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

Birdy Num Num

What’s my name? My name is legion, for I — we — are many. Many and colourless. I’m in him — and her, and them; I’m in some of those over there, the ones shopping for travel adaptors in Dixons. The pair of semi-whores — squeaking on high stools in leather skirts, eating caviar with their sour daddy at the granite lip of the seafood bar — I’m far deeper in them than he’ll ever be. As for that one, I’m most definitely in him, I’m loaded into him, the windy horse of a cleaner who, emaciated in his worn blue-denim fatigues, is invisible to these fervent believers in universal healthcare: the African, pulling his cartload of bleach and plastic bags from one village-sized toilet to the next.

I am not death, for death has no persona; death is only an absence — not even a mask. True, for some I am death’s helpmeet, but I’m not a psychopath, only a cytopath. I, too, am alive. I, too, have feelings — ethics as well. If I am known at all, it’s by my effects rather than my causes; in this I am antithetical to humans’ gods. Be that as it may, I am powerful, I am ancient, I am constantly changing, and I — we — are, if not omniscient, privy to a lot.

Y’know, some bio-theologians think I’m the First Cause, a primitive form of all the life on this dirt ball — that every animal evolved from an organism like me; others take the contrary view, that I — we — are fallen angels, cast out from the heaven of advancement, deselected and so become parasitic and unsexed.

I say, surely it’s a question of scale? Looked down on from a mile up in the sky — the holding pattern of a god — this air terminal is a body, the living tissue of which is bored into by bacterium planes, subterranean trains and hissing buses. Humans swarm through its concourses, virions with credit cards.

Soon, I — some of us — will be thrust into that steep vantage, the sky, then propelled over land and sea to another city; Helsinki, as it happens. Before I go, let me — us — tell you how this has come to pass; let me tell you about this generic Tuesday afternoon — because, let’s face it, it’s always Tuesday afternoon. Allow me to assemble a cast of characters, as well or as woodenly drawn as any in a whodunnit. They were all my accomplices; your task is to identify the victim.

November 1998, a Tuesday — the day teetering on noon’s fulcrum. Georgie Maxwell was walking along the first stretch of Kensington Road; she passed the gates at the end of Kensington Palace Gardens and then the driveway of the Royal Garden Hotel. In the fluffy onset of a fine drizzle, the hotel doormen moved smartly to marshal brass luggage carts and beckon taxis beneath the jutting portico with its inset lights haloed in the damp gloom. Over the shoulder of the hotel — a 1960s thing, granite-faced and angular — stretched the late autumn brownery of Kensington Gardens, and beyond them, Hyde Park, its black tree spars rigged with dead and dying leaves. In the middle east a dark mauve sky, its fundament coiled with ashen clouds, squatted over Bayswater.

Walking is perhaps an overstatement. Georgie’s progress was halting, despite her being encumbered with no more than a tabloid newspaper, a pint carton of semiskimmed milk and a packet of milk chocolate HobNobs, all in a plastic bag. She clunked from stiff leg to stiff leg, swinging them from her hips as if they were stilts. The hem of her skirt rose first above one thickly bandaged shin, then the other. The skirt, eh? Well, it had a Minoan motif worked into it — geometric designs embroidered with gold thread; once pale green, it was now stained and blotchy. People walking in the other direction, from Kensington Gore, didn’t take in the skirt, or the rusty raincoat, or the espadrilles unravelling from both swollen feet. They merely checked her against their internal list of street people — alcoholics, junkies, schizos and dossers — made a positive identification, then dismissed her from view.

Up close, and personally, Georgie smelt of sepsis. There were open sores under the chicken skin of her crêpe bandages; craters, really, in which bacteria, numerous as Third World miners, hacked at the exposed tissue-face. Thankfully, the day was fresh, and neither the hurrying working girls nor the strolling young ladies out shopping could smell this. However, besides looking crazy Georgie talked to herself: a twittering commentary in real time — ‘She’s crossing the road, pelican crossing, not a game bird, crossing the road’ — that kept her company as she did, indeed, cross the road at Palace Gate, stump back along the far side, then traverse the junction of Gloucester Road and turn left into De Vere Gardens.

Why did this street — no different to scores of others in the area — feel quite so bare, so baldly threatening? On either side magnolia-painted six-storey Victorian terraces loomed in the thickening drizzle; the pavements were anthracite glossy, void of any rubbish, or even the occasional bracelet — or tiara — of costly dog shit. The kerb sides were cluttered with tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of cars — cetacean Porsches and squashed Maseratis with Dubai plates — and, as she peg-legged by these, Georgie kept up her rap, a well-spoken psychosis, ‘Maybe he’ll be there — maybe he’ll come soon. Maybe-baby, if I don’t TREAD ON THE CRACKS!’ She shied away from the spear tips of the railings, then, halfway along the street, lurched towards them and, pushing open a gate, awkwardly descended an iron staircase into a savage little area full of bullying bins.

I — we went along for the ride — although we were also waiting inside.

*

Inside Billy Chobham, who, in turn, was inside the bath; which was inside the bathroom; which, in turn, was inside Tony Riley’s basement flat. The cell-like bathroom had no windows, and only a single lightbulb that dangled, unshaded, from a furred flex. The harsh light beat the limpid surface of the bath water, below which Billy’s pubic hair bloomed, silky as pond algae. The bath water had long since cooled — Billy was colder. He’d been in there for over an hour, his fair skin going blue, the ends of his fingers puckering up into corrugated pads. However, Billy was experiencing no discomfort, because, unlike the chaotic Georgie, he had had a get-up hit. Billy always had a get-up; this was part of his professionalism. ‘I’m a junky,’ he’d tell anyone unable to escape. ‘I don’t make any bloody bones about it. I don’t try an’ stop, an’ I ain’t sayin’ it’s not my fault neevah — I wanna be a junky. I like being a junky — I’m good at it.’

It’s debatable whether it’s possible to be good at being bad, and it’s a discussion I — we — would be happy to join in. This being noted, let’s not trouble with the theory for now, and instead present the actuality. Billy had jeans that stood up straighter without him in them, and a red mohair pullover given to him by a girl in East Sheen. If he was shod it was in prison-issue trainers. He had no fixed abode, but throughout London — and still further afield, in Reading, Maidstone and Bristol — there were small caches of his belongings: a T-shirt here, a paperback there, an exercise book full of mad ballpoint drawings of invented weaponry way over there. Billy never asked the occupants of the flats and houses where he crashed if he could leave these things; he just shoved them down the back of shelves or into cupboards, so that he could return days or months later and clamour to be readmitted, on the basis that ‘I’ve gotta get me fings.’

There were warrants out for Billy from Redbridge to Roe-hampton for crimes beneath petty: kiting ten-quid cheques, exchanging shoplifted underwear at Marks and Spencer, forging methadone prescriptions. There was nothing aggressive in Billy’s felonies; he took no part in the great metropolis’s seven and a half million fuck-offs, the abrasive grinding of psychic shingle on its terminal beach. Be that as it may, wherever Billy went, doors came off their hinges, baths overflowed and fat-filled frying pans burst into flame. His life was a free-pratfall, as, flailing, head over tail, he plunged through year after year, his fists and feet — entirely accidentally, you understand — striking mates, siblings, the odd — very odd — girlfriend, but mostly his old mum, who, while fighting depression, did the payroll for a chemical plant in St Neots and remained good — or bad — for a loan.

Billy, the career junky, always had his get-up: the brown-to-beige powder in the pellet of plastic, which — after being tapped into a spoon, mixed with water and citric acid, heated, then drawn off through the cellulose strands of a bit of a cigarette filter — was thrust inside his veins, making it possible for the muzzy show to go on. Locked in bathrooms with taffeta mats, crouching in back of couches, planted in the bushy corners of conservatories — Billy stayed in these spaces for as long as it took, watching for the bloom in the hypodermic syringe, his gift of a houseplant.

Georgie, who had forgotten her key, tapped on the glass panel of the kitchen door. Her face was a sharp, feline triangle, tabby with dirt and misapplied make-up; her taps were as diffident as the blows of velvet paws. No one heard her. In the cold bath, Billy gouched out, sunk in the hot Mojave desert of his habitual reverie, a corny old Blake Edwards vehicle for the comedian Peter Sellers called The Party.

Billy had first seen the film on television when he was four or five years old; but even then — it was originally released in 1968 — its depiction of flowery fun was painfully dated: the beautiful people of Hollywood cavorting the night away. Besides, it was a crap film with a dumb script — no plot to speak of, only a series of farcical sight gags for Sellers, browned up to play Hrundi V. Bakshi, a useless Indian who haplessly destroys the house where the eponymous party is being held, a party he has been invited to in error, and that is being thrown by the producer of a movie he’s already sabotaged with his stupid mistakes and brainless antics.

It was on the location for that movie-within-a-movie that Billy habitually began his drug-dreaming. So I — we — were inside Billy, who was inside the bath inside Tony Riley’s flat. In there with us was a ravine, somewhere out beyond Barstow, chosen for its superficial similarity to the Hindu Kush; and in the ravine were Hispanic extras playing Pathan tribesmen, together with more Hispanic extras playing sepoys. A detachment of Hispanics marched along the bottom of the ravine, accompanied by an Hispanic pipe band miming their instruments. The Hispanics playing the tribesmen — and a few light-skinned, Caucasian-featured blacks — reared up from the rocks above and made ready to fire. Frantic to frustrate the ambush, the half-Jewish Sellers — who, presumably, had been sent ahead as a scout — reared up as well, blasting a bugle. The Hispanic Pathans turned their rifles on him and he was struck by their volley. The bugle notes flattened into farts, Sellers collapsed, then reared up again, crazily tootling.

