In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  ‘What is this?’ the woman asked. Wearing black gloves, she fished out the transparent plastic bag with its yellow tubing, grey wires, electronic gauge and rather fat pen-drive.

  ‘What is it?’

  The young official raised an eyebrow, in genuine puzzlement. At last something she had never seen before.

  ‘It is not an explosive device,’ I told her.

  ‘Just tell me what it is, please.’

  ‘Medical equipment.’

  She turned the bag over and over in her gloves.

  ‘Of what kind, sir?’

  ‘Do I have to explain?’

  This annoyed her. ‘Just tell me what this equipment is for, sir.’

  It’s hard not to notice, as one grows older, how much young officials enjoy exercising power over someone who in other circumstances might be considered hierarchically superior. But I was more angry with myself than with her. Why had I suddenly wanted to possess this embarrassing object that, until today, I had never remotely thought of possessing, never mind using? Was I genuinely afraid that the pains brought on by the otherwise soothing lunchtime massage might signal the beginning of a new era of suffering, and that the only way to tackle them would be more and deeper massage, more suffering? Or was there, obscurely but more likely, some connection with the news of my mother’s decline, some feeling that if only my mother had been more frank about her body, she need not have left the world in the way she was leaving it? That said, at ninety one had to go one way or another, did one not? The truth is I really didn’t know why I had asked for it. Perhaps because Dr Sharp, like my father, was such a hard sell.

  ‘It’s a massage tool,’ I told her. ‘For pelvic pain.’

  The woman was examining the small yellow box with the liquid-crystal display. She wore a uniform that flattened but emphasised her breasts, almost forced you, that is, to think of her breasts being flattened. By officialdom. Absurdly, and it has to be said that when my mind starts racing it really does race, I remembered that during her three pregnancies, in the 1940s and ’50s, my mother had worn a tight girdle to prevent the belly from showing. This was one of the things that had somehow come up in conversation in the long limbo of that summer in her house four years ago. And Mother had laughed, shaking her head and saying those were different times and it was just not respectable to show a pregnant belly in church, with all the implications.

  ‘If you could just wait one moment, sir,’ the young official said.

  The implications!

  ‘My flight is boarding,’ I told her. ‘I can’t miss it.’

  ‘I am afraid I shall have to ask you to wait just a moment longer, sir.’

  People say that the problem with my relationship with Elsa is that it is hierarchically entirely in my favour – I am older and more powerful than she is. More powerful because older. How can a good relationship be built on such an asymmetrical basis? Here, on the other hand, a woman of the same age as Elsa was getting evident pleasure from giving me abrupt commands. If I told her, I thought, that my mother was dying and that I wished to see her one last time, this might actually make the woman more determined to keep me in line. She wouldn’t believe me. It would be a ruse to escape with my suspect device.

  ‘I’d rather you just kept it than that I missed my plane,’ I now said.

  But she had already turned her back to take the anal wand to her scanning colleague, so that now, as he turned from his machine to consider the device that Dr Sharp believed could spare men and women the world over oceans of unnecessary misery, I was holding up the entire line at Security, including an impatient young man beside me, also waiting to have his suitcase examined. The two officials came over.

  ‘How exactly is it used?’ the man asked.

  It occurred to me then that had the object in my bag been a sex toy, the two would have had no problem recognising it and waving it by. Sex toys must be two-a-penny in the luggage of people making weekend trips to Amsterdam. This was more embarrassing than a sex toy.

  ‘This is a last call,’ came over the PA, ‘for easyJet 570 to London Gatwick. Would travellers for London Gatwick on easyJet 570 please go directly to Gate 27, where this aircraft is waiting to depart.’

  ‘Please show us how it is used?’ the man repeated.

  For a moment it seemed awfully appropriate, or ironic, or just connected somehow, that I should be missing the chance to get to my mother, barred from speaking to her one last time, because of my decision to acquire an object that ran absolutely contrary to that squeamishness, fastidiousness, prudishness about the body that Mother had always maintained and always wanted her children to share. In asking for the wand, I had been rebuking my mother.

