In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  ‘Tom!’ Deborah cried. ‘At last!’

  It was the same posh and squeaky voice of old. It never changed. Though she did sound flustered.

  ‘Hi, Deborah.’

  ‘At last,’ she repeated.

  I explained I hadn’t seen her email for some hours because I was travelling. I didn’t have a smartphone. Then in the silence that she should have been speaking into, nothing. I heard some sighing. She had begun to cry.

  ‘Deborah?’ I said, gluing the phone to my ears as the train for Hounslow via Richmond rattled along the platform. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Are you in England? This is an English number, isn’t it? How wonderful. Are you in London?’

  ‘It is,’ I said, boarding the train behind a man with a stick, ‘and I am, but I’m tied up right now. I have to see my mother.’

  I had to go to the bathroom again too, but the fact that I wouldn’t have to disturb anyone to do so, just walk along the South West Trains carriage to where my eye had already located the illuminated sign, made this infinitely less painful than it had seemed on the plane. Hence it could wait. My bladder would soon be back to normal, I decided. Today was a glitch. A little flare-up after the massage. And I didn’t tell Deborah my mother was at death’s door because it seemed to me she had enough on her plate. Who had used that expression already today? Charlie had attacked David with a chair, Deborah’s email had said. David had been taken to hospital. She wondered if I would talk to Charlie, her youngest son. ‘You’re the only person I can imagine knowing what to say to him,’ she had written. ‘Like you did before, remember?’

  I didn’t.

  ‘Perhaps you could come over later,’ she said. ‘Could you?’ No doubt my mother went to bed fairly early, she thought. It was only half an hour from Hounslow to Kingston. And such a stroke of luck I was in London.

  This was difficult. Deborah’s voice had an edge of hysteria. Apparently she was just back from hospital, where David was under observation. I had no idea what shape I would find my mother in or what exactly was expected of me. Until just a few moments ago I had been convinced I was in a race against time to make it to her deathbed. But perhaps not.

  ‘What on earth happened, Deborah?’ I asked. I started walking along the carriage to the bathroom. ‘Why would Charlie do that?’

  But she said, No, Tom, she really couldn’t even begin to talk about it on the phone. ‘Rosie is listening,’ she whispered sharply. Every word she spoke reminded me how posh Deborah was. In the train there were bags to be stepped over. She just couldn’t, she said. And she burst into tears again. Rosie was the daughter. ‘All I’ll say is it’s a fucking disaster. I’m going fucking crazy.’ Now her voice was suddenly loud and harsh. Rosie must surely have heard, I thought, if she really was there. And I was taken aback because Deborah never swore. Deborah was a churchgoer, a high-churchgoer, one of those people who always warn you not to swear when you have a meal together with their kids. She got quite indignant when people swore. My mother was low-church, of course. Proudly low. And I swear far too much.

  I had buzzed myself into the South West Trains bathroom now and was pressing the phone against my shoulder to free my right hand to unzip. I can’t unzip with my left alone. Still, the last thing I needed was for the phone to fall into the loo. More calmly, Deborah said, ‘The fact is poor Charlie is likely to be charged with assault and battery. The police have told him to come to the station tomorrow morning. And he’s saying he doesn’t care and if his dad doesn’t shape up, he’ll do it again. He’ll kill him. Please come and talk to him, Tom. He’ll listen to you. I know he will. I’m going mad.’

  As we spoke, the phone beeped to warn me someone else was trying to call. The pee was slow in coming, the hi-tech South West Trains bathroom most impressive.

  ‘David’s going to be okay, though?’ I asked cautiously. ‘Isn’t he? Is he badly hurt?’

  The truth is, I would far rather have seen David than his son, Charlie. Or Deborah, for that matter. I had already been planning to call David at some point to meet for beers and to crow to him about Elsa. It was something I had been looking forward to. Now it seemed that wouldn’t happen.

  ‘Can I call him in hospital?’ I asked.

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ Deborah said rather drily; but no, he couldn’t answer calls. He was under sedation.

  ‘God! I’ll see what I can do and call later,’ I said, wondering why designers preferred expensive, push-button electric sliding doors to simple handles and latch locks. Surely it only increased the possibility of something going wrong.

  Deborah told me she was counting on me. It sounded unpleasantly demanding, but there was no time to think about this because now the phone rang again and it was my sister. I was still staring into the bowl.

  ‘Hi, Bro!’ she cried, ‘how you doing?’

  She was so breezy! As if I’d come home for Christmas. I was taken aback. The fact is my sister and I hadn’t spoken to each other for at least six months, perhaps a year. In our family my brother and I spoke to, or at least emailed, each other pretty regularly, but not my sister. Or rather, my sister always spoke to the parents, but not to us. Only my mother’s illness had forced this recent exchange of emails.

