In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  Sitting at the window in the Görlitzerstrasse, looking out at bare branches, parked cars, tidy Teutonic façades, I went back in my mind to the feeling in the room when Mother was dying, to the bodies of my son and daughter, their partners, my sister and brother-in-law, their daughter, my uncle, his son, my cousin, all leaning slightly forward on their seats, listening for something that would soon be something no more, listening for an absence that would confirm a departure we all knew had already occurred. Was that peaceful? Certainly it was calm, and resigned. There was a feeling of truce. There were battles set aside. There was a baseline affection for each other. Something had been allowed to emerge that is always there, but that we don’t often express: our tenderness towards others, and towards ourselves, because mortal.

  That was it. What we had all shared, during those last two quiet hours as my mother slipped away, was the intense awareness of being mortal, fleshly, animals. That was where the tenderness came from. Being dying animals together. With feet of clay. It was important that no one had said anything. The silence had made the awareness possible. Our silent awareness of the breath that was going. Our shared attention to dying. Then the absence. The last breath gone and our not knowing it was the last breath. A rising intensity of animal awareness and expectation. Smelling death, perhaps. My son and my daughter who came into this world from my semen leaning forward on their seats, breathless, listening for another breath from my mother who brought me into this world from her belly, between her thighs, then the nurse coming in and lifting the wrist and the swollen arm, making her announcement, and immediately an explosion of action. Immediately haste and movement and fretfulness. The last hours had been peaceful, but apparently it was a peacefulness that yearned to end and explode in action, in denial of dying. Life is always a denial of dying perhaps. I had stood up and hurried to the bathroom and recovered my suitcase from the guest room and, without even realising what I was doing, abandoned Mum’s poor body right at the climactic moment when the soul flies to heaven to meet its Maker. Animals stay by their loved one’s bodies, I thought. Even if only to lick their fur for a while. You fled to Berlin to give the Inaugural Address at the 27th Annual Conference of European Linguists. Knowing that these conferences are all much of a muchness. As Mum would have said.

  I sent the email to my wife unchanged and immediately started to hunt for flights back to the UK. There was one at 8.40 a.m. I could make it, I thought, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to buy the ticket.

  Confused, I went to the bathroom to pee. Why wasn’t I buying the ticket, when I felt so intensely I should go back and see Mother again? ‘Hello, Thomas,’ she had called in my dream. She had phoned! ‘It’s Mum,’ she said. The voice was cheerful. She was cheerful because she thought I was going back to see her. So why didn’t I book the ticket? This confusion was alarming. I should call the shrink, I thought. From our very first meeting, the shrink had made a point of telling me I could always call her in a crisis. ‘Don’t hesitate to phone me, Señor Sanders,’ the shrink said. And whenever she saw I was going through a bad patch she reminded me, ‘Don’t hesitate to phone me, if it all gets too much, Señor Sanders.’

  I should call her.

  Yet I never had called the shrink. I did not want to appear weak. It seemed like an enormous collapse on my part to have gone to a shrink in the first place. To have sat down in a shrink’s office and wept and formulated the bizarre phrase ‘Que haya un amor’. How strange to unburden oneself in a foreign language. Surely that was humiliation enough. I didn’t want to become the kind of guy who has to phone his shrink at the drop of a hat, as my mother would have said. The kind of guy who needs to have his hand held. I don’t want to give the shrink that satisfaction, I thought, that power over me. Though why I should think of my relationship with the shrink in these terms, I don’t know. For example, if I phoned the shrink now, she would advise me against going back to London to see my mother’s body. She would see it as another manifestation of an indoctrinated guilt, as she did when I kept going back to see my wife after having left home, making long and tiring flights from Madrid to Edinburgh for weekends that could not have been more depressing. ‘Why do you keep doing things that you have no desire to do, Señor Sanders?’ she would say. Although actually I did desire to go back and see Mother and spend a few minutes with her body. It wasn’t remotely comparable to going back to see my wife. Nothing could be said to be starting again from going to see my mother. Could it? She was dead. How could anything start again? Why haven’t you bought the ticket then, the shrink would ask? Why have you phoned me? You have phoned me because you know I will advise you not to go. That was true. And since I knew that would be her advice, there was clearly no point in phoning her.

  I moved the computer to the bedside table where the phone was – it was extraordinary my brother hadn’t responded to my message, since I know he checks his email every waking hour – opened the email from Dr Sharp again and dialled his number in California. What time was it now in California? I had no idea. Early in the morning.

  ‘Mark Sharp.’ It was his voice. I have it on my computer in fifty-five relaxation sessions.

  ‘This is Tom – Tom Sanders,’ I said. ‘Am I disturbing?’

  Lifting my eyes, I saw the frozen lake in paint and the three ducks flying low across it, looking for some water to land on perhaps? It really was a rather fine painting, for a hotel room.

  ‘Tom! I’ve been thinking about you! How’s it going? How is your mother?’

  I told the doctor that my mother had died, but that I had at least got to see her, and when he started to offer his condolences, I said thanks, but that was not what I was calling him for. ‘The fact is I’m just about to use your wand for the first time; I was wondering if you had any advice to offer.’

