by Will Self
Christ have mercy upon us! So dull this was: the plunge of the underpass beneath the haunch of the wooded hill.
When, up in the sky, Joyce had been ridiculously scared of dying – while not for a second considering the bursting of all those other bubble-worlds of thought, each so fragile and entire, each brilliantly reflecting the entirety of the others – the fear had blanked out the mundanity of her own well-administered death, which was all about her now, like cold dirty snow blanketing the verges.
Isobel got out her mobile phone and switched it on. Joyce blurted, ‘Please, Isobel, we agreed –’
‘I was only checking it worked, Mum,’ she began calmly enough, then choked up the scale: ‘I. Might. Need to make a call – later. Tomorrow. Y’know’, before hitting the high note of tears. Isobel was suddenly a little girl once more, sitting on her bedroom floor, the minute displacement of a tableau of tiny dollies having provoked this huge grief. Then, it came – or, rather, Joyce moved ever so slightly towards it. Out from the shadow of her own death, Joyce crept into the wan sun of her love for the daughter she had borne and beared.
The two women cried in one another’s arms, oblivious to the Mercedes’s progress, which swept downhill between prosperous villas, then apartment blocks, then past the green splash of the university’s grounds. A tram clang-ting-whooshed in the opposite direction, and to the right of the road the Limmat River shone, touched with the same golden lambency that played upon the domes, steeples and towers of Zürich’s old town.
Joyce had read – because that is what she had been taught to do – a selection of the relevant literature. The liver cancer and the imminence of death itself – these would, she had been informed, take up all her energies. The workaday world would, almost comfortably, recede, milk deliveries and tax returns taking on the character of metaphysical abstractions, now that the most important unknowns were on the point of being known.
And yet … and yet, it hadn’t been like that at all. True, she did find herself caught up – lost even – in the roomy soutane of death, its folds at once heavy and invisible, but there remained no escape from the trivial, the ugly, the banal.
Back in Birmingham they had argued about the hotel. Isobel favoured somewhere with all the four-star trimmings, while Joyce was set on thrift: not because she wished to deny herself – why bother? – but because she wanted, even at this late hour, to deliver a final homily to her only child on the virtues of parsimony.
‘Why, Mum? Why do you want to spend the night in a shitty little guest house?’ Isobel had been sitting in front of the PC, which was on the rolltop desk in the small room that used to be her father’s study. ‘This place’, she tap-pinged the screen, ‘is meant to be very nice –’
‘Nice?’
‘Well, stylish.’
Stylish. Joyce grimaced. Yes, she understood that this was hard on her daughter, but must she organize every single particular herself? This may have been a small administrative problem – renting the antechamber to death – but beyond it Joyce sensed Isobel’s psychic hinterland as office suite after office suite, all staffed by time-serving incompetents, not one of whom would have had the gumption to order a toner cartridge for the photocopier, were it not for Joyce’s assiduous management.
Phillimore’s detailed assessment had to be obtained, and Joyce’s birth certificate. There were the first phone calls to Switzerland, followed by the to and fro of emails arranging dates and details. Then the home visits had to be set up. Trained hospice nurses came, who acted as outreach workers. ‘Suicide assistants’, they called themselves, with what Joyce thought of as typically Swiss practicality. All of this she had had to do herself, the unspoken truth being that were Joyce to leave it for too long, Isobel would prove utterly incapable.
Joyce had been initially diagnosed in September of the previous year, but then, just before Christmas, she was given six months to live. Some present. Given them grudgingly, by Phillimore, in a way that, on reflection, she imagined that he considered flattering to her no-nonsense demeanour: ‘Even with further chemo, Jo, 50 per cent of people with this kind of cancer will be dead in six months.’ Jo! Jo! The nerve of the man. Some present. Some time. No hope.
Although it was now the beginning of March, Joyce didn’t feel too bad. She might, under other, easier-to-delegate circumstances, have lingered into spring, to see the bulbs she had planted – a prayerful act, on her knees, hands pressed together in the wormy earth – come up in the garden. Lingered to see the cherry blossom spraunce up the suburb. Lingered to hear Scoresby’s – and her own – Requiem performed at the Adrian Boult Hall. Kyrie eleison.
