Liver

by Will Self

  Joyce let her gaze track from one Swiss to the next. Vreni Stauben was cowed. ‘Ueli – Herr Weiss,’ she said, wheezing self-exculpation, ‘he has been making calls all the days to say how is Frau Beddoes?’

  ‘And you told him I was … fine?’

  ‘You did not seem like the cancer patient to me, Joyce.’ She allowed herself the upturned palms of a martyr.

  Weiss held the tip of one finger up to his walrus moustache. ‘When we first met, outside the chapel, I saw a very sick woman.’ A second finger poked at the charged atmosphere. ‘But when you came to St Anton’s you were much better.’ Weiss, Joyce thought, had the professional manner of someone who had no defined profession. ‘I could tell, because I had already seen how sick you were … Und now, well, Frau Beddoes’ – he withdrew the finger, laughed curtly – ‘these big walks round the town, and – you must forgive her – but Frau Stauben, yes, she has been telling me with what – der Appetit?’

  ‘With what relish,’ said the Papal Chaplain, relishing the opportunity to correct his countryman’s English.

  ‘So, yes, exactly: with what relish you have been eating her Röschti. Und now, we see here a very sprightly, yes? Sprightly lady. Well, already when I was talking with Father Grappelli about you – and you saying what had happened with Hohl – I am thinking this is not usual, it is strange happening. So, well, we are being very careful – Grappelli, he is frightened, but I say we must –’

  Leaning forward, Joyce cut Weiss off with a wave of her hand. ‘Can I be right in what I’m hearing, Herr Weiss?’ She was as matter-of-fact as if she had been querying bed allocation or late laundry delivery. ‘Are you suggesting that what has happened to me is a’ – she grimaced – ‘miracle?’

  Joyce wasn’t at all surprised that Vreni Stauben crossed herself, but a little that Marianne Kreutzer did so as well.

  ‘Aha!’ Reiter interjected. ‘This term – we don’t use it so much nowadays; it is very value-laden, I think. The preferred expression – certainly during preliminary inquiries – is “perceived suspension of natural law”.’

  Joyce laughed at his bureacratic jargon of the supernatural; laughed with Falstaffian vigour. ‘Gentlemen – ladies,’ she said once her merriment had subsided, ‘I can’t deny that I’m feeling extremely well indeed – and I’m happy to discuss the possible reasons for this, but, before we go any further, two things: I think I heard the kettle boil, Vreni. I’m thirsty and I would like some tea.’ Frau Stauben got up and, after soliciting the others’ orders for hot drinks, clucked off to the kitchen. ‘Second,’ Joyce resumed, ‘if I have been the … subject? Of a suspension in natural law, could you tell me, please, who has been doing the suspending?’

  It seemed that Weiss hadn’t expected her to raise this point so soon. The moustache winced, and he nervously shot the pink cuffs of his striped shirt. Marianne busied herself in her handbag – only the Monsignor had the sang-froid to reply: ‘Well, now, Mrs Beddoes, these are very early days, and the procedure by which such extraordinary events are authenticated is a lengthy one. I’m only on secondment here, preparing initial reports for the diocesan bishop –’

  Joyce silenced him with another imperious wave. ‘That’s quite enough of that, thank you, Monsignor Reiter. Let me put it another way: if you want me to cooperate at all, you’ll have to answer that question right away; otherwise I’ll pack my bag and leave.’

  Silence. Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth, Heaven and earth are full of … dust and cat hair. The eyes of the delegation all slid to the kitchen doorway where Vreni Stauben was standing, a spoon in one squashy hand, a tea strainer in the other. Her usually mild expression was tempered by an intensity Joyce hadn’t seen before: a fierce parental pride, not in some mundane swimming, jumping or instrumental achievement – but in a transcendent one.

  After Derry died their friends had drifted away. Joyce had expected this – been prepared for it, too. Derry had been far more gregarious than her; it was he who organized get-togethers. She prized this in him, just as he valued her asperity, her reserve. It was not that Joyce was incapable of friendship; loyalty, she felt, was akin to insurance payments – something you kept up. There were her two friends from girlhood: Ruth, now retired to the Yorkshire Wolds, and Iris, who had gone down to London, where she maintained a long-lasting lesbian union. Then, when Iris’s companion had died, she uprooted again and returned to Birmingham. She had stayed with Joyce for a month the previous year, while she hunted for a suitable cottage in the Forest of Arden. An indefatigable presence, round-faced, petite, vigorous.

