In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  For some reason that unpleasant word ‘corruption’ came to my mind in the ground-floor lavatory of the Claygate Hospice, with its paraphernalia for allowing people who are infirm and handicapped not to feel they need be in any closer contact with their excrement than the able-bodied who cheerfully flush it away without a glance, as if it had never been, as if piss and shit were just not part of who you are. In the newspapers, corruption means shady payoffs to government officials in foreign countries, but in the Bible, as I recalled – and what did my parents ever read to us as children if not the Bible and its endless spin-offs – corruption meant corruption of the flesh. Sin reaps corruption, and virtue eternal life. As I stood over the loo, my right cheek and my lower abdomen were throbbing in unison. The body is of its nature corrupt. What would the nurses think when they saw the bruise, I wondered? Flowering on my cheek. How could I explain to them that taking ten minutes off from my mother’s dying, ostensibly for a breath of fresh air, I had managed to get myself belted in the face by the son of the man who had been my best friend in my philandering days? ‘Stop it!’ Deborah screamed. ‘Prick!’ Charlie shouted again. He slapped me hard. ‘Coward!’

  In the bathroom I soaked paper towels in cold water and held them to my face. Was it puffing up? Could I pretend it was there before, but they hadn’t seen it? My abdomen seemed desperately in need of emptying, but no emptying came. Then, exactly as I began to zip up, there was a leak. Infuriating. Now I was damp. Now I would smell. I had been in too much of a hurry to get back to the bedside. For some reason, then, opening my trousers again to sort myself out, I remembered, and this seemed a complete non sequitur, that my sister’s one real complaint against my mother as a patient, those three weeks at her home when by all rights Mother should have been in hospital, was that she had refused to watch television or listen to the radio. Mother would not ‘while away the time’, my sister had complained, with some TV drama or radio comedy. As a result, she thought too much about her illness and became gloomy and anxious. She wasn’t cheerful. And what was striking about this comment was that while my mother and my sister were thick as thieves, if I dare use that expression, when it came to giving one’s heart to Jesus and going home to glory, so that in this regard their side of the family (sister and mother) were diametrically opposed to our side (my brother and myself), nevertheless I could perfectly well understand my mother’s refusal of TV entertainment, her reluctance to ‘while away the time’, while my sister could not. TV entertainment, aside from the News and Weather, or the occasional detective yarn – Mother always used the word ‘yarn’, as if storytelling had to do with knitting – was perhaps not a great deal preferable to the bedpan and the excrement, for my mother. A game show, for example. Or the open tumours on her breasts. It had a smell of corruption. Of triviality. Mother refused to be trivial. And I was on her side over this. Where my brother stands on the matter, I have no idea. Though it’s true that my brother does set a considerable store by cheerfulness and it was evident that my mother, when communicating with my brother, made a far greater attempt to seem cheerful with him than she did when with myself and my sister. The cheerful person, I thought, frees others from worrying on their behalf. The person chuckling over an old episode of The Big Bang Theory, or enthralled by Breaking Bad, does not make you feel you need to comfort them over their imminent demise, their embarrassment with a body that is no longer lavender and roses. Was this my sister’s problem? Mother’s gloominess was a form of demand for sympathy. If Mother had actually been gloomy, that is, if it wasn’t just my sister’s projection. But why did my mother protect my brother, but not my sister or myself? Were we perceived as stronger? Was it because my brother had been so long and so seriously ill as a child? But what on earth was the point of posing all these conundrums, when I had a bruise swelling on my cheek and once again my pee was blocked? Only the gesture of putting my penis back in my pants had made it flow. And what can we say of the person who is trying to be cheerful, trying to allow us not to be worried on their behalf, but isn’t really cheerful, understandably so, and actually has every legitimate reason for being worried and having us worry for them? Is that heroism or madness? Or was it, perhaps, that my brother had managed to make my mother feel guilty if she didn’t present herself to him as cheerful. If so, how had he managed to do that?

