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

Prometheus

Prometheus stands, quivering, by the water cooler in the inert core of the open-plan offices of Titan, an advertising agency renowned throughout London — and beyond — for its genius at breathing fire into the most sodden products, and the dampest services; igniting them, then fanning them up, so that their notoriety leaps and spreads from demographic to demographic, until entire populations are consumed by a mania for their possession.

Prometheus, his prematurely iron-grey hair erect on his scalp — a magnetized ruff — rubs his cloven-toed trainers on the nodulous rubber floor covering, trying to earth himself; it’s only seven thirty in the morning, yet he’s already hopelessly jazzed up at the prospect of the day ahead.

Prometheus: his cotton clothes of Japanese cut are in shades of beige and mushroom, their kimono cuffs peel away from his kinked limbs like insulation from live wiring. His wrists are bony, with thick black plaited hairs.

Prometheus, he jigs, then bends to hit the spigot of the water cooler, releasing air bubbles that swell and burst. He swigs from the waxed-paper horn and smacks his lips, which then resume their normal expression: an endearing smirk. He’s a handsome man — straightforwardly so; his Pantone 293 eyes keenly rectilinear, his smoothly shaven cheeks suggest the massaging of balms formulated by white-coated demi-virgins in the pseudo-laboratories of giant French cosmetics combines. A smattering of ancient acne pocks below each well-defined cheekbone are only grace notes, epidermal elaborations on the overall tautness of the composition.

‘Tap,’ Prometheus says. ‘Tap, tap, tap!’

‘What?’ Epimetheus is befuddled — still drunk from the night before.

‘Tap,’ his partner carries on dripping. ‘Tap, tap, tap. ’ Then he hits the spigot again.

Both creatives stare into the blue barrel of the water cooler, where another air bubble gurglingly gestates. It’s big, this bubble, it swells and swells until it displaces all the water in the cooler, then rigid plastic ripples as it morphs into the ridged barrel itself.

‘Whoa!’ the admen cry, appalled and enthralled. They back off as the bubble goes on engorging itself, schlupping up ergonomic personnel pods of brightly coloured, injection-moulded plastic; brushed-steel laptop computers; novelty waste-paper baskets; scrawled-upon whiteboards; photocopier machines and swivel chairs with cheese-grater-padded backs. With each engulfment the bubble’s transparency is momentarily occluded by the red-blue-green of these objects — but soon this clears and it resumes its awesome metastasis.

Prometheus and Epimetheus walk back towards the reception area of their agency — they’re still excited by this phenomenon, and clutch each other’s arms like little girls. A ridiculously basso voice-over begins incanting, ‘Water, water everywhere but it all costs money’, and, hearkening to this soliloquy, the bubble sends out quicksilver tongues to lap up stray biros and paperclips. ‘Why pay more’, the voice-over tells itself, ‘for fancy labels and silly-shaped bottles, when tap water tastes just as good?’

Far from addressing the two Titans, the godlike voice pulls at that liquid part of them; besides, they’ve scrambled out of a Crittall window and are dangling off an old cast-iron fire escape: the bubble has sucked up the entire office.

‘Five sixths of the earth’s surface is covered by water, and the same fluid makes up 90 per cent of the human body.’ Stated with such omniscience these schoolboy factoids take on the character of cosmic truths; the bubble, meanwhile, has engrossed London, then the south-east of England, then the whole British Isles, and is now vacillating over the Atlantic, Prometheus and Epimetheus soaring high above its leading curve: mythological man-birds with Muji wings.

‘So why compromise on the stuff of life? Drink Zeus Mineral Water, it may be a little dearer, but it’s definitely better than tap.’

‘Tap, tap, tap!’ With this Olympian endorsement the surface of the ocean condenses into a 3,000-mile-wide droplet that hammers the bubble back down: ‘Tap!’ It’s country-sized. ‘Tap!’ It’s regional. ‘Tap!’ It’s a dome over the conurbation. ‘Tap!’ With the last hideously amplified blow of liquid on solid, it’s driven back into the water cooler, and disappears in a milky cloud of its own tiny selves. All is as before: Prometheus whipping like an antenna, Epimetheus, bemused, saying, ‘What the hell kind of fucking end-line is that?’ Not that his mind is really on the pitch for Zeus Mineral Water at all — it’s still on, or even in, the girl he picked up — or who picked him up — the night before.

It was in Soho House. She was blonde, bright-eyed, no more than twenty-five. Epimetheus was stunned when she agreed to go home with him, because he’s no looker. Short, with bandy legs and an egg-shaped torso, no matter how much he spends on a haircut, Epimetheus always steps from the salon a 1980s footballer with a crap perm. Still, this was better than leaving his black waves to their own devices: flicking grease on to his griddle of a face, which was dominated by the fleshy T-shaped ridges of his nose and brows.

‘Tap,’ Prometheus keeps on, ‘that’s what punters ask for now: ‘‘I’ll have a glass of tap’’, as if it were totally fucking exotic. It’s getting like the States here — waiters’ve started pitching up with it before they’re asked!’

A killer end-line should be like a garrotte applied to any consumer’s faculty for making a rational calculus of price and benefit — and these lethal ligatures were plaited in Titan’s offices, in conversation pits of the kind favoured by imprisoning reality TV shows, in the pods where creatives were coddled by a warm albu-menof piped-in pop culture. It was Prometheus who’d had the water cooler installed; his colleagues mostly eschewed it, preferring the hot froth dispensed from the coffee bar by the agency’s own barrista, and then, by mid-afternoon, the cocktails that were shaken, without let or hindrance, by the agency’s barman. For, as Menoetius, the chief exec — and Titan’s founder, together with Prometheus and Epimetheus — was always at pains to point out: ‘We’re not in business to stifle appetites; we’re all about satisfying them.’

‘So what if punters ask for tap water?’ Epimetheus snarls. ‘It don’t mean they wanna shell out for it.’

He feels like a Bloody Mary — right now. A Bloody Mary followed by a trip to the steam baths on Ironmonger Row, followed by a therapeutic wank in bed, then sleep for a week — or as long as it takes to shake this brain ache and liver jab. Prometheus is still bobbing and weaving; he yanks two waxed-paper horns from their holder, lifts them to his brow and paws at the rubbery turf with his cloven hoofs.

‘Yes, indeedy — better than tap,’ he snorts. ‘And as for the graphic — on the labels, the PoS shit, the posters, whatever — that’ll be a big fucking tap.’

This, Epimetheus grimly reflects, is the tap-tap-tap of water torture: wrenched from a bed in which he’d scarcely rested to slosh through dirty puddles and overflowing gutters, for what Prometheus hokily referred to as ‘a blue-sky session’.

‘C’mon, man. We’ve done the broadband stuff for him; we jiggled his insurance bollocks, too; if we luck out with this pitch we could make it on the roster, become his agency of fucking record. Think of the billings — then double ’em!’

This was Prometheus’s voice, ever seductive, always with an undercurrent of laughter, as it sounded issuing from Epimetheus’s mobile phone an hour or so earlier; the mobile he’d found girded with the silky scrap of the girl’s abandoned knickers — for Pandora herself was gone.

Now Prometheus chivvies him towards the plastic face of the Macintosh with flirty pinches and punches. ‘He’s lunching us at St John at twelve sharp, and I want something to show him.’

Seated at the machine, Epimetheus goes down into the pixel mine and commences searching, picking and grabbing, shakily assembling a series of images that can be used for a PowerPoint presentation.

‘So,’ Prometheus chortles as his partner grafts, ‘who was she? Some tart, I s’pose.’

‘Why d’you say that?’ Epimetheus counters, but it’s a flaccid denial; there’s never any dissimulation between them, at least, not on his part. ‘Oh, I dunno,’ he groans on, ‘she didn’t swipe me card, but. ’ When he’d got up, he’d discovered that, while she’d left her underwear, she’d taken some of his outerwear. ‘She took that Forzieri jacket I got in Milan.’