  But these were crazy thoughts. I took the bag from the woman, removed the wand, squatted down on the glossy tiles of the airport floor and pushed the U with its off-white spherical extremity between my thighs. ‘You pull this up into your anus,’ I said, over-enunciating the words as if these good Dutch people spoke English as poorly as the Portuguese, ‘then toggle it back and forth to massage any tender areas inside.’

  Five minutes later, breathless and ragged, I boarded easyJet flight 570 after a severe scolding from an orange-clad official with an earring. He might well have been in his teens, as far as I could see. Disturbing an elderly woman to get into the middle seat of a row of three, I felt at once that I needed to go to the bathroom again.

  III

  The dilemma that has blocked my mind for some days now and that has had me orbiting pathetically around the undertaker’s opposite Hounslow railway station, or more precisely oscillating between the Costa Coffee across the street and the Barclays cash dispenser on the next corner, would not have gripped me in the way it has, I don’t think, had the circumstances surrounding my mother’s death – that is, my visit to her deathbed – not been so unsettling, and in particular had I not received immediately on my arrival at Gatwick an SOS from my old friend Deborah Seymour, recently Deborah Pool.

  I had spent the flight in a state of some misery, having gone to the bathroom as soon as the safety-belt sign was turned off and having got trapped for ten minutes behind the drinks trolley on my way back to my seat. Barely had I sat down, with the elderly lady in the aisle seat clearly having difficulty struggling out of it to make way for me, something that could not fail to recall my mother’s struggles to get out of her recliner, than I felt I needed to go again. Not urgently, but perceptibly. And perceiving it, I began to dwell on it and on the embarrassment that would inevitably ensue, were I obliged to ask my elderly neighbour to struggle to her feet once more; obliged to meet, which was probably worse, on returning to my seat, the gaze of the rather athletic man by the window to my left who had begun to watch an action film on his iPad, so that I was now vaguely aware of explosions and plumes of smoke and figures running for their lives, and of course the slight twitches and smiles on his face as, turning his pad this way and that like a steering wheel, presumably for the pleasure of seeing the image rotate on the screen, he himself seemed ready to burst into athletic action at any moment, his neck bulging beneath a collar and tie and his body constantly shifting from side to side, threatening to cross the armrest dividing our seats. He was young, meaty and confident. And hostile somehow. I felt that. Maybe I was wrong, but I felt it. Or, if not hostile, intolerant. Youth does tend to be intolerant.

  The elderly lady to my right now produced a pair of knitting needles held together precariously by loops of pale-blue wool and as she struggled to organise herself and find the right place for her ball of wool, so that it wouldn’t roll away to the floor beneath the seat but at the same time wouldn’t be so trapped it couldn’t untwine as she worked, I realised that this knitting presented another obstacle to my heading for the bathroom. Not only would the old dear have to struggle from her seat, but the needles and the wool and the small square of pale-blue knitting would have to be carefully folded away, then carefully brought out and reorganised again after I returned. And what if, on
return, I quickly felt I needed to go yet again? Already I could see the meaty contempt of the man to my left, who chuckled every time an explosion lit up his field of vision or whenever gunfire crackled in his headphones. It would have been appropriate, I thought, to think of more serious, even solemn things at this moment, on my way to my mother’s deathbed, and instead my body was forcing me to think of the bathroom, to worry about my neighbours’ reactions to my bathroom habits. It seemed cruel. Then how could this behaviour right beside me – the explosions, the gunfire, the little grunts and chuckles – not conjure the image of my eldest son, who spent his last years at home, or so it seemed to me, from age fourteen onwards, say, with headphones on his ears. What was the point of having children, I remember asking myself more than once, if they were forever wearing headphones? Or at least what was the point of my staying at home to spend time with them, as my wife insisted I must, if they were always in thrall to explosions and gunfire booming and crackling from their tablets and game consoles – gadgets I had given them myself of course, since, when it came to Christmas and birthdays, there was simply nothing else they wanted, nothing but the sophisticated electronics that would prevent any communication with their father when he stayed at home on certain evenings, as their mother more or less ordered him to, more perhaps because of her worries over what he got up to away from home than out of any real desire for a dialogue between father and offspring, let alone man and wife, something so improbable at this point as to have shifted into the realm of the surreal.

