In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  ‘You look awful,’ my brother told me at Arrivals. Later he asked my daughter’s boyfriend, ‘Which of us is older, hey? Try and guess. Try and guess. It’s a three-year difference. Come on. Who’s the older brother?’

  ‘Tom,’ the boy said at once.

  ‘Wrong! And I’m just off the fucking plane!’ He grinned at me. ‘Nine hours’ lag!’

  ‘You’re in form,’ I said.

  When we went up to our room at the Ibis, I again felt ashamed I hadn’t found anything better. As we let ourselves into a tiny double there was a distinct smell of sewage. Furious, I ran down four flights of stairs to confront the receptionist. ‘We can’t possibly accept this,’ I shouted.

  He was an affable young Pakistani. ‘No problem, sir,’ he said. ‘We have plenty of rooms.’

  Once in the new room, my brother slept until mid-afternoon. My daughter and her boyfriend went into town with the twins to buy clothes. To make up for my miserliness in the choice of the hotel, I offered the whole family dinner at a Thai restaurant in Twickenham. ‘You don’t want to be cooking for twelve,’ I told my sister.

  ‘You’re being very generous these days, Bro,’ she observed.

  Over spring rolls and Soave, at the end of three tables strung together, my brother-in-law told a story about the problems a Christian community in Gillingham had run into, when one of their members raised another from the dead. ‘They couldn’t get the registry office to revoke the Death Certificate,’ he laughed. ‘Please let’s not talk nonsense,’ my brother said brusquely. The twins were sniggering. ‘Did you go to see her in the end?’ my sister asked me quietly, as if appreciating that I wouldn’t want the others to overhear. ‘The boys went,’ I told her. Then as the noise level swelled, making it possible to whisper to one’s neighbour, I admitted to my sister that I had been feeling extremely bad about not having sat with Mother for a while after she finally expired. ‘I just feel I should have stayed,’ I said. ‘I feel I let her down.’ There was a hail of laughter now, because my daughter’s boyfriend was challenging my brother to a game that involved flipping up beer mats from the table edge and catching them as they spun in the air. ‘I didn’t stay, either,’ my sister said easily. ‘Mum would never have wanted us to.’ ‘At least over dinner you could stop texting,’ Mark complained. ‘Matt has got a girlfriend,’ he told the whole table. ‘Be sure that you’re the lucky one,’ my brother told him. ‘Old cynic!’ my sister laughed. She had always called my brother an old cynic.

  Later, when we had retired to our Ibis room, my brother asked me what on earth was wrong with me. ‘I thought you had a beautiful new woman,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t you be in seventh heaven? You look like you’re expecting to be arrested any minute.’

  I told him about David. About Deborah and Charlie. About my conversation with Mary. My brother lay under his white quilt chuckling and shaking his head. ‘Someone should put a stake through that guy’s heart,’ he said, ‘before he does any more damage.’

  ‘Why do I keep feeling I have to go and see Mother’s body?’ I asked him.

  ‘Morbid curiosity,’ he replied at once. ‘She’s there, so you think you have to see her. But you don’t have to and it’s not really her, and because you still have half an ounce of sense in your skull, you don’t go.’ He turned over to sleep. ‘Unless it’s some genetic thing,’ he added, ‘programmed a million years ago.’

  ‘Almost all cultures have wakes,’ I told him. ‘Or some kind of ritual, being together around the body.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Tommy,’ he said. ‘Cheer the fuck up!’

  The twins had gone to hear a band in Putney. Towards midnight a text message arrived from Mary. ‘Managed to get in the ward and sit with him. I think I will go mad.’

  I decided not to reply.

  ‘Bob is bringing the programmes,’ my brother-in-law said.

  We were at Mother’s house again, mid-morning. Saturday. A huge wreath of yellow roses was lying on the kitchen table. My brother and I were to contribute fifty pounds each. She had chosen yellow roses rather than lilies, my sister said, because lilies were so melancholy. ‘Heartily agree,’ my brother said. ‘Those white lilies do make everything feel so awfully funereal.’

  ‘Idiot,’ my sister smiled. She wanted to take the roses home with her, she said, when it was over. It was silly spending all that money and leaving them to rot in the crematorium.

  ‘Embalm ’em,’ my brother proposed. ‘Let’s have ’em last for ever!’

