Chianti bottles and a permanently fizzing rod of neon screwed to the nicotine ceiling, lending a mortuary ambience to the already deathly scene.

For the above is by no means exhaustive; we have omitted to mention the snapshots of former patrons, the un-taken-up invitations, the press clippings and ‘outsider’ canvases — their thick surfaces compressed by awful demons — that were stuck to the walls. Nor have we fully inventoried all the World Cup Willies, stolen pub ashtrays, vintage biscuit tins, voodoo dolls, brass bells, snow globes, and several more skip-loads of useless tat that had been deposited over the decades by decorating skills that were glacial in their slow indifference.

Indeed, given that our chance wanderer, had he happened upon the Plantation Club in 1999, would have found its appearance unaltered from 1989, 1979 or even 1969, it’s questionable whether we can speak of this interior as being ‘decorated’ in any meaningful sense of the word at all; rather, the contents of the club were more akin to the symbol set gathered together by a shaman, then arranged and rearranged in the pursuit of magical effects.

With this one proviso: the shaman of the Plantation Club, Val Carmichael, had never been known to rearrange anything, and, although Maria, a Filipina hunchback, came in punctually every morning to clean, she dealt only with the wipeable surfaces, leaving all the rest of this brooding stuff to become, over the years, set not in concrete but in a far more transfixing substance, to whit: dust. ‘Dust’, said Trouget, who was only an occasional visitor to the club, yet perhaps its most revered member, ‘is peace.’

Trouget, who was a world-famous painter — and therefore known to his fellow members merely as ‘the Tosher’ — was given to such gnomic utterances, and, while he himself may have discovered a certain repose in the furry interior, he none the less never ventured that far inside, preferring to position himself midway between the stools of the Typist and the Poof, erect in his habitual, tightly zipped, Bell Star motorcycle jacket (he lacked a machine himself but was keen on motorcyclists and liked them to ride him hard), while listening to the arch badinage of the others and buying them all round after round.

When Trouget swung open the green baize door and Val saw the painter’s oddly vestigial features — which were partly innate, although also a function of liberal rouging with shoe polish — he would exclaim, ‘Cunting cunty, cunt!’ The point being that in the Plantation ‘cunt’ in its nounal, verbal, adjectival, adverbial and even conjunctive forms was the root word of an entire dialect, the main purpose of which was to communicate either extreme disapprobation or, more rarely, the opposite.

If you were in with Val, and therefore in receipt of the right kind of ‘cunt’, then you were a made man — or, more rarely, woman: you were allowed to come, or go; to remain in the Plantation for an hour, or a month. You could run up a hefty tab; you could even borrow money from the huge till, leaving a scrawled-upon coaster as an IOU. But if you had bestowed upon you the wrong kind of ‘cunt’ — and, mark well, this was an instantaneous and irrevocable decision on Val’s part — then, like the black spot, it stuck to you unto the grave. It didn’t matter if you were vouched for by the oldest of the regulars, or if you tried to ingratiate yourself with Val in the most egregious fashion: buying his Racing News from the newsagent on Old Compton Street; running his bets to the bookie on D’Arblay Street; fetching him cigarettes and meat pies; lighting those cigarettes; and, of course, standing many, many rounds — it would all be to no avail. You might be tolerated for a week, or three years, but it would only be under sufferance, and sooner or later Val’s Embassy filter would be raised at a threatening angle — like the crozier of a battling bishop in the medieval church — and anathema would be pronounced. ‘You’re barred,’ Val would whine-grate, and if you failed to obey as quickly as could be expected of the average sot, by the average sot, then he would follow this up with: ‘Get that cunt out of here.’ Which was an appeal to the cuntishness of the Cunt himself, who had boxed at Toynbee Hall in the 1950s, then served a further apprenticeship in the early 1960s, wiring car batteries to genitals on behalf of the Richardsons.

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.

‘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 same 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 crê pe 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 oeuvre. ‘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: overgrown 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.

The stony canyon of Kingsway terrified the members; they hugged the ankles of the buildings, keening for mercy. They almost scampered into Lincolns Inn Fields, and made their escape, via the Old Curiosity shop, into Portugal Street.

They didn’t properly regain their breath until, cigarettes lit, they were ensconsed in the theatre bar, and the Martian had bought them all a drink — a triple for Val, who was most in need. ‘Why — why the fuck,’ Val panted, ‘did we fucking walk here?’

But, of course, none of them knew.

The crowd in the bar were not the usual sort of first-nighters. These sports-jacketed men, with British Home Stores bolsters of wives, had driven in from the outer suburbs, or even further afield; some with teenage children, others with elvers still more jellied. No more familiar with Beckett than Val Carmichael (less so, in point of fact, because he had met the playwright, once, with Trouget. ‘What’s he like?’ the Extra had asked. ‘Her?’ Val replied. ‘Total cunt.’), these punters had come to see Terry Pierce, the fresh-faced and rubber-legged star of the hugely popular peak-time sitcom Baloo’s Den, in which he played an accident-prone young Scout master.

