Liver

by Will Self

  At long last Joyce had replaced the handset and gone back to the TV, which broadcast a succession of films – Rebecca, National Velvet, It’s a Wonderful Life – that were a reassuring background to her resurrection. For, while to begin with Joyce was able to persuade herself that the numbness was due to her under-dose, by Thursday evening, when she felt hungrier than she had been in months, there was no denying that change was under way.

  She didn’t feel particularly well – how could that have been? But she wasn’t not well: this dullness of body and mind was wholly unfamiliar, a state of suspension. There was no medication for her to take, yet she remained continent. On Sunday morning, when she put on her clean underwear and stood in her slip in front of the biggest of the many mirrors, Joyce was jolted from her inertia by the sight of her own flesh.

  Which was no longer jaundiced. It sagged, certainly, but only in the way expected of an older woman who had once been rangy, with beautiful high-rising breasts – these last, Derry’s words, not her own vanity. And while for two decades, the jibe between white lace and pleated skin had struck Joyce as the worst turn-off of all, she now found herself turning a little this way and a little that to admire the new-old birthday suit.

  After four days of reclusion, the lobby was an alien planet. Floating from the lift to the reception desk, Joyce marvelled at the miraculous bubble-worlds of other people: an American mulling over a tourist map with his wife, a squat black maid struggling with an industrial vacuum cleaner.

  With her cream blouse, neat brown tweed suit and her good coat from the new Selfridges in the Bull Ring – fake-fur trim, unlike the Inverness worn by the odd man she’d encountered outside the chapel – Joyce looked, she thought, perfectly nice. Around her neck was a heavy Victorian gold chain, given to her by Derry for their fortieth anniversary. Perhaps a little premature, but … he had said, presciently.

  She placed her lilac carpet bag on top of the desk. Embroidered with gold fleur-de-lys, it was possibly too young for Joyce, but it was exactly the right size. Once the bill had chattered from the printer, it chewed Joyce up. Of course, there was Isobel’s added on – including many and pricey spirits miniatures – but her own snacks, teas and laundry were also, in the normal course of life, prohibitively expensive. She did well to hide her consternation, giving away only her Visa card.

  ‘You are wanting a taxi to the airport?’ the receptionist asked, and, when Joyce denied this, she suggested instead: ‘The Hauptbahnhof – the train station, maybe?’

  ‘No.’ Joyce shut the clasp of her bag with a definitive click. ‘Thank you, I’ll walk. It’s’ – she glanced at the revolving door which spun sunlight into the lobby – ‘a lovely day.’ She made to leave, then stopped. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know how to get to the Catholic church – St Andrew’s I think it’s called?’

  ‘St Anton’s,’ the receptionist corrected her, ‘on the Minervastrasse.’

  At first hesitantly, then with increasing confidence, Joyce made her way down through the cobbled streets of the old town, then across the Münster Bridge. The fresh air was heady, and when, to the south-east, at the far end of the cobalt-blue lake, she saw the seven snowy peaks of the Churfistern, she gasped, then stood at the balustrade for several minutes, drunk with their loveliness.

  It was only ten minutes’ walk to the church; the tramp down Seefeldstrasse, between dull five-storey houses and apartment blocks, wearied her, but Joyce got there feeling all right – not nauseous. She hadn’t thought ahead, and was oddly disappointed to realize she’d arrived at the end of a service. Father Grappelli was standing on the front steps, together with an older priest. Both wore snowy-white modern vestments, and long scarves embroidered with naive standard-bearing lambs. Joyce – despite not being a believer – thought the scarves demeaning of their office.

  The priests were chatting with their parishioners: prosperous families of burghers – the adults had the self-satisfied expressions of the recently shriven. Joyce scanned the throng for the otter-headed man and his tight-faced friend, but was partially relieved not to see them. Then, affecting an interest in a plaque on the wall, she made her way along the side of the church. Here, she came upon the blockhouse of a 1960s vestry. The door was open, so she went in.

  A teenage girl was bent over directly in front of Joyce, her long chestnut hair hanging down to the parquet floor, which was spread with newspaper. A woman of almost Joyce’s age – but plump, ruddy-faced, and squeezed into woeful jeans – was aiming a spray can at the silky cascade.

