Tom is Dead Page 10

  I had a brief moment of happiness. The water washed me. The huge seawall, that had once been white, cut deep into water and sky; you could see the sea all around, harmless in the breeze. We swam as if in the wake of a boat. I lay floating on my back in the sky, the sun behind me setting towards the land. The sky was becoming red, the sea darkening. Time flowed briefly through my veins. My body altered. I breathed, my lungs took in the air they needed, my throat let it pass and then the air returned to the air, freely. It was like sleeping, finally sleeping. Air took root in my chest; my breath was a tree, foliage, wind. Sleeping and letting yourself drift. The water opened itself up smoothly, the water slid around me, another skin. Without reasoning, without thought, the water was always the same, reliable, neither dead nor alive, my skin, my skin from before.

  We went on holiday. That’s what we used the MALF money for. That’s what we used the cheques for. MALF, in its wisdom, knew that the first opportunity for a holiday must be grabbed. Or the first urge, the first spark of life, the first desire beyond grieving, for an object even, for something trivial. Some recreation. Now, straightaway.

  It was eight months after Tom’s death. This period evokes nothing in me. When I leave for Tasmania with Stella, Vince and Stuart, Tom has just died, or he died a long time ago. When I leave for Tasmania, Tom has been dead forever. Time hasn’t passed, Tom’s been dead for a thousand years and he dies every day.

  Eight months—I know that’s right because I had an appointment at the hospital, and the psychologist picked up a calendar. I don’t speak. I cry. ‘It’s been eight months and you’re still crying?’ She shows me a table of the stages of grieving. The normal and the pathological. It seems that I’m taking my holidays a bit late compared to what is desirable.

  Tasmania is a holiday destination for Australians from the south. A kind of southern Brittany, the last inhabitable land before the pole. An island covered in rainforest. Stuart had decided that the rainforest would do us good. I could see Tom growing beneath the rain, growing back like a felled tree.

  A long empty inlet, turquoise water, a polar wind, and air of such terrifying purity. Razors in our lungs, it made our heads spin. Organic shops, rubbish bins of every colour, brothels for sailors, ten streets and a tourist office: HOBART: ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CITIES IN THE WORLD. We laughed, Stuart the Londoner, and me the Parisian. We hired a 4WD with the money from MALF. It was virgin country: could something start over again here? Passed down intact from the dinosaurs to us, stolen, as is, from the Aborigines, and taken over by radical environmentalists. Passing people as we drove, we felt guilty for breathing, for producing bodily waste and for driving a car. The trees were covered in NO SMOKING signs, not because of the danger of fire but because it poisons the lichen. Since Tom’s death, I was smoking a lot, and I’ve barely cut down in ten years. You can die at any age. Sayings you hear. Sayings you say.

  But most of the time, Stuart, Vince, Stella and I were alone. The beaches were enormous, curves of sand, virgin forest plummeting around them. The beginning of the world. Or the world in abeyance. We behaved like monkeys in the trees and otters in the sea. I cried out and I laughed. Yes, I laughed. My throat opened up, like the pelicans here and in Europe, like geese. So I was capable of laughing. The sound of laughter came out of my throat.

  Vince wanted to see the devils. Like in Bugs Bunny. Stella started to talk, she said ‘divil’ for devil, maybe she was adopting the Australian accent. Stella, my little Australian, my little devil. Stuart, he was still Stuart. He was Stuart having lost his second son, his reactions didn’t surprise me, and mine, mute as they were, didn’t surprise him. Every two hundred metres, a yellow sign warned of the possibility of wombats, wallabies and devils crossing. Vince explained to us that Tasmanian animals don’t see many cars and are careless, and that there are already so few wombats and especially so few devils: it’s an endangered species, whereas the tiger was hunted down by stockmen and hasn’t been seen for decades. The last Tasmanian tiger, with its striped rump, its stomach pouch and its hyena face, died in a zoo—Vince had studied up madly on all this. I said to myself that you can’t escape death.

