In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  Thinking about what exactly? What exactly am I thinking about? And when I write: ‘In the Görlitzerstrasse I thought this’ or ‘In the hospice bathroom I remembered that’, is it really true? Can I really remember all those thoughts, and when and where I thought them? What substance does it all have? And why am I not in Madrid with Elsa, sleeping and waking and living with beautiful, beautiful Elsa?

  Returning from the West Middlesex, I got off the bus a stop before I normally would, to go to the undertaker’s. It was closed. It was Saturday afternoon. A notice said, ‘Mourners wishing to view their loved one’s body should phone the number below to make an appointment.’ I felt relieved. It was like those situations where, not having said thank you or sorry at the right moment, it begins to seem pointless ever saying sorry at all. Or thank you. It’s too late. A sense of impossibility grows and, with it, the need to deny that there ever was any need to say thank you or sorry in the first place. Or as if viewing the body were like asking to see Mother in the bathroom, making an appointment to view Mother in the toilet. She hadn’t wanted to be embalmed. She believed the body was mere clay, to be flushed away with no great consequence when her soul flew up from the latrine for ever. If I went to see her, to view her, she wouldn’t respond. The way she never responded from the toilet. She wouldn’t be there for me. Even if I apologised, she couldn’t absolve me. This wasn’t like the moment on the deathbed, I told myself. The moment the breathing stopped. When I should have stayed. That moment can never come back. On the other hand, at that crucial moment I had badly needed to go to the bathroom. It had been urgent, painful. I had been resisting for hours – the hours of her dying – resisting manfully, firm at my post; I had needed to go. And then of course as soon as I stood over the bowl, there were messages to be read on my phone. There was the conference. Mother wasn’t interested, I thought, in my seeing this embalmed travesty. It wouldn’t be like Thomas pushing fingers in Christ’s open wounds. There was nothing I needed to be convinced of.

  On the other hand, she had phoned me. ‘Hello, Thomas, it’s Mum!’ Pulling out my phone, I tapped in the number of the undertaker, called it and immediately cancelled the call. I had the number now.

  ‘You must come to the funeral,’ I emailed my brother. I used italics. ‘We’ve got to be together at a moment like this.’ My brother replied that he was tired. He had a lot on, he said. Mum was dead. He had spent a little time with her in summer. He would like to see me, he said, but winter was not a good moment to travel. ‘There’s been a lot of snow, hasn’t there?’

  ‘You have to come,’ I wrote. ‘It’s Mother’s funeral. Let’s stand together this one last time, brothers and sister together.’

  As soon as I had sent this message I wondered where all this urgent rhetoric had come from. I was sounding like my father. I was sounding like a Churchill jug.

  When my brother didn’t reply, I wrote, ‘Have you ever thought how little Mother spoke of Father, despite remaining faithful to him, as it were, all those years? I mean, when you said Dad had been to a shrink, do you think it was possible he did that because he wanted to leave her, or he was attracted to someone else? Or he wanted to leave the Church maybe, which would have been a disaster for her. I mean, why else would Dad have been in so much trouble he had to see a shrink? And why did Mum never talk about this?’

  My brother replied at once. He said Dad had always had niggles with his nerves, and there were a million reasons for going to see a shrink. You didn’t need to be having a crisis of faith, or a pretty parishioner on the side. The parents were crazy with their religion, but they’d been pretty happy at the end, he thought. It was just a drag Dad had died so young. He was reading a book, my brother went on, which he couldn’t recommend highly enough, on the neural transmission of information through the brain. ‘We are all one hundred per cent predetermined,’ he wrote. ‘Free will is an illusion.’

  As the wintry days passed and I walked back and forth on the pavement by Hounslow railway station, without ever going into the undertaker’s and without calling the number I had stored on my mobile, eating Mother’s frozen meals, walking along the river where I had walked with Mother but also, and perhaps more often, with my wife, I became strangely and frantically concerned that my brother should be at the funeral, that brother and sister should embrace each other and that there should be some shared sense of occasion, a recognition between the three of us – brother sister brother – that this major thing had happened in our lives: Mother was dead.