  But had my mother’s knitting needles, years ago, promoted any more or better communication? For, sure enough, the unusual sight of a woman knitting on a plane – and I noticed now that her needles were of bright-yellow plastic, no doubt to avoid the danger of confiscation at Security – the sight of this woman tucking her ball of blue wool under her right elbow, the yellow needles drawing the blue thread looped around her fingers, jerk by tiny jerk, into what looked like the ribbed shoulders of a child’s tiny sweater, her jaw clenching and unclenching, her left elbow very slightly jogging my right with every pale-blue stitch she made, could not but remind me of my mother who had knitted and purled away most of our childhood. One neighbour to remind me of my son and one of my mother. Myself squashed in the middle seat, with both sides threatening my space. ‘But isn’t it true,’ the shrink had said during one recent session, ‘that everyone you meet, Señor Sanders, is potentially a close relative with the right to criticise you? Wherever you are, you imprison yourself in a world of familiar gaolers. Isn’t that the case?’

  No, Mother’s knitting had not promoted communication at all. Knitting through the 1960s and ’70s, Mother withdrew into a world of woolly enchantment, a thick, ribbed sweater entirely impermeable to the explosions and crackling gunfire of those dangerous times, and uncannily resistant too to the questions of her growing children. Often you would go to the sitting room to ask my mother a question as she sat in an armchair, varicose ankles raised on a footstool, knitting a Christmas present for Father, a chunky cardigan perhaps, or for one of us children, a woolly cap for winter walks maybe, and she would not even register that a voice had been raised and a question asked. Likewise my father, his head bowed over a biblical commentary, his thick reading glasses glinting in the light of the twee lamp they had brought back from a holiday in Bad Ems – or sometimes he would make use of a huge magnifying glass on an adjustable stand, with its own built-in fluorescent illumination – likewise my father might well not register that one of his children was in the room and had asked him a question. Then my mother would begin to hum. It was an automatic reaction to the question, perhaps, or to being questioned in general, an automatic intensification of the protective enchantment her rhythmical knitting had already induced – To God be the Glory, Mother would hum, great things He hath done. Or, And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Saviour’s blood? You asked Mother a question, perhaps a perfectly innocent question – Had she remembered to buy pellets for the rabbits? – or a more contentious question – Would it be okay if I skipped Bible Study this Wednesday to go to White Hart Lane? – or a question deliberately designed to engage your parents’ special interest in matters of religion and liturgy – What should I do at school prayers when everybody turned to the east to say the Apostles’ Creed? – and the clickety-click of her knitting would proceed unperturbed and a faint smile would light up on her face as she began to hum, Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. It was a deflector shield, raised against an alien spaceship. Meantime, the frown on my father’s face would intensify as he laboured over his biblical commentaries, scribbling notes in the margin in sudden predatory bursts, as if the speed and sharpness of his nib – because he always used a Sheaffer fountain pen with pale-blue Quink ink – had skewered an elusive thought that might otherwise have escaped for ever. Ha, he would mutter in a low tone and then more loudly, Hah!, his pen suddenly stabbing the page in the yellow lamplight, or under that huge magnifying glass with its circle of fluorescence, while my mother hummed in her strange, whiny way, at once smiling but full of pathos – When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died – as if happy to be sad, or sad to be happy, engrossed in her knitting and her devotion, quite unaware of the child in stockinged feet, the adolescent with the ugly corduroy jacket and the boil on his neck, trying perhaps to ask a difficult question: Why do I always feel sick when I have to go to school? Why do I always feel guilty when I turn out the light and lie alone in the dark?

