Will Self - Liver - A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes

‘M-Mum.’ Isobel had got her act together. ‘Mum.’ She slid a document out from the pile. ‘You haven’t signed this yet and we need someone else to witness it.’

It was the will; unless Joyce’s signature was on it, her legal heir, Isobel, would be stalled and for the meantime nothing could be done .

Oh, oh — ooooh! This is why none of it has been as I expected . Where was the fast-approaching darkness? The series of mighty contractions she had imagined, clenching and then releasing, clenching and then releasing her from the world?

Joyce set down the glass and picked up the will. She folded the pages neatly in half, then began tearing them into small square pieces. ‘I am not’, she said, addressing Dr Hohl alone, ‘going to go through with it.’

He was unruffled — so impressively so that Joyce nearly relented. ‘I understand exactly, Mrs Beddoes,’ he said. ‘I have been thinking already this morning that it is too soon for you, yes?’

‘Maybe, maybe too soon,’ Joyce acknowledged, although she already knew that, having refused the poison once, she might never muster the courage to take it.

Dr Hohl got up and, wheezing a little, carried the phenobarbital over to the kitchen units in the corner. He put it on the draining board, took down a funnel and a plastic bottle marked gift from a cupboard, then poured the liquid into it. ‘You appreciate’, he called over his shoulder, ‘that the payment you have made is non-refundable.’ He came back and sat down. ‘But it may be left as a deposit for if you will be making the mind change.’

‘Yes,’ Joyce said, choosing her words carefully, ‘I do appreciate that, Dr Hohl, and I also appreciate the way everything has been organized by you this morning. Now, if you don’t mind, would it be possible for you to call us a taxi?’

There was an old woman waiting for the lift. She had a matching hat and coat in synthetic brown material that looked sweaty , and as if the wearing of it would make you sweat. The three women stood in the breakfast-smelling lobby, listening as the building regurgitated the lift. The doors opened, and the old woman, peering intently at Joyce with glinting-coal eyes, said ‘ Bitte ’ and ushered them in.

Dankeschön ,’ Joyce replied, summoning up the remains of an ‘evening class in German from two decades before.

On the way down the old woman scrutinized Joyce. Her gaze was disconcertingly vivacious: a much younger woman looked out at the world, through two eye holes that had been cut in the parchment of her face. She knows. She’s seen, what? Body bags slumped in this lift? She knows — and she approves. I’ve won a hand against Death .

In the hallway, the old woman left ahead of them, pulling a wheeled shopping bag. Joyce watched her go and hated the kinship that she felt. So what if I live a few weeks longer? I’ll still be like her, trapped and used up . Only moments before Joyce had been a heroine — but now what am I?

An ambulance and a police car were parked outside in the street. Their crews stood chatting and smoking. They were surprisingly scruffy : a paramedic’s blouse unbuttoned to expose her bra strap; one of the policemen was unshaven. They were waiting for me . Joyce wondered if they were annoyed by this interruption in their schedule, or on permanent call, and therefore would remain in Gertrudstrasse until Dr Hohl — this time with more success — had methodically assisted another terminal case to drink up her phenobarbital.

A wave of exhilaration had pushed Joyce from the fourth-floor flat, sluiced her down and out of the building. In the street it broke: she was a sick woman, and, while not as old as the one with the shopping bag, old enough. She groped for Isobel’s arm. Isobel, her daughter, who had yet to speak — to acknowledge this astonishing reprieve.

‘What’, Isobel said, ‘are you going to do now, Mum?’

The tone was not quite right ; the hand that closed over Joyce’s felt at once diffident and disapproving. She wanted me to go through with it — she’s annoyed that I didn’t go through with it!

‘What d’you mean?’ Joyce said. ‘Are you asking what am I going to do with the time left to me before I die, or whether I’m going back to the hotel? You don’t, I may say, Isobel, seem that overjoyed to have me still with you.’

‘No. Mum, that’s not what I meant, it’s — ’

‘Which? Which of those two options didn’t you mean?’

‘It’s just. It’s a shock — the plans you’d made, so carefully. I dunno — I mean — ’

‘You’d’ve rather I’d gone through with it, wouldn’t you, my girl? That would’ve suited you fine, wouldn’t it? Let me guess: you’d already decided what you were going to ask for the house, you’d already spoken to a broker about selling off your father’s stock, you’d already thought about all the things you were going to do — is that it?’

‘Mum, please. ’ She gestured to the emergency workers. They were staring at the two women — Joyce realized she had been near to shouting. She stared back at them, hard; and they kept on staring back. This must, Joyce thought, be the flip side of Helvetian rectitude, this unselfconscious rudeness. Kyrie eleison .

They didn’t talk in the cab, which was an identical Mercedes, with another taciturn Swiss at the wheel. Isobel was crying again, and, even though Joyce had calmed down and was prepared to forgive her daughter ( It’s shock — I’m shocked. She may be self-piteous — but then, she is pitiable ), she still left her to steep in her own brine. It’s all too irritating. Despite which, there was an odd element of excitement: instead of being dead on that ghastly coverlet , Joyce had the whole day ahead of her; she felt as a schoolgirl does, when some confusion in the Olympian time-tabling of the adult world leaves her with a free double period.

At the Widder Hotel, the doorman, the concierge and the receptionist Teste David cum Sibylla looked at the two English women with ill-concealed surprise, as, arm in arm, they made their halting progess across the lobby to the lift.

‘Mum,’ Isobel said as she unlocked the door to Joyce’s room, ‘I–I mean, we. I mean, you have a return ticket, too. You remember — it was cheaper. The flight’s booked for two o’clock, we’ve gotta pack up now. ’ She trailed off: her mother was giving her a censorious look.

‘I don’t know what your father would’ve said about your behaviour today.’ As she spoke Joyce knew this was a low blow; Isobel, for all her self-centredness, had been unswerving in her love for him .

‘M-Mum, that’s not fair!’

Isobel had loved Derry more: it was only to be expected , but it still hurt . She had been so attentive during his last, dreadful illness; while since Christmas she’d spent at best three weekends in Bournville. Joyce had had to ask friends to go with her to the hospital — a shaming thing.

‘I don’t know what’s fair, Isobel,’ Joyce hectored her under-performing subordinate. ‘All I do know is that I’m tired’ — through the open doorway she spied blobs of underwear on an armchair, beside it a plastic bag that she knew contained a sodden incontinence pad — ‘and I’m going to lie down for a bit. If you want to take the flight, then it’s your own affair. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet, but, rest assured, whatever I do decide, I’ll be fine without you.’

Joyce went into the room, shut the door firmly behind her and locked it. Then she fell against it and listened to her daughter snuffling like a pathetic puppy requesting admission. Eventually, Isobel went away.