Tom is Dead (19 page)

When Stella started school in the Blue Mountains, we'd spent as much time without Tom as time with Tom.

I always see Tom as four-and-a-half. His glorious body, fixed in age, but so pale that light seems to emanate from him, a white hole the opposite of a black hole. He runs, jumps, taps repeatedly on an object or a door like little boys and ghosts do, then stops for a moment, dreamy, contemplative.

Tom's life is like an upside-down tree, a tree when you stretch out in the grass and lose yourself in its foliage. In the openings where the light penetrates, and in the depths, the networks, the specks, in the deep shifting light, in the pollen. Where is the end, in foliage, in wind, in splashes of light? ‘Tom's life' is neither a cut thread, nor an enclosed whole. This beautiful mess, this life—they say about a child, ‘
c'est un enfant vivant
', alive and kicking.

One wet morning, in Vancouver, I'd dressed Tom in an old raincoat of Vince's. It was too big—I had to roll the sleeves up, and Tom whinged, he didn't like the colour or the sleeves being too long. And Stuart and I told him off one after the other, when one stopped the other started up, and Tom didn't cry, he never cried, he went quiet, his head hung furiously over those too-long sleeves, and we had to move him like a bundle, push him, carry him. In the lift where we would ritually blow each other kisses, that morning there were no kisses, and I remember thinking that if he died, if he and Stuart had an accident, this would be the last image I would have of him: beautiful, furious and so moving, in Vince's raincoat.

That morning, Stuart did have an accident and when the phone rang I thought the worst, a brief glimpse of misery. ‘Everything's fine,' Stuart repeated to me, Tom was drinking a Coke with the firemen. Later we would call this incident ‘The Accident'; Tom had a confused memory of the clatter and heroism of it all, and a sense of death-dodging superiority over Vince. And I'd told myself that in the mornings we prepare ourselves for the worst, that mornings send us signs— the spotless raincoat, the quarrel, the thoughts stained with blood—and these signs fade at night when we go to sleep, safe and sound in our beds.

The morning of the day of his death, not one sign, and that last image of him, in undies and T-shirt in the terrible heat, that last image of him on his bed, before his nap: nothing, no thoughts of death—how could I have possibly thought of death? Of death in the bleak afternoon, in the children's bedroom?

We talk about losing a child—I say it myself—as if we mislaid them in a wood. One day I went to the forest, Tom was with me, I turned around and he was no longer there.

Tom and the dragonflies. Tom waiting, hands reaching for the sky, so that the dragonflies would come and land on them. And, sometimes, they came.

When I wanted to take his hand I held tight to emptiness, a fistful of air crushed between my fingers.

My hand white-knuckled, I'd wanted to hold so tight.

The little red dragon in the middle of the river. Tom played behind me, he threw bread to the birds in the park, I hear his skipping footsteps. I turn around, nobody.

The crumbs had been eaten, the birds flown, the path was empty.

The city far away. The horizon stripped of sunshine. It all happened in Australia, one summer in Sydney.

Tom was walking in front of me on the pier. A cloud passed overhead, Tom had disappeared—there was only air in front of me, empty air, Tom was no longer there.

A while ago, I was writing when a market researcher turned up. I see myself opening the door, here, in the Blue Mountains—I see the badge, unfamiliar to me, of the Australian Demographic Institute. It's a survey about religion. I tick the box marked ‘atheist', not up for a fight, and the researcher crosses out all the following pages and accepts the cup of coffee that I offer him. Sitting opposite each other, we dip our lips regularly into the mugs, nodding and mute, on pause. In a few minutes time, I'll go back to my journal and he to his door-to-door, but for the moment he muses, metaphysical and skinny, stalled at my place. Our noses dive and come up again, you'd think we were birds. We hear ourselves breathing, we hear the other sniff in the burning steam. As long as he's there I don't think about anything, he absorbs a little of my sorrow. From door-to-door, a reliever of memory, a philanthropist without knowing it.

I read later that, following a trend that took off on the internet, twelve per cent of the population answered that they were neither Protestant, nor Catholic, nor Muslim, nor Seven-Day Adventist, nor Buddhist, nor Hindu, nor Animist, nor Mormon, but Jedi Knight, like in
Star Wars
. And I remembered the diversity of the living, the humorous side that humanity can have, its insolence, its resistance.