Prometheus whistles appreciatively. ‘She’s gotta nose, then, ’coz it don’t look like jack, but it must’ve cost — ’

‘A couple of grand,’ Epimetheus concedes. ‘It’s camel suede shearling — so she’s either a tart or a thief.’

‘C’mon,’ Prometheus laughs again, ‘same diff.’

He’s still drinking water, but now it’s San Pellegrino he’s swigging from its dumpy green bottle. He’s always drinking water. ‘To keep me pure,’ he tells anyone who asks why.

The madhouse of the bar, limbs contorted in seeming intimacy. Next, the big clatter-whoosh of the doors as they’d bolted into the gents and bolted themselves into a cubicle. Then the tiny rasp and teensy clatter as she had chopped and ground and swept the granules of cocaine.

The certainty that he was going to see her naked was unbearably sweet for Epimetheus, syrup poured into this golden cubicle. He wanted this to have happened already, so that he could be looking back on it. She was a natural blonde, her hair a perfect bell, the rest of her as smooth and rounded. Her skin had a furring of white-blonde down. Her features were worryingly pretty, and there was more than a hint of the catty in her slanting green eyes. And the nose? Too small, too snub. She wore a chocolate-brown dress of 1950s pattern — full skirt, tight bodice — and her breasts were pushed up high in its low-plunging neckline. When she bent down to feed, Epimetheus could see their pink snouts pressed into the fabric trough.

He finds a big steel tap on a photo library site; it looks capable of hosing away offal. ‘Rustier,’ Prometheus commands. ‘Keep looking.’

He had haggled with the African minicab controller — but only for form’s sake. The tarnished rain dashed Epimetheus’s cheeks and the neon curdled on the slick pavement. Meanwhile, Pandora stood, her coat held up to protect her hair: a glamorous widow in an insurance advert. Epimetheus’s cock, his balls — all the meat of him was engorged with the present; packed into skin and scrotum were cars and bars, commissionaires and au pairs, cycle rickshaws and ticket touts, ’roided clones and voided dossers.

In the vinyl glove of the minicab he put his hand up those full skirts and felt neat fleece through silkiness; then, dipping down, he walked his fingers into the clammy cleft, and Pandora eased herself on to these, at the same time as she pushed her tongue into Epimetheus’s grotty mouth.

‘That’s the one!’ cried Prometheus. ‘That rusty fucking tap is gonna spurt out dosh — you’ll see. Whack it down on a clear black field.

Do it dripping — then pouring, then fucking gushing. Always the same line. Big type: BETTER THAN TAP. Got it?’

Epimetheus gets it. He gets it bad.

There had been no preambles at his flat — a purpose-built New York loft next to Tate Modern. Pandora walked in, slung off her coat, shucked off her dress, stepped down from her shoes and fell out of her bra. Over her bare shoulder the floodlit dome of St Paul’s boiled up: the mushroom cloud of the baroque. A split-tailed mermaid in her metallic tights, she flipped over the thirty-five feet of varnished floorboards to where Epimetheus’s bed — a post-industrial slab of bolted-together railway sleepers — dangled by chains from the rafters and, without any ado, mounted it.

Then she had to mount Epimetheus, who, on joining her, discovered that he had no equilibrium at all. If he sat up, the bed’s modest revolution threatened to topple him; even supine he couldn’t keep his balance sufficiently to lay his hands on her. Pandora didn’t appear to mind. She fetched the cocaine wrap from her bag and administered another line to them both. Then she coaxed his irrelevant nub with scarlet lips and delved with trowel of tongue, until it was significant enough — just — to penetrate her labia.

A Swiss Railways clock blooms on a silver stalk that bends over the rubbery allotment of the Titan offices. Its hands shiver to 10.57. The rest of the work spore have wafted in by now — account planners, researchers, secretaries and those eponymous heroes, the creatives. The creatives take to their pits and pods, and there they’re brought printouts, or publications, or croissants — all by way of nourishment.

Prometheus says, ‘I need a leak.’

‘I’m not bloody surprised,’ Epimetheus mutters.

Titan’s toilets are well appointed: the floors covered with quarry tiling, the sinks hewn from granite blocks, the urinals old Corporation of London horse troughs. The stalls, walled floor to ceiling, are equipped with the oak doors that once graced a Wren church in the City. Prometheus goes directly to the one at the far end, which is in the corner of the building and has its own window. Once locked inside, he takes out a key, unscrews the window locks, places them carefully on the sill and pulls up the bottom panel. He takes off his sack of a jacket and hangs it from the hook on the back of the door, then he drops his baggy trousers and his baggier silk boxers. He sits down on the commode and yanks up his jersey shirt, baring his narrow, almost hairless chest. He half turns to the window and bends forward, warping his long back.

Prometheus’s ribcage expands under taut white skin; piss hisses in the bowl. His face is aimed at the stall’s corner: he stares where tile, wood and masonry join.

Twenty-five thousand feet above Old Street a griffon vulture circles in the freezing air; twenty thousand feet below her a grey-brown lagging of cloud covers the city. The vulture’s gyre takes her from Ilford in the east to Hayes in the west, from Potters Bar in the north to Carshalton in the south. Her bald white head, skull-like brow and double-curved beak are angled not down — for there is no carrion to be seen — but straight ahead. The bird is in a holding pattern; her buff wing coverts and darker flight feathers riffle in the slipstream; her short, stubby tail is tilted, rigid as a rudder.

Way down there Prometheus strains, shackled to his ceramic rock. Mysteriously, the vulture responds to this contortion from eight miles away. She tucks in her huge wings and slides sideways, plummeting to cloud level in less than a minute, then slicing through the vaporous wrinkles as surely as a surgeon’s scalpel cuts through skin.

At once, the city is torn open for the vulture’s gaze: a mass of viscid interiority, with its vital organs of governance and commerce, its sinews and arteries of communication, its intestinal retail concourses and media glands, and surrounding them all its myriad cells of human habitation.

Down and down the vulture swoops, then brakes, her wings wide and cupped. She sees the tumour of the Swiss Re tower, the tapeworm of the Thames, the fatty deposits of Broadgate and the Barbican, the sphincter of the Old Street roundabout. Buffeted, slipping to right and left, the vulture slides through phone and power lines, manoeuvres beautifully between a fire escape and a wall, then glides up to stoop on the sill of the window Prometheus opened five minutes before.

The creative stares at the vulture, and she examines him in return with eyes that have black pupils and yellow irises. Her countenance is utterly inhuman, yet possesses calm wisdom and complete understanding. The vulture’s manifestation is terrifying: her wingspan is fully eight feet, and she stands as tall as a toddler. Her beak is perfectly designed to scythe, then rip; her ruff of white feathers cannot be anthropomorphized into Elizabethan courtly apparel and looks exactly like what it is: a sponge to sop up the blood of carrion.

She arches her muscular neck to gain entrance and comes into the toilet stall with dispatch, although careful not to create any noise or disturbance: a busy surgeon walking into a confined and cluttered operating theatre. Prometheus cants forward still more, so that every vertebra is clearly delineated. He bites the toilet roll. The griffon vulture spreads her wings with a scratchy rustle — the avian stench, musty, nitrous, is gassily pervasive — then abruptly lunges, plunging her beak under the lip of Prometheus’s costal cartilage. With a sawing motion of her head, the vulture opens a ragged tear in him, revealing the glossy maroon mass of his liver. Then, without ado, she starts gnawing.

The adman makes no sound except a faint groan, easily interpretable, from without, as the labour of excretion.

*

He’s visualizing a Sunday lunch in Middle England. Dad and two kids are at the table, while through the French windows we can see a trampoline standing on two tones of green lawn. Mummy gets up from the oven, her floral mitts gripping a sizzling pan. Dad and the kids are telegenically salivating, cutlery at the ready, when the French windows burst inwards. What’s up there in the blue, blue sky? A swarm of bees? A cyclone? No it’s a squadron of vultures in close formation.