  Where these emotions were coming from I had no idea, and at the same time, as if superimposed over them, an old fantasy returned. I would go back to my wife and we would look each other in the eye and then very deliberately, and by mutual unspoken accord, we would slap each other hard across the face. Not just one slap, but repeated slaps, across the face, and we would go on slapping and slapping hard across the face for as long as it took to feel that old scores had been settled and deep hurts repaid. They would be angry slaps, but also loving slaps. Why was I suddenly thinking of this again? Why couldn’t I focus on Elsa?

  I looked in the mirror at where Charlie’s bruise had all but faded. If my brother and sister had been here now, I thought, at Mother’s house, and if we had gone together to see her body, embalmed or otherwise, at the undertaker’s opposite Hounslow railway station, all would have been well. I felt sure of that, in the way I often find that I am absolutely sure of the nature of some experience – some wonderfully cathartic experience – I know I cannot have. I would have gone to the undertaker’s when my brother and sister wanted to go, stayed as long as my brother and sister wanted to stay, made the same gestures my brother and sister saw fit to make. They could decide everything, as far as I was concerned. All would have been easy if we had gone together, as brothers and sister, to say goodbye to Mother. But that wasn’t going to happen. As my sister saw it, Mother was already in heaven. She wasn’t there to be viewed. As my brother saw it, she was dead. And corpse-viewing was morbid.

  I was in between. Torn between.

  I phoned my sister and asked her to phone my brother and encourage him, in the warmest possible way, to come to the funeral. ‘I already have, Bro,’ she said. He had replied that he was thinking about it and would give a definitive response as soon as we had a date for the ceremony. Why hadn’t he replied like that to me, I wondered? And how could he say free will didn’t exist, and then talk about giving a definitive response when we had a date?

  ‘What are we supposed to do about the bills that have arrived at the house?’ I asked. There was a bill for the Wi-Fi, which I was making heavy use of. Another for a Waitrose delivery.

  ‘Oh, you’re in the house!’ my sister said. She hadn’t realised. She’d thought I was calling from Madrid. Apparently I hadn’t told her I’d returned to London. Was that possible? She was delighted, because my presence there would save her a journey she had been putting off for days. I had to look for a life-insurance policy, she told me; it should be in one of the files beside the desk in the back bedroom. And I should check a point on the bathroom ceiling that might be leaking from the tank in the loft. In which case a plumber would have to be called.

  ‘Did you go to see the body, then?’ she asked

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘Uncle Harry goes every day. Maybe you could go together.’

  ‘Don’t you have any idea when the funeral will be?’ I asked.

  Her hubby, my sister said, was working on it. The problem was a logjam for the cremation.

  ‘Logjam?’

  But now my sister asked, ‘So what are you actually doing there, Bro? In Mum’s house?’

  There were people I had to see in London, I said, about a project I’d been invited to get involved in. I put the phone down and stared at my father, smiling from behind his lectern. Without thinking, I went to the old stereo beneath the television, turned it on and pressed down the clunky button to play.

  ‘ … was a child, I spake as a child, I understo
od as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became …’

  Dad was reading from the Bible. The moment I heard his voice, my father’s voice – the very instant I caught the first cadence that was recognisably his, last heard thirty years before, on his deathbed – I hit the Stop button. I needed to go to the bathroom there and then. I made for the stairs.

  Mother, I thought, peeing, must have been checking out some old sermon of father’s for her Bible Study. Quite likely she had referenced the whole collection. Boxes and boxes of tapes. She had found an old sermon on Corinthians. Perhaps she repeated his very words when speaking to her study group. Perhaps repeating his words, she felt close to him. To her dead husband. On Christ’s other side. Thirty years after his death, Mother and Father were still a team. Yet Father had gone to a shrink.

