by Will Self
Joyce waited on the steps of the Opernhaus while the Schneider went to get his little clothes iron of a Mercedes. When he returned, and hustled round to open the door for her, Ueli Weiss gaped at Joyce – but was this because of the makeover, or the veil of night and the rouge of street lamps? He kept darting looks at her as he pressed the tarmac around the town to Stampfenbachstrasse. In the restaurant’s vestibule Ueli uttered a small, animalistic grunt of appreciation when she disrobed; or perhaps, since there was a strong smell of pasta and baby cow meat, this was only coincidental.
Beside a slim golden pillar, with a tapestry-covered banquette scratching between her shoulder blades, Joyce scanned first the menu and then the room. The latter was nothing special, with its off-white walls, undistinguished oil paintings and fireplace stripped of paint in emulation of a rusticism that had never existed. Joyce might have wondered why Ueli Weiss’s chosen women found such an ambience seductive, were it not that she already knew that seduction – in her case as much as in theirs – was not an issue.
The discussion of menu selections, and then, when the entrées arrived, of the music they had just heard, was as much a formality as these events themselves. The ear-worm of Scoresby’s semiprofessional Requiem bored into Joyce as she bent to scallops caught in a chicory basket. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Dom-i-ni. The quiff-flicking in the Arts Centre canteen – did it all lead, ineluctably, to this? And had the others – who, she was sure, whether young or old, had been lacking in self-esteem, seeking the stiffest, and shortest-lived, acceptance – been as numb as she? Drained of melody, what remained of anyone’s life? A narrative trajectory as straight and dull, as discordant and crowded, as the M1. Benedictus qui venit.
Bread and wine were needed for a benediction. Joyce ordered tagliatelle, with an amatriciana sauce, and drank deep of the Gamaret, a bloody red that Weiss regally called for – first one bottle, then a second.
He talked, if at all, of his first wife and their damaged child. Her virtues, it seemed, were many – although they were lost in the retelling: a loyal wife, a doting mother, a superb homemaker – the very ideal of a hausfrau; lovely to gaze upon as well … The trauma of Erich’s birth, the severity of his disability, these had been, well, there was no need for him to say this – the implication was as weightily present as he himself – but were it not for their faith …
Weiss had dealt with his own dish – some meatiness swimming in a jus – in double-quick time, and now his hands were free to flop in the orangey light flung down by the fake oil lamp on their table. They were hands, Joyce mused, that always seemed gloved – sheathed in their own tanned hide. She steeled herself, imagining what they would feel like flayed, then dug down between her buttocks and a mattress.
Joyce saw herself reflected in Ueli Weiss’s brown eyes: the two tiny miracles of her birth and her resurrection. He said, ‘She died of pancreatic cancer, you know.’
She hadn’t. The waiter arrived, his hips epicene below his short white jacket, and asked if they would like cream with their coffee. Weiss declined, then said, ‘Here in Switzerland we have the highest levels of pancreatic cancer – you are not knowing this, also?’ His tone verged on the hectoring. ‘It is the creams, the milk and the butter – the fats, you say, we are eating them all the times. We think, maybe, we are still up on the Alps, looking after the goats and the cows – like Heidi, you know?’
And this, she did know.
There could be no question of them going to the apartment that Ueli shared with Marianne in Seefeld – this was how Joyce thought of it, not, despite the evidence of the rings, as a marital home. She knew it was close to St Anton’s, and, while they were at Baden together, Marianne had explained in some detail how she had renovated the top-floor flat where Ueli’s parents had lived, bought a second flat in the adjoining building, then knocked through the walls to create a defiantly contemporary space.
Joyce placed Marianne in this chic penthouse as Ueli Weiss skimmed the rainy streets with the Mercedes. Marianne in black silk pyjamas on a black leather divan. Lobby music welled from concealed speakers while she turned the pages of a fashion magazine. Her abstraction – it was more integral to her than her faith.
As for Erich, it wasn’t possible to place him in this rational environment; he must be in the basement, beside the roaring boiler, crouching in an outsized plastic sack, waiting to be put out with the rest of the rubbish.