One after another, they swoop into the kitchen and land on the table, their reptilian feet sullying the tablecloth. The happy family’s grins somersault into girns — then they recover themselves; for these aren’t real vultures, they’re cartoon figures that link wings-for-arms and dance up and down, skilfully avoiding the dishes of roast potatoes and carrots, the beakers full of fruit juice and the sturdy earthenware plates.

The vulture chorus sings: ‘Don’t give Dad ’n’ the kids fat ’n’ bones, fat ’n’ bones, fa-at ’n’ bo-o-ones! Only give ’em a tummy fulla flesh, a tummy fulla flesh, a tu-mmy fulla fle-esh!’

One of the vultures breaks from the line-up and hops into the air to hover over the roasting pan. It grabs the meat with its talons — a scraggy half-burnt shank; the frame contracts to the vulture’s pawky beak. ‘Ooh!’ it camps. ‘What a dog’s dinner!’ The frame contracts still more, until only the bird’s unblinking eye is visible, and the familiar basso voice-over urges: ‘C’mon, Mum, don’t serve your family carrion this Sunday, when prime beef from Olympus is only two ninety-nine per five hundred grammes!’

‘You know my daughter, Athene?’ Zeus says, employing a marrowbone as a pointer. On the far side of the restaurant a bounteous young woman is in deep giggly conversation with another not the same. Allowing himself some moments within which to consider strategy, Prometheus watches the frond of marrow plipping dark spots across the white cloth.

‘Uh, yeah,’ he says eventually. ‘We’ve met — did she tell you?’

‘Some charity bullshit,’ the tycoon says dismissively. ‘I mean, I’m as philanthropic as the next man, but I don’t want a badge for it, or a round of applause from wankers in penguin suits.’ But all Prometheus hears is: He doesn’t know about you and her, and everyone says they’re close — too close. Bit paedo in fact. Mummy’s gone — she’s his walker; either she thinks he won’t approve, or she isn’t sure. Besides, what about me? If he finds out I might lose the pitch.

‘Aren’tcha having the marrowbone?’ Zeus resumes sucking on his own skeletal little columns, the architectural salvage from a temple of beef.

‘No.’ Prometheus gestures with his fork. ‘I’m on the eel.’

‘Probably wise,’ Zeus says. ‘This stuff ’s as dodgy as fucking fugu — swarming with prions. Metabolic time-bomb.’

Prometheus, despite having pitched to Zeus twice before, and running into him at half a dozen industry pissfests, still can’t read the man. He’s insecure, certainly, and who wouldn’t be with those freckles and that ginger scrub, those tiny hands and that stocky peasant’s build? Not that Zeus has come from nowhere; there are solid antecedents ranged behind him: moon-faced gentry execrably rendered in oils, staring down from the striped walls of airless parlours.

However, Zeus’s Formula 1 racing team and his financial services company, his record label and his airline, his Premier Division football club and his cable TV network, his cranberry-flavoured vodka and his luxury leather goods range, his condoms and his cola — Zeus’s products (or, rather, his brands, for every surface of his empire has a red z zigzagged across it) were a peasant’s conception of what youthful Midases desire, plaster props from which the gold leaf was always flaking. Perhaps it was for this reason alone that he was so successful, that the all-consuming wannabes had taken him to their wallets.

‘So,’ Zeus says, taking a slug of his Haut-Médoc, ‘whaddya got for me?’

It’s one of the little great man’s foibles that he takes such a close interest in the minutiae of his manifold enterprise. He has as many brand managers as Achilles has Myrmidons — and they’re easily as ruthless — nevertheless, Zeus overrules them as a matter of course. He tinkers with the products, but in particular he mucks with marketing. Nothing seems to give him more pleasure than hiring and firing advertising agencies. He also loves to haggle with the media houses, calling the planners and buyers into his office to chew it out with them, muzzle to muzzle.

No bus T-side, billboard site, Adshel, display page in a provincial free-sheet or fifteen-second segment on an FM radio station escapes his attention. Zeus has been known to cost out a single instance of a pop-up ident on a webpage. He even gets between the media buyers and the salesmen. ‘Take you to Chamonix, did they?’ he barks at the pushy boys in their penny loafers, patterned braces and Hackett suits. ‘I’ll fly you to fucking Gstaad!’

And he does, just for the merry hell of it: winching them up over slushy corries to where his ski chalet squats, a megalomaniac’s lair bought sight unseen, which looks like a mail order conservatory. There the boys frolic in hot tubs, the plugholes of which are choked with a thousand, thousand pubic hairs, shaved from the monses of models, actresses — whoever.

‘I got this,’ Prometheus says. ‘I got this.’ And he beckons to Epimetheus, who’s nose down in a plate of chitterlings.

Epimetheus bestirs himself, pulls out a laptop and cracks open its brushed-steel slate. It’s gloomy in the restaurant, despite white paint and yellow light, and, as the computer fires up, its sharp glare plays on the three faces gathered round: brain workers at a brazier.

Zeus goggles at the rusty spigot. ‘Better than tap,’ he snaps. ‘What the fuck’s that about?’

Prometheus laughs. ‘Well, it is, isn’t it? I mean, if it isn’t as good as tap it’s gotta be a total fucking rip-off, yeah?’

Zeus sticks a stubby finger in his own glass of mineral water and noisily stirs the ice cubes. Then he splashes water across the keyboard as he punches through the PowerPoint. ‘Taps, taps, more fucking taps — what’s it all about?’

‘Bus bums,’ Prometheus counters, ‘two, maybe three hundred of ’em. The biggest programmable signboard in the ’dilly, all the arterial route Adshels — maybe some TV — ’

‘TV!’ Zeus expostulates. ‘For a bloody mineral water! Anyway, you don’t buy my media, you’re s’posed to be some hot-shot creatives. Better than tap — can’t you do better than that? I mean, what does it mean?’

Prometheus isn’t fazed — he never is, that’s the essence of his charm — that and the gab. ‘Exactly what it says. Look, Zeus, people are fed up with mineral water. You couldn’t’ve chosen a worse time to launch one — it’s a drag on the market. Eco-shit, recession chic — whatever. Besides, punters mostly know it’s a con. Half the time when you order still, there’s a bus boy down in the kitchens filling up the bottles from a fucking tap. That’s why the waiters make such a palaver about cracking the screw top. This is a nod to that — a nod to the punters’ sophistication. They’ll like that; it’s surreal, counter-intuitive — ’

‘Counter-intuitive!’

‘And downbeat — it cuts through the crap, all that malarkey about purity. I mean, look at that.’ He points at the tycoon’s mineral water.

‘This?’

‘Yeah, that. Knowing this gaff it’ll be kosher, but you’ve paid a quid-fifty for it, and they’ve bunged in a load of ice cubes. Did they make those outta the same mineral water, or what?’

‘You’ — Zeus picks up one of the ice cubes and pops it in his froggy mouth — ‘have gotta point there.’ Then he crunches ruminatively on the chilly bones of water.

*

Only a couple of birding office workers, whose chance itches throw their heads back on their collars, spot the griffon vulture as she dallies down over the Holborn Viaduct. It’s not a day for tilting skywards in London — nothing encourages it. The cloud carpet’s pile has thickened, and the Londoners are woodlice trundling beneath it. One of the irritated twitchers recognizes the vulture as a griffon; the other misidentifies it as a Ruppell’s. Neither thinks much of it, after all; the city harbours so many aliens: refugees from the tyrannies of men and the market, Gastarbeiters, Russian oligarchs, black widows ridden in on a hand of bananas — why not this scavenger, too?