Might have, were it not that Joyce had seen enough people dying from terminal disease not to appreciate its awful, creeping normalcy: despite the black abyss being clearly in view, there was still this cup of tea close at hand, to drink or disdain; and so they nursed it – until it was too late.
Might have, were it not for her professional experience of doctors and their manner, which was nothing but the irrelevant furnishing of death, the shelves and bookcases installed in the earthen sides of the rabbit hole you tumbled down. As for treatments – what were they? A jar of marmalade you took up in falling – then dropped.
Might have, were it not that Isobel was incapable of filling in a form properly, and had to bring her grant applications – together with her laundry – home to Mummy in Brummie.
Standing on the cobbles of the Rennweg outside the Widder Hotel, Joyce felt the chill grit of her own soiled underwear and flipped into compassion for the dumpy thing, who was paying off the cab with burnt-sienna Swiss francs. Isobel, who tried to convince her mother that she lived an exciting bohemian life in London, but whose breathless accounts of hanging out at the notorious Plantation Club fell on sceptical ears: ‘And Trouget, y’know, he was the presiding spirit for, like, years … until he died.’
The Christmas before last Isobel had brought home Hilary, the club’s proprietor, who, although not nearly as inter-sex as his name, was an obvious pansy. He drank the best part of a bottle of brandy, while remaining perfectly polite. Isobel, quite gone on him, had done for the rest.
Hilary had then wet the bed in the spare room, and at 6 a.m. on Boxing Day morning Joyce came down to find Isobel in the utility room, sponging the mattress while the sheets moiled in the washing machine. ‘Why?’ is all her mother had said. ‘Why can’t you do this for yourself?’
These bitter ruminations occupied Joyce while her daughter completed the check-in formalities: dealing out her mother’s credit card, copying out their passport numbers. The receptionist was no flinty-eyed Alpinist but a black-haired chap with sallow skin. He glanced once at Joyce, verifying that she existed, and she thought he knows: his sallow skin spake unto her jaundiced one.
The Widder was a terrace of old houses that had been knocked through by architects armed with steely beams and chequered marble tiling. The corridors morphed into walkways that traversed glassed-in cists; at the bottom of these were hunks of masonry, preserved under spotlights. Stylish. Isobel led her mother here and there, her heels clopping; she’d declined the services of a porter, then got a little lost finding the lift.
Joyce’s stylish room was at once frigid and stuffy. There were four broad windows on the street side, and opposite them blond-wood cabinets with glass doors and mirrored shelves. In the seating zone, at one end of the long, squat room, shone the cold puddle of a mirror-topped coffee table. There was a mirror-topped desk cascading in the middle of the room; beyond it the white bed had a mirrored headboard. With impersonal funerary goods laid out for its occupant – chocolates, wine, fruit and flowers – Room 107 was an awful box in which to be penultimately alone.
Joyce watched her little old lady body totter into the bathroom. Then watched some more as she turned on the taps and slumped on the toilet; she watched herself take a quarter of an hour to struggle out of her reeking clothes, then roll her yellow body into the yellow bath.
Isobel kept calling
: it made her anxious to be shut out. Nervous of what? She can’t be afraid that I’ll die? Joyce lay in her favourite nightie, cold in the bed, the phone’s receiver beside her on the pillow: love reduced to a black plastic dildo. Would it, Joyce wondered, shock my bohemian daughter to learn that I’d once used one?
It seemed unnecessarily cruel to Joyce that these last few hours of her life should be spent not simply alone but divorced from anyone who had known her as truly vital, properly sensual; anyone who had touched and held her. That’s all I want, Joyce gripped the black rod, to be held one more time. I don’t even care who it is. Just held.
‘Have you taken a sleeping pill, Mum?’ The receiver resonated with tinny concern. ‘Or morphine?’
For want of anything better, Joyce had taken both. Not that she really needed the painkiller, but in the last fortnight she had discovered that it dulled the anxiety of falling to sleep. Without the temazepam she couldn’t sleep – and with it her narrowing vision was a catacomb hung with wind-dried cadavers, leading to a dark plain strewn with skulls.
‘I’m all right, Isobel,’ Joyce whispered. ‘I just want to sleep now, please … Please let me alone.’