  ‘OK,’ the old-hippieish woman cried, ‘jetzt – aufstehen.’ The girl straightened up, and with her clawed hands vigorously backcombed her laquered hair until it rose up in a great ruff. ‘Und … nächster!’ the woman cried, and the girl scampered away to be replaced by a second, who adopted the same posture and was duly sprayed.

  ‘Well, so, you have converted, yes?’ said a voice right behind Joyce. She jerked round. Quantus tremor est futurus, Quando judex est venturus, Cuncta stricte discussurus. Breath on my neck, moustache prickle; night presses against a cold black pane, vast, impersonal, yet alive.

  ‘Uh – y-yes; sorry – I mean, no.’

  The otter-headed man laughed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he corrected her. ‘I gave you a jump. Marianne always says to me’ – his nut-brown eyes slid away from hers, to where the tight-faced woman was examining a noticeboard – ‘that I am too on your face.’

  ‘I think,’ Joyce said, ‘the expression is “in your face”.’

  The moustache pouted. ‘Exactly so, in your face.’

  He was in a loden coat today, olive with horn toggles. He really ought to have a Tyrolean hat as well – its absence made his hydroplaned head seem that much sleeker.

  ‘You must allow me to introduce myself,’ he said. ‘I am Ulrich – Ueli for shortness – Weiss, and this is my – how do you say it? – partner, Marianne Kreutzer.’

  Hearing her name, the tight-faced woman came across and all three shook hands formally. Joyce put her in her mid fifties – older than Weiss – and with her gaunt, angular figure, she hardly seemed mistress material.

  Joyce found herself co-opted by Weiss and the Kreutzer woman. They introduced her to some people: ‘Frau Beddoes, she is visiting from England.’ And showed her round the church. ‘An undistinguished building,’ Weiss said, ‘you will agree.’

  Joyce did. Anglican churches were bad enough, with their tepid air of state-assisted piety, but Catholic ones had always seemed far worse: musty battlefields, where lust and repression fought it out, in the process torturing wooden effigies, then nailing them to the walls.

  The trio stopped in front of a headless figure that stood in a spot-lit embrasure. It wore a blood-spattered toga, and its head rested at its sandalled feet like a gory football. Joyce stared at the severed head; it stared back, the Aztec eyes maniacal.

  ‘You would say,’ Weiss lectured, ‘St Antoninus, but here St Anton for shortness. He was the public executioner at the time of Emperor Commodus, second century, and responsible for the execution of St Eusebius, among many other martyrs …’

  Joyce registered that Weiss was trying to make all this interesting to her, but she was bored already. Sacred objects, she had always felt, needed to be so much more powerful and affecting than even the greatest artworks; if, that is, they were to perform the tasks assigned to them. Otherwise, what were they? Useless tat; and what did that make God? Only a fervent bargain-hunter in a long white dress.

  Marianne – the Kreutzer woman – had strolled to the next embrasure along. Here she lit a candle and stuck it on a blackened spike spattered with waxy rime. Joyce searched the tight face – its grey eyes closed, its long top lip vertically creased – for evidence of prayer, or yearning, but saw neither.

  Weiss droned on: ‘… then this fellow, this executioner, he is having a dream, you know, a vision thing, Christ comes in his face, yes? And he repents.’ He brought his hand up abruptly, then dropped it. ‘Then it is his turn for the chopping, a
martyr also now.’ Except that this sounded like ‘Allzo nao’. Weiss smiled, and upper canines slid from beneath his walrus moustache.

  ‘We Catholics have so many of the saints.’ He took Joyce by the arm and led her on. ‘Sometimes I think too many. No longer is there the selling of indulgences and all those corrupt practices; but the saints, I think this non-believers find hard to … accept: that a man, the Pope, can decide that the naturgemäss – the natural law – has been – how do you say it – suspended.’

  Clearly, Weiss expected a response. Joyce said, ‘I had no idea there were so many Catholics in Switzerland; in England we think of the Swiss as very Protestant –’

  ‘No music, yes? No dancing. All in the black, yes?’ He laughed. ‘In exact fact there are more Catholics here in Zürich than the Zwinglians. Many Old Catholics allzo; y’know, who, ah, say mass in the Latin. ’

  They reached the end of the nave and went into the vestibule. Father Grappelli was seeing off the last of his communicants: an elderly couple, both with ski sticks, both swaddled in full-length quilted coats, who were haltingly making their way down the shallow stairs.

