In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  But my mother had said no. She had no wish to be embalmed. It was unthinkable, I realised now, having only moments ago reassured my sister that she had taken the right decision in assenting to the embalming, that embalming had not been proposed to my mother when she ordered her funeral package, precisely because it was now a standard service and very much the fashion. At the very least there would have been a box to tick – Embalming – and my mother had not ticked it. My mother was against embalming. She did not want to be injected with formaldehyde and have her various intimate orifices stoppered against seepage and her jaw and teeth wired together to prevent her mouth from falling open and her face creamed and powdered and so on, all by hands unknown to her, all in the aid of reconstructing the false impression that body and soul were still cheek and jowl when they very definitely were not, when the real Martha Sanders had already flown up to heaven. Mother had said no. Which also meant, perhaps, that she was against the viewing of the corpse in general, though this did not follow 100 per cent. Perhaps Mother wouldn’t have minded people seeing her naturally decaying body. Perhaps she might even find salutary that confrontation with crude reality. I doubted it. But I couldn’t know.

  In any event, thinking all this over, still completely unaware of the terrific and inane dilemma that was being prepared for me, I now recalled that of course my father had not been embalmed when he died thirty and more years ago at an age, as it happens, that I was now approaching. In three years’ time, incredible as it may seem, I will be my father’s age at his death. Sixty. It does seem incredible. But he too had found it incredible, that he was dying I mean, would be dead shortly after his sixtieth birthday. Then too, in the days immediately before my father’s funeral and consequent cremation, which came at least a week, though perhaps not two, after his decease, I had been seized by a powerful desire to see my father’s body one last time. I had rushed out of the vicarage and up Cricklewood High Street to the undertaker’s – actually it was barely a hundred yards away – and pushed the door, determined to carry through my resolve before my mind changed. I felt courageous. I felt I was inside an important drama, the drama of seeing my father’s corpse, and I suppose by the corpse one really means the face, the beloved face, for I did love him, despite all our disagreements, before it was committed to the flames and destroyed for ever. I rushed up the busy High Road and still remember my surprise, pushing open the door of the undertaker’s, at hearing a bell ding in a back room as in any sweet shop or newsagent’s, as if to alert the dead there was someone come to see them. And sure enough the elderly man who presently appeared from a back room did have a curious complexion to him, dark, but dully polished, immediately inviting analogies with mahogany or mummies.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said, with a slight Dickensian bow.

  ‘I have come to see my father,’ I told him, ‘the Reverend Edward Sanders. The funeral is tomorrow and I wanted to see him one last time.’

  Tall and stiff, the undertaker looked down on me with evident sympathy for my youth and agitated state. Then, clearing his throat, he said, ‘Mr Sanders, you do not want to see your father.’ There was a pause. ‘Death is not kind to the body, sir. Better the Reverend Edward as he was.’ At which, without even answering, so far as I can recall, I turned and walked out.

  Later I regretted this retreat. In particular I regretted having accepted someone else’s telling me, without any discussion, what I did or did not want to do. It was fair enough advising me that my father was not a pretty sight. But in the end I knew that. I had seen him die. I had seen the nose rise from the grey cheeks and the eyes sink into the waiting skull. I wasn’t so stupid at twenty-five years of age as to imagine that a week’s being dead had improved my father’s appearance. Certainly there had been no talk of his benefiting from embalming. So I knew perfectly well what I was going towards and there must have been some powerful instinct pushing me that way, pushing me towards seeing my father’s decaying corpse, however shocking the sight might be, until the tall and doubtless kind man who seemed to have been embalmed alive, and in a permanent rather than temporary fashion, simply said, ‘You do not want to see your father’ and said it in such an authoritative, even peremptory way, as if it was a self-evident truth, that I at once turned on my heels and walked out of the place. ‘It seems to me, Señor Sanders,’ my shrink drily remarked towards the end of perhaps our fourth or fifth meeting, ‘that other people are always telling you who you really are, or are not, and what you do, or do not, really want.’ I had mentioned, I suppose, what my wife had said: that it simply wasn’t me to leave her; that I was acting out some role that wasn’t mine. And the shrink had immediately connected this remark to a previous session when I had explained how my mother would repeatedly complain during my adolescence, whenever I behaved badly, that I was merely aping my rebellious brother: I was essentially a good boy, my mother was sure, but I was allowing myself to be dragged down to perdition by my brother, who, sad to say, had turned resolutely away from the Christian path. I suppose this is what one pays one’s shrink for, to make these kinds of disturbing connections: my mother, my wife, each in their different ways telling me who I was.