  There was coffee and Viennese chocolate biscuits, served on Mother’s old trolley. Its wheels laboured in the thick carpet. The twins were imitating the cuckoo. A small dog tore back and forth between sitting room and kitchen. A text from my wife read: ‘Since you’re coming up with the boys this evening, any chance you could get me a new laptop? Mine’s clapped out. Anything that works. I never have any idea what to get.’

  My daughter’s boyfriend was telling the twins the Scottish rugby team didn’t have a ghost of a chance. Uncle Harry arrived with my cousin, and my brother-in-law began to tell us who would be riding in which car. It seemed natural that he should play master of ceremonies. I put my coat back on and walked up the High Road. I called Elsa, but her phone was off. Was that odd on a Saturday morning? I stopped at the newsagent’s, asked for a pack of Marlboro and a lighter, then went into Dixons and bought a mid-range Toshiba with a pale-pink case. Why on earth are you doing this, Señor Sanders, I imagined the shrink’s voice, as if you were still her husband?

  I crossed the High Road, ordered a cappuccino at Costa, took it outside and nearly fainted after the third puff of Marlboro. Then, seeing a young man at the door to the undertaker’s, I jumped to my feet and rushed into the road. A motorcyclist braked and shouted. I slipped through the dark glass door as it was closing.

  ‘Mr Carrington?’ a voice was saying. ‘This way, please.’

  There was a very tight little space and a reception desk, low wall-lighting and low music of a New Age variety, flutes and running water. At first glance, it was not unlike a doctor’s surgery, except for a heavy use of dark-green marble, white lilies on a low table and large black-and-white photos of horse-drawn hearses. Quite determined now, I waited. There were murmurs from another room, then a blonde woman in her forties appeared wearing a dark-red skirt and jacket.

  ‘Sorry, I popped in on the wake of the other gentleman,’ I explained. ‘I would like to see Mrs Sanders. I’m her son.’

  The woman consulted a timetable on her desktop. ‘We were expecting you yesterday,’ she said. She sat down at her desk and adjusted her spectacles. ‘So many people have been to pay homage to your mother, Mr Sanders. She must have been very popular.’

  ‘She was well known in the church,’ I said.

  ‘However, I’m afraid your mother’s coffin has already been sealed.’

  She looked at me from slightly narrowed eyes. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Let me just go and see if there’s anything we can do, Mr Sanders.’

  Perhaps I smiled, or tried to. The woman pushed back her chair and slipped out of the door behind. A message arrived in my pocket, but I ignored it. Low voices came from the back room. Then a loud thud. And with that thud I realised I had left the Toshiba in a Dixons plastic bag beside my seat on the pavement outside Costa Coffee.

  I banged out of the door and again raced across the High Road. This time a horn sounded. The bag wasn’t there. I stood staring. How long had I been away? Five minutes? Yet another message arrived and I pulled my phone out.

  ‘Dad, can you get some H3 batteries please?’

  ‘Sir,’ a voice interrupted. It was the young French girl who had served me. ‘Sir, your bag.’

  Only a few minutes later did I check the other message. It was from Deborah.

  ‘He’s woken up, Tom. It’s a miracle.’

  Entering the church of St Peter and St Paul for my mother’s funeral, it seemed to me time ended here. Having failed either to view her body or decide
not to view it, I might as well be cremated with her. Had I really agreed to travel north to Edinburgh as soon as the cremation was over? Would I ever get on a plane to Madrid? To Elsa. Both these journeys seemed the stuff of fantasy. From the moment the Californian physiotherapist had slipped his subtle finger into my anus at the hotel in Amersfoort, I had fallen under a spell. The time spent in my mother’s house had been an enchantment. A coma. Across west London a soft drizzle had begun to fall. Planes descended on Heathrow in thick cloud. I too was proceeding on automatic pilot, guided by others. Under the flight path, the church was packed. At the top of the aisle, two trestles awaited my mother’s coffin.

  A miracle, Deborah had texted. I had read her message on the street, carrying the box with my wife’s new computer and a pack of H3 Duracells for the twins. Presumably it was Mary who had woken David up. Woken him to what? To his wife’s declaring it a miracle. Your beloved mistress brings you back to life, only for your wife to repossess you and rejoice. Entering Mother’s house, I had felt a powerful urge to vomit.