Backstage, Pierce had been appalled by the state that Bolton had arrived in. The Extra caromed off the distempered walls and nutted the safety lights’ wire basketry. However, after applying to an attentive stagehand for medicinal cocaine, the actor, who was to be the very embodiment of Beckett’s joyful pessimism, did indeed achieve a kind of. joyful pessimism.

‘Terry, darling,’ he slurred, propped in the doorway of his costar’s dressing room. ‘Don’ worry ’bout nuffin, sweetie. All I gotta fuckin’ do is sit there, babes — iss you gotta do the work!’

This, while technically accurate, was still not particularly reassuring for Pierce, who, in common with so many farceurs, had a deep — almost pathological — yearning to be taken seriously. The Extra, as Hamm, might well be able to sit in ‘an armchair on castors’ for ninety-some minutes, but whether he could bring the right kind of sonorous asperity to lines widely regarded as the very acme of bleak Absurdism seemed altogether doubtful. He couldn’t even remember the names of the actors playing Nell and Nagg — who fluttered about solicitously in their grey weeds, faces doubly whitened — merely waving them away with an idle, ‘Will you fuck off, you little cunts.’

Bare interior. Grey light. Left and right back, high up, two small windows, curtains drawn. The spartan set and insufficient lighting mandated by Beckett’s anal-retentive stage directions may have temporarily dampened the audience’s spirits — they were, after all, anticipating an evening rich with belly laughs — but the entrance of their hero, and his funambulist compliance to those self-same directions, soon ignited outbreaks of giggling, especially among the teenagers.

. goes and stands under window left. Stiff, staggering walk. He turns and looks at window right. He goes and stands under window right. He looks up at window right. He turns and looks at window left. He goes out, comes back immediately with a small step-ladder.

With each wobbly revolution and spring-heeled gyration, Terry Pierce called forth gales of laughter. Then, when he eventually closed in on the shapeless form centre stage and whipped away the sheet shrouding it to reveal Bolton in a dressing gown, stiff toque on his head, bloodstained handkerchief covering his features, the merriment faltered.

In the wings, the director of the piece was on his knees, a prayer on his lips, albeit a secular one — an adaptation, to suit these harrowing circumstances, of the playwright’s own aperçuconcerning Hamm: that he was ‘The kind of man who likes things coming to an end but doesn’t want them to end just yet.’

Midway back in the stalls, strung out along the best seats in the house, sat the membership of the Plantation. They had already attracted whispery opprobrium in the bar, as they sucked up booze, spurted out smoke and cratered the haze with their ‘cunts’. Now, in the blacked-out auditorium, their purse-lipped critics discovered that the Plantation members not only looked off, they smelt it, too.

Very red face. Black glasses. Handkerchief removed, a reversal began the very instant the Extra spoke Hamm’s first line: ‘Me — ’ (he yawns) ‘ — to play.’ The Extra hadn’t needed much make-up at all to conform with Beckett’s instruction that Hamm have a ‘very red face’, and, while he may have been drunk, he was still an old trouper: he remembered his lines, and gave them a slushy, sibilant delivery that sent out small puffs of spume, clearly visible in the footlights.

Bolton’s fellow members — who, while possessing little culture themselves (with the obvious exceptions of Trouget and the Typist), none the less knew perfectly well how to be snobbish about it — were appalled by the levity with which their country cousins were responding to the crepuscular vision of the great dramatist. They tut-tutted, and the Poof even poked the eleven-year-old boy sitting next to him and hissed, ‘Shut up, you little prick.’

But then the hicks became transfixed by the Extra’s Hamm. He may have remained seated, but his performance was definitely a high-wire act. The unutterable pathos of the human condition, as revealed by the desperate, halting exchanges between Bolton/ Hamm and Pierce/Clov, fell heavily on them: a mighty weight crushing their bourgeois complacency. The mums and dads ceased chuckling; the teenagers stopped tittering; the smaller kids struggled on with their giggles for a few more minutes, but soon, flummoxed by the weirdness of it all, they, too, shut up and lapsed into that state of shocked boredom that Theodor Adorno characterized, vide Endgame, as the ‘gerontocracy of late capitalism’.

However, Very red face. Black glasses. Hamm, calling upon the dogged, hapless, slavish Clov to poison himself. Hamm, static unless wheeled; self-obsessed unless rebarbative. Nell and Nagg in their bins, the whitened after-images of human affection, condemned for ever to an atemporal realm in which they acted out, and acted out, and acted out the pathetic dependency they called love.

Very red face. Black glasses. It didn’t need Ken Tynan — the only individual who had known both mise en scènes intimately — to recognize that this set-up was uncannily like the daily psychodrama in the Plantation Club; nor to grasp that Hamm, as portrayed by the Extra, bore close comparison with Val Carmichael himself. By the time Bolton reached the line ‘Do you not think this has gone on long enough?’, and, worse, delivered it with an accurate imitation of Val’s whining croak, the overseer of the Plantation could bear it no longer and whined back, ‘It certainly has, you cunt.’

