by Will Self
To forestall the agitation of the buzzer, Joyce got her own jacket, snatched up her shopping bag and skipped down the rubber treads of the communal stairs. She tossed a pan-European ‘Hi’ to Astrid Pfeiffer, who was playing out on the landing with a lubriciously pink and naked doll. Joyce shopped daily – for freshness, and to give herself something to do; this encounter with Sandra would be like the others – with Miriam, with Iris, with Ruth – screened off by nylon mesh.
She isn’t my friend. Sandra came across the patch of grass, smiling, her arms open for a hug. She’s only the ghost of an old acquaintance. ‘Joyce, what’s the matter – Joyce!’ she cried out, far too loudly for this quiet suburb, especially in the still mid-morning of a weekday.
‘Joyce.’ Sandra fell into step behind Joyce, as she hurried towards Beckmann’s, the convenience store. ‘I’ve come all this way to see you – to talk with you. Miriam told me –’
Joyce said nothing, silencing her with an angry glare. Told you what? What? That she’d been given her marching orders, too? Those other three had been bad daydreams, mercifully brief, easy to forget, for, although these women had sought her out here, where Joyce lived, the reality was that they’re dead to me. We’ve said our goodbyes. They might just as well have gone to Fluntern, strolled along the cinder path between the box hedges and paid their respects to the waiting niche. These corpses-in-waiting, stinking of the eau de toilette they applied for special journeys, were no more welcome than Isobel, stinking of booze. They all want bloody handouts.
Joyce’s exorcisms of these domestic demons had been short and sharp: ‘I have nothing to say to you’; ‘I don’t care what you’ve heard’; ‘Leave me alone’. No pleases or entreaties; and, while a dispassionate observer – if one such can be imagined – might have expected her visitors to be more persistent, Joyce was so very vehement that, having once recoiled, none of them returned.
Sandra hung on a little longer. She shadowed Joyce to Beckmann’s, then up and down the short aisles, examining swatches of kitchen cloths and jars of sauerkraut. Was Sandra, Joyce wondered, making the sort of three-way exchange comparisons – from Sterling to Euros to Swiss Francs – that were meat and bread to the bankers downtown? Or were these only nervy displacements?
Once Joyce had paid – exchanging pidgin weather chat with Frau Beckmann – Sandra came at her again, saying, ‘Joyce, I’m your friend – Isobel called me as well. I – she – we’re both so very worried about you.’ Then she made the mistake of taking Joyce by the arm.
What did the passers-by see? And the lingerers across the road, outside the pensioners’ drop-in centre? An old Englishwoman – crazy, with lank hair – shouting, while grabbing at that nice lady who lives on Saatlenstrasse, the one who moved in a few weeks ago and who, altogether understandably, keeps herself to herself.
The cotton wool cloud of Swiss opprobrium descended on Sandra as Joyce shrugged her off. ‘I’m a doctor, Joyce,’ she protested; ‘I can help you.’ But this was utterly counterproductive; a futile assertion that was her last. She dogged Joyce back to the apartment block, and as they reached the door to the flats Joyce at last spoke: ‘There’s a taxi rank at Schwamendingenplatz, five minutes’ walk that way. But if I were you I’d go the other way, along Tramstrasse to the depot. You can get a tram direct to the airport from there; it’s far cheaper – and quicker.’
Then, having fulfilled her duty of care, Joyce went inside and closed the door firmly in the former paediatrician’s wrinkled and wounded face.
At Sechseläutenplatz there were fat green buds on the upscratching limbs of the lindens along the quayside. The sun was a dull silver disc, while haze lay on the lake. The crowd, being Swiss, struggled to achieve festive incoherence, one bright, primary-coloured jacket slicking against its neighbour. They watched, muttering their appreciation, as the Reitergruppe – the mounted guard of the twenty-six guilds – undertook its ceremonial canter around the bonfire of the Böögg.
Joyce had set out from Oerlikon at lunch-time, intending only to take her usual walk, up along the snaking paths of the Zürichberg to the Fluntern Cemetery. But, on reaching the far side of the woods, she could see ant-people milling across the Quaibrücke, and the flash of the Umzug‘s penants, as the guildsmen, together with their floats, processed through the streets of the old town.
