In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  Chuckling, he added, ‘I mean, did the missus kick you out, or did you run?’

  ‘I walked,’ I said. ‘Of my own accord.’

  Staggered more like.

  ‘How did she take it?’ my sister asked.

  As she spoke, the light in the reception area of the Claygate Hospice went out. At once I was afraid there was something definitive about this. As if a door that had been open had now been locked and bolted and I wouldn’t be able to see Mother in time. Suddenly I could feel a bonfire of impatience sizzling across my skin, tensing my fingers and toes. It was worse than the urgency to pee. Why on earth had I told them about separating?

  ‘I’ve no idea how she took it,’ I said sharply. ‘In the end I can’t know, can I, what’s in my wife’s head? It’s not my problem. My problem is how I’ve taken it. That’s what separation is about. Being separate. From now on, I think about me.’

  My sister said quietly, ‘All Mum – or any of us – wants is that you be happy, Tom.’

  ‘That’s right,’ my brother-in-law agreed.

  ‘Well, if there’s one thing you can all feel assured about,’ I laughed, ‘that’s it. I’m happy as Larry these days.’

  Even as I spoke the words I knew they would convince no one.

  ‘Maybe Mum would be relieved to know you’re with someone else,’ my brother-in-law said. ‘Not wilting on your own, I mean.’

  He actually used that word, wilting. ‘I will wilt and die,’ I had told the shrink. I opened the door of the van. The rain was teeming.

  ‘Let me give you an umbrella,’ my sister said and twisted round to search on top of the seats behind her. Then, waiting for her to pull out the umbrella, which would be precious of course, if I was kept hanging around at the now-darkened hospice door, and feeling irritated that my crass claim to be happy had only convinced everybody of the opposite, I said the truth was that I had a wonderful new girlfriend with whom I believed I was in love; just that I wasn’t sure whether this was the kind of thing I should be saying to Mother, in the state she was in. ‘On Jordan’s banks,’ I added.

  My sister put a small telescopic umbrella into my hand. ‘How old is she?’ she asked.

  Whenever a man over fifty says he has a girlfriend, the first thing people ask is, How old is she? It’s not a stupid question.

  ‘Thirty,’ I lied.

  ‘Bro!’ My sister shook her head, but then suddenly she was laughing. It was as if another side of her had managed to grab the driving wheel. ‘Jeepers,’ she was almost giggling.

  ‘Perhaps better if you don’t mention that to the kids when they come,’ I said.

  My sister was still shaking her head in disbelief. My brother-in-law said, ‘I know you don’t believe these things, Tom, but when you’re with Mum, why don’t you just let the Lord Jesus be your guide? He is looking after her. He will tell you what to say. And what’s best left unsaid.’

  I was out of the door, opening the umbrella.

  ‘Phone me after you’ve spoken to the doctors,’ my sister called. ‘Maybe she’ll live for ever!’

  I negotiated a puddle. As they turned in the road, the van’s headlights swung across me, catching my reflection in the rainy glass. Here to see his mother die, I thought. Every time I see my reflection, I want to call Elsa and tell her to find a more suitable man. No, I don’t. Hitting the bell, I just had time to register a ferocious burning feeling beneath the navel, then the lock buzzed sharply and the reception light came on. I was still trying to get the umbrella to close, when the same head appeared around the corner of the corridor with its same story that there was no receptionist after five, but all the same I had to sign the book on the desk.

  ‘Ah, it’s you,’ the nurse said. ‘Who were you for again?’

  ‘Mrs Sanders.’

  ‘Right.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m afraid Mrs Sanders has been rather poorly.’

  ‘Can I see her?’

  The nurse had come forward now. She was a sturdy woman in her forties, face frank and knowing, firm full lips, hair permed flat under her cap. A no-nonsense woman.

  ‘Of course. Close family have twenty-four-hour access.’

  ‘I’m her son,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’ She seemed to think for a moment. ‘Thomas?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘She’s been asking after you.’

  But when I started moving towards her, the nurse said, ‘Let me just pop in first and see how she’s getting on.’

  She retreated. It seemed odd, as if she was trying to come between us, or to check that my mother really did want to see me, or that I wouldn’t go in and find something that upset me. In any event, I had the impression that someone was mediating between myself and my mother, that I needed the nurse’s permission to see her.

