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

‘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 Sechsel ä uten , 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. verh ä tscheln ?’

‘Pampered.’ Weiss had rejoined them. Was it Joyce’s imagination, or were his chocolate eyes melting with a vision of this verh ä tscheln ?

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, nat ü rlich .’

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 verh ä tscheln .