Tom is Dead

by Marie Darrieussecq

  PRAISE FOR MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ

  ‘There are very few writers who may have changed my perception of the world, but Darrieussecq is one of them.’ The Times

  ‘I love the way Marie Darrieussecq writes about the world as if it were an extension of herself and her feelings.’

  J.M.G. LE CLÉZIO, Nobel Laureate for Literature, 2008

  ‘This savvy young writer plays her cards beautifully.’

  New York Times

  ‘A thousand times more inventive than any British writer of her generation.’ Irish Times

  ‘The internationally celebrated author who illuminates those parts of life other writers cannot or do not want to reach.’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Her gifts are dazzling.’ Observer

  ‘In Tom Is Dead, Marie Darrieussecq gives us a novel that is more than moving. We are obliged to confront our own humanity.’ L’Humanité

  ‘She makes all those daring young men of letters look very tame indeed.’ Herald (Glasgow)

  ‘As ever, Marie Darrieussecq is a step ahead.’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Tom Is Dead is powerful; when one has finished reading it one feels it absolutely needed to exist.’ NANCY HUSTON

  ‘The French enfant terrible Marie Darrieussecq has been much overlooked in Anglophone circles—a scandal.’ The Times

  ‘This is indeed writing on a grand scale in a slim volume.’

  The Guardian

  ‘Tom Is Dead should be terrifying; it is deeply moving. And so heart-rending, it’s hard to believe it’s fiction.’ Ouest France

  MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ was born in 1969 in Bayonne, France. She is a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her debut novel, Pig Tales, was published in thirty-four countries and became the most popular first novel in France since the 1950s. Her second novel, My Phantom Husband, became an immediate bestseller. Three other novels have also been translated into English, Breathing Underwater, A Brief Stay with the Living, and White. Marie Darrieussecq now lives in Paris with her husband and children. Tom est Mort was nominated for the Prix Fémina and the Prix Goncourt.

  LIA HILLS is a poet, novelist and translator. Her debut novel, The Beginner’s Guide to Living, is also published by Text Publishing. Lia was born in New Zealand and now lives in Melbourne.

  TOM IS DEAD

  Marie Darrieussecq

  Translated by Lia Hills

  The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia www.textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Marie Darrieussecq 2009

  Copyright © Lia Hills 2009

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in French as Tom est Mort by P.O.L editeur, 2007 First published in English by The Text Publishing Company, 2009

  Page design by Susan Miller

  Cover design by W.H. Chong

  Typeset in Plantin Light 11/15.75pt by J&M Typesetting

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Darrieussecq, Marie.

  Tom is dead / Marie Darrieussecq.

  ISBN: 9781921520310 (pbk.)

  843.914

  TOM IS DEAD

  Tom is dead. I write this sentence.

  Tom has been dead for ten years. Ten years now. But the date isn’t branded into me with a hot iron, as they say. When Tom died, in fact, I was at a stage where I didn’t really know what day it was. It’s not the same for my husband. The date is branded with a hot iron into his mind, he says. His life turned upside down around this date. Me too, my life turned upside down. But these are not words I’d say.

  For example, the dates to do with my children, my other children, I have to consciously think about them. I tend to mix them up; my children were all born in spring, like the young of otters or koalas or Tasmanian devils, or lots of other animals; I’m only naming the animals that interest me. May, June. The birthday season. It’s coming up soon. I want to write: if we are still alive. It’s a sentence that came to me often after Tom’s death. I said it like a discovery, nothing really astounding, but like a fact I was unaware of until then. If we are still alive. Later on, I said this sentence because I believed it. I also said it to provoke, but I don’t say it anymore, it wounds people. And then it became a tic, a thought tic, it punctuated my reasoning, my internal monologue, all my plans (the plans had come back, we’d discovered this too: that plans could come back, that we were capable of making them again).

  I tried different therapies, support groups, and I never got Tom back. Even this: refusing to go into mourning, is part of the work, it’s plotted by graphs. When you mourn, you have work to do, even if you don’t want to do it. In this, my husband was like me. And if I begin this journal, maybe it’s because he and I are at the same point now, for once, at the same point at the same time. Synchronous. He’s the one who says this, we are synchronous. Almost together.

  The mourning that they describe is a natural process that disgusts me. A digestion. You enter into it and you move forward, whether you want to or not, as if through a succession of intestines. Tom’s death passes through our bodies. We haven’t finished yet; I’m not saying it takes ten years. I’m not saying anything at all. Do I suffer less than before? I don’t know the equation. Maybe I suffer less often. Tom’s death is a beast that raises its head from time to time, a shuddering dragon, the earth heaves, its head sticks up. A geography created by a beast, in our minds. After an earthquake you refer to ‘shock waves’.

  I’m not saying it takes ten years. Tom was four-and-a-half, so what are the determining factors? His age, the time spent together? The type of death? Here too, there are graphs and gauges involved. And sayings that circulate. It takes four seasons. It takes a whole life. It takes half the time spent together—a saying about the widowed. A baby lives for two hours, so his parents take one hour to get over it? It’s impossible to quantify dead children. That’s why I have nothing to say. The death of children. It precedes the death of the parents, so nothing adds up anymore, nothing makes sense anymore. The world’s the wrong way round. Support groups, at least, allowed me to see the others, the other mourners, what they looked like, and for us to utter together incoherent ramblings that no one else listens to.

