by Will Self
The mirror behind the sink doubled the pill pots, the bottles, the tubes and the blister packs that Joyce had shakily laid out when she arrived the previous afternoon. It was the same device that cocktail bars used to convince drinkers of their alcoholic largesse.
Diuretics and antacids, sleeping pills and drugs to tamp down anxiety, painkillers and dietary supplements – marmalade snatched while falling. She had never properly questioned the justness of all these before: this was what you did, you took what you were told to take.
In the window of a pet shop at the shabby shopping parade in Selly Oak, she had seen them: Scottie’s Liver Treats. Shrivelled, blood-dark excrescences packaged in cellophane. That’s what’s going on inside me. To begin with she had been accusatory of her own body as she watched it wasting in the pier glass she had inherited from her own rangy mother. Is it you, or you, or you? Breasts and bones and blood. But then Phillimore had confessed: he had no real idea where Joyce’s cancer had originated.
‘Although the most obvious, ah, tumour is in your liver, this is not where the cancer began – primary liver cancer is almost unknown in the developed world, Jo.’ Phillimore seemed to be taking personal responsibility for this. ‘Except among alcoholics and people with Hepatitis C.’
‘So … where?’ She was dreamy during these day-mares.
‘Usually, when – as with you – we’ve done a biopsy, we can analyse the cancer cells and discover their origin, but in anything up to 15 per cent of cases this will remain occult.’
‘Occult?’ What was he talking about? A silver-bearded wizard? A voodoo priest?
Phillimore smiled at her consternation – how she loathed him. ‘That’s merely a medical term for something we don’t know – yet.’
Yet, looking at all these useless salves and inadequate physics, then recalling the lead apron, the scattered footfalls, the spooky hum – it struck Joyce that ‘occult’ was precisely what Phillimore’s treatment of her had been. I … I … It was difficult to grasp – peering through the eye holes of her old woman mask, at the woman in the mirror wearing the old woman mask – but in the suicide flat Joyce had somehow begun talking again with her body; they had recommenced a conversation that was reassuringly prosaic, full of itchy chatter and punctuated by companionable burps. This was a dialogue that excluded Joyce’s questioning mind – for all her body demanded was a compliant listener, prepared to sit and nod, and occasionally mutter, ‘Yes, yes, of course, dear’ in response to its own moany self-absorption.
The capsules popped from their blisters straight into the toilet bowl; the pills plopped after them, followed by coils of ointment and splashes of linctus. Then she flushed five times, until the whole business was done.
There was one thing left: the Oramorph, a sticky solution in a squat bottle. I’m in pain, now – the pain of having to lug Isobel around with her, she even has Derry’s mouth. His mouth! Decisiveness mutated into a deadly impulsiveness; she clenched and twisted the safety cap until it yielded, then took a swig.
What? To cease upon the Swiss lunch-time? She tittered, then wove through the Teutonic symphony of blond wood and clashing mirrored surfaces to where clean white linen offered quiet sanctuary. She fell across the bed and directly into her own fugue. Mors slopebit et natora, Cum resurget creatura, Judicanti responsura … Scoresby, naked, working himself up into a right old tizzy, bearing down on Joyce, quiff flicking like a baton; his blue-veined marble torso smashed against the bedside table and crumbled into dusty chunks. He’s only plaster! Her horsey neigh took her back and back to the paddock of puberty, where she watched with a queer hot thrill older, richer girls posting up and down. Their jodhpurs stretched into hide, the girls transformed into centaurs with ponytails, their ponytails fanned out, iridescent, becoming peacock tails. The peacocks’ beaks thickened into dolphins’ snouts, the dolphins arched and dived into oceanic tea cups that shrank into dancing Disney crockery. Scoresby chased the string section up a spiral staircase, while ahead of them scampered the Singers. Liber scriptus proferetur, In quo totum continetur, Unde mundus judicetur … Even in drugged sleep, it seemed to Joyce that such a fantasia was pitifully wasted on a dying woman.
