by Will Self
Joyce Beddoes — Jo, to her friends, Jo-Jo, sometimes, in frank intimacy, to her late husband, and also to her daughter, Isobel, when she was a child — wanted to get her head down between her knees.
‘Are you all right, Mum?’ Isobel — who insisted on the ugly sexlessness of ‘Izzy’ — asked her, maybe for the fiftieth time that morning. It was an inquiry, Joyce felt, that was aggressively pleading, devoid of any true concern.
‘I–I just want. ’ She was going to say ‘to bend down’, but the fruitlessness of this desire — the seat was too cramped, she was too frail, and the sound of her own voice, more the hiss and cluck of a barnyard fowl than anything human — overwhelmed anything but the blunt articulation of need itself.
However, that didn’t mean the sentence was incomplete, because Joyce did just want everything: the tray table, the fake tortoiseshell hairgrip in the stewardess’s honey hair, the glossy magazine she could see through the gap between the seats in front. She just wanted that magazine — and what was pictured on it: the corner of a table set for a leisurely breakfast with elegant white crockery, a basket of croissants and a glass of orange juice. Joyce just wanted the shapely hand of the model in the photograph, a hand that held a teaspoon with studied poise.
Instead, Joyce had these things that no one wanted: nausea, sickly-sour and putrid; a painfully swollen belly and a hot wire in her urethra. Overwhelming all of them was a dreadful — near criminal — lassitude.
‘Is it water, Mum, d’you want some water?’ Isobel said; except to Joyce it sounded like ‘warter’, and what was that? A fifth element, a lumpy substrate on which they all thrived and died, like bacteria?
How she loathed Isobel’s affected common accent — it made the young woman ugly or, rather, not young at all any more. She was, Joyce realized, increasingly resembling her father. Isobel had always been Derry’s girl — and that was lovely. For Joyce, the great joy of motherhood had been to discover that the young man who had courted her with Stan Getz 78s and Turkish delight, and who had been as slick and assured as his Brylcreemed hair, was back again; but re-cast, played now by an adorable little girl.
But in the past couple of years Isobel had leapfrogged her father’s mature good looks — his firm dimpled chin, his level brown gaze — and gone straight on to his middle age, when, to be perfectly frank, Derry had run to fat. Isobel, who was only thirty-three, had a dewlap beneath her own dimpled chin. Her brown hair — thick and straight to begin with, exactly like her father’s — had been hacked about and dyed so much that it crackled like candyfloss on her round skull.
No, Joyce didn’t want water — and besides, they had none. At Security their plastic bottles had been dumped in a bin — a sudden scare. And, although Joyce had asked Isobel to go and get some more, it was too late because the younger woman had already spent too long in the ladies.
They had only recently taken off and the plane was still climbing sharply: a tilted tube full of humdrum. At last, Joyce succeeded in wrestling her face to the window. The outside world would, she hoped, play the part of knees: she could press her burning cheeks against cool clouds, take deep breaths of fresh air and quell the nausea.
In the frame of the aircraft servomotors whined, the ailerons jerked, the wings’ tips waggled, rivulets of moisture bleeding across them. Joyce noticed that each pimple of a rivet head was surrounded by a ring of infective rust.
The plane slammed into an air pocket. Joyce gasped, then clamped her hand to her mouth, imprisoning the metallic bile that had sprung up her throat. Down below, way below, wheeled the English Midlands, their jigsaw of brownish towns and greenish fields bucked and then scattered. Joyce saw the slick beading of row upon row of new cars, fresh off a production line. Thousands of feet yawned between her wasting flesh and their toughened windscreens; she was — she realized, as once more the plane rocked and rolled — absolutely terrified.
Terrified of plummeting into a superstore’s car park on the Coventry bypass. Terrified of her meagre hand baggage — a change of underwear, useless make-up, unspent money — being strewn over a rutted field. Terrified of being disembowelled by a pylon, or her limbs amputated by humming cables. Terrified, despite her, of all the forty-odd passengers on this flight from Birmingham to Zürich, having the least reason to fear death.
