Liver Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Yes, Bernie Jobs knew a thing or two about chucking people out – you don’t acquire the nickname ‘the Cunt’ somewhere as cuntish as the Plantation without special qualifications; and Bernie, with his Wermacht helmet head – shiny-bald, save a black moustache that ran from ear to ear across the back of his bulldog neck – and his squat build – a brick shithouse built to withstand a direct hit by an ICBM – was fully accredited.

  Alternatively, were you in receipt of the right kind of ‘cunt’, you might, on any given afternoon between, say, 1976 and 1983 – for the procedure took this long to fully complete – have witnessed the ritualized humiliation and – this is by no means too strong a term – dehumanizing of the Plantation’s resident barman, Hilary Edmonds; who, until this procedure was completed, was denied even the consolation of a nickname, being referred to by Val and his cronies – or ordered about by them – purely by means of a specially inflected ‘she’.

  On this particular afternoon – a Tuesday one, not that it matters one jot, it was always a Tuesday afternoon in midwinter in the Plantation, even if outside it was a steamy midsummer evening or a lemon-bright spring morning – ‘she’ was being teased remorselessly.

  ‘She’s something stuffed in her crack,’ the Dog observed as Hilary bent down to fetch a packet of crisps from one of the cardboard boxes under the bar. ‘I hope it doesn’t work its way up inside her.’

  The Dog licked his chops – literally: a carpet tongue unrolled from chapped lips, touching first one of the pendulous jowls that had secured him his moniker, then the other. He had once been a tall cavalryman, the Dog, and he still dressed in regulation tweed hacking jacket and twill slacks, with a paisley cravat tucked behind the collar of his Viyella shirt. It may seem a solecism that so much whisky could have engendered a burgundy hue to his bloodhound’s muzzle – but it had.

  Hilary, still at a comparatively early stage of his conditioning, felt enough shame with the Dog’s, the Cunt’s and of course Val’s eyes on him to, still bending, reach back to yank down the hem of the Breton fisherman’s jersey he wore in emulation of his controller. Losing his balance, he tipped forward and banged his head.

  ‘Ooh!’ cried the Cunt. ‘She’s hurt herself; clumsy girl – silly fucking girl. Won’t be giving her a china dolly.’

  Val chuckled indulgently; it sounded like the first stages of emphysema. ‘Heugh-heugh, she should give that little cunt of hers a bit more of a sluice, filthy little trollop.’

  Hilary straightened up and handed the crisps to the Poof, who negligently thanked him. Gillespie was the only regular male member of the Plantation wh
o was nominally heterosexual; and, while he cast a benign eye over the taunting, he seldom joined in. As for the Martian, his sexual orientation was ambiguous, if it even existed at all.

  Gillespie was a well-known photographer, the extempore chronicler of the beautiful and the damned of London’s West End. Gillespie, who always wore a lush brown leather coat and a white silk shirt. Gillespie, thrice married but pulling behind him a string of blondes that stretched, taut with yearning, from Billericay to Barnes. Gillespie, whose gypsy-raffish good looks still as yet uncorrupted by the trays of Campari and soda he was undeveloping them in – the features becoming more blurred with every year. Gillespie, whose barrel trunk and columnar thighs every red-blooded queer in Soho wanted to feel battering against him, and who, for that very reason, warranted the ironic title ‘the Poof’.

  Descending from her bar stool as if it were a glittering rostrum on the stage of the Windmill, and she was still the statuesque brunette she had been during the last war, the Typist sashayed up to the bar and placed her empty glass on a mat. Leaning forward, she gazed down the back of Hilary’s orange loons and remarked in clipped, headmistressy tones, ‘Isn’t that the string of her Tampax poking out? I think she must have the curse, poor thing.’

  General sniggering.

  Val said, ‘In that case she probably needs a drink, eh? Pity I’ve nanti dinary, or I’d stand her one.’

  This rare lapse into his native Polari was a sign that Val was in an uncommonly good mood. There was nothing quite like humiliating Hilary to cheer him up. His rubbery face mask stretched with amusement, pushing his beaky nose into still greater prominence.

  Ah! Val Carmichael’s nose – a treatise could have been written on it; indeed, it looked as if an unseen hand had begun to do exactly that – poking with steely nib at its sub-surface blood vessels and pricking them into the raised, purplish calligraphy of spider angiomas, a definitive statement that the Plantation’s owner was already in the early stages of cirrhosis.

  Now, quietly, unobtrusively, the Martian joined the torturers at the bar, murmuring so casually, ‘I’ll stand everyone a round’ that the others barely registered his largesse, even when, with a loud ‘ting’, Val fed his twenty-pound note into the till.

  Then. A hiatus. Drinks were poured by Hilary and guzzled – as something for nothing so often is.

  This interlude gives me the opportunity to admonish you, gentle reader, not to sit in stern judgement of the Plantation’s members and their decadent airs. Weren’t, aren’t, won’t Soho’s denizens always be thus? More truly subject to an almost mathematical recursion than any other cultural grouping in the world?

  This 5 × 6 grid of streets has been a quartier specializing in the division of the human spirit for decades – centuries, even. Since Marx burst his boils and buried his kids on Dean Street; since Hazlitt expired from his ‘happy life’; since Johnson’s club strutted; since young Wolfgang tinkled the ivories and Casanova got his oats on Frith Street. Back and back, the same divisors have been applied to each term of the series: alcohol and insouciance.

  Back and back, until Huguenots destroyed their eyes with needlepoint, while Billy Blake bunked off from his dad’s drapery to trip, off his head, down to the satanic mills of Farringdon. Soho! Your very name a cry thrown over the shoulders of hunting noblemen. Is it any wonder that generation after generation of your inhabitants have been brought to bay, then stood – or slumped, or lain legs akimbo – frozen, waiting to be dispatched by the hounds of time?