This was where Billy, as Peter Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, made his entrance: a junky in a bath in a fantasy of a film. He had seen The Party next in his teens, again on television; this time he was banged up in a secure hostel on the Goldhawk Road. This second viewing confirmed for Billy that this was ‘his’ film: an acid-pastel ball, in which he could perceive his dull childhood transmuted to the plinkety-plunk beat of a Henry Mancini soundtrack. Eventually Billy had acquired his own videotape of The Party. It was wrapped in a pair of bloodstained combat trousers and pushed behind the hot-water tank in a bungalow near Pinner.

Billy’s white body, fishily flattened by refraction, undulated in the cold water as he mimicked the flips and flops of the comedian; who died in 1980 of a heart attack — his third — brought on by the amyl nitrate he huffed on the sets of movies such as The Party. Billy’s wide mouth — which could be described as generous only if what you wanted was more plaque — stretched into a rictus. Outside, Georgie’s taps increased in volume as the drizzle percolating De Vere Gardens bubbled into rain.

Along a gloomy corridor that ran the length of the basement flat, between Dexion shelving units stacked with papers and paperbacks waiting to be burnt, then between a thicket of cardboard tubes that sheathed old point-of-sale materials and posters, then in through an open door, the minute sound waves pulsed, to where Tony Riley, the Pluto of this underworld, sat on a sofa in his boxer shorts, his unshaven muzzle clamped by the transparent obscenity of an oxygen mask, while the cylinder lay on the cushion beside him, steely and fire-engine-red.

I — we — were in Tony, too, not that this mattered; the catch, then gush, as his own febrile inhalation triggered the valve and yanked a gush of oxygen into his defeated lungs, drowned out everything: hearing, thought, intention, feeling. Tony was hanging on to life by his teeth, which were sunk in the plastic mouthpiece. Shitty disease, emphysema; shitty paradoxical condition. Tony sat in a stale closet, into which every small sip of air had to be dragged down a long corridor wadded with cellulose, while beneath his rack of ribcage his lungs were already abnormally distended.

Tony Riley’s legs were kite struts in the flattened cloth of his boxers; his sweaty T-shirt hung on him like a scrap of polythene on a barbed-wire fence; his dirty-brown hair was painted down on to his canvas scalp; his grey eyes streamed behind once fashionable Cutler and Gross glasses. Up above him, on the purple and taupe striped wallpaper, hung a Mark Boxer cartoon of Tony in his heyday. It was a prophetic casting of inky sticks: the Roman profile and laurel wreath of hair simplified to a few thin and thick lines. Two decades on, the caricature was as good a likeness as any photograph — perhaps better. No photo could have captured the way Tony’s breathless need for heroin simplified the awesome clutter of the large, low, subterranean living room — its middle-aged armchairs and smoked-glass coffee tables, its Portobello Road floor cushions and swampy Turkish kelims, its portable commode and novelty coat tree — into two white dimensions of nothing.

Beside Tony’s meagre thigh there lay a scrap of tin foil, on which trailed burnt heroin. Chasing the dragon? For Tony it was more akin to staggering after a snail: he huffed, he puffed, he struggled to exhale, so that he could carve a tiny pocket in the necrotic tissue of his lungs to fill with the narcotic fumes.

Tony spat out the mouthpiece, snatched up the foil and, from the coffee table in front of his sofa, a gold Dupont lighter; then he grabbed a rolled-up tube of tin foil, poked it between his lips and hunched to his labour.

‘In the primitive environment,’ Lévi-Strauss wrote, ‘the relevant is the sensational.’ But really, in Tony Riley’s basement flat, it was too primitive even for that; here, sensations were muffled and numbed by mould and opiates; the rain falling on the roof five storeys above penetrated the slates, then joists, plaster, paint, carpet, floor boards and more joists, until it pattered on to the jungly floor between the chief ’s bare feet. The parrot of addiction flapped across the dank clearing to perch on the edge of a serving hatch. Oh, that noble psittacine! Longer lived than humans, perfectly intelligent, and well able to imitate the squawks of their most awful mental pathologies.

Outside, Georgie’s tapping had finally risen to a determined rapping. It was only 12.20; nevertheless, the most dissolute of establishments still have their routines. There were chores to do, calculations to be made, the supplier to be contacted; then, soon enough, the customers would begin arriving. She rapped, the glass bruising her clenched knuckles. She had once had a body that, like any affluent woman’s, was a gestalt of smell, texture and colour — but now that had all flown apart: she was as dun as a cowpat, you wouldn’t want to touch her, her smell was in your face.

‘Whereis’e? Stupid Billy. Fucking Billy. Open up. Gotta do Tony’s meds. Call Andy. Gotta do Tony’s fucking meds. Call Andy. Gotta do Tony’s meds — ’ This aloud, the narrative of her staggering thought replacing the saga of her limping walk along Kensington Road.

Skin pancaked between bone and glass; the raps marched through the kitchen, along the sepia corridor, and into the room where Tony was trying to recapture the thrill of the chase. He left off, let fall his impedimenta, stood and lurched to the doorway. ‘Billy!’ he shouted in a crepitating whisper. ‘It’s her — get the fucking door!’ Then he crumpled up as thoroughly as any scrap of tin foil.

‘Brill-ll-llerowng! Brill-ll-llerowng! Brill-ll-llerowng!’ Billy had discovered that if he plugged his ears in a certain way and pressed his mouth against the side of the bath, his submarine ejaculations sounded — to him — like sitar chords. Billy, as Peter Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, sat cross-legged on the floor of his Los Angeles bungalow, wearing a long-sleeved, collarless linen shirt. The big bole of the instrument was cradled in his lap, his browned-up face concentrated in mystic reverie. ‘Brill-ll-llerowng!’ When the letter-box flap lifted, a letter fell on to the mat, and the flap clacked shut. Clacked shut. Clacked shut again. It wasn’t meant to do that — this was the invitation to the paradisical party, and he, Billy-as-Hrundi, was simply meant to pick it up, open and read it; but the fucking flap wouldn’t stop clacking!

Billy lunged up in the bath, in time to hear ‘—king door!’ in the calm after the splash. Then he was all action: out on the wet lino, twisting a thin towel round his nethers, then into the corridor. He knelt over Tony. ‘All right, mate? Y’all right, mate?’ A ghastly simulation of Cockney mummy concern.

‘Juss, juss, juss — ’ Tony shudderingly inhaled, then sputtered, ‘Get the fucking door.’

Calcium hydroxide, calcium chloride, calcium hypochlorite. In a word: bleach. We don’t altogether fear it — there are too many of us, and we’re too small. Far too small. I’m small even for my kind — maybe fifty nanometres across, which is fifty billionths of a metre. That’s smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so why should I fear bleach? For I can have no colour. Anyway, Georgie doesn’t apply bleach to the insides of syringes or spoons, nor does she dunk razors or toothbrushes in it. All her bleaching activities are confined to the laminated surfaces of Tony Riley’s kitchen. In the days when the disorder in her life was a tea mug unwashed up for the odd hour, or a book left face down on the arm of a chair, Georgie used to say, ‘It doesn’t matter how messy things get so long as you have clean kitchen surfaces.’

Of course, that was when things weren’t really messy at all. That was during the eight clean years, when Georgie attended her self-help groups, built a career as a television producer, had a couple of happy-then-unhappy relationships, visited her parents, paid her taxes. That was before the craters full of sepsis and the shrinking of her head; that was when she had her own studio flat in Chiswick, not two black plastic bags in the dark corner of Tony Riley’s damp bedroom.

Now the clean kitchen surfaces were the only ordered thing in the mess that was notionally her life. After cooing, billing and heaving Tony back to his oxygen cylinder, Georgie adjusted her dressings — fallen down around her ankles, obscene crêpe parodies of old women’s stockings — before setting to with bucket, hot water, brush and bleach. She didn’t stop until the Formica was lustrous and the aluminium draining board gleamed.

Shitty disease, emphysema. Admirably shitty: chronic, progressive, degenerative — a bit like civilization. And here we have the gerontocracy of late capitalism that Sam Beckett — himself a sufferer — would undoubtedly have recognized. With their faces — one browned by neglect, the other blued by anoxia — Georgie and Tony were typecast as Nell and Nagg. He nagged her, wheezing demands, while she nellied about the flat, fetching his anti-cholinergics and bronchodilators, administering his steroids and checking the levels on his oxygen cylinder. Setting to one side the ghastliness of a carer almost as sick as her patient, there was a ritualized and stagy desperation to their relationship; because, of course, there is no more painkiller, the little round box is empty, and everything is winding down.

Yes, a stagy desperation heightened only by their cloying affection and their treacly endearments: Chuckle-Bunny, Sweetums, Little Dove, Ups-a-Boy and Noodly-Toots for each other; and for the drugs: smidgen, pigeon, widgeon and snuff-snuff. To behold them, passionately engaged in the chores of moribundity, was to intrude upon the intimacy of a couple so old, so long together, so time-eroded into a single psychic mass, that they seemed ancient enough to have had children that must’ve grown up, gone away, formed partnerships of their own, had their own children, grown older, then themselves died. Of old age.

