In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  I had given my mother a copy of Molloy, I recalled now, sitting beside her bed, watching for signs of life, because I found the book hilarious and captivating. I wanted my mother to be captivated too, to be taken captive, by Beckett. This was my father’s habit of impulsively sharing his enthusiasms, impulsively wanting others to be captivated as he was, to fall thrall to the same spell. I didn’t even reflect that I was asking my mother to read a story about a man who sets out to find a mother who lives he knows not where, and with whom he can only communicate by knocking on her skull. In the darkened, overly warm room in Claygate Hospice I smiled and shook my head. How was it possible that I realised this only now? Only now, aged fifty-seven, sitting by my mother’s broken body in the year 2014, did I realise how inappropriate it had been, or no, how completely appropriate, to have given my mother a copy of Molloy in the year – what, 1971, 1972? Appropriate precisely because my mother had not remarked on the connection at all. And nor had I. At no point did mother and son mention to each other that they were sharing a book about a mother and son who couldn’t communicate. Or is that what literature’s for, to talk without talking? To substitute for talking. To escape talking. Rather she said she had been quite enjoying the novel – she offered me that sop – until she came to the part where Molloy talks about his excretory habits, and then she really did not want to read any further, because it was in bad taste and she really couldn’t understand why such a talented man as Samuel Beckett evidently was would want to talk about such things. It was vulgar.

  I had been disappointed, but perplexed too, because I couldn’t recall much talk about excretory habits in Molloy, unless you count the passage where Molloy counts his farts, which is madly funny. It was one of the passages that had made me fall in love with the book. But Mother of course did not want these references to the body and its functions. Molloy’s farts had come between us, then. There was an unpleasant smell to the conversation. Mother never said a word when someone let off an unpleasant smell in the room. Even when we were young children. Farts couldn’t be uttered. It was odd, I thought, squeezing my mother’s hand again, and this time there was no response, it was odd that I had never given my father any of my books to read. Never given Dad Beckett. Never given him T. S. Eliot. Never given him Dostoevsky. I never tried to get my father along to White Hart Lane, or to the pub for a pint. Perhaps I sensed my father would not stand in my way. Or I didn’t care, one way or another. I did not need my father’s consent. I was fine with my father, however sharply we disagreed. It was my mother I had to seduce and never could. Mother was never impressed. Never impressed by a book. Never impressed by a girlfriend. Never impressed by a job, or even a prize. Yet she constantly seemed to invite me to try to impress her, to try to win prizes. I am eager to approve of you, Thomas, she seemed to say, if only you could convince me that you are worthy of approval. I am ready to pray with you, she said that summer, if only you would bend your knee.

  ‘Mum,’ I said again, and as I spoke a message buzzed on my phone.

  I wouldn’t read it. I felt it was wrong for messages to penetrate this scene, as if we were both in church together. How different church would have been in my childhood if there had been mobile phones to take the boredom out of my father’s sermons, though it’s hard to imagine my parents would have stretched to giving their children mobile phones, even if they had existed in those church-mice days.

  I wouldn’t read the message.

  ‘Are you awake, Mum?’ I repeated. I was worried about the coldness of the hand. Shouldn’t it be under the blanket? ‘Tom’s here.’ I tried to warm her, rubbed her fingers. ‘Thomas.’ Their squishiness was odd. It wasn’t normal blood and bone.

  My eye strayed round the room. To the left, opposite the bed, there was some kind of bureaucratic regulation on the wall. But the lettering was too small to read in the dim light. Some kind of restriction, or warning. The low table by the armchair was strewn with magazines and chocolate bars. One half eaten. Mother loved chocolate bars, though it seemed unlikely she had done the eating here. My brother-in-law? Would he have left the bar unfinished?