  If the Plantation Club (est. 1948) was still lost in the foggy forties, with its members aping the mores of Maclaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas, and lapsing into the secret language of formerly outlawed inverts, then this was only as it should be. And yet … And yet … there was a deeper timelessness to the bar-room above Blore Court, a holier stasis. For, while the black plastic bags piled up in the streets during the Winter of Discontent, and then, come spring, were hauled away, the trash in the Plantation remained. As the upper echelons of West End Vice ran amok and the streetwalkers became entire formations, the Plantation stayed just as whorish. While the social revolution of the 1980s raged, and merchant bankers sprayed every surface matt black, in the lavatory of the Plantation Club the toilet paper was still the consistency of Formica.

  No change at all was wrought in this sequestered cell. To say of any of its members that they were ‘gay’ would be a nonsense, for, while outside in Old Compton Street everyone became openly gayer and gayer, inside the club they only grew sadder and sadder. No popper was ever popped, no T-shirt was tightened, there was no house music in da house.

  To apply the epithet ‘gay’ to Val Carmichael would have been worse than ridiculous; while to say of him – or of any of the rubbery plants in the Plantation – that they were ‘queer’ would have constituted a gross understatement. The term ‘homosexual’, if it was taken to imply that Val sought intimacy with – or simply ingress to – to a member of his own sex, was also no longer applicable, and hadn’t been for two or three years now; not since Val had discovered Hilary Edmonds in the Wimpy Bar at King’s Cross.

  The young man was too old and too unmissed to be described as a runaway; he was rather a stroll-off, who had sauntered away from the repression of his home town – some Market This or Thatminster – much as a dazed passenger staggers, fortuitously unharmed, from the smoking wreckage of a car crash.

  Hilary had no money and knew no one in London. For three nights he had been scratched under a holly bush in Bloomsbury Square. When Val spyed him, sitting in the window of the burger bar, Hilary was consuming his last few pence in the form of a sweet bun seamed with beef. His collar-length brown hair lay in dangleberries on his spotty neck – an imperfection that the older man found particularly arousing.

  Beyond this Hilary was no great catch. He was tall, scrawny and had features that, cruelly, already bore a mean-spirited impress exactly the same as his father’s, although Edmonds Senior had taken thirty-odd years of rankling behind the grille of a bank branch to acquire them.

  Val took Hilary home, which was a third-storey walk-up on the old LCC estate off Harrison Street. At that time these redbrick warrens had been overrun by punks, who lolloped furtively along their balconies, halting in the stairwells to nibble amphetamines, their soap-stiffened mohicans twitching like rabbit ears. Val noticed none of this; it belonged to a parallel universe.

  If anything, the flat was even more time-locked than the club. Unhemmed yards of blackout cloth kept out the day; a plush-covered sofa slumped on the herringbone woodblock floor, twenty-six inches in front of a black and white television. In the tiny kitchen, the tea cups were kept in a broken Baby Belling. In the bathroom the porn was kept in the bath.

  Strictly speaking it wasn’t all porn. There were early German magazines of the burgeoning homosexual community, such as Die Insel; there were the homoerotic leaflets of proto-Nazi hiking clubs; there were even bound volumes of the works of Magnus Hirschfeld. This was heavy water at the bottom of the bath; above it was half a fathom of health and fitness magazines, together with outright penis-in-anus stuff brought from Copenhagen. However, the froth on top of this was touchingly innocent: underwear advertisements cut out of Titbits and Reynold’s News that showed men in navy Y-fronts with white piping. There were a few knitting patterns featuring chaps posing in cardigans, and even bobble hats, which Val now found oddly affecting; for, as his ability to construct a viable erection declined, so the objects of his desire became more and more remote: a typology of the masculine, rather than the man himself.

  On this exceptional evening Val did try to have sex with Hilary. Being obliging, and a complete ingenue, Hilary was more than happy to lower his dirty polyester houndstooth check trousers – with the stylish flat front – and allow Val’s doughy face to knead his crotch. But once the foreplay had been completed – a matter of seconds – and Val was about to munch on the poisoned apple of Hilary’s behind, his worm turned and bored back inside him.

  Behind t
he bar at the Plantation, in a votive niche hollowed out between the liquor bottles, so that she was surrounded in death by the alcohol she had worshipped in life, there stood a framed photograph of Ivy Oldroyd, the self-styled ‘Queen of Soho’. (An absurd pretension: Soho was, is, and always will be a republic of queens governed by a parliament of whores.) Ivy, even in the sepia tones of the old photo, had a face that recalled Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas; she had been a whale of a woman, whose blubber was still constrained by whalebone when she died – of liver failure – in 1966.

  Despite her legendary acerbity – wit as quick and bitter as a salted lemon hurled in your eye – Ivy had suffered the same humiliation at the hands of Val Carmichael, as was now, just as unwittingly, being perpetrated upon him by Hilary Edmonds. She, too, had taken a shine to a young man from the provinces whom she had discovered drifting in the London streets. In the photograph Ivy was standing, jade cigarette holder held upright, with Val beside her, looking ineffably young and handsome and manly. His hair was thick and blond, his tie (yes, tie!) was straight – but can she really ever have convinced herself that he was, too?

  We will never know; the only certain thing is that when, eventually, he rejected her advances, far from rejecting him, Ivy Oldroyd clamped Val to her Ben Nevis of a bosom, suckled him with wormwood and resolved that he would never be weaned.

  As it had been with Val, so it was to be with Hilary. They were both brainwashed into becoming the tireless workers for their respective Queen Bees, and fed with increasing doses of alcoholic royal jelly until they were no longer willing – or even able – to buzz off.