  We followed the directions that Vince had found on the internet; it wasn’t hard given that every five kilometres there was a sign showing us the way to the Farm, the Devil Farm—the devil is to Tasmania what the edelweiss is to Switzerland. An English family ran the farm, they took care of sick devils, they collected the dead, fixed the injured and pampered the recovering, they practised artificial insemination and helped out with difficult births, they made sure that the babies didn’t miss the pouch entrance—so Lisa, Jeff and their children opened the doors of their bed-and-breakfast to us and we stayed a week, amidst the smell of kennel and nursing home. Vince took pictures to show to his class. The infancy of marsupials has something soothing about it; the babies spend months in the pouch, no risk of losing them, even walking on all fours. I managed to make a few onomatopoeic sounds, and even several yes. I wrapped scarves around my neck—Tasmania gets chilly at night. Jeff and Lisa didn’t ask any questions. Tom sat at the table with us; I left a space next to me. I didn’t expect them to see him, but I was persuaded that they knew, it was so obvious. Like couples believe themselves understood without speaking.

  Maybe it was in Tasmania that I entered a state of melancholy. When we left the bed-and-breakfast, Jeff and Lisa told me that I looked better. And since then we’ve stayed in contact, all these years, we’ve sent each other photos of our kids, they’ve even visited us here in the Blue Mountains. And one day it was too late to utter Tom’s name. That’s how it goes. There are friends with Tom, and friends without Tom.

  The forest closed in around us, moss, giant flowers, lichen curtains. The rain had caused this forest to grow by streaming along the vines, drop by drop, shower after shower, a vegetable rain. You could see it spread out everywhere, become trunks, stems, leaves, ferns, green lace between two trees. From time to time it opened out onto the sea. We picnicked, we swam far from everything, in the vertigo of the deserted island, the sea of no return.

  One night, in the forest, we stayed in a bush campsite, with ecologically friendly toilet blocks and spotless showers— we were in the tent because of the mosquitoes, and we heard a yap, a bit like a fox terrier. ‘A tiger,’ Vince breathed. He got out, taking his camera with him. For a brief childhood moment, he was able to believe he was all by himself in the forest, in pursuit of a tiger, filled with happiness and mock fear. Stuart took Stella in his arms and we followed our son through the benevolent forest. I just complained about the mosquitoes, carried on until Vince turned towards me and said: ‘Ssh!’ I held a torch and he looked like an outline on a medallion, the little white hunter in the deep dark forest. To the side, the ferns moved, all lit up. Click. The next day, at the Parks and Wildlife office, a ranger recorded his photo and wrote down his account in a special log, amongst the thousands of other witnesses who can’t resign themselves to the total extinction of the Tasmanian tiger. The photo was in colour but it looked like a black and white, a fringe of white ferns surrounding a fuzzy shape, a fugitive blur, stripes and a mass of lichen.

  When we got back from Tasmania, Stuart made a decision: the remaining boxes needed to be emptied. Stuart got the things out of the boxes and I put them away in a chest of drawers. This chest of drawers became a safe. We never opened the bottom drawer, the one with the videos. Ten years on, I still haven’t watched them. Maybe much later, in my old age. I don’t envisage dying without seeing the videos of Tom again. But for the moment, I can’t. The unbearable realism of film. At least, that’s how I imagine them: unbearable. Tom living but dead. Tom moving, Tom laughing, Tom kicking a ball, Tom at the Maritime Museum, Tom in my arms, Tom blowing out the candles on his fourth birthday. Tom in Vancouver. Frozen in time. Inaccessible, on the other side of the world. Embedded in the television like after an accident, after a reality crash.

  We didn’t watch Stella’s first steps again either, or Vince�
�s swimming lessons, nothing about those two. Or the relative youthfulness of our parents, when they held our babies in their arms. Even Stella and Vince filmed alone, the following image is Tom—in everything that we did together there is Tom, it’s Tom. In the beginning, I’d thought I could make a video for each child. But as soon as Tom was mobile he made it clear to me that he intended to be involved in everything, and, first and foremost, in his brother’s life: it was impossible to film one without the other. ‘Moi aussi!’ ‘Me too! ’ Tom cried as he ran towards the camera, as soon as he knew how to speak. Me too was his war cry.

