by Tim Parks
One thing my brother and I have in common is that neither of us believe Mother will be going to heaven when she dies. Or anywhere else, for that matter. We’re atheists. Or he’s an atheist, I’m an agnostic. Mother, on the other hand, really does believe. She’s spent her whole life in the Church, she’s an evangelical. Our childhood was full of talk about being born again and giving your heart to Jesus. Still, she doesn’t seem pleased by the prospect of paradise now that it’s at hand. Last week, on top of everything else, she was dealing with a urinary infection. ‘It’s hardly worth living, in these circumstances,’ she said, shaking her head grimly. ‘Apparently she has written down the details of her funeral service,’ I emailed my brother. ‘The hymns she wants and where to spread the ashes.’
‘I have days when I feel like that myself,’ my brother replies, ‘bar the hymns of course.’
Unlike her brothers, my sister shares Mother’s beliefs. She has the same faith, the same fervency. And she lives much closer to her than I do, only an hour or so’s drive. But she doesn’t visit very often and is somehow never there when I visit. I don’t email her, or she me. My brother doesn’t communicate with her at all, though there’s less age difference between them than there is between him and me. I’m the youngest, my sister the oldest. The fact is, at some point the whole religious thing split us apart. On the other hand, following my mother’s recent fall and consequent deterioration it seems important that we children get ready to take tough decisions. I phoned my sister and asked her what arrangements were in place for the time when my mother would no longer be able to look after herself in her own home.
Why, I don’t know, but on the very rare occasions I have reason to be in touch with her, I always phone my sister. I wouldn’t dream of emailing her, whereas despite being much closer to my brother I never phone him, only email, and he never phones me. He phones my mother. More often, he has his wife phone my mother.
On the phone my sister was extremely friendly and practical and not at all competitive – it was quite a pleasure to be speaking to each other again. (Actually, this is always the case, so that I invariably end up wondering why we don’t speak to each other more often.) What took me aback, though, was how critical she was of Mother. ‘She’s in complete denial,’ my sister complained. ‘Refuses to sort out the necessary legal documents, doesn’t want to accept that sooner or later she’ll have to leave the house. And she’s such a bad patient, moping about the pain, but not doing anything to keep her mind busy. Why doesn’t she listen to music or watch a video?’
I didn’t refer any of this to my brother since it really isn’t my perception of how Mother behaves. Instead I emailed to say that, since falling down the stairs, Mother needed a nurse twice a day to sort her out and was having problems with incontinence and a sciatic nerve. ‘Apparently she has some kind of arrangement with a hospice but it isn’t clear when they’ll be willing to admit her, or whether Mother will agree to go to a place you only leave feet first.’ ‘She’ll keep the heavenly hosts waiting a while yet,’ he replied.
Laptop on my knees on the long train ride home, it occurred to me that my irritation with my brother might have the function of allowing me not to dwell too gloomily on my mother’s suffering. Looked at that way, the friction between us seemed positive. Certainly his offhand responses to my unhappy news are sapping more mental energy than her suffering. A little later, though, it seemed that this stupid distraction – the feeling that her dying had become part of a win/lose discussion with my brother – was actually depriving me of a proper relationship with my mother in this critical period, the last of her life. I was wasting the opportunity of being with her by seeing everything in terms of what I would say, or email, to my brother. On the other hand, however surprised I was by my sister’s criticisms, I never felt like challenging them, or arguing with her the way I do with my brother. Mother probably behaves differently with all of us is the truth, and even when her behaviour is the same we see it in different ways. That said, the fact that a person is terminally ill is something undeniable, not a point of view.
When my father died, almost thirty years ago now, my brother had already emigrated, but there was no email then and hence this discussion at a distance couldn’t be had. Phone calls cost a fortune; neither he nor I had much money, and it must have been my mother who called my brother to inform him of my father’s rapidly deteriorating state. His cancer was much quicker than my mother’s, a matter of months. In the event, my brother came to visit shortly before the death but then did not return for the funeral. It seemed sensible. I can barely recall my feelings that day, nor a single word of what passed between myself, my sister and my mother. I wonder whether the same will be the case with the funeral to come. All this irritation with my brother will be forgotten, but so too will all these visits to my mother which take the form, I realise now, of two people knowing that they are meeting above all because one of them is not long for this world. No doubt that’s why I feel I have to write those emails to my brother the moment I leave her house. I have to get it off my chest. Certainly, if my brother does come to the funeral it will be the last time we three children will ever be together.