  ‘Hi, Sis.’

  ‘Sorry, listen,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid things are a bit complicated, Bro.’ Her voice seemed jokily conspiratorial. She was the only person I knew who called a brother ‘Bro’. ‘Where are you, by the way?’

  ‘On the train to Hounslow.’

  ‘Ah. You see, she’s not in Hounslow. As of two days ago. That’s why I was trying to get in touch. I’d forgotten you wouldn’t know.’

  My sister now began a long explanation of my mother’s recent movements, while I zipped up and pushed the button to move out of the bathroom, well aware that I hadn’t peed all there was to pee and hence would very soon have to go again. ‘After her fall on the stairs, you see, they couldn’t work out whether the deterioration was due to the impact on her back or an acceleration of the cancer. I mean, these awful pains she’s getting. Obviously, if they are due specifically to the fall, then the situation might not be terminal. More orthopaedic.’

  ‘But where is she now? If I’m going to get to her this evening …’

  ‘Claygate.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘It’s to the south,’ she said. ‘Check on your phone.’

  When I explained once again that I didn’t have a smartphone, she called out, ‘How does Tommy get here from a train between Putney and Richmond? He’ll check,’ she said. Meaning her husband presumably. ‘He’s a whizz at these things.’

  ‘You’re there, then?’ I said. ‘Now.’

  ‘With Mum? Yes. Or rather, not exactly. We’ve just come outside for a few minutes’ break. It’s heavy going. But we have to leave soon.’

  ‘And how is she?’

  ‘All over the place, to be honest.’

  Again I was surprised by my sister’s tone of voice, which didn’t seem melodramatic or anguished at all. Almost offhand. What did she mean: all over the place? Again it occurred to me I might have completely misjudged her email. After all, it had popped up exactly as I was feeling the first effects of the fatal massage. I had only read it once. One thing colours another.

  ‘Yesterday she managed a few steps with the Zimmer frame. They are eager to get her up on her feet again. You know how they are. But today she looks like it’s all over, bar the counting.’ She paused and began more seriously, ‘What you have to do, though, Tom, when you see the doctors tomorrow morning—’

  Now her husband interrupted. I should get off at Richmond, he was saying, assuming I hadn’t already passed Richmond, and take a taxi or a bus, depending on my finances. If a bus, it was the 65 to Esher. ‘Get off at St Leonard’s Road,’ my sister said. ‘You see, she was in the hospice in Hounslow, where she’d always meant to go, after being with us, I mean, but then they sent her to the hospital for a scan, to see if there was spinal damage. That
meant a trip to the West Middlesex. Wednesday. The scan took hours and, when it was over, the bed in Hounslow had gone because of some emergency that had come up. I thought it was pretty disgraceful, to be honest. They’d just bundled her stuff into her bag. Anyway, at that point, thank God, they found her the place in Claygate, otherwise she’d have been in a regular hospital ward with a dozen others. They even threatened to send her back to us, if you please.’

  ‘If you please’ was another expression my mother always used, but which I don’t think I or my brother ever did. Like ‘whizz’, for that matter. In fact, as this conversation with my sister unfolded – the first conversation, as I said, that we had had for at least six months, perhaps a year – I was acutely aware that not only had our family long been split into the religious side and the non-religious side, but we even spoke different languages. Or we spoke the same language in different ways, if you please.

  ‘Anyway, what you’ve got to do,’ she was saying, ‘when you see the doctor tomorrow morning …’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘They come round around eight. I think it’s a woman. Is demand that they …’

  The train was arriving in Richmond. I had to move, I said.

  ‘Okay. Text me when you get on the bus and we’ll meet you at the stop and say hello, before we drive home. St Leonard’s Road. See you soon, Bro.’

  My sister, I should have said, lives in Swanage and has a handicapped daughter to return to. Severely handicapped. In her thirties now.

  Getting off the train, I wondered if I should phone Deborah again and tell her it was definitely off, I couldn’t possibly come. Then I thought I would wait at least until I had seen what the situation at the hospice was. David, far more than Deborah, had been an important part of my life and though I had rather lost contact in the last couple of years with moving abroad, I was curious to know what was going on between them. Extremely curious. In particular, why on earth would their charming son Charlie have attacked his father with a chair? What had David done? Charlie, unlike his brother Robin, had always been a good boy. As I too, unlike my brother, had always been a good boy.