  In the sitting room my sister’s son-in-law had just brought freshly printed copies of the funeral programme, which my brother-in-law was declaring ‘mighty spiffy’. He turned the pages back and forth with evident satisfaction.

  ‘A very superior publication,’ my brother agreed. He too turned the pages. ‘Only it doesn’t say anything about a funeral.’

  ‘Mum didn’t want us to use the word,’ my sister said. ‘She wanted it to be a service of thanksgiving.’

  There were plates of sandwiches on the low table between recliner and sofa. A dozen people crowded round. ‘Going Home to Glory’ the programme was titled: ‘A Service of Celebration and Thanksgiving for the Life of Martha Florence Sanders’. A round photo showed Mother in half profile, face tilted to the sky, full of energy and hope.

  ‘Who chose the picture?’ I asked.

  ‘She did,’ my sister said.

  I went upstairs to dress. My dark suit from the Berlin inaugural address was hanging in the wardrobe in her bedroom. I should never have gone to Berlin, I thought. Together with a white shirt. Should I wear a tie? It had been sheer lunacy to set out for the airport the second her breathing stopped. I couldn’t decide. The shirt wasn’t freshly cleaned, but clean enough.

  I stood barefoot in my mother’s bedroom, unable to decide about the tie, unable to shake off the reflection that my inaugural address to the 27th Annual Conference of European Linguists had been fatal. Without that conference, I would surely have sat with Mother for a few minutes after her death. I would have protected her in the crucial moments when the soul abandons the body. She would have acknowledged my presence. In some way. Or I would have imagined her acknowledging it. In short, I would have taken leave of my mother properly, then flown back to Madrid and Elsa and sanity. If I hadn’t gone to Berlin to deliver that talk, driven by an inflated idea of my own importance, a childish excitement about my own feverish ideas, I wouldn’t be hovering here now, unable to decide whether to wear a tie or not. Mother always insisted I wear a tie to church, I remembered. Not wearing a tie had been a first significant step towards emancipation and independence. How old was I, the day I finally walked into church without a tie? Sixteen, seventeen? But why was I thinking about such trivia?

  What settled it was seeing an old tie of Father’s in the top drawer of Mother’s dresser. I pulled out the top drawer of the dresser, quite at random, and for some reason, thirty years after his death and cremation and the scattering of his ashes from Kew Bridge, there was a tie of Father’s neatly folded among Mother’s underwear and stockings. Dark blue with silver crests. Seduced by a sense of inevitability, I wrapped it round my neck. If I couldn’t give my heart to Jesus, I could at least wear a tie. Downstairs, I noticed my brother was entirely himself in a grey tweed jacket over a smart black polo neck. Who – whom – would David choose, I wondered, now he had woken up again? Or would he just make a better job of topping himself, when he found he couldn’t?

  Programme in hand, my brother-in-law was reminding us of the timing. D-Day minus fifteen. D-Day minus ten. He consulted the digital display on his iPhone. The cars, the coffin, the seating, the reception, the cremation. The day was out of my hands. ‘I will get the first available flight,’ I had texted Elsa, making no reference to the train to Edinburgh. ‘If you want to stay another day or two with your family, feel free,’ she replied.

  ‘The cars!’ Mark and Matt shouted.

  Mother’s cul-de-sac was in the form of a T. The three big cars had trouble turning, the hearse in particular. It manoeuvred back and forth. Standing at the front door, I glimpsed the coffin through gleaming glass. It seemed too large, too polished, and quite unconnected with the exhausted body I had abandoned on the hospice bed. I stared. I felt intensely that we should be moving towards it, to greet it in some way, to pay our respects, but nobody moved. We watched together from the doorstep as the hearse inched backwards and forwards and the coffin slowly turned through a hundred and eighty degrees, like some object on a revolving display. You follow none of your instincts, I thought. Dad’s tie felt tight. Anal massage had not saved my life. I hurried back into the house for a last pee and instead found myself vomiting. I vomited my breakfast. At least this was something new, I reflected, drinking from the tap to freshen my mouth. It just wasn’t Tom Sanders to throw up his cereal.

