In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  ‘Tell me why you’ve come here,’ this shabby elderly lady asked, lighting a menthol cigarette. She spoke matter-of-factly, quietly. I was still blubbering. I would never have imagined I could break down so completely. It wasn’t me. ‘Que haya un amor,’ I eventually got out. In Spain the analysts speak Spanish. ‘That a love should be.’ Those were the words. I was shaking my head rhythmically from side to side, ‘like a man possessed’, my mother would have said, a man who has surrendered all his dignity. My mother would never have given my father her consent to see a shrink. Low-church folks don’t do analysis. There was the expense, aside from anything else. ‘That a love should be,’ I repeated. Did my brother know something about my father that my mother didn’t? The Reverend Sanders had gone to a shrink without telling her. Was that possible? He had stopped because she found out, perhaps?

  ‘And what exactly do you mean by that,’ the shrink pressed, ‘Que haya un amor?’

  In her mouth the words sounded arcane, some atrophied formula, a mantra. She was a small, stout elderly woman in a sack of a dress and bedroom slippers, smoking.

  I took a deep breath. Perhaps I was snivelling. The shrink proffered a box of tissues. Not a cigarette, though. Shrinks are used to weepers, I suppose. They have their tissues ready. I wiped my eyes. I took a few moments over it, trying to pull myself together. ‘It means,’ I said, ‘that after all these years’ – I sighed, what was I saying? – ‘after all these miserable years, just one time in my life, there should be love.’

  Never once, when phoning for the appointment, when catching the tram to go to the shrink’s studio, had I imagined saying anything remotely like this. It was not me. To speak of love. Perhaps only the Spanish made it possible. I would never have gone to a shrink in Edinburgh.

  The phone had finally begun to ring in Madrid. After hurrying a few steps in pursuit of the dispersing passengers, I had stopped, on the damp pavement of St Leonard’s Road, very conscious that this was ridiculous. I would never catch up with them. I was losing my grip. I had set out on this journey at the drop of a hat. A taxi, a flight, two train journeys and now another taxi. I who never take taxis. Now here I was, in Claygate, something after nine in the evening, presumably within a few hundred yards of where my mother lay dying, and I couldn’t find her. What’s more, until I spoke to my sister, I had no way of finding her. No one else would know where she was. And instead of calling my sister again, I was calling Elsa. In another country. Another life. The phone was ringing now. Glued to my ear. In Madrid. That a love should be. That is the moment I go back to when panic grabs me, when I begin to think I have screwed up big time, I should never have left home, I should be back in our handsome semi-detached Edinburgh property, protected by the winter branches and the evergreen shrubs and the carefully drawn curtains. Que haya un amor. My eyes met the shrink’s and she understood. It came as a shock. I had said words I never meant to say, in Spanish to boot, and a woman I had never met before understood those words. She understood, and I knew she understood. She knew I knew. A foreign woman. And something shifted. Something felt different. Change was possible. Whenever I think I have made the wrong decisions, I go back to that watershed, that tear-shed, in the shrink’s drab office, the moment when our eyes first met and I understood I had an ally. That a love should be. Our modern malaise, Mother said. In Madrid the phone rang four times before the call was rejected.

  Nothing unusual in that. Elsa is a busy woman. She was with someone, no doubt. In a restaurant perhaps. It wasn’t a convenient moment. I had to find out where the hospice was. Actually it was better this way. I would have wasted precious time chatting to Elsa. About what? Nothing. Maybe the thing to do really was to knock on one of these doors, assuming people would open to a stranger on a drizzly evening. You’re at home on a drizzly evening, stockinged feet cosily snuggled on the sofa with TV or iPad, or getting dinner for the children, do you really want to open the door to a stranger with a battered bag? Do you really want to hear him ask where people go to die in your part of town?

  ‘Excuse me!’

  Someone was passing me from behind. I turned to take advantage. It was an Indian woman with a raincoat over a sari.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  She was hurrying through the drizzle.

  ‘Yes?’

  She stopped. Was it takeaway pizza she was carrying?

  ‘Could you …’

  My phone was ringing again.

  ‘Yes?’

  The Indian woman waited, cocking her head to one side in the rain.

  I flustered with the phone. It must be my sister.

  ‘I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘This call will solve it.’

  ‘Thomas?’

  It was Elsa.

  ‘I didn’t want you to pay,’ she said. ‘I still have free minutes on this deal.’

  Having desperately wanted to speak to Elsa a moment ago, I now felt frustrated. I couldn’t respond as I should have. The Indian woman was already a few paces away. I needed to speak to my sister.

  ‘Elsa.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  I hesitated, watching the Indian woman walking away in the rain. ‘I just wanted to tell you I loved you.’

  ‘Again?’ she laughed. ‘How’s your mother?’

  ‘It’s crazy,’ I said and explained I hadn’t seen her yet. I didn’t know where she was. My sister had gone incommunicado at the crucial moment, leaving me stranded in the English drizzle. I was reduced to asking people in the street.

