by Tim Parks
‘Hello, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’m a friend of David Pool’s. I left a message on your answer service a few days ago.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, I think you have the wrong number. This is the Hounslow Funeral Parlour.’
I closed the call, closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep.
XVIII
‘Excuse me, I’m looking for David Poole.’
I was at David’s bedside when a shadow at the door made me look up. It was a woman in her late twenties perhaps, small, buxom, with long, straight brown hair framing a round face, a snub nose, a generous mouth.
‘I’m looking for David Poole,’ she repeated.
‘You’ve found him.’
I was sitting between David and the door. She came in a little way. When she saw his face she stopped. There was tape on his nose, a tube in the nostrils.
‘Is his wife here?’
I looked at my watch. ‘She’ll be taking over at four.’
The woman stepped round me and crouched down. She was wearing a grey wool coat, unbuttoned, a roll-necked sweater and jeans.
‘Davy,’ she whispered.
She put a hand on his cheek.
I could see the fullness of her thighs as she crouched.
‘What happened?’
‘He took some pills.’
As I spoke, a nurse passed the door, talking. The woman started and got to her feet. She stood looking down at him, her mouth trembling, then again crouched down and caressed his cheek. ‘Oh, Davy.’ Her shoulders began to shake. In a single rapid movement she turned and hurried out.
Then I went to the undertaker’s to see Mother at last. That same afternoon, returning from the hospital. Time was running out. The funeral was on Saturday. Just as I was crossing the High Street from the station, a young couple went in ahead of me. A couple with two young children, one in a stroller. The door opened and closed. It was a dark glass door that you couldn’t quite see through. I had finally decided to go in and see my mother face to face. To confront my mother, in her blue tailleur and the bonnet with the peacock brooch. But I should wait, surely, I thought, until this other family came out. I didn’t want to be in there with others. With crying children.
I peered through the smoked glass. The fact is I hadn’t phoned to book a viewing. Somehow my calling the undertaker by accident, when I had thought I was calling the number Charlie had given me, had made it more difficult for me to phone again afterwards. In any event, the only way I was ever going to see Mother, I realised, would not be by appointment, but on impulse, rushing into the undertaker’s from the street. Hello, Mum. It’s Tom!
I paced up and down in the High Street, waiting for the young family to come out. Traffic was heavy, the pavement busy, and two young women in scarves and bubble jackets were asking people to sign up for some dentist’s deal, where you could have your teeth whitened cut-price. No, thank you, I said every time I paced past them. They had set up a small stand with before-and-after photos. My teeth are white enough, I said.
After five minutes an elderly man using an umbrella as a walking stick also stopped at the dark glass door. He rang, and it opened for him. You had to ring. I hadn’t noticed that. How many stiffs could they have in there, I wondered? The place didn’t look much bigger than my mother’s house. Or did they keep the corpses elsewhere, in a refrigerated warehouse, and only bring them when people made appointments? In which case, I might not find her even if I went in.
I retired to Costa Coffee across the street. The day was blowy and spitting rain, but I sat outside anyway. To keep watch on the undertaker’s door. Surely if they only brought the corpses when people made arrangements to view them, I would have seen a coffin arriving from time to time, I thought. Or departing. And so far I had seen no sign of a hearse.
Over my coffee, staring at the dark glass door of the undertaker’s, I remembered that Mother loved stopping for a cappuccino when she was out doing her shopping, or visiting the folk she helped – ‘folk’ was her word – but Costa hadn’t arrived on the High Street until she was already too ill to get out. All the coffee places round here are hopeless, she would say, but she went to them anyway. Mother was always on the lookout for small pleasures that could not be construed as sinful.
Now the door opened and the young father appeared with his two small children, but without the mother. The mother had stayed no doubt because it was a parent of hers who had died. She wanted to be alone in her grief. I stared at the glass door as it swung to and realised that there must be a service entrance at the back. Of course. If only to bring the coffins in the first place, and then load them into the hearse for the final journey. Quite suddenly I was afflicted by the impression that Mother wasn’t really dead. She can’t be. Or she was dead, but alive too. She was alive in her coffin, in the undertaker’s.
