In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  ‘I guess she would have felt guilty if she had started something with someone else.’

  Again a dark wing brushed by. There was a thought out there.

  Charlie sat up, drained his Coke, put the can on the floor and reached across me for the computer. ‘Can I show you something?’ he asked. ‘On Facebook?’

  Since he seemed to be cheering up, I let him go ahead. Moments later we were scrolling down photos of his parents’ wedding on his mother’s Facebook page. David had worn a bow tie. A turquoise bow tie. His long hair was tied back in a ponytail. He had always kept his hair long. His glasses had thick turquoise frames. His big beard was unusually neat above his barrel chest. It was a strange mix of formality and burly flamboyance.

  ‘Mum wearing white was a kind of joke,’ Charlie observed.

  There were more pictures of the couple raising glasses, intertwining arms and champagne cups. David had a glazed look; Deborah was gleaming. I was glad I hadn’t gone. One picture showed the whole family. The newly-weds embraced, Charlie had his arm round his mother from the other side. The other two children crouched in front.

  ‘He doesn’t deserve her,’ Charlie said flatly.

  ‘Nobody deserves anybody, Charlie,’ I told him. ‘They’ve been together thirty years. Get a life.’

  ‘You left your wife after thirty years, didn’t you?’

  ‘Charlie, for Christ’s sake. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’

  I snapped the laptop shut and stood up. Charlie got to his feet too. He was tense again. The photos had worked him up.

  ‘You should have stopped it,’ he said.

  ‘Stopped what?’

  Again there was the sound of a buzzer along the corridor. I turned but couldn’t see where the light was flashing.

  ‘The wedding.’ Now he was emphatic. ‘You should have stopped the wedding.’

  ‘Why on earth would I have wanted to do that?’

  Rather than answer, he glared. He looked wild.

  ‘Charlie, if you so much as touch me, I’ll call the police. Is that clear?’

  ‘Even if I’m your son?’

  ‘Enough. I’m tired.’

  ‘You didn’t have any trouble telling my parents I was gay.’

  I pulled my old Nokia from my pocket, pressed for recent calls and phoned Deborah.

  ‘Mum wanted me to speak to you because she said you knew Dad better than anyone.’

  This was unexpected. ‘Years ago, maybe.’

  Charlie’s face changed again.

  ‘I definitely will kill him, you know. I feel I will.’

  The phone rang, but Deborah didn’t answer. How was it possible that she had left her seriously disturbed son with a friend whose mother was at death’s door?

  ‘Why don’t you tell her what kind of man my father is?’

  I wanted to be shot of him.

  ‘Your mum’s not answering, okay? But it’s really time you went now, Charlie. Let’s do this, I’ll call a cab and you go home in it. But my advice is that you leave the family, go and live somewhere else, and keep as far away from your parents’ relationship as possible. Whatever they think of each other is what suits them. Your father is a brilliant publisher and a fantastic man. The heart and soul of every party. Your mum loves him. Everyone loves him. Leave them alone.’

  ‘Actually, I live with my boyfriend,’ Charlie answered.

  This was a surprise.

  ‘So why don’t you just be happy with him?’

  As I spoke I was looking around for where I had seen a noticeboard with useful phone numbers. In reception? I stepped out of the Commemoration Room, with Charlie following. Down the main corridor a red light was flashing over a door to the right. I remember a fleeting anxiety that the nurses might not have seen it: somebody was in trouble, and no one was going to help. Remembering this now, I realise I am ridiculous, quite ridiculous. But I wasn’t wrong about the useful numbers. They were on the same small noticeboard that was advertising the Christmas party. I called a minicab.

  ‘I haven’t got any money,’ Charlie objected.

  ‘I’ll give you some.’ I, who hate paying for my own cabs, was now longing to pay for his. Then I remembered I had only my cards and some euros. I couldn’t give him cards.

  ‘Damn.’ I explained I had no cash. ‘Your mother can pay when you arrive.’

  ‘What if she isn’t home?’

  He was relishing my unease.

  ‘It’s nearly two, why wouldn’t she be home?’