Gravity dragged her down the hill. With all this exercise Joyce’s knees no longer creaked or groaned; she had bought some ski pants at Globus, and the foot straps transformed her legs into exo-tendons, giving extra snap to every stride, as Joyce marched down the Rämistrasse into town, barely breaking sweat.
She ate an apple fritter – hot and sugar-dusted – that she bought from a stall, then wandered among the guildsmen in their cod-medieval costumes. It was somehow predictable that Ueli Weiss would be in quartered hose, half of each leg yellow, half green. His yellow-green belly could be glimpsed between the sides of his leather jerkin, from the slashed sleeves of which escaped puffs of yellow cotton.
Weiss stood, together with a handful of others similarly attired, at the base of the bonfire. These paperbag manufacturers and loss adjusters were fooling nobody with their embroidered banners and velveteen cowpat hats; burst blood vessels, liver-spotted hands, bifocals pinching pitted noses – in the fifteenth century this lot would be long gone. All apart from Weiss, who, as ever, managed to carry it off. His aquatic head bobbed in the surly-burly of civic gaiety, his manicured hands gripped the varnished haft of a fake halberd, and the moustache bristled with martial pride.
Spotting Joyce in the crowd, he saluted her with his ceremonial weapon. They would, she thought, have sex; there would be no breathy tenderness, only fat slug push and stubble rasp, but so what? The axe head of the halberd chopped at spring air, Weiss grinned, and then his brown eyes rounded: he had spotted someone in the crowd behind Joyce. She turned, expecting to see Marianne Kreutzer leading the miraculous Erich; instead, there was Isobel, being dragged away by the police. Their white-gloved hands were under her armpits, yanking up her short leather jacket. The pale slab of her back was exposed, and the near-legible notelet of her underwear label.
Joyce was disconcerted – she hadn’t thought that Weiss knew what Isobel looked like. But then he resumed his historical mummery – posing legs apart, the halberd sloped – and Joyce realized that he’d made no connection between her and the drunken beggar; it was only the disruption that had drawn his attention.
One of the policemen was now pushing Isobel down by her head into the back seat of a Volvo estate, his white glove grabbing her scrappy dyed hair. Joyce searched the crowd for the Tamil boyfriend, but he was nowhere to be seen. However, here and there, idling among the children rabbiting on toffee apples and their gassing parents, were the town drunks; it was they who were the festival’s cosmopolitan element – some with brown or black faces reddened by wine – leavening the heavy Swiss-German homogeneity.
When Joyce looked back the police car had gone, and Marianne Kreutzer was standing in front of her, with Erich Weiss tethered by her arm. Marianne bestowed her cheek on Joyce – this had been the way of it since their spa break. To Joyce, giving her a peck felt less like further intimacy than being fended off by a shield of foundation.
‘It is your date with Ueli this night,’ Marianne said, while Erich spluttered, ‘Sch-sch-schwess!’ A leakage of breath and spit that was surely parodic of the tongue he couldn’t twist his own around. He was so smart, Erich, and so handsome. At St Anton’s, Joyce had been taken by this mad fancy: that Erich was no more handicapped than anyone else, that his tics, spasms, barks and yelps had been carefully rehearsed and his spasms blocked out. The English apparel – toff’s canary-tan corduroys, the waxed jacket, the brogues – these, she felt sure, were Ueli’s doing, although could anyone be stylish and subnormal?
‘He will take you for supper at Casa Ferlin after the concert,’ Marianne said. By this alone Joyce understood that she was not the first other woman to be so entertained, and nor would she
be the last. ‘Be making sure to have baby cow meat – the veal?’
‘The veal,’ Joyce concurred.
‘It was the dinners for the Umzug last night – Ueli was with his Schneider Zunft until late times. He was ve-ery drunk.’ She laughed.
‘Schneider?’
‘The men who do the’ – she mimed sewing – ‘making of clothes.’
‘Tailors? I had no idea Ueli was a tailor, I understood he owned a Mercedes dealership.’
