by Tim Parks
‘Phone this number,’ he said and placed a folded yellow Post-it in my hand.
‘Why, who is it?’
Charlie shook his head. He pushed his hands back in his pockets, glaring at me. Then turned to go.
‘You know,’ I called after him, ‘your mum says you’re not gay.’
‘I know,’ he replied over his shoulder. ‘Think about it.’
Returning to my mother’s room, I decided it really was imperative now to call the conference organisers in Berlin. However, the phone number was on my computer, which was in my bag upstairs; also this idea of picking apart the baptismal hymn in the inaugural address of a major international conference on linguistics and rhetoric was exhilarating. It had cheered me up. The call could wait another hour or two.
‘Why don’t you guys go and eat something?’ I told my sister and her husband. And I added, ‘We’ll hold the fort.’ Another of Mum’s expressions.
An hour later, in the pub, my cousin started to tell my children and their partners what it was like to live in Belfast. I hadn’t planned to drink at all, but while my son and I were parking his car, the others had already got in a pint of Pride and an order of gammon and chips for everyone. The city was deeply divided, my cousin was explaining to my daughter as I lifted my glass, but at the same time life was actually very normal and even dull. As he spoke I watched my children, whom I hadn’t properly spoken to for some months. I hadn’t spoken to anyone in the family for many months. It was a sort of permanent truce, my cousin was saying. My daughter sat with her hands linked over her partner’s wrist. He was a large, beefy boy with forthright opinions, immediately asking my cousin about the Protestant parades. Shouldn’t they be banned? At a break in the conversation I told the story my mother had always told, that when as a child the family visited her grandfather’s farm in County Longford, on Sunday morning, as the Protestants headed for their church at one end of the village and the Catholics for theirs at the other, the men and women of differing denominations would spit on the ground as they passed each other. In all other circumstances, and this was the thing that always fascinated my mother, people were perfectly polite to each other. Only religion divided them. I laughed and saw my son turn to his partner across the table and whisper something into the softness of her neck. And his young wife smiled happily as he whispered and nudged her cheek to brush against his lips. They are in love, I thought, as the gammon steak arrived.
No one mentioned my mother as we ate. Nor did my children mention their mother or ask me awkward questions about my present life. This was the advantage, I thought, of having my cousin with us, talking about how well Belfast was served with parks and public transport. My mother and the Christian ethos she passed on to me, I thought, slicing the pink gammon, had certainly delayed my leaving their mother, my wife. And the children too; the children had also delayed my going. Or rather, not the children themselves, they hadn’t done anything, but the idea I had of the children as creatures to be protected at all costs had made it seem important to remain firm at my post, manfully, for as long as possible, a great cross stamped on my brow. David, I thought, had manfully opted for remaining at his post, his cross, when he finally decided to marry Deborah after all those years. Perhaps he did it for the children, even though they were grown-up. Who knows? Perhaps he sensed how Charlie disapproved of his philandering. Or he worried that his son’s sexual orientation was to do with his own constant unfaithfulness. David was constant in his inconstancy, I smiled to myself. But he had definitely done the right thing, I thought now, when he decided to remain at his post and marry Deborah. That was the only decision that made sense. In my own case, though, it had been precisely my children’s romances that made it impossible to remain. One stays in a loveless relationship for one’s children, and then one’s children’s love relationships remind one what love is. And it becomes impossible. Unless of course one could love one’s wife again. ‘Señor Sanders,’ my shrink lit another menthol cigarette, ‘por favor! ’
‘Earth to Dad?’
It was my daughter.
‘Thinking of Gran?’ my son asked sympathetically.
There seemed no point in not saying yes. At the same time an inner voice ordered me, Phone Elsa. You must speak to Elsa at the earliest possible opportunity. That a love should be. Excusing myself for needing a pee, which for once I didn’t, I walked round the bar towards the bathroom and phoned from an alcove.
‘Elsa, I love you.’
The signal was surprisingly good. She was in the university canteen. ‘Tommy! I love you too.’
