by Will Self
Such speculations are useless. Insectoid, arthropod, protoplasmic blob, cyborg, robot built from purest iridium with laser-polished coltan fittings – these are the feeble projections of human imagineers on to the mighty screen that is the universe. It is sufficient to paraphrase Wittgenstein, and note only that if we were able to see the Martian as he really was, we wouldn’t understand what it was we were witnessing.
So, on this basis, let us go with him to Totteridge, to the shuttered light-industrial premises between the Great North Road and the South Herts Golf Course that Stenning Offset used to occupy. Unobserved, save by us, the Martian undid the padlocks and went inside. As soon as the door was locked he resumed the pace of action last witnessed at the St Charles. Even so, it took him the best part of the day to fuel, programme and then load the craft that would carry Val Carmichael’s liver on its 38-light-year voyage to the Martian’s home planet.
Late that evening the Martian sat with Hilary and Her Ladyship in the snug back bar of the French in Soho. The Martian raised his glass and muttered ‘Bon voyage’. The others had no idea what he was talking about and assumed that he was drunk. But the Martian had never been drunk in any of his two thousand, six hundred and forty-six solar years.
At that precise moment, in Totteridge, the roof of Stenning Offset exploded in a sheet of white flame and a smoothly tapered ellipsoid lifted off into the sodium-stained London night. It was invisible to either human eye or human instrumentation, and, although it left considerable devastation in its wake, no one was injured. Leant upon by the gas company, the insurers paid out without a murmur.
Val Carmichael’s funeral was a desultory affair; only the older members of the Plantation Club even bothered to attend. To them Val was … well, something – but to the younger crowd he was merely an ‘old cunt’. Those who live by the cunt, do indeed die by it.
As has been remarked, irony was not an attribute of the Martian; however, please feel free to consider how inappropriate it was for a man with a pig’s liver transplanted into him to be burnt at Golders Green Crematorium. Moreover, why not indulge in a little Schadenfreude as you gaze upon the Dog, the Poof, the Cunt, Hilary and Her Ladyship, who, even in the brilliance of a summer’s day, have the dazed-grey look of ghetto-dwellers about to be relieved of their remaining teeth by Nazis with pliers.
Mark only these two further things. If you feel aggrieved by the way this narrative has moved towards its – frankly sickening – conclusion, proceeding not with straightforward honesty, but waddling through needless digressions and lunging into grotesque interpolations, then all I can say is that it has only been mimicking the Martian’s own perception of humanity. For, where we are confronted with the nobility of feeling, high culture and deep spirituality, he sees nothing but the stereotypic behaviours of anthropoid geese.
Second, if you are inclined to feel bad when you contemplate the cosmic fatuity of a species that exists, in its given form, purely so that a few score individuals may be harvested for their cirrhotic livers, then don’t: self-pity is such an ugly attribute of the human character, and one particularly pronounced in the alcoholic.
Instead, why not return with the other members to Blore Court and climb the two flights of stairs to the green baize door? Take off your coat, throw it over a stool, wink at the Prince Consort, then watch his glazed eyes begin to rove as the Poof pounds upon the piano keys, wrenching the Death March from its dusty bowels.
The gang are all here – all in their allotted places. The Martian would have had to decamp if things hadn’t panned out in Totteridge, but now he’ll be able to stay a while longer. See him sidle up to the bar – and note how attentive young Stevie is.
The Martian orders a round, specifying a triple for Hilary; and, in time-honoured fashion, Hilary pours a bit of his vodka into Stevie’s glass of lager. All is as it should be as they raise a toast to the memory of Val Carmichael: the gavage is under way. It may take a while, it may perhaps seem cruel, but then there’s no finer flavour in the universe than foie humain.
Leberknödel
Introitus
Joyce Beddoes – Jo, to her friends, Jo-Jo, sometimes, in frank intimacy, to her late husband, and also to her daughter, Isobel, when she was a child – wanted to get her head down between her knees.
‘Are you all right, Mum?’ Isobel – who insisted on the ugly sexlessness of ‘Izzy’ – asked her, maybe for the fiftieth time that morning. It was an inquiry, Joyce felt, that was aggressively pleading, devoid of any true concern.
