In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  ‘So your lady wife told me.’

  I was feeling in my pockets for my passport.

  ‘Enough of the wife stuff, Tommy. Speaking of whom, however’ – David knew I was a stickler for ‘whom’ – ‘the dear creature told me Charlie had given you a mysterious number to call.’

  ‘Plus a whack round the chops.’

  ‘Ah. She didn’t mention that. Is it bad?’

  ‘Not pretty. He seemed determined to get me involved in your, er, shit.’

  ‘Faeces. Yep, delicately put, Tom. Listen, you couldn’t tell me what the number was, could you?’

  I hesitated.

  ‘I’d have to look through my bag. I’ll text it later.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘About Charlie, though. You should get him to a psychiatrist.’

  ‘Couldn’t agree more. I’ve been surfing eBay for straitjackets.’

  I laughed.

  ‘To be serious, though, Tommy boy, did you get any idea what his problem is exactly?’

  ‘I thought you would have fathomed that.’

  ‘Sort of yes-and-no-ish. I was just interested to hear what you made of it.’

  ‘Well, he seemed upset about your history of extracurricular activities.’

  ‘I’m afraid the boy’s been a bit of a nosy parker.’

  ‘He said he’d read some of our old emails.’

  ‘A serious breach of privacy.’

  As we spoke I was having a minor passport panic, searching back and forth between the pockets of my jacket, the pockets of my coat and the endless zipped compartments of my disintegrating Samsonite.

  ‘Odd,’ Dave was saying, ‘when you think how generous we’ve been, giving him the upstairs flat and everything to share with his little “friend”.’

  ‘What I thought was strange, Dave, was that he’s so worried about the past now, even after you’ve made his mother an honest woman, so to speak.’

  ‘He and his ingratitude can go to hell,’ David said flatly.

  The passport was in the back pocket of my trousers. I felt relieved, but had absolutely no recollection of having put it there.

  ‘You know Deborah told me he wasn’t gay.’

  ‘Her reasoning is that if one day the boy should change his mind, it might be better if no one ever knew. Denial, in case the truth changes.’

  I shuffled along in the queue, shifting my bag over the floor with my foot.

  ‘Lots of debriefing on both sides,’ I said lamely.

  ‘You were always very forgiving to your own little spies, as I recall,’ he observed.

  ‘They were rather younger than Charlie, Dave.’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘Maybe I was grateful they forced things to a head.’

  I showed my passport.

  ‘Tom, for Christ’s sake. A spy is a spy. You would never have separated if they hadn’t blown the gaff. Am I right, or am I right?’

  ‘Hard to call.’

  The thought that my destiny, and Elsa’s, had depended entirely on the twins reading a few text messages was depressing.

  ‘Listen, old mate, whatever number my miserable offspring may or may not have given you, you’re not going to call it, right?’

  I was walking down the tunnel to the aircraft.

  ‘To be honest, Dave, I haven’t had a second to think about it.’

  ‘Spot on, so let me think for you. Don’t. And don’t give it to Deborah, either. In fact, that most of all. Don’t give it to Deborah.’

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘It’s a shame, actually, you mentioned his giving you a number at all.’

  ‘Wasn’t thinking,’ I agreed. ‘It’s been a heavy day. Woke with a puffed-up face. Mum died. My old peeing problem has returned.’

  ‘Ah, sorry to hear that,’ Dave said. ‘Punishment for porking Miss Perfect, I suppose.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘It’ll pass.’

  ‘Everything passes.’

  ‘That optimism again.’

  There was the usual huddle of passengers at the plane door. To end the call on a positive note, I said, ‘By the way, Dave, about your marrying.’

  ‘Yeeees?’

  ‘Seeing Deb yesterday, I was thinking: you really did the right thing, staying in there. In the end, if you weren’t going to split up …’

  ‘We might as well go the whole hog.’

  ‘As my dear mother always used to say. Anyway, I feel bad not having made it to the wedding. Sorry about that.’