  Suddenly, standing in the lavatory – and it was after midnight now – I was aware that I, Thomas Sanders, had come to a complete dead end, a position of utter impasse and ugliness. Every thought was a knot, a snarl. Yet the very extremity of the awfulness, or my awareness of it, brought a small sense of relief. You have hit bottom, I told myself. So just breathe and relax. Forget your mother’s dying, even if only for two minutes, and breathe. Untangle yourself. Aren’t you a man in love? I could still taste the cigarette on my breath. Breathe deeply for all the time it takes to pee. I coughed. There’s no hurry. Fill your chest, drop your shoulders. Remember Elsa. Remember Dr Sharp’s exercises. Perhaps the problem had been smoking that cigarette. Could that have had an effect? Anyway, nothing was going to happen in the next few minutes, was it? There wasn’t really anything I needed to do, standing here in the lavatory. I was quite safe from attack, safe from disappointment. I wasn’t going to die here. And in fact, after a few deep breaths, the flow had actually begun and was even promising, when a message arrived in my pocket. With a sudden happy conviction that this must be Elsa sending a goodnight kiss, I pulled out my Nokia and read. ‘Charles won’t get in the car. What on earth am I to do?’

  I cleared the screen and texted Elsa, ‘Think of you constantly. Can’t wait to be back.’ It wasn’t true. I hadn’t been thinking of her at all. But I very much wished I had been thinking of her and it seemed the right thing to text.

  There was a knock on the bathroom door.

  ‘Are you all right in there?’

  ‘One moment, sorry.’

  As I came out, the nurse told me, ‘I’m afraid your mother’s been sick again.’

  ‘I’ll come at once.’

  She looked at me hard. The light was low in the corridor and perhaps it wasn’t altogether clear that the changed state of my face was the result of a violent blow.

  ‘It might be useful actually,’ the nurse now said, ‘if you could spend the night with her. So you can call us if it happens again. We can’t be in there all the time.’

  ‘I ought to send an email,’ I said, ‘to my brother, if you have Wi-Fi here. He ought to know what the situation is. He’s in the States.’

  The nurse said there was Wi-Fi in the visitors’ lounge at the end of the corridor. ‘Just connect. No password is required.’ I went into my mother’s room where I had left my bag and computer. Again, on entering, I had the impression I was stepping into a different dimension, a limbo zone between life and death, so that although what was happening in that room, which was what always and inevitably happens, I suppose, in hospice rooms, could only take so long to unfold, nevertheless there was a comforting sensation of timelessness here. Mother was on her back, breathing noisily. I sat down beside her.

  ‘Mum?’

  She did not reply.

  ‘Mum, I’ve left home,’ I said. ‘I’ve separated.’

  She didn’t stir.

  ‘I’m now with a very lovely woman, Elsa. Though I’m afraid she’s much younger than me.’

  ‘Why, Señor Sanders,’ the shrink asked, ‘do you always say you’re afraid she’s younger? Rejoice!’

  ‘I know it’s early days, Mum, but I hope sometime to marry her.’

  Nothing. The light was dimmer than an hour before. The room felt warmer. Blanket and sheet were perfectly smooth. The nurses must have changed her twice in the time I was away. It was chastening. I picked up my bag and stood to go and email my brother.

  Then sat down again. Chaste, chasten, chastise. Somehow those words held me beside my mother. Why? I muttered them out loud. There was some connection. I let go of the bag. Chasten, chastise, chaste. Chased. Mother didn’
t move. She had vomited blood twice and they had changed her bedclothes twice. The body was corrupt but the nurses kept it clean. With a chastening effort. Then I had it. Or I had something. An incident in childhood. Perhaps it was just a continuation of my thoughts in the bathroom, my bathroom thoughts. I and a friend called Malcolm played a game where we watched each other pee. How old were we? Six? Eight? We had peed into jam jars. In the back garden in Blackpool. Do all kids do that? We wanted to see the colour of our pee. Mother kept a supply of jam jars in the garden shed, for autumn jamming. We left the pee in the jars in the shed. Why? Why not throw it away? I can’t recall. I only remember a powerful smell, and my mother’s dismay when she discovered it. Who would have thought she went to look at the jam jars in the shed? She opened the jars with their yellow liquid and was distraught. It seemed I had done something terribly wrong, something far worse than the time I stole half-a-crown from her handbag. I couldn’t understand it, just associated her anger with the urine smell and the excitement of two boys peeing together. That was transgression, the urine and the smell. Mother yelled and wept. I felt cowed. I can’t recall in the end what the punishment was. Perhaps seeing Mother weeping was the punishment. Feeling you had hurt her. Did she suppose we were perverted? Gay? The word hardly existed then. Later my friend Malcolm, whose parents were missionaries, was hacked to pieces in Burundi. His whole family were killed. They had refused to renounce their faith. They were cut to pieces with machetes and their mission centre burned to bits. 1965? 1966? My father held a commemoration service for them, throughout which I couldn’t stop thinking of the powerful smell of urine in a jam jar in the garden shed. I suppose neither Malcolm nor I had known that urine smells worse when you leave it in a jar in the shed for a few days. It must have been that smell that upset my mother so much. The smell of our bodies. Our corruption.

