Tom is Dead Read online

  Fire at the doors of the city. Burning eyes and throat. Storms, but no downpour. It was around the beginning of the new millennium, when Australia teetered on climatic disaster, months and years without rain.

  Disaster made sense to Stuart. A climate of dust, an air of catastrophe. A world on fire. There was a logic to disaster. And Stuart was there, sitting at the edge of the world, on the brink.

  One day, out driving, he stopped off at Virgin Mega Store, and bought the CD that was playing on the radio. An Australian singer whose name everyone else has forgotten but that stayed with us. Music made to order, easily digestible, a nice voice that doesn’t bring time to a standstill, that doesn’t cut through the void. A CD to stop you from thinking. A CD that made impossible transitions possible: between the bush and Victoria Road, between him, Stuart, and home, between the building sites and Tom’s death. Stuart says that our move began with music. Our move to the Blue Mountains. It enabled us to leave Sydney. He started buying lots of CDs at a time when everybody else got music off the internet. Time passed. He brought them home, the CDs kicked around with the rest of the mess, he put them on as soon as he got in; and not long after, Stuart tells me, when he got home from work, there’d already be music on. He tells me: I opened the door and there was music.

  I don’t remember. One day, for the first time since Tom’s death, I must have done this, made this gesture, put a CD in the player. There is very little before and after for me during this period. Between, say, getting back from Tasmania and leaving for the Blue Mountains. It seems to me it was a time when I managed more or less to stick to my objectives: to take Vince to school and Stella to childcare, bathe them, put their pyjamas on, wait for Stuart. And then there was a day when I put on some music.

  Love or break-up, grief or reconciliation. No songs talk about children dying, but they all talk about it in some way, the pleas, the departures, the desertions, the fear.

  In the old days, Stuart danced with the three children. Stella in his arms, Vince and Tom each hanging off a leg. He spun around and wiggled his hips, a human greasy pole. Me, too. We all danced. Pregnant with Stella, my hands were free, one for Vince, one for Tom. And I spun too, a whirligig. Tom said ‘ore’, hesitating between more and encore, but what he wanted was this: that it never end.

  Stuart was looking for something. He doesn’t know what. A sentence. A thinking rhythm, a rhythm for thought. To enable him to move. To work. For the body to follow. To go from one place to another. To function. To breathe. In the car, song by song, he began to listen to music again, to his old CDs, to music from the old days. Stuart, who’d always listened to music from all eras and of all sorts, began to explore a delicate apparatus. He was looking for abstract music. He didn’t want empty music anymore, but neither did he want music that told stories. Too sad or too sentimental, he’d start thinking again. A particular memory connected to the music, and to the tone of the music, added up to a double torment. He’d be totally caught up in the music, terrorised, or in tears. And as he lived with a woman who was a walking aria, opera was out of the question. He was after music that was abstract but that would seek things out for him. Do his desiring for him. Then one day, he found Coltrane. One phrase from Coltrane, a thinking breath, a thinking rhythm, and the body begins to move.

  Coltrane wasn’t on about Tom. He wasn’t on about anything. But he was looking for something. What? Like Stuart. Coltrane’s last CDs, especially the concert in Seattle— today we would be incapable of listening to them again. But he opens up our grief, and Stuart and I can talk about this, about Coltrane. About the intelligence of grief.

  Stuart was offered a job in Canberra. He was the one who talked about the Blue Mountains. A house in the forest, somewhere round there. Repacking the boxes.

  The books were easy to pack: I realised that I hadn’t opened them since Tom’s death. The last one I’d read was easy to recognise: a Lonely Planet guide to Australia, as worn as a prayer book. There’d been no more reading. All that was needed was to remove them shelf by shelf, their order was still intact. So much order amidst the chaos. Their alphabetical ordering had not prevented Tom’s death. This was what went through my mind as I rewound the thread of those untouched books, each as ineffectual as the other. Every one innocent, every one ignorant: what did I care about those love affairs, those misadventures, those stories? What did Stendhal know about the death of children? And Virginia Woolf with her chic, pathetic suicide. The luxury of Proust writing in his bed! I threw the books into the boxes.

  During this same period I had my last sessions with the Sydney support group. I remember suddenly becoming interested in the stress scale, like you become fixated on a mathematical puzzle. Losing someone close to you was at the top of the scale with 100 points. But all that was needed was to give, say, 150 for the loss of a child, for the scale to finally become a valid tool. My own invention, the 150-point scale. The measure of that which can’t be measured.

  The support group’s psychologist suggested that we do a skill exchange. He told us that it would be good for us, to talk about something else. We all had skills. Mourning shouldn’t make us forget that. We needed to draw on these skills so as not to become purely specialists in mourning. He said that all human beings have scope for freedom.

