by Tim Parks
Result? I now had the full array of symptoms all over again: the pains, the urgency and the racing mind that was somehow one with pain and urgency.
How could this not affect my relationship with Elsa? Wasn’t the age difference enough, without a condition like this? I would have to hide it from her. And if there was one thing I did not want to do, it was to start hiding things from Elsa. Was I, or was I not, going to ask the elderly lady to put aside her knitting and struggle out of her aisle seat so I could go to the bathroom? Because I really needed to go.
And all this, I thought, on the very day my mother chooses to die. Mother from whom everything had always been hidden. Mother who had always been complicit in having things hidden from her, whose eyes pleaded with you to have things remain hidden. In that sense not unlike my wife. Women to whom things ought to have been said, and from whom some response should have been elicited.
I am in one hell of a state, I realised, then realised also that the elderly lady was talking to me.
‘I’m sorry, is my elbow bothering you? I’m afraid I can’t seem to tuck it in tight enough.’
As she spoke I appreciated she must be asking the question for the second time, or maybe even the third. I had been so wrapped up in myself, something my children always accused me of, just as I had always accused my parents of being far too wrapped up in themselves and their religion.
‘It’s no problem at all,’ I told her. ‘Actually, I was rather enjoying watching your fingers. You’re so fast.’
She smiled and her previously severe face creased with friendly wrinkles.
‘My mother used to knit,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Knitting was more popular in the past.’ From her accent, I thought she must be German. ‘I suppose it was a cheap way of providing quality clothes. Especially for children. Now the wool is so expensive, it costs more than buying a sweater in the shops.’
‘She even taught me to knit once.’
I had forgotten this until the moment the words came out. But it was true. When I was about eight or nine my mother had taught me to knit.
‘That is unusual,’ she smiled, ‘in a boy.’
‘Perhaps I was playing at being good,’ I explained, ‘or trying to get myself forgiven for something I’d done wrong.’
The German woman looked puzzled.
‘It didn’t last. I don’t suppose in the end I knitted more than a few dozen squares for refugee blankets. No fancy patterns or anything. Later Mum had to stop when her rheumatism got too bad.’
Or was it arthritis?
‘Yes,’ the lady nodded. ‘The hands get stiff.’ She flexed her fingers as if checking all was okay, then added, ‘I do it, for fear of flying. I always knit on planes.’ She nodded to the window beyond our beefy neighbour. ‘It stops me from thinking we are in the air.’
Almost at once, as if just mentioning flight had frightened her, she dropped her head to go back to her work and the fingers began to move again and the left elbow very slightly to touch my right elbow. My mother loved flying, I remembered. She was always delighted when there was some reason to travel. So it must have been something else that she was afraid of when she disappeared into her knitting. Staying on the ground, maybe.
I was struck then, watching the German woman’s hands as she took up her needles again, by how many muscles and movements were involved in this homely act of knitting. She had quite small, dry white hands, the skin only faintly mottled around the knuckles with one thick gold ring on her wedding finger and, as she worked, literally scores of tiny muscles and tendons clicked in and out, back and forth, rose and fell, to keep the blue wool feeding into the pattern around the shiny points of the yellow needles, to keep her mind from thinking of her precarious physical position thousands of feet above the ground. The hands formed, as it were, a neat machine in constant internal motion but fixed in space, never shifting from their place on the lap of her olive-green skirt except, every two or three minutes, when she reached the end of one row and raised her right hand in the air for a moment to finish off and start another. It was astonishing to think that, as a boy of eight or nine years old, I too had known how to do this. Forty-eight years ago. I had been so eager to get close to my mother, I suppose, as she sat there in her knitting enchantment, so fascinated, or perhaps so bored, that I had demanded she teach me to knit too, begged her to draw me into the spell of her knit-one-purl-one. And though I have not the slightest idea now how to hold a knitting needle or tie off even the first stitch, so that you might think there really is no continuity in our lives at all and the past simply non-existent, all the same I do vaguely recall sitting for hours at a time beside my mother, needles in hand, seeking to join her in her raptness, her rapture.