  Even as I spoke, a beep told me someone else was trying to phone. I should put down at once and call my sister. But having sounded unconvincing when I said I love you, disappointed even when I heard Elsa’s voice, I didn’t want to hang up now. The last thing I needed was to feel things weren’t well with Elsa.

  ‘What’s the name of the street you’re in?’ Elsa asked. ‘I’ll google it.’

  ‘St Leonard’s Road. I spelled it for her. Her English wasn’t perfect. ‘In Claygate. That’s clay as in earth, and gate as in departure gate.’

  Ominous.

  ‘And they’re called hospices?’ she asked.

  ‘With a “c”. Like ho-spice. Not hoss piss.’

  Elsa chuckled. ‘Okay. I have it. Wait me. Okay. There are two.’

  ‘Damn. Which is nearest?’

  ‘St Leonard’s Road is long.’ She went back to Spanish. ‘It goes right down the screen. Give me the name of a cross-street?’

  I began to trot through the drizzle, bag in one hand, phone in the other. The beep came a second time.

  ‘Hang on. Nearly there.’

  ‘I can wait.’

  ‘Stoughton Street.

  Elsa cursed the English spelling.

  ‘Like fought or brought or bought. Not caught or short or wart.’

  ‘Okay, okay! So, the nearest is on … There’s no name. I’ll have to zoom. Okay. Grange Street. It’s quite close. Which direction have you just moved, to get to Stoughton Street?’

  I thought of a line from Richmond to Esher. ‘South. From north to south.’

  ‘Okay … so, continue in the same direction. It’s the second on the left. Go a bit of the way down that road, Grange Road, not sure how far. Two hundred metres. Three. It looks like the ho-spice is on the right.’

  ‘You’re fantastic. I love you.’

  ‘Go to your mother, Tommy.’

  Elsa closed the call.

  Suddenly feeling immensely cheerful, I set off with more purpose. At last I knew where I was going. I had a wonderful woman on my side, if not quite at my side. My hair was damp now, my shoulders too. Was there any point in phoning my sister? Probably yes. Because there were two hospices. I stopped to make the call, but my sister’s phone was busy.

  Grange Road was a little further than I expected and the rain had begun to fall more steadily. My bag felt heavier and was banging against my left leg. I was carrying it on the left to keep my right hand free for the phone. It is an extraordinary thing that I need
my right hand to use the phone. The actions involved are so few and so simple, pushing a couple of buttons, but I just can’t do them with my left. Or not easily. But now I shifted the bag to my right hand, which was also rather better than the left at stopping the bag from banging against my leg. The fact is I don’t use trolley bags. I have tried but I can’t get on with them. It’s not a question of my resisting change and innovation. I think I was one of the first to buy a small trolley bag, when they came in big time in the 1980s. The kind you can carry on as in-flight luggage. Immediately I knew it was not for me. I disliked the rumble of the wheels on the pavement. I felt it must bother people in quiet streets, or crossing the courtyard of my apartment block to catch an early-morning flight. I hate to bother people. In this I’m like my mother. And I disliked the position of the body, one arm pulled back as one walks. It felt unnatural. I intensely disliked the way the wheels bounced from side to side on uneven paving, if one tried to hurry. I am always hurrying. Or if they hit a bump or caught some litter between the wheels. I hated the fussy business, whenever you face a flight of stairs, up or down, of having to telescope the handle down into its frame, so that you can then pick it up from another handle attached to the bag itself. I know this hardly takes two seconds, but that’s time enough to have the people behind you curse and push as they hurry to board a departing train. I understand their impatience. I don’t want to be in their way. Mother again. So I went back to my old Samsonite. Or rather, I tried to buy a new piece of non-trolley hand luggage and found it impossible. Samsonite didn’t make them any more. ‘No one wants them, sir.’ Now you had to buy a trolley bag. As later you would have to have an iPhone. Production of all hand-carried luggage had ceased the world over. That can’t be true, but it felt that way. In any event, I am now stuck with something twenty years old and, to tell the truth, disintegrating. Or on the verge. Something totally out of line with my social status. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome Emeritus Professor Thomas Sanders, who has come to talk to us on the subject of syntactical shifts in global English and always uses a twenty-year-old bag with a sticky zip and a piece of stiff wire that protrudes from one of the bottom corners.

  Turning the corner of Grange Road, I broke into a run, extending my right arm a little to keep the wet bag from banging against my trousers. It had better not disintegrate now, I thought. With the famous anal wand inside. Then the phone rang again. This must surely be my sister. But I was almost there. Did I really want to stop in the rain, shift my bag from right to left and fuss with the phone, when it was only a matter of a minute or two? I knew from long experience that it is impossible to extract a phone from a right-hand pocket with your left hand. What if it was Deborah?

  I kept running and realised that this purposeful movement and my new cheerfulness had completely sorted out the pain in my belly. Could such a poor urinary flow – a blockage almost, it had seemed – really be entirely and merely psychosomatic? I very much hoped so. Then this whole business of right and left hands and urinary flow reminded me, running down Grange Road, of the endless debate I’d had with my mother that summer four years ago in her tiny house about the relationship, so called, between mind and body, or as my mother chose to frame it, between body and soul. One says ‘mind and body’, but then ‘body and soul’, inverting the position of body in the two expressions. Heaven knows why.