  Seeing them, Joyce remembered that she was ill – dying, in point of fact. Felt, too, Derry’s absence – as acutely as any human presence. Church bells were pealing across the valley of the Limmat, glockenspiel notes struck on bronze. Pigeons wheeled, Joyce’s head spun. She staggered a little, and Weiss tightened his grip.

  Marianne Kreutzer came up beside them, her face betraying little concern. ‘But you are not well, so?’ she said. ‘I think this other time.’

  ‘I’m all right, really.’ Joyce detached herself from Weiss – his cologne was lemony, alcoholic, Father’s bay rum.

  ‘Perhaps you are hungry? It is lunch-time, we would’ – he sought confirmation from his partner – ‘be delighted if you would like to join us.’

  ‘Off course,’ Marianne said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Joyce gathered her carpet bag into her arms. ‘I wouldn’t want to impose.’

  ‘It is not imposing.’ Again, the wolfish smile. ‘You are a guest in our country. Normal times we go to a bistro near to here – but of course you have visited the Kronenhalle?’

  Joyce looked blank.

  ‘No? But really this is too bad, this is the most famous eating place in Zürich; to be here and not to visit, it is almost a crime – you will please to be our guest.’

  Father Grappelli was lingering, rolling and unrolling his scarf of lamb. He had a tentative expression on his boyish face, and Joyce guessed he was hoping the invitation would be extended to him. It wasn’t. Weiss, coughing Schweizerdeutsch, took the priest’s hand and shook it. Then he explained to Joyce, ‘I will get the car’, before skipping off down the steps while pulling on his suede gloves.

  Joyce turned to Marianne: ‘Please, it isn’t necessary for all this …’

  Her tight face clenched still more. ‘Frau Beddoes,’ she said, ‘Ueli is not so ordinary Swiss person. He is ausländerfreundlich – you say, friendly to the aliens. That is his … thing, so, come, please.’

  Not deigning to take his hand, Marianne Kreutzer nodded to the rejected priest, then indicated to Joyce the car that was already idling by the kerb, as compact as a travel iron. As he leant across to open the passenger door, Weiss’s otter head dived out of it.

  In the oaken burrow of the Kronenhalle, the Zürichers – sleek, black and dapper as moles – tunnelled their way through mounds of food. Many of them blinked from behind tinted Christian Lacroix glasses, as if even this subterranean ambience were too bright. The Zürich guilds’ coats of arms were painted on to the creamy plaster of the walls, up above the wood panelling. Waitresses bustled among the crisply laid tables, while the hunched maître d’ slowly propelled a trolley up and down the aisles, the silvery lid of which was rolled up, exposing a glistening joint of beef: the meaty pupil of a steely eye.

  Stripped of his loden coat, Weiss was disconcertingly exposed in a black roll-neck pullover that was so sheer Joyce could see his nipples.

  ‘So, here, you see’ – the lecture was resumed – ‘the most celebrated Zürich restaurant. Here in this place since the 1800s. Haunt of the writers – Dürrenmatt, Keller, Mann, Frisch. Musicmakers also – Strauss, Stravinsky, Perlman …’ He rattled out the names with scant feeling. ‘I think maybe the artists’ presence more obvious still – Miró, Braque, Chagall …’ As he pronounced each name he pointed to their respective efforts: small canvases, their oils tastily effulgent beneath downlights. ‘Und there, by your back, Frau Beddoes, Picasso.’

  It was a blue boy on a lighter blue foreground, seated, with his naked arms encircling his bare legs. There was a pierrot’s conical hat on his tousled head.

  ‘Same family, see, the owners – two generations now – have been very clever.’ Weiss leant forward, his black breasts resting on the white linen. ‘Some are saying they took the paintings from the escaping Jews in the war … I think this is but only gossip. See, the, ah, presiding spirit of the place’ – he gestured to a portrait of a formidably beaky matriarch that hung up high by the curved cornicing – ‘Madame Zumstag, by Varlin.’ He snatched at his own snub nose with all five of his plump digits. ‘She does not, I think, look like an anti-Semite.’

  Marianne sighed and rattled her menu card. She’s bored, Joyce thought; bored, disapproving and hungry. All three.