  ‘Maybe she’s gone to see Dad.’

  This was exasperating. I closed the call exactly as a voice answered. At the same moment an elderly woman in a dressing gown appeared from the main corridor and shuffled towards the Commemoration Room, leaning on a stick.

  ‘Call your boyfriend. Perhaps he can come and get you.’

  Charlie shook his head. He looked hard at me. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I found out you’d told them. I was furious, but in the end you did me a favour.’

  ‘Call your boyfriend. I’m going back to my mother. At a push, you could always spend the night on the sofa in there.’ I nodded to the Commemoration Room.

  ‘Drinking tea with moribund insomniacs?’

  It was exactly the kind of thing his father would have said.

  ‘You don’t have to talk to anyone.’

  ‘While you sit with your mother?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Once again I found myself lying. I wouldn’t be sitting with Mother. But it was too complicated to explain. Then if I mentioned a guest room, who was to say Charlie wouldn’t want to join me there? He seemed to need my company, while I needed to be alone, with my thoughts and with the pain in my abdomen that had now become a deep scalding from bladder through to groin. Yet the thought that I was lying again upset me. Another person wouldn’t have lied. ‘The person I’d like to be,’ I’d told the shrink, ‘does not lie.’ ‘So don’t,’ she said.

  Charlie was watching me. ‘Let me have your computer,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lend me your computer for the night, so I have something to do.’

  ‘No.’

  He sighed. He looked around the reception area as if there was something he might have forgotten, then turned to me again.

  ‘I thought they’d be incredibly upset and disappointed. With me being gay. Instead they converted the top floor of the house into a separate flat for myself and Stephen.’

  ‘Great parents,’ I told him. ‘There you are. And now you want to ruin their lives.’

  The boy swayed on his feet, hands thrust in his pockets.

  ‘Thinking about it, you could probably walk home from here, right? It can’t be more than a few miles.’

  ‘Stephen is away,’ he said. ‘On a training course.’ He looked out of the window. ‘And I don’t have an umbrella.’

  I felt a powerful urge to walk away, but was worried he might follow me. Should I offer my sister’s umbrella? Where had I left it?

  ‘You say I’m ruining their lives,’ he went on. ‘But don’t you want me to tell you why I hit Dad?’

  ‘Charlie, I asked you that in the car and you wouldn’t answer. Now I want to sit for a while with Mum. You can tell me tomorrow, if it will help, but not now.’

  As if we were bargaining over something, he said, ‘If you let me have the computer, I’ll just sit in the room here for the night and surf and maybe write something.’

  ‘Charlie, I’m not giving you my computer.’

  ‘Why not? You’re not going to be using it while you sit with your mum, are you?’

  ‘Because not.’

  ‘You don’t want me reading your emails?’

  ‘Among other things.’

  Charlie laughed. ‘I read your emails ages ago.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  He grinned, ‘I read your emails to Dad. That’s why I sent you those stories. I felt I knew you pretty well.’

  ‘You read my emails to your fa
ther?’

  ‘I cracked his email password. Years ago. It wasn’t hard.’

  This felt considerably worse than a slap in the face, and certainly more dangerous. At the same time there was a large part of me that just did not want to deal with it right now. Making a gesture I hadn’t expected to, I raised both arms to the boy’s shoulders.

  ‘Charlie, as one human being to another, let me have these moments with my mum; today, tomorrow, whatever. Do me this favour. Then we can have a long talk.’

  I gave him a small, friendly push and headed off down the corridor.

  XI

  This is still the same day in which I enjoyed a man putting his finger into my anus.

  That thought crossed my mind in the sleepless dead of night. Or if not the same day, calendar-wise, at least the same twenty-four hours. The other doctors hurt you because they were in a conflicted state, the Californian physiotherapist had said. What a nice man he was, so at ease with himself and with others. They wanted to be good doctors and arrive at a correct diagnosis, but they didn’t want to do what it took: put their fingers in your anus. They found it distasteful. They didn’t want to give their whole selves to this act, willingly. They put their fingers in your anus, but unwillingly, the way a man might carry a dead rat, touching only its tail, through rubber gloves, arm fully extended, rigid with disgust, face averted. They looked away and stopped their noses, mentally at least, as they put a finger in your anus, to perform their diagnosis.