  My husband, Stuart, is really against support groups, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about. This child, we made him together, he says. By made he also means bore, begat, he carries Tom and his pain. There’s nothing biological in what he’s saying, nothing male or female, it’s purely parental. Mourning, this word that I’ve accepted because it’s a beautiful word, that makes me think of mimosa, marigold, mourning flowers— mourning is undertaken like having a child. We still have three children, Tom, Vince, and Stella. Vince, Stella, and Tom.

  I am forty-five years old and this child occupied four-and-a-half years of my life, plus nine months. I don’t know what that means.

  Tom’s death neither confirms nor refutes anything. It doesn’t enter into any system. Tom’s death taught me nothing. I have unlearned. I’m not even another me. My melancholy has come into itself, my adolescent melancholy, my old melancholy. ‘I told you so’, says my melancholy. There’s a lot of this sniggering.

  Before, he w
as called Tom Winter, now he’s called Tom is dead. He’s been dead much longer than he was alive. My little dead boy. I’m not saying that I’ve kept my sanity.

  Sometimes I have the impression that Tom is exactly in the middle of my life. As if I’d had him when I was twenty. A before and an after of equal length. I carry him, in the middle of my life. I carry him in the middle of my life and he lives there, in a hollowed enclosure.

  Yesterday, we went to the beach. The day before yesterday, actually, given that I’ve been keeping this diary for two days now. We drove east for a long time to find waves. It’s the moment when Vince turns into a kind of elf. His wetsuit reflects the sun and he resembles a slippery, muscular creature. With the sun behind him, his edges are eaten by the light. His silhouette disappears against the sky. He still agrees to come out with us on Sundays. He could do with some friends, if you ask me, friends to go surfing, to hang out with. And Stella spent the whole time sitting under the beach umbrella, as usual, to protect her white skin. My Stella all in black, with her mittens, sulkily watching her brother surf. Black mittens and big black shoes, despite the heat, just to be like her friend. There was nothing worrying about this. Our children were growing well, our children had grown well. And it was in this way, two days ago on the beach, that I thought about Tom. Or rather, I didn’t think about him. He was a sort of diffuse nevertheless in the background. Somewhere with us on the beach, but very distant, or very small, reduced to a grain of sand, or to the enormous mass of grains of sand. A background, an obvious fact. Do we think about the sand when we go to the beach? It seems to me that we think about the sea, that we turn towards the sea. Except maybe when you’re a child, armed with a bucket and rake.

  They don’t want to make it worse. Our two wonderful children, our two intuitive children, mediums, in their lit glory on the beach—yes, they want to spare us. Stella and Vince, alive. Immortal. As if death strikes only once. As if, in some way, we’d already made our offering. But to whom, to what? Ten years dwelling on emptiness.

  The day when every memory I have of Tom is coloured by his death—is no longer isolated from it—perhaps only then will I know that he is dead. His whole life will be taken up by his death. Then in a way he will have the right to die. This will be his death, and not my death, Tom’s mother. I don’t know how to say this. He was four-and-a-half years old.

  Alone with his death. Maybe it’s possible. Maybe death is also a childish thing. His dying like a grown-up. Must you be an adult to face it? That children are mortal is something I was unaware of, before. But I have very few memories from before. Was it like the day before yesterday at the beach? A world where objects were objects, where their shadow was a shadow? Where my children were my children? The vanilla ice-cream that Vince handed me tasted of vanilla ice-cream and brought back no memories, no little boy with a dripping chin, mesmerised at the Vancouver Maritime Museum, no, there were no precise, painful memories. Except this staining of things, this sort of shadow, this ulterior motive behind the world…yet, for a whole day, yes, until we got home, I stopped seeing us as survivors.

  The world was intact. And we were inside it, included in this completeness of the world. Nothing had ever happened, on that beach and in this world.

  Maybe there are units of memory like there are units of language. Maybe memory can be divided into smaller and smaller fragments until the nucleus is found, the molecules. Memory is not one long narrative. Memory’s words are recollections of words, recollections of sayings. Memory’s images and sensations only exist through us. To put them into words is like trying to recount a dream, and Tom is caught up in that jumble. There’s nothing left of him but that.

  If these micro-elements of memory exist, little blocks, like Lego, the same for everybody, then on that beach even the tiniest of these molecules seemed filtered by Tom’s death.

  For ages, it seemed to me that other people lived a lie. They were unaware that death is the shadow of every object in the world. It was so obvious, yet nobody saw it. Vince and Stella also carried their double, their death, wherever they went. I took sleeping pills but even this chemical sleep was affected. The colour didn’t fade. A colour endowed with physical traits, a weight, a consistency, a kind of constriction of everything, space, air, throat, chest, stomach…A sound as well, that came and went, piercing then hushed, always present. Can’t you hear? Can’t you see? They’re deaf and blind, those others. Non-existent. Ghosts. My knowledge was incommunicable, a minus knowledge, an opening that let nothingness in. My knowledge of black holes was making the world disappear. The emptiness was growing. The bottomless pit.