I needed a pee. I drained my coffee, gathered the crumbs of my cinnamon twist and stood up. For a moment I thought I might use the bathroom in Costa, but decided against. The urge was merely psychological. I need to get this behind me, I thought. As I crossed the High Street, the glass door swung open and the old man with the umbrella came out arm-in-arm with the young mother. Apparently the two were together. They had made an appointment to see the same corpse and arrived separately from their separate homes. Now they were chatting happily. Seeing the dear departed had cheered them up.
The coast was clear and I could have gone in, or at least rung the bell. Instead I hurried past the dark glass and turned right off the High Street, then right again. Sure enough there was a narrow access street lined with garage doors. A hearse was parked tight against the right-hand wall.
I waited at the corner of the street. The wind was chill, but I had my hat and scarf. The need to go to the bathroom wasn’t going away, but it wasn’t getting worse, either. I thought again of my mother turning up at this rather downbeat undertaker’s to negotiate the terms of her body’s disposal. Had she shopped around? And I remembered that when Father died, it had fallen to me, as the only child on the spot, to identify an undertaker’s and take her there. And when the man started talking about rose trees and plaques in the crematorium garden, it had been me who said, Put him in the river, Mum, where he liked to row. Put Dad in the river. And she had said: Perhaps you’re right, Tom. Dad loved the river.
The food in the freezer was running out. I would need to do a spot of shopping myself soon. I walked back to Mother’s house via the Barclays cash dispenser and Tesco’s, bought fresh salad, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, fresh cheese, fresh meat, dumped the lot on the kitchen table, saluted my father’s photo in the living room, mounted the steep stairs as an eagle, visited the latrine, nodded to Bangladesh, went into Mother’s bedroom and prepared to use Dr Sharp’s anal-massage wand. As I pulled the rubber glove over the shaft, the expression ‘arming a harpoon’ came to mind. From Moby-Dick perhaps. How do you arm a harpoon?
But nothing would distract me this time. I lay down on the bed and turned off my phone. Then turned it on again and phoned the shrink in Madrid. Her phone was off. I didn’t leave a message on her answer service. You didn’t really want to speak to her, I told myself. You are relieved she didn’t answer. I turned the phone off again. My computer was in the back room. I got up and went to fetch it. Perhaps what I should really have bought was a fresh tube of Vaseline, but this thought would neither distract nor delay me. Otherwise there would be no end. I took off my jeans and underwear, then once again lay down on Mother’s eiderdown. You should change the sheets, I told myself. No. I tied the rubber glove off beyond the stopper, smeared it with ten-year-old unguent, raised and spread my knees, carefully sited the wand where it had to be sited and prepared to plant it in my fundament.
Every muscle in my body tightened to resist intrusion, to resist this strange snorkel affair, Dr Sharp’s harpoon. ‘Savour that resistance,’ Tom Ingram laconically suggested. I had his chinless face onscreen. ‘Don’t fight it.’
I pressed gently. All at once the wand w
as as if sucked upwards into the viscera. It seemed to happen of its own accord. The Vaseline had done its job and, with only the slightest pressure, the wand was in. Downstairs the cuckoo clock cuckooed. I burst out laughing. It was nothing, Mum. It was a joke.
‘We’re not going to do any exploring or massaging,’ Tom went on. ‘Not today. We’re just going to insert the wand, leave it in place for a minute or two, then very carefully withdraw it.’
Feeling pleased with myself, I disobeyed orders and wiggled the wand a little from side to side. This was muscle that had never been touched before. Against orders, I wiggled the wand a bit more. Everything was tender, but not exactly sore. I pulled and pushed and manipulated the wand between my legs so that the ball inside pressed here and there. The wand was a gearstick shifting in my innards. It saved my life, the Portuguese paediatrician told the Dutch lady physiotherapists. Perhaps I could release the clutch and get moving, I thought. I wondered how the handsome man had spent the night after the talk. Do not try to hit a home-run, Dr Sharp had warned. I pushed down gently on the wand’s handle and again it seemed to move of its own accord. Just a hint of resistance, then it popped out. It wasn’t even dirty. Pulling my jeans back on, I felt surprisingly relaxed. Perhaps I had done something right at last. Taking the computer into the back bedroom, I immediately fired off an email to my sister.