The Extra was too much of a pro to react to this, but Terry Pierce fumbled, then dropped the three-legged toy dog. Having got this off his sunken chest, Val had no intention of leaving; besides, he had wittingly planted an evil seed, and in the last half-hour of the play was delighted by its burgeoning, as, unable to control himself, Bolton began to gash Hamm’s gnomic utterances with more and more ‘cunts’.

Now it was the members’ turn to be convulsed, while the small town burghers sat — possibly as Beckett had intended — desperate for it all to end right away.

By the time the Extra glossed Hamm’s final weary remark thus: ‘. speak no more. Old cunt! You remain,’ they were shuddering with embarrassment, whereas Val was clucking with delight. Backstage, the director lay unconscious in a pool of his own tears.

The critic from Time Out declared Bolton’s Hamm to be a ‘masterful improvisatory tour de force’, restoring ‘a much needed contemporary bite’ to a piece that was beginning to petrify in the gorgon stare of academic eyes. Others were not so sure, and, although Endgame smouldered on at the Peacock Theatre for another sixteen performances — with most of Bolton’s expletives deleted — it was soon enough stubbed out by lawyers acting on behalf of its author, who, whether or not he may’ve been a total cunt, totally objected to any bowdlerization of his work.

However, that night at the Plantation — which Val, in an almost unprecedented move, had reopened — the Extra received a hero’s welcome. No Larry Olivier or Ralphie Richardson could have been more lauded. Val ordered Hilary to suck Bolton off in the toilet. Trouget loitered, standing everyone champagne for an hour or so, then slipped away. The Martian made good the deficiency, buying round after round — always triples for Val — and Val, pressing on with Hilary’s gavage, took care to pour a little of each V & T into his understudy’s glass.

The Poof mounted the piano stool and pounded out, over and over and over again, ‘(Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage) Mrs Worthington’, a ditty that, although risqué in its own day, took on a filthy contemporary tinge as the members bawled their heads off, adding ‘cunts’ in all the irrelevant places.

The Prince Consort, safety-pin nose-ring jangling, pogoed on top of the piano; Her Ladyship’s dewlaps jiggled; Bolton cut a wonky caper. By the till, Val Carmichael lit Embassy after Embassy, each from the tip of the last, while surveying the giddy pavane with a dangerous leer. The Cunt roared, His Nibs smiled sardonically, the Dog howled with drunkenness.

Some time after midnight, the Typist, who had long since concertinaed into blackout atop her stool, wet herself; but no one paid this the least attention, as they were all caught up in the whirling circularity of dervishes, who, as they spun faster and faster, became more and more abandoned in the devastation of their short-term memories, until they metamorphosed into figures with no more ability to think of the next move than a chess piece.

Each on its appropriate square, left to right at the bar: Val, the Dog and the Poof. In the second row the Cunt and the Extra; dumped on a stool her own colour, the queenly Typist; trapped at the end of the board, the Martian and Her Ladyship; taken by it all, slumped against the wall, His Nibs. And observing the whole scene, that silly goose, the Boy. Hilary, who on this dark night was granted a painful moment of not to be repeated clarity, and grasped that this was a zugzwang from which he could never escape.

A couple of years later they were all still on the same squares. Entire civilizations of dust mites had arisen, then fallen, while in the human realm nothing had changed, except that it was June, earlier in the day, and the Tosher was in. He stood by the door, diffident as ever; that was how Trouget made his way in the world: light as a fly sensing its way across a soufflé. Give him a tin of brown shoe polish and a bottle of vintage Taittinger, zip him into his Bell Star jacket and hand him a first-class plane ticket, and away he’d go with no thought to the morrow, intent on dropping ten, twenty, fifty grand on the tables at Biarritz or Monte Carlo.

When the Tosher was in town he toshed all day at his studio, which was above a sanitary-ware manufacturer in Peckham Rye, fuelled only by successive glasses of champagne. Then, in the late afternoon, he applied his polish, lacquered his hair into a hard helmet and went up to the Plantation, where he stood by the door and drank champagne. Cunty, darling.

Without the Tosher, the other members would have been mere mudlarks grubbing on the foreshore for trinkets discarded by the Truly Significant as they swept past on their gilded barges, heading downstream to the silvery sea of posterity. Without Trouget their ossified mores would have been a stylization that had forgotten style. Trouget — by virtue of his great success alone, for he was as daft as one of his own brushes — belonged to the world without; a world that was steadily growing faster and brighter, while in the club it only grew slower and dustier.

‘Are you well hung, cunty darling?’ Val asked him on this particular day. The Tosher murmured an affirmative. ‘It’s all in the hang, isn’t it, Tosher?’ Val continued. ‘I mean, if your daubs ain’t hung just so, no cunt’ll buy ’em.’

Again, Trouget’s weird young-old face contorted consent. The world-famous artist suddenly spasmed forward, pecked a few peanuts from the bar and popped them into his mouth. He brushed his fingertips on the flanks of his jacket; the grains of salt fell to the carpet, poisoning the peaceful fields of dust.

Val took another line: ‘Have you got our cunt-boards? And are our names on the silly list? You know I can’t be doing with a wait.’