Why did she begrudge her only child any reassurance at this late hour? Why couldn’t she be a good mother? True, it had been difficult to get between Derry and Isobel – who’d been every bit as close as loving father and only girl child should be – but it was Joyce who had sewn the name tapes, put the dinner money in the envelope and been there to comfort the cygnet in tutu and tights when she cried because she didn’t get the part.
It was far too late for a re-evaluation of all this now. The gap between the narcotics was getting narrower and narrower … Joyce could no longer see the telephone; her visual field was a cranny, in which lay the Cartier watch Derry had given her for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, a digital clock, the plastic tub of pills with her name tape sewn on to it, the brown bottle labelled ‘Oramorph 5 mg solution’, the bedside lamp – a clear tube, its filament a glowing worm – the window, which was ajar.
From the street below came the click of well-shod feet over the cobbles and the chesty cough of Schweizerdeutsch. Joyce had supposed – what? That she might venture out? That she and Isobel would visit the Fraumünster, admire Chagall’s stained-glass windows? Then, later – what? A heavy meal in an oak-panelled restaurant, a plank of beef with a knob of butter on top?
After the spat they’d had about the hotel – and Joyce’s troubled concession – she’d read the guide. So she knew what to expect from Zürich: well made, orderly – pretty, almost, with its setting between wooded hills and either side of the Limmat, the swift little river that flowed into the long lake. The Zürichsee, with its pleasure boats, its bathing beaches, and its islets hollowed out by reclusive millionaires.
Zürich, Joyce gathered, was a country town masquerading as a global financial capital – or perhaps the other way round. At any rate, here the deep, cold current of money was obscured by surface ripples of tepid liberality, while the Zürichers hid their avarice beneath polite masks.
The benzodiazepine stroked Joyce’s frontal lobes, the morphine caressed her cortex. In the cranny, the red numerals on the digital clock blinked from 14.18 to 15.18.
Zwingli, preaching at the Grossmünster, sways gently in a long black robe, his pale face uplifted to a vertical beam of still paler light.
Baptism is a covenant between God and Man, he says, making of faith a contract; it’s a notion that appeals to the hard-nosed burghers who sit in the pews. The sacrament is symbolic, Zwingli says, a memorial rather than a re-creation. Again, this recommends itself to the Zürichers, geared into time’s progress as they are, the ratcheting of moment to moment. As for music in church – isn’t it the most obvious distraction, Zwingli asks. Why, you’d never countenance a lutenist in the counting house, or a drum being struck in time to the heavy beat of the coinage, now would you?
This, too, the City Fathers swallow – because he’s a charismatic fellow, this priest, his holiness as unimpeachable as his own instrumental talents – for he can play like an angel upon the flute and harpsichord. At the same time as he preaches against liturgical music, Zwingli cannot prevent his angular frame from swaying in its natural spotlight.
Ba-ba-ba-ba-baaa. Babba-daaa … Zwingli swings. What were they called? The girls with long, ironed-down hair, the men in matching roll-neck pullovers. The Swingle Singers, that was it – but that was later, on Top of the Pops, in the bright fuzzy fog of black and white television. I want earlier – the skiffle night at the Locarno Dance Hall. Derry said it wasn’t real music, but, preachy as he was, he still liked to swing me around, crackling handfuls of crimplene. Later, cocoa at the Kardomah on New Street. Later still, smuggled past his landlady into his bedsit, the tremendous gift of his hands … Kyrie eleison … Christe eleison.
14.21. Joyce slept. Half an hour later the pass key turned in the lock and Isobel tiptoed in. She leant forward at the head of the bed, holding her dyed-blonde hair to her neck, and listened to her mother’s monochrome breathing. The porter stood in the doorway, massively indifferent in his striped hotel livery.
Isobel turned to him. ‘She’s asleep,’ she said, and, taking the handset from the pillow, replaced it on the cradle. ‘But I’ll sit with her for a while.’
He left, and that’s what she did. She sat, and, as the footfalls outside grew more and more scattered, she wept. The fog oozed up from the surface of the lake, infiltrating the narrow winds of the old town, pressing against the plate-glass windows of the underwear boutiques along the Rennweg, imposing its grey shroud of modesty on the brazen plastic models.