Even so, Joyce hunched up whimpering, while self-made homilies — What will be, will be — came to her parched lips. Joyce wanted her distant and yet jovial father — one side of his face bulgy with the gutta-percha used to replace the cheekbone that had been pulverized in France, the other smoothly benign. Joyce wanted to be on his knee, in a dappled woodland before the Second World War. But he was dead — her mother and Derry, too. And there could be no comfort in the arms of the dead: you couldn’t feel them — and they felt nothing.
God, then — he would stop her from falling; God and the pure sounds of uncorrupted humanity.
Until the end of January, when she had felt too ill to continue, Joyce had been one of the Bournville Singers, who were rehearsing Mozart’s Requiem in the canteen of the Institute. No one — including their insufferably vain director, Tom Scoresby — could have claimed that their performance was going to be either the most faithful or the most sonorous; yet, even with serving hatches for a backdrop, they had soared.
Requiem aeternam dona ets, Domine. Dumpy men in open-neck shirts — some former car workers, others retired middle-class professionals — their chests heaving; then Joyce and the other women panting up the scale: et lux perpetua luceat ets. She tried not to see Scoresby, his quaver of silver-blond hair bouncing as he whipped up his singers, but instead focused on those beautiful streamers of sound, chords looped over clouds so that the angels might haul her up. Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine on them.
It was so stupid to have got on this flight; and cretinous not to have appreciated everything before she left — the row of storage jars on the kitchen shelf, rice, pearl barley, flour, sugar — but taken all that wondrously dispassionate order for granted.
If I ever get down from this sky I won’t be making that mistake again, oh, no.
The plane surfaced in a sea of cloudy islands, then broke through into unearthly sunlight. Relief rippled audibly along the fuselage. The stewardess unbuckled her harness and stood, swaying, straightening her skirt.
‘Water, Mum?’ Isobel asked again, her plump features stuffed with the gutta-percha of concern.
The immediate anxiety fell away from Joyce, a dark plume dispelled, leaving the black truth behind: the nausea, the wire, the distension, the lassitude. How mad, how mindlessly bloody insane to care if I die now, when in a matter of hours I definitely will.
The rest of the flight was uneventful. There was no question of Joyce accepting the white roll filled with cheesy sludge — an alcoholic drink was unthinkable. The stewardess — maybe she knows — kept hauling herself along the plane to ask, ‘Is it. your mother? Is she OK, yes?’ Then she and Isobel — both of them, Joyce thought, a little bovine — would low: ‘Would you like some water?’
Water! Joyce was pretty sure she’d wet herself on take-off. When they left the house, and she had locked the door for the last time and handed the keys to Isobel, Joyce was gripped by an unworthy rage. What will she do with the good drapes and the seat covers? Her father’s LPs and the Venetian glass? She saw it all — despite her meticulous instructions — dumped in cardboard boxes outside the Sue Ryder shop in Shirley.
By the time Joyce got a grip on herself, they were in the cab heading for the airport — and it was too late to go back for the incontinence pads. And now, well, there must be a dark patch on the pale blue airline upholstery. Shameful.
The plane, moaning, hunkered down towards the ground. Wooded hills, bare fields, arterial roads flowing between the metal barns of light industry. The housing was as samey as that which they had left behind. There was no sign of the Matterhorn — or grassy Alps. No snow — but this was March — or cuckoo clocks, or chal
ets with wide wooden eaves, or Heidi running with the goats, or chocolate bars stacked like lumber. The only clichés were the airport, the runway, the plane braking to a halt, the co-pilot announcing: ‘Welcome to Zürich, ladies and gentlemen, where the local time is 11.48. I hope you enjoyed your flight with us today, and on behalf of the crew I’d like to wish you a safe onward journey.’
Joyce, who had always been a tall woman — a rangy woman, Derry’s expression, and she had liked it from him — couldn’t extract herself from the window seat without Isobel pulling, and the stewardess, who had slid into the seat behind, pushing.
A moment before she got up, with a colossal effort, Joyce lifted her behind and slid the paper napkin beneath it. Fleetingly, she had a touching faith in the napkin’s absorbency, but when she looked back there was an obvious pool of urine. The stewardess must have seen it, but she was tactful — a Swiss characteristic, Joyce supposed — and offered to help Joyce on with her coat, indicating that she understood the need to hide the spreading stain on the back of Joyce’s skirt.