Tony was fifty-three, Georgie forty-one. They had known each other for six months.

From time to time, Georgie would break out of her stagy desperation and peremptorily order Billy to fetch this or do that. This may have been a ship of fools, but it was a tight one. There was no room on deck for shirkers. Billy had shed his moist breech-clout in favour of a neatly pressed tan linen suit, white shirt and red tie — perfect protective colouring for a hapless Indian actor attending a Hollywood party. The ‘plink-plink-brill-ll-llerowng!’ of his sitar had snagged the twang of an electric guitar; now a snare drum brushed up the tempo, as Billy, in a dinky three-wheeler car, pulled out of the driveway and buzzed off down the boulevard lined with palms. It was an iconic image of Los Angeles, undercut, if only he knew it. Ach! Fuck it! If only he knew anything; and if only he didn’t behave as if his entire life were a pre-credit sequence.

Because here it was: Ars Gratia Arts captioned a lion roused from torpor and petulantly roar-yawning. But a better motto for Billy would’ve been Pro Aris et Focis; for, as he piloted the joke car of his narcotized psyche down the corridor of Tony Riley’s flat — a boulevard lined with the drooping fronds of old advertising flyers and press releases, the domesticated foliage of Tony’s once wildly successful career in public relations — Billy was reverencing his deity and preserving this hearth.

The order of the credits for the production was this: Tony, the hotshot producer whose mortgage arrears couldn’t now catch up on him before the repossession of Death. He had the De Vere Gardens flat and a few more quid in the bank to chuck on the pyre. Every day he re-erected the set upon which the film of the party was shot — but he couldn’t do it without Georgie. Georgie was the director: she assembled cast and crew, rehearsed their lines, consulted with script editors and cameramen — without her there would’ve been no action. Since her legs had started to rot — abscesses from shooting up, did you really want to know? — she could no longer act as a runner for a different production, the big one, overseen by Bertram and Andy’s crew.

Then there was Billy, who lived from hand to hand — because his mouth rarely entered into it. He gofered for Tony and Georgie in return for wheedling rights on the drugs that flowed through the gross anatomy of the flat. Billy, most weeks, couldn’t even get it together to go to pick up his emergency payment from the social in Euston. So, no leech, but by default an exemplary sole trader, engaged in the arbitrage of small quantities of merchandise, while offering piffling services. He probably should have received an Enterprise Allowance — or a British Screen grant.

*

At the venue for the party, the capacious and ugly modern home of capacious and ugly Hollywood film producer Fred Clutterbuck, Billy manoeuvred Hrundi V. Bakshi’s three-wheeler between two ordinary-sized cars, and then had to climb out the top because he couldn’t open the door. In this, Peter Sellers was only aping many episodes in Billy’s own life: the insinuation of his simian body into spaces it wasn’t intended for — tiny toilet windows, constricted shafts, tight transoms; and places where it wasn’t wanted — nice teenage girls’ bedrooms, the locked premises of chemists’.

The Clutterbucks’ front door was answered by a uniformed black maid. Beyond her stretched a long hallway, with a walkway running over an artificial stream that flowed alongside a bamboo screen. When Billy was a kid, it was the insane largesse of this interior rill that made of the Clutterbucks’ home — or, rather, Blake Edwards’s production designer’s conception of the Clutterbucks’ home — a domestic pleasure dome. (Fernando Carrere, died 1998.)

It might be surmised that with age and experience any child would be disabused of this impression by other, more stylish domains, so that, upon reviewing The Party, he would wince at the tackiness of it all: the painted plywood cladding on the walls, the funnel-like light fitments, the circular fireplace — all of which were to be travestied, and travestied again during the next two decades, until such ‘features’ ended up skulking in chain hotels by motorway intersections, on the outskirts of a thousand cities that no one chooses to visit. Not to mention the stream itself, which was no Alph but a mean little trough, its bottom and sides painted with durable, aquamarine paint.

Might be surmised — but not by Billy; Billy was never disabused. True, on TVs in the association areas of remand centres, then latterly, on those clamped in the top corners of cells, he had glimpsed these other, more stylish domains. There had also been times, on the out, when, like an anthropoid tapeworm, Billy had lodged himself in the entrails of others’ evenings — usually because he’d sold them a blob of hash or a sprinkling of powder — and so ended up in their fitted flats or architect-designed houses.

While his unwitting hosts grew maudlin and clumsy in the kitchen, Billy roamed the other chambers, examining such innovations as rag-rolling and glass bricks with an aficionado’s eye. When he left he’d take with him a silver-framed photograph or leather-bound book in lieu of a going-home present. He’d seldom been invited in the first place — and he was never asked back.

So, Billy — he wasn’t disabused; for him, Chez Clutterbuck remained the acme of warm and sophisticated hospitality, to which he was invited back again and again, despite the fact that each and every time he arrived with mud coating one of his white moccasins. Oops! What should he do? Billy, as Peter, as Hrundi, had trodden in the oily gunk in the parking area, and then tracked black footprints along the pristine walkway, a dull single-player version of that quintessential sixties party game Twister.

Billy and Hrundi — they’re both peasants, basically. A stream of water in a house must be for washing arse or hands, so the dabbling of the muddy shoe in the stream was only — like all slapstick — logical. Basic physics. It floated away, a jolly little boat, leaving Billy to encounter that stock character, the drunken waiter, while hopping on one bare, browned-up foot.

The waiter was young, with sandy hair, and in full fig: tailcoat, high white collar. He dutifully presented his tray of cocktails. Then Billy — as Peter, as Hrundi — got to deliver one of his favourite lines in The Party. Recall, he was a career junky, a professional. Heroin, morphine sulphate, pethidine, methadone — all opiates, synthetic and organic, these were his stock in trade; but alcohol, apart from when he needed it to sedate himself because he couldn’t get any junk and his chicken bones were splintering in his turkey skin, well, ‘Thank you, but I never touch it.’ And so, unsullied, Hrundi hopped off to retrieve his moccasin that, like Moses’s basket, had grounded in some rushes. Behind him the waiter, who was every straight-living hypocrite Billy had ever known, took a glass from his own tray and knocked it back.

All this — the fragments of remembered dialogue, the off-cuts of scenery, the comedian’s fatuous mugging — was projected on to Tony Riley’s blank basement, while the other two parties to the ill-lit production got set up for the day’s shoot.

Once wiped down and medicated, ornamental Tony was replaced on his sofa with a cup of tea; and Georgie, having done the surfaces, retired to the bathroom, where, under the bare bulb, she put a bird leg up on the bath and unwound four feet of crêpe bandage to expose the open-cast bacteria mine. In the enamel ravine below lay strewn the rubble of Billy, his horny nail clippings and fuse-wire pubic hairs, the frazil of his dead skin left high and drying on crystalline ridges of old suds.

Georgie winced as she dusted the gaping hole in her shin with fungicidal powder. It was perhaps a little bizarre that, given the exactitude with which she measured, then administered, palliatives to Tony, she so woefully mistreated herself; but then, by sticking to her story that these septic potholes were ‘just something I picked up’, she could maintain the delusion that she was ‘run down’ and ‘a bit stressed out’, so necessitating certain other medications, which the authorities, in their infinite stupidity, saw fit to deny her.

The truth was that Georgie was dying as well — and she knew it. She’d been clean for long enough, before relapsing back into the pits, to no longer be able to cloak her mind — once swift, airborne, feathery and beautiful — in the crude oil of evasiveness. She had resolved to die with Tony, to go with him into the ultimate airlessness of the emphysemic’s tomb, as a handmaiden for the afterlife.

Be that as it may, in the time left to her there was work to be done; so, once the pits had been powdered and crêped, Georgie retreated to the inner sanctum she shared with Tony, the master bedroom, in order to make The Call.

Georgie had met Tony when she was a runner for Bertram and Andy’s crew. Bertram, at one time a paper-bag manufacturer in Leicester, had been lured down to London ten years before. No one’s saying Bertram’s paper bags were any good: he didn’t maintain the machinery, skimped on glue and abused his Bangladeshi — and largely female — workforce. His bags often split. I know, because I was also in Leicester, in some of Bertram’s workers; remember, I am legion — and non-unionized. Bertram also knocked his own wife around.

Bertram liked whoring — and he liked whores still more. He panted down the M1 to London on the expensive scent. While in town, he treated his ‘ladies’ like. ladies, just as back home he treated his women like whores. He particularly cherished nice girls from good families who had fallen on to his bed of pain. He bought the fucked-up Tiffanies and Camillas he hired — at first by the hour, then by the night — as if they were nobility, dressing them up so he could take them to Fortnum’s for tea, or to Asprey’s for ugly silver fittings.

Bertram was a medieval miller of a man, complete with jowls and an extra brace of chins. His great girth suggested the washing down of capons with many firkins of ale. His thick thighs cried out for hosiery, his paunch bellowed for a codpiece. On his first chin was stuck a goatee the approximate size and shape of a Scottie dog. The beard looked as if it had flung itself at Bertram’s face to get at the liverish treat of his tongue.