Trouget dropped his weak chin to his strongman’s chest.

The Boy, who had been tidying up the bottles of Britvic orange beloved of the Martian, couldn’t prevent himself from breaking in at this point: ‘Um, T-Tosher, c-can I come, too?’

Over the years Hilary had lost any awe he may have once had in the presence of the others, who, while they were hopeless sots, were none the less what his mother quaintly referred to as ‘your betters’. But with Trouget, Hilary was still tongue-tied; and this despite the fact that the painter had once, very civilly, asked Hilary to beat him with a small hammer, the kind railway engineers formerly used to check tappets. More of that, never.

Val, outraged, froze: his Embassy aloft, his claw gripping the till, as if it might give him the strength of money.

Had you, for the past two years, been spending all afternoon, every day, in the Plantation, you probably wouldn’t have noticed the changes in Val — the changes, specifically, in his nose. The spider angioma was far more advanced: ruptured blood vessels now entirely enmeshed his fleshy beak in a net of angry bluey-red lines.

The sight was so arresting that newcomers to the club — of whom, admittedly, there were few at this time — would be altogether transfixed by the nose as it shone, a warning buoy bobbing in the whirlpool of booze. If, at some later date, these neophytes were asked about their visit to Soho’s oldest and most celebrated private members’ club, they would only ask in return: ‘That man who says ‘‘cunt’’ all the time, what’s wrong with his nose?’ As if you would know.

It was comforting to think of Val Carmichael’s nose as evidence of bad character — each bloody filament a wrong choice or an evil deed — but the truth was far sadder, and more desperate. True, Val had not been exactly nice to begin with, but for a long time now it had been the nose that was lighting his way into the most Stygian recesses of human nature.

The nose burnt with unholy indignation.

Trouget said nothing, then unzipped his jacket and, withdrawing a thick deck of engraved invitations, dealt one on to the bar in front of the Boy. It read Trouget 1955–1985, A Retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, then the usual guff. The Tosher didn’t stop there: he went on from place to place, silently dropping invitations into the hands and the laps of the members. It was a fait accompli; however much the ugly old sister hated it, the Fairy Godmother had decided: Cinders would go to the ball.

In the Methuselan lifespan that it was taking for Val’s indignation to subside into resignation, the Martian rose and slowly scuttled the five steps to the bar. ‘Have a drink, Val,’ he cautioned him. ‘On me — Boy, get Val a V & T, a triple, I think.’

‘She, she, sheeeeoooo.’ Val’s attempt to become the screaming pope and excommunicate Hilary ended with a sound the members had never heard before: his sighing. Hilary, who had been holding his own bad breath, at last managed to swallow.

This time they didn’t make the mistake of walking. Even so, when the two cabs pulled up on Belvedere Road, and the ten members of the Plantation party struggled out into the summer evening, they found the light and the noise and the air and the people almost overwhelming.

His Nibs, who had more cause to venture outside the square mile of the West End than the rest, took the lead. Yet even he, once they had entered the labyrinth of stairwells and walkways that corrugated the cardboard Brutalism of the South Bank, was altogether bamboozled.

McCluskey halted and looked back. Coming up behind him, arm in arm, were Val and the Boy; while to their rear limped the rest of the members: defeated Tommies retreating across a concrete no man’s land. At the very back was the Martian, one hand on each of Her Ladyship’s buttocks so that he could propel her forward.

His Nibs was oft times precluded from deep insight — by reason of alcohol, of course, and also for professional reasons: so much of his intellect was adapted to the secretion of shmaltz — the heating up of it, and then its smearing across the tabloids — that he had lost his nose for what might, or might not, be kosher.

The Boy, almost a decade on now, had reached a peculiarly affecting stage: plump and dazed, subject at least once or twice a week to blackouts, his suffering lending his thin nose and flabby cheeks a kind of nobility.

McCluskey was no gastronome; he knew neither of the iecur ficatum — the livers of geese force-fed with figs — originated by Apicius, nor of the manner in which the medieval European Jews had, as a by-product of their own dietary laws, preserved the practice of gavage. Nevertheless, observing the Boy and his tormentor, His Nibs grasped that what existed between them was no Beckettian stalemate; and that no matter the extent to which the Plantation and its members were outside time, there was still a linear process at work here, one that, no matter how haltingly, was limping towards some strange fruition.

According to Pliny the Elder, when the Romans’ geese were fat enough, they were drenched with wine and immediately slaughtered. In Hilary Edmonds’s case the drenching was taking years, and His Nibs now realized that the only thing that might prevent his eventual demise was the saturation and slaying of the poultry keeper himself.

McCluskey was not the only one to be granted insight on the night of Trouget’s triumphant retrospective. (The prices paid for the Tosher’s canvases quadrupled in the first few days of the show, while he was levered from a position of undoubted avant garde pre-eminence to a pedestal of Portland stone. The OM was spoken of — and we’re not talking Buddhist chants here.) In the topsy-turvy galleries of the Hayward — spaces at once airily vast and oppressively claustrophobic — some hundred and fifty of the Maî tre’s mighty oils loomed and brooded, deepening the mystery.