‘I—I just want …’ She was going to say ‘to bend down’, but the fruitlessness of this desire – the seat was too cramped, she was too frail, and the sound of her own voice, more the hiss and cluck of a barnyard fowl than anything human – overwhelmed anything but the blunt articulation of need itself.
However, that didn’t mean the sentence was incomplete, because Joyce did just want everything: the tray table, the fake tortoiseshell hairgrip in the stewardess’s honey hair, the glossy magazine she could see through the gap between the seats in front. She just wanted that magazine – and what was pictured on it: the corner of a table set for a leisurely breakfast with elegant white crockery, a basket of croissants and a glass of orange juice. Joyce just wanted the shapely hand of the model in the photograph, a hand that held a teaspoon with studied poise.
Instead, Joyce had these things that no one wanted: nausea, sickly-sour and putrid; a painfully swollen belly and a hot wire in her urethra. Overwhelming all of them was a dreadful – near criminal – lassitude.
‘Is it water, Mum, d’you want some water?’ Isobel said; except to Joyce it sounded like ‘waiter’, and what was that? A fifth element, a lumpy substrate on which they all thrived and died, like bacteria?
How she loathed Isobel’s affected common accent – it made the young woman ugly or, rather, not young at all any more. She was, Joyce realized, increasingly resembling her father. Isobel had always been Derry’s girl – and that was lovely. For Joyce, the great joy of motherhood had been to discover that the young man who had courted her with Stan Getz 78s and Turkish delight, and who had been as slick and assured as his Brylcreemed hair, was back again; but re-cast, played now by an adorable little girl.
But in the past couple of years Isobel had leapfrogged her father’s mature good looks – his firm dimpled chin, his level brown gaze – and gone straight on to his middle age, when, to be perfectly frank, Derry had run to fat. Isobel, who was only thirty-three, had a dewlap beneath her own dimpled chin. Her brown hair – thick and straight to begin with, exactly like her father’s – had been hacked about and dyed so much that it crackled like candyfloss on her round skull.
No, Joyce didn’t want water – and besides, they had none. At Security their plastic bottles had been dumped in a bin – a sudden scare. And, although Joyce had asked Isobel to go and get some more, it was too late because the younger woman had already spent too long in the ladies.
They had only recently taken off and the plane was still climbing sharply: a tilted tube full of humdrum. At last, Joyce succeeded in wrestling her face to the window. The outside world would, she hoped, play the part of knees: she could press her burning cheeks against cool clouds, take deep breaths of fresh air and quell the nausea.
In the frame of the aircraft servomotors whined, the ailerons jerked, the wings’ tips waggled, rivulets of moisture bleeding across them. Joyce noticed that each pimple of a rivet head was surrounded by a ring of infective rust.
The plane slammed into an air pocket. Joyce gasped, then clamped her hand to her mouth, imprisoning the metallic bile that had sprung up her throat. Down below, way below, wheeled the English Midlands, their jigsaw of brownish towns and greenish fields bucked and then scattered. Joyce saw the slick beading of row upon row of new cars, fresh off a production line. Thousands of feet yawned between her wasting flesh and their toughened windscreens; she was – she realized, as once more the plane rocked and rolled – absolutely terrified.
T
errified of plummeting into a superstore’s car park on the Coventry bypass. Terrified of her meagre hand baggage – a change of underwear, useless make-up, unspent money – being strewn over a rutted field. Terrified of being disembowelled by a pylon, or her limbs amputated by humming cables. Terrified, despite her, of all the forty-odd passengers on this flight from Birmingham to Zürich, having the least reason to fear death.
Even so, Joyce hunched up whimpering, while self-made homilies – What will be, will be – came to her parched lips. Joyce wanted her distant and yet jovial father – one side of his face bulgy with the gutta-percha used to replace the cheekbone that had been pulverized in France, the other smoothly benign. Joyce wanted to be on his knee, in a dappled woodland before the Second World War. But he was dead – her mother and Derry, too. And there could be no comfort in the arms of the dead: you couldn’t feel them – and they felt nothing.