Who flies arrow-straight through the central arcade of Smithfield meat market, her scholarly gaze not deviating to the right — halved cattle, rigid as boards, anatomy like a drawing of same; nor to the left — scores of fowl, plump as eiderdowns slung over a washing line. She swoops up again, then drops down into the ancient court behind St John Street, where cigarette butts and dead leaves mulch the flags, and pigeon droppings ice every ledge. Hunched up, with folded wings, the vulture squeezes past the wheelie-bins and enters through a fire door that’s been left propped open with a mop.

She works her way unerringly into the backstage of the restaurant, avoiding the staff by tucking herself into recesses or flattening herself behind equipment. She quests for the only foody aroma that interests her: the liverish thread. Prometheus is already waiting in the gents, snibbed into a cubicle, back bared. He hears the rustle and scratch of the bird’s approach, admits this late luncher, then bites down on another toilet roll.

For luncheon the griffon vulture takes another fifth of Prometheus’s liver. She clamps the hepatic artery and duct with one talon, the portal vein with the other. With almost half of the organ already missing she has to be scrupulously careful. The soles of her lunch’s shoes beat a tattoo on the floor. When Prometheus returns to the table he’s shaky and leached of colour.

‘Are you OK?’ Epimetheus whispers, but Zeus booms, ‘You look like shit! What’s wrong with you?’ Other late lunchers peer up from their tripe and their oysters.

While his partner was away it’s been a difficult five minutes for Epimetheus. At first, he tried to divert Zeus with talk of other accounts the agency handles: Devo, the giant Korean electronics corporation; Prosser and Beadle, tea merchants by Appointment; Lickstep Sportswear — but the tycoon wasn’t impressed. Nor was he impressed by Epimetheus’s talk of ‘meaningful effectiveness data’ and ‘household penetration’. Epimetheus may art-direct, but his real passion is the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of advertising: looking back to the immediate past and judging how true has been the flight of cupidity’s dart.

Zeus is so ineffably bored that he examines his nails. For the first time he takes in his companion’s shady cheeks and the raw circles under Epimetheus’s eyes. This, he troubles to conclude, is not merely the creative dishevellment of adland; this scumbag looks like he was up all night snorting coke with some whore. Epimetheus is on the verge of making a complete fool of himself, blethering on about ‘interacting via text, phone or red button’, when Prometheus is back, and gulping down water.

‘It’s nothing, really,’ he gulps up. ‘I’m fine.’

It’s always like this in the first few minutes after the vulture has been feeding on him. There’s a near-catastrophic collapse of Prometheus’s system. His blood pressure plummets; the remaining portion of his liver, his gall bladder and his pancreas all swell with bile, threatening to rupture. Then comes a spasm, as of an anaconda choking down its own tail. Then the adman’s internal organs right themselves and he begins to spiel, talking better than ever, quip after riff after sly dig, all accompanied by charming jerks of his handsome head.

Ah, Prometheus, he has the great salesman’s knack of being able to convince whomever he transfixes in his charm-beam that he really does want to be their friend; and, moreover, that his amity is something keenly to be desired, a passport to carefree sunny uplands — a larger commercial featuring baking-hot pool surrounds, convertibles sweeping along a generic corniche, tipsy dawn serenades beneath the balconies of rapacious Rapunzels. and more — much more.

‘OK,’ Zeus silences Prometheus. ‘You can do the fucking water, and you jokers can come on the roster.’

Both admen begin to thank him, but Zeus chops them down: ‘Yeah, yeah, don’t get overexcited, there’s a poxy spend on this one, and you’re gonna have to deal with my people, who’ll cut the deal with the media house. There’s no percentage in it for you shysters. And, while we’re at it, I don’t want one penny wasted — and I want results!’

Then he’s up and toddling among the tables — there is no other word for the muleless rider — towards the glassed partition separating the restaurant from the bar-cum-bakery, where bankers with unsustainable levels of personal debt dab at olive oil with cubes of bread. Zeus pays the bill en route, standing by the maître d’s plywood podium punching digits into the card-reader.

Next he’s gone, and it isn’t until then that Prometheus realizes the tycoon hasn’t so much as nodded to his own daughter.

In recent weeks Prometheus has found himself contemplating this fine madness: that he was born out of Athene’s head, in a wobbling caul, from which his features — like the bonnet of an implausibly high-performing mid-range saloon car — stretch towards the future. But this is absurd. He was fully formed when they met; thirty-five, well educated — no mere Hoxton haircut with a grab-bag of thefts masquerading as creativity. And yet. her energy, the kissing slap of her buttocks against his thighs, the report of her thought in his mind. She was yet quicker than him, she had twists of phrase that left him spinning, unable to retort — how could this be?

In private members’ clubs and minimalist bars, in restaurants with anorexic decor, and at plumply uncomfortable country house hotels in the Cotswolds where horse brasses neigh from the walls, Prometheus applies the bellows to his soul-forge. There’s no tight-mindedness in him at all, no ability to guard his ideas, he gives of all and to all freely.

‘What we advertise’, he says, ‘is nothing much — things, and the things people do. But what we do, matey, that’s the real McCoy, the full-fucking-monty. See, when a punter sees what we do, likes what we do, he begins to desire our ads more than the things — and the things people do — that they’re selling. At that exact moment the whole fucking gig catches fire, because now the punter wants ads — covets them; wants to be in that mytho-bloody-logical realm where a guy can strap on a pair of homemade wings and fly, or a chick can comb snakes outta her hair — real ones! — with the right kind of conditioner.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A shunt?’

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

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

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

Prometheus says nothing. What is there to say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A roadie?’ Prometheus groans.

‘Sorry, I mean a radiologist.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Would you like me to come over?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You looked like you were dying.’

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

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

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

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

Their motions those of sea creatures just evolved to move on land, the lovers resume the making of it; they creep over, then under, one another. Prometheus rears back, her trapezius muscles gripped like handlebars; this is not the explosion that tore Athene’s clothing from her, hurling it across the beech flooring in the blast pattern of lust; this is ruminative lovemaking, as infinitely tender and considerately solipsistic as two geriatrics masturbating with each other’s hands.

It is completely dark, yet seagulls are still mucking around the containers piled behind the chainlink, razor-wire and concrete fencing. Containers full of everything worth having — food, electrical goods, furniture, paper, metal, plastic, old photos, letters, locks of hair — that cannot be matched to anyone that wants it. The containers are waiting for dawn, when they will be grabbed, then winched on to barges, before being floated downriver from the Wandsworth Solid Waste Transfer Station to landfills on the Essex marshes.

The griffon vulture flies up to the massive beam of the winch, then accepts the gulls’ mobbing as of right, smiling inscrutably out from the grey riot of their wings. Lazily, she takes once more to the sky; eighty feet up she yaws, then tacks across to the Hurl-ingham, then back to the Heliport, then from there to Chelsea Harbour, until her course takes her in past the Peace Pagoda to dock in one of the avenues of planes running along Battersea Park Parade.

The feral smell they sense as fear incarnate blows through dank boughs and raggy leaves, to reach blackbirds, pigeons — crows, even — and wake them from their citified sleep, safe under sodium lights. They limp into the air. As with the Wandsworth gulls, the griffon accepts their mobbing gracefully. Trailing the scrappy little airforce, she dallies over the floodlit tennis courts, then spirals up, the smaller birds falling away, fighter cover that has failed to bring the liver-freighter down.

Up, banking past the clapboard gasometer, soaring between the signature chimneys of the power station, then wheeling back round to approach Chelsea Bridge Wharf, not, as its developers might have wished, to take ‘Another Look’ — their own end-line for this terminally uninteresting development — but in order to land on the topmost of the curved balconies, which, in as much as they resemble jetties at all, are ones only suitable for the loading and unloading of brioche.

So considerate, the vulture, so intuitive; she enters with the aplomb of a third lover, en route to join the two entwined on the futon. Hearing the rustle and scratch as she beaks, then necks open the sliding glass door, Prometheus stirs but does not turn over — he knows who it is. Athene’s hip is smooth and rounded in his palm, her wheaten belly rising against his finger tips. In pleasured drowse, she senses the cold air and murmurs a sing-song, ‘Y’all right, love?’ Only to be reassured by his face pressing further into the arch of her neck.