Benedictus qui venit in nomine. Ueli had booked a room at the Widder, Dom-i-ni, natürlich. Either because they didn’t care, or else because they were accustomed to his liaisons, the staff showed no particular interest in them; and yet, and yet … surely this was the point at which somebody should’ve balked and made a pointed remark?
Blood. Or even, , estate cars idling in the Mid-East car park, URGENT BLOOD on their flanks, their snouts $$ noses. Up in the treatment rooms, the operating theatres and the intensive-care wards there were plenty of bodies pulled back from the edge of the abyss; jolted with electricity and then pumped with factors 1 through 8. Were these rollings away of the stone any less mysterious than her own? She had witnessed them all her working life – and were the arisen any more grateful, any more content? Did they not subside, soon enough, into the dull mulch of ordinary existence, cursing their miraculously humdrum lives?
It was Karl – her bellboy – who showed them up and up, to a room in the converted attics of the old townhouse, although he made no indication of having recognized her, except for saying ‘Good evening, madam’ in English, as he ushered her in through the door.
Joyce had an impression of queered familiarity. Her previous room at the Widder, with its blond-wood mirrored cabinets, mirror-topped desk and coffee table, its riot of cut glass and urns of fresh-dying blooms, had been crushed to fit under the sloping roof. But she had no real time to take this in: Ueli switched off the lights and pushed her against the wall; one of his hands clutched her right breast, the other she felt coming up under the hem of her dress.
She did not mind the moustache that grew immediately on her top lip, nor the strange tongue that flexed in her mouth. A kiss – always a thrilling taste of the essence of another, from adolescence on: their sweetness, their sourness – the loneliness of the nervy cave, lined with tombstones, where the hermit I lived.
She did not mind the rush and fumble. She felt no sexual arousal, yet was excited by her own suppleness, as she backed and wove between the furniture, absorbing his onslaught until they toppled on to the bed.
When, in the mêlée of snort and paw, Joyce cried ‘Stop it, Ueli!’, he did at once. She rose and bade him unzip her dress, which she saw no cause to damage.
While in the dark and delusive room she searched for a hanger, he, rumpled by his urges, pulled the black wave of his jacket over his amphibious head, then kicked out with his trousers.
She did not mind the way he yanked her underwear, nor the push-down of limbs, then the drag-up of covers. They thrashed about, and Joyce wondered, where are the aches and pains, the cramping of ageing muscles, and the tightening of tendons that, over the decades, had hobbled their love-making? This wanton coupling belonged to a time when she and Derry were newly married and had overcome their shyness, when they fitted together: parts of a single organism engaged in complex self-pleasuring. She remembered the dry greasiness of the condom as she had rolled it on to him, and the live-wiriness of his penis. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini!
She did not mind when Ueli turned her over, nor when she felt him digging at and then into her. She did not mind the astringency of his cologne and the shellacking of his sweat, nor yet intermittent suffocation in the crisp Widder pillows; but she did mind, very much, when he stopped and, rearing up over her, began to describe upon her skin the botched geometry of his caresses.
She had gained her shaming night sight; flung from cabinet, to desk, to window, Joyce saw their mirror-images: the portly pink Swiss, his sleek hair mussed, babbling love twaddle to the cadaver coiled beneath him. She
saw this, and she saw also that Marianne Kreutzer, who sat quietly on an upright chair by the door, had seen it, too. Then Joyce snapped: ‘Don’t fondle my bum, I’m seventy years old!’
After that he finished off brutally – three or four rams into her and all of Ueli went blubbery. He slid away, then collapsed beside her, panting. Osanna in excelsis!
Later, when Joyce was sure Marianne had gone, she got up and, feeling Weiss’s semen trickling out of her, went carefully into the bathroom, where she encountered the pathos of the hand towels.