  The American physiotherapist hadn’t actually said all of this, but at some point during the night, in the guest room of the Claygate Hospice, I began to elaborate this train of thought, I imagined him saying it and I began to conjure up – really to see – the disgust of doctors exploring anuses, and also my mother’s disgust at dealing with her weeping tumours. Mum didn’t want to face them. She turned her head away from her own breast. But who would want to face such things? Would I want to see the state my mother’s body is really in?

  On leaving Charles, I had gone into Mother’s room again to say goodnight. All the doors along the corridor were open now, so that a nurse walking up and down in a low glow of night lights could see at a glance the condition her patients were in. Not unlike air hostesses, I thought, on intercontinental flights, walking up and down the aisles to check on their sleeping passengers. So even from the door I could see the pain on my mother’s face as she slept. ‘Mother is falling into death,’ I muttered, surprising myself with this odd expression. Ninety-nine per cent of the time the brain churns clichés, then all of a sudden something new. Mother is falling into death. The words seemed to come from a dream. The dream of falling is always a dream of falling into death, till waking’s safe hands catch you in extremis. How often have you thought you must die in dreams, then you wake up? But this would not happen for Mother now. The dream was reality.

  Her forehead creased as I approached. It was painful to look at her in this state. Painful to smell her. But it would also be painful to leave her, painful to let that smell go. I sat down and took her hand, which now had an extraordinarily leathery feel to it. At once I felt sorry for her hand, sorry for her knitted forehead, sorry for her sunken mouth, sorry for her bruised cheeks, and at the same time I reminded myself that Mother didn’t want me to be here, seeing these things and feeling this sorrow for her. She didn’t want me to witness this. For her, this hand and face and mouth were not her, not the real Martha Sanders, née Crawford, who, on the contrary, was outward-bound for Paradise on a flight that had departed some time ago, was already cruising above empty deserts while angelic hostesses watched over her; and my father, needless to say, was already preparing to greet her at the pearly arrival gate – claygate, pearlgate – already practising his dance steps, though Dad had never danced a single step on earth, nor Mum for that matter. Never, never danced a single step, that I knew of.

  Why, I wondered, gazing at my mother’s tense and suffering face, did my mother and father have this idea of dancing in Paradise, when they had never danced in London or Leeds or Liverpool or Manchester, all places where they could have danced any time they wanted? Dancing was popular in the North of England where they had lived in the early years of their marriage, and hardly unheard of in north London in their more mature days. Why was dancing okay in the above and beyond, but not in the here and now? Dancing is a supremely physical thing. Bodies moving around each other in space to the rhythmical beat of music. My mother and father wanted to do a supremely physical thing, but without the encumbrance of their bodies. The heavenly music was never mentioned. Psalms? Canticles? The trumpets of the Revelation? How bizarre. And how lovely it was to dance with Elsa, I thought, and to dance for Elsa, in my small flat on Calle Abel. I hadn’t danced for a decade till I met Elsa. Now I danced for her in the evening with exhibitionist abandon, and she found old favourites on YouTube and laughed and held me in her arms and danced with me.

  This happy thought immediately drew a shadow with it. All at once I felt threatened, sitting by my mother’s bed, by something hidden in that happiness. It was the same shadow, I realised, that had threatened me when Charlie had asked about my mother’s never remarrying. ‘Noble,’ Charlie had said, when I told him I thought my mother would have felt guilty if she had started something with somebody else after my father’s death. Suddenly I had a powerful impression of darkness coming over me, of being drawn into darkness, which was also the dark pain in my belly and the grim pain I was watching knitted in my mother’s forehead. You can’t start anything new after the death of your marriage. That was the knowledge the darkness brought. Mother knew she couldn’t start anything with another man after Father died. It was forbidden. A man who has abandoned his wife of thirty years is not allowed to enjoy new happiness. He does not deserve it. Not while his wife still suffers. Or at least he cannot go to his new happiness wholeheartedly. He is held back by his wife’s misery. That was surely what my mother must have told herself after Father’s death, since of course she believed him to be alive in another dimension, not dead at all; she believed him to be watching over her from Paradise, as I have often thought my wife is watching over me somehow, from some kind of unhappy Purgatory.