  The Bangladeshi boy smiled from the twinned toilet in Aghailjhara. How do you pronounce that? My pee came slowly. Was I ever going to use Dr Sharp’s wand? A strange game had been played between my mother and myself that long summer together four years ago. Vis-à-vis the bathroom. Since I had to pee often at night, and she too, perhaps because of the drugs she was taking, had to get up three or four times, there was the question whether to flush or not on every occasion that one peed. The flush was loud. The house was tiny and poorly insulated. We would both be waking each other up all night long. So we didn’t. Didn’t flush. Out of courtesy. However, this meant that towards morning the loo, the one loo, was rank with stale urine. And we both experienced this rankness, this shared corruption. Our two bodily fluids mixed together. Yet neither of us could mention it, Mother because she just did not mention these things, and I out of respect for her, being her son.

  So this strange, sad intimacy formed between us, behind the surface cheerfulness that was always such a heroic achievement on my mother’s part. At one point, wishing to alleviate the situation, but also to prevent my mother from feeling sorry for me, something I found depressing and even strangely offensive, as if manhood itself were at stake, I decided to look for some sort of container I might pee into through the night, so as not to have to slip out of the door of the bedroom into the space at the top of the stairs, where a board creaked beneath the carpet, and then into the bathroom, whose door would only close if you clicked it rather loudly. If you didn’t close it and click it, it swung wide open of its own accord. It wouldn’t stay ajar. This meant that on those rare occasions when both of us headed for the bathroom at the same time, one of the two of us would risk being seen by the other in the toilet. Which was unthinkable.

  So I looked for something I could pee into through the night, then empty in the morning when Mother had already gone downstairs to make her morning tea and read the Bible and pray in the recliner by the revolving bookcase, that prayerful moment, when all was serene and the body’s irksome nagging in delicious remission. And the only thing I could find, in the cabinet above the fridge, beside the cuckoo clock, because I mustn’t take anything that would be too obvious, was a pint mug. What a pint beer mug, evidently stolen from a pub, was doing in the kitchen of someone who would never darken the door, as she would have put it, of a licensed bar, I have no idea. Perhaps my brother had stolen it. I must ask him. As an adolescent, my brother was the kind of person who might well come home with a pub ashtray in his pocket or a pint glass in his hand. In any event, I took this mug upstairs every night, giving the impression I wanted to have some water by my bed, then peed into it two or three times as required, until it was nearly full, so that although it never quite got me through the night, it did reduce the number of trips I made; and in the morning, when Mother wasn’t around, I filled it with water from the bath tap and emptied this water in the loo. Perhaps two or three times. This seemed hygiene enough. Nobody had to drink out of it. Until one day, for reasons I can’t recall, I had emptied the glass but not yet washed it – perhaps the cuckoo cuckooed, to call me down to breakfast – and left it in this state in the back bedroom, forgetting it there when I went out. So that Mother, who always liked to show her generosity by coming into the room and putting things in order, found the anomalous pint mug and took it downstairs and washed it with dish soap, though without rinsing of course. Which meant she must have smelled its smell and realised I had peed in it. She said nothing, but after that I could not bring myself to take the pint mug upstairs again.

  Why not? It was so childish. When I was a child, I spake as a child. There was a kind of enchantment with my mother that prevented very much from being said. As there was a kind of spell with my wife that had prevented something quite different from being said. With my wife, one could have talked of peeing problems till the cows came home, but one could never mention the dire state our relationship had fallen into, the possibility that perhaps we should call it a day. Call it a day was Mother’s expression. Likewise, till the cows come home. However, in both cases – mother and wife – it was precisely the unsaid things that made the bond between us so strong, so dense with emotion. As if my mother and I knew each other above all in the smell of nocturnal urine, while my wife and I knew each other most intimately in the stink of my betrayals. And winding up this pee, which I had hurried upstairs for after hearing just a half dozen words of my father’s voice reading from the Bible on an ancient cassette, it occurred to me that finding that peed-in beer mug that morning four years ago, my mother would very likely have connected it with the time she had found the jam jar with its stinking pee in the outhouse in Blackpool fifty years before – is there anything that sets off memory more than smell? – and so would very likely have remembered how she had yelled at me that day and wept, and said if I went on like this I would bring her down with grey hairs to the grave, an expression she always used whenever one of her children did something seriously beyond the pale; and how contrite on that occasion her good little bad boy had been, to the point of offering to learn how to knit squares of blankets for black people dying in Rwanda. Did Mother smile then, remembering that? Or did she frown? Did she think life had been worth living? And had she perhaps gone on to recall how my accomplice in crime on that occasion, my friend Malcolm, had been martyred with his entire family, in Burundi a year or so after that incident, cut to pieces because they had refused to renounce their Christian God for whatever other gods were on offer in West Africa and, remembering that, did she long for such a death herself, a glorious, martyr’s death as opposed to the slow malodorous decay of cancer?