Agnus Dei
At dawn on 14 July, Joyce Beddoes awoke in the small bedroom of her flat at 34 Saatlenstrasse, in the Zürich suburb of Oerlikon. She did not lie there tangled in dream shreds, or stare woozily at the pictures on the white walls. For her there was no confusion between sleep and wakefulness, and nor were there any pictures in the bedroom. The only representations in the flat at all were two postcards: one propped on the thermostat unit in the kitchenette, the other leaning against a jar that Joyce had intended for rice but never filled. The first was a banal Alpine scene of picturesque peaks reflected in a limpid lake; the second a reproduction of a painting by Trouget, the great contemporary master of figuration, whose acquaintance Joyce’s daughter had laid claim to, despite the very glancing, bar-room nature of their association.
Getting up, going to the toilet, then dressing – these Joyce did automatically. In the kitchenette she made coffee and prepared a bowl of muesli with soya milk. If she noticed the Trouget postcard at all it was not because of what it depicted – the artist’s usual subject matter and conceit, a bourgeois in a suit, distressingly upended – but only to recall buying it; and the other card, from a visit to the Kunsthaus weeks before, because that’s what you did, didn’t you?
She sat by the window eating her muesli and drinking her coffee. She looked down into the dull street, along which came a figure with the draught-animal plod of a woman bearing heavy shopping. But bought from where at this time on a Sunday?
The day smeared ahead, hot, murky and ill-defined. Dona eis requiem. Grant them rest. There was no one for Joyce to meet, no place she had to go, or task she needed to complete. It was Sunday, but what should I rest from? She had stopped attending mass at St Anton’s three months before – shortly after Sechseläuten. Since then Joyce had employed this, the most void of days, to fit in her household chores; but there were so few of these anyway that she soon found herself weeks in advance of her routine, with the Sundays to come purged of any structure at all. She discovered herself slavishly dusting individual Venetian blind slats, morning and evening.
This morning, once cup, bowl and spoon had been washed up, there was only Monday’s rubbish to be put in its Züri sacks, ready for when the refuse truck came truffling along Saatlenstrasse the following morning. Joyce squatted down before the swing-bin in the kitchen and sorted through her meagre detritus, reducing it still further. Tin cans, clear, brown and plastic bottles she put to one side. These she would bag separately and take out with her on her walk, stopping at a recycling centre to post them into colour-coded dump bins.
All this order – what an oppression it had become. The necessary formalities; the correct paperwork; the importance of social responsibility rather than personal impulse. While during her first few weeks in Zürich, Joyce had been relieved – finally, she was among others who understood the virtues of careful administration as well as she – now this was no longer the case. Instead, the go-round of each identical week, with its shopping for solo meals, its washing of a handful of clothes, its payment of the odd bill, seemed like the reprise of a terminal exercise: the winding up, and winding up once more, of a pitifully small estate.
The mounting warmth, the silence in the flat – punctuated only by the Pfeiffer children’s stifled play – the odour of the place that, no matter how much she sprayed and aired, still smelt so much of her, and her alone – it was more than enough to make Joyce swoon; and she would have done, were it not for the stupid, blind vigour of her body rising up from the kitchenette floor, forcing her into walking shoes, gathering the bag with the bottles and a second with her swimming costume and towel in it, then driving her out the door and shooing her down the stairs.
On her body went, frogmarching Joyce up the trails of the Zürichberg, while behind her the sleepy suburb slumbered. The previous Tuesday she had had a letter from Father Grappelli on headed diocesan paper. With tongue twice-tied – by formality, by estrangement – he had informed her that Monsignor Reiter would be returning from Rome in the next few days. The initial response of the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints had been encouraging, and in view of this the Bishop would like to assemble a second report. Would it be possible for Frau Beddoes to –?
But no, she had thought, why should I? Not only assist in the beatification of the goofy Stauben girl – a ridiculous notion – but also be compelled to speak English again, with all the messy intimacy that this would entail. Confined, for day after day, to the certitudes of Grüezi, Guten Abend, Bitte, Danke, and the naming of small needs, Joyce had become ein verschlossenes Volk of one; she almost believed that this was the limit of any possible communication, while beyond lay only this hillside: the dense curtains of yellow and grey-green needles, the stink of their sap stronger than creosote; the undergrowth parched and crackling, with midges swirling over the boggy hollows; and the grasshoppers pulsing like blood.