  These thoughts flashed through my mind as I trotted bag in hand down another breezy, well-to-do south-west London street, slightly downhill now, always in the rain. The English rain has always seemed to me to have a different quality from the rain in other countries, a special freshness and rawness. I was almost enjoying myself. Or my body was. The simple fact of the different functions of our two hands, I had said to my mother that summer over our long games of Scrabble, our shepherd’s pies and apple crumbles, all the automatisms and immediacies behind their manipulations – tying shoelaces, for example, playing the piano, eating with chopsticks – indicated very clearly that mind and body were entirely integrated. We were our hands. Not to mention our facial expressions across the Scrabble board, the communication of our eyes when one of us hit a triple-word score or another managed to play a Q or a Z. We were our eyes, our smiles. This simply was us, hands face feet, doing whatever we were doing. In the end, mind and body, I said to my mother, were just words referring to different areas of the same single entity, me. No, not even different areas – different aspects, apprehensions. The mind was in the hand. The hand was in the mind. I felt that more and more, I told my mother that summer. Probably it was the first time I had spoken to her so fervently since adolescence. It was the revelation my chronic pains had brought me to. We were our bodies, and our bodies were our minds. Pain is identity.

  But my mother couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see this at all. What did left and right hands have to do with it, she protested? She could lose either or both and still be herself, Martha Sanders. Couldn’t she? Would she have a different name if she lost her hands? No, she would not. She grew older, she said, and fell ill, but she was still herself, her Christian, church-going self. She wasn’t her body, she wasn’t her cancer. She was a soul, faceless and handless. She was going to meet her Maker. So I suppose what Mother meant when she told me that psychoanalysis was part of a modern malaise was that I mustn’t go looking for excuses for the soul I irrevocably was, or asking other people to take control of my life and find justifications for decisions that were my responsibility and mine alone, like having married my wife, for better or worse, till death us do part; and when my mother talked so calmly of the disposal of her earthly remains, I think the very evening before my return to my decaying marriage, it was partly to show her confidence that these were not her essential self that she was disposing of, but the merest fleshly receptacle, a skin she could shed when the time came, with barely a change of mood. Here is my right hand, here is my left. I surrender them to you. And my nose, and my mouth. Shall we bury them or cremate them? Even my eyes. Out, vile jelly. All this when it was abundantly clear to anyone who knew my mother that she was already no longer her old self and had not been so for some long time. She was performing her old self, and doing it against the grain of a body pleading for rest, pleading to be spared the shepherd’s pies and apple crumbles, the gardening and the cleaning and the cuckoo clock that had to be wound up twice a day, pleading repose, pleading the end. And if anyone thinks that a man running in the rain with a moderately heavy bag, looking out for the sign that would indicate a hospice rather than another well-appointed semi-detached house, could not think all this over a distance of – what? – four hundred yards, well, they have another think coming. Because I thought all that and more. Above all I thought how unwise, how cruel, how criminally stupid even, I had been that summer to suggest, repeatedly, that the mind could not exist separately from the body, when my mother must already have understood that sooner or later, sooner rather than later, this cancer would be her undoing. She wasn’t long for this world. Her body would be a corpse. I also thought that I had only insisted on this idea, despite its cruelty or, rather, oblivious of its cruelty, because, with a view finally to warning my mother of the imminent break-up with my wife – or was it that I needed her consent? – I was actually trying to suggest to her that there was no point in my mind’s, my reason’s, my will’s insisting on my staying with my wife, insisting on remaining loyal to old promises and principles, when my body was increasingly telling me in every possible way that it was not happy with the arrangement. It did not want to be married to my wife. Worse than that, my body was telling me it would wilt and die if I stayed with my wife a moment longer. It would wilt and die. You have no choice but divorce or death, my body was saying, or murder perhaps, and I was trying to let my mother know this, so that she would consent to what I had begun to feel at some point I would have to do: leave home. Something she would see as a terrible sin. Que haya un amor, I told the shrink. But perhaps all this had merely been suggested by my friend David’s celebrated remark
that Deborah was not and never could be, despite twenty and more years of cohabitation, his woman. That was why he hadn’t actually married her. The politics and ideology were just an alibi. She never had been, and never would be, the woman for him. Even if he had spent his life with her. Why? Perhaps this whole new line of thought I had been developing, mind and body, etc., this excuse, as my mother would no doubt have seen it, for my leaving my wife – that my body would wilt, etc., etc., or at least require anal massage, and so on and so forth, if I didn’t leave – had merely been suggested to me by David, by my old friend, the way my bad behaviour in adolescence was supposedly the result of the merest suggestion from my wicked, atheist brother. Thomas Sanders had no self at all, just a shoddy vocation for mimicry. And Mother would no more have consented to the break-up of a marriage than she would have to my father seeing a shrink.