  I often have the urge to go over to this drawer. I handled, caressed the cassettes, consulted the labels that I’d carefully written. Our life from before. Locked away in these black boxes as if at the bottom of the sea. Boxes we would never open, that would never tell the story of those last hours before the fall. Pain boxes, like there are sewing boxes, shoeboxes and knife boxes.

  Stuart tells me that, anyway, soon there won’t be video recorders anymore, that they’ll have to be copied into another format, that it costs a fortune. Like the Super 8 films of our childhood, they’ll be illegible memories for us.

  Stuart waits till I go to sleep to watch Tom. Alone, remote in hand. He mutes the sound. The tension in the apartment, this flickering shadow, gathered like a sob—one night it woke me up. Stuart’s face, in the flickering blue and white light. I saw nothing of Tom. As soon as Stuart saw me he turned it off, as if he’d been watching a porn movie. But he looked like a hero, like the hero from that Spielberg film where the father watches images of his assassinated son. My husband, Tom Cruise.

  There are photos as well. Photos on paper. My memory of that scene is very clear, unpacking with Stuart, the scene with the last box. I see Stuart opening, as if by reflex, a packet of photos, and me holding up my hand: non! The French non that rises to my lips from deep down. So Stuart closes the packet and we start unpacking again, from box to drawer, in an even more complete silence. From a barely opened box to a closed drawer, like a pointless gesture—the envelopes full of photos make a journey in the air and the light, from Stuart’s hand to mine. A leap out of the dark, like carp.

  I’d seen elephants on TV passing bones from trunk to trunk, holding them in the air for a few seconds, meditative, swinging like a pendulum. I had the feeling, and I’ve often had it since, of being only a small part of a mortal community, the link in a food chain dominated by things much stronger than I am.

  Yes, after that box, I think you can say, we settled in. We stayed three years at Victoria Road, neither more nor less than in all the other countries where we lived. The country where Tom died, the country where we settled into Tom’s death. A street with the apartment as its capital. Inventing signs, finding rationales, making patterns. Maybe it was the same day, the same week, the week of that box, that Stuart brandished in front of me, like a hunter holding his prey, a jumper, size four. It was pale blue, with lots of black hair on it. Our dark-haired child, our only dark-haired child. The start of the new school year, when Stuart ritually cut our sons’ hair. When Tom and Vince looked like two little plucked chickens. It was the day before his death. We must have rolled that jumper up and shoved it somewhere—we did things fast, fast as usual, fast and joyously, grumbling as we went. I’ve had the impression since then that a plug has been pulled out, part of our power supply cut off: we were alive, furiously alive, and now we are listless.

  I saw Stuart with that jumper in his hand. The hair was shiny, surprisingly shiny, maybe from having been conserved in the wool for so long. Stuart took each hair, one by one, between his nails and contemplated them in the light, looking through them. To find what? They do clone dogs, after all. Sometimes pain separated us, Stuart and me, and at other times it made us telepathic. ‘Donne,’ I said to him in French, give it to me, the d and the o came out; Stuart handed me the jumper and I threw the last traces of our son into the bin, his last traces of DNA, so that we wouldn’t go mad, the two of us, together.

  Stuart tells me that I began to talk again, little by little, that I simply went back to talking. That’s what he tells me. Reminds me. I took over from him. It was his turn to sink, to seek out the bottom of the lake. Stuart clasping his hands tightly at his forehead, arms stiff, his two hands gripping each other, pressed into his forehead; and me standing behind him, arms dangling, body dangling, dangling like a bell, just after the scream—this is the first image that I have of us, the image at the hospital, just after Tom’s death. I picked things up where I’d left off. I picked up Stuart’s words too, converting them all into first person like pounds into euros.

  I had no strength in my mouth or my jaw, but the most important thing was for me to practise, for me to articulate, to regulate my breath and the pitch of my voice. I was unaware that so many muscles and such energy were needed to speak.