  ‘Mum,’ I chuckled. ‘What a lot of weird thoughts in your old son’s head.’

  She lay still.

  ‘And in yours too most likely.’

  If only, she had cried out.

  I picked up What To Do When Faith Seems Weak from the bedside table and looked at the chapter headings. Kenneth E. Hagin offered ten steps for having one’s prayers answered. This is a practical guide, he said in the preface, to successful prayer. Step one was recognising that your enemy was Satan. Step two was checking whether God had in fact promised to deliver the particular goods you were praying for. Step three was making sure there was nothing in the way you lived that upset God and prevented him from honouring his promises.

  I put the book down.

  ‘Do you remember my old friend, David, Mum?’ I said. ‘David Pool. He came to dinner a couple of times, remember, with his partner Deborah. Can you believe they married recently, after thirty years together? Anyway, it seems his son is going crazy.’

  Again I was surprised to find myself talking to my mother like this. As if she were in a position to offer advice. ‘He’s gay, and he has it in for his father who’s always been super-heterosexual. Do you think I should try to help? Deborah asked me to talk to him. After all, you always tried to help.’

  This was true. Mother was always helping others. There was always a teenager who was pregnant, a man who believed himself possessed by demons, an elderly lady who could no longer look after herself. During the first AIDS crisis my mother had volunteered to assist sufferers when no one else would go near them – this despite her conviction that AIDS was a scourge sent by God. Throughout the summer I spent in her house, and regardless of her own growing difficulty moving around, she never failed to make her Monday-morning visit to a man with no legs who refused to throw away the lifetime’s collection of newspapers and magazines with which he was now slowly walling himself in, or her Thursday-afternoon visit to Mavis who, without in any way suffering from dementia and despite being some five years younger than my mother, had simply ceased, after her sister’s death, to look after herself, so that now a dozen or so ‘good folks’ from the parish had to share the task of doing her washing and cleaning for her.

  Mother always had fascinating stories to tell about these people. The legless man, for example, had married a woman twelve years his senior, who complained that her husband was overweight but at the same time fed him a diet of bread, potatoes, fried foods and chocolate. She also told good stories about the people who regularly came to her for ‘counselling’ and for whom, during that summer, I had to vacate her tiny sitting room while she served them coffee and home-baked cakes. Mother’s fruitcake was remarkable. But it had always been like this from earliest childhood. We heard nothing of my parents’ early lives, but everything about so-and-so who had been beaten by her husband, and so-and-so whose arthritis had led to her losing her typing job. To be around my mother was to be made constantly aware of people less fortunate than yourself. The refugees in Rwanda, for example, for whom I had knitted those four or five squares of coloured blanket, near-neighbours of the revolutionaries in Burundi who had chopped my friend Malcolm to bits. Had I learned how to knit, I wonder now, to make up for the smell of urine in the garden shed? Was it remotely possible that some of those red-and-yellow squares could have ended up in the hands of those who slaughtered my companion-in-crime?

  ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘Do you remember Malcolm? The Pearsons? Who died in Africa.’

  It was a glorious destiny, my father said, to be a martyr for Christ.