God, then – he would stop her from falling; God and the pure sounds of uncorrupted humanity.
Until the end of January, when she had felt too ill to continue, Joyce had been one of the Bournville Singers, who were rehearsing Mozart’s Requiem in the canteen of the Institute. No one – including their insufferably vain director, Tom Scoresby – could have claimed that their performance was going to be either the most faithful or the most sonorous; yet, even with serving hatches for a backdrop, they had soared.
Requiem aeternam dona ets, Domine. Dumpy men in open-neck shirts – some former car workers, others retired middle-class professionals – their chests heaving; then Joyce and the other women panting up the scale: et lux perpetua luceat ets … She tried not to see Scoresby, his quaver of silver-blond hair bouncing as he whipped up his singers, but instead focused on those beautiful streamers of sound, chords looped over clouds so that the angels might haul her up. Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine on them.
It was so stupid to have got on this flight; and cretinous not to have appreciated everything before she left – the row of storage jars on the kitchen shelf, rice, pearl barley, flour, sugar – but taken all that wondrously dispassionate order for granted.
If I ever get down from this sky I won’t be making that mistake again, oh, no.
The plane surfaced in a sea of cloudy islands, then broke through into unearthly sunlight. Relief rippled audibly along the fuselage. The stewardess unbuckled her harness and stood, swaying, straightening her skirt.
‘Water, Mum?’ Isobel asked again, her plump features stuffed with the gutta-percha of concern.
The immediate anxiety fell away from Joyce, a dark plume dispelled, leaving the black truth behind: the nausea, the wire, the distension, the lassitude. How mad, how mindlessly bloody insane to care if I die now, when in a matter of hours I definitely will.
The rest of the flight was uneventful. There was no question of Joyce accepting the white roll filled with cheesy sludge – an alcoholic drink was unthinkable. The stewardess – maybe she knows – kept hauling herself along the plane to ask, ‘Is it … your mother? Is she OK, yes?’ Then she and Isobel – both of them, Joyce thought, a little bovine – would low: ‘Would you like some water?’
Water! Joyce was pretty sure she’d wet herself on take-off. When they left the house, and she had locked the door for the last time and handed the keys to Isobel, Joyce was gripped by an unworthy rage. What will she do with the good drapes and the seat covers? Her father’s LPs and the Venetian glass? She saw it all – despite her meticulous instructions – dumped in cardboard boxes outside the Sue Ryder shop in Shirley.
By the time Joyce got a grip on herself, they were in the cab heading for the airport – and it was too late to go back for the incontinence pads. And now, well, there must be a dark patch on the pale blue airline upholstery. Shameful.
The plane, moaning, hunkered down towards the ground. Wooded hills, bare fields, arterial roads flowing between the metal barns of light industry. The housing was as samey as that which they had left behind. There was no sign of the Matterhorn – or grassy Alps. No snow – but this was March – or cuckoo clocks, or chalets with wide wooden eaves, or Heidi running with the goats, or chocolate bars stacked like lumber. The only clichés were the airport, the runway, the plane braking to a halt, the co-pilot announcing: ‘Welcome to Zürich, ladies and gentlemen, where the local time is 11.48. I hope you enjoyed your flight with us today, and on behalf of the crew I’d like to wish you a safe onward journey.’
Joyce, who had always been a tall woman – a rangy woman, Derry’s expression, and she had liked it from him – couldn’t extract herself from the window seat without Isobel pulling, and the stewardess, who had slid into the seat behind, pushing.
A moment before she got up, with a colossal effort, Joyce lifted her behind and slid the paper napkin beneath it. Fleetingly, she had a touching faith in the napkin’s absorbency, but when she looked back there was an obvious pool of urine. The stewardess must have seen it, but she was tactful – a Swiss characteristic, Joyce supposed – and offered to help Joyce on with her coat, indicating that she understood the need to hide the spreading stain on the back of Joyce’s skirt.