  Then there were Miriam and Sandra, both former colleagues; although her friendship with the former, who had once been her secretary, was always a little strained. On several occasions Miriam had negotiated the tortuous arterial roads all the way from Snow Hill in order to take Joyce for her radiotherapy at Mid-East.

  Sandra, who had been a long-serving and much revered consultant paediatrician, now reposed in the leafy splendour of Edgbaston. Every room of her Arts and Crafts villa was like a conservatory, while the entire house resounded with the song of grandchildren – or such was Joyce’s impression on her infrequent visits. Sandra dispensed meals whenever required – came over, too – but she was hardly proactive. I had to ask her to take me to the clinic – and that was hateful. Shameful.

  Self-pity was not in order, though: I had a life, and even, briefly, after Derry had died, another lover; a source – surely justifiable? – of considerable satisfaction. Age would not wither me. Despite all this, the way those couples had dropped me hurt. The self-satisfied solicitors and their WI wives, it was they who were withering as they dealt the pack of remaining individuals into bridge pairs.

  Obscurely, Joyce blamed Derry for this, and related it to a failure in their intimacy: they had been close, certainly, yet the bulk of the unspoken communication between them had been that there was nothing much worth saying.

  All this while the three seated Swiss looked at the one standing; all this while the Magi adored the Saviour’s mother. It was preposterous, most definitely, the dippy shrine to the miraculous teenager; the beatification of Gertrud – first spotty, then holy. Oddly, Joyce now felt empowered by all those wordless decades she had spent with Derry. There was a shrewdness in them – a native cunning.

  The Swiss had their coffee; Joyce took her tea. They talked, a devilish interplay between pragmatism and spirituality. It transpired that Ueli Weiss had a severely disabled son. ‘A hard birth, there was not enough oxygen,’ he explained, and Joyce thought he’s describing his marriage as well. The baby had been – and this was stated like a menu choice – ‘a vegetable’: deaf, blind, dumb, paralysed. One day, Weiss, as had been his custom, took the persistently vegetative infant with him to visit Gertrud Stauben, who was in hospital, dying of leukaemia.

  Joyce could envisage Vreni’s daughter, her skin as translucent as dripping wax, stretching out her anaemic fingers to draw strength from the little boy’s potato head … ‘There are three classes of such happenings,’ Monsignor Reiter said. ‘Quoad substantiam – this is the biblical act of the Saviour, and some of his saints.’ The young prelate had sat and crossed his legs, the skirts of his soutane falling open to reveal tan cotton trousers. ‘Then there is quoad subiectum, which, while not entailing the full resurrection of the dead, can nevertheless exhibit the full restitution – restitutio in integrum – of irreparably damaged organs; the growth, even, of new ones.’

  So far as Joyce was concerned, it was this second kind of … not faith but collective suspension of disbelief that Reiter was investigating. The dying girl had laid on her hands more than fifteen years ago: ‘My son, he was, as I say, a vegetable. Now, he is not the totally normal fellow – no one is saying this –’

  ‘But he feeds himself, dressing too,’ Marianne broke in. ‘He can walk and is talking these few words, so.’ She leant forward, her usually saturnine face animated. ‘This was baby with no brain – Siis Hirni isch Hackfleisch –’


  ‘The grinded meat,’ Weiss put in.

  ‘Now he is doing these things, but with what?’ Her own struggle to be understood echoed this incomprehensible happening.

  Joyce could picture the young man: wet-chinned, butting his big head at a door, his features grosser than his father’s, and in place of Weiss’s thick moustache the charcoal smudge of male puberty.

  Reiter was pedantic: ‘We don’t expect the doctors to support what we’re trying to prove for one second; nor do we look for doctors who are Catholics; the evidence is the evidence and we will abide by it. But even getting the doctors to give me interviews, the hospitals to release the records, and, naturally, arranging for Erich to have the necessary scans and examinations – this is taking the longest time, you see.

  ‘Then there is the relationship between the diocese and Rome. We are,’ he said with a smirk, ‘like any other very large organization, so, there is much paperwork. Once already, the Bishop here in Zürich has referred this matter, but the report has come back: there must be more tests, further confirmation.’