  Do I really want to see my mother’s body, then, I wonder? Or don’t I? Or am I simply waiting for a wife or mother to tell me whether I want to? But I have no mother now and to all practical purposes no wife, either. Certainly the undertaker is unlikely to tell me not to see her, or view her, having gone to the effort of embalming the lady to make it easy for me. So if I do darken the threshold of the undertaker’s there will be no further advice. As for Elsa, I feel I should keep her out of this.

  In the taxi to Schiphol, Dr Sharp removed his anal wand from its transparent plastic bag and began to talk about its various components. He shouldn’t really be giving me a wand in this way, he said, since a patient needed to learn how to use the wand from a qualified physiotherapist over two or three practical sessions, otherwise he was in danger of doing himself damage. Or herself, because there were female users. However, along with the wand and the gauge, there was also a pen-drive on which I would find a series of videos where my namesake Thomas, the physio, explained how to use it. ‘With great care,’ Dr Sharp said, ‘and, above all, slowly.’ For example, the first time you used the wand, or perhaps the first two or three times, you really must do no more than insert and remove it. Just to get used to that action, insert and remove, to become familiar with a part of your anatomy you had never touched and a sensation you had never known before. The transparent plastic ring, he explained, which could be slid along the U of the wand and then fixed with the Allen key provided, was to prevent you from pushing the tip of the instrument in too far. You pushed the wand into the anus up to the plastic ring, which was too wide to pass the sphincter. Recommended distance between the tip of the wand and the plastic ring was your middle finger plus half an inch. This to start with, after which you could fine-tune with use and experimentation. Once set, the fixed point represented by the ring guaranteed that having found the sensitive points at the source of your pains, you could be sure of finding them again easily and always massaging the same spot. I would know where I was, as it were, up my arse.

  Why I was listening to Dr Sharp talking over the niceties of prophylactic internal pelvic-wall massage, for which I sincerely hoped I had no real need, while the taxi struggled through heavy traffic to Schiphol whence I was to fly to my mother’s deathbed, I have no idea. The good doctor was persuasive, I thought. Evangelical even. He was spreading the word. About anal massage. Then of course I was still feeling the aftermath of the massage that I had rather stupidly asked for some hours earlier. Perhaps I was worried I might need the wand and wanted to have one, just in case. Already I knew I did not want to use it and most likely never would. ‘Eventually you reach a point,’ Dr Sharp was reassuring me, ‘where massaging the pelvic floor through the anus becomes as routine, even pleasurable, as flossing your teeth or paring your toenails.’ He laughed. If only, he said, peop
le could overcome their irrational repulsion when it came to engaging with the more intimate parts of their bodies, then an awful lot of pain could be put behind us. ‘No pun intended!’ He laughed again.

  ‘They have no qualms about masturbating,’ I remarked.

  I had suddenly realised, on the back seat of the Dutch taxi inching forward through heavy traffic, that Dr Sharp reminded me of my father. My father too was always excited by the message he was trying to get across to people, always believed he had the unique solution to their problems. There had been something attractively innocent about my father’s sermonising, in a way that wasn’t altogether true of my mother’s. You forgave my father for preaching because he was so genuinely excited to tell you what he believed, even if you couldn’t follow him there. Mother, on the other hand, inculcated more guilt than enthusiasm. But now a message buzzed on my old Nokia. My sister needed to know my ETA.