  ‘Ah. Okay.’ The doctor seemed surprised. ‘Have you read the articles I sent? About trigger points and calibrating the pressure you apply?’

  I said I had.

  ‘And you have the videos with Tom Ingram’s instructions, right? On the pen-drive.’

  I said I did.

  ‘Well, there’s really not much I would want to add to that,’ Dr Sharp said.

  I had the impression he was drinking something as he spoke. Perhaps it was breakfast time.

  ‘Are you still flared up,’ he asked, ‘after the massage?’

  I said I was, a bit. I’d had a bad couple of days.

  There was a silence on the line, which was a little odd, considering what a loquacious man Dr Sharp was. Calling California from a four-star German hotel was not going to be cheap.

  ‘I just thought there might be some crucial piece of personal advice you could offer,’ I told him, my eyes fixed on the three ducks in search of a spot to land. At least they had company.

  ‘Tom,’ Dr Sharp sighed. ‘The thing is not to imagine it will solve things from one moment to the next. Maybe we made a mistake when we decided to call it a wand. You know? It’s not magic. Use it slowly and very gently, otherwise you’ll make things worse. You’ve got a lot of tension stored up in there. Be kind to yourself. Don’t try to hit a home run.’

  ‘Got you.’

  The nice thing about the painting was the way it caught the last rays of sun over the wintry scene, with the ducks flying through a pinkish dusk, looking for somewhere to spend the night. An odd mix of beauty and anxiety.

  ‘So, did you tell your mother about your separation?’

  ‘I decided against.’

  ‘I’m sure that was wise,’ he said.

  ‘She died peacefully with the family all around.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he said.

  I said thanks, I would be in touch to let him know how I got on with the wand, and hung up.

  So was I going to take tomorrow morning’s early flight, or not?

  I pulled the wand from its plastic bag, which also included a pack of ten thin rubber gloves. The idea was to stretch the middle finger of the glove over the ball at the
top of the wand, pull it down the shaft, then tie it off beyond the plastic ring that prevented the thing from disappearing up your butt. All of which I did. What was missing was some lubricant. I went into the bathroom, where there were the usual pots of hand cream. Would that work? I feared it wouldn’t, but opened a pot anyway and smeared the runny white cream on the rubber. Apparently I had decided to go ahead with this wand experiment, come what may. Yet another of Mother’s expressions. Come hell or high water. I hadn’t realised how many I used. I plumped up two pillows so that I could half sit, half lie on the bed, then decided perhaps I really should read the article Dr Sharp had sent me and at least open the video on the pen-drive and check out the first lesson. I got up again to fetch the computer, which was on the desk. Outside, snowflakes had begun to fall into the tidy German street.

  The article was more complex than I had imagined. There was a long preamble about myofascial muscle tissue, the formation of trigger points, their referral of pain to remote points of the body, such that a trigger point embedded in the muscle of the abdomen could be responsible for a pain in the perineum or testicles. Why was that? Why did life have to be so complicated? Then a long section on the proper technique for releasing the tension that these trigger points supposedly stored and blocked. Was it all nonsense? Could it be that Dr Sharp was a quack? I felt impatient. Toggling to my email, I noticed new messages from my wife and Deborah, among others. I didn’t want to open them and so went back to Dr Sharp’s article. The key was to use the wand only to meet the pain, but no more than that. At least initially. Just go to greet the pain, Dr Sharp’s article said, then stop. Or rather, then hold it there for two minutes. What exactly did he mean by that? Were meeting the pain and greeting the pain the same thing? Can you greet something for two minutes? There was the slight problem that since I had already smeared the rubber glove covering the tip of the wand with hand cream, I was having to hold it in the air with my left hand to prevent it from smearing the sheets. Fed up with this, I now got off the bed and managed to hook the snorkel part of the wand over the bedside lamp in such a way that the creamy bit wasn’t touching anything. I then removed my jeans and underwear, ready for the adventure.

  Why was I doing this stuff, instead of booking the flight?

  Back on the bed, I opened my wife’s email.

  ‘Thanks for yours, Tom. It’s good to think of the kids being there. It’s an important experience for them, and I’m glad it was so peaceful. I would have come myself, but feared I would not be welcome. I have written messages of condolence to your brother and sister. I hope that’s okay with you. Let me know if you want me to come to the funeral, though I don’t suppose you will. You seem so determined to throw everything away. Anyhow, the twins want to come. They adored Gran. Just let me know when it is and I’ll put them on the train. Your loving ex.’

  I scanned this through a first time, very rapidly, skipping here and there, as I always do with my wife’s emails, in much the same way, I suppose, that you open a package you fear might be hiding some kind of booby trap. Then, having checked it was safe, as it were, I read it again carefully, at which point I realised that actually it wasn’t safe at all. Precisely its reasonableness, its air of placid, nostalgic hurt, made this brief email extremely dangerous.