My daughter-in-law crossed the bar on her way to the bathroom and saw me phoning in the alcove. She smiled.
‘When I’m away from you I feel scared.’
A beep told me someone else was trying to call.
‘But scared of what?’ Elsa asked.
‘I don’t know. That it’s not real somehow. Us.’
‘You’re just upset about your mother, Tommy.’
‘I’ll have to cancel the conference in Berlin,’ I told her. ‘I should have done it already.’
‘Do you want me to do it for you? Just give me a number or email.’
Suddenly, my cousin came running round the bar, phone in hand. ‘She’s going!’ he said. ‘We have to get back.’ His father had called, Uncle Harry. ‘The nurses say this is it.’ I closed the call.
It was two-thirty. Mother died towards five. Sitting down by her bed again, I felt dazed from the pint of Pride and the hurriedly eaten gammon steak. Mother’s breathing had slackened. Her face had smoothed. Her body lay absolutely still. Her pulse was fading, the nurse said. It was there, but fading. Likewise the winter light, filtering in from the patio. It bled from the room. Through the window the birdbath faded from pink to grey. The conversation dwindled, like embers greying. Occasionally it sparked. Someone said a word or two. The food in the pub had been pretty good, hadn’t it? I hope the dogs aren’t taking the van apart. Then the silence came deeper than before.
Sensing the drama of the end, people had started to lean forward from their seats to catch the sound of Mother’s breathing as it came and went, now faint, now stronger again, but always fainter still when again it fell away, fainter and fainter as her forehead became smoother and smoother. Everyone in the room was focused on this breathing. Everyone was leaning forward from his or her seat. I needed to go to the bathroom and did not go. I needed to phone the conference organisers and did not phone. Every ten minutes or so the nurse came in, a new nurse now, young and plain and neutral; she threaded her way through the chairs, bent over my mother a moment, felt her pulse, looked at us all leaning slightly forward from our chairs, listening for the next breath, smiled faintly and went out again.
My son sat stiller than I imagined he ever could. The tip of my daughter’s tongue poked between her lips, as it had when she did her homework as a child. I was profoundly glad my children had come. I felt comforted by their presence. I was relieved they hadn’t asked anything about my present life. I was relieved they hadn’t seen my mother vomit, hadn’t heard her speaking without her false teeth. Messages vibrated on my phone, but I did not check them. I would have been ashamed to check them, ashamed to be seen to be checking text messages while my mother really was dying now, before my eyes. Not that I didn’t feel an urge to check them, but the shame that would have followed stopped me. Uncle Harry’s head was tilted to one side, cocked like an old dog’s waiting for a caress, or a command that wouldn’t come. An occasional tear rolled down his grey cheek, but he did not speak. No one spoke. From time to time my sister’s eyes met mine across our mother’s expiring body, or rather across the mauve blanket that was covering that body. She raised her eyebrows and sighed, communicating I wasn’t sure what. She seemed solemn but also unworried, untroubled. Mother is holding our attention for the last time, Bro; was that what she was saying? Just stay firm at your post, Bro. Manfully. Just a little longer. Then, perhaps the second or third time my sister looked at me li
ke this, I relaxed. It was quite a sudden thing. I breathed deeply and all at once felt the muscles relax, in my face and jaw, in my shoulders and thighs. There was a definite letting go. It was my old sis did this for me, I realised, with her calm, oddly businesslike presence, her sense that we were doing a job together. I relaxed with her into my mother’s dying. In token, stopped stamping and printing and blazoning the baptismal cross in my brain. I stopped worrying about the conference. You can go now, Mum, I thought. We’re beside you.