  At the same time, looking around in the foyer of Richmond Station for some information as to where I might catch the 65 to Esher via Claygate, I was struck by the thought of the ordeal my poor mother was going through and the relaxed, sometimes flippant tone of my sister’s voice. Not that I meant any criticism of my sister. Who, after all, had been on hand to look after my mother when she had finally sent out her plea for help, days after the famous fall, if not my sister? And looking after my mother in those days meant carrying her to the bathroom, or the toilet as my sister still said, or simply letting her do it in bed. And who could have carried a big-boned woman like my mother to the bathroom, the toilet, the loo, if not my sister’s huge-boned husband? Who would have done the unpleasant cleaning, if not, again, my generous sister, herself in her sixties and seriously worn out by thirty years of looking after a disastrously handicapped child.

  So I wasn’t criticising my sister’s tone of voice at all. I was just surprised by the thought that this is what life is actually like. Your mother is going through every kind of hell, in excruciating pain, not knowing what bed she will die in, your sister sounds relaxed and jokey, and you are thinking of your old friend Dave and the precariously double life he always led. David would have done anything not to hurt Deborah. He had told me that a million times. He admired Deborah. In a way he adored Deborah, he truly did; certainly he prized the whole family thing that he and Deborah had put together: their lovely children, their fantastic home – homes, rather – their circle of friends, and so on. But he had never really felt, Dave had told me on one memorable occasion, that Deborah was his woman.

  Once again I wasn’t thinking of my mother. But I had found the 65 bus stop. So I should be with her soon enough. There would be time enough for Mother, I thought. I didn’t want to take a taxi, because I couldn’t see the point of spending ten times as much to save: what? Just five or ten or fifteen minutes. This was a thriftiness, a habit, I had learned in childhood, no doubt from my mother who, as we have seen, was determined now to die in the thriftiest possible way. That was one of the reasons why she was going through this miserable ordeal, shifted back and forth from hospital to hospice.

  Thrift or not, though, the truth is I hate that feeling of being trapped in a taxi having to watch the meter creep up at every traffic light. No, let’s be more specific. Whenever I’m in a taxi I feel guilty: guilty of throwing money away, guilty of treating myself like a king when I should be with ordinary people on the bus. And who had instilled this guilt in me, if not the woman determined to die cheaply in order to pass on the money to me, so that I could feel guilty whenever I spent it on a cab? This is the money your mother is earning for you now, I thought, if you want to see it that way, dying so cheaply as she is, and you spend it on a cab. But because I’m no sooner feeling this taxi guilt than I realise that it is stupid, it is nothing more than a hangover from childhood conditioning of an emphatically low-church variety, an instinctive resistance kicks in and I start to mock myself for feeling guilty and to wish I was taking taxis all day long, with classy women and fat cigars and bottles of champagne on the back seat. I wish I was spending lavishly, scandalously, above all carelessly, unwisely, living it up in every possible way, and at the same time I loathe the sight of the meter creeping up to form the scandalous figure I am actually going to have to shell out when the journey ends. I feel like a sheep gripped tight for the fleecing. And since riding in a taxi inevitably provokes this conflicted state of mind in me, I have started to hate taxis most of all because of what they tell me about myself. Even when travelling on expenses I hate taxis. The emotions click in even when I’m not paying. Perhaps that partly explains my anxiety in the long taxi ride to Schiphol.

  Still, at least this taxi decision had started me thinking of my mother again. My mother’s absolutely central role in everything I am. No doubt my father’s too, truth be told. Or the combination, Mum and Dad. They made me who I am. Suddenly, unhappily, I was now electrically aware there would be an awful lot of thinking coming my way in the next few days. Assuming Mother died. But even if she didn’t. Perhaps especially if she didn’t. An awful lot of very difficult thinking and very difficult emotion, to the point that I felt exhausted just thinking of the thinking I would soon have to be doing. Not to mention the emotions I would be feeling. Presumably. How would they impact on my bladder? Impact actually seemed an appropriate verb in this particular circumstance. If only Elsa were here, I thought. Elsa calms me down. On the other hand, if anyone’s life had run parallel to mine over these last two decades, or at least until my separation, it was David’s, and David came from a completely different background from my own and had been conditioned in completely different ways. So where was the determinism of one’s parents’ genes and cultural conditioning? And if any phrase has ever sunk into my skull over the years, with the purpose and urgency of a gunshot announcing a long-delayed revolution, it was when David said that evening, over beers no doubt, since David never said anything personal without a beer in his fist, ‘Despite the family, Tom,’ he said, ‘despite admiring Debbie so much, despite not wanting to hurt her, and so on, ever, I just feel really she is not my woman. Not the woman for me. Never has been, never was.’ And then he added with a sigh, as if admitting a major defeat, ‘I suppose it must be a thing of the flesh.’