In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  But whatever the case, I thought, slowing to a stop on Grange Road, out of breath now, my body simply refusing to push itself any harder, and to hell with worrying about my jacket getting wet, whatever the truth of the matter, I absolutely mustn’t allow these corrosive thoughts to get in the way of a serene last exchange with my poor mother, a proper closure to our long story. The idea of telling Mother anything new and important, like my having left my wife two years ago, like having recently fallen in love with a woman thirty years my junior, was nonsense. It would kill her. All we could do now was share some quiet time together.

  Not only did I think all this, resuming my rapid walk down Grange Road, remarking a cat hiding from the rain under a dripping SUV and a street lamp straining to light up properly, straining to pass from red to yellow, as if urgently striving to do something that ought to be possible but for some reason had ceased to be so – not only did I think all this, but I also gave some attention to the phone in my right-hand jacket pocket; because once again it had started to ring. I had put the ringtone on loud, since otherwise I never hear it when I’m out on the street. I didn’t want to miss an important call. I had thought about this ringing phone as I ran and even after I stopped running, and decided not to respond, because I would surely be at the hospice any second now, and I simultaneously thought that I would very much regret not answering it, if this turned out not to be the case, or if the hospice turned out to be the wrong hospice. Hadn’t enough things gone wrong this afternoon not to risk another? I had just changed my mind and decided I would after all answer the phone when it stopped ringing, and again I was just preparing for the inevitable onslaught of self-criticism for having failed to answer it when the prosaic sign, ‘Claygate Hospice: No Parking’, appeared on my right, exactly as dear Elsa had said it would, and at once I felt justified. I had got everything absolutely right. I had a splendid girlfriend. I felt immensely pleased with myself.

  I hurried to a glass door giving onto a soberly lit reception area and, finding it locked, rang at once. There was no immediate reply and no shelter from the rain, either. I pulled the phone from my pocket and found I had been called by no fewer than four people. It seemed impossible. While covering a few hundred yards and thinking a few scattered thoughts, four people had called me. My sister. My daughter. Deborah. My wife. Not the twins, though. Imagine if I had answered my wife, without knowing whom I was about to speak to! A buzzer unlocked the door and once again I congratulated myself that I had got everything right. As I stepped in, a woman in nurse’s uniform put her head round a corner. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have a receptionist at this time of evening,’ she said, ‘but you should sign the book. Who are you here for?’

  ‘Mrs Sanders,’ I said.

  ‘Sign in,’ she told me, pointing to a book that was open on the reception desk, ‘while I go and see where she is. Sanders, right? Not Saunders? There have been a lot of admissions this week. I’m afraid I don’t know all the names yet.’

  ‘Sanders.’

  It was as I was signing in, my head bowed over the visitors’ book, wondering if I really needed to write my complicated Spanish address in full, that my sister appeared.

  ‘Tommy Bro,’ she cried. ‘You made it!’ Then she said, ‘Mum’s been vomiting blood.’

  At least I had come to the right hospice.

  VI

  Towards 3 a.m. that night, or the following morning rather, finding myself quite unable to sleep, quite unable to take advantage of the rather narrow bed I was in, I decided – but perhaps it was more like 5 a.m. – to recall so far as was possible all the occasions I had been to the bathroom to pee that day and how much had been peed on each visit, and likewise all the times and places I had taken on fluid and how much exactly had been drunk. Partly it was anxious curiosity, to see if there was anything really the matter with me – the way when I still used a car regularly I would always check miles against petrol consumption to see if there were anomalies. And partly, I suppose, it was a way of counting sheep, though no doubt the whole point of counting sheep is that one isn’t at all curious how many sheep there are. Or anxious. One just counts, and counts sheep because sheep have nothing to do with your life. You are not a shepherd. Which is probably why I have never been able to count sheep. My mind only engages where there is curiosity or anxiety, and in my case there is rarely one without the other.