  ‘You look better,’ Jeff and Lisa had said to me. When we first arrived at their place, was I wringing my hands and my hair? Later, once I began to speak, my voice was hoarse and my mouth stiff. The holiday in Tasmania etched a notch in time. Springtime in this benign, temperate, ridiculous country. I became aware of seasons. I remembered. I was on a planet, even if upside down. Over there, in France, it’s autumn, my father going in and out of hospital like an indecisive hare before winter—my mother calls me and talks to me about rain, good weather and lithium, and I try to answer her, to speak clearly.

  You haven’t told the whole story, says Stuart. In Tasmania, I swam in the waves. Those virgin, deserted waves. I was afraid of sharks but the great white sharks are further north, in more temperate waters. I didn’t really care about anything; yet I was happy to see Vince happy on the beach.

  I went beyond the surf, where the waves no longer break. The tide was high. The swell lifted me gently and I slid down its slope. It took me a while to realise that I was drifting. Tasmanian waves, on the west coast, resemble the ones from my native land, on the English Channel—I’d forgotten about the currents. The way water moves is unique to each beach, but here, who would know? Maybe, in the Dreamtime, there had been Aborigines who knew a bit about the ways of this sea. But they’re all dead, and the sea is empty.

  Stuart, Vince and Stella were lying in the pale sunlight, wearing sweaters, legs naked. Slowly, they got further and further away. I started swimming in their direction. The swell wasn’t bad—I managed to make use of its momentum— but the next wave sucked me back. I ebbed towards the open sea, I slowly let go of the edge. I pushed on, swimming freestyle. But I was no longer the girl that was born on the French coast. I’d only swum once, with Vince, since Tom’s death. I was thin, a wisp. And it was no longer a sea that was swallowing me, it was the ocean, become huge again, indifferent to beaches, sovereign, far from the edge. The water rose and fell calmly, breathing me like air. Stuart, Vince and Stella became tiny, struck by a spell. I waved madly…I was already maybe hundreds of metres above the bottom, above the octopuses and giant squid. Stuart! I wanted to cry out, I ran out of breath. The three bodies laid out on the beach appeared dead, dead for a time, the time it would take for me to die in turn. A grey sweater, a green sweater, a white sweater. Motionless in the cold sunlight. The water absorbed my heat, fed off it. Watching the Earth getting further and further away, like an astronaut blasted into orbit…The beach was there, straight ahead, it was stupid enough to make you want to cry. I slammed into the water and water entered my mouth, my nose, my throat, sounds began to form—not Stuart, or Tom, nobody’s name: air, Ms and As, the first word, maman, the word for everything, the panic word, the word that would give me back my breath, and give me shelter.

  I thought about all this afterwards, on the beach, as I sat shivering, transfixed by that ancient word stuck in my throat, as I left the land and sank into that hollow in the water.

  Stella was starting to walk when Tom died. That Frankenstein look that babies have when they stand. The badly coordinated swinging of the arms. The stiffness of knees. The head so straigh
t, the neck out of time with the rest. Moving around like an unstable little block, eighty centimetres tall, ten kilos in motion. But the hands free, finally. The brain galloping, the feet following as best they can. Stella was walking, and she wanted Tom. To race with Tom. To fight with him. Without uttering a word. A pure contest of muscle.

  After he died, she looked for him. Right up until after he died, she wanted him. Stella’s wandering was really something to see. She’d go straight to the door then come back to the sunroom, backwards and forwards, the door, the sunroom, freewheeling all day long. We felt like cutting her off, like shouting stop! Taking her batteries out, blocking the key that turned in her back. Stella was perplexed. Someone was missing. A little one almost like her. Another. And then it seemed to me that the days accumulated over the top of this gap. Like fine deposits on a pane of glass, shower after shower. More and more often, she’d stop still. For a second. And play. Stella. My lucky star. My little itinerant widow. A hard layer of forgetting forming over the chasm. Allowing her to move more freely. And us, maybe, to follow her.