by Will Self
‘It was only in the — was ist beratend?’
‘Advisory.’ Unusually, it was Marianne who made good Weiss’s deficiency.
‘Yes, so, it was only in the advisory capacity Monsignor Reiter was acting. The diocesan staff, they will now be making this second report. The Monsignor is a papal chaplain you know — ’
‘I know.’
‘Good, so, he has returned to Rome.’
They were standing on the church steps, and Weiss spoke as if he regarded Reiter as a rival of some specialized kind, Celibacy being — this was Derry’s fruity, lawyerly disdain — only an extreme sexual perversion.
It was a drear day, the cloud covering the top of the Uetliberg, the spires and cupolas of the old town brownish smudges on the near-distance. Marianne Kreutzer held Erich’s hand cursorily, as if he were human rubbish and she were looking for a bin to drop him in. The young man moan-whistled; he was handsome, but the steady hand of consciousness was needed to draw finer features.
Weiss went over to talk to a man in a navy trench coat. ‘That is one of Ueli’s guild,’ Marianne explained. ‘They are preparing for the Umzug now.’ When Joyce looked perplexed, she continued: ‘It is part off the Sechseläuten, the men, you know, they are having the big gets-together, the big lunch, the big dinner. They tell these special jokes and things.’ Marianne seemed awfully bored, and, observing the grey foreclosure of her handsome features, Joyce wondered, not for the first time, why does she bother?
‘He will, I think’ (Eyezink) ‘ask you to go with him to the Opernhaus; there is a special concert.’ This she said offhandedly, yet this is what she wants. But why? Stylized poses, Marianne and she as Sabine women, Ueli Weiss naked except for a crested helmet, his penis adamant below a moustache of pubic hair. Ridiculous. ‘Und so, you will come to Baden with me, for the spa day? It is a good thing for us girls (Uzgurls) ‘to be. verhätscheln?’
‘Pampered.’ Weiss had rejoined them. Was it Joyce’s imagination, or were his chocolate eyes melting with a vision of this verhätscheln?
Marianne Kreutzer pulled up outside the Saatlenstrasse block the following morning in the compact Mercedes that looked like a travel iron. Joyce was surprised to see Marianne driving — she had thought her one of life’s more accomplished passengers. When they were pressing north along the neat crease of a dual carriageway, Joyce continued her reappraisal. From the way she managed the car alone, Joyce judged Marianne Kreutzer to be no mere ageing geisha, schooled in Catholic ritual and cultural pursuits, but a competent woman of this particular world: the trim farms, neat business parks and geometric plantations of conifers through which the spring sunlight strobed.
Marianne piloted the car with tight precision — and at speed. Light music mingled with car air freshener. She spoke little, yet when she caught Joyce’s eye in the rear-view mirror, she smiled; not her usual constipated smirk but a grin that displayed tightly packed and beautifully maintained teeth, the white pipes of a cherished organ.
‘So, yes, we are going for one night — you have the night things? Good, so, we are staying at Hotel Blume in the Kurgebiet — the healthy district. It is having its own hot spas like all these hotels, also very high space inside. ’ She lifted a leather-gloved hand from the steering wheel.
‘An atrium?’
‘That is it, an atrium. There we will be pampering our tummies after the treatments.’ Again the smile. ‘That is my treat to you.’
‘No, no, really Marianne, I couldn’t possibly — ’
‘Please. You will be making me cross if you refuse. Also, when I was running my Gesell — my company, I have done public relations for the hotel, so I have discounts.’
‘You were in public relations?’ To her own ears Joyce’s remark sounded tinnily silly: tenth-rate conference-morning-coffee-break chit-chat.
‘Yes, I was businesswoman for many years, working all the times, but I enjoy it.’ The grin. ‘Und, so, I never marry at that time. It did not bother me. I have the company workers — the employees, yes?’
‘Yes, employees.’
‘They are being children for me; and I have my faith, natürlich.’
The way Marianne referred to this ‘faith’ was as a spiritual utility: supernatural gas, to mingle with her own sophisticated musk, a perfume that battled with the car air freshener for olfactory supremacy.
The Mercedes had been ironing along in the slow lane; now, seeing a gap in the faster traffic to the left, Marianne pressed her expensively shod foot down on the accelerator, and the car shot into it, stopping up the conversation.
