One of the by-products of human language development, I told the 27th annual gathering of European linguists in Berlin the morning after my mother died, was a heightened awareness of mental activity and consequently a flattering illusion of inner presence and power. Whatever the external reality, we all have the impression that we can think what we wish.
If this was not quite what members of the Society of European Linguists were used to hearing, at least it had made them sit up. It was nine-thirty and the auditorium was packed.
Whereas the truth was, I went on, savouring an excellent PA system, that language was above all an appropriation of the mind on the part of the community. ‘We could think, if you like,’ I told my fellow linguists, ‘of first-language acquisition as a form of baptism, a welcoming into the community, a token of belonging and a cross one has to bear.’
‘By all means take a good long look,’ I had told the Security lady at Heathrow the evening before. ‘In another year or so, these will be all the rage.’
She held the anal-massage tool at arm’s length, as if she expected it to smell.
‘And what does it do for you, sir?’
My mobile had begun to trill.
‘Eases tension,’ I said.
‘With respect, sir,’ the lady handed the instrument back, ‘you’re not the best advertisement for the product.’
She had seen my hand shake as I fumbled and dropped the phone.
‘Because I haven’t started using it yet,’ I told her. ‘Wait until you see me next time.’
She smiled. ‘Good luck, sir.’
Deborah asked, ‘How’s your mother?’
‘She died, Deb.’
I was walking through the Duty Free store.
‘My God, I’m sorry,’ Deborah said.
‘At the end it was very peaceful. With all the family round the bed. Like something out of Dickens.’
Was it because there had been so many people at the bedside that it had seemed okay for me to dash off? If I had been there alone, I surely wouldn’t have done that.
‘I’m glad.’ She hesitated. ‘Tom, I just called to ask if you’d seen Charlie. The police came to talk to him; it seems they’d given him an appointment, but he didn’t show. He isn’t answering his phone.’
I told her Charlie had dropped by at the hospice and given me a phone number to ring; immediately Deborah asked what number that was. Whose? Could I give it to her? I fished the Post-it from my back pocket, then changed my mind.
‘Sorry, I can’t find it right now, Deb. I must have put it in my bag or something. I’ll text you later.’
In the departure lounge, snacking at Caffè Nero, I found myself enjoying the thought that I hadn’t had to cancel my conference, as if this was an important personal victory, and at the same time a little perturbed by the odd feeling that Mother hadn’t actually died either, that the whole dying scene had been a dream; nothing had happened; or as if only my cancelling the conference would have made her death real. Then once again the phone was ringing and this time David’s voice asked, ‘All right, mate?’ which was how David always began phone conversations. ‘Condolences over your mum. Debbie just told me.’
‘Que sera, sera,’ I said.
‘I read that as cautious optimism,’ he observed.
I laughed.
‘Aside from which?’ he asked. ‘It’s been a while, hasn’t it?’
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ I told him. ‘More than fine.’
‘Reaping the fruits of legal laceration?’
‘Yep. I’m deliriously happy, if you want to know, Dave, with a charming young lady. But tell me about married life.’
‘Way-ay-ayt a minute!’ David cried. ‘Do I hear crowing on the other end of this line?’
‘Cawing,’ I confessed. ‘I was hoping for a pint, to debrief.’
‘Pretty?’
‘Beautiful.’
‘Hmm, intelligent? Creative, perceptive and, of course, sensitive?’
This was an old routine.
‘Are you still in hospital, Dave? How are you doing?’
The PA announced our flight was ready to board. I had to gather my stuff, and the phone left my ear a moment.
‘Would be good to see you,’ he was saying.
I told him my situation. We could speak after the conference tomorrow.
‘That was quick.’
‘What?’
‘Deathbed to Departures in nine minutes.’
‘Not much point hanging around,’ I said.
‘After the horse has bolted.’
‘The chickens hatched.’
‘Joking aside, mate,’ David said, ‘My sympathy.’
‘I guess it hasn’t sunk in,’ I told him. ‘But this is a big conference. Society of European Linguists. Inaugural address. Proper money, if nothing else.’
‘What else could there be?’ he laughed and said he was hoping to be discharged the following morning. ‘I’m afraid young Charlie doesn’t play Queensberry. He really crocked me up.’
‘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, living 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.