Does that matter?
The next time I came down to the city my sister phoned me while I was on the train to say that Mother had been taken to hospital. That day I had a full schedule and then the following morning, just as I was heading out towards the hospital, my sister phoned again to say that Mother was now being taken down to her house: my sister’s. Her husband was driving her. Theoretically, I could have made it down to my sister’s and back in time for my returning train, just about, but I couldn’t see how I could really help, now that my mother was in good hands and had company. Actually, it felt rather pleasant to find I had the day to myself. I did a little shopping and took the train home without seeing her.
‘She was in so much pain, she called an ambulance,’ I emailed my brother.
‘Poor Mum,’ came the response. ‘Never underestimate her capacity to bounce back.’
My visits to the city changed. I didn’t stop tagging on an extra day to my business trips, something my wife and family were now used to; it was just that I spent the time wandering around on my own. Again and again I planned to make the further trip down to my sister’s, but a strange reluctance always overcame me. I had rather enjoyed seeing my mother in her tiny house and being useful to her and eating together and playing a little Scrabble, which she always beat me at; but the thought of seeing her with my sister was depressing, especially since there were no signs of her bouncing back; rather the opposite. I wouldn’t have minded seeing my sister on her own, if she happened to be in town, but not my mother and my sister together, and neither of them singly at my sister’s house. Why? I wasn’t sure. The religious texts on the walls? The fluffy white rugs, the many dogs and cats?
Meantime, my sister’s husband began to send rather formal emails to both my brother and myself. Mother was unable to move from a sitting to a standing position. Sometimes she was incontinent. Her left arm was now entirely useless. The drugs were quite inadequate to deal with her pain. I mailed back at once offering to share the cost of a private nurse. I noticed that while I responded using the reply-to-all option, my brother did not. But I knew he had replied, because when my brother-in-law responded to him he copied me in. My brother had said that he wished there was something he could do, but he couldn’t see that there was. ‘Rather gruesome bulletins from Sis’s hub,’ he commented in a mail to me. Immediately it felt like we could be friends again. I phoned my sister every few days and she again complained what a dire patient Mother was, in particular her obstinate refusal to enjoy any kind of entertainment; but my sister didn’t seem unhappy and her voice was affectionate when she passed the phone to my mother, who actually sounded rather cheerful. She had sewn a button on a coat for her granddaughter, she said, and even managed a few rows of knitting.
Perhaps, it occurred to me, putting the phone down, Mothe
r put a different face on things over the phone, not just with my brother but with everybody, and hence the key to his whole blasé approach to the situation was her phone manner, which had led him to believe that my mails were alarmist. Why didn’t I Skype my brother, I wondered, and enjoy a nice chat with him? Why did I phone, but never email, my sister? Why did I ‘reply to all’ in emails to my brother-in-law while my brother replied only to him, even if, as it turned out, there was nothing in his messages that couldn’t perfectly well have been sent to me too? On another long train ride I suddenly had the intuition that if I put some pressure on these questions, if I really tackled the issue of why each of us contacted the others in the different ways we did, I would eventually find my way back to some defining moment in our childhood when my sister, my brother and I had become who we were. Behind the mystery there would be some scene, or some protracted drama, that explained everything. It seemed an interesting idea, but I felt reluctant to pursue it. Instead I began to wonder how my father would have communicated with us if he had lived into the period of email and Skype. Dad loved gadgets and electronic novelties. He once spent quite a lot of money trying to find the perfect voice recorder so he could record his ideas wherever he was. Mother used to laugh about him preparing his sermons in the bath. And he bought a fax machine at great expense as soon as they came in. Half asleep with the rhythm of the train, I dreamed I received a text message from my father: ‘Soon your mother and I will be together in paradise,’ it said.