  ‘Would you have preferred that, Mum, to the stink of cancer and the moments when faith seems weak and victory lost?’

  I muttered the words in a very low voice, as if there were a danger of her hearing them. She breathed deeply and noisily. Mother had been obsessed, my sister had said, while staying at their house, by the fear that the district nurse would be late coming to dress her weeping tumours and the smell would intensify. ‘If only she’d been willing to while away some time with the TV, she would have worried a bit less.’

  ‘No one to help now, Mum,’ I said out loud. Unless myself, of course.

  If only …

  Damn. I got to my feet. I had wanted to transmit sympathy to my mother. Instead I felt angry. How many holidays had we gone on with some miserable loser whom my parents were struggling to help? A school friend they offered to foster, when his mother committed suicide and his father turned to drink. A lesbian army sergeant discharged for molesting a private. A jilted young woman on antidepressants. These people were always with us at the seaside, in the Scottish Highlands, the Yorkshire Dales, always ready to raise their voices in prayer after my father read from the Bible when the dinner plates had been cleared away.

  My mother would definitely have taken time out from a deathbed to help Deborah and Charlie.

  ‘Mum?’

  She lay quite still.

  I picked up my bag and walked down to the visitors’ lounge, which I now saw was called the Commemoration Room. There were cheap red-foam sofas round the wall, and a counter with kettle and mugs, tea and instant coffee. I made a coffee and, while the computer was firing up, looked at my phone. There was a missed call from my daughter. Apparently at some point I had muted the thing. And beneath that call, so to speak, an unread message. ‘He’s standing right outside the hospice. I don’t know what to do.’

  Meantime the computer had booted up and connected itself to the Wi-Fi, but for some reason the Internet wouldn’t work. How was it possible, I wondered, that Deborah felt she had the right to insist like this, to bombard me with messages about her unhappy son, who had just slapped me across the face, for God’s sake, when my mother was dying? But had I actually told Deborah Mother was dying? I couldn’t remember. I must get the truth from the doctors tomorrow morning, I thought. The coffee was bitter, in part because there was no milk and I will not use powder. I hate powder. But then how was it that I myself didn’t rebel at Deborah’s presumption and tell her to get lost? How the shrink would have chuckled. ‘You’re a bit of a sucker, Señor Sanders, that’s the truth, isn’t it?’

  ‘Arrived an hour
or so ago,’ I typed rapidly to my brother on Outlook, waiting for the Net to connect. ‘’Fraid I’d hardly started to talk to her when she began vomiting blood. Things don’t look good. She’s in pain. Tomorrow morning I’ll talk to the doctors and we’ll see if they have anything up their sleeves.’

  Up their sleeves?

  ‘Far from being a sucker,’ I told the shrink sharply, ‘I’ve had any number of affairs with an army of beautiful young women.’

  ‘Guaranteeing yourself an ocean of guilt to expiate,’ the shrink observed.

  ‘As soon as I’ve spoken to them, I’ll let you know.’ I wrapped up the email to my brother, then added, ‘What’s worrying Sis is that they’ll want to move her again for some treatment they can’t do here.’

  I signed off and clicked Send, but the Net still wasn’t working and the email remained unsent. The coffee was undrinkable. My cheek was growing puffier by the minute. I should ask the nurse for an aspirin perhaps. Or ice. I didn’t want to look a state at the Berlin conference, the 27th annual gathering of European linguists. But was it likely I would be at the conference? I ought to cancel. It was a shame, though, when I had the inaugural limelight.

  I stood up and walked back out to the porch, where, through the glass doors, I saw Charlie.

  ‘What’s up?’ I opened the door and called to him.

  He didn’t reply. He was leaning against the railing beside the gate, looking away from me.

  ‘Charlie!’

  It was drizzling and chill. All he wore was a short leather jacket. I didn’t want to go out and let the door shut behind me, since that would mean ringing the bell again.

  ‘Charlie! For Christ’s sake!’

  He must have heard. Why stand outside the building where I was if he didn’t want to respond when I offered to talk to him? I closed the door and went back to the Commemoration Room, where an elderly man had appeared in pyjamas and was waiting for the kettle to boil.