  I stood with the reception behind, and to my right a long corridor stretching away into a row of soft red night lights. The nurse disappeared into a door towards the end on the left. The ninth door, the tenth? Perhaps there were more. I waited. Then my eye fell on a notice on the wall just inside the corridor.

  CHRISTMAS PARTY.

  I moved closer. All those bereaved in 2014 were invited to a Christmas party at 5 p.m. on December 22nd, to share their memories of loved ones who had died in the Claygate Hospice.

  It was interesting, I thought, that one automatically classed dead relatives as loved ones. You would never do the same with live relatives. And what Christmas party was there for those whose loved ones had departed this world, this hospice, between the previous party just before Christmas 2013 and the following New Year? Why does my mind pick nits like this?

  I stared down the long, empty corridor trying to get used to the idea of a place where, if everything is running according to plan, every room is an agony, every bed yields its monthly corpse. Or weekly. A sort of factory of death. But benevolent. Dying fields, not killing fields. Isn’t life itself a factory of death? The hospice was the last section of a production line that began in the maternity ward. Conception the culprit. Carbon and water the raw materials. And what kind of Christmas party would this be, I wondered, where one turned up to swap stories of the recently defunct? Or was the party, in actual fact, a rather blatant invitation to make donations to the hospice, which no doubt was an expensive operation only partially funded by the State? It can’t be cheap to provide thrifty citizens with a pain-free death.

  ‘Thomas,’ a voice called. I had not seen the nurse beckoning me. As I walked along the corridor I felt the vibration of a message arriving in my pocket.

  VIII

  Counting my bathroom trips through the night, I eventually raised the post-massage tally to eleven. As for input, after biryani and beer in the Indian restaurant, there was still a tea to go, a coffee and a can of Coke. I would also smoke a cigarette before the night was out, but that’s by the by. The can of Coke came from the hospice’s automatic dispenser in the visitors’ lounge to the left of reception, a Wi-Fi hotspot. Where exactly that left me on input and output at the end of the day, I had no idea. Whether my bladder was bursting, but unable to pass water, because hopelessly silted up, or whether, to the contrary, it was squeezed quite dry, but still urgently determined to pass water that wasn’t there, perhaps due to some sad overproduction of adrenalin, I have no idea. The sums are beyond me. You have a body and you can’t even say whether there’s more going out than coming in, or vice versa. Never mind the stuff that goes in and out of your brain, one way or another. In any event, of all the visits to the bathroom that day, the tenth definitely took the biscuit for the most frantically miserable.

  Arriving at my mother’s door, which the nurse had quickly pulled closed behind her to speak to me, I was surprised to see there was a nameplate on it. The effect was strangely formal, as if this were a managerial office in some corporate corridor. MRS MARTHA SANDERS, the plate said. My mother had at last been recognised as an important person.

  ‘She is sleeping,’ the nurse announced. Her robust figure seemed to b
e guarding the way. She still hadn’t decided whether I was worthy to enter. ‘If you need to call us, there’s a buzzer by the bedside table.’

  Still she stood.

  I waited, trying to convey to the nurse my awareness of the solemnity of the situation, as if eager to pass muster.

  ‘If she should bring something up – you know, if she’s sick – there is a stack of disposable basins. On the trolley. And call us at once. There are always two of us on duty.’

  Now that she was stepping aside at last, I stopped her and asked if I could spend the night beside my mother in the armchair, since I had nowhere to stay and it was already late and I would like to be close to my mother at this difficult moment, and she said of course I could. Perhaps she thought this was noble of me, because now she smiled. It was a wan, grown-up smile. It said, We all have to go through this, Thomas Sanders. You’re right to stay with your poor mother through the night.

  ‘I’ll bring you a blanket,’ she offered. ‘On my next round.’

  ‘I suppose you’d better tell me where the bathroom is, then,’ I said.

  She pointed to the door at the end of the corridor on the right.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Some ten hours, then, after receiving my sister’s urgent email – Mum’s sinking fast – I now stepped into the room where my mother had recently been asking after me.