The vulture insinuates her head under the duvet, and Prometheus bites his lips hard enough to draw blood as she makes her expert incision, reopening a wound only superficially healed. As the bird feeds, her feathers — black, buff and white alike — are suffused with the pinkish wash of the external floodlights; a colour scheme that will, its developers hope, make of the wharf a pleasing property sweetmeat. Highly edible.

With pulp-tipped claws the grape stalk pulls itself out of the bin, while inside Prometheus’s fridge an old Roquefort rind shudders into life; then a celery stalk rocks, rolls and tips upright. For a split-second the earth stops spinning and its magnetic field is neutralized: the fridge door unsuckers itself. Rind of Roquefort, stalk of celery, four squares of Swiss milk chocolate — all sprout cartoon limbs as they jump down to the white beech floor; in the fridge light they jeté to join the pirouetting grape stalk.

Throughout the wharf women light scented candles as they make ready to recline in tubs frothing with stress-busting bubbles, and men surf channels to rediscover the Discovery Channel. They are oblivious, seized only by relaxation, gripped by little more than reverie. So it is that the contents of their fridges and freezers are able to rustle, crack and rumble into life.

Lifts rush down into precisely ruled courtyards where bought rocks cluster in frigid beds and water features; the animated food-stuffs waltz out of their metal doors. The double-sized figures of wholesome chaps and winsome chapesses tear themselves from the billboards, where for four seasons they’ve languished tapping little ends with huge teaspoons. These demigods and demigoddesses feel not the cruel west wind that parts their mighty terry-towelling robes; they round up the food, cajoling frozen chickens, lassoing pots of clotted cream, trawling bags of Ethiopian sugar-snap beans and arresting jars of pesto. The subdued food is shovelled into an immense cone that one young Hercules has fashioned from a sheet of corrugated iron torn from a nearby scaffold.

The billboard deities choreograph a tableau gigantesque around this horn of left-over plenty — and this, truly, is worth Another Look. Then, with no sense of movement, no crude disjunction, we’re back in the penthouse, back in the kitchen, back in the fridge — where a single slim tin of energy drink, lit by its own inner taurine and decorated with the silhouette of a naked youth that’s blazoned ‘Ganymede Up All Nite’, half bows, crunching itself a waist.

And still the vulture feeds, its frightful ruff saturated with Prometheus’s blood.

Doc Ben doesn’t, as a rule, do house calls. ‘Whadda vey fink eye am,’ he says dropping into Mockney for the benefit of his Portia, ‘a fucking tart?’ A strange denial, because that’s precisely what he is: after all, he puts himself about by the hour and deals drugs on the side — although, admittedly, not very nice ones. Doing out-calls is not the distinction between medical whoring and doctoring.

Nevertheless, Doc Ben feels differently about Prometheus: the guy is three chords short of a punk song, too crazy even to be considered as a proper patient. He revolves through the Harley Street consulting room every fortnight, his liver rotten to the core, then off he pops, it’s almost as if. But Doc Ben is way too preoccupied to make the diagnosis any open-minded practitioner would be compelled to: that Prometheus’s liver is being eaten away at, then spontaneously regenerated. Way too preoccupied by finding a parking place for his Porsche — and not just any berth. The underground car park at the wharf is way wrong; no security, poorly illuminated, and the mad axeman — who’s actually an amateurishly poor plucker — has two Gibson Les Pauls in the boot worth a cool fifteen grand.

When he eventually finds a safe on-road space, then ascends the lift, Doc Ben discovers Athene waiting for him at the front door to the penthouse. A stench of organ failure hangs in the costly void. Below the plate glass prow of the block, the woolly-brown river knits and pearls itself. Lying face down on the futon, the impassioned lover of the night before resembles a used condom stuffed with offal. There’s a large bloodstain by his latex belly.

Doc Ben thinks, there’s always more sex the morning after than there was the night before; he has a nose for these scents, and Athene hasn’t showered, only pulled on underwear, skirt and blouse, rolled-up stockings. He clocks the hot veins on the insides of her wrists as she presses her razor-thin mobile phone to her cheek. Idly wondering how the fuck does he get it up, Doc Ben kneels to give the adman a rare probe.

‘He discharged himself from the London Clinic yesterday, did he tell you?’

Athene, who has introduced herself only as ‘a friend’, blanches.

‘He was meant to have a liver shunt put in today, but it’s too late for that now. There’s massive distension here — his tummy is full of blood.’

Doc Ben is a good enough doctor, just, to notice this; although not good enough to spot the long, curved feather that’s wedged between patient and mattress. ‘I’m gonna call for an ambulance — he needs to be in an intensive-care unit as soon as possible. Do you know who his next of kin are, Ms. ’

‘Athene,’ she concedes, then asks, ‘Is he going to die?’

‘Die? I dunno about that.’ He could be speculating on poor ticket sales for a Deep Purple reunion gig, so mundane is his tone. ‘I can tell you this: if he can be stabilized — and that’s a fairly big if — he’ll need a liver transplant, deffo. His liver’s. ’ He pauses, regarding her well-used voluptuousness at the same time as he, belatedly, registers her name; then allows himself a definitive ‘fucked’.

The griffon vulture watches from the summit of the north-west chimney of Battersea Power Station as Prometheus is stretchered from Chelsea Bridge Wharf to the waiting ambulance. She’s driven away the peregrine falcons — London’s sole pair — whose nesting site is this modernist ruin: a redbrick cliff-face, saturated with sulphuric acid and carbon, the best monument possible to humankind’s transmogrification of the earth.

From her lofty vantage, the vulture stares down on traffic, river, park greenery and the mop-top of Athene, who skips to the far side of the road, intent on hailing a cab to get her away from this awful wharf.

*

A fortnight later Epimetheus met up with Neil Bolton for a drink at the Sealink Club. Epimetheus didn’t bother much with the Sealink any more; the ad industry’s social interaction, such as it was, had headed east, to where the new generation of mono-nominal agencies — Mother, Naked, Poke, Dare and Titan itself — had gone to ground amidst the artists’ studios and Bangladeshi sweat shops of Whitechapel and Shoreditch.

As for Bolton, he’d never been an habitué of the Sealink, which, despite having suffered new owners and revamped decor at least twice in the past decade, still had a car-ferry ambience, what with its safety lights caught in wire basketry, three-legged triangular chairs and raised door sills. The gents’ urinal was a waterfall in a zinc trench, the stalls a storm in a space shuttle. This, the quintessence of chic circa 1980, was all far too modish for Bolton, who longed to strip the skirts from the yattering women who frequented the club, if only to put them on the table legs.

Bolton, who in recent years had become the narrator of a fiendishly successful TV sketch show — think both spin-off dolls and hagiographies of its originators in the qualities; think of catchphrases as widespread and involuntary as sneezes — now gave himself airs that would’ve been insufferable coming from Kean. When Epimetheus came in, Bolton was standing centre bar, his big fleshy face hanging in the air like a bruise, poorly bandaged with several loops of a long woollen scarf. He was holding forth to the barman, and his basso voice, like Pavlov’s tinkling bell, recalled insistently to the minds of all who were hearing it the mineral water, meat, detergent and, latterly, energy drink it had been used to advertise, as it rumbled through the bar, inexorable as waves crashing on a shingle beach.

Spotting Epimetheus, Bolton boomed, ‘My dear boy, how’s Prometheus?’

‘He’s fine, really Neil.’ Epimetheus ordered a gin and tonic.

‘That’s not what I hear,’ Bolton told everyone. ‘I’ve heard he’s in and out of hospital every few days — some sort of liver thing.’

Liver thing. Bolton managed to deliver the words with coloratura at once bloody and bilious. Liver things — Bolton knew all about these: his last decade or so had been a cellular go-round, from bar, to recording studio, to rehab, and back again.