  Deciding not to respond, or not at once, I turned to the window, where snow was falling thickly and steadily through yellow lamplight. It looked rather beautiful and very calm and I watched it for a couple of minutes, as if granted a truce. It was the slow steadiness of the falling flakes that did it, the feeling that they were simply doing what any snowflake has to do, falling: without enthusiasm, without protest. The ice on the lake where the ducks were flying also communicated a sense of calm and truce. Something had been stopped, arrested, though it was hard to see where the ducks would be able to stop, if they didn’t want to land on the ice. Were the ducks calm? I felt they were. They were calm despite their predicament, flying over this broad expanse of ice. Then, turning back to the window and the snow, I was reminded of the calm in my mother’s room in the hours before she died. Mother was falling into death, the way every mortal animal must at some point fall, and every fleeting snowflake. It was a movement beyond conflict, beyond the aberration of metaphysical battles won and lost, of faith weak or strong. All of a sudden you let go and bowed to the old imperatives of gravity and death. It was so easy. Everything is easy, I thought, in the end. It’s before the end that’s hard.

  Meantime, on my computer screen Tom Ingram was sitting on a blue sofa holding the yellow wand between the fingers of two raised hands. I clicked Play and he began to talk. Even on the video he conveyed the sense of a man entirely at ease. Not a professional broadcaster or a publicity man, simply a good honest fellow at ease with himself and his technical competence and perfectly happy to appear on a video about anal massage. ‘Today we’re going to start you off on the wand,’ he said and was obviously talking not just to camera but to an audience, presumably at Dr Sharp’s San Diego clinic. At once I wished I was there, at the clinic with the other sufferers, listening to this wonderful man. ‘Nothing spectacular,’ he said, ‘nothing life-changing. We’re just going to get used to inserting the wand in the anus and taking it out again, without doing ourselves any harm.’ He leaned back on the sofa, lifted his knees and showed how to position the wand against the dark perineal seam of his jeans. All this with a quiet laconic dignity that hypnotised me, as I was also hypnotised, looking up again, by the falling snow. It seemed I wanted to be hypnotised.

  It was now 7 p.m. Should I order dinner or try the wand first? I could hardly have the thing hanging over the lampshade when they brought up a tray of schnitzel. Undecided, it occurred to me I should check the weather forecast. Heavy snow. That was worrying. I found the Tegel website. What if they were cancelling flights? Nothing. Tegel’s website said nothing about the weather. Was that encouraging? I should definitely buy my ticket now. ‘What happens to a body,’ I typed into Google, ‘after death and before burial?’ This to find out where Mother was up to, so to speak. But glancing through the sites that popped up – Our dear Auntie Lilah exhumed after fifteen years, YouTube, 4.27 minutes – I decided to investigate no further. All I wanted to do was to see Mother for a few moments, half an hour maybe, touch her forehead perhaps, say goodbye, maybe apologise for having rushed off to a stupid conference when she was going to meet her Maker. Though why my mother should be interested in an apology from me, if she was waltzing her way through Gloryland, was hard to say; and if she wasn’t, she would be none the wiser. I toggled back to the email and opened Deborah’s. ‘Tom,’ she had written, ‘something terrible has happened. Dave took some pills. He’s in coma. If you can, please come.’

  I took the wand from the bedside lamp, peeled off the creamy rubber glove and chucked it in the bin, dressed, packed my bag, wand included, then hurried down to reception, where I checked out and paid my extras in full view of various speakers from the 27th Annual Conference of the Society of European Linguists, who were sipping what looked to me like Weissbier in the busy hotel bar.

  XVI

  I realise now that I couldn’t, as I first thought, have received that email from my sister, the one that listed her expenses on Mother’s behalf and introduced the unexpected embalming, while at the hotel on the Görlitzerstrasse. It must have been in the Ibis at Tegel. And not the evening I checked in there, after finding there were no places on the last flight to Heathrow. A courtesy bus had driven us through a sprawl of airport wasteland to this miserably prefabricated dormitory. Convinced it would be another sleepless night, I hadn’t seen the point in spending more. Not the evening, then, when I arrived at the Ibis, at once a mythical bird and a miserable hotel chain, nor the following morning, when ten inches of snow had caused the suspension of all flights in and out of the airport, so that having gone down early for breakfast, I realised there was no point in checking out in a hurry. No, I must have got my sister’s email towards midday, shortly before being
forced to vacate the room if I wasn’t planning to stay another night. Hence one of the reasons I responded to my sister so rapidly would have been the need to shut down my laptop and check out of the hotel.

  I had booked myself onto a Lufthansa flight due to leave at 11 a.m., but it was repeatedly rescheduled as the morning passed and the snow disruptions got worse. My old friend David was in a coma. Outside, the world was absolutely white. On checking into the Ibis the evening before, I had phoned Deborah, who told me David had come home from the hospital in the morning and taken the pills that afternoon in his room, where he had gone for a nap. She had called him to come down for his tea towards five and gone to peep at his door when he didn’t reply. From this I deduced that they now slept in separate rooms. He was lying on his back, fully dressed with his hands folded on his stomach. And I mustn’t imagine it was a suicide attempt, she protested, because they had just had a really lovely lunch together and downed a bottle of Sauvignon. He hadn’t left a letter or anything. It was just that his frustration with insomnia had led him to overdo it.