  One thing I hadn’t foreseen was that the undertaker would walk in front of the hearse in his dress suit, all the way from Mother’s house to SS Peter and Paul Parish Church, a distance of perhaps half a mile. In the car immediately behind, I began to wish I too was walking ahead of the hearse, or beside the coffin. I needed to move.

  ‘Who will carry the coffin into church?’ I asked my sister.

  ‘The undertaker’s men,’ she said.

  Then she added that the undertaker’s secretary had asked whether any of us wanted to help with the bearing, but her husband had thought no, and at once I yearned to carry the coffin, to feel its harsh weight on my shoulder. If I couldn’t view Mother, at least I could carry her. Bear her. One says ‘bear’ when it comes to coffins. As with children. Bear a coffin, bear a child. Bear the brunt.

  Then my sister asked, lightly but seriously, if I and my brother were planning to cry at the funeral.

  We were sitting three on the seat, looking forward beyond the driver to the hearse, which was now slowing traffic on the High Street. Faces tried to look into our car as we slid by.

  ‘Planning to cry? I’ve nothing scheduled,’ my brother joked.

  ‘I’m determined not to,’ my sister told us. She didn’t want to make an exhibition of herself, she said, and be in a state for the reception afterwards. ‘Mum wouldn’t have wanted us to,’ she added.

  ‘I always cry at funerals,’ I said.

  My brother made to ruffle the hair I no longer had. ‘Tearful Tommy!’ he laughed. ‘Feet of clay!’

  The hearse proceeded up the High Street with exasperating slowness. My brother was making quips about the undertaker now, his Dickensian demeanour under that tall top hat. So reassuring to be back in the UK, he said. Settling into the back seat, I opened my mother’s programme:

  Welcome, dear friends.

  The text was in italics.

  Thank you for coming and joining in; what I desire, above all things, is that this should be a service of celebration – not of my life and achievements, but of the wonderful Lord, who has been my strength and stay, all my life.

  It was her voice. Mother was going to conduct her own funeral. I hadn’t quite grasped this till now.

  I have always loved the words of Jacob who, after a long and chequered life, could say as he blessed his grandchildren, ‘The God who has been my shepherd all my life to this day, the Angel who has delivered me from all harm, bless the boys.’ The Lord has certainly been my shepherd, saved me, blessed me, guided and delivered me. I heartily recommend my dear Saviour to you.

  Martha Sanders.

  Bless the boys!
I suddenly felt alert. Why the boys, and not the children? I couldn’t remember the details of Jacob’s story, but felt at once that this blessing was intended for my brother and myself, the unbelievers. Mother was dead, but still making this appeal, still playing her hand.

  In something of a daze, I climbed out of the car and followed my sister and brother across a patch of grass, into a porch and up the aisle of the nave. I had expected that we would walk behind the coffin, but it seemed that it was to be brought after us. The canonical moments for showing grief had been edited out of the event, together with the word ‘funeral’. What I desire, above all things, is that this should be a service of celebration.

  Inside, the church was petite Victorian Gothic, dank and twee, but generously festooned with flowers. The congregation murmured as we passed. These people knew Mother well, they had heard her preach on many occasions, but had never seen her children. Or not her boys. The rebellious boys. They knew Mother’s charisma, but not the cross she had to bear.

  With the coffin trestles to our left, we filed into a very short front pew, truncated by a thick stone buttress. Our places had been decided for us: my brother at the end against the buttress; myself beside him; we were trapped there, quarantined perhaps, by my sister, to my left; then next to her, beside the aisle and closest to the coffin, my brother-in-law. ‘Because he has to go up front to read the lesson,’ my sister whispered.

  In the pew behind us were Uncle Harry and his son. But again the place by the aisle, close to the coffin, went to my sister’s son, my nephew; he too was to give a reading. My sister’s family, who shared Mother’s evangelical convictions, would be active in the service. This had all been agreed months ago. Her boys, more accustomed to public speaking, would play no part. We had been blessed. We must keep mum.

  Waiting for the coffin, my brother turned round and joked with our cousin, Uncle Harry’s son, immediately behind him. I stared about me at the familiar trappings of an Anglican church and the less familiar paraphernalia of high-church ceremony: lighted candles, a crucifix. I hadn’t been in a church in decades. Suddenly the old aura was upon me. The organ struck up, sombre.