‘Shush, Neil.’ Epimetheus went so far as to take the old thespian by his boneless arm and give it a squeeze. ‘Please, I don’t want any more talk.’

This was a futile admonition, given that Bolton was nothing but talk; besides, the cutting-edge creatives may no longer have supped at the Sealink, but their older, blunter colleagues were all there: client directors, chief strategy officers and group accountants from Abbott Mead Vickers, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, and Saatchi and Saatchi, who, while they may have lost the ability to create particular standout, still retained good noses for the bouquet of distress and the stench of failure.

‘He’s absolutely fine,’ Epimetheus continued, signalling to the barman to get them both another drink. ‘As it happens, we’ve gotta big pitch tomorrow, Hermes.’

‘Scarves?’ Bolton said, tugging on his own.

‘No, the other lot — mobile phones.’

This wasn’t a work drink. At this point in his liverish life cycle Bolton was useless to Titan; he was so bloated with fine wines and TV residuals that he’d completely forgotten the voice-over he’d done for Zeus mineral water only ten days previously, and instead blethered on about his finest theatrical performances. His Falstaff (Southampton Gala), his Henry Higgins (Stamford Arts Centre) and, of course, his triumphant Hamm at the Peacock.

Epimetheus, whose knowledge of Beckett’s plays was sketchy, kept hearing Endgame as ‘end-line’, which dragged him back to advertising, and his own naive faith in luxury goods, graven images and idols with everything of clay. Which dragged him back to. Pandora, who had brought oodles of vice and insanity into his life.

The previous evening he had arrived back from Old Street to find her fucking a stranger in his own bed. Epimetheus drubbed the man from the place; his last sight of him was a bare bottom impressed with the tread of his boot. He threw the man’s clothing out the window, then had to endure Pandora’s full-fledged psychotic breakdown: handwashing without soap or water; a ‘Pakki’ called Andy beating her, who likewise wasn’t there; then the spewing of five dirty tongues with her delicious little one. And then — shameful this — he ravished her, after which they did drugs together.

In the ten days since she had moved into his loft, Pandora had begun to abstract Epimetheus’s goods. They were bizarre thefts — a single cuff link one day, a solo stereo speaker the next. The smooth materiality of his existence was being peppered with holes — yet still he cleaved to her; they would, he avowedly hoped, be together in old age, snuggling down into the soft ruin of their bodies.

Hence this get-together with Bolton, for advice on where Epimetheus could send his love so that she could ‘get better’. Who better than Bolton, who’d done ’em all? Primary treatments, secondary ones; halfway houses, three-quarter ones; then first-through-third-stage sojourns. Bolton, slobbing out in front of wonky tellies watching fake dramas, while the real tragedy of his life was right to hand — at his feet, where poorly laid carpet tiles curled up from the carpet tiles that had been poorly laid by the last batch of recovering alcoholics.

Ach! Bolton! So washed away by the longshore drift of his alcoholism that he could no longer tell which group he was not a part of. Were these stacking chairs circled for talking or drinking therapy? How should he pitch this old tale of derring-tipsy-do, as pathos, bathos or self-flagellating realism? In his old haunt, the Plantation Club, Bolton was nothing but a joke — and a bad one. To abandon his drinking comrades once was a betrayal; to do it again and again was their equivalent of a war crime. Hilary, the Plantation’s commanding officer, had stripped Bolton of his old moniker and given him a new one; he was no longer ‘the Extra’ but only ‘the Prop’; because, despite having been barred, he still insisted on coming back and propping himself against it. The bar, that is.

Epimetheus was drunker than Bolton, and the actor did indeed have to prop the adman up, as, wavering in and out of blackout, they proceeded to Blore Court by way of Piccadilly Circus.

Sony PlayStations and Nicorette patches; Halifax mortgages and Nokia mobile phones; Coca-Cola and depilatory cream; the giant girlies of a mythic present — apple-cheeked Hesperides, star-fucking Pleiades, Hyades suffering with water retention — rode juggernauts and scaled the sides of buildings in their armour of lights. Cars transformed into robots and duelled down Lower Regent Street, while Eros fired arrows that were tipped with soft-centred milk chocolates.

Epimetheus reeled through the throng, each face a semitransparent pop-up ident swelling in his monitors: clay faces, not yet set, gashes for mouths, indentations for eyes, slick with the water they swigged from plastic bottles, each labelled with a rusty tap-tap-tap graphic. Overhead, the electronic signboards bellied out, their surface tension a deliquescent blare. Clay and water, flesh and.

Blood and bile flowed through the veins of the liverish city; coiled conduits that merged, then branched out into the biliary tree of Soho. In Blore Court the two drunks tumbled through the visceral peritoneum, before being sucked into the porta hepatis. They staggered on the stairs, slammed against the door of Mr Vogel’s long-dormant import business, recovered themselves, fell up the next flight, collapsed through the filthy plywood door — its baize long since gone — and, partially recovering themselves, entered the bar-room with all the nonchalance of five-year-olds stealing biscuits.

Hilary was on his stool by the cash register, an illegal cigarette between washing-up-glove fingers, a vodka and tonic in front of him. Behind the bar, Stevie was slotting a new bottle of Bacardi into an optic, while on the other side the Cunt and the Poof raised their animalistic faces from small pools of alcohol.

The smoking ban had been in force for only a few months, yet witnessing someone smoking in a bar was like seeing an old film. Epimetheus’s lazy eyes rolled down the blue-grey grooves of smoke to where these merged with the inflamed veins networking Hilary’s swollen nose. He looked away, and discovered the Martian deep in conversation with Isobel Beddoes, who, since she had been released from jail in Switzerland, had assumed the position formerly occupied by Her Ladyship. Margery De Freitas, dead drunk for years; now simply dead.

Isobel — known in the Plantation as ‘Come-to-Beddoes’ — was tolerated by Hilary because she had an inheritance to squander. Her miserable devotion to him was another bad joke. Sometimes he made her fuck Jones, the resident cocaine dealer, in return for a gramme for them to split — he and Jones, that is.

There were two or three other members in the club — a Scots sculptor who specialized in Holocaust memorials, a fashion writer for a mid-market tabloid, Cal Devenish, the ailing television personality and one-time literary enfant terrible — but even to Epimetheus’s untutored eye they were an irrelevance. He saw only the old ads for cable-knit cardigans tacked to the bamboo-patterned wallpaper; the gibbous letters of an ancient flyer that bellowed BLACK SABBATH AT THE MARQUEE CLUB; and a tin hoarding showing two cloth-capped kids, their nostrils flared to suck in a meaty ribbon, which had had its slogan customized to read ‘Ah! Cunto’.

‘ ’Allo,’ Hilary said after an age, ‘it’s the fucking Prop — and oo’s this ugly cunt ’e’s got viv ’im, eh?’

Billy tittered and took a slug of his vodka-spiked lager. Bolton swept off his mohair fedora and addressed the company magnilo-quently. ‘Ladies, gentlemen, my residuals are far from negligible, courtesy of this fine and principled advertising executive. I’m in a position to offer you and your leader’ — he half bowed to Hilary — ‘many libations.’

Paper cuts an already raw mucous membrane. Insufflation: the shrapnel blast of cocaine granules. Jostled by flying blood boulders, the tiny colourless creatures embark on the next leg of their fantastic voyage.

Abruptly, in the still, sweaty eye of his drunken storm — and after a score of nights the same — Epimetheus remembered that last night was especially not right. In the small hours, while Pandora whimpered beside him, crazy little grunts falling from her parted lips, he was gripped by an ague so intense that the chains of his dangling bed clinked. He knew it then — he knows it now still more — his body had new visitors, and, unlike so many of the others, these would stay.