Her watch said it was five when she awoke; she didn’t look at the 24-hour digital clock, and so assumed it must be the following morning, so deeply refreshed did she feel. She picked up the phone and dialled Isobel’s room: no answer. She got up and opened the curtains: fog still nuzzled the panes. She dressed carefully, then further adjusted her clothing in the mirror, turning this way, then that, paying strict attention to the lie of her skirt – was it becoming? She had brought hardly any make-up, only lipstick, and blusher to give life to her moribund complexion; but it didn’t really work, not on such jaundiced skin. Nevertheless, in the bathroom she applied these, marvelling at her own girlishness. Death and Nature shall be astonished, When all creation rises again, To answer to the Judge.
Going along the carpeted gantry to the lift, Joyce discovered Isobel slumped on a leather-padded bench. She was plainly drunk, her mascara smudged, her lipstick smeared, and her cheeks – without the assistance of blusher – as pink as any Heidi’s. There was a stiff paper bag between her slack calves. I see, a little retail therapy.
‘Mum, oh, Mum,’ she gasped. ‘I wanted them – I didn’t know. I wanted them to go into your room – but you’d locked it inside.’ Then, using Joyce’s own thrift in recrimination: ‘We missed the flight.’
Joyce came straight to the point: ‘Well, you’ll have to get another one, then – and pay for it yourself.’ A book, written in, will be brought forth, In which is contained everything that is, Out of which the world shall be judged.
‘Mum …’ Those grovelling tones. ‘What’s happened to you?’
‘Nothing much, but I’ve decided to stay here. And, Izzy, I may not have killed myself, but I’m still dying.’
Isobel was too saturated to absorb her mother’s news, or note the rare diminutive; she slid down further on the bench, a cashmere heap.
‘You’re thirty-three years old,’ Joyce couldn’t forbear from reminding her. ‘I can’t go on carrying you for ever – and I don’t want to.’
After that, for a while, she stood and listened to her daughter’s sobbing, and the heavy whoosh of the approaching lift.
At reception Joyce handed her key to the concierge. He wore a cod-antiquated waistcoat with gold facings and striped sleeves. He had a 17.00 hours shadow and regarded her with the detachment of hotel staff the world over. ‘Madam,’ he began, ‘we tried –’ but was interrupted by a manager, a wispy man with a high-domed forehead, who appeared at his shoulder.
‘Your daughter, Frau Beddoes, wanted us to enter your room – but I was not wanting to do this; it would have been second time in your stay.’
Joyce said, ‘I didn’t realize there was a quota.’
‘Madam – please?’
‘Nothing – really, nothing. I’m going for a walk now.’
‘Do you know how long you will be making the stay with us? Your reservation is for one night, only.’
‘I—I don’t know … not indefinitely; why, do you need the room?’
The manager consulted the screen that peered up at him from beneath the brow of the desk. With one waxy finger he picked out a monotonous tune on the keyboard. ‘I can let you have the room until Sonntag – Sunday – but then there is a higher rate for the Friday and Saturday nights.’ He gave Joyce an avaricious smile, top lip tucked under lower for safekeeping.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Sonntag it is.’ And went out into the street.
Where it was chilly, Joyce realized, with the approach of evening. Swiss sat suppering in the candlelit window of a restaurant opposite, the plump men correct in jackets and ties, their wives restrained by decent couture. From thirty feet away Joyce could still make out the food piled on their plates, and she felt the first quickening of an appetite long in abeyance. Pulling her coat tightly about her and buttoning it, she headed off uph
ill between the bright windows of the bijou luxury goods shops that took up the ground floors of the hunched houses.
Her saliva tasted sweet; the rumbling of her belly was unthreatening. Although she had forgotten an incontinence pad, Joyce felt no seepage or ominous swelling. The wire had been yanked out of her.
Leather goods as edible as milk chocolate; gold-nibbed fountain pens as suckable as teats; jewelled sweetmeats arranged on velvet-covered platters – Joyce gobbled it all up. She turned up a cobbled ramp, passed an inscribed Roman tablet set in a niche and reached a small hilltop park where linden trees with their first green tips stood in raised beds, and a water feature dribbled into a pool surrounded by empty benches. A low stone wall drew Joyce to it; from here she could look out over the old centre of Zürich. Close to, in the fading light, the twin domes of the Grossmünster, the tapered spire of the Fraumünster, all the other high-gabled buildings, with their steeply sloping roofs, weathercocks and gilded clock faces, jostled along the banks of the Limmat. The fog was lifting, scudding up as the darkness streamed down from the woods of the Zürichberg. In the suburban streets, the street lamps came on, braiding the trees. The Limmat unwound, a vinous ribbon between glassy embankments.