  It was easy to understand Vreni Stauben’s motivation: better than memory – or formaldehyde – faith would be the ultimate preservative; an acknowledgement from the highest level of the beatification that every parent bestows on her child. As for Reiter, he was a functionary, and this was his equivalent of a doctor’s cure; Joyce well understood how such statistics secured funding and advanced careers. But Ueli Weiss and Marianne Kreutzer? It was difficult to peg them as zealots. Was there a murkier guilt that needed assuaging, some sin of dereliction that must be shriven? Or was it only that this was a middle-aged man with a business card, who had never done much business worth speaking of? Vreni Stauben had mentioned a car dealership in Berne that Weiss had inherited; however, in her very glancing remarks there was the suggestion that this was a going concern, for which he had done very little of the running.

  All this clicked through Joyce’s mind with tight precision as she listened to Reiter. She was making the kind of assessments that had been integral to her work as a high-level administrator; an analysis of ways and means and motives that, since retirement, had seized up to become mere crankiness. Sitting on her Modernist throne, Joyce was empowered to make statements ex cathedra.

  ‘So’ – she put a stop to the Papal Chaplain – ‘because I don’t look as if I’m dying, you want – you want to believe – that I may’ve been subject to’ – she savoured the phrase – ‘a suspension of natural law.’

  ‘Quoad modum,’ Reiter said succinctly. ‘This is the third class: a recovery from a fatal, progressive malady that is spontaneous, and that, even if it could be managed by medicine, would take a long time and a lot of resources. Yes, Joyce, we do believe this may have happened to you.’

  Fac eas, Domine, de morte Iransire ad vitam … Allow them, O Lord, to cross from death into the life … Joyce laughed heartily again – and although the lay Catholics grimaced, she was pleased to see Reiter joining in her secular merriment. ‘And how, may I ask, did Frau Stauben’s daughter perform this, ah …’ She fluttered her fingers in allusion to the politically incorrect miracle. Mors slopebit et natora, Cum resurget creatura, Judicanti res-pon-sura … The awesome phrases wormed their way into her inner ear.

  ‘Here are two things for you,’ Reiter said. ‘First thing. You may not be familiar with what Catholics believe here; these intercessions can occur years later, called forth – provoked, if you prefer – by the prayers of the faithful. Second thing. On the evening that you met with Herr Weiss, Marianne Kreutzer and Father Grappelli … well, this little chapel by the Lindenhof, it is – it has become – entirely unofficially, of course – a lot like a shrine for Frau Stauben’s daughter. Most days’ – he looked to Weiss for confirmation and the otter head dipped – ‘they go to pray there.’

  Joyce had a vision of the power ‘provoked’ by their prayers: a neon thunderbolt that shot along the dull Zürich boulevards. It zapped into the flat at 84 Gertrudstrasse, where Joyce sat with Dr Hohl, and, by snapping open her jaw, helped to stay the assister-of-suicide’s hand, before playing up and down her abdomen – crackling purple veins on the glassy skin of a van de Graaff generator – irradiating her diseased liver with the entirely free, and on demand, X-rays of faith.

  They were all staring at her. Reiter had stopped speaking; Vreni Stauben was cradling the framed photograph of the dead girl, which she had retrieved from her own domestic shrine. Thinking back to her foolish confidences at the Kronenhalle, Joyce said, ‘I’m not a fool, you know –’ Weiss sucked air sharply, but there were limits to Treu und Glauben and she pressed on: ‘This strikes me as a very smart … very political move on the part of the deity, given what Herr Weiss told me about Dr Hohl’s organization, the city’s government, the Catholic majority here in Zürich – and so forth.’

  Reiter sat forward, gathering his skirts over his knees, an action at once sexless and coquettish. He pressed his slim white hands together and brought them up in front of his long expressive face. Joyce thought of Phillimore, who, with his flaxen fringe thatching farmer’s features, was a peasant compared with this princeling of the Vatican.

  ‘You are entirely astute, Joyce,’ Reiter said. ‘And, although there is nothing to prevent the Lord involving himself in the minutiae of local government, I concede that from outside the Church this would appear very … well, worldly.’

  Joyce decided she was going to enjoy doing business with Monsignor Reiter – and business it was most definitely going to be. His English, of course, was far too good – especially for an Englishman. It made everything he said pitilessly clear: ‘Should you decide to cooperate with our investigation, the medical examinations, any treatment you require, accommodation – also a per diem: all of these we would help you with.’