  Entering the plane, phone pressed to my ear, I was suddenly very aware I only had the flight and then a couple of hours in the hotel to rewrite my talk and prepare a decent PowerPoint. If I was going to rewrite it, that is. And in a way, if I was going to Berlin, it was partly because the day beside my dying mother had given me such an electrically eccentric idea to present there.

  ‘Well,’ Dave was saying, ‘it seemed the right decision at the time. Y’know. Speaking of which, or whom, how’s your own other half? Ex-half. I must say, I rather miss the dear girl.’

  I said I really didn’t know how my wife was. We rarely communicated.

  ‘Thirty years together and you don’t know how she is?’

  ‘It’s called separation, Dave.’

  ‘Sounds like cruelty to me.’

  ‘You have to be cruel to be cruel, as someone we know once said.’

  David chuckled. ‘Let’s have a pint soonest, Tombolino.’ He coughed and lowered his voice. ‘I need you to give me skin, mate. Things are dire, to be honest. This stuff with Charlie has completely thrown me.’

  ‘Will do, Dave.’

  Sitting down, I inserted earplugs, brought out my notebook and began work on the talk. Since I had managed to get an aisle seat towards the back of the plane there would be no problem going to the bathroom as often as I wished. For the next two hours, then, while the attendants went through all the pre-flight rigmarole and trolleys of refreshments rattled up and down the aisle, I worked away furiously without ever once thinking about my mother, or about David and Deborah and Charlie, or about my wife, my children, my separation, or even about Elsa. ‘Language,’ I scribbled off the top of my head, ‘has always been fascinated by everything that came before language, everything that lies beyond it, always eager to imagine and possess that unimaginable space, to describe it as brutal and crude, or as noble and sublime – in short, to feel superior or servile. And being supposedly close to that no-language experience, early language is alternatively seen as primitive or pure, the howl or the hallelujah. So archaism suggests a contact with a more intense, natural, spontaneous world. Life was nobler when people said “thou”, not “you”.’

  Earplugs snuggly in place, cruising at 30,000 feet over the North Sea, only hours after my mother breathed her last, I scribbled down these questionable ideas in a notebook and found, as the seatbelts sign came on for our descent, that I had not gone to the bathroom once. I rejoiced. Only later, when my head hit the pillow in Görlitzerstrasse, did I realise I was in the wrong place, the wrong country. I shouldn’t have come. I hadn’t even kissed my mother goodbye. Why do I never get a single call right?

  It was past midnight. I got up and paced back and forth, barefoot on four-star carpeting, between polished black desk and polished black bathroom door. If I didn’t sleep, of course, I would make a hash of my talk tomorrow and there would have been no point in my coming at all. So the thing to do, surely, was to give all my attention to the talk until it was over, then head straight back to England to right the wrong I had done by leaving the corpse in such a hurry. Then perhaps I could take one or two key decisions for the future, about Elsa, about my family. My mother’s death, it appeared, and it seemed barely credible that she was gone, had altered the landscape; as if my life to date, without my being remotely aware of it, had leaned against my mother, like a shed against a wall, and now it would have to stand alone without this hidden support, though in what way my mother of all people could have been supporting me, livi
ng far away as she was, rarely seen and never agreed with, I could not have said. Or as if my existence, at some very deep level, had been anchored by my mother and now was at the mercy of the tide, in need of a new harbour, a new direction; or had been imprisoned by my mother and was now free at last.

  It seemed there was no end to ‘as if’s’ and analogies.

  Then, at some point during that night in the German hotel, my third night away from Elsa, lying awake in the dark, I became intensely aware that fifty-seven years ago my infant unbaptised naked body had actually physically emerged from my mother’s flesh. This might seem self-evident – what else does the word ‘Mother’ mean? – yet amazingly I had never actually visualised this defining event until the night after my mother’s death and my thoughtlessly rapid desertion of her body, a moment when I really should have lingered, should have stayed with her, at least for a few minutes, perhaps an hour. And what I visualised now – fidgeting under the unpleasantly heavy quilt – was my infant body emerging from Mother’s body, not as she had been in 1956, but as she was on the bed of the Claygate Hospice fifty-seven years later. My flesh emerging from Mum’s cadaverous flesh. Her breathing her last at the very moment my newborn lips let out their first plaintive yell.