  The light was dim. Dark curtains were drawn over the patio. The armchair was there on the far side of the bed, as seen in my brother-in-law’s iPad photo. On the near side was an ordinary chair. I put my bag down by the wall and sat. What light there was came from a sort of big glass saucer high on the wall to my left. The warm air was heavy and sickly-sweet. Entering, I was immediately aware that I had passed into a completely separate world, as though stepping into a dark church from bright sunshine, or finding a deep cave along a sunny seashore. This was a different dimension. I sat and contemplated the figure on the bed.

  To say my mother had aged, enormously, would not be enough. She was transformed. She had adapted, been adapted, to this other world. One with its darkness and heaviness. The bed had two guardrails. Painted pale yellow. She was flat on her back, head and shoulders propped up a little. The blanket, tucked tight as a straitjacket, was a thick felty mauve and came up almost to her neck, where it was folded over with a starched white sheet. The arms, in a pale nightdress, lay leaden on top. The right arm, further from me, was tubed up to a drip; the left, grossly swollen, clutched the buzzer at the end of its wire, as if ready, even in sleep, to call the nurse. Her face was not white, or drained of colour. It was a bruise of mottled blues and greys, but pleated with wrinkles so fine as hardly to seem skin at all; more like a shrivelled fruit fallen from a tree. Her mouth was open and slack and, with her false teeth out, the lips had fallen in; they were gone, as though darkness inside were dragging the flesh down into itself. Her thin grey hair had turned oddly yellow and gave the impression someone had tugged it back hard, stretching the forehead and forcing the skull up and out. But most of all, Mum looked larger than I remembered her. The head was bigger, the neck thicker, the body bulkier and heavier. She was swelling up. As I sat down, the open mouth sucked in air with a sharp snoring shudder that shook the shoulders and was followed by a distinct gurgling sound.

  At once I felt I had to wake her. I had to speak to her. At the very least, exchange a glance of recognition. What was the point, really – and my impatience, rather than subsiding now that I was beside her, actually increased – what was the point of my coming so urgently to see my mother, if she were to die the moment I sat down beside her? To become mere material, before anything was said. Because on seeing her, I was convinced she must die at once. Already she seemed nothing but numbed and bruised flesh. Why else had they put the plaque on the door? Did they use the same plaque, I wondered, on the box that would carry her out of here? A sensible economy. You got the plaque when they knew you were going. You swelled up to be ready for death. To split open like a pod. And she had been asking for me. The nurse had said so. Still compos mentis, she had wanted me to come. If she woke, some simple greeting and farewell could be spoken, even if she then went straight back to sleep. Even if she died before waking again. Some contact would have been made. She would know I had come. I hadn’t abandoned her.

  Sitting by her side in the dim emergency light opposite the dark curtains drawn across the patio and the pink birdbath that, thanks to my brother-in-law’s iPad, I knew were out there in the rain, I slipped my hands between the yellow bedrails and took my mother’s hand. The position of the upper rail forced me to lower my wrist rather unnaturally, so as to come to the bed and her hand from underneath it. Alternatively I could have dropped my hand over the rail. I tried. But this was unnatural too, forcing the hand vertically down on the bed. It was hard to find a comfortable position in which to hold my mother’s hand. So let there be discomfort, I thought.

  ‘I’m here, Mum,’ I said.

  Then I remembered the text message that had just arrived on my phone. Text messages are no respecters of time or place, or different dimensions. Who was it from? One of the children, perhaps, needing the hospice address, or Elsa. Or Deborah again. Or even David. We always spoke when I was in the UK. I withdrew my hand and checked the phone. It was a message from Orange to tell me my credit was low. ‘Top Up now and win two tickets to the Premier League game of your choice.’ Then, exactly as I was returning the phone to my pocket, it began to ring. Its trill sounded obscenely loud, and somehow altered, in the dark room. Everything was altered here. Deborah Seymour. She still has that name on my mobile. I declined the call, but did not want to turn the phone off in case my children tried to get in touch. Or Elsa. I texted Deborah: ‘Mother taken urgently to hospital. Can’t meet tonight.’