  On the other side of the bed was a service trolley, with water in a baby-bottle and various pieces of medical equipment. Those must be the disposable basins, I thought. Grey rectangular trays, like old egg boxes, but bigger, deeper. The drug pump was half hidden under the blanket by her shoulder and fed into her right arm. Presumably. It was good to think she was getting all the painkiller she needed. Then I saw that on the bedside table beside the phone, from which only hours ago she had spoken to my brother, there was a book, and I removed my hand from where it was still holding hers and reached across to see what my mother had been reading. The cover showed a crusader’s shield and an ancient sword laid across it, but rather than the historical romance you might have supposed, the antique lettering of the title read, What To Do When Faith Seems Weak & Victory Lost. By Kenneth E. Hagin.

  Again the phone in my pocket vibrated with an incoming message. I put the book on my lap and pulled out the phone.

  ‘Really sorry about your mum. Things frightening here. Charlie psychotic. Please let me bring him to speak to you. Even ten minutes. When they have got her to sleep. Please, Tom. Need help. Don’t know who else to turn to.’

  My daughter had texted. ‘Poor Gran. Arriving 11 tomorrow. Please send address.’

  I sat in the chair and, with my left hand still holding Mother’s, turned a few pages of this unexpected book with my right. What To Do When Faith Seems Weak & Victory Lost. ‘In whom,’ read an opening quotation from Corinthians, ‘the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine upon them.’ So much for missing pronouns. And another verse, ‘Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.’

  I shook my head. I have often wondered whether it wasn’t precisely my biblical childhood that gave me my vocation as a linguist; the only way out of madness was to concentrate on the language it was written in. Yet here was my mother on her deathbed in danger of becoming sane. So it seemed. Or at least looking around for props to shore up folly. When faith seems weak. Could Mum’s faith really be wavering, with her nametag already nailed on death’s door? One of the things that had alarmed me as I approached this visit was the fear that there would be a repeat of my father’s deathbed appeal for me to convert. ‘I would go to my grave happy,’ my father had said, perhaps a week before his death, ‘if you would return to the faith, Tommy.’ I did not want to go through that again, to have to disappoint the person I had come to comfort. Yet even worse somehow, I now realised, was the thought that my mother might lose her faith, in extremis. At the very last moment she might feel she really was nothing other than a decaying, flabby, stinking body. And my presence there, sitting quietly by her bedside, might remind her of all the arguments I had made out for this position, arguments that then seemed so sane to me, playing Scrabble together in her little house four years ago. Suddenly I felt an intense pang of nostalgia for Mother’s little house, for its tiny bathroom and treacherously steep staircase. I had felt safe in that house. It was a low-church house, plain and poor and sensible. Safe from my crumbling marriage, safe from the demands of my then girlfriend. Protected. At ease. And what had I given my mother in return? I had sought in every way to undermine her faith, to undermine her house. All at once it seemed crucial that my mother make it through to the end with her faith intact. Four years ago I had had a vague and pious concern that my mother should rediscover the body she had always disparaged and ignored, always subordinated to Christian propriety. Now it seemed essential that she go on ignoring and subordinating her body to the end. Let Christian propriety triumph. The last thing I wanted now was for Mother to tell me I had been right.

  Holding her hand, my wrist twisted by the safety rail, I began to dread the mental anguish I might be witness to when s
he woke up. Certainly my father had been horribly anguished when he had told me he would go happy to his grave if only I would acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ. I was shaken. Until those very last days Father had always granted me complete liberty of belief. So why did my convictions, or lack of them, have to be at the centre of attention in his dying? Was it that a gesture on my part would have shored up his own faith? Perhaps everyone’s belief is challenged with the approach of death. And denial is definitely easier when done together. The more people are Christian, the easier it is for Christians to go to their graves. The more people clap for Tinker Bell, the more Tinker Bell exists. Certainly a marriage can last for eternity, if both partners deny it died a decade ago and hasn’t even been decorously embalmed. My mother, I thought, was about to wake in anguish over the last-minute crumbling of her faith and, sitting there by her bed, I would be partly guilty for that pain.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. My right hand had dropped the book to return to her forehead. When faith seems weak, the title said. Perhaps Mum had been persuaded by that ‘seems’. If she had had the foresight to bring the book with her to the hospice, it was because she intended to be so persuaded. Perhaps her wobble had already been drawn into a narrative of temptation and overcoming. Wasn’t wobbling part of the story of being faithful? Even Jesus was tempted. Even Our Saviour cried, My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? Mother has gone beyond, I thought.

