In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Parks

  Title Page

  PART ONE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  PART TWO

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In Extremis is one of the most implacable, but also one of the funniest, novels about death and family you will ever read.

  Thomas knows there is something he needs to say to his mother before she dies. But will he reach her in time? And will he have the courage to say what he couldn’t say before? His phone is buzzing, his mind is racing, and he can’t concentrate on the significance of what is happening. Should he try to solve his friend’s family crisis? Should he reconsider his separation from his wife? Why does he feel so utterly confused and paralysed?

  In his most exhilarating book to date, Tim Parks explores how profoundly our present identity is rooted in our family past. Can we ever really change?

  About the Author

  Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He lives in Milan.

  He is the acclaimed author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, Cleaver, A Season with Verona, Teach Us to Sit Still and Italian Ways. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Betty Trask Prize, The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the John Florio Prize and the Italo Calvino Prize.

  Also by Tim Parks

  Fiction

  TONGUES OF FLAME

  LOVING ROGER

  HOME THOUGHTS

  FAMILY PLANNING

  GOODNESS

  CARA MASSIMINA

  MIMI’S GHOST

  SHEAR

  EUROPA

  DESTINY

  JUDGE SAVAGE

  RAPIDS

  CLEAVER

  DREAMS OF RIVERS AND SEAS

  SEX IS FORBIDDEN (first published as THE SERVER)

  PAINTING DEATH

  THOMAS AND MARY

  Non-fiction

  ITALIAN NEIGHBOURS

  AN ITALIAN EDUCATION

  ADULTERY & OTHER DIVERSIONS

  TRANSLATING STYLE

  HELL AND BACK

  A SEASON WITH VERONA

  THE FIGHTER

  TEACH US TO SIT STILL

  ITALIAN WAYS

  WHERE I’M READING FROM

  PART ONE

  I

  Mother’s corpse. This is what I keep thinking about.

  Should I view it?

  Why can’t I decide?

  I was at a conference for physiotherapists in Amersfoort. There was much discussion of the pelvic floor and anal massage. For the first time, I opted to try the treatment myself. At breakfast a Portuguese paediatrician had sworn by it. It had saved his life. The physio, from California, warned me that a single massage might do no more than bring back old pains. But I was curious. Afterwards in the shower I felt an unpleasant urgency, a burning in the bladder and, with it, a shift in my state of mind: fretfulness. It was all too familiar. Then, glancing at my laptop as I towelled myself dry, I saw an email had arrived from my sister, addressed to both my brother and myself. ‘Mum going downhill fast. Better come now.’

  So the question was: whether to give the talk I had been invited to give, or to depart at once. It is the decisions you can’t take that make you wonder who you are – despair sometimes. But this one was easy. I was only going to lose a couple of hours; I felt a certain responsibility to my hosts, who had paid for the trip and been generous. The business with the corpse is different. Actually, if I say ‘corpse’, I feel there can be no problem ‘viewing’ it. Viewing is their word, not mine, as if one were looking over a property, or the scene of a crime. And if I say ‘Mother’, then I really do want to see her. Tears come. But you can hardly use the word ‘view’ to speak of seeing your mother. It is ‘viewing Mother’s corpse’ that is the problem.

  What struck me about the massage was the man’s delicacy. He came to my hotel room, knocked softly on the door. Dropping my trousers, it was impossible not to think of a homosexual assignation. He was aware of my embarrassment and wanted only to keep the situation no more or less than what it was, a physio massaging a patient. ‘Stick a pillow under you, mate,’ he said. He was grinning. Perhaps he thought all Englishmen called each other ‘mate’. Aged forty-fiveish, chinless and pockmarked, he was not a good-looking man, yet extremely attractive to be around. A man entirely at ease with himself, I thought. He communicated ease. I was envious. What I want, I had told my shrink on our first tumultuous meeting, is to be at ease with life. She frowned as if to say, Don’t go running ahead of yourself now, Señor Sanders.

