Liver: A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes

by Will Self

  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 uphill 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 dé ja` 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 Gertr
udstrasse 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 having 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.

  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 c
hurch — St Andrew’s I think it’s called?’

  ‘St Anton’s,’ the receptionist corrected her, ‘on the Miner-vastrasse.’

  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.