In the morning the fog was still there; daylight struggled to illumine the stony façades and blank windows. As she woke, Joyce recalled what the minicab driver who’d driven them to the airport had said.
The A45 was its usual coagulation, and he kept switching lanes, speeding up, then braking so hard that Joyce’s bloated middle pressed uncomfortably against the door handle. ‘Please,’ she gasped. ‘Please, really, there’s no hurry – we’re in plenty of time.’
‘It’s true,’ he replied; the fight went out of him and he slumped over the steering wheel. ‘You’re a long time dead.’
Isobel winced, while Joyce thought: why is it that even those closest to me regard my dying as socially awkward?
Rising in slow stages, Joyce ran through the checklist that confirmed she was unfit for duty: the banging headache and the wire in her urethra, the painful numbness of fingers and toes, the cruel blockage in her oesophagus and the malevolent gravity of her internal organs.
She limped to the bathroom and pulled the cord. The woman in the mirror, with her sparse skullcap of grey-white hair, looked like Death’s mother.
Not long after she had been diagnosed, while she was undergoing the useless chemo and radio, Joyce had begun marvelling at this aspect of her illness. All her life she had been engaged in a secret conversation with her body; whispered talk concerning the removal of her mucus, the blotting of her blood, and the evacuation of her bowels; consultations regarding the squeezing of her blackheads and the plucking of her hairs. In this, Joyce supposed, she was no different to anyone else. But now this chit-chat had been shouted down. Joyce’s body had revolted. The respectable working-class liver cells had gone berserk, smashing the chemical refinery they laboured in, then charging down the bloody boulevards to carry their fervour to gall bladder, bowel and lungs. They would not stop until they had toppled the sovereignty of consciousness itself, and replaced it with their own screaming masses of cancerous tissue.
Peeing, then wiping herself, then fighting to brush her teeth, Joyce reeled once more under the revolutionary terror, and so remembered what day this was, and why she was in her familiar purple nightie, shaking in this strange yellow bathroom.
The imminence of her death – and the fact that she, herself, had booked the abattoir – pole-axed the poor cow. So she sat, stupidly sullen, while her mi
lkmaid daughter helped dress her for the slaughter.
Isobel, who had barely slept, despite four massively overpriced gin and tonics in the hotel bar, was equally stunned. Ridiculously, they were late, and the continental breakfasts she had ordered for them lay untouched on white linen covered trays.
‘Mum, I’ve asked them to get us a cab,’ she said. ‘It should be here in a few minutes. I’m sorry there’s no time …’ She gestured helplessly at the croissants, the furled Emmental and smoked ham, the freshly squeezed orange juice. Joyce ignored the breakfast gaffe (Still, how many times have I told her that I mustn’t eat before …), ‘Well, dear, you’ll need to make up some time later if you want to pack and check out in time to avoid paying a supplement.’
Her parsimony, Joyce knew, was inhuman – and yet all too human.
Isobel had begun to sob uncontrollably. But we have been over all this time and again! Just as Joyce had forced her daughter through several tutorials in the study, so that she would be able to find all the papers required for probate, so Joyce had also rehearsed these last few hours and minutes, blocking out every move with precision and care, all but scripting lines for both of them.
Joyce understood intuitively what every executioner soon discovered: perfect choreography is essential if messiness and hysteria are to be avoided. So, although hustled towards extinction by her daughter’s poor time-keeping, Joyce was determined to keep her cool.
For the facts were these: apart from Isobel’s preschool years – the early 1970s, a good time to take a rest on the career ladder – Joyce had spent her entire working life as a hospital administrator; she had ended up running a large trust, responsible for many staff and patients. She had, she hoped, brought all this professionalism to bear on her own death.
Joyce struggled upright. She was wearing her comfortably lined ankle boots, a smart tweed suit, dark tights and a cream silk blouse. The emerald brooch Derry had given her on their twentieth wedding anniversary was pinned to her lapel. She hadn’t troubled with an incontinence pad; there’s nothing left now. Her mouth was fearfully dry; they had said no liquids or solids before arriving at 84 Gertrudstrasse, but that can’t possibly include Polos, can it? Joyce fingered out one of the small white rings and slid it between her chapped lips; then, as they moved to the lift, she worked it with her tongue, savouring the dissolution of its minty wash.