Trouget’s brushwork may have changed over three decades, from the smooth viscosity of Léger to the scraggy abrasion of Kokoschka or Jasper Johns, but his fidelity to his palette and his subject matter was absolute. In picture after picture, using his favoured bile-greens and bathroom-tile blues, Trouget portrayed well-built nudes, willowy youths and neotenous golems, their heads part skull, part the melted plastic of dolls. There were also a lot of dogs — cartoonish and naturalistic.

In many of the paintings, pricks (‘penises’ would be to dignify them) stuck out of the pictorial space as scaffolding poles do off the back of a flat-bed truck. Trouget employed them to support the drapery of his backgrounds, which were divided, laterally, into three, or stretched into astigmatism, or simply dumped in the corner, a heap of old Euclid.

Art critics — who never know better — ascribed both the persistences and the discontinuities in the Tosher’s works to ideological conflicts, and to modes of being and seeing that were at once lofty, yet, for him, gnawingly ordinary. The reality — as any of his fellow club members could have told them — was that he was always pissed.

But the most salient thing about Trouget’s paintings — a fact long since ignored, now that you can see a Trouget replicated in an advert for arch supports, or a poster of one stuck up in the toilet of a small town library — is that, without exception, whether seated, standing, recumbent — or, in the case especially of the dogs, on their haunches — all of the figures were upended: dangling men and women, their painterly hair draggling the heavy gilded frames Trouget’s gallerist favoured.

Whether this made of his subjects brachiating apes or lynch victims, it was difficult to say — and the critics expended a great deal of energy not saying either; but on that balmy evening in mid June, in the mid 1980s, there were few among the attendees of the private opening who did not experience these serried ranks of gibbeted figures as anything except premonitory of Death.

Their shoulders hunched in their outsized shoulder pads; their scalps contracted beneath their big hair. Whether they were drawn into the horror show of an individual painting, or hurried past them all in a blur, even the most corpulent bankers visibly shrank into the boxy confines of their double-breasted suits, while their Adam’s apples shrivelled behind the huge knots of their Valentino ties.

The artist himself blew and spun through the Hayward, a masochistic spindrift of a man, who was wafted along by the artistic director, the curator and even — for a good part of the evening — the Minister for the Arts himself. (A ludicrous goofy fatty, who later that year was to lose his portfolio, after getting his prick stuck — like a scaffolding pole — in a prostitute.)

When Trouget finally found Val and the others, they had gone to ground in one of the smallest spaces — no greater than a well-lit coal hole — where he had placed three of his ‘sculptures’. Which were nothing more — and possibly even less — than the rags Trouget used to clean his brushes. Glaucous, pyramidical piles of these — the arse-wipes of his art — now lay under perspex. This, an astute memorializing of his thrilling praxis, anticipated the wholesale iconography that was to be constructed after his death, when the ’dilly boy Trouget had named as his heir flogged off the Maître’s studio. It was systematically broken up, the 597,644 bits individually numbered, then crated and shipped to Indonesia, where they were reassembled in a Jakarta shopping mall, much to everyone’s satisfaction.

The supplies of ’poo were perfectly acceptable for anyone who called it champagne — but not for the Plantation workers. Seeing that they were getting restive, and perhaps fearing a scene, the Martian had discreetly palmed a waiter a twenty pound note; subsequently, tray after tray came winging down into the coal hole.

Val sat on a padded bench bracketed by the Typist and Her Ladyship, while His Nibs, the Poof, the Extra, the Dog, the Cunt, the Martian and the Boy leant against the outside-inside walls. Seeing them all clearly — which, after all, was what he was good at — abstracted from their usual habitat, even the other-worldly painter was taken by how anachronistic they all seemed. In this brave new world of matt black and mirrored glass the Dog’s terrycloth shirt and flared trousers, the Extra’s leather waistcoat and floor-licking knitted scarf, the Cunt’s Harrington jacket and polyester trousers, even His Nibs’ suit — brown, Burton, gleaming at shoulder and elbow with wear — let alone Val and the Boy’s matching Breton fishermen’s jerseys — all set them as firmly apart as the Appalachians do remote hillbilly communities. Their arch cuntishness and mannered Cockney was as bizarre to the ears of the passing crowd as Elizabethan dialect in the mouths of modern Americans.

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.’

And 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.

Val had cleverly utilized the masochistic tendency he had first intuited in the young Hilary when he saw him through the window of the Wimpy Bar. Thereafter, Val had forced Hilary to swallow so much humiliation that it had stuck in his craw, in much the same way the poultry farmers of the Dordogne made use of their geese’s natural tendency to store grains in their oesophaguses.

At the St Charles, the gloomy Victorian hospital in back of Ladbroke Grove where Val ended up, a junior registrar had to give him a shot of Ativan to stop him fitting. She was no expert on this spectacular form of self-abuse, which involved relentless terrorist attacks on the temple of the body; but then few are. However, even a cursory examination of Val’s dropsical body was enough to tell her that: ‘This, uh, man — Mr Carmichael, is so close to suffering a portal haemorrhage. Well, I don’t suppose. ’ She looked up from the bed, where Val’s head, a crushed grape, lay on the pillow. ‘Mr?’ she queried.