  ‘I don’t really object to Dr Hohl’s activities at all,’ Joyce shot back at him. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to him. On the contrary, I think he and his organization are doing good work – giving people a real choice.’

  Weiss’s eyes were popping, and Vreni Stauben caught a sob in her fat cheeks, but Reiter was unperturbed. ‘It isn’t really a question of conviction, Mrs Beddoes,’ he said judiciously. ‘It’s more a matter of finding common cause. Besides, the primary objective here is not to campaign against assisted suicide’ – this phrase he couldn’t forbear from grimacing over: bitter pips – ‘but to investigate events of an overpoweringly spiritual nature: the evidence of God working through humanity.’

  ‘I understand that,’ Joyce remarked succinctly, although she didn’t believe for a second that Ueli Weiss’s prayers to Vreni Stauben’s dead daughter had cured her of cancer. This odd feeling – not of health but of a kind of competent nullity – was simply a mundane plateau covered with a dusty rug, on all sides of which the abyss still fell away, deep and dark and deadly. Vreni Stauben’s wombless Birman came padding into the room and over to where Joyce sat. It looked at her with its stupid vain eyes.

  Ueli Weiss began talking with his tone of slightly egregious, boyish competence. The necessary tests, he said, could take weeks – perhaps months. Even if Joyce was in a position to demonstrate that she had considerable – and liquid – assets, obtaining a Niederlassungsbewilligung, or type C residence permit, from the federal government might still prove impossible, given her condition. But he, Weiss, in conjunction with the diocese, had access to the best immigration lawyers; and there seemed to them to be a prima facie case for Joyce claiming refugee status.

  ‘Refugee status?’ Joyce goggled at Weiss, who today was sporting a well-cut flannel suit in a highly neutral shade of blue. ‘What exactly am I seeking refuge from, the NHS?’ The Swiss looked blank, so she elaborated, ‘The medical care in England, I mean.’

  ‘No, no.’ Weiss remained in earnest. ‘We are thinking that you are asking for the Asylberechtigung from Hohl, his people – the pressure they made to kill yourself.’

  I was subject to no pressure or duress by anyone … ‘But they h
ave safeguards for this, a tape recording, a contract –’

  ‘So, so, we know this, natürlich …’ He went on, reassuring Joyce that there would be no fuss – that wasn’t the way things were done in Zürich. It would be a case of back-door representations, informal interviews, the subtle influencing of politicians and jurists. There was a case to be made – of that much they were certain; the shifting demographic of religious affiliation in the canton chimed with a gathering nationalism … You are seeing our new kind guests. Black guests, brown guests. How ironic, she thought, me and Isobel’s Tamil friend. Two of a kind.

  Joyce was surprised that Monsignor Reiter ceded all this suasion to the unpersuasive Weiss. Despite this, she had resolved to go along with them before he eventually finished speaking. She couldn’t have said what her motivation was; certainly, it had nothing to do with their aims, while her own were inchoate. This wasn’t, it occurred to Joyce, as they all stood and tramped down the dim corrider to dead Gertrud’s Zimmer, to do with ends at all; but, rather, means: the filling out of forms would fill in otherwise featureless days. There would also be appointments to attend – this would be comforting, a small sort of part-time job. And then there was the prospect of her own flat. I’ve got to get away from this bloody cat!

  Vreni Stauben, Ueli Weiss and even Marianne Kreutzer – they all knelt down, seemingly unselfconscious, in front of the shrine; bowing their heads before the schoolgirl’s bibelots, hair ribbons and dag-tails of macramé. Reiter darted a sharp look at Joyce: a schoolmasterly prohibition on giggling or fidgeting. Then he began chanting, low and clear, in Latin, while the trio made the appropriate responses, ‘Credo in Deum Patrem … Et in Jesum Christum … Credo in Spiritum Sanctum …’

  A flat of her own would involve Joyce in her newly adoptive city, allow her to become part of it – then she pulled herself up short. This was ridiculous! I’m terminally ill! Quid sum miser tunc dicturus, Quem patronum togaturus, Cum vix justus sit securus? What then shall I say, wretch that I am? What advocate entreats to speak for me? The righteous Swiss had Monsignor Reiter, his purple sash glowing in the gloomy bedroom, with its nightlights wavering in their faithful exhalations. Reiter had said the Church could not sanction Saint Gertrud’s growing cult – yet here he was, tending its shoots.