  At the beach, the day before yesterday, I relaxed for the first time in ten years. I was on holiday. I didn’t think about Tom anymore. For an hour or two, it’s true, I watched Vince and Stella like a mother watches her children in a moment of sun-drenched serenity. Set against the background of that vague understanding shared in the west: death as a distant horizon, a boundary, in the face of the beauty of bodies and the serenity of the scenery. You let out a sigh. Your shoulders are loose, breath relaxed, you exhale. I felt this the day before yesterday: this experience of a world without death. A pause, where you’re nothing more than the beach, and the waves, and the stunning beauty of Stella and Vince. I’d managed to achieve, I believe, this state of rest: the blues that happy people feel. The heartrending side of happiness.

  When Tom died, Vince was seven and Stella was eighteen months old. Sometimes I feel like I have had four children, Vince, Stella, Tom, and then dead Tom. Or in this order: Vince, Tom, Stella, and dead Tom. I was thirty-five. My parents were alive. The world was turning the wrong way. Time was going back to its source. I was constantly cold, in the beginning, a sensation of cold wind on my skin, an icy wind in midsummer—in the depths of the earth there was a gaping hole.

  I can’t begin. In my head, everything revolves around Tom and ideas lead to other ideas like the escalators in the shopping centres in Vancouver, escalators with several junctions, several directions, whereas I should begin at the beginning, namely the day Tom died. The date. But nothing seems chronological in all this. Go back in time, but to when? Unfold what? Which thread would lead to this conclusion without having anything to do with the rest? As if lives move forward in a sequential way, a+b+c…

  Or else go back all the way to his conception, like the Chinese do. According to the dates, it must have been in London, in that waiting period between two of Stuart’s postings, before Vancouver. At a hotel, one of those good, practical serviced apartments, where we were put up at times like that.

  What surprises me most is the desire to make love; what with the move, Vince not quite three, the jet lag, and everything else we had to sort out. That this moment should be registered during those days, during those nights, in a particular room, beneath one of those decorative paintings you find in hotels like that. That there was a time and a place, an opening, so that Tom could come, Tom, and nobody else.

  Where is the beginning? I hear an unusual sound. I’m sitting in a white room. The beginning is Tom’s death. So do causes have effects, do events unfold as if along a thread? Accidents happen suddenly—I have always known that, always said that, my mother used to say it too. An unthinkable thing, that doesn’t fit into any system, a thing that doesn’t make any sense, crouching at the bottom of caves, and that suddenly rises, screeching, devouring. Yes, accidents happen suddenly, I’ve always been ready for this possibility. I remain seated, dignified, I keep my cool. I will cope till the very end of this catastrophe; from now on my life will be dedicated to Tom’s memory.

  The unusual sound preys on my composure. At exactly the same time, I’m enclosed in a red cube-shaped room. I am in a red cube. The walls are padded in a weird way: a damp material into which you can sink your fist. I am a moving blade that vibrates like a gong. I’m locked up in a red cube-shaped scream and I slam into blood-drenched walls; nobody hears me. The scream exits my own mouth, and the woman sitting in the white room is
shocked: me, so calm, wailing away.

  That won’t bring you back Tom, the woman in the white room is already thinking. Control yourself, please. You’re letting yourself get carried away. Because you’ll need self-control to be Tom’s mausoleum from now on.

  In the red room you don’t think, you need to scream. The red room is made for isolating yourself from the white room. In the white room, you’re ashamed to scream—it’s common knowledge: what is expected of us in these circumstances. Know-how from time immemorial, from ancestors and sit-coms. I began to scream, and then, to my surprise, the scream took over from me. I stayed in the red room, banging against the weird walls. The red mucous was swallowing me up, dissolving me. A tiny humming insect in an enormous carnivorous flower. The world had become carnivorous.

  My husband was holding me in his arms, or rather restraining me, holding me down. He wanted to make me go into the white room but I was terrified of it. The dignified mother, who takes care of the corpse in an atmosphere of lunacy. My future life. Inside the scream, I already knew everything. Saints sigh, and fairies scream.

  Tom held tight in my arms and decomposing.

  Don’t stop looking at him. Safe in death.

  Once I was inside the scream, the scream convinced me. There was nothing but the scream. Because it was IMPOSSIBLE. The woman sitting in the white room, the one who knew it was possible, she is the one who should have died.

  I was not yet a weeper. The weepers come later, around the grave. I was completely preoccupied by the scream, by what I had to do: scream. Empty-handed, arms by my side, alone in the oblivion of the scream. Far away from the white room, from our house, from my husband and from my children, far from Tom. Then, the injection. My throat aching as if I’d been beaten from within. A scream worthy of the outrage. Accuse everyone. Make them bear witness to the impossible. But when the scream ends, it’s irreparable, there’s no going back. It happened. It’s done.