  For some time, then, unable to sleep, I couldn’t get this grotesque image out of my mind, or the strange, stupefied emotion that came with it, as if the fact of flesh giving birth to flesh were a matter of huge significance that I had never really taken on board, and this despite having witnessed the birth of my own children. I recalled my vivid dreams of the night before, in the guest room of the Claygate Hospice: a grasshopper pushing out of the eye of a toad, bellowing cattle spilling into breakers from a storm-tossed ship. Are our dreams also accidents of evolution, I wanted to ask my son? How self-assured he had seemed, how knowledgeable! Fifty-seven years ago I had emerged from my mother’s belly, her last child. Days later, as if to keep me bound to her, I had been baptised with the sign of the cross. Why a grasshopper from a toad? Why through the eye? Twenty-five years after that, my father had performed the ceremony that bound me to my wife. This time the token was a ring slipped onto my finger. Outward sign of inward fetters. Those whom God hath brought together, let no man put asunder.

  These disquieting thoughts raced through my head in the Görlitzerstrasse hotel on the night after my mother’s death, and this despite all my efforts to concentrate on my inaugural conference speech the following morning. At some point towards dawn, waiting to pee and observing myself in the bathroom mirror, I imagined that words themselves were insects in cerebral slime, thoughts were maggots crawling in my brain. The slimy grey matter of my brain was crawling with noisy word-insects and fat white thought-maggots. Only minutes later, it seemed the alarm was waking me at seven-thirty to give me time to go over my conference paper at breakfast. I took a shower and felt surprisingly resilient and good to go.

  XV

  The conference in Berlin could not have been more different from the conference in Amersfoort. In Amersfoort a group of people had got together to see how they could help other people who suffered from Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome. They told embarrassing personal stories or they put themselves on the line, allowing their own pelvic floor to be explored through the anus, or exploring the pelvic floor of others, through the anus. A lot of rubber gloves were used, a lot of lubricant. Participants came away with a heightened awareness of their flesh. They were in the quick of life, groping into blood and bone. At that conference I had but a small walk-on part, as one who has suffered and survived, apparently. And all was paid for by the participants themselves, who wished to improve the service they were offering to their clients.

  The 27th Annual Conference of the Society of European Linguists was funded by the European Community. Its participants were all salaried professors from European universities. They delivered papers in order to publish them in the conference proceedings, so as to accumulate points that would improve their chances of promotion, increasing their salaries and hence their pensions. They talked about the semantics of unaccusatives, about metonymy and metaphor in the evolution of phrasal verbs, about datives versus nominatives in early Icelandic, about comparative auxiliary distribution in Germanic and Romance languages.

  In short, nothing could have been further from the world of the Amersfoort conference, or indeed from the Claygate Hospice where my mother had vomited blood and breathed her last. I was back in my normal environment. All the same, there was no doubt in my mind that it was because I had spent such a large part of my life in the abstractions of diachronic and synchronic linguistics that I had ended up with the kind of abdominal condition that required anal massage – or at least Dr Sharp thought it did. It was the abstracted, cerebral, mental space I moved in that had left my body so dramatically uncared for. Add to that a marriage which neither partner wished to admit wasn’t working, and you have the perfect pathogenic situation: a live, flesh-and-blood human male, full of spit and spunk, who has been ordered from the earliest age to put aside all carnal affections, even though he knows he cannot put them aside, and to cultivate all things of the spirit, even though he never really believed there was any such thing as the spirit. ‘Spirit is an invented word to cover an invented space,’ I told my colleagues at the 27th conference of European Linguists. ‘Beginning as the innocuous spiritus breath, something absolutely verifiable and physical, observable at any deathbed, for example, or at any childbirth, the word morphed into the metaphysical, vaguely archaic spirit: a hypothesis, a hope, a nothing.’