Joyce drank in Zürich’s peace and orderliness. The city gave her a curious sensation of déjà vu, as if it were a picture that she had stared at, sightlessly, in childhood: a reproduction of Hunters in the Snow on a classroom wall. The breeze was fresh, with a note of last year’s leaf fall. There was hardly any noise – no police sirens, no shouts, no traffic grumble, only the carillon of a distant tram.
Later, as she made her way back to the hotel, Joyce passed by the open door of a small Catholic chapel. A young priest, closing up for the night, was ushering out two late worshippers; his face was chubby, although his soutane hung loose on his rail-thin body. The sparse blond hairs on his bare head caught the light shining from behind the altarpiece, which was an undistinguished modern diptych: the Virgin Mary on one side, a frumpy mummy in a magenta housecoat; Jesus on the other, not a baby any more, and really of an age when he should be expected to dress himself.
The young priest said ‘Guten Abend’ to Joyce, and she said ‘Guten Abend’ back.
Hearing her accent, the couple, who had been hurrying off, stopped, and the man turned. He was middle aged and solidly built; when he came back into the light, Joyce saw that his otter head was sleek with dark-chocolate hair; he also had a rounded oblong moustache that was less groomed. It demanded, Joyce thought, to be waxed. He wore an Inverness-style coat, the cape fur trimmed. On most men this would have been an affectation, but, as he approached, Joyce saw that, somehow, he could carry it off.
‘You are’, the man said, ‘English?’
‘Yes.’
‘If you were looking for a Catholic place of worship, I am sorry that this is only a shrine, joined now with the Benedictine monastery at Einsiedeln.’
‘I’m not –’
The man rode over her denial; he was gently slapping the palm of his left hand with the gloves he held in his right, an insistent accompaniment to the information he had to convey. ‘Father Grappelli und I’ – he submerged his otter head; the priest smiled and half bowed, thumbs hooked in the cord at his waist – ‘we are the committee people of the old parish here, we look after the restorations and these things.’
Joyce glanced at the man’s female companion, expecting a complicit look, but the woman, whose features were pinched under tight curls, only stared back blankly.
Joyce tried again: ‘I’m not a Catholic.’
‘So, so’ – the zealot wouldn’t let her off the hook – ‘but if you were wanting to be’ – the moustache quivered – ‘or are only needing the comfort of an English-language service during your stay, then Father Grappelli is one of the – ein offiziants at St Anton’s in Minervastrasse. We’ – he indicated the woman – ‘are communicants there also.’
‘P-Please.’ Joyce held up a hand; she thought she was annoyed, but discovered that her voice bubbled with merriment. The priest and the cold woman chuckle-coughed Schweizerdeutsch over each other. Joyce assumed they were telling the natty man to rein it in.
‘Please,’ the man echoed Joyce, ‘that is enough of it now, Guten Abend, we are hoping to see you there.’ He took the woman by the upper arm and escorted her away.
Joyce turned to the young priest, expecting him to say something – the scene seemed to demand it – but he only added his own Guten Abend and retreated inside the chapel.
Later still, Joyce sat on the sofa in her hotel room. She snapped off a spun-sugar span from the stylish confection that had sat on the coffee table since her arrival. Then, reaching inside the sickly cage, she took a white chocolate truffle.
Chocolate.
While the bonbon melted in her mouth, Joyce reflected on her odd journey; from one chocolate to another, from Bournville to here, to the Gertrudstrasse suicide flat, and now back here again. At every stop there had been a sweet treat.
After two more truffles Joyce dialled Isobel’s room. There was no answer. She called reception: ‘My daughter – Fräulein Beddoes – has she gone out?’
‘She has checked out, madam, this evening at 17.00 hours, approximately.’
‘Was it? Did she – did she leave a message?’
‘Yes, madam, there is a letter here for you. Would you like me to send it up?’