Seeking and failing. For if I enjoyed fiddling with the needles and the hairy touch of the wool and the smell of the wool – and the way these repeated actions focused the mind and brought an easy sense of accomplishment as the repetitive clickety-click became a woolly form, and also an act of charity, a soft thick blanket for someone infinitely worse off than myself – if I enjoyed this simple, practical, generous task, at the same time Mother’s constant humming drove me mad. The wondrous cross drove me mad. The great things He hath done drove me mad, the Saviour’s blood drove me absolutely insane. And far worse than the words, which actually she barely mouthed, but which unfortunately I already knew and so couldn’t help hearing in my head even when they weren’t clearly pronounced, far worse than the words was the whiny sadness of her humming, its raptured resignation. This drove me wild. The whole mood of complacent sadness communicated by that whiny, self-denying hum was a torture for me, and very soon I gave up the knitting because of it. But without ever being able to tell my mother why. All my life I was never able to tell my mother that her constant humming of sad, somehow sticky hymns, something she did from my earliest memories of her right on into extreme old age, while cooking, or cleaning, or climbing the stairs or simply relaxing in her recliner, drove me quite berserk. Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee. I hated the intense pleasure she took in this sticky pathos, this surrender of herself to a ghoulish story of sacrifice and salvation – let the water and the blood, from Thy riven side which flowed – I wanted to grab one of her knitting needles and stab it right through her, like the spear in Christ’s ribs, the wounds my biblical namesake thrust his fingers in. Life need not be like this! I wanted to scream. I do not need to be washed in blood. Soon enough, I gave up knitting and headed for White Hart Lane.
‘May I ask you a question?’ I said.
The elderly woman beside me did not appear to have heard. The fingers and thumbs continued their mesmerising motions on her lap.
‘Excuse me?’
She turned, ‘Yes?’
‘May I ask you a question?’
She smiled with a sudden warmth, as if in the space of a few minutes we had become old friends.
‘I was observing, while you knit, I hope you don’t mind …’
She waited.
‘I was noticing that when you knit your lips move. Are you actually saying anything?’
She frowned, then sighed.
‘I should tell you,’ she said rather formally, her accent sounding stronger now, ‘that I am not aware of it at all, while I’m knitting. I might even think you were making it up, except that my husband always complained about the same thing.’ She hesitated. ‘He told me he couldn’t bear being around me when I was knitting, because he was always wondering what my lips were saying. It irritated him.’
‘Prayers?’ I suggested. ‘For a safe journey?’
‘Oh, I’m not religious at all,’ she smiled. She reflected. ‘For a while, to please him, I did try to knit with my lips clamped shut, but I found I couldn’t do it. It made me feel most uncomfortable. Strange, isn’t it? My lips have to move when I knit.’
‘So how did you resolve the question?’ I asked. ‘With your husband, I mean’, and I knew already that this business of my
neighbour’s knitting would prove my salvation on this flight, for the bathroom urgency that had been tormenting me until just a few moments ago had now receded to a dull ache; then even if I did have to ask her to get up to let me make my way along the aisle, I wouldn’t now feel embarrassed at all. We liked each other. We were friends. As for my other neighbour, I didn’t give a damn.
‘I’m afraid the problem solved itself,’ she sighed. ‘He was killed in a car accident.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘It was many years ago.’
She sat in thought for a moment or two, then again looked down at her hands and began to draw the wool to her needles. Watching, I had the impression her mouth was moving more rapidly than before.
Came a loud ding and the safety-belt sign lit up. The athletic man turned off his drama, but still stared at his mirror image in the iPad screen. Through the window beyond him the cloud was impenetrable. We were flying on our instruments, I thought, entirely dependent on computer technology. And I thought if the plane crashed on its Gatwick approach and I was killed, what were the things I wouldn’t like people ever to find out about me from my papers and computer files? It’s a game I often play in aeroplanes, at moments of turbulence, for example, when you get those sudden wobbles and drops in altitude; to ward off bad luck, or to quell my fears, I say to myself, Okay, if you died now, Thomas, what sins would they find on your laptop? Then I tick them off in my mind. I did this now on easyJet 570, approaching Gatwick through heavy raincloud. And the list was growing longer and longer and the smile on my face broader and broader, thinking of the things I had done that I wouldn’t like other people to know I had done, thinking that one of the great pleasures of age is the growing list of rules you have had the courage at some point or other to break, when the plane touched down with a contact as light and smooth as the caress of the Californian physio as his fingers slipped into my butt.
‘It is such a help,’ the lady beside me confided, visibly more at ease now, ‘to have a calm, cheerful fellow passenger as a neighbour. Thank you so much.’
Fifteen minutes later, firing up my laptop in the passport queue to take advantage of the airport Wi-Fi, I opened my email and found Deborah’s SOS.