  If I look back I can count perhaps half a dozen other medical intrusions in this territory. All painful, one excruciating. Invariably humiliating. On all fours, up on an examination bed. Taken from behind. You an animal; they in their white coats in complete and castrating control. Why am I talking about this now? Didn’t I say I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother’s corpse? But that’s not quite right. What I am actually thinking about, or trying to decide, is whether I should view the corpse – her corpse – knowing she wouldn’t want me to. She would be humiliated, though she can’t be, being dead now. Instead, this physio laid me tummy-down on the cushion, legs spread, and began to massage my buttocks, much as one does with a baby. I was surprised, tensed for violation. He chatted to me about how he had got into this line of business, years ago now. Certainly it wasn’t what he had meant to do when he studied physiotherapy. He chuckled. His voice was gravelly and pleasant. The gentle rotation he applied to the upper part of the buttocks was exactly the massage I had given our tiny children when they couldn’t sleep, years ago. Still I was tensed for violation. He chatted on about how Dr Sharp had talked him into it. He was using jelly of course, though he must have warmed it in his hands first, because I hadn’t noticed the usual warning coldness of jelly squirted onto the skin. Dr Sharp was an extraordinary person, he said. He had charisma. And, extraordinarily, I realised he was already in there. I hadn’t noticed. Presumably with a glove on. It was warm and full and undeniably pleasant.

  ‘My job,’ he laughed.

  I checked what the flight situation was. I would have to forgo the flight to Madrid and book to Heathrow or Gatwick. I did some googling. My bladder was burning. The flights were expensive, but there was nothing for it at this stage. How much should one shop around, when one’s mother is dying? And how, I wondered, could an event that had been as reassuring as that massage, even pleasant, have stirred up so much pain, for it was building now, not to mention this agitated state of mind? I recognised it. Yet my mother had gone out of her way to shop around for the cheapest way to die, to save the money she wanted us to have when she was gone. That was important for her. To leave us with a little money. More important for her than for us, perhaps. Even if it would be paid for with pain. I moved from KLM to easyJet and saved fifty-nine euros, though I lost an hour into the bargain. I would just have time to grab something to eat at Schiphol. Now I had to give the talk.

  Of course I should have given the talk before the massage rather than after. Then I would have been in good faith when I told the physiotherapists I was pain-free and had been for years. I was a success story. It is easier to convince people when you’re in good faith. On the othe
r hand, the very fact that a mere massage had brought back the pain – only temporarily, the physio assured me – was proof that this was a condition that had to do, as they claimed, with muscles and muscular tension, not infection or cancer, and so in a way was reassuring.

  But what if it wasn’t temporary? What if that one gentle massage set off the nightmare again, for years to come? Where would that leave me with Elsa?

  First the Portuguese paediatrician spoke. His English was poor and he wasn’t used to talking about embarrassing subjects. All the physiotherapists were women. Big Dutch women. He stumbled and made mistakes. But he was handsome in a Latin way, and a good ten years younger than me. The ladies relished his timidity, his embarrassment, his poor English. He talked about pelvic pains, back pains, shooting twinges in his legs, urinary urgency, abdominal stiffness, anxiety. ‘I was beginning to think I must kill myself,’ he announced rather abruptly. ‘I am never previously imagining this. But life is horrible. For months and months. Also I am impotent. There is no pleasure. I am complaining every time with my dear wife and children. I am becoming a bad, unhappy person. Very unhappy. You know? And every day there is misery.’

  The Dutch women were attentive. I wondered why there were no men. Are all physiotherapists in Holland women? The Americans leading the seminar were men. Or are Dutch men especially averse to carrying out anal massage? The Portuguese doctor spoke for longer than he was supposed to. In particular about the experience of self-massage with Dr Sharp’s famous wand. It had saved his life, he repeated. I had the impression he wasn’t unaware of the seductive potential of intimate confession. Some of the women looked promising. Meantime, I had a train to catch.

  ‘This is a muscle like any other.’