DAY AND NIGHT
By day Thomas puts on respectable clothes and goes to work. His income will pay for the roof over their heads, the clothes on their backs, the shoes on their feet, schools, holidays, teeth, etc. He feels virtuous and rather successful.
By night Thomas dreams that a violent wind has blown through their house, sweeping up all his and his wife’s underclothes and scattering them across the gutters of the suburb where they live. He wakes up anxious and excited.
By day Thomas works in the garden, digging the flowerbeds for spring, or pruning the roses, or mowing the lawn, or cutting the hedges to keep things in order for other members of the family to enjoy, if they should so desire. Resting on his spade amid strong smells of soil and yew, he feels that perhaps something has been achieved.
By night Thomas dreams an earthquake shaking the hillside and his wife transformed into a unicorn galloping madly around stones and clods and broken fences. He wakes in a sweat.
By day Thomas and his wife go to a furniture warehouse to order a fitted kitchen. It is a pleasure to examine the smooth stone and steel of the work surfaces and open the heavy doors of quality appliances with their padded rubber insulation and shiny interiors. Installed at home, these items will be handsome and practical. Signing an expensive order, both he and Mary feel quietly satisfied.
By night Thomas dreams a strange strong humming sound. He goes down the stairs from bedroom to first floor, from first floor to ground floor, from ground floor to basement, then down more stairs, narrower and narrower, and still more stairs, deeper and deeper, a pitch-black staircase, leading down down down into the belly of the earth. Now the hum is a roar and suddenly he is standing on the brink of an underground river that runs swift and black through a mass of stone beneath his well-appointed house. Preparing to dive in, he wakes with a start.
By day Thomas reads newspapers and magazines. He is concerned about the economic crisis. He is concerned about youth unemployment. He is concerned about levels of immigration. He is concerned about global warming. And about the fate of Bristol Rovers, his old home team, who are fighting relegation. Over breakfast, lunch and dinner he and his wife and children discuss these things and his mother’s cancer and listen to on-the-hour radio bulletins. It seems life is a constant battle to preserve the wealth and security they have accumulated.
By night Thomas dreams a gypsy boy running off with his laptop. After a long chase, he catches the boy and is amazed by his beauty, his long black ringlets and friendly, seductive smile. After the boy hands back the laptop, Thomas can’t find his way home. He is lost.
By day Thomas works out, running or swimming or rowing, to make sure his body is fit enough to keep doing all the work he has to do to make his income and pay for the new kitchen and keep the garden in order and worry about everything he has to worry about. Sometimes he pushes himself very hard, especially on the running track, checking his heart rate regularly through a device on his arm. Later, after a shower, he feels a welcome glow of self-righteousness.
By night Thomas dreams excavators toiling around a simply enormous boulder that is blocking the flow of a major river. It seems impossible that man-made mechanics could ever shift such a huge obstacle and he wakes with an angry energy on his skin.
By day Thomas plans advertising campaigns and contacts clients and writes letters and lunches with business associates and takes his car to the mechanic and has his blood tested for PSA and cholesterol levels and generally feels life is a hectic treadmill. But once every few weeks, by night, if he is lucky, he sleeps with his girlfriend and then there are no dreams because actually they hardly sleep at all, though after lovemaking Thomas tells her about his quakes and gypsies and tumultuous waters and wistfully she wonders why he doesn’t come and live with her since they are always so happy together.
He can’t, he says.
Returning home, Thomas guides his newly serviced Audi down the ramp to the impressive three-vehicle underground garage beneath the well-kept garden. A remote raises the big door and as the car enters a light comes on automatically, illuminating stacked firewood against one wall, bicycles on racks on another, a tool cupboard, packing cases, a bobsleigh, skates, backpacks, books, a red and white Vespa, tennis rackets, guitar cases, amplifiers, an electric piano, a broken scooter. Turning off the ignition, Thomas sits and stares at it all. How many reassuring things, he thinks, tokens of past life and pleasures. After a while the light goes off, but Thomas continues to sit and stare. In the subterranean quiet of his garage on the comfortable seat of the dark sedan he might be an Etruscan prince embalmed in his ship of death.