  In any event, sleeping in the small back bedroom these last ten days, getting up in the night far too often, it has been impossible for me not to remember that old nocturnal intimacy with my mother, and its melancholy urinary tang. And on more than one occasion during these nights I have allowed myself to imagine I can hear Mother’s uneven breathing as she sleeps, fitfully, in her old bedroom. Or worse than that, when there was no breathing to be heard, allowed myself to imagine her lying in silent wakefulness, listening to the uneven flow of her son’s pee in the bathroom. Yes, standing in the bathroom in the middle of the night, I sometimes imagine my mother is not in her coffin at the undertaker’s at all. She is in the room behind me, feeling sorry for me as I pee. Nothing is more irksome than the thought of my mother feeling sorry for me. Even in her coffin, Mother will be feeling sorry for me, because I am not a Christian and not going to heaven. It’s crazy.

  Having escaped my father’s voice and hurried upstairs to the latrine, I now went straight into the back bedroom, removed the plastic bag with Dr Sharp’s wand and took it into my mother’s bedroom, where there was more space to put the computer on the bed and watch the video in which my enviable namesake Tom Ingram explains how to tackle anal self-massage. I fired up the computer, pulled a rubber glove over the wand and tied it off beyond the stopper that prevented the thing disappearing up your back passage. There was the problem of lubrication again. Had I seen Vaseline in the bathroom cabinet? Indeed I had. True, the tube had all the appearance of being a dozen years old, but I can’t imagine that Vaseline has a sell-by date.
>
  I smeared the Vaseline on the wand and had just removed jeans and underwear, and lain down on the flowery eiderdown over Mother’s bed, when the phone rang. Not my mobile, which I had kept beside me, but the landline downstairs beside the television and the stereo system with my father’s voice. I hurried downstairs in stockinged feet with no trousers or underwear and, being in a hurry to get to the phone before it stopped ringing, managed to slip. The staircase at my mother’s house is desperately steep and covered what’s more with a thick-pile carpet that encourages the foot to slip forward, unless placed firmly and deliberately on the flat of each stair. It was the accident we had always feared would happen to my mother. We had marvelled that in thirty years it hadn’t happened, she had never fallen. For a while we told ourselves we had been wrong to imagine she would fall, we had been too fearful – the mount-up-with-wings-as-eagles text was working miracles, my brother-in-law joked – and then she did fall and it was the end.

  I fell. My foot slipped away from me, my backside hit the steep stairs and in a flash I was at the bottom, clattering into the wooden railing where the staircase turned left into the sitting room. For a moment or two I was in a daze. The phone must have stopped ringing at some point, because now it started again and I found myself crawling over to it, rather than getting to my feet.

  Had I found the life-insurance document, my sister asked?

  I said I had.

  Had I checked the damp on the bathroom ceiling, she asked?

  I said there was none.

  The funeral would be the 20th, she said. Her hub had just sorted it. At 2 p.m. We needed to work out how many people were coming, and who was going to sleep where.

  I climbed back up to Mother’s bedroom, on my feet now, relieved that I did not seem to have hurt myself seriously. Lying down where Mother had lain in the days after her fall, I shifted aside Dr Sharp’s wand and assorted paraphernalia, found my phone, opened the recently called numbers and phoned the number Charlie had given me.