Bertram didn’t do drugs — but his ‘ladies’ were clopping about in the muck. He soon realized he could secure himself cheaper favours if he took up dealing. During a brief sojourn in Pentonville — the result of a contretemps involving an electric kettle lead, his pivotal arm and a girl who wasn’t a ‘lady’ — Bertram met Andy (real name, Anesh), who dissimulated about everything, including his skin colour. At night, even in the nick, he rubbed whitening powder into his tan cheeks — an inverted Hrundi V. Bakshi, playing Peter Sellers. Andy was small Asian fry, but he had big Jamaican and Turkish connections. When they got out, the paper-bag manufacturer and the fraud went into partnership.

The viral quality of vice, well, we have to stop and admire it — for an instant. Bertram and Andy’s business plan was simplicity itself. This was the early 1990s and crack cocaine, a recent arrival, was stupendously dear. Most of Bertram’s whores used crack with their clients, as it made everything go — if it went at all — quicker; and the clients, many of whom had been as ignorant of hard drugs as Bertram, ended up using smack, too. Through nose-shots and cold-vagina-calls Bertram cemented his client list with blood and mucus.

They never wrote anything down, and the crew was built up on a cellular basis: Bertram made the wholesale buys; Andy portioned out; the Tiffanies and Camillas brought them runners, addicts who were unemployable, yet still presentable. Best practice was straightforward: they wanted only white clients in good standing — no blacks, no Social Security jockeys. Their delivery area was exclusively the West End, Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham. None of their crew would cross the river — although, like motorized rats, they’d make a skulking meet in Oakley Street. Late each morning, Bertram and Andy rendezvoused with their four top runners at an hotel by the Hammersmith flyover, in a room held vacant for them by a compliant and heavily addicted manager. Those four, in turn, subdivided their allocation among other runners, and so on, for as many links as were necessary — drugs rattling in one direction, cash in the other, the entire saleschain cranked by desperate need.

If the runners used up too much of their stock, they were compelled to sell more; if they grew flaky they were brushed off like the dead skin they were fast becoming. At least, that’s how it was all supposed to work; in practice Bertram and Andy weren’t good managers, and they lacked a Human Resources department. They had their weaknesses — Georgie being one of them. Once the holes in her shins had become too large, and her tinkling accent a church bell that tolled the knell of her; well, by rights she should’ve been given her limping orders, but Bertram had some strange affection for her. Was it sexual, or still more venal? Best not to start out in that direction — let alone go there.

Aquila non capit muscas — ‘The eagle does not hunt for flies.’ Georgie was pensioned off to this queer care home in De Vere Gardens, and instead of running drugs she sat still and waited for them. The gloomy basement, squishy with dust, barbed with Tony’s PR tat, was a carnivorous plant into which the flies spiralled, only to trigger the sensitive hairs that ensured their gooey absorption. Eagle-eyed Andy — neither he nor Bertram were fools enough to touch their stock — had only to wait until the trap-flat was full.

Piles of discarded clothing, together with the previously alluded to black plastic bags, smoothed the corners of the master bedroom. The brocaded drapes muffled the hammering of the rain in the basement area. A bedside lamp illumined the altar of pillows and cushions that had to be constructed just so, then mortared with smaller pillows and cushions, each time that Tony tried to sacrifice himself to sleep. It was Georgie who built the altar, and who had to arrange the stiff loops of Tony’s oxygen line so they wouldn’t kink and block during his provisional oblivion.

This was a boudoir — we always felt — that, with its huge old water bed, exerted a lunar pull on body fluids, encouraging their wanton exchange. We swing from ape to ape by pricking stick, but sex — especially low down and dirty sex, sex with lesions — will do.

Georgie picked up the receiver of the antiquated Bakelite phone on the bedside table and made The Call. Georgie never had a get-up; she was lucky if there were a few sugary sips of methadone linctus to stave off withdrawal. The dialling alone was torment to her hurting fingers, with each circuit feeling as if her entire body were being pulled apart on a torturous wheel. Georgie made The Call, and listened with the acuity of great suffering as the impulses nattered away under the London streets.

To a recently completed block of studio flats in Brook Green, where Andy was lying with a nearly sixteen-year-old girl called Pandora, whom he’d liberated from a pimp called Bev, so that she could be pressed, by his hand, into the bondage of his thighs. Pandora, who, at this early stage in her misfortunate life, despite the miseries that boxed her in, was still given to the giggles and hair-flicks of girls her age, girls who’d never seen the (men’s) things that she had.

The mattress sat on a carpet that stank of rubbery underlay. Pandora sprawled across Andy’s thighs and smelt the ghee that Meena, his wife, used liberally in her cooking. The ghee and the traces of urine in his sparse pubic hair. It was taking Andy a long time to get aroused; Pandora’s mouth was available to him whenever he wanted it, so such congress had the ordinary sensuality of squeezing a blackhead. He groped for the chirruping mobile phone without troubling to shuck Pandora off.

‘Any poss’ of getting over here firstish?’ Georgie said without foreplay. ‘We’re gagging for some albums — soul and reggae.’ This was the kids’ club encryption they used: heroin was ‘soul’, crack cocaine ‘reggae’. Only if the interceptor of their calls had been a complete ingenue could crew and clients have escaped decoding; of course, such naivety was a given.

‘Is anyone else there?’ Andy asked.

‘Er, no, not yet — but they probably will be soon. Please, Andy, I — ’

‘Not now. I haven’t got any albums. I’m busy — it’ll have to be. ’ He searched his sparse mental terrain — rancorous swamps, low hills of contempt, the isolated crag of violence — for the name of the runner currently serving Tony’s patch. ‘Quentin. Yeah, give Quentin a call in a couple of hours.’

Georgie knew it would take at least two hours for Bertram to see the Jamaicans and the Turks, then another for Andy to do the portioning, packaging and distributing. It wouldn’t be until late afternoon that Quentin came padding down the stairs of the mansion block, the complexion of his motorcycle leathers clearer than the hide they hid. It’ll be too late by then! Georgie’s body yowled, I’ll be mush!

‘P-Please,’ she sobbed into the phone. ‘Andy, I know you’ve got one or two, you’ve always — ’

‘Can’t talk now.’ He cut her right off. It was true, Andy held a small stash, enough to keep Pandora. busy, but this was the way it was: the eagle does not hunt flies. The flies would be buzzed into Tony Riley’s trap-flat, and by mid-afternoon Andy would relent and make the drop himself.

Andy liked to keep Georgie and Tony on a tight leash, feel them tugging as they walked to heel. It was all in the desperate doggy tug of their need and their obedience that Andy’s mastery inhered. Back in Southall he was a nothing, the bad third son who’d been to jail for thieving; but in the Royal Borough it was white women like Georgie who bowed down before him.

Billy, still slow in the syrupy glow of his get-up fix, enjoyed this time: the elongated hours before the dealer came. It was when the party got under way. The hack combo in the matching blue nylon jackets picked up the beat and strolled with it; the drunk waiter circulated with his drinks tray; the cowboy actor with steer-horn shoulders mock butt-fucked his starlet date, as he pretended to teach her pool; Clutterbuck and his cummerbunded cronies drank cocktails and smoked cigars — ‘I still have a few left over from the pre-Castro days.’ Hrundi V. Bakshi leant on pillars or hid behind bamboo, and shyly observed the gay scene.

As the guests trickled in, alliances were made and concordats formed. These weren’t minor Hollywood players pretending to be slightly less minor Hollywood players, but the flies who congregated at Tony’s flat and waited for the eagle.

‘Oh, my goodness, it is you! Wyoming Bill Kelso!’ Billy said to Bev, Pandora’s old pimp — a big Yardie bulked out still more by a puffa jacket. ‘I am the biggest fan of your movies — ’

‘What the fuck,’ Bev said, pushing past Billy, who had answered the door. Billy fell back, muttering, ‘Howdie pardner.’

Bev could pick up where he lived, in Harlesden, but the gear Bertram and Andy’s crew served was reliably better; besides, his girls worked in Earl’s Court. Bev had intellectual pretensions. He was reading Heart of Darkness, and, plonking himself down in an armchair opposite Tony, engaged the suffocating ex-PR man in a conversation about the impact of colonialism.

Between chuffs on his oxygen Tony was eager to participate; he was wobbly-bubbly, oscillating in his start-the-day steroid high. That he’d never read Conrad’s novella himself didn’t matter in the least.

Billy, wearing a trim maid’s uniform, checked the video intercom, then buzzed in Jeremy, who came ambling through the upstairs lobby and down the stairs. Jeremy, in Oxfords, jeans, and with a silk handkerchief snotting from the top pocket of his tweed jacket. He appeared every inch the scion of a minor squirearchical house — which is what he was. However, his account at Berry Brothers and Rudd had been stopped and his Purdey pawned; Jeremy’s career in stocks was irretrievably broken, yet still he brayed, such was his sense of entitlement — to drugs.

Next to the party was Yami, a Sudanese princess as tall, elegant and unexpected in these dismal surroundings as a heron alighting in a municipal boating pond. She stalked along the corridor of the flat, so leggy her legs seemed to bend the wrong way. Everyone assumed that Yami whored, yet her almond eyes, salted with contempt, held no promise of anything.

Billy followed at her high heels, chuckling, and when Yami rounded on him, Hrundi V. Bakshi said, ‘I missed the middle part, but I can tell from the way you are enjoying yourselves it must have been a very humorous anecdote.’ Yami looked at him with regal hatred.

Then Gary arrived, a bullocky little geezer, with his hair damped down in a senatorial fringe, and a thick gold chain encircling his thick neck. Gary, who was in jail garb — immaculate trainers, pressed tracksuit and freshly laundered T-shirt — touched fists with Billy as he came in. ‘Safe,’ they said — although it was anything but.