Hoping this was generous, Joyce tipped the bellboy ten francs. She might need an ally. He smiled and bobbed his pillbox hat, but by no means obsequiously. Was it her imagination, or was there a certain brusqueness about everyone she had encountered since she had refused Dr Hohl’s cup full of poison? An absence of the patronizing manner the living had towards those feckless enough to be dying; a manner that implied they were the parents of teenagers embarking on a permanent holiday, with very little luggage and inadequate preparation.
Joyce didn’t open the envelope immediately. Instead, she lay on the bed, which had been remade and turned down while she was out. She picked up the aluminium stick and prodded the flat-screen TV into life. Trevor Howard materialized, saying: ‘Go home, Martins, like a sensible chap. You don’t know what you’re mixing in, get the next plane.’
But Joseph Cotten demurred, ‘As soon as I get to the bottom of this, I’ll get the next plane.’
Trevor Howard gave a tough, realist’s grimace – all the more commanding, given his homely features and bat ears. ‘Death’s at the bottom of everything, Martins,’ he clipped. ‘Leave death to the professionals.’
Joyce shifted on the fresh white pillows, curling up her legs, resting on one shoulder and an arm – it was a posture she hadn’t assumed in months. She opened the small box of chocolates the maid had left on the other pillow.
The Snow Hill Gaumont, the cigarette smoke thicker in the gloom than the Vaseline smeared on the lens when Alida Valli was in shot. Whatever happened to her? Clattering down alleys between ruined houses, scrambling over mounds of rubble, splashing through the cavernous sewers – there went the past in its square-cut suit. Then they were on the Ferris wheel, and Orson Welles – such a spendthrift with his talent, in the way that Death was a waster of human lives – was saying: ‘In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’
In the still stiller middle of the night, when the television had dwindled to news and tombolas, Joyce finally read Isobel’s letter. It was only the orphaned wail she’d expected; the ‘you don’t understands’, ‘it’s so hard for mes’ and ‘if only Daddy were still alives’. Of course, the ostensible cause of all these histrionics was her own dying state – Quid sum miser tunc dicturus? – and yet Isobel had abandoned her. She didn’t say where she had gone, whether Birmingham, London or that villa in Majorca belonging to a useless rich friend – one of her favourite bolt holes. There was only silly omniscience; Isobel wrote that she would be ‘watching out’ for her mother, that, despite hav
ing checked out, she would be ‘checking to see that you’re all right’. Really, Joyce thought, if it weren’t so pitiful it might be mystifying.
Over the next three days, Joyce called on the bellboy’s services often. He brought her snacks and, while she lounged in a bathrobe with Widder across its left breast, took her clothes away to be laundered. His name, Karl, was also embroidered on his left breast. Joyce tried her seized-up German on Karl, but he blanked this: his English was fine.
There was no call from Isobel. It had been agreed that it would be best if she went back to Birmingham immediately after Joyce died. There was no requirement for her to participate in her mother’s cremation, then the filing away of her dust – that could be left to the professionals. Isobel was needed for amateurish tasks: sorting stuff into boxes, humping some to charity shops, then asking Joyce’s friends if they wanted to ‘choose something’ from the superior residuum, that in a few years’ time their own friends would be asked to choose.
Late on the Friday evening Joyce called her home number and listened to the phone ringing in her own empty house. As it rang, she pictured the interior of the fridge, empty except for non-perishables: chutneys that wouldn’t die and low-fat spreads awaiting Judgement Day.
The undertakers had been recommended by Dr Hohl’s organization. Joyce called them on the Thursday morning – twenty-four hours after her reprieve – and their response had been as dispassionate as Hohl’s: her deposit was non-refundable, as was the one for the columbarium niche at Fluntern Cemetery. Both orders could, however, be reactivated when necessary.
Joyce had let the phone ring in her own house for a long while, half convinced that Isobel was hiding from her mother, crouching in the walk-in cupboard in her parents’ bedroom, her small shoulders shaking between polythene-sheathed dresses, her Start-rite feet planted between rows of shoes, all stretched by shoe trees. This was where Izzy had secreted herself when she was a little girl and evading elocution lessons or piano practice; but the phone only trilled on, duetting with the dunked-biscuit contralto of the Radio 4 continuity announcer, which had been left on to simulate the departed householder.