In Extremis by Tim Parks

Author:Tim Parks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

XII

Even by my standards, it was a bad night I spent in the guest room of the Claygate Hospice. There were twitches, sudden visions, old voices, echoes, giddiness. At one point I know I caught myself humming the baptismal hymn. In token that thou shalt not flinch. Why was I humming the baptismal hymn, I wondered, the night of Mother’s agony? Why not Abide with me, fast falls the eventide? In some strange state between sleep and panic I saw turbulent seas frothing with sewage. I saw a cattle-ship foundering and animals sliding about the deck, bellowing to be free. I saw a grasshopper push its way out through the eyes of a toad. I heard drumming hooves and my own heart humming, We print the cross upon thee here, and stamp thee His alone. Until finally a voice woke me from my sleeplessness. An imperative cut the air of the Claygate Hospice. Get up, Tom Sanders. It’s time to get up.

So I got up. Who knows why one wakes when one does, why one imagines a voice has spoken? Extraordinarily, I didn’t need to go to the bathroom. It was shortly before seven. Showering, I had no idea whether I had slept or not. Yet I felt good now. I felt that yesterday could be showered away, that my pains could only improve. Perhaps I had slept. The cattle-ship was a dream, it must have been, the animals bellowing as they thrashed in sewage. A nightmare. Perhaps the organism is simply kick-started by another day, regardless of whether or how you’ve slept.

At once I was eager to get down to Mother. Her veto has lapsed now, I thought. Mother hadn’t wanted me to sit beside her through the night, to face the night’s demons with her, but she would be happy to see me now. She would be feeling better and we could talk a little. The morning was always a good time to talk to Mother. I would come downstairs to find her in her recliner, Bible or prayer book in hand. I’m speaking about that summer, of course. In Mother’s tiny Hounslow house the stairs were actually in the sitting room, so I would see her from above, over the banister, her grey hair bowed in prayer, or reading the Collect for the Day. One felt surrounded by prayerfulness in the early morning at Mother’s house, before she started humming. Before the cuckoo cuckooed eight.

In the kitchen, breakfast was already laid. The cereal was on the table. The Brazil nuts. The milk in a china milk jug. The toast rack, the tea cosy. These were the kind of objects my mother surrounded herself with. Milk jugs, tea cosies, toast racks, serviette rings, cuckoo clocks. And in the morning one could talk easily of humdrum things. I would ask her if she had slept well and she would say, So-so, which meant she had hardly slept at all, and she would ask me how I had slept and

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