IV
It was dark in England. As soon as I boarded the train at Gatwick I removed the SIM card in my phone and replaced it with an English SIM. I was aware that this SIM-switching was out of date and that the logical thing to do nowadays is to get a smartphone with a contract that will allow it to roam everywhere. But I knew I was not going to do this. I suppose I resent the constant pressure to update and be every minute connected in every way. It seems an important part of my identity to resist such things, at least for a while. On the other hand, nothing would have been more useful to me at the present moment, moving as I was between countries and with a whole series of conversations on the go, private and work-related alike, than a single gadget that gathered phone calls and emails from wherever they came to wherever I was. Had I had an iPhone, for example, I would have seen emails from my brother, my wife, my daughter and Deborah Pool, not to mention numerous work emails and a lovely message from Elsa, before I got on the plane at Schiphol, something that would no doubt have changed and certainly complicated my mood on the flight and allowed me to be better prepared for what awaited me in England, though it might also have altered, if not entirely obliterated, my taxi conversation with Dr Sharp, which for some reason I was now thinking of as an important conversation, one I must return to when I had some time, though quite why I wasn’t sure. Certainly not for any precise content. Perhaps for the train of reflection it had set in motion with regard to my father. Dr Sharp’s similarity to my father, that is. With my mother’s imminent death, I had started thinking of my father, whom I hadn’t thought about for many years. The fact is there were things I would have liked to ask my mother about my father, a vague theory I had that I would have liked to verify. But if these were questions I hadn’t had the courage to ask in the past, when she was crying ‘cooee’ up the stairs and cooking plum crumbles to be served with thick yellow custard, was it likely I would be able to ask them now? I must see, I supposed, what state my mother was actually in.
‘I am sure,’ was the burden of my brother’s email, opened on my laptop while standing in the passport queue at Gatwick, ‘that the dear old bird will bury us all. I called her the day before yesterday and I assure you she was extremely chirpy.’ In short, it was a typical email from my brother. I had read it shuffling along in the queue, pushing my small bag across the floor with my toe, so as to have my arms free to cradle my laptop on my left arm and protect it from other shuffling passengers with my right. Mother was made of tougher stuff than people like us, my brother wrote. His daughter, he said – my niece, that is – had been passing through London on business just three weeks ago and had found her grandmother ‘in fine shape’. They had gone to Marble Hill Park together. They had walked by the river and had tea and cakes. In any event, he was a bit surprised – my brother, that is – to learn that I had jumped on a plane at the first cry of alarm from my alarmist sister. He himself, he wrote, couldn’t easily envisage crossing half the globe in the next few weeks, which were packed with institutional obligations. He had had a nice visit with Mother in the summer. He had good memories of that and wasn’t sure they needed adding to. The rest of what was really a generously long and chatty email encouraged me to read a new book on evolution, seen from a chemist’s point of view, a book he had found particularly impressive both for the clarity of the style and the illuminating nature of the information provided. ‘More and more,’ my brother concluded, ‘it does seem we are just a predetermined fizz of chemical reactions set in motion millennia ago. Including our most intimate thoughts. Hardly worth struggling against the tide. Heigh-ho, Tommy! Have a good trip and let me know how you find the old dear.’
A trolley now arrived selling sandwiches and, having paid for tea and ham-and-cheddar with a card, because I had no British currency, it occurred to me that perhaps it was what Dr Sharp had said about masturbation that had really impressed me. People impose pleasure on their bodies even when they don’t really need it or want it, Dr Sharp had said. An act of will. People had convinced themselves they must have pleasure. All the time. Pleasure coming more from the mind, really, than the flesh. That was an interesting idea. Was my aversion to the iPhone and the iPad partly to do with the fear of having Internet porn constantly and alluringly available, so that one would always be tempted to impose pleasure on one’s body? Mental sex. Though it did seem that Elsa had ended that phase of my life. Since I had decided to stake everything on Elsa I had noticed, to my surprise, that I was suddenly and entirely free from that kind of compulsion. The truth is, one day you will have to get an iPhone, I thought now, because the world will become so integrated with this new gadget, there will be so many apps one can’t do without – to book a theatre ticket, to find a restaurant, to check street directions – that you will have to get one merely to function in society like other human beings, the way everyone has to wear clothes, like it or not, live under a roof, get an income, pass a driving test, take care of their teeth and open a bank account. All like it or not. Civilisation imposes these things. You cannot live simply as the animal you are, even if you might like to, or might like at least to try, or to have tried. All the same, I didn’t want to buy a smartphone right now. I would wait until the last possible moment, as my mother had waited until the last possible moment before calling for help after her fall down the stairs three weeks ago, perhaps the day after the visit from her granddaughter, my brother’s child, or perhaps that very same evening, for nobody knew exactly when Mother had fallen down the stairs, even though this accident was something we had been expecting for twenty years and more. She hadn’t been able to say. And presumably she waited till the last possible moment before calling for assistance because she knew in her heart that when they took her away from her home she would not be coming back.