‘Sis,’ I wrote, ‘if it’s one of those funerals where the nearest and dearest are invited to stand up and say a few words about the deceased, I’d really like the chance to do that.’
I then went downstairs, ate a heavy lunch and slept all afternoon.
I had sent this email to my sister on Monday, but received no reply for almost forty-eight hours. On the Tuesday, checking to see that I really had sent it, I was surprised to find I had used the word ‘deceased’. Eventually, Wednesday evening, I got a reply, not from my sister, but from my brother-in-law, executor of course of my mother’s last will and testament. ‘Mum specifically said she didn’t want any eulogies at her funeral,’ he said, and went on to explain that the ceremony would be officiated by the vicar of St Peter and St Paul, Hounslow, who had been informed of my mother’s wishes. ‘As you know,’ my brother-in-law concluded, ‘Mum wrote the funeral programme herself, and my son-in-law, who’s a whizz with these things, is getting it printed out with photos, and so on. Hopefully it will look very posh, for a proper sending-off.’
‘What I’d planned to say,’ I responded at once, ‘was not exactly a eulogy.’
My brother-in-law did not reply. He had a business to run, of course.
Each morning, now, I spent half an hour with Dr Sharp’s wand. It seemed important to do the deed on Mother’s bed. Or at least not inappropriate. Perhaps it was a kind of un-baptism, I thought, or un-birth even. I put the computer on the bedspread beside me and had Tom Ingram talk me through the explorations of my pelvic floor. His twangy, laconic voice was an adrenalin-damper of the first order. ‘We’re just managing our insides with a stick,’ he said. ‘The same way you might use a stick to scratch your back. It’s boring, ordinary stuff.’
And yet it was mysterious. Eyes closed, moving the wand fraction by fraction across the muscle behind the abdomen, it seemed I was exploring the dark side of the moon, or the deep inside of myself. Every slight shift of pressure might trigger a pain that was also, obscurely, an emotion. Oceans of fearfulness were frozen here. Sunken hulks of guilt. Did I really feel better afterwards? Did I pee more easily? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure it mattered. Actually, I wasn’t sure anything had happened at all, except my having finally decided to do something I thought I never would. This in itself cheered me up.
At lunch with Deborah in the hospital canteen, she said that Charlie had split up with his friend Stephen and come back down to his old room in the main house. ‘It’s such a relief that he’s himself again,’ she said. ‘He speaks very highly of you,’ she went on. ‘Says he’s eternally grateful.’
‘For what?’
‘Whatever you said helped him.’
It was curious, watching Deborah in the humdrum bustle of an NHS canteen. She wore her class about her like a sci-fi deflector-shield. Her table was a protected environment, absolutely distinct from the hubbub all around. She lifted her eyes to mine, batting long lashes. ‘And I’m sure you’re helping David too, you know.’
As far as I could see, my friend was utterly remote in his barbiturate coma.
I ate fresh food now. Fruit and salad and fresh meat. I sat up writing late into the night. The Telecom trucks came and went. I had the mad idea that when I had written all this down, I would give it to Elsa. And with that gift, all indecision would end.
‘I’m writing something for you,’ I told her, ‘something you won’t want to read.’
‘I can’t wait till you’re back, Tommy,’ Elsa said. ‘It’s been such a long time.’
‘I’ll arrive Friday a.m.,’ my brother wrote now. He hadn’t written for three days. He would fly from LA to Heathrow and would return immediately after the funeral, Saturday evening.
‘That’s crazy! You won’t even be here forty-eight hours. Come Thursday, stay at least till Monday.’
He had booked the flights, my brother replied. He had a lot on and did not like being away from the family. ‘I presume there is somewhere to sleep.’
