The Tell-Tale Liver

I woke up this morning with a dry mouth. Tongue like the Sahara, throat like the Kalahari. Felt like I’d swallowed one of those packets of clear little plastic balls they put in shoeboxes. DO NOT SWALLOW. Felt like I’d been sucking a wad of kitchen roll all night. Then I opened my eyes and the light hurt. I picked up my head but it was much too heavy so I put it back down again. Flump. My stomach heaved. A tsunami of nausea crashed through me, powerful enough to devastate several coastal villages. Last night. Last night, I recalled, I had been drinking. Drinking with that kamikaze ferocity that only Britain’s nineties children are capable of, only we, the binge-drinking, tactical-chundering, screaaaming-in-kebab-shops, sick-in-our-hands-in-the-back-of-a-taxi generation can do so well. We’ll all be sorry. We’ll all be sorry in the morning, yes, but by twilight we’ll be pouring cheap spirits into sticky plastic bottles and heading off into the night, eyes glowing, lips blazing. And in the morning we’ll be so, so sorry once more.

I rolled over onto my back. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. Not just a stabbing pain; it was rawer, quicker, dirtier. Like I’d swallowed a member of a London gang and he was shanking his way out of me with the kitchen knife he’d stolen from his mum’s house. Real horrorshow, like. And all of a sudden, the pain imploded into that hot white blindness, that bolt of sheer agony that our bodies wince at the thought of. My eyes tore open in time to see my stomach, torn open. My Primark dalmation onesie, too, soaked in red, ripped wide; and a big lump of flesh, some foul organ of mine I never dreamt I would lay eyes on, lay on the bed beside me, pulsating. My liver. My liver had torn itself out of my body and was now sitting beside me, wincing in the stale air of my matchbox bedroom.

Then my liver stood up and spoke to me. His voice sounded like David Mitchell’s. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he squawked. ‘I’ve had enough of your Jaegerbombs and JD and Wray & Nephews and WooWoos. I mean SERIOUSLY. If you’re trying to kill me you’re going the right bloody way about it, and I’ve had enough. I’m LEAVING.’

And before I could say anything, he started inching off like a grotesque caterpillar, leaving blood on my carpet and getting all covered in lint, poor mite. Bollocks, I thought. How long can I live without a liver? Maybe I should follow him. But I was too hungover so I rolled over and went back to sleep, quietly bleeding.