by Tim Parks
He laughed. ‘You’re sharp, Thomas. Doubting doubtless hones the mind!’
But he had no doubt, Dr Sharp went on, that his mother had indeed wanted him to be there, if only because he had heard her on the phone begging his sister to come ‘before it is too late’.
‘Your sister,’ I said. ‘Not you!’
‘I was already there,’ he laughed.
‘But did your mother specifically ask you not to leave?’ I asked.
‘She did not,’ he admitted. ‘But I never said I wanted to leave.’
I was surprised by how sarcastic and unpleasant I was being. I was also surprised by how cheerfully Dr Sharp was putting up with it. Perhaps I was angry that I risked missing the flight because of him. The taxi was in a long tailback on the sliproad to the motorway.
‘The truth is,’ I told him, ‘there is something I want to tell my mother that I have never told her. I don’t want to miss this last chance.’
And what was that, he asked?
I sighed. I wasn’t really sure, I said. ‘I just have that impression – that there is something that has to be said. I’ll know when I get there. It will come out.’
‘Interesting,’ Dr Sharp thought. Or maybe he thought I was bullshitting him.
The taxi driver turned the radio on. There was some merry discussion in Dutch. Perhaps it was a quiz show. Raising my voice, I said I really needed to be at the airport in an hour and five. Would we make it? The driver turned on the navigator, which gave our estimated arrival time in present traffic conditions as seventy minutes. ‘As you see,’ he said, ‘there’s not much I can do.’
‘Try to relax,’ Dr Sharp told me.
Then I told Dr Sharp that one of the reasons why I was so wired up was that the massage his physio Thomas had given me after lunch had on the one hand convinced me beyond all doubt that the pelvic floor really was the source of my sufferings – my erstwhile sufferings – but at the same time just touching it had reactivated those sufferings. They were no longer erstwhile. What was I to do? The idea of plunging back into months of chronic pain was so depressing.
Dr Sharp was thoughtful. He was a jovial, generous, fleshy man, very much taken up with his own projects, but more than willing to focus on you for the few moments it took to assess your needs.
‘Everything you have told me about yourself,’ he said, ‘convinces me that you have managed to control your problem by making a big investment in relaxation techniques, yoga, breathing exercises, whatever. Essentially, you have learned to chill a little, to turn down the stress temperature, and that has got you out of gaol. Stress comes from ourselves as much as anything else. But when things get out of hand, when you’re out of your normal environment or crisis strikes, you lose control and soon enough you find yourself in pain again.’
His conclusion was that I should come to San Diego, follow his protocol for a month and have the problem massaged out of me, once and for all. It would be painful at first, but beyond pain lay comfort and freedom. ‘Above all,’ he said, ‘you should learn to use the self-massage wand, which would empower you to take control of your own destiny.’
‘Empower’, like ‘impact’, is a word I have trouble with.
Then as we sat in heavy traffic on the autobahn between Amersfoort and Schiphol, and my mother lay dying in London, Dr Sharp lifted his bag from the floor, clicked it open and pulled out one of three or four plastic bags. Through the transparent plastic you could see a yellow-and-amber tube shaped rather like a short snorkel, except that the U was more open than with a snorkel, and instead of a mouthpiece there was a white ball the size of a large marble and at the other end a handle running perpendicular to the tube, as if at the top of a small spade, a children’s beach spade perhaps. Beneath the handle, the straight shaft of the instrument was enclosed for perhaps three inches in a rubbery yellow sheath, from within which a grey wire emerged that then connected to a small box, also yellow and featuring a liquid-crystal display. First the ball was inserted in the anus, Dr Sharp explained, and he leaned back and lifted his knees onto the seat of the taxi to show how the sufferer slipped the curved end of the wand – the mouthpiece of the snorkel, if you like – covered with a rubber glove of course, well-lubed needless to say, between his thighs, beneath his scrotum and into the anus. After which you operated the handle – ‘Joystick, we call it!’ he laughed – to steer the ball, now deep inside the colon, to the point on the pelvic wall that triggered your pain, and then pushed forward, sideways or backwards on the wand to apply pressure and massage that point. Gently! The display on the gauge responded to the tension generated in the flexing tube as you forced the U open, and hence indicated how much pressure you were applying to the muscle, internally, so that this could be monitored and gradually increased over a period of months.
‘We’ve had it patented,’ he said. ‘It has passed all the stringent US standards for medical equipment. This will do it.’
The doctor’s enthusiasm was contagious. He was convinced he had the solution to a problem that plagued millions of men. And many women. If only they had been willing to listen to him on the subject of anal massage. The taxi began to move as the jam on the motorway freed up. For my mother, who would never have dreamed of inserting items in her anus, no matter what kind of pain she was in, time was slipping away.
‘Could you give me one, please,’ I asked Dr Sharp. ‘I’d like to try.’