  ‘Mum,’ I repeated. ‘I’m so glad I made it here.’ I spoke in my softest voice. In the end I just wanted everything to be okay.

  My mother snored sharply. Her white nightie, I noticed, was damp with sweat around the neck. Again something gurgled in her throat, pulling the lips deeper into the mouth. The neck tightened to swallow, and the eyes screwed up. She was suffering. Abruptly I stood up, walked out of the room and down the corridor to the bathroom. ‘She’s in a hospice,’ I texted, waiting for the pee to seep through reluctant sphincters. Who cared whether Deborah realised I had been lying before? ‘In Grange Road, Claygate. Text when you arrive and I’ll come outside for a few minutes.’

  Later that night I would be recalling this as the ninth pee since the massage. My fingers were shaking. The pee came in fits and dribbles. The bathroom, clunkily equipped for wheelchairs, was full of depressing requests to respect other users. There was urine on the seat, a puddle on the floor. Reams, I thought, could be written about how people behaved in public lavatories. Reams no one would ever want to read. And I was struck by the thought that after the word ‘public’ one would never say ‘bathroom’. Public bathrooms. Though once one used to say public baths, and even municipal baths.

  ‘Do you remember,’ I began, on returning to my mother’s room – and again I was impressed to see the plate, MRS MARTHA SANDERS, on the door, and disturbed to smell the cloying smell of cancer as I approached her bed – ‘when you used to take us to Derby Baths, Blackpool? And Squires Lane Baths, Finchley? My eyes would weep with the chlorine. Do you remember? They were good times, Mum,’ I said.

  Mother never joined us in the pool. She did not want to appear in a swimming costume. She didn’t want us to see her body. Or maybe she just didn’t enjoy pools. I don’t know. But she took us to them anyway and dried our ears and gave us oxtail soup from a Thermos. She enjoyed seeing us in pools perhaps. The bodies of her young children. In baths. ‘I remember,’ I told her, ‘my head on your tum while you towelled my hair.’

  I was holding my mother’s hand again. She was snoring more lightly now. I might as well be talking to myself, I thought. Why was I trying to feel these emotions? As if they were a duty. Sentiment an imperative. Why try to feel warm and sad? Just get up and go. Now the wrinkles at the corners of her lips trembled. Her stomach lifted and fell, the same stomach that fifty years ago had held me to itself, towelling roughly, hurting my ears. Mother was generous, but never gentle. Maybe she just wasn’t aware of roughness and gentleness. What is the point of remembering these things? The finger rubbing vigorously in the ear through the towel to make sure all was dry. I wasn’t helping her, being here. I wasn’t helping myself. Mother was happier when we went into the countryside, I thought. And all at once I recalled something that hadn’t seen the mental light for decades. ‘You remember, Mum,’ I began again, ‘that pond called the Figure of Eight? Beyond Leyton Primary School. When you bought me a net to fish minnows and we tried to keep them in an old kitchen sink in the garden?’ How tolerant she had been, I thought now, of my pet obsession. Me far more than my brother and sister. I had to have pets. Why was that? The fish, the frogs, the mice, the hamsters, the guinea pigs, the rats, the rabbits, the dogs. All dead now, of course.