  The phone back in my pocket, I slipped my hand through the bars again, took Mother’s hand in both mine and squeezed gently. My mother always had rough, raw, rather large hands. If I think of them now, I see their redness plunged in cake mix or bread dough, or chopping carrots, or pulling weeds. Doing things, anyway. But that night they were cold and swollen and, when I squeezed, it was as though they had been filled with air or some liquid that couldn’t escape but moved around as I pressed. They felt wrong. This was the woman, I thought, to whom you once said, ‘You and your body are one, Mum, you are your body, your body is you.’ What would it mean to be this body now? She snored again, sharply, abruptly, and the cheeks seemed to be sucked even more deeply into the sunken mouth. A faint, sweet, cloying smell hung in the air. It was the smell she knew awaited her when we had spoken together four years ago.

  ‘Mum.’

  I squeezed her hand and this time got a faint response, a faint returning squeeze.

  ‘Mum, it’s Thomas. I’ve come.’

  Only my mother calls me by my full name, Thomas.

  ‘I’m glad to be here beside you, Mum.’

  I pulled a hand out from under the bedrail and reached towards her face, smoothing hair that was already in fact too flat and smooth against the skin. Her forehead was damp and cold, but when I pressed ever so slightly there was a faint hum in the skin, a livingness still. I let my hand rest there and stared. I felt deeply sorry for my mother, sorry for her face, sorry for her eyes, her head, her skin, her body, sorry that all this had happened to her and now must go on happening until the final calamity; and at the same time I felt repelled, as if I really did not want to be touching the sick forehead and lank hair, I did not feel comfortable with my wrist so near the sunken toothless mouth, the strangely flabby neck. Doctors knew they had to put a finger up your butt, the Californian physio had told me, but at the same time they didn’t want to. They were repelled. I had no diagnostic duty to caress my mother’s face, but with all my heart I wanted to. I wanted to care for her, somehow, in some way. It seemed important. And I didn’t want to. I really didn’t. This wasn’t my mother of old. Hence perhaps it wasn’t ‘with all my heart’. There had never been many caresses in the Sand
ers family; that is the truth. Or not that I could recall. Can one trust one’s memory on these matters? ‘Mum,’ I whispered. ‘Mum?’ And I thought it hardly mattered whether I did or didn’t caress her face because she wasn’t awake anyway and wouldn’t sense either the affection or the repulsion. At least I wasn’t hurting her, I hoped. At least that. Unless these things can be sensed in your sleep. Unless the interpretation we normally put on the word ‘sensed’ is far too narrow and even in sleep one’s well-being, or unease, can be shifted by a touch or a soft word. We know so little about these things. I squeezed her hand again, this time with my left hand alone, and again had the impression, but perhaps it was only an impression, that the hand squeezed faintly back.

  ‘Mum,’ I said in a louder voice, but still soft. The silence in the room, or rather the soft electronic hum from some appliance or other, made my voice sound very harsh, even in its would-be softness. ‘The last thing you want to do is wake her,’ my sister had said.

  ‘Can you hear me, Mum? If you can, give two quick squeezes for yes.’ Immediately there was a little squeeze, much clearer this time. But only one.

  I withdrew my hand from her face and sat watching her, trying to get used to this terrible transformation that had overcome her, the strangeness of my suddenly being in this dim, over-heated room beside this broken body. At the same time, the silly business of trying to communicate by asking her to squeeze my hand, when she was so evidently asleep, reminded me of a moment in Beckett’s novel Molloy, where Molloy says he communicates with his mother by knocking on her head, with different numbers of knocks for different requests. I had given Mother my copy of Molloy to read sometime in my teens. She would have been in her late forties then. Like the knitting and years later the Scrabble, it must have been an attempt on my part to find some common ground that Mother and I might meet on, some territory that was not the Wondrous cross or our Saviour’s blood. Or perhaps what I was asking for was some acknowledgement on her part of the legitimacy of my different interests, the different path I was choosing. Language. Books. I wanted my mother’s consent, I suppose, for not being the person she had always wanted me to be, as years later I had sought her consent for an eventual separation from my wife, without ever having the courage to mention the word ‘separation’, and indeed had sought my wife’s consent for a separation she did not want; yes, I had secretly, shamefully encouraged my wife to kick me out of the house, so as not to have to take this decision myself. As I had encouraged my mother to suggest that separation was the only solution, without ever saying, I want to separate. ‘Let this cup pass from me’ was one of the few prayers in the Bible I have ever really prayed in earnest. ‘How many people have to say it’s okay, before you will allow yourself to leave your wife?’ my shrink had enquired on perhaps our third or fourth encounter.