The eggy reek of a forehead drenched with feverish sweat, the watery flux of the bowels; if only, Epimetheus thought, this was some earlier era when such supernatural rumblings could be propitiated, when there was a gross, yet effective, match between anatomy and belief. Instead, he would have to make an appointment to see Doc Ben — this, too, impinged, a rock in the maelstrom of alcohol — so that those callused fingers could prod the buttons, make the calls, arrange the further appointments at which Epimetheus’s organs would be peered into by X- and gamma-rays.

‘Oi! You! Ugly cunt — bonehead.’ It was Hilary.

‘Me?’ Epimetheus beheld the ancestral nose.

‘Yeah, you. What’re you ’aving?’

He was having a nervous breakdown — drowning in the splenetic fluids of the Plantation, a hepatocyte in a lobule in a lobe in a liverish city. London, a metropolis that had itself been breaking down cultural toxins and processing rich nutrients for two millennia, yet could only do so by manufacturing hectolitres of bile.

Never before had Epimetheus been so transported by all the rough and scumble of lived life: the blurring of feeling and texture that lay below the slickery of his visuals — an icy surface that human desire skated over, describing figure eights, pound and dollar signs.

‘I said, what’re you FUCKING ’AVING!’

A frozen moment, indeed. Nowadays, Hilary was prone to lashing out, and Stevie was a girl who walked into doors. The Cunt said, ‘Shall I give ’im the old ’eave-’o ’ilary?’ But the Martian, who was fetching his and Come-to-Beddoes’s drinks, took the matter in hand, picking Epimetheus up and lifting him on top of the bar.

For the art director was nothing but a perspex torso, such as are used in pharmaceutical advertisements. His transparent outer layer would allow a camera lens to discover green gall bladder, pink pancreas, blue guts, brown stomach and red liver; all the better to convince the superstitious peasantry — for whom medicine remains a cadet branch of magic — that they should leave their innards to the professionals.

The Martian slipped on a crisp white coat and brandished a pointer; Stevie hurried around arranging the chairs and bar stools for the presentation. The neon tube on the ceiling spluttered, then flared solar, annealing every scumbled thing until it was white-tile-hard and bright. The audience put on the same expressions of serious concern. The Martian picked up a jug of water from the bar and poured some into Epimetheus’s reopened fontanelle; it trickled down, a silver stream that the Martian followed with his pointer, while saying, ‘Pegasys is an injectable form of pegylated interferon alpha. ’The water coursing through his veins and converging on his liver felt icily dangerous — not that Epimetheus, object lesson that he had become, could do a damn thing about it.

‘Success,’ the Martian snapped, ‘you can depend on all the way. Patients in clinical studies, overall, had a better than 50 per cent chance of achieving sustained viral response. Pegasys helps the body’s immune system fight the hepatitis C virus; Pegasys is the most prescribed medication of its kind.’ The small audience was rapt, their eyes following the Martian’s pointer as it tapped first one lurid organ, then the next. Epimetheus’s liver was brimming with bubbling water — his own clever visualization, intended to express the mortal combat of the winged horse and the viral Furies.

Understanding very well that timing was everything, Bolton, thorough professional that he was, constricted his range and enormously increased the speed of his delivery. The result was — to paraphrase Coleridge — that listening to him was like reading the index of the A — Z, while someone kept flicking a lighter that obstinately refused to ignite.

‘SeriousadverseeventsinhepatitisCtrialsincludedneuropsychiatric disordersseriousandseverebacteriologicalinfectionsbonemarrow toxicitycardiovasculardisordershypersensitivityendocrinedisorders autoimmunedisorderspulmonarydisorderscolitispancreatitisand ophthalmologicaldisorders.’

As this babbling of side effects went on, nobody noticed the flight feathers curled round the edge of the plywood door, fresh as paint. The griffon vulture sidled in along the wall, her buff wing coverts rasping against the bamboo-patterned flock. She hopped up on to the piano keyboard, her talons striking the opening chords of Chopin’s Marche Fune`bre — music oddly appropriate for an anti-retroviral advert.

The griffon hopped up again and, biding her time, pecked the Prince Consort’s sightless eyes. She didn’t have long to wait: the Martian was reaching the end of his thirty-five seconds of enlightening, his pointer, tipped with a ball of green lightning, poised over Epimetheus’s carbonated liver. The vulture flapped down and came barrelling through the audience of drinkers. Hilary swung his hornbill towards her beak. ‘Blimey!’ he exclaimed. ‘Who’s this birdy cunt?’

It was too late for Epimetheus, for, with the crazyological cutting of a TV advert, the vulture grabbed his liver in her talons, then, taking off across the bar-room, smashed through the sash window, swooped along Blore Court, banked into Berwick Street and began to climb over Raymond’s Revue Bar, up into the contusion of the London night.

It was to be a civilized drink to discuss the future of their relationship — if it had one. The venue: the champagne bar at the Savoy; here, among solid leather footstools, there would be no footsie. Then, at the final hour, Athene is overpowered by the wanting of him, so calls and suggests that Prometheus come instead to her father’s huge penthouse apartment, high above the river at Vauxhall.

He takes the call while watching a financial services advert on cab TV; he’s on his way from the City, where he’s been making a pitch for another such. Making it alone, because Epimetheus has been getting flakier and flakier in the past fortnight: dead scalp on the padded shoulders of a clerk in the offices of a building society. Perhaps.

‘Oh. OK,’ Prometheus says, ‘but what about your old man?’

‘He’s in Zürich seeing his bankers. I’ve sent the staff away for the night and the doorman’s stoned on qat.’

She’s thought of everything — except how she’ll feel when, for the first time since his boudin noir body was fed into the ambulance, she sees Prometheus. He’s so tanned, so planed, so pivoting on the moment, that all the lines she rehearsed, sitting at her dressing table clipping on Bulgari and spraying Clive Christian No. 1, evaporate. She was going to say, ‘It’s drugs, isn’t it?’ Because nothing else could begin to explain his total collapse, followed a few hours later by a blithely apologetic call assuring her he was ‘on the mend’. At the time, Athene hated him as much as the cliché; but, instead of remonstrating with him, she says, ‘I want to tell Zeus about us.’ A thought not arrived at until precisely now, for she’s in thrall to her father and knows no other life than the lifestyle that goes with compliance to his whims. Athene is used to wealth — swims in it like an element, and has no understanding of its true clagginess.

Prometheus says, ‘I’m shocked; I’d assumed I was only a bit of rough for you.’ He moves towards her, his trainers soundless on the dark marble with its liverish veins and swirls.

Zeus’s penthouse is enormous; its twenty-foot-high windows imprison within their dark aquaria the big oily fish — Rothkos, Trougets and Freuds — that are mandatory catches for the ultra-rich. The fossilized trunk of an ancient hardwood rears up out of an equally ancient Japanese basin, its sinuous boughs embracing the plush atmosphere. Zeus’s interior decorater convinced him this feature would ‘bring the outside in, to integrate the domestic with the natural’; but what it actually does is to demonstrate that most of us are doomed.

Prometheus takes Athene in his arms, his hands in her warm hand-holds, and presses his cheek to hers. ‘I want to be with you, too,’ he says, although his mind is racing ahead. Where will we live? He sees an ugly Victorian house in Wandsworth, the sheet of grey paving in front of it punctuated by the commas of dog turds, a recycling bin hooked over the railings, evidence of a repetitive task that is all the more Sisyphean for its pretension to virtue. He sees Athene, grown plump and ordinary and matronly, no longer a fabulous deity, only another upper-middle-class woman, a function of her taste and her credit rating: a target group of one.

‘I want to be with you, too,’ he reiterates, ‘and we’ve gotta talk, but — ’ He twitches, and his skin tightens, sensing the vulturine approach, and he wonders if this, also, could be accommodated in Wandsworth. ‘First I’ve gotta use your loo, I’m busting.’

Athene wriggles out from him, frowning. He waggles the half-empty bottle of Zeus mineral water, and she points the way down a malachite passage to the third door on the gauche.