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br /> Sitting on the train from Gatwick – not the Gatwick Express but Southern, for my immediate destination was Clapham Junction – I was about to call my old friend Deborah, in response to her emailed SOS, when a message arrived from my sister. ‘Please call as soon as you arrive.’ Then the phone rang and it was my son in Bristol. ‘You’re in the UK already?’ My son was evidently surprised that my UK number had responded. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As of half an hour ago. How are things?’ He would gladly come to see his grandmother, my son said, my eldest child, but he would need to beg a day off work. Was I absolutely sure she was dying? I had no idea, I told him. I had merely responded to an email from my sister. ‘You’re the doctor,’ I said. He laughed. He was indeed a doctor, my son agreed, but he hadn’t seen his grandmother for some time. A doctor wasn’t a diviner. I was surprised the boy knew the word. ‘Call me after you’ve seen her this evening,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll find a doctor at this hour, but speak to the nurses. These things can be deceptive.’
I now started to call my sister, but as I did so Clapham Junction was announced and I cancelled the call to gather my bits and pieces and be ready to get off. It would be absolutely typical of me to leave some crucial piece of luggage or clothing or technology on the train. Then, having found the platform for Hounslow at Clapham, and Clapham is never easy, the person I actually called was Deborah, though all the while aware that I ought to be focusing on my mother, my sister. There were only five minutes to wait, the illuminated indicator told me, for the Hounslow train, which was a stroke of luck. I had taken it for granted, initially, that Mother really was about to die, but what if she wasn’t? These things can be deceptive, my son said. He was a doctor. What if my sister was being melodramatic, exaggerating? Alarmist, my brother had said. One effect of my brother’s unwavering conviction that my mother will live for ever is a desire, on my part, to demonstrate to him once and for all that she is now in serious trouble; she is mortal; people do die. Drum that into his head. Above all, parents die. They really do. To wilful denial one reacts with wilful exaggeration. Mum’s sick. She’s dying. Exasperated, perhaps, by some comment my brother had made – the dear old bird will bury us all – my sister had upped the stakes, to get through his thick skull – officially, it should be said, my brother is the genius of the family – that something really was happening. ‘She’s going downhill fast,’ my sister – officially the family dunce – had emailed. This to have my brother face facts, even if the facts weren’t perhaps quite as extreme as she was intimating. Or at least my son had put this idea into my head. And I realised now that I really ought to have thought of the implications of my sister’s including my brother in that email. It wasn’t an email exclusively for me. And I should be phoning her now to find out more. I should be trying to figure out how long I would stay in the UK, if my mother was not dying. Should I cancel the conference in Berlin? The 27th annual gathering of European linguists. My diary was teeming with appointments. Uses of Archaism in Contemporary Communication Strategies was the title. I had a flight to Berlin from Madrid tomorrow evening. But I wouldn’t be in Madrid. What should I tell Elsa? Vaguely I was aware that ‘teeming’ was a word my mother always used and that I never did. For rain particularly. It’s teeming down, she would say. As I approached London and London weather, I was using Mother’s words. On the other hand, Deborah’s SOS had been so interestingly alarming, and had to do with people who had been so much closer to me over recent years than my family had been, how could I not phone her with some urgency? To be honest, I had hardly seen anyone from the family in an age now. With the exception of my mother, that is, whenever I passed through London, and then only because she was ill, because it was a duty to visit a mother who is ill when it’s not too difficult to do so. Though never, since that long summer together, for more than a lunch or a dinner. Then surely, I thought, there would be time enough to focus on Mother and what needed to be said to Mother, and whether and when I should book a flight to Berlin or to Madrid and so on, while I was sitting at her bedside. She would hardly want to be sitting up talking all night. There would be plenty of time.