  ‘You’re dead right about masturbation,’ Dr Sharp was chuckling. People masturbated far too often, he thought. Many men, he was sure, masturbated compulsively, forcing pleasure on themselves, as if it were a duty almost. Daily, even hourly, men masturbated, some men, to prove they were in control of their bodies. With the aid of Internet porn, of course. Then quite possibly they saw their pelvic pain as a punishment for the masturbation. They tied themselves in knots. Nor did they hesitate, and again the Californian doctor seemed to find this funny, to stick all kinds of sex toys up their butts, precisely as part of this process of forcing pleasure on themselves. They had to feel they were getting regular pleasure, extreme pleasure, and that they were in total control of that pleasure. It was part of their vision of themselves as successful human beings. Hence they would buy the craziest of objects to assist them in this task, because the creation and control of sexual pleasure did eventually become a kind of task, something you had to do. Screwing up your pelvic floor in the process, of course. He hadn’t really realised the full extent of the phenomenon, Dr Sharp said, until he, Tommy the physio and Dr Morrison, his now-ageing mentor, had decided to develop a self-massage tool. ‘We are not designers and didn’t have much money to invest,’ he explained. ‘We were like any ordinary folks thinking how on earth they are going to produce an object that has never been produced before.’ So the first thing they had done was go to a sex emporium to see if there was any pre-existing sex toy that could be adapted for the goal of pelvic-floor massage. It would save a lot of time if there was. In the event, they had bought and tried out every anal plug and every vibrator on the market, to see if there was something that would do the trick. As it were! Offer an effective massage of the pelvic floor. Dr Sharp was laughing out loud now and rubbing his hands. ‘We tried them all!’ But there was nothing. ‘They were never quite long enough, you know, or easy enough to manipulate, you couldn’t quite press them in the right places. There was no leverage. What a movie that would make,’ he went on, laughing. ‘Three doctors going through the sex-toy shop.’

  ‘Not sure yet,’ I texted my sister. ‘I’ll let you know from the airport.’ And as I did so, another message arrived. ‘Go to your mother, Tom. That’s the important thing. Don’t worry about me.’

  Elsa.

  The fact was, Dr Sharp was saying, that people were all too ready to touch their own and each other’s intimate parts when in the throes of erotic excitement, and in particular transgressive erotic excitement, but not in order to improve their health. A woman was perfectly willing to put a finger up a man’s anus while making love, or vice versa, but when you suggested he needed a pelvic-floor massage to relieve pain, she suddenly found the area dirty, smelly and repulsive. The same being true the other way round of course, of men with women. The repulsion and the transgressive attraction were part of the same taboo-driven mindset, he said, and both equally unhelpful. They found it sexy one moment because it was repulsive the next. Modern Western eroticism, in fact, Dr Sharp insisted, was nothing other than the overcoming of repulsion, of taboo; hence, logically, the more repulsion, the greater the excitement overcoming it. Which was why people got into so-called water sports and the like. ‘I love you and love you and love you,’ I texted back to Elsa, and I told Dr Sharp that my mother’s cancer had been so far advanced when they finally operated on her because, being in the breast, she had been reluctant to go and show it to a doctor. She had only gone when the situation became unbearable and the tumour, or so at least my sister had told me, grotesque. For years my mother had been conscious of this lump growing in her breast and must have been aware of the dangers, but all the same, or perhaps precisely because of the dangers, because of the thought of the medical Via Crucis that awaited her, she hadn’t wanted to show it to a doctor. The thought of exposing her body, and in particular her breasts, to medical professionals was too depressing.

  Dr Sharp nodded excitedly and said that this was absolutely standard behaviour for every pathology that had remotely to do with the body’s sexual or secretory functions. By the time people came to him, for example, they were absolutely crippled with pain and had been for years. But because it was urinary pain, testicular pain, perineal pain, they didn’t want to discuss it. And still they baulked at anal massage. ‘They would rather have open-heart surgery or a hip replacement,’ Dr Sharp laughed, ‘than anal massage. But I’m beginning to worry you won’t make your plane,’ he added. He returned the wand to its plastic bag. ‘Remember never to use it without putting a surgical glove over the ball,’ he said. ‘And plenty of lube.’ I looked at my watch and in fact the boarding gate was due to close in just four minutes. ‘They never close it when they say they’re going to,’ the taxi driver offered. He spoke as if I might have been intending to blame him for missing the flight. I sat back and stared at the traffic. How had I allowed this to happen?