  A waitress halted at their table; in her trim uniform of black dress, white cap, black hose and white apron, she was perfectly timeless. A stilted bilingual interchange began, as Weiss – unnecessarily, as these were printed in English as well as German – explained the dishes to Joyce: ‘Mistkratzerli … gebraten, mit gebraten … Mit Knoblauch und Rosmarin – it’s, you would say, a little bit of baby chicken, yes, with the garlic, yes, and rosemary.’

  Joyce was fully intending to decline the food, or to have any drink besides sparkling mineral water. But Weiss prevailed upon her: ‘Please, this is a Lattenberg Räuschling, an ’05 from a local vineyard; we are right to have the pride, I think.’ A moist and red lower lip pouted from the luxuriant moustache.

  Because of its very rarity, the foody aroma of cigarette smoke in a confined space seemed a special treat. The hushed munching of the diners and the priestly garb of the efficient staff, all of it felt so … enormously pleasing. Then there were Joyce’s insides, which were talking to her again, although not with the barely suppressed hysteria of incontinence, nor oedema’s plummy nastiness. I’m hungry, her stomach blared. A trumpet spreading a wondrous sound.

  The cerise wine was clearer than complete transparency. It smelt of fresh-cut hay. Joyce had to restrain herself from glugging. She had never been a drinker – or, rather, Derry had been a whisky drinker, and it always seemed a waste for Joyce to open a full bottle of wine, then leave it in the fridge, expiring beside the mayonnaise.

  She ordered the baby chicken for a main course, and some of the Leberknödel soup to start. She hadn’t consulted the English translation, so Joyce didn’t know what Leberknödel was – or were – but soup was always comforting.

  The Swiss ordered as well; then, after grudgingly asking whether Joyce minded, Marianne Kreutzer lit a long slim menthol cigarette. The minty acridity suited the woman, while the smoky threads pulled her face still tighter. Weiss began – gently enough – to probe Joyce concerning her widowed status, her former career and the rest of her life back in England. She was happy to impart; however, she remained vague when he asked her the reason for her being in Zürich, and the likely duration of her stay.

  Their entrées arrived. Joyce’s soup smelt so heavenly that she shifted uneasily on her seat: surely the hot wire would still be there, only buried deeper? But there was nothing; only the companionable rumble of her stomach, so she took a sip of the soup. It was meaty, herby … tasty. Fleshy dumplings floated in the life-giving broth, and Joyce spooned one up and bit into it, releasing tangible pulses of flavour.

  ‘Mmm,’ Joyce couldn’t restrain herself
from exclaiming, ‘this is absolutely lovely!’

  Weiss, who was digging at a tall seafood cocktail with a long-handled spoon, peered at her with his lustreless hazel eyes. ‘I’m glad you are liking it; it is not a very typical Swiss dish – more the German, I think.’ (Eye zink.)

  ‘And what’s in these dumplings?’ Joyce asked, biting into a second.

  ‘The dumplings? Ah, so, die Bouillon mit Leberknödel, yes, you would call them liver dumplings.’

  Scottie’s Liver Treats. Occult origin. Her body, sad and lonely, tossed without regard across the middle of the bed they had shared for ten thousand nights. Her own middle, a mass of alien tissue, revolting, poisoning her with its blind and senseless growth.

  Joyce was laughing; a full-throated guffaw, the like of which she hadn’t experienced in months. She laid down her spoon and picked up her napkin to cover her mouth.

  ‘You – is everything all right for you, Frau Beddoes?’

  Imagine that thick fur against your neck – or your thigh!

  Marianne, having shuffled the lettuce leaves and slices of smoked meat on her plate, resumed smoking her lungs.

  ‘I’m f-fine, really, thank you, Herr Weiss.’

  She recovered herself – but only partially. Some blockage had been swept away by her hilarity, and now Joyce found herself telling the moustache – for the man was only a whitish growth hanging off the back of it – far too much: her illness, her loneliness, her pathetic and inadequate daughter, her miserable decline and Phillimore’s indifference.

  Then Joyce told Weiss how she had heard about Dr Hohl’s organization because of a high-profile case in England: the woman with motor neurone disease haranguing TV news reporters and chat show audiences, then departing for Switzerland and the afterlife, her wheelchair carried shoulder-high on to the airplane, the litter of a crippled warrior queen.