Erich cavorted over to his father, who was chatting with his fellow Schneiders; from a hundred feet away their hungover hilarity was still salient: shoulders shook, banners quivered. Erich fitted in, Joyce thought; his country squire’s costume was more mummery. St Vitus was Erich’s patron – he zigged and zagged and boogied beside his dad, who, together with his friends, seemed oblivious.
Marianne laughed again, sourly. ‘Aha, no, you see this is only the guild for the ceremony – they are not real tailors.’
Any more than this was the medieval era, with an abbess installed in the abbey church, although, as the big bells of the Fraumünster began to two-tone toll ‘Bing-bong, bing-bong, bing-bong’, a local government official in fancy dress stepped forward and fiddled with a lighter, until the brand he held licked into life. The tots in baseball caps cried out, as worshipful of fire as anyone, ever. The brand sent flames hopping and skipping up the flanks of the pyre. It was, Joyce judged, a cleverly constructed and very Swiss pyre: a giant inverted fir cone of precisely stacked logs. The Böögg himself, far from being a grotesque Guy, was an elegant wooden bodyform that would have sat well in the Kunsthaus. One of the vanquished Winter Spirit’s arms was raised, and as the two women watched this was slit by fire and puffed yellow smoke.
‘I hear nothing now from Father Grappelli,’ Joyce said. ‘Now Monsignor Reiter has returned to Rome, it’s as if I … well, don’t exist.’ She fell silent, appalled by her own self-piteous tone. The Böögg was swaying in a fiery soutane, then the first of the fireworks packed into the effigy’s shapely chest shot up through the linden boughs and arced over the river. ‘I mean,’ she resumed, ‘what’s happening with the political side of things – this business of a referendum? Father Grappelli seemed to think it would be easy to get the necessary signatures – fifty thousand, is it?’
Again the tightened face and the acerbic laugh; whatever creaminess Marianne Kreutzer had exuded in Baden had now gone off. ‘You – you, well you are not understanding, Joyce. The referendums – no one is giving their votes. No one cares, you see. No one cares.’ More rockets launched from the burning manikin, as the crowd sighed with pleasure; a flight of pigeons lifted off from the Badeanstalt – the open-air swimming pool out in the river. The Böögg half crumpled, embers bleeding from his cracked ribs. It was a creepily human motion – as if the figure were a suicidal monk, who had doused himself in petrol, then sparked a match.
Marianne Kreutzer urbanely lit a mentholated cigarette. ‘I was, you know, twenty-one when the Federal Constitution was changed to make the women do the voting – to give me the vote. By then … well, I was making my money already three years. There are some cantons – Appenzell Innerrhoden – where there was no women voting until 1990.’ She took a pull on the cigarette and exhaled; her expression said it had lost its minty savour. She dropped it and ground it out with a patent leather toe; then she picked up the butt and clicked to a steel bin, where she discarded it. By the time she returned to Joyce’s side, the Böögg was no longer humanoid – was no longer anything, and the Sechseläuten was only another bonfire.
‘The churches, the state, the banks also – in Switzerland, Joyce, to have any of these – these Grossfirmen …’ She cast about, almost wildly, having reached the limits of her English.
‘Do you mean institutions?’
‘Exactly so. To have any of these big institutions pay any attention to a woman – an older woman – well, this is, I think, also the miracle.’
In the interval Joyce followed Ueli Weiss to the circle bar, where, on a shelf supported by two gold-painted plaster cherubs, two gin and tonics were waiting for them. He used the paper napkin with his surname written on it to blow his nose and wipe his moustache, then he began an explanation. This was not the usual venue for this festival concert: it was normally held in the Grosser Saal of the Tonhalle; but then nor was it the custom to have a visiting orchestra playing – in this case, the San Francisco Symphony.
Joyce only half listened to his lecture on Zürich’s musical politics; she sensed that Weiss was giving it not because he thought it of interest to either of them but simply to fill time: a verbal intermezzo.
Other couples, the vast majority in late middle or old age, stood having their drinks. The wealthy and cultured Zürichers were dressed in their habitual navy blues and shades of black – with, here and there, a youngster in her fifties who dared brown. Jewels sparkled at plump wrists and plumper throats; these women’s bodies were display cushions, scattered in this gilded cabinet.