Her body wouldn’t let Joyce stop for long at the gates of the Fluntern Cemetery, but shoved her on down the Zürichbergstrasse into town. It was still before nine, and under their wide eaves the deeply recessed windows of the houses were blank eyes on the world. What could they have seen anyway on this overcast morning? Only the flapping black silhouette, a ghost of the civic dead.
At the Bellevue Bridge, Joyce had to wait; the Frauenbad – the women’s bathing area – wasn’t open yet. A few other, younger women were lingering on the quayside by the Stadverwaltung, and when the custodian came to open the turnstile they roused themselves and headed for the changing cubicles at a neat clip. The enclosed pool, which was fed with water from the lake, was clearly visible from the surrounding buildings, yet a few of the women bathed here in the nude. Joyce had never considered doing such a thing, but this morning her stupid blind body made the decision for her, by folding its clothing neatly, placing this mound on top of its shoes in the locker, then chucking on top of this both towel and swimming costume.
Joyce’s body threw her into the water – an aggressive dive; then its arms dragged her, while its feet kicked her, up and down the length of the pool. Up and down, up and down – two lengths, four, then fourteen. It was untiring, this body of hers, and the gaggle of girls who had entered the water with her gave up long before Joyce, disengaging themselves from its chilly embrace to pace the concrete surround. Their breasts and buttocks and thighs were, Joyce judged, babyishly soft, and wobbled as they rubbed themselves ruddy. When Joyce’s body hauled her out – no need for the ladder – she couldn’t fail to notice the contrast between her own trim, adult form and these graceless maidens.
Perhaps drawn by this elderly lady’s vitality, they seemed to want to talk to her; one mountainous Valkyrie came over and offered her some mineral water. However, Joyce’s body had other ideas: it hustled her away, towelled her down, dressed her and then escorted her off the premises.
Once she had regained the top of the hill, Joyce was fully intending to take the trail that led off behind the Zürichberg Hotel, through a series of grassy clearings, and so, eventually, home. A hot dry wind had begun to stir the trees, and she knew what this was – the Föhn. The oppressive feeling she had had all morning, that the very sky was smothering her, was this down-draught of hot air from the mountains.
Far from being enervated by the Föhn, her wild body hearkened to its soughing and pulled her the opposite way, on through the woods towards Rigiblick. Then, at the second waymarker, it forced her in the direction of Forch. From previous excursions Jo
yce knew that this was the beginning of a five-hour hike, and, with the temperature rising and no water with her, this would be at best uncomfortably debilitating; at worst it could prove fatal.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem sempiternam. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant them everlasting rest.
Joyce cavilled as sure feet took her along the trail. Combed by the Föhn, the myriad needles of spruce, fir and pine formed ominous figures in the undulating green carpet. She tried to ignore them and busy herself with memories of a convivial past, not lamb of God but leg of lamb, mint sauce, red wine. A family Sunday lunch, Isobel – at her best age, ten or eleven, not rebellious yet. Derry vigorously carving the joint … the scent of rosemary, as if a Provençal hillside had been raised up out of the Birmingham suburbs.
Her wayward body was having none of it; it got at Joyce’s hurting head from behind, prodding her on through the forest: Et-er-nal rest, et-er-nal rest, the 4/4 beat of its footfalls a forced military march. On Joyce went, through the shuttered-up town of Forch, then back into the woods, and finally she arrived at the monument, the Forchdenkmal.
Joyce had visited this before and thought nothing of it, but on this fetid and dismal outing the iron blob on its wide plinth struck her as unspeakably disgusting, cream or excrement dolloped from the heavens. The legend Die ewige Flamme – ‘The Eternal Flame’ – had been inscribed in runic script on the stepped pyramid of the monument. There was also a desiccated wreath, and buried in its crispy core Joyce saw the white-out-of-red Swiss cross. But what war dead could this wreath possibly be honouring after five hundred years of democracy, peace and brotherly love?
Communio
Towards dusk Joyce returned to Saatlenstrasse. Her body showered itself, fed and watered itself, because that’s what bodies did – but it wasn’t remotely tired. The Föhn, a feverish zephyr, rubbed its sweaty flank against the apartment block, while inside the flats the static crackled.