  The physio who had massaged me now stepped in, to say a word between our two testimonies. This was unscheduled. On the other hand, I hadn’t told him my mother was dying. Nor that I was experiencing pain and urgency, following his massage.

  ‘Actually, it’s the same kind of tissue as the shoulder muscle. Nobody is embarrassed about having their shoulder massaged, are they?’

  The physio went to the back of the room and wheeled forward a life-sized plastic skeleton, its torso packed with organs in an attractively coloured three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Hanging from a hook on a mobile frame, inanimate Mr Plastic swung and clacked with cheerful relaxation. Everything was loose and easy, as my body will never be. Unpacking the abdomen, the physio reached in and plucked out the pelvic floor. It was made of pink silicon and shaped rather like the cups of those plungers used for clearing blockages in kitchen sinks, or an oversized tennis ball sliced in half.

  ‘This should be elastic,’ he said, squeezing the cup and letting it pop open again. He placed it on his middle finger, which passed through a hole where the anus is. ‘Instead, in the men we’re talking about, but many women too, it feels as stiff as an old boot.’

  Again I was struck by how at ease this man was. For all his chinlessness and pockmarkedness, he gave the impression of being truly present before us, in a way the handsome Portuguese paediatrician hadn’t quite. The paediatrician had been hidden somehow, even at the moments of most intimate confession. Perhaps because he was speaking a foreign language, or because of a general unease. He was brittle, withdrawn. Perhaps it’s part of this condition. You could view him, but you couldn’t quite see him. In contrast, the physio’s immediacy, swaying easily in cheap grey tracksuit and trainers, was heartening, even beautiful. He was a healthy man.

  Now it was my turn. I shifted a desk away from the wall so that I could lean back against it and half stand, half sit in front of my female audience, commanding but casual. I had been made aware from the youngest age, of course, of the importance of posture in delivering a talk. Just watching my father in the pulpit had been enough. The difference between the Reverend Sanders elevated above his congregation, in the black-and-white authority of his robes, and nervy Ted Sanders sprawled in an armchair after lunch, his trousers loosened, was total. My mother too was no slouch when it came to combining body language and rhetoric. Only a month ago she had mentioned preaching to a congregation of two hundred. You could see she was pleased with herself. ‘Absolutely,’ Dr Sharp insisted when I had asked, just the previous week, if he really needed me to be there. Wouldn’t it be enough, I had suggested – I was feeling a little tired and overstretched – to write a testimonial for them, or do a video interview perhaps? In the end I would be saying the same things.

  ‘No, it’s absolutely crucial you be there,’ Dr Sharp repeated. ‘There’s nothing like putting flesh and blood in front of people.’ He chuckled on the phone from California. ‘Someone called Thomas should appreciate that.’

  I was surprised he had picked up on my name.

  ‘I hope they won’t be eager to push their fingers in my wounds,’ I laughed, and he said, ‘I’ll pay you double if they try.’

  He was serious. Actually, he was already paying far more than I was used to being paid for a twenty-minute talk. But this is hardly my regular field. He was paying through the nose to put my flesh and blood in front of fifty Dutch physiotherapists. This, in the end, was why I had decided to go to Holland and do the talk despite the fact, given Mother’s condition, that an urgent trip to London was always on the cards; despite a more familiar kind of conference only two days later; despite the fact that, incredible as it may seem, I was falling in love, or believed I was, and did not want to be away for a moment longer than was necessary, since it seemed to me that every day I spent away was a day lost in pleading my cause, a day in which Elsa could take the smart decision to steer well clear of an old shipwreck like Thomas Sanders.

  Almost an hour behind schedule when I got up to speak, I nevertheless spent thirty silent seconds, perhaps a whole minute, wriggling myself into a comfortable position, half sitting, half standing on and against this desk, smiling at my audience, breathing easily, letting people see who I was; above all, making sure to appear relaxed and pain-free, even though, as I have said, ever since the after-lunch massage I was not pain-free at all. On the contrary, I was now in some considerable pain. All sadly reminiscent of the past. So much for curiosity.