And so the party filled up. David arrived, a failing screenwriter of spurious intensity, his face dominated by a gnomon nose, its shadow always indicating that this was the wrong time. With him was Tanya, his stylist girlfriend, a jolie laide who had to drop cocaine solution into her blue eyes in order to dilate her pinprick pupils, so her colleagues couldn’t tell she was doing smack. As if.

Finally, there was an estate agent with boyish bad looks, who tore at the sore in the corner of his mouth with a ragged thumbnail. While he was cluttering up the living room of Tony Riley’s flat, his own prospective buyers were getting soaked in Acton.

They parked their arses and groaned the same old addict myths: how far they’d shlepped, how hard they’d fought, how the fucking Greeks kept pushing wooden horses within their justifiably guarded walls. They slumped on chairs, floor cushions and couches, a layer of cigarette smoke slow-swirling above their vaporous heads, waiting for Circe and lotus leaves at forty quid a bunch.

Tony Riley still had a smidgin of heroin left, and each time he spat out his mouthpiece to take up his foil buckler and suck pipe, the double-bores of their withdrawing eyes followed his every move. Tony compounded their anguish by sharing with Bev; they were, after all, far up the River Congo together, with the pimp bamboozled by Conrad’s semantics: ‘Yeah, I mean, like, when ’e calls ’em ‘‘niggers’’, ’e don’ mean it like ‘‘niggaz’’ do ’e? I mean, ’e weren’t a bruvva, woz ’e?’

Tony, taking a chuff, aspirated ‘ho’, by which he meant ‘no’.

On the lesser of the two sofas — an intimate two-seater, deep and softly upholstered — the screenwriter and the stylist were struggling not to touch. From moment to moment they became more mutually repulsed: he could not stand to look upon her needy face, while she was appalled by his pores — so very big, they threatened to engulf her.

Gary slumped on a floor cushion by the radiator, his fists held in front of him. The knuckles were scrawled upon in blue ink: God, Elvis, Chelsea — the council flat trinity. Scrawled upon with pins, in prison, which for men of Gary’s ilk was only the continuation, by other means, of double maths on a wet Tuesday afternoon.

Tired of propping herself on a skimpy windowsill, Yami commanded, ‘Shift yersel’ ’, and Gary hunkered over, so that she could curl herself round his back, assuming a child’s nap posture. He may’ve found himself cupped by Yami’s thighs and belly, her breasts snuggling against his back, but Gary experienced no arousal. Like all the other waiters, his libido was further underground than the tube line from Knightsbridge to Hyde Park Corner: they could sense sex rumbling through the earthy element above them, but down here it was frigid and still.

Georgie kept nellying in and out of the room to check that her meal ticket was all right: Tony was as thin and translucent as a potato crisp, and might crunch into powder at any time. Every three minutes she nellied down the corridor to the bedroom and called Andy again. ‘This number is currently unavailable, please try again later.’ Georgie sat, the phone cradled in her rotten lap, picturing with ghastly clarity the dealer journeying across the city in his metallic-green Ford Mondeo, a car so anonymous that to look upon it was to see nothing. Her feverish imagination summoned up cops and crooks and tidal waves on Scrubs Lane; anything, in fact, that might get between her vein and the needle.

Thunder bumped over the rooftops as Billy went from one huddled waiter to the next, asking if they wanted a cup of tea. It was all he could bring to the party. In the kitchen he clicked on the electric jug and lost himself in his reverie. Through the serving hatch he could see the pompous Clutterbuck and his stuffed-dress-shirt pals, while he, Hrundi V. Bakshi, tiptoed along the margins, concealing himself behind shrubberies, pressing himself against fake veneer walls, lurking artlessly below the watery amoebae that were evidence of Alice Clutterbuck’s awful taste in abstract painting. If he approached the guests with ‘Oh, hello, hello, good evening — what a beautiful evening it is, to be sure’, they turned their backs on his naked gaucherie.

The jug clicked off. Billy slung bags in cups and rained hot death down on them. The rejected Hrundi had found a parrot in a cage. The parrot gave him a hungry look, and the borstal boy playing the manic-depressive comedian playing the washed-up Indian actor cocked his head charmingly, then said, ‘Hello.’

‘Num-num,’ the parrot clucked. ‘Birdy num-num.’

‘Num-num?’ Billy queried aloud, and from the living room came ‘What the fuck’re you on about?’ It was Jeremy, whose well-tailored accent was finally fraying, along with the cuffs of his Turnbull and Asser shirt.

‘Birdy num-num,’ the parrot reiterated and rattled its claws in the bars. Looking down, Billy spotted a dish on the floor. He picked it up so that we all could see: it was full of bird food and printed on the side was birdy num num. ‘Oh, my goodness,’ Billy chortled, ‘birdy wants num-nums does he? I’ll give him num-nums — I’ll give you your num-nums.’He began spooning sugar into the mugs lined up along the gleaming counter — squat, fine bone, chipped. ‘Here, birdy, here!’ The parrot pecked at the grain strewn on the bottom of its cage, while Billy poured milk into the mismatched tea set. ‘Num-nums, num-nums, birdy num-nums,’ he continued muttering, as he fetched down from a cupboard the packet of milk chocolate HobNobs.

Hrundi V. Bakshi was hugely enjoying feeding the parrot; in the ecstasy of interspecific contact he forgot the stuffy Clutterbucks and their snobby guests. His browned-up face glowed with boyish enthusiasm as he sowed the bottom of the cage; but then, ‘Num-num is all gone!’ The num-num was indeed all gone. He had nothing more to offer, so had to put down the bowl and walk away, dabbing his damp palms on his linen jacket, glancing round to check he hadn’t attracted attention.

Billy lined the teas up in the serving hatch and knocked on the wooden frame. He popped his satchel lips and made a ‘pock-pock’ sound, as a techie does when checking to see that a microphone is working. The waiters strewn across Tony Riley’s living room ignored him; they were listening to something else: the music of their agonized nerves, tortured by craving the way a heavy-metal guitarist tortures the strings of his instrument; they heard their nerves screech — a chord that seemed to have been sustained for ten thousand years.

Hrundi V. Bakshi had found a control panel sunk in a wall. The array of buttons and dials was connected to he knew not what, but he pressed one anyway, then, hearing a speaker crackle, spoke into a grille: ‘Birdy num-num ‘‘pock-pock’’. Howdie, pardner.’ This latter an allusion to his cringeworthy encounter with Bev, the Yardie pimp playing the B-actor playing Wyoming Bill Kelso, the cowboy actor.

Warming to his medium, Hrundi blew on the mic again, ‘pock-pock’, then announced: ‘Waiting for more num-nums. Num-nums is all gone!’

‘Bi-lly,’ chided Georgie, who knew all about his counter-life.

‘No, seriously,’ Billy said, ‘I’m not fucking handing these round, they can come and get ’em if they want ’em.’

Birdy num-num. Birdy num-num all gone — this was the key scene in The Party so far as Billy was concerned. The parrot had had his fill, yet still craved more. Much more. Billy came round from the kitchen and, one by one, checking who wanted sugar, handed out the teas. For specially favoured guests he also offered a milk chocolate HobNob.

Like an army chaplain giving extreme unction on a battlefield, Billy bent down low to present them with their sweetened solution, and while subservient he offered this pathetic intercession: when Andy came, he, Billy, would speak to the dealer on their behalf. Andy always disappeared into the master bedroom with Georgie, who’d taken their orders in advance. Then there would be a further long wait, as she negotiated her and Tony’s cut for concentrating the market, trapping the flies.

Billy, in return for a pinch of smack here, a crumb of crack there, offered to ensure that their orders would be filled priority, or else suggested other tiny services that he could perform: the feeding of meters, the obtaining of works, pipes and foil; perhaps even the making of calls to employers/wives/husbands/children to explain — in sincere, doctorly tones — the entirely legitimate reasons for so-and-so’s non-arrival. This marginal service sector paid only because of Billy’s preternatural ability to gauge the extent of his clients’ desperation, and so adjust his pricing accordingly.

They clutched his sleeve and murmured pitiably, ‘I was meant to be in Baker Street at half eleven’ or ‘My kid’s out in the car, go check she’sOK, willya?’ or ‘I gotta have a hit before I leave!’ And Billy would nod gravely, accepting downpayment for these indulgences; the pope of dope with his dirty chuckle of absolution: ‘Er-h’herr.’

‘Waiting for more num-num, num-num is all gone,’ Hrundi said to Billy; then Billy said it aloud. The coincidence between the hunger of the parrot in the cage at the party and the cold turkeys in the cage of addiction never ceased to amuse him — like a custard pie thrown in the face of the world.

And still Tony nagged for breath on the sofa, and still Georgie nellied in and out of the living room. ‘Ha-ha-ha — ’ he gasped.

‘What’s that, Ups-a-Boy?’

‘Ha-ha-ha — ’

‘What’re you saying, Noodly-Toots?’

‘Have you, have you —?’

‘Have I what, Noodly?’

‘Have you, have you ‘‘euch’’ called him?’

‘Oh, you know I have, Ups-a-Boy, just this second.’ So it was that they conformed to all the ordinary amnesia of the long-term married.

Every three minutes she would make the same forlorn calculation: their desperation factored against Andy’s irritation; but, whatever the result, she’d still bruise her fingers dialling.