  Never mind. It was something to focus on. Peeing. So, I began: one pee on waking shortly after six and before going through Dr Sharp’s breathing relaxation exercises. That had been in the hotel in Amersfoort, whose huge four-star bathroom mirror offered me a chance to see myself in polished profile pretty much from head to toe as I performed. There is no doubt that mirrors heighten self-consciousness, and equally there is very little doubt that self-consciousness inhibits urinary flow. It would be as well not to put mirrors near lavatories – there should be some kind of building regulation – and where there are such mirrors, it would be as well for the pee-er – I nearly wrote peer – not to look at them. Certainly I did everything I could not to look at my ageing body peeing in the Amersfoort hotel bathroom, for fear this would impede my flow. Yet twenty-one hours later in the Claygate Hospice guest room, thinking back to this first pee of the day in Holland, perhaps more to block out the unhappy events of the evening than anything else, I do in fact see myself in the bathroom mirror – I see my body in profile, peeing, waiting to pee – and I do recall thinking that this body of mine is always thicker in reality, or at least in mirrors, than the slimmer image of a younger Thomas that clings on inside my head. Inside my head I am always other than what I am in mirrors. Above all slimmer, though you could hardly call me fat, I don’t think, even going on the mirror image. But enough vanity. And even if, thinking back on that pee, I don’t see my face in the mirror, don’t remember meeting my eyes there, I nevertheless recall that disturbing awareness of the nearness of my mirrored presence as I peed, much the way one is aware of another person’s presence in the room; even when you are not watching them, you assume they must be watching you. I was aware of being threatened by the imminence of self-awareness. It was not a great pee.

  I thought nothing of it. When is the first pee of the day ever a great pee? Unlike cigarettes, where the first is the best. One needs to move about a bit before peeing well, and I stopped smoking years ago. Or I need to move about. I made myself some tea, using the kettle available in the hotel room – fortunately there was camomile – and settled down to practise my relaxation exercises.

  So, one pee, one tea. Given that this was a hotel teacup rather than one of the big mugs I use at home, I would say the volumes in and out were pretty well matched at this point.

  Then another two cups of tea at breakfast, which I took early to avoid the crowd, bringing my laptop with me so I could read the papers while eating. It was the usual hotel fare, and of course the usual newspaper fare, though there was one interesting story about an old murder brought back to life, as it were, by DNA profiling. That is the kind of thing I like to read about these days, the past somehow changed and made possible thanks to changes in the present. Then the Portuguese paediatrician arrived, asked if he could share my table (we had met briefly the evening before) and began to explain, over scrambled eggs and ham, a choice I found surprising for a Portuguese, that anal massage had saved his life. He had been in utter despair, this friendly Latin doctor said, folding his toast over his scrambled eggs, when he had heard about Dr Sharp’s clinic, dropped everything and caught the plane. Maybe I would try it myself sometime, I laughed. In the hospice, it occurred to me that if I hadn’t heard the Portuguese doctor’s confession over breakfast, the entire day would have gone quite differently.

  After which, on returning to my room there was now a second pee with bowel movement. I am never sure about peeing volumes with bowel movements. I suspect they are somewhat less than the normal peeing volume. Who knows? Certainly I looked away from the mirror. Nevertheless, once again I find a ready memory of mys
elf mirrored on the pot. At this point, then, I would say the intake with all that tea at breakfast was significantly up on the output, something rectified during the morning by a further pee, this time in the bathroom at the back of the conference room, thankfully mirrorless.

  Water intake at lunch, of course. But only one glass. All normal so far, then, until the disastrous post-lunch massage, thanks to the Portuguese, after which the deluge, or rather, the over-frequent dribbles – a deluge would have been a delight – all afternoon, time and again, an endless need to go, and nothing to go with. Immediately before my talk I had gone to the conference-hall bathroom and failed to pee anything at all. How to count an experience like that? Perhaps it’s appropriate; the word ‘bathroom’ was obviously preferred for its removal of the idea of urination, its suggestion of perfumed ablution rather than malodorous excretion. Not peeing in the bathroom, I was right in line with this vocation for euphemism and things virtual rather than real. Except I felt I needed to go.