As they left the main road and drove through the outskirts of Baden, Joyce sat, barely registering the picturesque jumble of buildings in the narrow upper valley of the Limmat, or the ruined Stein Castle high on its crag. She was fixated on I never married at that time. Was this merely the imprecision of Marianne’s English, or had she meant to imply that she and Weiss were now married? Their being lovers had always seemed to Joyce to be incompatible with their status as pillars of ugly St Anton’s; yet at that first meeting — and this inconsequence Joyce could vividly recall — Weiss had definitely introduced Marianne as his ‘partner’.
As Marianne Kreutzer expertly manoeuvred the Mercedes into a parking place, Joyce slid about in these ambiguities of word and flesh.
Joyce had a Holy, holy, wholly bad feeling in the hotel room; everything that should have been soft and inviting coldly rejected her. There were too many pillows on the bed: bleached teeth gnawing the taupe silk of the headboard. The mattress, when she drew back the coverlet, shone like a white-tiled floor. The unsettling reversal continued in the bathroom, where, as she arranged her toiletries, the real tiles sickeningly yielded beneath her heels.
Joyce felt her forehead — a useless examination when practitioner and patient were the same one. Is it my teeth? She had looked after them — almost all were her own; nevertheless, there was the inevitable softening of the gums, the exposure of bony roots in the old mud of her mouth. Not pretty.
But no, a cursory probe with tongue and eye was enough to reassure on that score. Then she reeled back into the bedroom and bit down on the bed. Whatever had happened to her — whatever might happen — Joyce’s teeth would, she knew, survive her flesh, dentine kernels popping against the perforated cylinder that revolved to grind her bones.
She and Isobel had scattered Derry’s ashes into the Severn near Tewkesbury, where, for a couple of years, he had moored a stubby cabin cruiser — another thing father and daughter had shared, to Joyce’s mild derision. His teeth had been intact. She saw them, perfectly clearly, as they fell gnashing into the grey puffs of his dust. Then they sank, and the dust had lain on the coffee-coloured bulge of the river’s shallows, between yellow doilies of algae. Isobel had cried, but then she always did.
No, it wasn’t her teeth; it was this room, with its heavy double shutters and oppressive atmosphere. They had checked in so early — and now they had the whole day ahead of them in this stuffed womb. A speedy reverse gestation: the rubbing away of hardened skin, the removal of adult hair, the tightening of slack flesh, until she and Marianne were thrust from the delivery room of the spa, twins identical in terry towelling, fresh and ready to have their little tummies verhätscheln.
It all reminded Joyce of the Widder, and those four strange days when she was — what? Reborn — resurrected? She didn’t believe any of it, not for a second; all she knew was that she had come to hate hotels more than she feared the grave. She rose, checked herself in the mirror, picked up the key with its heavy-testicle fob from the liverish top of an armoire and left the room.
It was the revelation of Marianne Kreutzer’s body that made Joyce anxious, more than the exposure of her own. She found it difficult — no, impossible — to conceive of this elegant Swiss woman, childless and of a brittle age, being comfortable in her own skin — even if it was only under the eyes of an older, less beautiful woman.
This anxiety was misplaced; the spa at the Blume was a clini
cal unit rather than a leisure centre. There was to be no girlish disrobing beside troughs of carefully graded rocks, or preliminary chatting over peach tea and fashion magazines. Instead, they were interviewed by a nurse-alike in a starched white tunic, who sat behind a metal desk upon which lay blood-pressure equipment and a stethoscope.
She was a tough-looking blonde with no English, so Marianne translated, and Joyce declined die Dickdarmberieselung, das Enthaarungsmittel, die Druckstrahlmassage and especially die Abblät-terung. In German these treatments sounded scarily invasive: a scouring out of her body, then the decortication of what little remained. Joyce settled instead for the basic package: a dunk in the hotel’s own sulphur baths, followed by a brief laying on of trained hands.
‘She is asking to me,’ Marianne relayed, ‘if you are having the heart conditions of any kinds?’
Joyce checked herself from saying ‘only heartlessness’; it was a problematic sentiment to translate; besides which, it had meaning for herself alone.
She and Marianne separated. Joyce changed in a cubicle, and was then led down sloping white-tiled tunnels into the hot bowels of the hotel. Here she was submerged in the shit-tangy waters that bubbled and farted in a giant stone basin. The orderlies, in their plastic aprons, were unsmiling butchers and hustled her along: another body part to be hosed down and then wrapped. The masseuse — whose developed sense of her clients’ modesty caused her to work on one portion of their bodies at a time — gripped Joyce’s calves as if she were squeezing giant toothpaste tubes and exclaimed, ‘Ach! So dick! Sie Händ vil Musklä!’ Joyce, startled from her drowse, reared up, and the woman scattered confused English: ‘Madam, so sorry, I am only that you have very physical, ja?’