II
The corpse-viewing dilemma did not come whole. It crept up. The first whiff arrived with an email from my sister listing expenses incurred as a result of my mother’s death – money that she, my sister, had taken from my mother’s bank account in the hours immediately after the death, but before it was registered and the account consequently blocked. Mother had given my sister her bank card and PIN number, it seemed, for precisely this purpose. These items of expenditure I barely glanced at, knowing as I did that my sister would behave scrupulously when it came to money, and that anyway the very small amounts my mother was leaving were hardly of a kind to turn around the precarious financial circumstances my separation from my wife had left me in. But my eye did stop on the word ‘embalming’. Embalming: £98. ‘Mother would never have wanted to be embalmed,’ I immediately wrote in reply to my sister, ‘and if she had, she would definitely have included the service in the funeral package that she herself chose and paid for years ago.’
As soon as I had fired off this email to my sister, I felt rather foolish, for of course my sister would know all this far better than I did. At the same time, I felt a sort of concern for my mother, as if, now dead, she needed protecting from the things she would have considered a violation, not so much of her body, which she always insisted was a matter of no importance, but of her sense of propriety, and above all her strict belief in the absolute separation of flesh and soul, such that any money or effort spent on aesthetic appearance beyond the requirements of respectability or the merely practical needs of the body was a waste. Mother hated waste.
My sister, without taking offence, but rather as if I had simply queried, out of curiosity, some unexpected purchase, responded that since Mother had asked for cremation, the law required that two doctors certify the cause of death, and a third certify the certification, so to speak. Only then could the cremation date be booked. This took time. After which there was a waiting list for the cremation itself, such that at least two weeks would pass between decease and funeral. The nice lady at the undertaker’s, whom my sister hadn’t actually met but had spoken to on various occasions over the telephone, had suggested that since these days people liked to view the body (for ‘closure’, she had explained) in the week preceding the funeral, it might be an idea to have a relatively inexpensive temporary embalming performed in order to allow this to happen, in order to get the corpse, as it were, through to the funeral in a respectable state. Uncle Harry, my sister wrote, had already been along to see the results and pronounced them excellent; Mum looked, or at least so Uncle Harry had said, very much
her old self, in the pale-blue tailleur she used for special occasions with matching bonnet. ‘Not that I have any intention of going to see her myself,’ my sister went on. ‘I prefer to remember Mum as she was. But that’s just me. You’re welcome to, if you want.’ And she explained that the undertaker’s in question was the one directly opposite Hounslow railway station.
Again I responded to my sister’s email immediately, which is a bad habit I have, since my immediate response almost never coincides with my more settled opinion of a day or two, or even just a few hours, later. In this case, a few minutes. ‘I am sure you are right,’ I answered. There was a ‘certain appropriateness’, I joked, rather flippantly, in Mother’s going to her funeral in her Sunday best, obsessed as she always had been that one should be ‘properly spruced up for church’. I was glad, I dashed off – not foreseeing as yet the area of dilemma I was entering, and I think one of the reasons one responds so immediately to emails is that if you don’t, there is a good chance you’ll never respond at all, with all the messages the world throws at you these days; plus of course, having been pompous and abrasive in my previous email, I was now eager to reassure my sister, who after all in the absence of her two brothers was taking on herself all the responsibilities surrounding my mother’s death – I was glad, I wrote, that Uncle Harry had been cheered by his viewing of the body, rather than the opposite, since with his age and his cancer, the thought most present in his mind must have been that all too soon he would be in the same position as Mum, on his back in a box.
This was the gist of my immediate response. Reassuring and flippant. But only moments after sending it, from Berlin it must have been, I was remembering how uncannily precise and sure of herself my mother had been, when she had first spoken to me of her funeral arrangements. It was a memory that took me back some four years to a summer spent in her tiny house off Hounslow High Street. I was there, needless to say, because my wife and I now seemed unable or unwilling to go on holiday together, or indeed to spend time together in any way. I had invited my then lover to come on holiday with me to the UK but she had refused. If I wasn’t going to leave my wife, she said, the last thing she needed was to start building up happy memories that could have no future. She wouldn’t come. On the other hand, she hadn’t left me outright. Presumably, then, she was putting pressure on me. Presumably my wife too was putting pressure on me, or I was putting pressure on her. Or on both. In any event, we had a stand-off which amounted to the worst of all worlds and there I was, a man theoretically with two women but actually with none, staying at my mother’s house for the summer, ostensibly because this elderly Christian lady needed, or at least would be grateful for, my presence, being ill and having recently been operated on – mutilated might be a better description – but in reality because I had no idea what to do with myself, no idea what to do with my marriage, no idea what to do with my lover, no idea even whether I wanted to stay in my job in Edinburgh or make some major move abroad: disappear, as it were, and as I eventually did, from the family radar.
In any event, it was while I was at my mother’s house that summer in a state of maximum psychological precariousness, like a man about to take not one plunge but several, or perhaps none – and loathing myself into the bargain, yet at the same time not entirely unhappy, if only from the relief of being away from my wife; this without intending any criticism in her regard, the problem was mine, not hers – it was while I was there, towards the end of my stay, that my mother, who as I said had recently been operated on and was no longer her old self, in fact had clearly begun a phase of terminal decline, and you could see she wasn’t her old self by the way she so determinedly ‘acted’ her old self, performed her old Christian cheerfulness, calling ‘cooee’ up the stairs and baking apple pies and cherry cakes, but also her old Christian severity, frowning if I ever mentioned yoga or meditation, which were works of the devil, not to mention separation or divorce (her nice neighbour had been abandoned for a younger woman and this was ungodly cruelty on the husband’s part) – it was while I was at her house, possibly the evening before I was due to depart, that my mother first spoke to me of the funeral arrangements she had made.