I remember the sensation of leaving the house, of dropping everything and going up the hill on foot all the way to the centre of town, saying hello to the shopkeepers, watching the hiking groups in front of the Blue Mountains Tourist Board. Belonging briefly to the world. The sun drifts towards this strange winter, dotted with hail that falls at the height of August on these mild mountains. I imagine doing good deeds in schools and retirement homes, I become one of those women in walking boots and straight skirts, who teach Aboriginal children to read and who benevolently cook biscuits in bulk. When the emptiness after two o'clock becomes intolerable, I go and have coffee with Fiona, the woman who runs the ski shop, just opposite.

Meeting up with Fiona—was it before or after my sister-in-law? I finally have a friend, she's the one who tells me about Rodin's idea that the raised, uneven material, ‘les reliefs', on the surface of the body are the tips of hidden bodies, shapes of which we only see the part that is emerging. ‘The inside of the body,' Fiona says to me, ‘remains unknown to us. We never have access to it; you'd need to be your own surgeon, or an artist maybe.' Or dead. I think of that film,
Night of the Living Dead
—I liked it before Tom, and I still like it. There are things that don't change, that resist death, like certain objects pass from one world to the other via the cracks, the tears; and certain books as well, like notches on the grip of a revolver, they remain.

Or maybe I thought about nothing that precise. No, nothing like that. I thought that each of the bumps beneath Fiona's clothes was the tip of some mysterious organ that I was not endowed with, her breasts in particular, beautiful, or reconstructed, my own body's bumps nothing but the visible tips of my grief. A different human matter.

No, nothing that precise. Tom, the inside of Tom, I would never know, I would've had to disembowel him, crack his skull, open up his ribcage like in an autopsy or open-heart surgery—like a gate, the two doors split open at the level of the sternum—to see what was inside. And yet I had built him, I had created him, my body had contributed to his body, to the forming of each of his organs, from the biggest to the smallest, from the heart to the lungs to the spleen to the tonsils, he had everything as it should be, he ran smoothly, Tom. The irrepressible force of his growth, the information carried by his DNA, by evolution, and I don't know what other force, the one that makes babies grow in women's wombs, puppies in dogs and jonquils out of jonquil bulbs—this force had made a bump in my stomach and this bump had been Tom. Not a baby, not just any baby in any woman: Tom, in Tom's mother.

Fiona fell feet first into the middle of my grief,
plouf
, with her speech about Rodin, she was out of context, everything she said was out of context. Yet some of her sentences resonated beneath my bumps, in the middle of my jumbled organs, in the straw, in the sawdust that I was made of. My body a butcher's shop, or the trampled floor of a stable. Maybe it had been years since I'd listened to anyone. Fiona chatted away and her sentences jostled against unformulated, untouched things. In the lake that I'd become, there were abutments, dykes, water catchments. Grief distanced itself for a moment, I kept it like a consciousness, a weight moored at the back of my head.
If she knew
…But she didn't know. She didn't need to know. She smiled gently at me, as if at someone nice and slightly handicapped. She had the right to be there, to tell me about her life, her misfortunes and her questions, without me dragging my son's corpse before her eyes.

Memory makes hollows and bumps. But, sometimes, below the uneven surface there is nothing. The pain withdraws into the
o
of Tom, red. Or sometimes, the huge submerged mass is undetectable from above. Or sometimes, memory raises up these flat images and shatters them like concrete slabs. And what's warm and alive flows once more.

A geography in motion, with landslides, erosion, a particular light upon an everyday landscape, or a word, or Rodin, or a simple martini…I'm in the bar of the Mountain Lounge with Fiona and I tell myself that he'd be fourteen now. Though, more and more often, I leave him in peace. Even though he takes up the whole sky. A permanent background, my colour, my climate, the true complexion of the world.