In the oasis, a clear pool beckons to Prometheus from between ferny fronds. He looks for Polynesian beauties offering him half coconut shells brimming with milk — then remembers this was a chocolate advert in his childhood. There’s no window in the bathroom, only the ceaseless moan of aircon. Prometheus frantically dithers, caught between the demands of bladder and vulture. He succumbs, unzips, relieves himself, then, using his inner Ariadne, he makes his way through a maze of smaller passageways to the service entrance, where he finds the griffon vulture already waiting for him, a superior look first in one yellow eye, then the other.

Farce ensues as Prometheus tries to smuggle the giant bird back to the toilet so that she can feed on him in peace. He has to hurry — he’s been gone a while and Athene is bound to be suspicious. The vulture isn’t helping, uttering peremptory feeding cries — pig grunts, goose hisses — as she butts at his thigh.

They gain the toilet and are about to go in, when there’s Athene, her amethyst eyes flashing, the words ‘It’s drugs, isn’t it?’ expiring on her ruby lips.

Prometheus stretches out the wings of his jacket, attempting to hide the scavenger; the griffon defeats his efforts by stretching out her own wings. Prometheus hustles right and hustles left, as if this two-step can obscure the vast span of feathers, the bony brow, the delving beak. ‘So,’ Athene says redundantly, ‘it’s not drugs.’

‘No,’ Prometheus begins. The urge is upon him to explain the griffon vulture away — to riff, to spiel, to sell himself — but for once he’s tongue-tied and can only mutter, ‘It’s not drugs.’

‘I should’ve guessed!’ she spits. ‘Your stupid Greek name.’

‘I am Greek’ — he paused — ‘ish.’

And there it was: he had subsided into a simpler past, and so discovered a different, more honest, eloquence. ‘She comes,’ he explained, ‘most days, and feeds. Obviously, I feel. like shit the next day, but then my liver — it grows back.’

‘Regenerates.’

‘Yeah, that. And when it does I feel better than ever, every time. Stronger, cleverer, too — more able to win pitches — bigger pitches with bigger spends. The first time she came I won the Zephyrcard account from your — ’ He faltered.

‘My father.’ Athene, despite his revelations, and the vulture’s presence — its antediluvian vibe, its reek of nitrogen and rotting flesh — was disengaged, bored.

The vulture was becoming more agitated, spluttering and chuckling, working her head up the back of Prometheus’s clothes, desperate to feed. ‘I have to. ’ He gestured hopelessly.

‘What’re you saying — that the two of you require privacy?’

‘N-No, not exactly privacy, but somewhere out of the way.’

‘I should’ve bloody realized,’ Athene mused; ‘the stains on your futon, and I thought it was my period — then that creepy doctor came.’

‘Yeah, yeah, he is a creep, isn’t he. No, we — she — doesn’t need privacy, just somewhere I can sorta bend over and be, um, braced. I normally do it on the bog.’

‘No.’ Athene was emphatic. ‘This I’ve got to see.’

She led Prometheus back to the main room of the penthouse and pointed to the tree trunk. ‘How about there? You can brace yourself against that.’

‘It’s hardly private, Athene. This is a glass box — anyone could see.’

‘Bullshit!’ Her colour was up: two burning spots in the centre of each olive cheek. ‘No one can see in here — unless they’re sitting on top of Tate Britain with a fucking telescope. Now, get on with it — that bloody bird’s starting to nauseate me.’

Which was fair enough, because there was something not right with the vulture; her talons scrabbled on the marble floor, her wings hung limp, and her deep chest spasmed. Prometheus stepped towards her, then, arrested by Athene’s furious scowl, retreated to the columnar tree trunk. He took off his sorrel jacket, then began to pull his mushroom shirt over his head. The bird was sick — that much was obvious. He was gripped by dread: if she couldn’t feed, then what of him? He knew that what they had was a compact: her liverish treat gave him his gift of the gab, and so won Titan their new business; deprived of it, he’d be only another pedlar, crying his wares without the city walls.

Prometheus turned his back on the bird, and, bending over, shackled himself to the petrified wood with his own arms. He willed the vulture to be peckish.

Athene cried, ‘Oh my God!’ Prometheus whipped upright as the vulture arched her long neck and began to wretch. Together they watched, appalled, as a lump travelled up the bird’s gullet; she coughed, then evacuated rubbery red chunks across the liverish marble floor. Blood and bile splattered the legs of Athene’s sky-blue satin lounging pyjamas — she leapt for the shelter of the dead tree. But Prometheus went forward.

And knelt. How could this be? He sensed recognition in the regurgitated carrion: it knows me, he thought, and — more to the point — I know it. He picked up a chunk between thumb and forefinger, then held it to his nostrils; the vulture made a lunge for it with her imperious beak. Prometheus beat her off. ‘You fucking murderer!’ he shouted. ‘I know whose this is — I know.’

Athene was no longer repulsed — it was all too strange for that. In lieu of repulsion she felt that overwhelming need for comfort that she remembered from mummyless childhood; so, like any other hurting little girl, keeping the tree between them, she backed away from bird and man and blood, and ran to her bedroom. Atop the dais of her bed, curled up on a tasselled cushion, lay a cute Scottish terrier, a tartan ribbon tied round its furry white neck. ‘An-gus!’ Athene sang. ‘An-gus, come to Mama!’

The puppy raised himself up on his paws, his tufty eyebrows twitching; with his bearded muzzle and squared-off head, he had the angrily seraphic expression of Nietzsche after the philosopher’s syphilitic breakdown. ‘Come to Mama,’ Athene called again; however, the Scottie had other, more significant impressions: a line of fresh meat aroma had been cast into the bedroom, and the hook had caught in his nose. He sprang from the bed, went wide to avoid Mama’s open arms, and was gone.

‘Epimetheus, oh Epimetheus — you poor guy!’ Back by the framed hyper-realist paintings of night-time London, Prometheus sobbed over the chunk of liver. ‘I should’ve paid attention — I should’ve listened to you.’

An absurd spectacle, no? A man, stripped to the waist, and addressing a bit of meat as if it were his boyhood friend. Not so, for Prometheus, so long a stranger to the backward look, now saw the whole terrain revealed. He saw the futile obsession that Epimetheus had for Pandora — a mad love that would lose him most of his liver, and perhaps also his life — and he surveyed the delusive hope that blanketed all human affairs, blanketed them like a toxic miasma, a smog over a city. Tightly woven, thickly piled hope, beneath which trundled millions of lice, buying and fucking, eating and sleeping, loving and working; hope, which hid them from the godlike perspective of their own, evolved consciousness.

Yes, Prometheus recognized that this was Epimetheus’s liver, and realized also what it contained: it was he who was the technician able to analyse the biopsy the bird had performed. Every human misfortune was in Pandora’s box, but the worst of all was delusive hope — and it was this that Prometheus had been feeding on. The delusive hope that this purchase, that sex act, those shoes, this person, another meal. would make it all right; and so, fashioned from mortal clay and shaped with costly bottled mineral water, they would go on and on until the big firing.

The Scottie raced across the marble floor yapping madly; the vulture, hissing, stretched out her fearsome wings and back-flapped from the mess of adman. The Scottie leapt to snap the meaty titbit from Prometheus’s fingers — ‘Tap!’ The steel frame of Zeus’s penthouse shuddered, then shrank. And why, thought Prometheus, haven’t I noticed before now that here in Zeus’s own home, there’s no branded thing? ‘Tap!’ The half-naked man bending over to pet the cute puppy — at least, that’s what any lazy viewer would think, seeing this single image graven for all eternity. ‘Tap!’ It would’ve been so reassuring to have been able to think of it all as a myth, a fable or a dream, but, as Neil Bolton’s portentous voice-over came rolling upriver — ‘Give your dog Scottie’s Liver Treats and show him you love him as much as he loves you’ — Prometheus was gnawed at by the most excruciating end-line conceivable.

It was all an advert.