So, for almost two hours, we focused on Martha Sanders’s dying. I cannot recall ever being with people, family particularly, thus quietly focused, enchanted even by the phenomenon of fading breath. And now it did seem there was something beautiful in the room; not Mother, not us, but this twilight togetherness of the living and the dying, these long suspensions between one breath and another. The long silences. Sometimes it seemed impossible another breath could come after such long silence. But come it did, with the faintest rising of the mauve blanket. And every breath of hers was an awareness we all shared, a shared relief in her still breathing and a shared disappointment of drama deferred. As when a parting must happen, yet is unthinkable. You say goodbye, but turn back. You breathe again. And my sister gently shook her head, shook her pink permed hair, with its faint green highlights, and looked at me with a knowing wonderment in her eyes, communicating something I could never have put in words, and I for my part found myself thinking how natural all this was, yes, how natural, simple, simply physical, and anyway utterly unlike the tormented spiritual battle my parents had always prospected. Mother was dying simply, physically, naturally dying. Without melodrama. No angels or demons were tussling over her immortal soul. An old lady was nearing her end. In Claygate Hospice. Her clay at the open gate. A dying animal. Breathing her last. Mum is breathing her last, I muttered. The old expression made sense, intensely. Lastness was in the hospice air. Mum was breathing it. We all were. And this calmness we shared, the calmness of Mother’s dying, had entirely stilled my need to go to the bathroom, stilled it or frozen it, anyway made it bearable, as we all sat in the near-darkness now, waiting and waiting for the next soft breath that didn’t come and still didn’t come and perhaps would never come again, it seemed; and then the nurse walked into the room, threaded her way between the chairs, raised mother’s wrist, paused, held the limp wrist, feeling and waiting, still paused, face intent, lips pursed, and said, ‘She’s gone.’
Then the light was on and people were on their feet, and now I badly needed to get to the bathroom, really badly. It was three hours since the beer. I would kiss my mother goodbye, after I had been. ‘Can you speak, mate?’ David had texted. I pulled my phone out in the loo. ‘Call when you’re free,’ Deborah had texted. ‘Do you know where the spare set of keys is?’ Elsa had texted. ‘I’m locked out.’ And standing over the bowl then, phone in my left hand, it occurred to me I could still make it to Berlin tonight. It was only fiveish. I could still make it. And I wondered, Why should I let them down, since Mum was gone now? There was nothing I could do for her. It was almost as if she had timed it on purpose so that I could go to Berlin after all and talk about the baptismal hymn. She didn’t want to disturb, didn’t want to force me to cancel. Mother’s old obsession with never disturbing. I smiled. A disturbing obsession. Certainly it would be a major disturbance for the organisers, if I cancelled now, I thought. Two hundred people were expected. It was the inaugural address, a plenary session. I too have an obsession with never disturbing. Why should I disappoint them, I wondered, when it was all done and dusted here, when Mother had explicitly appointed my brother-in-law as the executor of her will, explicitly preferred the manful Christian who was always at his post to the agnostic son so often absent? Why shouldn’t I go to Berlin, when the person handling all the practical details would be my sister, obviously? Even if I stayed, was it likely my sister would defer to me in practical matters like the washing and dressing of Mother’s body? And if I was going to cancel, shouldn’t I have done so hours before? Stepping out of the loo, I felt purposeful and liberated.
In the corridor my son was coming towards me. ‘I guess we’ll be off now, Dad,’ he said. His wife had to be up at the crack of dawn, he explained, for her own nursing work. They had a long drive ahead of them. ‘Take me to Heathrow,’ I told him. ‘It’s on your way, isn’t it? More or less?’ Only in the car did it occur to me I had not kissed the corpse. I had not bent over her dear dead face and kissed it goodbye. I had not said anything to her dead body or touched her in any way. ‘Spare set with Raul in number 6,’ I texted Elsa. ‘Mum died at 5.’ Checking her iPad, my son’s wife told me Lufthansa had a flight at seven-thirty. We bought a ticket online as my son negotiated heavy traffic on the M4. ‘All our emotions are an accident of evolution,’ he said.
PART TWO
XIV
One of the by-products of human language development, I told the 27th annual gathering of European linguists in Berlin the morning after my mother died, was a heightened awareness of mental activity and consequently a flattering illusion of inner presence and power. Whatever the external reality, we all have the impression that we can think what we wish.