Billy retreated once more to the kitchen. He opened a cupboard door and the band were all in there smoking a joint. ‘Shut the door, man.’ The sax player comically honked. Next, Billy found the control panel again, and dickered with its switches. At the party in The Party, the statue of the little boy peeing in the ersatz rill increased its flow all over Wyoming Bill Kelso; the fire burning on the circular hearth flared up; the bar where Clutterbuck and his cronies were standing retracted into the wall, scattering glasses with tinkly abandon.

Billy watched these dumb happenings delightedly, superimposing them on Tony Riley’s living room, so that it was Gary and Yami who were slammed against the mouldy wallpaper; Tony’s Dupont that threw flame at Bev’s face; and Jeremy’s mug from which the tea jetted.

What of us? Does it ever tire us — me — our swarming behind the sightless eyes of the junkies and the tarts? Do I remain as amused as Billy by the slapstick of addiction, the inability of these Buster Keatons to do even one thing properly at once? Well, yes and no. True, I never grow bored with my own imposture; each time I break into a cell, rip off a strand of DNA, patch it into my own RNA and so reproduce myself, I experience anew the thrill of creation.

Jean Cocteau — a junky, true enough, although before our time — said that all artists are, by nature, hermaphrodites, as the act of creation is one of self-insemination, followed by parthenogenesis. I — we — would concur with this, except that we are far more inventive: we mutate so quickly within the galleries of our patrons, simultaneously gifting them originals and multiples.

Then there’s time, the most significant dimension of creation. Size may matter, but time diminishes all things, bringing them down to our level. We — I — bide our time; we savour our own side effects, the minor symptoms of accidie and loss of appetite, the insomnia and the biliousness. Wearen’t one of those Grand Guignol maladies, half in love with its own horror show. We do not seek to liquidize tissue in seconds, then send blood spouting from every orifice; nor do we see any beauty in the gestural embellishments of the cancers — although, all in good time, we may bring on those cellular clowns. Consider the slapstick of cancer, its crazy capers, the way it messes up the metabolism, chucking buckets full of tumours about the body.

No, they call what we do disease, but we know it’s art; and the art of life is a process. This is what we do: we hang in there. We loiter — we don’t hurry, we take years — decades, perhaps. For us, human death is a failure; unless, that is, enough of us have blasted off to colonize new worlds.

They are mobilizing against us. Pegylated interferon alpha, Ribavirin — crass names, brutal mercenaries. They don’t even know how these drugs work, but let me tell you — it’s not pretty. Figuratively speaking, they cut off our balls and stitch up our cunts. Still, let’s not dwell on the future; for now, it’s still that Tuesday afternoon, in November 1998, and at Tony Riley’s there’re loads of us. Loads in Billy, Georgie and Tony himself. Loads in Bev and Jeremy, loads in Gary and Yami, loads in the screenwriter and his stylist girlfriend. And not forgetting the estate agent — there’re loads of us squatting in him, as well. An abundance of mes, two million in every millilitre of their blood — a whole earth’s population in one individual.

We bide our time. ‘It is good’, as Peter Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, said to Claudine Longet as Michele Monet, ‘to be having a good time.’

‘What the fuck’re you on about?’ said Tanya, the stylist.

‘I am saying to you’ — Billy waggled his head from side to side, his black locks swinging — ‘that it is good to be having a good time.’

After the encounter with the parrot, and the revelation of its empty dish, this was Billy’s second favourite moment in The Party. The girl, in her filmy, lemon-yellow mini-dress with the spangly bodice, was obviously meant for him — why else the soft focus, her slim yet shapely form, her air of sexualized neurosis, the ski jumps of her hair? Moreover, she was being harassed by her date, who was none other than Herb Ellis (as himself), the boorish director who threw Hrundi off the set out beyond Barstow, with the ringing cliché, ‘You’ll never make another movie in this town again!’

How many times had Billy heard that before. Still, here he was, looking deep into Tanya’s eyes — which were brimming with sickness — and they’d clicked, hadn’t they? ‘Lissen,’ Billy went on (as himself), ‘I’ve gotta bit of gear if you want, not much. ’ He glanced at David, but the screenwriter, unable to cope with his enfeebled conscience — it was his kid who was outside in the car — had dropped a Rohypnol.

‘I dunno. ’ Tanya muttered. She was chubby-cheeked with gingerish hair — not at all like Michele Monet.

‘C’mon,’ Billy said, insistent, ‘meet me in the karzy in five.’ He wandered off, avoiding the sandy-haired waiter, who, having downed most of the drinks on his tray, was now completely pissed.

But at first the bathroom was locked, and when the synthetic cockatoo who’d been using it emerged — a woman who, earlier in the evening, Billy’s antics had gifted with a roast chicken for a hairpiece — there was a second waiting her turn. Ever gallant, Billy let her go in front of him.

Hrundi V. Bakshi climbed up a spiral staircase to the second storey of the Clutterbucks’ extensive and ugly dwelling, crept into a bedroom that was an atonal symphony of nylon and velour, then finally found his way into the en suite bathroom. By now he was risibly pigeon-toed, his knees half crossed to sustain his full bladder. He’d been refusing alcoholic drinks throughout the party — but he’d drunk a lot of water. Then there was the strawberry soup he’d sipped sitting on a daft low stool, while to either side of him the sophisticated Hollywood types exchanged banter.

The Clutterbucks’ bathroom was intimidating to a fake Indian. There was shag-pile carpeting, tiled steps up to a shower and pot plants everywhere; still, at least there was the comic relief, the slackening of Sellers’s funny face.

Tanya came in. She was wearing a ribbed sweater, one of David’s; the sleeves covered her hands except for her gnawed-upon fingers. She sat on the edge of the bath and peered down at Billy’s silt. Billy busied himself at the sink, setting out works, spoon, wraps of smack and citric acid on the shelf.

‘I won’t fuck you, y’know,’ Tanya said dully. Through his filmy lens Billy saw Michele Monet singing of love, while accompanying herself on an acoustic guitar.

‘It is good to be having a good time,’ Billy said in his stupid golly-gosh Indian accent, heating the spoon with a Bic lighter. Tanya sighed — she was used to idiots and snapped, ‘Gimme that.’

But Billy thought this precipitate; he whipped his belt from the loops of his jeans, half garrotted his arm and dowsed for a vein. When, eventually, he handed the syringe to Tanya, the barrel was full of blood. Or should we say blood? The sucked-up back-flow of his circulatory system. Billy’s viral load wasn’t particularly high, and it was only a one-mil’ syringe, yet there we were, a Varanasi’s worth of virions, our isocahedral capsids jostling together in the tube like so many footballs floating down the Ganges.

Not that Tanya didn’t have plenty of us, too. When she kicked off her flip-flop — in the fashion industry they dubbed this ‘heroin chic’, but, trust me, it was only junky déshabillé— pulled her foot up in front of her on the bath and, taking the syringe, bent to tend it between her toes, she paused to remark, ‘I can’t have a hit in my arm — they check there.’ Then asked Billy, ‘Are you negative?’ To which the only realistic reply would’ve been, are you fucking joking? This guy is nothing but negation piled upon negation! But once he’d gruntaffirmed ‘Finkso’, she let herself have us.

How was it for me? Think of that numinous — but, for all that, real — moment in any party, when it all begins to slide into mayhem. The guests are tipsy; the band are getting looser, louder and funkier; darkness has come to press against the picture windows, and shadows swell in the swimming pool; sensual possibilities tickle everyone’s extremities; and the drunken waiter falls backwards into the kitchen, where he knocks off the chef ’s toupee.

That’s when the influx comes: younger, crazier, happier gatecrashers, prancing and dancing, and twisting their minds off, a gay cavalcade with a baby elephant they’ve liberated from the zoo and daubed with corny hippy slogans: ‘The World is Flat!’, ‘Love is a Sugar Cube!’ and ‘Go Naked!’

That’s what it was like for us as we gatecrashed Tanya.

No, they didn’t fuck, but they were slung together by the plush impact of the heroin, ribbed pullover against mohair woolly. Tanya thought of little else, and Billy, as Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, flushed the toilet once, twice, a third time; then, fool that he was, lifted the lid of the cistern and fiddled with the ballcock. One of Alice Clutterbuck’s vile daubs fell off the wall into the cistern; Hrundi pulled it out and jerked the end of the toilet roll for some paper to wipe it. The roll began to spin, disgorging loop after skein of toilet paper on to the fluffy floor of the bathroom. Alarmed, Hrundi stooped to gather up an armful and, in so doing, predictably, dropped the cistern lid. Down below a lump of plaster fell on to the snare drum. The band played on. Hrundi rubbed the blotchy purple painting with the toilet paper; it smeared, but he put it back on the wall anyway, then stuffed the bundle of toilet paper into the toilet, shut the lid and flushed it. The toilet began to overflow; the bidet turned into a fountain. Billy watched — numb, enthralled — as a new interior rill formed a course across the Clutterbucks’ bathroom.

Five minutes previously, in the catacomb of the master bedroom, cadaverous Georgie was strung up upon the wire for eternity when she heard ‘I’m coming myself.’ Andy had cut through the static, then broken the connection.