Dr Phillimore — whom Joyce had first met when he arrived at Mid-East, a year before she retired — had known full well why she wanted a letter setting out the details of her cancer, its likely progression and definite prognosis. Although she had no great respect for him as a practitioner — Phillimore’s manner was brusque and self-satisfied — at first Joyce was merely grateful that he didn’t try to dissuade her; this implied that, despite the scant attention he had paid her when he could have been expected to keep her alive, now she had stoically chosen death he would aid her in the Ancient way.
So, no mention of the excellent palliative care team — which anyway would have been an arrant falsehood. Although Joyce hadn’t had a direct hand in the hospital’s administration for a decade now, she kept in touch with old colleagues at Mid-East and knew the threadbare condition of these things. Nor did Phillimore remind her of the many hospices with which the hospital had good working relations; nor yet still did he speak of the tremendous advances in pain management, which would allow Joyce the lucid repose of a Socrates up until she breathed her last.
It was only as Joyce shuffled off down the corridor — grateful for the handrail that she herself had arranged to have installed — that it occurred to her that Phillimore, far from being disengaged, might actively support her decision: not for philosophic reasons, but only because her removal would lighten his own caseload, enabling him — a plump arrow with white coat fletching — to stay within the concentric rings of his allocated budget and hit his targets.
Isobel insinuated under one arm, the stewardess tucked under the other, Joyce scraped her ankle boots over the concrete pan to the shuttle bus. Inside it black-clad businessmen and women urgently gripped their mobile phones. Ignoring their impatience and the damp chafing of her own underwear, Joyce paused, savouring the mineral tang of aviation fuel, the beat of heat and the echoey howl from taxiing aircraft. She looked back at the plane that had brought her, shackled now by gravity. On its tailfin the stocky white-out-of-red cross glowed: it was the opposite of an air ambulance, Joyce thought, bringing her here with great dispatch so that she might be lost, not saved.
Kyrie
Lord have mercy upon numbered bank accounts, neutrality and Nazi gold. Joyce shivered in the shiny arrivals hall, then shook as they shuffled along the shushed shopping concourse. She had no option but — Christe eleison — to allow her daughter to get on with it. Of course, they had taken only carry-on. Joyce may have been intending to stay for ever, but she could make do without a change of shroud; while Isobel would be flying home the following day.
Be that as it may, with her mother to tote, Isobel had to find a luggage cart and ask for directions — tasks she performed, in Joyce’s eyes, poorly. Her daughter was at once loud and ineffectual; she moved with a mock-triumphant roll of her wide hips. Her outfit of high-heeled boots, tight jeans and cropped leather jacket seemed designed to emphasize how overweight she was. She had — Joyce thought, not for the first time — her father’s bullishness but none of his charm.
Finally, they were in a cab, a Mercedes as snug and black as an orthopaedic boot. You don’t see those any more — all the victims of the polio epidemics after the war; grown up — dead, I suppose. As the cab rolled away Joyce admonished herself. Stop criticizing Isobel: this is harder for her than it is for you, because she’s not like you. She’ll have to go home alone — and there is no home for her, really. No boyfriend — or lover. What’s she doing with her life? A photographic project of some kind — an installation, she calls it. Peculiar term, more military than artistic.
Neubahn Birchstrasse. Glattalbahn. Flughofstrasse. The very words on the signs looked heavy, with their dumpy vowels and chunky consonants. The blocks of flats and factory buildings lining the roadway were as fat as the back of the cab driver’s neck.
Isobel had told her mother that she was meticulously photographing the contents of some rooms in the Soho district of London, rooms that had been left sealed up decades before. She had grown animated as she described Mr Vogel’s abandoned office, which was cluttered with Gestetner machines, rubber stamps, typewriters and all sorts of other office equipment from the 1950s — and even earlier — all of it still boxed up.
Joyce had nodded, making encouraging noises, while Isobel explained that hers was a visual inventory of objects that had, sort of, defied time. But really, her mother had thought, this was a nonsense, not proper work at all — and certainly not art — more a kind of play that the grown-up girl indulged herself in, and that various public bodies — colleges, councils, libraries — were prepared to indulge her in as well, by supporting it with grants.