  Flowers too. At some point, walking in the countryside with Mother, I had started collecting wild flowers, pressing them and taping them in the pages of an exercise book. Bizarre to remember this now. Why had I done that? To please her? Did I hope Mother would be pleased to have a son interested in wild flowers? A son who could knit? Or was I really interested in them? I couldn’t recall. Certainly I’m not now. Who gives a thought about wild flowers? But I do remember how quickly they drooped and died. It was astonishing. So much more quickly than daffodils or roses. You picked them and they drooped and died. A matter of seconds. ‘You told me,’ I said, holding my mother’s hand, though I might as well have been talking to the bedpost, ‘that everything wild dies at once, when you take it out of its proper world.’ Certainly the attempt to create a tiny pond in our Blackpool garden with the help of an old kitchen sink was an abject failure. Barely a day passed before the minnows were upended on the surface, or trapped slimily pale in the weeds. Already the water smelled of death. A low-tide smell. Different from cancer. Different from farts. When the frogs died, their back legs opened wide. They lost their froggy shape. There was no talk of Paradise. They were just matter. Squidgy smelliness. Everything dies; that was the lesson of pets. Everything dies and loses its shape. I didn’t say this out loud, in case somehow she might hear. Especially pets stolen from the wild. Yet I was definitely saying it to her, in my head. Shape is life, Mum. The salamanders and that broken-winged blackbird. They died in a flash. Far sooner than a well-bred dog or cat. Lose your place in the world and you lose your shape, your life. Removed from pond or hedgerow, these creatures couldn’t give up the ghost fast enough. Why hast Thou forsaken me? Only the mice thrived. White mice in the old vicarage boiler room in Cricklewood. They gnawed through their wooden cages and escaped into a neo-Gothic maze of rotten pipe-lagging. Which clown had sold us thin plywood cages for white mice? They bred and stank of life as powerfully as the minnow-pond had stunk of death. Amazing all the droppings. Till Dad got them exterminated – remember, Mum, while I was off on the Youth Club house party? Dad had the mice exterminated. I never saw their bodies.

  ‘Thomas?’

  It was her voice.

  ‘Thomas, is that you?’

  Her eyelids were still closed, but trembling. Without her teeth, the voice was a slurred whisper.

  ‘Mum! I just arrived. I’m so glad to be with you.’

  ‘Thomas.’ She sighed. ‘Of course.’ She breathed deeply. ‘How silly of me. I am sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’ I squeezed her hand. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘Pain,’ she muttered. The head shook from side to side.

  ‘Shall I call the nurse?’

  She didn’t respond. The mauve blanket had her neatly tucked in almost to the shoulders. Above that, the white nightie was damp with sweat, the head was lumpy and grey. The hair was yellow.

  ‘Thomas!’

  Suddenly Mother pulled herself up, wrestled herself upright, the way she had once wrestled herself out of her recliner.

  ‘Thomas!’

  Like a child coming out of a nightmare, she forced herself up onto her elbows. Her eyes opened and found mine. She seemed alarmed.

  ‘Mum. I’m so glad I made it.’

  Why did I keep saying that?

  ‘If only …’

  She stopped, staring at me
.

  ‘Oh, Thomas, if only …’

  I stood and leaned across the bed to kiss her. Even as I did so, I felt a text message arrive in my pocket.

  ‘Mum.’

  Her mouth opened, to greet, or speak. It was filled with blood. Black blood poured out.

  Looking back, you would have to say I moved fast. In a flash I was round the bed and grabbing the grey egg-box basins. Before the second jet rushed out, I had one under her chin and a hand behind her head.

  ‘Mum. Mum. Keep calm. Hang on.’ Holding the basin in one hand, I found the buzzer with the other. I pulled it from her hand and pressed.

  ‘Mum.’

  Maybe blood was not so bad as the words I had feared.

  Her eyes were still fastened on mine. Veiny, bloodshot, but still very blue, very alive, very determined. ‘If only.’ In extremis, my mother was willing something, willing something against the tide. She vomited again. I put down one basin on the bedside table and shifted another under her mouth. The blood was black, and frothy. Now two nurses were in the room with rubber gloves.

  ‘You had better leave for a little while,’ they said.