I spent an hour on Booking.com and eventually settled on the Ibis in Hounslow. I was in an Ibis phase. A room for the twins, a room for my daughter and her man, a room for my brother and myself. My sister’s family could have Mother’s house. It was the usual Sanders split.
‘I’ll pay,’ I told my brother.
‘Ibis?’ he wrote. ‘How appropriate.’
‘Why so?’
‘Didn’t the Egyptians stuff ibises and place them on guard outside tombs?
‘How could a stuffed bird guard anything?’ I objected. At the same time I felt I should have chosen a more expensive place. I was still trying to save money. I should have set us up in a four-star suite in Richmond with champagne beside the Jacuzzi.
‘I’ve put the twins on the train.’
It was hardly necessary for my wife to phone to tell me this. The twins could perfectly well have called themselves or sent a text. It was the first time we had spoken since the separation. She sounded perfectly relaxed.
‘I’m looking forward to seeing them,’ I said. ‘I’ll be at the station.’
She asked me how I was, and I told her about David’s attempted suicide.
‘Poor Deborah, she waits all those years to marry and this is how he celebrates.’
Then she said if I felt like it, I could always travel back with the twins on the train to Edinburgh. I could stay a night or two and fly to Madrid from there. There were a couple of things we really ought to discuss.
It was the invitation I had foreseen.
‘We could have dinner with the boys. They’d be thrilled.’
‘We’ll see,’ I said.
There was a brief pause, then my wife sighed. ‘Listen, Tom, about your mum, I just thought I should tell you I’ve forgiven her. May she rest in peace.’
I was thrown.
‘Forgiven her for what?’
There was another sigh. ‘The horrible things she wrote to me after you went.’
I knew nothing of this.
‘Anyway, I hope the funeral goes okay. It will be good for the boys to have the experience, I suppose.’
As she said this there was the beep of another phone call arriving and when I closed the conversation, extremely unsettled by what she had told me, I found a number that looked familiar and dialled it at once.
‘I’m the person who came to the hospital the other day,’ the voice said quietly. ‘You’re Tom, aren’t you? Can we meet?’
‘Do you have a name?’
‘I will when we meet.’
I explained that I was on my way to pick up my children from King’s Cross. ‘I’m afraid Saturday is my mother’s funeral.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘There’s no need to be. She lived to a ripe old age.’
I had been wondering when I would use that expression.
‘Perhaps we should speak on the phone,’ I suggested.
She hesitated. ‘I don’t think I’m up to talking on the phone.’
I gave her my mother’s address.
‘But you’ll be there with your family.’
‘My sons today, the tribe tomorrow.’
The hour I now had before setting off to Euston to pick up the twins was actually my last chance to see Mother, before being constantly in other people’s company until the coffin lid was screwed down on Saturday morning. But instead of phoning the undertaker’s, I found myself looking up the website of St Peter and St Paul, Hounslow, as if checking out a conference centre where I was to speak, even though of course I had been told I must not speak on this occasion.
The heart of Christ in the heart of Hounslow, read the slogan. The site had the same feel as the noticeboard in the porch of my father’s church forty years ago. Wednesday Coffee Mornings, Friday Prayer Evenings, The Praise & Joy Service every third Sunday of the month. After service, my father, in his robes, would stand in the porch to shake people’s hands as they left, rather as an air hostess says goodbye to those disembarking her flight. And when I appeared from the nave and passed him, to get out at last into the fresh air, we would exchange a glance that had a strange complicity and embarrassment, as if we both knew, but must not say, that this was all theatre, that our real lives were at home, in the kitchen, at the dinner table. Or as if he both envied my youth and freedom and feared for me too. I had not remembered this exchange of glances with my father for many years. We both sensed, I suppose, that I would soon be leaving not just the building, but the Church and the faith in the broadest sense, and this understanding somehow brought us closer in a way it did not with my mother. I came down the two steps from the nave into the porch and looked at my father in his robes and he smiled at me with a sad smile that meant, I love you, Thomas, and will not oppose you.