  The woman to my right now, I realised – and her hair was permed into a silvery helmet that had the faintest reflections of green in it – was not humming but muttering to herself as she worked, or at least moving her lips in a way that somehow connected with the movement of the needles and the rapid rise and fall of her fingers as she dropped loop after loop of blue wool over the yellow needle and, in so doing, formed a protection against the world outside. She worked in a protected space, like a spider in its web, so that I could already foresee and even feel her irritation, but also pity no doubt, when I snapped the spider’s threads and asked her to struggle up out of her seat again so that I could go to the bathroom, barely twenty minutes after going the first time. ‘Bathroom’, I should say, like ‘impact’ is one of those Americanisms I resisted for years, determined to go on using the ugly but somehow more correct, I felt, ‘toilet’ – for how can one speak of a bath on an aeroplane? – then eventually caved in, as I always do, and began to use ‘bathroom’, and use it emphatically, so that now I hardly say ‘toilet’ at all. Where’s the bathroom, I say, over-enunciating the ridiculous ‘bath’. I’m almost tempted to pronounce it with an American ‘a’. Yes, I could already see my elderly neighbour’s pity, and it would be very similar to my mother’s pity when she had eventually realised – it was inevitable, during that long summer we spent together in her tiny house with just the one bathroom (‘restroom’ I swear I will never stoop to) at the top of narrow, steep stairs – that her fifty-something-year-old son had problems in that department. He went too often.

  Not that my mother would ever have spoken out loud of those problems, of course. For heaven’s sake! Mother would never have said, ‘Thomas, you do seem to be going to the bathroom rather frequently.’ But her eyes showed she had seen. Which was worse. ‘Have you slept well?’ she would ask, meaning she had heard me go to the bathroom any number of times during the night and wished to express her sympathy, even pity, but without actually broaching an embarrassing subject, not realising that pity was worse than straightforward observation, than open discussion. Or perhaps she did realise but couldn’t think of any way round it.

  And I could foresee too the young man’s contempt, as he raised his eyes for one split second from his treasured screen. Or if not actually contempt – I exaggerate – his distaste, repugnance, at the mere thought of age, at the thought of this male weakness of mine, a ‘weak bladder’, one says; it is weakness to go to the bathroom twice in twenty minutes,
and it was also my son’s distaste, my son’s repugnance, looking up briefly from his game console, years ago, very briefly, but long enough to register distaste, repugnance, in the face of a father’s age, and weakness, a father surely beyond any sexual interest in the world, surely beyond any dealings with a woman thirty years his junior, a woman as charming as Elsa. How will I ever explain my new relationship to my children? Although this was not unlike the impatience with which I viewed my own ageing father when he bent over the biblical commentaries with his fluorescent-lit magnifying glass. Weak bladder, weak eyesight.

  In any event, this anticipated embarrassment at my neighbours’ response to an eventual second trip to the bathroom, on what was after all only a one-hour flight from Schiphol to Gatwick, somehow managed to fuse itself with the growing pain in my belly; pain and embarrassment embraced each other, as it were, in a decidedly uneasy clutch. Then suddenly, from out of this unhappy mix, came anger: anger with the athletic youngster engrossed in his idiotic film, anger with the elderly woman who seemed oblivious to the fact that her elbow was nudging mine every two seconds, anger above all with myself for having so presumptuously insisted on trying that massage even when I had been warned it might cause pain, even when I had been feeling perfectly well for some years and really had no need of any therapy at all, and hence could have given my talk to the Dutch physiotherapists – how I had cured myself from chronic pelvic pain with years of deep-relaxation techniques – in perfectly good faith. I had presumed that after several years’ remission of my unpleasant symptoms, years of yoga and breathing exercises, I was cured. I was in the clear. I had imagined that being thus in the clear, I was free to savour the technique of anal massage that I had hitherto renounced, not having had the cash to go to Dr Sharp’s San Diego clinic at the critical moment. Or perhaps I had simply been too squeamish. Too afraid. I had cured myself without resorting to anal massage and now, years later when California had come to Europe to teach Europe anal massage, I had imagined I could seize this opportunity (offered free of charge) and sample the intervention when I no longer needed it – assess it, so to speak, or assess it if you like, weigh it up, from a position of power, virile in my very openness to what most virile men would not want to admit, proud of the ease with which I dropped my trousers for the Californian physio, two grown men chatting in the most relaxed fashion about things that most folks can’t even begin to contemplate: anal massage.