‘Stenning,’ the Martian replied matter-of-factly. ‘Peter Stenning. Val — Mr Carmichael — is my cousin. And, yes, I do know what a portal haemorrhage is.’

Although while in the dusty confines of his adoptive habitat the Martian was notable for his tranquillized manner, strange to relate that here in the St Charles he appeared studiously efficient. And while in the tawny interior of the club his garb and even skin had a tinge that matched his greenish hair, in the cold-old light of the general ward he didn’t look like anything much: just another late-middle-aged, middle-class man wearing slightly anachronistic spectacles and a suede jacket.

There was little to be done with Val, so the medical staff did nothing: there was no heroism in giving this spavined old nag a painless trip to the knackers. The Martian, however, did plenty. He had told the junior registrar that he was Val’s cousin, and, since he was so willing to undertake the palliative care that they couldn’t be bothered with, they saw no need to inquire any further when he signed the relevant paperwork as next of kin.

The Martian had Val moved to a private room. He gently petitioned the doctors for all the medication necessary to make the dying man comfortable. All agreed that in the case of this most determined waster of it, it was only a matter of time. A matter of time before pancreatitis, hepatorenal syndrome, hepatitis, cancer and, of course, cirrhosis jostled together in Val’s engorged liver, kidneys and gall bladder, and, finding a common pathway out, ruptured the walls of his weakened arteries, so that blood gushed into his throat and drowned him.

It was only a matter of time, but, despite waiting for decades now, the Martian was succumbing to a mounting impatience. He went down to the convenience store on the corner of Cambridge Gardens and bought quarter-bottles of vodka; a tacky brand called something mock-Slavic like ‘Gogol’, but that hardly mattered at this stage. It was also a hot summer, but that didn’t matter a damn either.

The Martian fed Val tiny sips of the burning spirit through a straw, and the patient croaked his gratitude. No one else came to see him — not that he would have been able to recognize them if they had. The Plantation Club members had a well-justified fear of hospitals, given that any self-respecting mental health practitioner would’ve sectioned them more or less on sight.

Her Ladyship, escorted by Hilary, did make it as far as the main lobby of the St Charles; there, upon seeing an immunization flyer that depicted a doting mother and her winsome baby, she was utterly overcome by her own pathological self-pity and had to adjourn to the nearest pub for much needed medicinal gin.

Hilary himself couldn’t have given a toss about Val. He would only have entered the queerly shaped nook where Val lay — the result of eras of partitioning — in order to press a pillow over Val’s horror mask and extinguish his flame-red nose for ever.

But he didn’t have to, because the Martian was doing the job for him. Between trips to the offie, the Martian sidled about the St Charles. In an environment at once hurried and yet desultory, the staff barely noticed this nondescript figure; while if a clamp went missing here, and a scalpel there, then they barely noticed that either.

Over several days the Martian assembled all the equipment he wanted and stashed it in the cupboard in the corner of Val’s nook. Each evening, when visiting hours were over, he went back to his house on Melrose Avenue, off Shoot Up Hill. If our chance wanderer — last seen lurking in the vicinity of Blore Court — had happened to creep through the overgrown front garden to the bay window, he would have seen a curious spectacle through its scummy panes: the Martian, standing stock-still in the middle of a completely empty room, waiting, hour upon hour, for the dawn.

On the morning of the day Pete Stenning killed Val Carmichael, he left his house as usual and travelled by minicab to Lidgate’s, the organic butcher’s on Holland Park Avenue. Here he collected a pig’s liver that he had ordered by telephone.

The Martian doubted that the pathologist at the St Charles would wish to conduct a post-mortem: the uncertainty, in Val’s case, would concern not the cause of death but how his life had been maintained for so long. Even if they did perform an autopsy, the pig’s liver might still fool them.

There was also the undertakers to be considered. Embalming was not an issue — Val’s cadaver was to be cremated forthwith — but the Martian knew some of them could be sharp-eyed; and some liked to handle corpses — that’s why they took on the job. They left it to colleagues to honour the dead and comfort the living, while they poked about in the cremulator.

The Martian wasn’t too bothered if his subterfuge was discovered. He was not an entity characterized by a sense of humour, let alone irony, but he did like to leave his mark. Much as Trouget blobbed three dots of paint in the bottom-right-hand corner of his canvases — thereby increasing their value ten-thousandfold — so the Martian considered his transplants a form of signature.

The Martian had a good feel about this morning, believing he had got his timing exactly right. He stopped at the convenience store for a bottle of Gogol that he concealed in the inside pocket of his suede jacket. Even this late in the procedure there was still the possibility of discovery and that would make things. awkward.

The pedestrians hurrying towards Ladbroke Grove tube station swarmed past the Martian not like flies — such an image suggests fat and hairy bluebottles — but midges fizzing over a puddle; while the vehicles coursing in the roadway had all the mass and heft of mosquitoes dallying above diaphanous netting. It was the same at the St Charles, where the medical and auxiliary staff swarmed through the corridors much as termites pullulate in a mound, while the patients lay in their beds: black and white grubs, nourished with pap.