At last the peach tea, the recliner, the terry towelling. Lying in soft moist splendour, ‘very physical’ was, Joyce considered, a perfectly apt description of how she felt. The Kursaal was spartan — white walls hung with black and white photographs of highly toned naked bodies, strip lighting rebounding from the chequer board of white and black floor tiles — yet to Joyce it all seemed suffused with a roseate glow. Pleni suni coeli et terra gloria tua. Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. Joyce hadn’t thought she would ever again experience such a complete mingling of calm mind and easeful body.
When Marianne Kreutzer came in, her hair in a towel turban, a second wrapped beneath her arms, Joyce amazed herself. ‘Oh, Marianne,’ she gushed, ‘this is heavenly! Thank you.’ By way of acknowledgement, she unwound her hair, dropped her other towel and stood bare before Joyce’s recliner.
What did I expect? The cruel scar left by the barbed bracelet of a Catholic sect? Or else fierce preservation — a body plumped, filled, implanted, and so engineered into artificial youth? Clothed, Marianne Kreutzer was so poised; yet, here it was; the sagging breasts and scrawny arms, the blue veins straggling through cheesy thighs and the pucker of cellulite on drooping buttocks.
‘Come,’ Marianne said, extending her left hand. Had they always been there — the diamond solitaire engagement ring, and the dull circlet of a platinum wedding ring? Or had Marianne slipped them on as she slipped her towel off? ‘Come, please, Joyce, show yourself to me also, please.’
There was a full-length mirror by the door that was wide enough for the most brassy cream pot of a Zürichers, and Marianne led Joyce to this. Joyce didn’t understand what this ritual was — yet grasped that full revelation was essential. Was it gratitude or pride that made it so easy to abandon a lifetime’s reserve and divest herself? She could not have said.
They stood there looking at themselves, until Marianne Kreutzer said, ‘Ach, Joyce, you are too beautiful. Really, too beautiful. This, I am thinking, is the miracle.’
Benedictus
As Marianne had predicted, Ueli Weiss telephoned the following week to ask Joyce if she would accompany him to the special Sechseläuten concert at the Opernhaus. Joyce was inclined to turn him down; he had, she felt, so neglected her. However, he smoothed his dereliction over with pat English phrases: ‘I’ve been rushed off my feet,’ he said, but it was ‘time we caught up’.
Employing equally formulaic language — ‘It would be a pleasure’, ‘At what time?’, ‘I’ll look forward to it’ — Joyce imposed a week-to-view grid on the shapelessness of her current life. For if not there, on that green coverlet, beneath that Alpine landscape, then when? My father’s death at Ypres had surely, given the odds, been inevitable. Yet he survived. And my own, also — now there’s nothing ahead of me to look away from. I’ve been shifted into some other. Everything is possible — but nothing. heard.
Joyce replaced the handset and twitched the curtain to stare across Saatlenstrasse. There was a noticeboard on the pavement opposite; the Zürich Nord branch of Die Heilsarmee had placed details of their services and their youth club behind glass, together with pious homilies printed on cards cut exactly so and edged with cotton wool to make little clouds of godliness. The biggest cloud — which Joyce, having time to kill, had already read several times — proclaimed, ‘Hilf mir zu erkennen, oh Gott, dass die Dunkelheit in Wirklichkeit der Schatten deiner liebevoll augestreckten Hand ist.’
She wondered if Sandra — who stood beside the noticeboard, and whose sea-green, incorruptible eyes were levelled at Joyce’s window — knew enough German to understand this; to grasp how, according to the North Zürich branch of the Salvation Army, God played with insect humanity: they scuttled about in the spring sunlight, then He plunged them into abject terror by blocking out the sun with His august right hand.
Sandra still wore her ivory-white hair defiantly shoulder-length; while her black slacks and tan suede jacket suggested, to her former colleague and friend, that her retirement was being spent in coffee bars discussing airy abstractions. Sandra, whose lifetime of ministering to childflesh — in between pushing out some of her own — had bequeathed to her more practical support than she could possibly make use of. Sandra, who had none the less eschewed the assistance of her grown children — all competent medics themselves — and booked her own ticket, then driven herself to the airport and enjoyed the short flight despite the gravity of her mission. Sandra, who, with equal efficiency, had now taken a cab here, to Oerlikon.
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 Beck-mann’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 B
