The one who died with Tom was Tom’s mother. All that’s left is Vince and Stella’s mother. Tom’s mother is gone. The one who Tom saw. The one I was in Tom’s eyes, born with Tom and for Tom. Ten years on, I can hardly remember her. I remember Tom. It seems to me that I could, for four-and-a-half years plus a pregnancy, play back, minute by minute, his whole life. From the first ultrasound to the last image. I contain him; he’s with me. But in the blanks, in the moments when he was at school, in the moments when he was out of my sight, who was Tom’s mother? I can’t see her anymore. In the blank moments, she disappeared. Maybe he carried me away. He took me with him. The idea is almost soothing. To tell myself that I am with him, wherever he is. That I can be of a little help to him. And that an empty husk remains here making my gestures and keeping me breathing, a straw woman.
The wooden house became a facade, and what I saw out the windows was just as fictitious, posters stuck to walls, an illusion in my cell. Everything was flat, two-dimensional. I was well-known the length and breadth of the flowered footpaths, people greeted me—up until then, I’d taken part in fundraising for the school, been elected to the parent-teacher committee— but the greeters moved around flatly, like those paper dolls that children dress up. I wasn’t silent anymore, but I talked about nothing, ready-made sentences, a sitcom English. Maybe it was worse that nobody knew. I would’ve liked to show them Tom, and the blood. So they’d understand. So they’d shut up. So they’d wear the same dumbstruck, reproachful mask as the people in Victoria Road. The mask of those who know, who think they know.
I knew: the forest, the continents, the sea, could’ve done without humans. The air would’ve been breathed only by animal gills and lungs, the ground trodden only by paws, the sea would’ve been traversed only by flippers, the sky by feathers. Or nothing. An empty planet. Nothing to breathe it. Nothing to roam over it. Thought about by nobody. Whirling alone, absurd, absurd anyway. Like the astronaut in 2001, in an untellable space odyssey. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. The computer chanting a distorted nursery rhyme in a drunken voice, showing off his circus-dog knowledge, and Dave disconnecting it, disconnecting. Strauss waltzes. Suns without life.
I’d raised Tom for death. I’d brought him into this world and fattened him up for death. There’s a character of Genet’s, I can’t remember from which work: Harcamone was shined, polished, massaged, softened up by his torturers. Living the good life, before the execution. I often thought about this idea. It particularly disgusted me that a well-preserved, plump body was handed over to the torturer, a body rarely exposed to danger or the cold.
All these images are from before, from my student days, forgotten images, obsessive fears; but they suddenly reignited, haunting, insistent candles, birthday party pranks.
Stuart urged me to go and spend the New Year at my parents’ place. He’d look after the children, I needed some rest, to see France again, maybe. Tom died in January—I try not to think in numbers, but from the date of his death to that of his birth, every six months, with each turn of the wheel, we cross over impassable thresholds; every six months the solstices kill us.
We’re all mortal, all promised to nothingness. The sky passed above my head, clouds, colours, night, day. I felt the Earth’s movement, its spiral trajectory, and the galaxy rotating with the other galaxies, and the ends of the universe. I looked at the stars. Tom wasn’t there, but there was enough space for the outrage of his absence, enough space for my grief. The minute point that was Tom, the tadpole in the Milky Way. With us dead, Tom would end up disappearing into Stella’s tiny memory, Stella the little sister, the grandmother, the last one to have seen him alive. And then, there’d be nothing left.
Stella was about to turn five, the age that Tom would never be. She resembled him. Vince had preceded her in his resemblance—he resembled Tom before Tom was even born. But at twelve, his resemblance went too far, a science fiction Tom. Stella, she looked just like Tom. She was about to move beyond this point, but at that moment, she was there, she was Tom. Blond not dark-haired, but with the same cheeks, the same shaped face, the high astonished forehead and, most of all, the same mannerisms, as if the few months that she’d known Tom had left an imprint, the brother’s legacy to his sister: her furiously clenched fists whenever she disagreed; the you know that came before everything, where Tom began all his sentences with tu sais; and the same way of asking questions, bridging English and French—a rising intonation peculiar to them, peculiar to him. I heard Tom’s French behind Stella’s English. She danced, feet wide, jumped up and down, a joyous stamping, and I saw Tom; those last few times in the Victoria Road apartment, when I ordered him to make less noise because of the neighbours.
I don’t remember taking the plane. Maybe a snippet, a reddening moment amidst that bad sleep you grab in economy class—the sun coming up as if above the sky, out in space, suspended— but all those flights get confused in my mind, it might as well be a dusk halfway between London and Vancouver, or Stuart, Vince and Tom sitting next to me—or for that matter maybe it’s neither before nor after: red sun on no man’s land.