  Why had this happened, I asked? To satisfy a craving for profundity, but also for separation from the contingent world, something that went hand-in-hand with the enhanced inwardness that language had produced. An accident of evolution. You evolved language to make the species more efficient and ended up with something you absolutely hadn’t bargained for – this nonsense of the spirit, this nonsense of renunciation of carnal affection, angels, devils, whatever. ‘The role allotted to archaism then,’ I confidently declared – and I don’t doubt my academic colleagues were quite astonished to hear me making such unsubstantiated and impassioned claims – ‘was that of providing the illusion of a more profound and meaningful space where quite simply there was none.’

  At this point I projected the first verse of the great baptismal hymn on a PowerPoint slide, typed in Victorian Gothic to get people in the mood. I would have sung it too, had I had the nerve:

  In token that thou shalt not fear

  Christ crucified to own,

  We print the cross upon thee here,

  And stamp thee His alone.

  As a child singing this hymn, I confessed to my learned audience, I had had no idea what a token was, or what ‘in token’ meant. Sometimes perhaps I had got ‘token’ mixed up with ‘totem’, which was not as unreasonable as it sounds; the whole dynamic of the text was one of substitution: as a sign of something I want to occur in an invisible world, I draw a symbol in the visible world, a cross on a newborn’s forehead, and to this sign – and, indeed, to this whole murky apparatus of appropriation – archaisms cluster and attach themselves like iron filings around a magnet.

  ‘The mystification of baptism, and indeed of all religious ceremonies,’ I told the European Linguists, ‘is only made possible by language, preferably old language. In fact as the hymn progresses, the simple outward sign of the baptismal cross is surrounded by expressions whose exact referents largely elude us: ‘to glory in His name’; ‘to blazon on thy front’; ‘to sit thee down on high’. What do these things mean? Archaisms,’ I suggested to my colleagues, ‘create gravity where there is only wishful thinking, nouns where there are only adjectives. Even to call it thinking was wishful.’

  I was aware, as I began this talk in the plush lecture hall of the Friedrich Schlegel Conference Centre, Berlin, that I had not had the proper time to prepare it, and that very likely it would come across as superficial and forced. I was aware that three-quarters of my audience were no
t themselves native speakers of English – perhaps five-sixths, to be more accurate – and hence might not grasp the nuances of the baptismal hymn. I was aware too that many colleagues would have their laptops open and would hardly be listening to what I was saying, since while it is always politic to be present at these conferences, there is no real onus on anyone to pay attention. And the more I got into my subject, focusing on the relation between archaism and belonging, archaism and coercion, the more I was aware that I had simply fallen into the trap of ranting about my own personal issues, while at the same time, oddly, actually avoiding these issues, in that I was ranting rather than confronting them.

  Hence it was somewhat to my surprise when, at the end of this mad sermon, I received three whole minutes of solid and enthusiastic applause. Two or three of my colleagues actually stood up, shook the dust off their baggy sweaters and applauded. What exactly I had said at the end of it all I wasn’t even sure myself, and had the whole talk been read back to me, I would very likely have winced. Yet it had gone down well with a qualified audience, perhaps more for its entertainment value than any academic worth, or for the pleasure of having seen a colleague expose his own weaknesses so embarrassingly. In any event, the morning’s chairman stood and beamed and declared that never had the relevance of linguists in the modern world been more forcibly put. He even offered me his hand, something I can’t recall happening at a conference before. I sat down in a sweat.

  In bed the night before, in the Görlitzerstrasse, I had promised myself I would leave the conference and return to England as soon as my talk was over. But even as the applause died down, it was evident that I could not do this. I could not simply stand up and go. It was one of those situations where all four speakers of the morning session were sitting on the podium together, and would take questions together at the end of the session. If I wasn’t to be extremely rude, I must stay put and listen to three other talks, each half an hour long, then make some kind of contribution to the debate at the end. I should have foreseen this. Already the next speaker was being introduced in the usual fulsome fashion: this milestone publication, that prize, the other prestigious appointment, etc., etc.