  ‘In your head you have not really left her, Señor Sanders,’ the shrink observed. ‘That is the truth.’

  Dad was waiting for Mum in Paradise. So how could she love someone else? How could she go on living even? She might as well have been burned with him on his pyre. Suttee made sense. You think of your love for Elsa as idyllic, I told myself, sitting by my mother’s deathbed, trying to understand why she had remained faithful to Father even after he was dead, even when a wealthy Danish businessman whose friendship she very much enjoyed made a generous proposal; but this idyll is no more believable, no more congruous than the image of your father and mother pirouetting in Paradise. It’s a delusion. The idea, I suddenly thought, of Thomas Sanders beginning again, dancing again, with a woman thirty years his junior, is complete folly. Now the shadow really was on me. It is meaningless, Thomas, it is futureless. If Thomas was a doubter, it was because Thomas wasn’t stupid. Thomas wanted the truth. And the truth right now is your mother falling into death, her face knitted in pain; the truth is your ruined marriage, your unhappy wife, your thirty years raising children. These are the truths that count, that smell, that have body. David did the right thing, I realised now, agreeing to marry Deborah after thirty years’ resistance. What else could he do? Leave her? Marrying was the right and honourable and only thing for my friend to do – an acknowledgement of reality, an acceptance of who he was. I should have gone to the wedding. The affairs David and I talked about, Charlie, in those emails you read, were absurd. Not really him. Not really me. We had affairs that seemed wonderful at the time, but they weren’t us. Not really. They were diversions. Mother didn’t start again after Father because it wouldn’t have been her. It wasn’t me to be with Elsa, as all my affairs hadn’t been me but the work of the devil. Charlie had discovered the devil in his father�
��s email. There was no other word for it. It had turned his head.

  And there was no other word but despair for the state of mind I was falling into now. The whole love story with Elsa is ridiculous, I muttered. You’re ridiculous, Tom Sanders. I shook my head from side to side and, as I did so, my mother also became agitated. Her head jerked a little, first to one side, then the other. They were sudden spasmodic movements this way and that, as if the head itself were trying to escape some pain coming from the neck, desperate to escape an ominous rumbling and gurgling that had begun somewhere beneath the bedclothes. The head wanted to twist itself off its own body, to look away from its own corruption. Without hesitating, I got to my feet and reached for the buzzer on the bedside table where faith seemed weak and the victory lost, in the shape of Kenneth E. Hagin’s odious book, and rang for the nurse. I did not want my mother to wake and see me seeing her in this state.

  While my mother vomited and the nurses cleaned her up – we were well into the early hours now – I took the key they had given me and climbed the stairs at the end of the corridor to the guest room. No sooner was I on the stairs than I wondered whether perhaps Charlie had been watching as I left my mother’s room and, if so, whether he would have the gall to walk the length of the corridor and try to follow me. What exactly did the boy want, I wondered at the top of the stairs, trying to remember whether the nurse had said the door on the right or the door on the left? I didn’t want to wake someone up or scare them. He was young, good-looking, well educated, well placed for what they call a successful life. Being gay is hardly an obstacle these days. Why didn’t he get on with it? Why was he allowing himself to be held back by his parents’ problems? Are my own children similarly held back, I wondered, choosing the door on the left and inserting the key as quietly as possible? It did not seem to me they were. I chose the left-hand door at random, if only to avoid being forced to go back downstairs to where the nurses were mopping up black blood and changing sheets for the third time in a matter of hours. Not to mention the risk of being seen by Charlie again. Had any of my children tried to hit me? They had not. They had criticised me. From time to time they had seemed cold. They were sympathetic to their mother and responded to her suffering. But no one had been raising their fists. Though it was true they did not know about Elsa yet.