The Martian moved through all this mini-beastliness decisively. If our chance wanderer had been back on hand, and noticed that this otherwise forgettable man, with his greenish hair — the result, no doubt, of a duff dye-job — seemed out of joint with his surroundings — or, more specifically, out of time with them: jibing the underlying biological rhythms of human life — then that would have been a very fine piece of observation.

For, while one of the reasons the Martian had chosen the Plantation as his sphere of activity, and Val Carmichael as the subject of his attentions, was that the very stasis of the club — where it could take the best part of an afternoon for a member to make it from bar to toilet and back again — made it easier for him to calibrate to the behaviour of creatures who were, to him, as mayflies are to us, none the less, he had disciplined himself so well that he could not only communicate with them — a prerequisite, all would agree, of any successful animal husbandry — but also engage in intercourse with those creatures who were, to humans, as frenetic and transitory as we are to him.

The Martian could catch a fly in his nicotine-stained fingers — and talk to it.

Speeding up, slowing down, but mostly in sync — as a computer-generated effect is edited into an early silent film — the Martian went about his work. Once in Val’s nook he became a blur: feeding Val sips of vodka through the straw; putting a frame beneath the bedclothes to give himself ease of access to the abdomen; removing the instruments and further equipment he required from the cupboard, then arranging these under the bed.

Timing was crucial: for the product to have the highest possible value, it had to be removed, entire, at the precise moment when the portal haemorrhage occurred. Too early and there would be too much blood in the liver; too late and there would be too little.

In the centuries since the Martian — or another of his kind — had nudged humans in the direction of ‘discovering’ the distillation of alcohol, there had been a few scores of them at work during any given epoch. All sorts of methods had been tried in order to perfect this gavage. The Martian had himself developed many different techniques, from performing ‘split-liver’ transplants of cirrhotic organs into the bodies of So Paulo street urchins, then tending them until harvest, to working with hebephrenic living ‘donors’. He had force-fed his human geese with fine burgundies, arrack, poteen and cider; he had soused them with Marsala and drenched them with ale. But, after centuries of experimentation, he had decided that the best possible results were achieved when the gavage was undertaken at a natural pace, with voluntary subjects.

Pure grain alcohol imparted the most nodulous appearance to the necrotic tissue — a finish that was highly sought after by the Martian’s gourmet clients.

Feeling the cold metal of the frame press his flesh, Val surfaced from the mire of his moribund brain. Seeing the concern on the Martian’s face mask, he whined, ‘Giss some acqua, Marshy’, and when his carer obliged with the Gogol, Val sank back on the pillow, sighing, ‘I’m croaking, Marshy, you cunt.’

The Martian nodded sympathetically to indicate that this was indeed true.

‘Lissen.’ Val’s eyes, stripped of their shades, glittered unnaturally. ‘I ain’t got long, Marshy, but you’ll grant an omi-paloni ’is final wish — won’cher?’

Again, the Martian nodded.

‘Juss yer lapper, cunt.’ Val groped for the Martian’s hand. ‘I ain’t after a bloody jarry — only a fucking sherman.’

Even if the Martian hadn’t understood Polari — which he did, perfectly — the dying man’s feeble motions would have instructed him. As it was, Val’s desires coincided perfectly with his own: with his hand on Val’s penis, the Martian could both increase Val’s sluggish heart rate, and sense the precise moment when the rotten wall of his portal vein ruptured.

Culinary savants differed on the question of how an animal’s state of mind affected the quality of its liver, but most agreed that fear and disillusionment engendered a pleasing deliquescence to the fat-engorged tissue. With the more philosophically inclined beasts, it was even worth while giving them a snapshot — as much as their limited minds could take in — of the wider picture.

As he masturbated Val, the Martian spoke to him urgently. It would be onerous to translate from the Cockney, the back-slang and the Polari he employed, but the substance of what he had to relate was that Val’s entire life had been leading up to this: at the very instant of his expiration, he, the Martian, would cut out Val’s rotten liver.

So it was that Val Carmichael died, eyes wide with astonishment and horror, a final valedictory ‘Cuuuunt’ rattling between his bluing lips.

At once the Martian set to work properly, his hands a blur beneath the covers as he made the incision in the upper abdomen, then clamped and sutured with machine rapidity. A passing nurse — a wanderer in this city of death — chanced to poke her nose into the nook and, noting that Val’s own nose was losing its angry hue, taxed the Martian: ‘Is Mr Carmichael all right?’

And even though at that precise moment the Martian was speedily dividing all the ligamentous attachments — common bile duct, hepatic artery, portal vein — that held Val’s liver snug in his abdominal cavity, he had also had the foresight to close the dead man’s eyes and was able to say, with believable sincerity, ‘He’s just resting, sister, I think he had a difficult night.’

Convinced, the nurse moved off, leaving the Martian to complete in twelve minutes an operation that would have taken a skilled human surgeon — were he minded to transplant a pig’s liver into a man — some five or six hours.