This is a good place to grow old in, Thomas thinks, a safe place to fall ill and eventually to die in, surrounded by loved ones and household gods.
But Thomas is not old. He is not ill. He is not dying. His beloved is not here.
‘I am full of life,’ he mutters out loud. ‘I am brimming with vitality.’
GOAT
Mary was brilliant with names. She had so much fun with them. Coffee had a name. It was feefee. And tea. It was teawee. That was in her younger days when her Scottish accent was stronger, though sometimes she would bring the old words out even in middle age, when she was in a good mood. London was the Dungeon. Paris, for reasons Thomas never fathomed, Old Weepy.
But it was the names of pets, friends, children and partners that most inspired Mary. Her flatmates, when Thomas first met her, Liz and Patty, were known respectively as Shuffle and Sharpie. Mary herself was Cane. One drunken evening the girls had explained to Thomas how each of these names came to be, an intricate series of shifts and transformations that had seen Patty become Marmar, then Shasha, then Shaman, then one day after she had said something particularly unpleasant, Sharp, and finally, with a little more affection, Sharpie. Quite how Liz had become Shuffle, Thomas couldn’t remember. Perhaps her surname came into it, perhaps her dancing skills. Mary had been Mayhem, then Hurricane, then Cane. A hint of hurry and a hint of chastisement, Patty laughed, admitting it was always Mary who thought up everything, and Mary, in the end, who decided which name stuck. Thomas also laughed, stroking a cat that had originally been Bilberry, then Berryboo, then just booboo. ‘Booboo!’ Mary cried delightedly, rubbing faces with the fat black cat. ‘Do you like our new friend, Tum?’
Thomas accepted this reference to his healthy appetite with good grace. But in no time at all, perhaps because stomachs do grumble sometimes, and sometimes couples argue, he had become Tomtom, Grumble and finally Grump. ‘Gru
mp yourself,’ Thomas told her, since Mary was famous for grousing. ‘Big Grump and Little Grump,’ Mary elaborated, looking to patch things up. So now both had the same name. Then Grump became Gripe and Gripe Pipe and Pipe Pip and for a while this neutral monosyllable stuck and both were Pip – ‘I love you, Pip’, ‘I love you, Pip’ – until the evening someone on television said, ‘You really get my goat’ and later that evening Mary said, ‘I wish someone would get my goat, for Christ’s sake’, and towards midnight, and perhaps it was their happiest evening ever, Thomas and Mary were in bed calling each other Goat. They would be Goat to each other now for twenty years and more. They wrote letters to each other beginning, Dear Goat. They started phone conversations saying, Hi, Goatie. In the filing cabinet under the stairs there was a file entitled Big G and another entitled Little G. When mobile phones arrived, each entered the other in the address book as Goat.
Sometimes it was embarrassing. At some formal dinner party Mary would say, ‘You do the honours, Goat’, or ‘Goat, do you think you could go and check the potatoes?’ and Thomas would reply, ‘No worries, Goat’, or if he was in a bad mood, ‘Yes, Goat, no, Goat, three bags full, Goat.’ ‘No Goat, no go,’ Mary frowned.
Then everybody laughed and wanted to know exactly how this Goat thing had come about, and Mary would tell a different story on every occasion. Her favourite version was that goats, in popular tradition, were supposed to calm other farm animals down. ‘You’ve got my goat actually meant you’ve taken away my calming influence. So, being goats, Tom and I calm each other down.’ ‘What nonsense, we wind each other up,’ Thomas protested. ‘Nothing to do with sexual performance?’ one of the guests would always say. ‘Alas, no,’ Thomas confessed. ‘Or demonic forebears?’ suggested another. ‘You’d have to ask the Reverend Paige about that,’ Mary observed, meaning Thomas’s father, ‘wouldn’t she, Goat?’ and Thomas answered, ‘She would indeed, Goat, darling, and the response would be: negative.’ Sometimes a guest, Mary’s sister for example, might join in and start to call them Goat herself, thinking this was fun, but Mary discouraged it. Goat was their name for each other. It was a oneness. Thomas and Mary are Goat. A single identity. But for others they must be Thomas and Mary.