  Kicking off, I followed the outline Dr Sharp had suggested: a brief biography, what kind of person I was, my professional, mainly academic life, a sketched account of the chronic pains I had run into in my late forties, some discussion of how the medical profession had failed me, concluding with my discovery of the Sharp and Morrison approach, my email exchanges with the doctor, and finally light at the end of the tunnel, etc., though of course I had never made the trip to Sharp and Morrison’s San Diego clinic, or ever been treated by a physiotherapist following the famous San Diego protocol. Until today.

  ‘No, it’s better that way,’ Dr Sharp had enthused. ‘It’s really better.’

  Dr Sharp, I was discovering, was always enthusiastic, or scandalised, a man who seduced or repelled you with his boundless evangelical energy. ‘That way it doesn’t seem so much like our sell,’ he said, ‘or like we’ve brainwashed you or something. You just took our model, from the book, a couple of conversations, and ran with it. On your own.’

  ‘If I look back,’ I wound up for the physiotherapists after twenty minutes of intimate and unpleasant details, ‘it seems impossible to account for this illness, this recovery, this whole experience, in easy terms of cause and effect. I was wired up in all kinds of ways over many years, then I was in all kinds of pain over some years. I sought rapid medical solutions, urological interventions, in vain and with growing frustration, until, dimly, I began to perceive that the problem was me. My body was me. My pain was me. I would have to work on myself – physically, mentally, without the help of conventional medicine.’

  Dr Sharp, I noticed, who is not in reality a medical doctor, but a PhD in psychology, was beaming and assenting as I said all this but, rather than reassuring me, his enthusiasm, coupled perhaps with the angry smouldering in my belly, made me feel that everything I w
as saying was false. I was telling the truth of course – aside perhaps from not relating these new pains, consequent on a first massage of just the kind we were here to promote, but this seemed an unnecessary complication – I was telling the truth as of a couple hours before; the truth as it was when, following our email correspondence, Dr Sharp had invited me to put my flesh and blood before the physiotherapists, and yet it felt like it was not the truth; in fact it felt particularly misleading and false, in part perhaps because I had become so aware over recent years of the need to perform when giving a talk, or teaching a lesson for that matter, any kind of public discourse, and in part because, although it was the truth as of a few hours ago, it wasn’t quite the whole truth. My wife had made this objection on numerous occasions and suddenly I felt very conscious of it. ‘Everything you say to people about your so-called health problems,’ my wife told me, ‘is false. Because you never tell the whole truth.’ Ex-wife, that is. What she meant of course was my unfaithfulness, my doubleness, which lay at the heart of the matter as she saw it. It made her angry, she said, that I was applauded for my candour when in fact I wasn’t candid at all. ‘Nothing but the whole truth is the truth,’ my wife said. And she was right. But how can one tell the whole truth in just twenty minutes? And with your mother at death’s door.

  ‘I was wondering,’ asked a rather matronly woman in the second row, ‘how all this impacted on your marriage?’

  It was question time. Dr Sharp had suggested twenty minutes talking, ten or fifteen fielding questions, then I was free to go. My train was at five-o-five. He didn’t know that. He thought I was leaving later. ‘If you don’t mind,’ he had said. This was earlier that morning, before the massage. The fact was: questions reinforced a speaker’s authenticity, showed there was someone there beyond the prepared talk, open to interaction. ‘Only interaction really constitutes reality,’ Dr Sharp had said, ‘for most people.’ This was why they learned so little from books in the end. ‘People read books, even the most fantastic books,’ he said, ‘brilliantly written and instructive and so on, but they learn very little, because they’re in a passive position, they can’t ask the writer questions and hear something back. They can’t touch him.’ There was a sense, Dr Sharp said, in which books remained for ever in the realm of the hypothetical, because the words that constituted them were silent. They never left the printed page and, as a result, people just couldn’t take them on board.