Christ have mercy upon us! So dull this was: the plunge of the underpass beneath the haunch of the wooded hill.
When, up in the sky, Joyce had been ridiculously scared of dying — while not for a second considering the bursting of all those other bubble-worlds of thought, each so fragile and entire, each brilliantly reflecting the entirety of the others — the fear had blanked out the mundanity of her own well-administered death, which was all about her now, like cold dirty snow blanketing the verges.
Isobel got out her mobile phone and switched it on. Joyce blurted, ‘Please, Isobel, we agreed — ’
‘I was only checking it worked, Mum,’ she began calmly enough, then choked up the scale: ‘I. Might. Need to make a call — later. Tomorrow. Y’know’, before hitting the high note of tears. Isobel was suddenly a little girl once more, sitting on her bedroom floor, the minute displacement of a tableau of tiny dollies having provoked this huge grief. Then, it came — or, rather, Joyce moved ever so slightly towards it. Out from the shadow of her own death, Joyce crept into the wan sun of her love for the daughter she had borne and beared.
The two women cried in one another’s arms, oblivious to the Mercedes’s progress, which swept downhill between prosperous villas, then apartment blocks, then past the green splash of the university’s grounds. A tram clang-ting-whooshed in the opposite direction, and to the right of the road the Limmat River shone, touched with the same golden lambency that played upon the domes, steeples and towers of Zürich’s old town.
Joyce had read — because that is what she had been taught to do — a selection of the relevant literature. The liver cancer and the imminence of death itself — these would, she had been informed, take up all her energies. The workaday world would, almost comfortably, recede, milk deliveries and tax returns taking on the character of metaphysical abstractions, now that the most important unknowns were on the point of being known.
And yet. and yet, it hadn’t been like that at all. True, she did find herself caught up — lost even — in the roomy soutane of death, its folds at once heavy and invisible, but there remained no escape from the trivial, the ugly, the banal.
Back in Birmingham they had argued about the hotel. Isobel favoured somewhere with all the four-star trimmings, while Joyce was set on thrift: not because she wished to
deny herself — why bother? — but because she wanted, even at this late hour, to deliver a final homily to her only child on the virtues of parsimony.
‘Why, Mum? Why do you want to spend the night in a shitty little guest house?’ Isobel had been sitting in front of the PC, which was on the rolltop desk in the small room that used to be her father’s study. ‘This place’, she tap-pinged the screen, ‘is meant to be very nice — ’
‘Nice?’
‘Well, stylish.’
Stylish. Joyce grimaced. Yes, she understood that this was hard on her daughter, but must she organize every single particular herself? This may have been a small administrative problem — renting the antechamber to death — but beyond it Joyce sensed Isobel’s psychic hinterland as office suite after office suite, all staffed by time-serving incompetents, not one of whom would have had the gumption to order a toner cartridge for the photocopier, were it not for Joyce’s assiduous management.
Phillimore’s detailed assessment had to be obtained, and Joyce’s birth certificate. There were the first phone calls to Switzerland, followed by the to and fro of emails arranging dates and details. Then the home visits had to be set up. Trained hospice nurses came, who acted as outreach workers. ‘Suicide assistants’, they called themselves, with what Joyce thought of as typically Swiss practicality. All of this she had had to do herself, the unspoken truth being that were Joyce to leave it for too long, Isobel would prove utterly incapable.
Joyce had been initially diagnosed in September of the previous year, but then, just before Christmas, she was given six months to live. Some present. Given them grudgingly, by Phillimore, in a way that, on reflection, she imagined that he considered flattering to her no-nonsense demeanour: ‘Even with further chemo, Jo, 50 per cent of people with this kind of cancer will be dead in six months.’ Jo! Jo! The nerve of the man. Some present. Some time. No hope.
Although it was now the beginning of March, Joyce didn’t feel too bad. She might, under other, easier-to-delegate circumstances, have lingered into spring, to see the bulbs she had planted — a prayerful act, on her knees, hands pressed together in the wormy earth — come up in the garden. Lingered to see the cherry blossom spraunce up the suburb. Lingered to hear Scoresby’s — and her own — Requiem performed at the Adrian Boult Hall. Kyrie eleison.