The programme, thus far, had not entranced Joyce. Her thoughts had not been about music – or music itself resounding in her mind, note-for-thought, tone-for-feeling, the organic development of mood – but preoccupied with how very un-musiced she felt. The musicians had clodhopped on to the steeply raked stage, frumpy cellists and tubby percussionists, their evening dress worn as lovelessly as traffic wardens’ uniforms. Had they been this apathetic when they left the City of Industry, or had the pall fallen on them only as their flight descended into Zürich?
And there, in the shape of the local conductor, had been the cliché Joyce dreaded: he was a Francophone Swiss from the hinterland of Geneva, who was yet more Bavarian than a puppet in wooden lederhosen strutting from underneath a clockface. Tick-tock, tick-tock – he gestured from the waist, and hearkening to his Taylorization of sound, the assembled lines of players sawed and hammered and blew. The opening chords of the Overture Egmont, which should have been a Romantic storm surge, were instead a mechanical pumping out of sound.
As the San Franciscans laboured to the Swiss beat, Joyce despaired. There was no dizzying ascent into the orbit of the crystalline chandelier that dripped from the ceiling of the auditorium; instead, she was sent truffling between ankles, where she smelt the shit of toy poodles smeared on expensive shoes.
Back in Birmingham, back in time, on those rare occasions when she had thrust Derry before her to a concert – it wasn’t that he was crass, or that he couldn’t swing to a slower beat, only that he preferred his Laphroaig to hand, and to be able to turn up the volume when Dexter blew hot and mean – Joyce, not liking herself for it, would involuntarily cast her eyes to one side, again and again, gauging his response to what they heard and then, sickeningly, adjusting her own.
After the piano had been brought on for the soloist – with some huffing and puffing – the second piece in the first half of the concert began. The San Franciscans obediently transported him through the choppy waters of the Allegro, if not con brio, then at least with dispatch; then the young man – who, Joyce didn’t need the programme to tell her, was French from the tip of his ascetic nose to the ends of his lily-white fingers – geared himself down for the Largo of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto.
His forearms and thighs appeared to stretch out from his forward-canted trunk. Still, no fiery embers fell from this Böögg: he might have been typing so far as Joyce was concerned. To her left, Ueli Weiss’s thumb supported his smooth-shaven chin, while his manicured index finger probed the soft barbs on his upper lip. Frozen and tantalized, she watched the white half-moon of his nail trace the wing of his nostril.
At the interval Joyce had been desperate to pee; she rose but Ueli remained solidly seated, until, the applause pounding her ears, she was compelled to clamber over his knees.
In the second half the San Franciscans abandoned their factory and went wandering in the Alpenglow of Strauss’s tone poem. Joyce was too tired to accompany them, as they humped their harps and drums into decep
tively pillowy couloirs and across polished blue glaciers. Besides, there was a fat lady, not singing but shouting Domini, Domini, as a Brummie slapper might bawl at an unwanted child, her every ragged warble bracketed by the still louder cries of the bass baritone, Derry, who stood outside the Top Rank Bingo Hall at Five Ways, intoning mournfully, Dom-i-ni, Osanna in excelsis. She ran away from him and found herself beneath the purple sky of Monsignor Reiter’s soutane, with his pale face – where it shouldn’t be! – the sun.
Either Ueli Weiss didn’t deign to wake her, or he cared not that Joyce slept. She was roused by the deadening réclamé of the Zürichers, only to witness the spectacle of the mousy first violinist scuttling into a bouquet. As the clapping scattered, Ueli said invitingly, ‘Und now, supper at Casa Ferlin.’
Joyce hadn’t gone so far as to obtain a full fur, but the saleswoman at Weinberg’s had persuaded her to buy a black leather coat with genuine mink at cuffs and collar. Her old-new coat was abandoned. Beneath the leather was a real dress, plum silk, cut on the bias; and beneath the dress there was an armature of more silk and wire, that, amazingly, provided her with a not unbecoming décolletage. The lank grey crop that the hairdresser in Oerlikon had treated with not much more than professional neglect – shampoo, set, trim, the hedging of old growth – was, at Marianne’s instigation, borne across town to Schwartzkopf’s on Urianastrasse, where it was artfully dyed, before having completely new topiary.