I land at my parents’ house right in the middle of the turkey; my mother wanted to celebrate the New Year, and the image that I have is of her pushing us around in our wheelchairs, my father and me, after throwing a tartan rug over our knees. She goes backwards and forwards from the kitchen to the dining room, a good fire crackles in the fireplace, I’m freezing, it was high summer in Australia; my mother is huge in the firelight, enhanced, she takes up all the space, the shadows dance, and soon we’ll see her overflow, arms through the windows, head through the chimney, two big breasts floating through the louvre windows, and her legs will lift the house up and she will carry us with her, striding across the cursed ground. ‘Eat,’ she says. She serves me some more of whatever it is, foie gras, oysters, I chew, my father starts to leap about, he too has a restless five minutes, looking for wine, the corkscrew, he opens the wine, takes a whiff, pours, gallops from the cellar to the attic—my father the goblin and my mother the ogress are happy to see me, they say so, I say it too, I’m happy. Those twenty years away from home are just a bad dream. I came back home, I say, but I never learnt English, it comes to me from nowhere, I’ve always been here. Between my mother and my father, cosy and warm. A fat, pampered goose. My father sways a little; it’s the end of the meal. He’s very thin, and from time to time his eyes roll back exposing the whites. As for me, I no longer have a body. My parents exist like my ears and my arms, on either side of me. My father shakes his head more and more violently— it’s the dangerous hour, we must go to bed, otherwise things will be said and some scourge will swoop down upon us. My mother claps her hands, ‘Time for bed!’ I get up, everything spins. She supports my father, she carries him up the stairs, my father’s white legs, clad completely in white, hang over my mother’s arms, and his head lolls, on the side.
Impossible to sleep. My mother may well have transformed my childhood room into a guestroom, but I feel I’m in my little bed, thirty years earlier. The pitch-dark night crushes me, and I tuck my chin under the quilt. Rather than taking an umpteenth sleeping pill, I turn the light on and get up. A naked woman, old and white, stands before me, haggard, arms by her side—I bring my hands to my throat, it’s me, I’m naked—my mother has removed the curtains I had when I was a child and the window acts as a mirror in the electric light.
I open the window. A half moon has risen above the trees. The air is sharp, the seasons are about to change. I open my eyes wide—it’s a tic so that I don’t have to think. I might be hearing the sea, like when I was little, on calm, cold nights. I hear my mother too, downstairs, forever tidying, and the old guilt returns…Go down and help her…My mother has her back to me, bent over the sink. Her skull is pink through her dyed hair, on top she’s nearly bald. She scrubs and scrubs her pressure cooker, the metal bottom bangs against the sink. And she wipes her wrist under her eyes, the soft part, under the rubber glove. She cries and cr
ies, and bangs her pot.
The little square beach, the white line of the cliff in the hazy sky. The freighters in a dotted line, the ultra-civilised sea, crisscrossed like a canvas. Grey, underlined in green, painted in oils beneath the ancient sky. I’m with my father, we’re walking the dog—my father calculates the time difference and calls Vince and Stella, he makes them listen to the sea, this sea, the sea we know. A photo of a lost world, the last trace of what’s left.
A background of pebbles and water, a shell to shelter me. The safe territory of meals to prepare and walks on the beach. Then the hour of despair at the low point of the day, when my father dozes over his cup of coffee, and my mother embroiders, settled in one of those armchairs bought by mail-order, that you adjust with an electric lever. My mother’s needle pricks in and out of the material at a steady rate, tiny explosions, poc, poc, followed by the faint whistling of the thread. Don’t touch anything. Not a word. Here—when I allow myself to think, when I briefly remove the wedge that blocks the cogwheel in my brain—here is where I can feel surprised that the death of a child could be such a catastrophe. That five years out of my forty had dug such an abyss. A meteor child. Here, between my mother and my father, this child is something we’ve notched up, a failure, almost a breakdown; a doesn’t matter after which everything, nothing, continues. I try to hold myself there, upon this narrow point of the world. On one foot. On a needle. Encircled by waves. I avoid thinking because thinking means thinking about Tom.
‘An only daughter and three grandchildren, more than we could’ve hoped for!’ said my mother when Stella was born. These days she says, ‘I preferred it when you were in London,’ or, ‘a quick trip on the Eurostar and you were here.’ We talk about that, about the speed of trains, the breakthrough of the tunnel, illegal immigrants, the refugee camp in Sangatte, those poor people. We talk about London and the English, we talk about Stuart, beans on toast and driving on the left. We talk about how there are three tunnels, one to go, one to come back, and a third service tunnel, the tonnes and tonnes of dug earth, three times seventeen kilometres, fifty kilometres in total. We don’t talk about dead children.
His name so quick to say. His diminutive name. If Tom had had a longer name, would he have lived longer? And if I hadn’t met Stuart? Or maybe, it’s me who attracts death, and one of my children would have died anyway, one of my other children, those children born without Stuart, those non-existent children.
The sea swell rose and fell, in a circle, wheels, mills under the water, an exhausting threshing. Foam, racket, and in one clean sweep, everything was sucked away. Beyond, there was the open sea, grey or green, or blue. It was futile and empty, too big. It was enough to make you angry and throw stones, hard enough to rip your arm out. I was born on its shores, and it had taken Tom away from me, one way or another, it had taken him from me. This thing without thought, this horizon beyond the horizon, and still it goes on, flat and without end, and that’s how the world is, and the edge of the world is a great drop.
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.
Tom is Dead Page 14