Traversed by images. A systolic rhythm. My heart beats, Tom, Tom. I get up, I can't stay at home any longer, I look out the window, and I see him.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
What is my suffering for, if it's of no use to him? If it's not the coin in his mouth, if it's not paying for anything? What would I have said to him, given to him, if I had known, if a
goodbye
had been possible? Wherever he is—I know that he's nowhere—wherever he is, I send him a little each day, to my child who stayed in the homeland. He turns around and says hello to me, in the lift, wearing his raincoat. We blow kisses to each other, fair weather, foul weather. Maybe that's the last image. Tom turning around to say hello to me, fair weather foul weather, come rain or shine. And not Tom in a Spiderman T-shirt, given his marching orders at naptime, and not, no, not Stella in her cot (with Vince finally asleep, I was going to be able to rest a little) and not Tom getting up again, grizzly and sweaty,
I'm too hot
, without any idea of the weather, or what time it is (from Vancouver to Sydney in a single flight) and not me, shouting.

Vancouver. An Indian summer so scorching that the lake only reaches our ankles. I'm with Stuart and Tom. No doubt Vince and Stella are there, surely Stella is in my arms, but I can't see them. I see Tom in front of me, and Stuart. Tom's carrying a yellow inflatable toy in the shape of a duck, but I know that's wrong—later I found an inflatable toy in the cupboard: a green turtle.

We've come for a swim, but the lake isn't deep enough. So Stuart heads into the river. The water is dark behind him, the disturbed silt swirls. I think about this abstract thing we have in common, he and I, being born far from where we live. He drags the water behind him swaying his hips, and the trees close in around his head. He pushes back the vines, he straddles tree trunks. He moves away, arms half raised: a GI,
Apocalypse Now
.

Dragonflies. Stuart held out his hands and the dragon flies landed on them. It was difficult for Tom. Staying still waiting for dragonflies, between the frogs, the trees, water running around his ankles, all those dams to build, and the fish, the small swirls of silt—the world was too desirable to focus for very long on only one of its creatures, for such an uncertain result.

Stuart, his hands trembling with blue dragonflies, two big blue flowers at the end of his fingers. Though, from time to time, a dragonfly landed in Tom's outstretched hand, as if the world were gentle.

So Tom made himself into a statue. Gentle dragonflies, big as his hand, the body electric blue, the wings vivid red, the head green. As if the world were a carnival. Tom motionless for a second, eyes marvelling at the offering, marvelling at the world, blue eyes matching the dragonfly in the harmony of the world, wide with joy and with exquisite fear. ‘
Maman
!' Tom whispers. A photo from my memory. Where are Vince and Stella? They are the ones who have disappeared.

I don't know where Tom is. I know that he's dead, I know that he's not anywhere, but what about chronology?
When
is he? Did it all really happen one day? One stupid day, one day on the calendar? It seems to me that this information still hasn't reached the slowest areas in my brain, and that I will die believing Tom is alive, given that Tom has always been alive, he's never been anything but alive. Tom will die at the end of this grief, with its highs and lows, its tides and episodes; Tom is dead because of this grief. It was before the Tasmanian devils, before Fiona, before
still
, before that beautiful day at the beach, but it's also unending, fair weather, foul weather, messy, jumbled, rising and falling beneath my skull, Tom dying, horizon after horizon. And my mouth is full of a salty ocean, my mouth is immense and empty, lapping and huge.

Vince will leave home soon. My mother offered to have him—a year in France, at the University of Rouen. Stella is still here. Apart from being the mother of a dead child, I have little idea of who I am.

Maybe, by dying at four-and-a-half, Tom, fulfilled all that he was, because dead, he's that too. I don't know how to say this. I see my hand held out and then dropped, and Tom at mid-distance—he doesn't hold his hand out to me, no, but he raises it a little, in a strange gesture. Neither goodbye nor wait. A small signal, at the end of his fingers. He's half turned, he doesn't come, he doesn't move away; he's there without being there.

There's the image of Vince when he leaves, when we take him to the airport and he's half-impatience, half-affection; the image of a sulky Stella, who's still with us, still a bit too young, still having to put up with her parents. And Tom, Tom missing between the two, Tom much younger than them, four-and-a-half years old plus ten years, Tom whom I'm trying to leave in peace, to whom I'm trying to give the right to his death.

I'd sent him off to have his nap; he'd protested. I'd locked the door to the apartment, and the windows, as I always do when I want to sleep, and I'd lain down, exhausted, all those boxes, three young children, and the jet lag, and Stella monstrous, and Tom who wasn't sleeping well. I'd forgotten the sunroom. When I woke up, in the bedroom there was Vince, there was Stella, there was no Tom. In the sunroom, the window was open, I leant out, and I saw him.