‘I just want you to know, Thomas,’ she had said, ‘that I have made arrangements for my funeral so that you children will not have to pay.’
It was an act of generosity. She had got a distasteful practical duty out of the way to save others, we children, the trouble. I must be grateful. And I was grateful. I distinctly remember feeling, Great, that is one thing that won’t need to be done.
‘You will find all the papers in the first drawer under the bookshelf,’ she said.
But of course it was something more than an act of generosity, I reflected now, probably in the hotel in Berlin, on the Görlitzerstrasse as I recall, having dashed off that jocular and reassuring response to my sister over the question of the embalming. It was also a bid for control. She, my mother, would be the one to decide what happened to her body, what kind of funeral she would have. Not her children. ‘It will be very simple,’ she explained that evening from the big recliner she had recently bought, because by this time she found it uncomfortable to sit for long in ordinary armchairs, though the bind with the recliner was how difficult it could be to get out of, once you were in it, precisely because it tipped you back in a reclining position, so that when sometimes, on returning to the house without my key, I was obliged to ring the bell, I would see my mother through the frosted glass of the front door, which opened directly into the tiny sitting room, a blurred dark form rocking herself back and forth in an attempt to launch herself out of her comfortable recliner and onto her feet to answer the door. Sometimes it could take three or four minutes. Then when at last she opened up for me, it would be with a beam of generously performed cheerfulness that denied all difficulty and prohibited any mention of illness – she never complained about my forgetting my key – though her manner might well be transformed into a frown of puritan severity if it then became clear that I had been drinking, or if there was a smell of smoke on my untidy clothes.
‘Thomas,’ she would sigh.
And in general, looking back now, I am reminded that standing outside the frosted door of Mother’s house, watching Mother struggle to climb out of her recliner, or even in the years before that, simply waiting at the door for Mother to appear, blurred in the cheap glass as she moved towards me, often pulling a shawl about her shoulders, or fixing her hair with her hands, I always experienced, in those few seconds before meeting, an extremely strong and peculiarly mixed cocktail of emotion, which had to do simultaneously with guilt and tenderness and impatience and indecision. The truth is that when visiting my mother I never knew whether I really wanted to be visiting my mother or not. Visiting my mother was a moment of maximum confusion as to who I am. I both wanted and did not want to visit her, simultaneously.
The funeral would be simple, she repeated. No more than what was strictly required, and no fuss. She had paid for the coffin and for the cars to take everybody to church. It was only a few hundred yards. The funeral ceremony too, she said, had already been written; that is, she had written it, and chosen the hymns, and it would be extremely simple. Rather than flowers, people were to make an equivalent donation to charity. In this way her death would be of benefit to others, though not of course to the florists, who I suppose rely pretty heavily on funerals to make a living in these hard times. Quite likely she said all this while the BBC boomed out the news in background, since Mum had been losing her hearing for some years now and kept the volume turned way up, and perhaps as we were enjoying our pre-dinner sherry, which, along with a rare glass of white wine at lunch, was the only alcohol my mother ever allowed herself. Sherry with dry-roasted peanuts.
After the funeral, she said, she was to be cremated as Father had been and, as with Father, there must be no memorial. No urn. No rose tree. No plaque with words. The ashes were to be scattered, she said. Where, she did not mind. ‘That’s up to you,’ she
finished.
She looked at me softly, but also with the satisfaction of someone who has acted with admirable resolve and for the best. She knew what was right. ‘That can be your decision,’ she said. She leaned forward to take a sip of her sherry, and the BBC flashed in her glasses. Perhaps from the kitchen the cuckoo clock cuckooed. I heard a ‘you’ plural at the time. You children. But later, thinking back, it would come to me that she actually meant you, Thomas. You, Thomas, will decide where to scatter my ashes. In which case the sense was, as would ultimately emerge: And that, dear Thomas, will be your one and only decision with regard to me and my decease. For otherwise you have no part to play. You are excluded.
However, what struck me now, recalling, in Berlin I think, in the hotel on Görlitzerstrasse, this quietly compelling conversation in which my mother had explained her decisions regarding her earthly remains, was this: that on going to the undertaker’s to choose and purchase her funeral package and having explained, as a starting point, her preference for cremation, my mother would doubtless have been reminded by the kind lady my sister had spoken to, or by her predecessor if things had changed in the intervening years, some other kind lady or kind gentleman undertaker – and they are all kind when you are ordering and paying for expensive services years before they are required – that this preference for cremation would mean quite an interval between the moment of expiry and the funeral, and that since the prevailing custom was to view the body prior to the funeral, the day before, say, or even the same morning if possible, decorously laid out in polished wood (of much finer quality, it has to be said, than any of the mail-order furniture in my mother’s Hounslow sitting room), it would be only wise to include some basic temporary embalming in the package, at what was actually a very reasonable price.