  ‘Do you have a long way to go from the airport at the other end?’ Dr Sharp asked.

  ‘Change of trains to Hounslow,’ I said. ‘An hour or so.’

  ‘Try not to be too anxious,’ he said. ‘Especially over the things you can’t control.’ He gestured to the motorway traffic advancing like a lava flow in the cold evening gloom, brake lights flaring and fading, flaring and fading.

  Then I said the fact was that I was agitated because I had never actually told my mother that I had left my wife. I wished I had told her, but I hadn’t. I would like to tell my mother this now, I felt that to tell her this would constitute becoming adult in some way. She would see me as I really am for the first time. ‘But I don’t know if I should.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell her?’ Dr Sharp asked.

  ‘Because it would have hurt her,’ I sighed. ‘Because I knew she didn’t want to hear it. Because, living abroad for the last few years, it was easy for me not to tell her. Easy to keep the two worlds well apart. I have a long track record in keeping worlds apart,’ I said.

  If she hadn’t wanted to hear it in the past, Dr Sharp reflected, she was hardly going to want to hear it now, was she? She would have other things on her mind at this point. ‘Let it go,’ he said.

  ‘It seems important,’ I told him.

  At last the car stopped and I said goodbye to Dr Sharp, who insisted on embracing and touching cheeks in the modern, rather sentimental way, and despite my haste and agitation I found myself appreciating this, I appreciated the momentary warmth of his body and the contact with his closely shaven skin and the shine of his evangelical eyes, so like my father’s, as once again he thanked me for being so generous as to go ahead with the talk, despite my anxiety over my mother.

  Freeing myself at last from the powerful magnetism that hung around Dr Sharp, wishing him good luck for his meeting with the anonymous benefactor, I began to run towards the sliding doors of the foyer and immediately had to stop. I had forgotten that I had released my belt and the top of my trousers in the car, to ease a sense of constriction. Suddenly, my trousers were down around my thighs. I put my bag on the ground, sorted myself out and started to run again. Yet even as I hurried into the vast atrium of Schiph
ol Airport, anxious above all to see the departure board and find out whether there was still a chance of making the easyJet flight that had been fifty-nine euros cheaper than the KLM, I simultaneously wondered whether it was really worth all this enormous effort to go and see my dying mother. Did I really want to tell my mother that I had left my wife two years ago? I was stressing myself out. Or that I had fallen in love at fifty-seven. With a woman thirty years younger than myself. Did I? It was ridiculous. It wasn’t me.

  I stopped in the atrium, noting as I always do that Schiphol is bigger than you would expect for such a small country as Holland. My eye went to the top left of the departure board. Bigger and glossier. Was my flight still up there? The floor in particular seemed extremely glossy. A Lufthansa to Frankfurt had a three-hour delay. Did my mother really want, I asked myself, still searching for my flight, to hear these things from me on her deathbed? She did not. Had she ever wanted to hear them? No. But yes, the flight was there. Delayed for fifty minutes. What luck! Go to Gate 27. My mother knew my marriage was in crisis, she had known for years, but she had never asked me what I was going to do about it. Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. ‘If you don’t tell people what they don’t want to hear,’ the shrink had said, ‘it’s hardly surprising that you are forced to appear what you are not.’ Even as I rejoiced over the delay, the ‘Now boarding’ light began to flash.

  ‘Sir, we need to open your bag.’

  Pleading a last-minute booking because my mother was ill, I had pushed my way to the front of the queue at Security, only to be pulled out for inspection on the other side of the X-ray machines. It was a woman in her late twenties, Elsa’s age; she was brusque and practical, understandably tired at the end of her working day, irritated with the stupidity of people who, despite all the warnings and lists of forbidden items, still put things they shouldn’t in their hand luggage. I too have often felt irritated with such people and indeed was sure that I had removed all liquids from the bag, not to mention my computer, my Kindle, etc. So what was up? Around us there was quite a buzz of people threading belts back on and fastening watches. I unzipped the bag.