If this was not quite what members of the Society of European Linguists were used to hearing, at least it had made them sit up. It was nine-thirty and the auditorium was packed.
Whereas the truth was, I went on, savouring an excellent PA system, that language was above all an appropriation of the mind on the part of the community. ‘We could think, if you like,’ I told my fellow linguists, ‘of first-language acquisition as a form of baptism, a welcoming into the community, a token of belonging and a cross one has to bear.’
‘By all means take a good long look,’ I had told the Security lady at Heathrow the evening before. ‘In another year or so, these will be all the rage.’
She held the anal-massage tool at arm’s length, as if she expected it to smell.
‘And what does it do for you, sir?’
My mobile had begun to trill.
‘Eases tension,’ I said.
‘With respect, sir,’ the lady handed the instrument back, ‘you’re not the best advertisement for the product.’
She had seen my hand shake as I fumbled and dropped the phone.
‘Because I haven’t started using it yet,’ I told her. ‘Wait until you see me next time.’
She smiled. ‘Good luck, sir.’
Deborah asked, ‘How’s your mother?’
‘She died, Deb.’
I was walking through the Duty Free store.
‘My God, I’m sorry,’ Deborah said.
‘At the end it was very peaceful. With all the family round the bed. Like something out of Dickens.’
Was it because there had been so many people at the bedside that it had seemed okay for me to dash off? If I had been there alone, I surely wouldn’t have done that.
‘I’m glad.’ She hesitated. ‘Tom, I just called to ask if you’d seen Charlie. The police came to talk to him; it seems they’d given him an appointment, but he didn’t show. He isn’t answering his phone.’
I told her Charlie had dropped by at the hospice and given me a phone number to ring; immediately Deborah asked what number that was. Whose? Could I give it to her? I fished the Post-it from my back pocket, then changed my mind.
‘Sorry, I can’t find it right now, Deb. I must have put it in my bag or something. I’ll text you later.’
In the departure lounge, snacking at Caffè Nero, I found myself enjoying the thought that I hadn’t had to cancel my conference, as if this was an important personal victory, and at the same time a little perturbed by the odd feeling that Mother hadn’t actually died either, that the whole dying scene had been a dream; nothing had happened; or as if only my cancelling the conference would have made her death real. Then once again the phone was ringing and this time David’s voice asked, ‘All right, mate?’ which was how David always began phone conversations. ‘Condolences over your m
um. Debbie just told me.’
‘Que sera, sera,’ I said.
‘I read that as cautious optimism,’ he observed.
I laughed.
‘Aside from which?’ he asked. ‘It’s been a while, hasn’t it?’
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ I told him. ‘More than fine.’
‘Reaping the fruits of legal laceration?’
‘Yep. I’m deliriously happy, if you want to know, Dave, with a charming young lady. But tell me about married life.’
‘Way-ay-ayt a minute!’ David cried. ‘Do I hear crowing on the other end of this line?’
‘Cawing,’ I confessed. ‘I was hoping for a pint, to debrief.’
‘Pretty?’
‘Beautiful.’
‘Hmm, intelligent? Creative, perceptive and, of course, sensitive?’
This was an old routine.
‘Are you still in hospital, Dave? How are you doing?’
The PA announced our flight was ready to board. I had to gather my stuff, and the phone left my ear a moment.
‘Would be good to see you,’ he was saying.
I told him my situation. We could speak after the conference tomorrow.
‘That was quick.’
‘What?’
‘Deathbed to Departures in nine minutes.’
‘Not much point hanging around,’ I said.
‘After the horse has bolted.’
‘The chickens hatched.’
‘Joking aside, mate,’ David said, ‘My sympathy.’
‘I guess it hasn’t sunk in,’ I told him. ‘But this is a big conference. Society of European Linguists. Inaugural address. Proper money, if nothing else.’
‘What else could there be?’ he laughed and said he was hoping to be discharged the following morning. ‘I’m afraid young Charlie doesn’t play Queensberry. He really crocked me up.’