Dr Phillimore – whom Joyce had first met when he arrived at Mid-East, a year before she retired – had known full well why she wanted a letter setting out the details of her cancer, its likely progression and definite prognosis. Although she had no great respect for him as a practitioner – Phillimore’s manner was brusque and self-satisfied – at first Joyce was merely grateful that he didn’t try to dissuade her; this implied that, despite the scant attention he had paid her when he could have been expected to keep her alive, now she had stoically chosen death he would aid her in the Ancient way.
So, no mention of the excellent palliative care team – which anyway would have been an arrant falsehood. Although Joyce hadn’t had a direct hand in the hospital’s administration for a decade now, she kept in touch with old colleagues at Mid-East and knew the threadbare condition of these things. Nor did Phillimore remind her of the many hospices with which the hospital had good working relations; nor yet still did he speak of the tremendous advances in pain management, which would allow Joyce the lucid repose of a Socrates up until she breathed her last.
It was only as Joyce shuffled off down the corridor – grateful for the handrail that she herself had arranged to have installed – that it occurred to her that Phillimore, far from being disengaged, might actively support her decision: not for philosophic reasons, but only because her removal would lighten his own caseload, enabling him – a plump arrow with white coat fletching – to stay within the concentric rings of his allocated budget and hit his targets.
Isobel insinuated under one arm, the stewardess tucked under the other, Joyce scraped her ankle boots over the concrete pan to the shuttle bus. Inside it black-clad businessmen and women urgently gripped their mobile phones. Ignoring their impatience and the damp chafing of her own underwear, Joyce paused, savouring the mineral tang of aviation fuel, the beat of heat and the echoey howl from taxiing aircraft. She looked back at the plane that had brought her, shackled now by gravity. On its tailfin the stocky white-out-of-red cross glowed: it was the opposite of an air ambulance, Joyce thought, bringing her here with great dispatch so that she might be lost, not saved.
Kyrie
Lord have mercy upon numbered bank accounts, neutrality and Nazi gold … Joyce shivered in the shiny arrivals hall, then shook as they shuffled along the shushed shopping concourse. She had no option but – Christe eleison – to allow her daughter to get on with it. Of course, they had taken only carry-on. Joyce may have been intending to stay for ever, but she could make do without a change of shroud; while Isobel would be flying home the following day.
Be that as it may, with her mother to tote, Isobel had to find a luggage cart and ask for directions – tasks she performed, in Joyce’s eyes, poorly. Her daughter was at once loud and ineffectual; she moved with a mock-triumphant roll of her wide hips. Her outfit of high-heeled boots,
tight jeans and cropped leather jacket seemed designed to emphasize how overweight she was. She had – Joyce thought, not for the first time – her father’s bullishness but none of his charm.
Finally, they were in a cab, a Mercedes as snug and black as an orthopaedic boot. You don’t see those any more – all the victims of the polio epidemics after the war; grown up – dead, I suppose. As the cab rolled away Joyce admonished herself. Stop criticizing Isobel: this is harder for her than it is for you, because she’s not like you. She’ll have to go home alone – and there is no home for her, really. No boyfriend – or lover. What’s she doing with her life? A photographic project of some kind – an installation, she calls it. Peculiar term, more military than artistic.
Neubahn Birchstrasse. Glattalbahn. Flughofstrasse. The very words on the signs looked heavy, with their dumpy vowels and chunky consonants. The blocks of flats and factory buildings lining the roadway were as fat as the back of the cab driver’s neck.
Isobel had told her mother that she was meticulously photographing the contents of some rooms in the Soho district of London, rooms that had been left sealed up decades before. She had grown animated as she described Mr Vogel’s abandoned office, which was cluttered with Gestetner machines, rubber stamps, typewriters and all sorts of other office equipment from the 1950s – and even earlier – all of it still boxed up.
Joyce had nodded, making encouraging noises, while Isobel explained that hers was a visual inventory of objects that had, sort of, defied time. But really, her mother had thought, this was a nonsense, not proper work at all – and certainly not art – more a kind of play that the grown-up girl indulged herself in, and that various public bodies – colleges, councils, libraries – were prepared to indulge her in as well, by supporting it with grants.