Andy slid through the chicane on Kensington Church Street and stopped at the lights opposite the Polaris bulk of Barker’s. When the feeder light changed, he turned into Kensington Road. This junction had no resonance for him: he thought not of Biba hippies and Kensington Market honking of patchouli; nor, as the Mondeo headed east, did he ruminate on William and Mary’s big move. The previous August, Andy hadn’t so much as registered the cut-flower embankments that, overnight, had piled up along the railings of Kensington Palace — the most expensive compost heap in history.

For Andy, those strange August days had been business as usual; the same plus c’est la mê me chose of pick-ups and divvying-ups, of driving and serving, of screwing ruined under-age girls in empty flats, then heading back to Southall to play the overbearing and abusive paterfamilias — a role that Andy performed magnificently.

There was no prescience for this man, either; he could not sense the future, the coming Muji-Bouji’s-woojie of dizzy dancing on ceaseless credit. No, Andy saw what was there in front of him: sheikhs, transplanted desert blooms, their pot bellies tenting their robes, their masked womenfolk ambling along behind. He saw men in shirtsleeves boring themselves to death in the overheated conference rooms of the Royal Garden Hotel. He saw cabs and buses and a faux-vintage Harrods delivery van. He didn’t feel, as anyone else might, the vapid cosmopolitanism of this quarter of London, where the corner shops sold Swiss watches and the postmen knew no one’s name.

Back in Tony Riley’s flat, the chord that seemed as if it might sustain for ten thousand years was chopped off. Georgie jerked into action: all must be as the grim little god wanted it. Bev must cut short his seminar and, together with Yami, go into the small back bedroom, where more relics of Tony’s gift for public relations were stacked and piled. The two black people came to rest on a large leather pouffe, sitting at the feet of a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Tony dressed as Wyatt Earp, his six-shooters blazing from the hip, a speech bubble poking from the side of his Stetson. 2-D Tony was saying, ‘Meet me at the OK Corral on Old Brompton Road for fun that should be outlawed!’ Bev and Yami didn’t have speech bubbles.

Georgie fluttered among the remaining whites. ‘C’mon, get up.’ She ordered the sedated screenwriter: ‘Giss yer money. Tell me what you want — Andy’s coming.’ The junkies dug out their linty notes — Gary even had the shame of change. The binary listing, brown/white, began. Tony left off his oxygen to do the count.

All at once, the party was in full swing. Jeremy stood and, locating a mirror, held it up so that he could comb his hair. It was as if he were courting drugs. Gary got up, rolled his shoulders and then, leaning against the wall with his arms held out, stretched first one leg then the other, just another bloke in a tracksuit limbering up.

David tottered off up the corridor. He tapped on the bathroom door. ‘I know you’re in there, Tanya.’ Knew, and didn’t really mind; theirs, like all drug economies, was a hard scrabble for subsistence: you did what you had to. ‘Lissen,’ he continued, ‘Andy’s coming — I’ve put in our order, but I’m gonna get Poppy from the car, so you better come out.’

Why would anyone bring their small child into this miserable place at the precise moment when the drug dealing — and taking — was about to begin in earnest? Answer: risks incalculable for those to whom responsibility is a given. The child had been in the parked car for over an hour, the rain was slackening off, traffic wardens and dog-walkers would be out on the street. There were these factors, and also the screenwriter’s naive faith in the capacity of a little girl to summon up compassion — credit might be forthcoming.

But not with this little a girl, and not from Andy, who was riding the clutch at the pelican crossing beside the De Vere Hotel. Riding the clutch and holding Pandora’s crotch, as any other sales rep might fondle the Mondeo’s controls, its gearstick or steering wheel. He knew she was eight days shy of her sixteenth birthday — and felt both more and less secure because of it. Bertram had warned Andy off Pandora sternly; but his business partner pointed out that the girl’s mouth was multipurpose. With the wipers slicing semicircles of London out of the drabness, Pandora sat behind the windscreen, a chipmunk with cheeks stuffed full of Class As.

We were in Pandora all right — in her for the duration. When those hateful anti-retrovirals became widely available, she wouldn’t have the modicum of self-discipline needed to administer them. Yes, we’ll be in and out of her for decades — and, given what she gets up to, and who gets up her, we have reason to be grateful to this air terminal of a girl, through which our kind transfer with conspicuous ease.

We were in Pandora — but we weren’t in Andy. I know, I promised you a victim at the outset; but, sad to report, it isn’t Andy. No matter how deserving the dealer may’ve been of a debilitating and progressive disease, he was in no danger of contracting this one. As has been remarked, he didn’t take drugs — except for a joint when a girl was sucking him limp; and for the purposes of fellation, he wore not one but three condoms. Andy didn’t subscribe to the African idiocy that a sweet wasn’t worth having with a wrapper on it; because it wasn’t a sweet for Andy at all, it was a grim staple, sexual sorghum that he had to shovel down because famine might come at any time.

He parked the Mondeo at the far end of De Vere Gardens. Parked it scrupulously, sending Pandora to fetch a ticket from the machine, while he scoped out the other parked cars, then looked up and down the street for possible tails. Sometimes Andy carried a scanner that flipped automatically through the police frequencies, but mostly he didn’t bother: he knew that when the bust came — and come it would, eventually — he would’ve been set up by a fuck-wit junky.

No screenwriter, no matter how inventive, could have got down on the page the scenario that unfolded as Andy and Pandora, together with David and his daughter, were buzzed in. As the plausible quartet took the short lift ride down, the junkies crowded into the corridor. Tanya emerged from the bathroom, with Billy snuffling in her train. Georgie came limping at a run along the corridor and herded them all back towards the living room. ‘Get in there! Keep outta Andy’s way!’ Answered the door, then hustled the dealer and his jailbait away. David’s daughter said something fivish, like, ‘How long’re we gonna stay here, Daddy?’ And Billy, as Sellers, as Hrundi V. Bakshi, took a direct hit in the forehead with the sucker dart fired by the Clutterbucks’ kid, who was romping in his plaid pyjamas in his toy-stuffed room. ‘Howdie, pardner,’ Billy mugged, reprising his embarrassing encounter with Wyoming Bill Kelso, and the little girl — traumatized by an hour alone in a parked car in a London residential street on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in November — started to cry.

Slapstick is, in essence, the ritualized worship of causation, something humans place more faith in than they do their gods. Post hoc ergo propter hoc — ‘after this, therefore because of this’. Anyone watching a comedian attempting to do two things at once — or even one — will be familiar with this instinctive belief: of course you would try to stop the toilet overflowing by shutting the lid; of course you would stuff all that toilet paper down the pan; of course you would — given your state of shock — allow yourself to be fed with liquor, despite having been refusing drinks all evening; and naturally your obeisance before the great god Necessity would be rewarded with the vestal virgin Michele Monet; she in nothing but a towel, you in an orange jumpsuit because you’ve had your trousers pulled off you by Fred Clutterbuck and Herb Ellis. Of course.

These effects follow their causes far more surely than night follows day; and so it went: Hrundi decried the desecration of the sacred Ganesh, and the hip protesting young folk decided to wash the slogans off the baby elephant in the pool. Then the drunken Hrundi climbed out of an upper window and rolled down a projecting roof into the deep end, and people dived in to save him. Then the crapulent waiter messed with the controls and the dance floor slid back, dumping more jolly guests into the water — water that was frothing with the washing-up liquid used on the baby elephant. A great glinting-white mass, such as children of all ages delight in, began steadily, like some beautiful and alien organism, to creep up on the band, who kept right on laying down the groove, despite the suds that spattered across the snare drum, each multicoloured bubble — caught by the adequate cinematography of Lucien Ballard (died 1988) — a world. Possibly.

*

Post hoc ergo propter hoc — but Billy’s gofering was a triumph of the will. Andy sat at a kneehole desk, banknotes piling up in front of him as he took pellets from the stoppers Pandora had removed from her gob. Georgie fluffed, then stammered, ‘I h-hope y’d-don’t mind, Andy, it’s just that B-Billy was crashing here last night, and he’s a help — what with Tony being so ill. He keeps them in line, and better they pitch up here — doncha think?’ However, this was a conversation that, having only one participant, was going nowhere.

Billy gave Andy the orders in monosyllables — ‘Two brown, one white’ — while Andy uttered profundities such as ‘Here’. Billy darted back into the living room, distributed the goods, watched them being unwrapped, took his cut, returned to the bedroom and did the same again.

David and his dysfunctional family left at once; as did Yami, Gary and the estate agent. They tucked their stoppers into their gobs and put on workaday faces. They took the lift back up to the lobby of the mansion block, walked past the console table neatly stacked with junk mail, then stepped out the weighty oak door, with its brass fittings, and took the tiled steps down to the geometric street.

Yami turned right, towards the Brompton Road, moving with the pantherish totter of a tall woman on too-high heels. Gary splashed over to a van that was amorphous with dents and bashes. David, his daughter, and his abetter in her criminal neglect, climbed down into an MG Midget that wasn’t theirs.

None of them said any goodbyes — what would’ve been the point of that? Nor, of course, were we required to say our farewells; we went with them all — including the kid. Went with them as they horizontally transmitted us across town.

Now the drugs were on the premises, the party in the basement was in full swing. Bev returned from the back bedroom to resume his seminar on the literature of colonialism. He and Tony sat either side of a coffee table strewn with the apparatus of derangement, and, while Tony battled to insinuate a poot of crack smoke into his lungs, Bev gently coaxed him, ‘C’mon, bruv, thass it, I’ll ’old the lighter.’