Pausing for a fragment of a second to admire the perfection of the foie humain entier that he had removed — its pleasing heft, its bloody-beige marbling, its glistening wartiness — the Martian wrapped it in the greaseproof paper Lidgate’s had provided and popped it into his string shopping bag.

Instruments wiped and stashed, bed rearranged and cadaver rearranged in it, the Martian left the nook without a backward glance. No poultry keeper in the Dordogne — no matter how mimsy or sentimental — sticks around to mourn a goose; and I think we can all concur that, as geese go, Val Carmichael was one of the least endearing.

Dear, perceptive reader, you will have grasped by now that Peter Stenning, aka ‘the Martian’ (and aka, for that matter, ‘Peter Stenning’), was an extraterrestrial — an ‘alien’ in common parlance. To see him wend his way through the mid-morning traffic on Ladbroke Grove — resisting a strong impulse to break into a run faster than the 100-metre World Record holder — would have been enough to confirm this for an acute observer; no sixty-something on earth has such a swift and supple gait.

But were I to tell you that, should he have wished to, the Martian could have taken to the air, flipping, rolling and weaving through the power lines, and between the chimney pots, at twice the speed of sound, I would, perhaps, stretch your credulity; or, rather, invite you to speculate on the nature of the Martian’s real appearance, shorn of the fleshly overall of his assumed humanity.

Such speculations are useless. Insectoid, arthropod, protoplasmic blob, cyborg, robot built from purest iridium with laser-polished coltan fittings — these are the feeble projections of human imagineers on to the mighty screen that is the universe. It is sufficient to paraphrase Wittgenstein, and note only that if we were able to see the Martian as he really was, we wouldn’t understand what it was we were witnessing.

So, on this basis, let us go with him to Totteridge, to the shuttered light-industrial premises between the Great North Road and the South Herts Golf Course that Stenning Offset used to occupy. Unobserved, save by us, the Martian undid the padlocks and went inside. As soon as the door was locked he resumed the pace of action last witnessed at the St Charles. Even so, it took him the best part of the day to fuel, programme and then load the craft that would carry Val Carmichael’s liver on its 38-light-year voyage to the Martian’s home planet.

Late that evening the Martian sat with Hilary and Her Ladyship in the snug back bar of the French in Soho. The Martian raised his glass and muttered ‘Bon voyage’. The others had no idea what he was talking about and assumed that he was drunk. But the Martian had never been drunk in any of his two thousand, six hundred and forty-six solar years.

At that precise moment, in Totteridge, the roof of Stenning Offset exploded in a sheet of white flame and a smoothly tapered ellipsoid lifted off into the sodium-stained London night. It was invisible to either human eye or human instrumentation, and, although it left considerable devastation in its wake, no one was injured. Leant upon by the gas company, the insurers paid out without a murmur.

Val Carmichael’s funeral was a desultory affair; only the older members of the Plantation Club even bothered to attend. To them Val was. well, something — but to the younger crowd he was merely an ‘old cunt’. Those who live by the cunt, do indeed die by it.

As has been remarked, irony was not an attribute of the Martian; however, please feel free to consider how inappropriate it was for a man with a pig’s liver transplanted into him to be burnt at Golders Green Crematorium. Moreover, why not indulge in a little Schadenfreude as you gaze upon the Dog, the Poof, the Cunt, Hilary and Her Ladyship, who, even in the brilliance of a summer’s day, have the dazed-grey look of ghetto-dwellers about to be relieved of their remaining teeth by Nazis with pliers.

Mark only these two further things. If you feel aggrieved by the way this narrative has moved towards its — frankly sickening — conclusion, proceeding not with straightforward honesty, but waddling through needless digressions and lunging into grotesque interpolations, then all I can say is that it has only been mimicking the Martian’s own perception of humanity. For, where we are confronted with the nobility of feeling, high culture and deep spirituality, he sees nothing but the stereotypic behaviours of anthropoid geese.

Second, if you are inclined to feel bad when you contemplate the cosmic fatuity of a species that exists, in its given form, purely so that a few score individuals may be harvested for their cirrhotic livers, then don’t: self-pity is such an ugly attribute of the human character, and one particularly pronounced in the alcoholic.

Instead, why not return with the other members to Blore Court and climb the two flights of stairs to the green baize door? Take off your coat, throw it over a stool, wink at the Prince Consort, then watch his glazed eyes begin to rove as the Poof pounds upon the piano keys, wrenching the Death March from its dusty bowels.

The gang are all here — all in their allotted places. The Martian would have had to decamp if things hadn’t panned out in Totteridge, but now he’ll be able to stay a while longer. See him sidle up to the bar — and note how attentive young Stevie is.

The Martian orders a round, specifying a triple for Hilary; and, in time-honoured fashion, Hilary pours a bit of his vodka into Stevie’s glass of lager. All is as it should be as they raise a toast to the memory of Val Carmichael: the gavage is under way. It may take a while, it may perhaps seem cruel, but then there’s no finer flavour in the universe than foie humain.