  Next came the pee snatched in the reception bathroom before fleeing for the airport, gazing at the condom-dispenser with its Banana Boy and Cucumber Kid advertisements; then another immediately on board the plane, this time reading the warning that if you smoke you will be arrested and charged on arrival at your destination. Then another immediately on disembarking at Gatwick. And yet another on South West Trains with their impressive space for wheelchair users, and here again there was an inhibiting mirror, this time to my left. I can imagine a major research study where urinary flow is measured in bathrooms with mirrors and in bathrooms without. I have no doubt this would be a valuable contribution.

  Such was the state of play, then – six pees in fewer than seven hours and with zero liquid taken on, which speaks volumes for the lack of volume, I suppose – when my sister came to greet me in the reception area of Claygate Hospice and said, ‘Mum’s been vomiting blood’, and I said, ‘I’ll just grab a pee, then I’m with you. I don’t want to go in to see her and then have to go right out again. She might think I was upset.’

  ‘No hurry,’ my sister said. ‘You can’t go in now anyway. They’re cleaning her up and then they’ll be getting her ready for the night. We can take a rain check for at least half an hour.’

  I was astonished, honestly, to hear my very English sister use the expression ‘rain check’. Had the nurse said it to her and she was just repeating it for me? That would be understandable. But if so, where was the nurse from? Quite recently at a conference in Frankfurt I had listed ‘rain check’ as one of the idioms that still distinguished American English from English English. And no one is more English than my sister. I felt let down. I had let the Frankfurters down.

  ‘We don’t want to be stuck waiting here,’ my sister’s husband cut in. ‘It’s too depressing.’

  This imposing, expansive, determinedly friendly man, my brother-in-law – he always seems to loom slightly, as if outside the conversation, but pressing to be inside – now suggested we hurry out for a quick bite, in Claygate, after which he and my sister would drive home to Swanage and I could take over ‘the night shift’. Fifteen minutes later, in the tiny bathroom of an Indian restaurant that we had reached in my sister’s van, a vehicle that positively stank of dog, I reflected on this ominous expression: night shift. This was the van my sister and her husband had bought to accommodate the wheelchair of their severely handicapped child, who was now a child no longer, and yet in a way would never be other than a child, lacking as she did the resources for even the most limited independence. Today the belts used for anchoring the wheelchair were tying up the three family dogs. Had my brother-in-law, I wondered, meant ‘night shift’ as a joke? The Indian restaurant loo was unbelievably small. He was a man who did like to joke. My left thigh was brushing the washbasin as I performed; my forehead was almost touching the frame of the open window. Perhaps not. Perhaps I really would be awake beside my mother all night. Thinking about it, I rather liked the idea. I phoned Deborah over what was now the seventh post-massage pee and told her that since my sister was unexpectedly home with my mother for dinner, I could hardly come out this evening. We could speak tomorrow. I hadn’t seen my sister in a year and more, I said.

  But Deborah wouldn’t hear of it; this was an emergency, she insisted. It was life or death. Her son had beaten her husband over the head. Now Charlie was threatened with a criminal charge for assault and battery, while David was in hospital facing scans for brain damage. ‘The boy needs counselling, urgently,’ she said, and she said she had a hunch that, given what there had been between us in the past – myself and Charlie, not to mention myself and her husband – I was the right person to do it. The very fact that I was in town when she needed me was a sign. It was providence.