Jeremy hunched in the furthest corner of the room, his cheap gold hair wreathed in dear fumes. In between hits he interjected: ‘But don’t you see — I mean, Kurtz is — I went to Africa — once.’ Disjointed remarks, made with tremendous sincerity and not intended to be ingratiating, because he had no need to be — the brown and the white had done it for him.

Crazy intimacy frothed up from the sunken pool of the living room, then shivered along the corridor to the master bedroom, where Billy — as Hrundi — had found a new Michele. What happy mayhem as the Hollywood party descended into anarchy. Billy was still in the swimming pool with the gay young folk, overseeing the bath time, while Pandora sat atop the baby elephant; coincidentally, she was wearing the same clothes — blue jeans and a grey T-shirt — that Michele Monet had been lent after her own dress was soaked.

Yes, Pandora sat on the baby elephant in the room — her own babyishness. It was irresistible. Billy saw them leaving together — leaving the wild party saturated with crack foam, where a Russian balalaika band that had just happened by was whipping the revellers into a frenzy of dreadful dancing. It was dawn, and the LAPD were standing by their squad cars. They had no warrants out on innocent Hrundi, so he and Michele would get into the funny three-wheeler — Michele with her mini-dress back on again — then they’d bumble down the palm-lined boulevards of Kensington and Knightsbridge, searching for a cute bungalow smothered in bougainvillea, where Billy could declare his hapless love.

On a Tuesday afternoon in November?

Andy goaded his mule — ‘Going’ — and handed her the remaining rocks of crack and pellets of heroin, all wrapped up once more. She popped the stoppers in her cheeks. They exited the bedroom, Andy moving with the slow lollop of a creature that knows how to conserve its evil energy. He paused, seeing Bev by the coffee table, and snapped at Georgie, ‘No blacks. I told you no blacks. I won’t come by here if there’re blacks.’ Then he headed for the front door, Pandora walking to heel.

Before he reached it the buzzer went. The foamy, cracky vibe shuddered, then popped. Georgie squeezed past Andy to get to the intercom. ‘Who izzit?’ she demanded. ‘Jones’ crackled back at her.

Jones. She could see him on the poxy screen in his trademark, wide-lapelled velvet jacket, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Jones, partially sighted behind shades-for-all-seasons. Jones, looming on a grey day with his white black man shtick. Jones, who, like a sponging relative, invariably turned up exactly when Sunday lunch was being served. Jones, who sold powders in the West End drinking clubs. Jones, who held court at Picasso’s on the King’s Road with a big bunch of keys squatting on his crotch. Jones. but don’t fret, we’ll soon’ve seen the last of him: split ends on sharp shoulders.

‘Let him in,’ Andy commanded; then they all waited until there came a knock on the front door of the flat. Georgie heaved it open, sucking Jones and another man into the cramped vestibule. They all stood silently for several seconds — Pandora, Georgie, Andy, Billy, Jones and the new man — recompressing in the airlock of their drug paranoia. Presently, Andy — who knew Jones — said, ‘You should’ve called.’ Then he and his mule disappeared off up the carpeted mesa.

It took a while for the party to get back under way. Georgie remonstrated with Jones: no call — and who’s this, then? This was, Jones explained, Cal Devenish, the bad-boy writer, whom he’d picked up at the Plantation Club in Soho. The celebrated Plantation — where there was a wake going on for the world-famous painter Trouget. Jones related these things breathlessly, as if they were momentous: names, reputations, achievements — they meant nothing to him, although he knew they had currency.

Not much with Georgie; she wasn’t impressed by Jones dropping Trouget’s name, despite death being a career move she herself was about to make. As for Devenish, she’d heard his name in her arts programme producing days; seen him at parties as well. She knew nothing of his work, but held fast to the received opinion that it was glib, and that he was an egomaniacal pasticheur. However, his bona fides as an addict weren’t in doubt; he hovered there in the vestibule, his stringy form dangling from his swollen head, its taut, rubbery surface dimpled with acne scars, puckered up with fresh scabs. At night, in front of the mirror, Devenish picked away at what other people thought he was — distressing his public image, while destroying the private individual.

‘I, yeah — sorry,’ he said to Georgie, for he’d immediately grasped that she was the chatelaine. ‘I was looking for a bit of. gear? And Jones — ’

‘Come in, come in.’ Georgie was all scary smiles, Billy bowed and scraped, because Andy had left a little smidgen-wigeon-pigeon behind on tick, and that meant there was a mark-up to be had. The beat combo struck up again as they trooped past the Dexion shelving; the Amazonian girl with the Mary Quant crop gyrated by the poolside, the foamy beast reanimated.

Billy hustled around, making the introductions, finding Jones and Devenish seats, explaining to Bev that this was a real writer, who had written real books. Billy kept taking sidelong looks at Cal: assessing his financial potential, certainly, but also taken by the other man’s air of hopeless bewilderment.

Cal Devenish was quite drunk, a little coked up and oozing shame. Nowadays, he left a silvery trail of shame wherever he went; and, still more snail-like, he carried his bed of shame with him. He had reached a stage where seconds of euphoria cost him weeks of abject self-loathing. He was on his way to Finland, to promote one of his books that was being published there, and had only dropped into the Plantation to have a single drink and to commiserate with Hilary Edmonds on his great financial loss.

There was Jones with his white lines — and now Cal was sticky with Scotch, bristling with feathery cocaine and being ridden out of town on a rail. He took a seat next to Tony Riley, a bit disgusted by the dying man in the oxygen mask — but then that was only natural. He got out cashpoint-ironed twenties and bought into a rock of crack that Bev was crumbling into the foiled mouth of an Evian bottle pipe. All the while Billy watched.

This Devenish, could he be another Hrundi V. Bakshi? Whited up, and playing his superficial role, while inside of himself he dropped Michele Monet off at her sherbet-yellow Art Deco apartment block? Was Cal, like Billy, suggesting that Michele hang on to the cowboy hat that Wyoming Bill Kelso had given him; suggesting this, so that very soon he could call her up and, on the pretext of getting it back, ask for a date?

Oh, no, Cal Devenish wasn’t at The Party at all. With his first hit on the crack pipe all the fuzzy foam had condensed into icebergs clashing on the frozen Baltic. What would Helsinki be like, Cal wondered. He suspected exactly the same as London, except for better modern architecture, together with publishers, journalists and publicists who appeared troll-like.

Georgie came into the room and passed the writer a pellet of heroin. Billy scampered to fetch the mirror and, placing it on the coffee table in front of Cal, said, ‘Any chance of a little bump, mate?’ Then added, ‘D’you want me to get you some works?’

Cal looked up and then around at the drugged bedlam: Tony, huffing and puffing and blowing his body down; Bev, talking arse about Conrad of all things; Jeremy, squatting in the corner, his eyes saucers that needed washing up. He thought of the late Trouget’s paintings — what might they be worth now? Those solid bourgeois and yelping dogs, upended and gibbeted by his barbed brush, their faces either obscured or rendered far too vividly.

‘No,’ Cal told Billy. ‘No, thanks, I’m gonna snort some, but you can take enough for a hit if you want.’

Billy could take some, because Cal knew there would never be enough to sate himself. He was going to be hungry for ever. Cal tapped some of the beige powder on to the smeary mirror, had elves been skating on it? Billy, by way of being a good egg, rolled up his one remaining fiver and passed it to the writer. The parrot of addiction — unlike the owl of Minerva — will fly at any time of the day or night; so it flapped across the clearing from the serving hatch to land on Cal Devenish’s shoulder.

If Cal had troubled to unroll the banknote, he would have seen the fresh bloodstain that wavered along its edge: an EEG that plotted a fine madness. Whose blood was it? Does this matter? I — we — told you at the outset, this was never a mystery, or a crime procedural — this was never to do with who done it, only who got it. Or us.

Cal bent to rub noses with his doppelgänger at the same time as he shoved the rolled-up note into his already raw nostril. ‘Slap’, the sharp paper edge, struck the mirror at one end, while ‘stick’, the other end, burrowed into his mucus membrane. Snuffling, feeling the numbing burn, Cal dabbed at the blood that dripped from his nose, then asked Billy, ‘You couldn’t get me a tissue, could you?’

As if he could blow us — me — out!

Where is the redemption in all this? Where is the reformed character on day-release from prison, teaching kids with learning difficulties and through them rediscovering his shared humanity? We don’t know. I’ll tell you one thing, though, our flight’s been called — and we simply love flying. C’mon, Cal, up you get. That’s OK, you look perfectly presentable — apart from your messed-up face. Still, not much chance of any official interest in a flight to Helsinki.

If he were to get a pull? We’re not bothered — we like prison as much as flying. Possibly more. C’mon, Cal, Gate 57, one foot in front of the other, there’s a good chap. Past the windy horse of a cleaner in the shafts of his disinfecting cart; past Dixons and Wetherspoon’s; past W. H. Smith’s and the Duty Free hangar.

No, Cal, that’s not the way to approach a travelator — anyone who’s anyone walks along it, doesn’t just stand there. Ho-hum, we’re going to be with you for a long time — years in all likelihood — so I suppose we better get used to your petty vagaries, your inability to do one thing properly at once.

At least we’re well cushioned in here, buffered by blood and bile in our basket of lobules, ducts and veins. Foie humain, Leberkndel Suppe, Scottie’s Liver Treats — we love ’em all. But most of all we relish birdy num-num. Birdy num-num. Num-num. Num.