  There had actually been very little between us, Charlie and myself. An exchange of emails, nothing else. Hence I had a hunch that the person who needed counselling, or just company, was Deborah. How quickly she had learned to toss out the word ‘husband’, I thought, when they had barely been married six months. Looking back, my reluctance to explain to her that my mother was dying, and that hence it was impossible for me to come, bewilders me now. Why didn’t I? I had spared Deborah a mention of my mother’s condition earlier because it seemed she had quite enough to worry about. And perhaps I didn’t want to bring Mother in now, here in the tiny bathroom of the Indian restaurant where no bath would ever fit, because I didn’t want to use her as an excuse. Or rather, to be suspected of using her as an excuse. It’s odd because in the past I had used the gravity of my mother’s illness on numerous occasions to excuse sudden withdrawals from work appointments, including, on one occasion, the cancellation of a conference – on phrasal verbs, as I recall – in Tokyo, and again, way back before our separation, I had used it to explain at least two otherwise inexplicable absences to my wife. ‘My mother is very ill,’ I had said. ‘I have to fly to London.’ I suppose the point is that on those occasions no one suspected me of using her illness as an excuse at all. On the contrary, they were extremely accommodating and sympathetic. Which made it okay, in a way. And I had often smiled to myself, thinking, If only Mum knew the shenanigans her cancer is facilitating, one of them appearing very high on the list of pleasing transgressions I tick off at dicey moments in aeroplanes.

  But this evening, with Mum vomiting blood, I didn’t say a word to Deborah, who was now suggesting she drive over from Kingston with Charlie to speak to me. She could say hello to my mother, she said. They had met decades ago at my wedding. Perhaps I had already reached the point where you can’t tell someone something because, if you do, they’ll think it pathologically weird that you didn’t tell them earlier. As when I didn’t tell a certain person I had left my wife until a year after I had, causing a significant change in her attitude to me when she discovered this.

  ‘I’ll call again when I see how the evening’s going,’ I said.

  We ate biryani. Or at least ordered it. For the moment there were only poppadoms on the table, plus the usual sauces. My sister and her husband were in surprisingly good spirits. Her husband, who was allowing himself just one beer before driving, pulled out his iPad to show me photos of the dogs I had already seen in the van. Two big, heavy-breathing creatures and one exotically miniature fluff-ball. He told me their breeds, which I have forgotten; he told me their names, which I have forgotten; he told me anecdotes about them, which I can’t remember at all, but which invariably had to do with their outwitting and outrunning, or just generally outdogging, other dogs. These were finer dogs than other people’s dogs, my brother-in-law was eager to convince me, more interesting and more characterful. He really was in excellent spirits. The white downy dog, he said, in particular was a sublimely bossy little bitch, so convinced of her frothy specialness as to be quite unintimidated by animals of a far larger size, even pit bulls. The long, sleek, almost hairless animal that I had erroneously supposed must be a greyhound had the most playful, boundless energy you could possibly imagine, running rings round the
other animals, literally, on the heath behind their Swanage bungalow. Wide rings. Concentric rings.

  As my brother-in-law spoke, his long middle finger stroked image after image across the iPad screen. I also noticed a thick gold, time-worn wedding ring, something I am slowly getting used to wearing no more. Dogs fighting over a ball – he flicked his finger – dogs on their backs with their paws in the air – his finger again – pink tongues panting at the lens. ‘Isn’t she a scream?’ my sister giggled. But this black lump of a beast, my brother-in-law was explaining now, the oldest of the three, was simply the grumpiest creature that had ever crossed the face of the earth. And not photogenic at all. Or entirely continent, alas. ‘But he adores Suzy,’ my sister cut in indulgently, and there, sure enough, was a photo of this sad old dog complacently licking the dazed but happy face of an evidently retarded young woman slumped in a wheelchair.

  I felt chastened.

  ‘How is Mum, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Pretty much ready to see Dad again,’ my sister’s husband promptly answered. He was still flicking through the dog photos as he spoke. ‘Do you want to see her room?’ His big finger poked the screen to find a different folder.

  ‘She’s such a survivor, though,’ my sister said, ‘Anyone else would have given up the ghost, yonks back.’

  ‘Yonks’ was an old friend I hadn’t come across in a while. Yonks in fact. Not the sort of term that turns up in conferences in Frankfurt and Tokyo. I had also forgotten my brother-in-law’s habit of referring to my father as Dad, as if he hadn’t had one himself.

  ‘Here,’ he said.

  He pushed the iPad towards me and I saw a pleasant enough room with a large window to the left giving onto a patio; to the right, my mother was sitting up in bed eating from a tray and trying to be her cheerful self for the camera. Through the window, on the patio, you could clearly see a pink concrete birdbath.