  I wondered what skills I had. A widower got things started with a slide show that he’d put together himself, on climate change in New South Wales. It showed how thin the growth rings in trees had become over the last few years, and explained about hydric stress. I also remember a machinery driver from Perth, who did a presentation about his work, and the history of Poclain hydraulic diggers—a French company, he said smiling at me—and it’s true, it did take my mind off things the whole time he was speaking.

  I threw myself into it. I drew a calibrated diagram onto transparencies to try to understand what literature could do for us, if it could do anything. The psychologist thought that this stuck too close to our subject. I remember having argued that the hydric stress of trees was directly related to our subject, and Poclain hydraulic diggers as well, because someone called Georges Bataille, a farmer from Oise, set up Poclain in the nineteenth century, and Georges Bataille was also a French writer who, wouldn’t you know it, wrote about death. The psychologist let me go on talking and by way of introduction I recited an English translation of ‘Demain, dès l’aube’. Tomorrow, at dawn, at the hour when the countryside lights up, I will leave. You see, I know that you are waiting for me. I will go by the forest, I will go by the mountain, I can no longer remain far from you. I will walk with my eyes fixed on my thoughts, without seeing what is outside of me, without hearing any noise, alone, unknown, my back bent, my hands crossed, sad, and day will be for me as night. I will watch neither the gold of evening fall, nor the distant sails descending towards Harfleur, and when I arrive, I will place on your grave a bunch of green holly and heather in bloom. Everyone listened to me. I gave Victor Hugo’s poem 140/100 on the scale. His daughter dead, at nineteen. They got the idea.

  Afterwards, I gave 0/100 to La Princesse des Clèves, to the qualms of a lovesick woman who’d never given birth, and ends up opting for a convent. ‘Faith,’ somebody said, but I stuck to literature and its appreciation, because once Australians start on religion, it can go on for the whole session. After that, I tried to translate some passages from Charlotte Delbo, in particular those about forgetting. I call forgetting this faculty that the memory has to cast the recollection of a warm and living sensation into a place of unfeeling, to transform the memory of vibrant love, the love of flesh and warmth, into images that have lost their intoxicating and dreadful power. And I explained to them that Charlotte Delbo had been deported to Auschwitz and that when she got back she wrote down everything that she remembered about every one of her assassinated companions, all of them, individually, one by one. And as I’d brought her books with me, I began to translate fiercely, long passages. Then you will know that you mustn’t speak with death, it’s useless knowledg
e. I began to shake and the psychologist asked me if I was sure I wanted to continue. I gave all of Charlotte Delbo’s books 150/100. I gave Marcel Proust 10; 10 still because even if the mourning in it is nothing, the pages about the grandmother’s death throes are really good. And 100 for Georges Perec. I explained to my audience the thing about sans e, without e, which in French sounds the same as sans eux— without them—without his parents, the father dead during the war and the mother deported. E is the most frequently used letter in French, and to write A Void entirely without using the letter e plunges the language into mourning as violently, as tangibly, as we’ve all been, I said. And they all hung on my every word. Why 100 and not 150? Because the technical aspect of the novel remained offensive, there was a nonserious side to it. At that time, I confused the serious with the solemn; we talked a lot about this.

  At the following session, that woman with the hat arrived with a poem, a poem that she’d written. And for once (the grieving write a lot) it wasn’t about a bird flying over the sea or a setting sun or a tree in winter, or maybe about all of that, but was written entirely without the letter i. Not because it’s the most common letter in English, but because she’d written the whole thing without saying I. ‘It’s your most personal piece,’ I said to her, and I gave it 120/100; it was very beautiful, very powerful, and then the conversation started to get out of hand. The psychologist said that his ‘personal skills’ workshop wasn’t a writing workshop, that it was for talking about something else, and that the scoring could only be used to assess our ability to tolerate stress; to which someone had said that it was intolerable to compare Auschwitz to the death of a child, and why not give that a mark as well, it was a widow who spoke, and the woman in the hat suddenly got angry, and said that the death of her son was Auschwitz, exactly the same, and an orphan yelled, ‘You can’t say that’ (you can’t say that is Australia’s motto), but the lady in the hat shouted even louder, she shouted for all of us, the enraged ones, she had every right, to cry and to bite and to eat her hat and to give a score of 150 to anything she liked, and she left, slamming the door behind her, and that was the end of that support group for me as well.

  When we moved, the same problem came up, the same as always: what were we going to do with the door? The children’s door, the one on which, since Vince was big enough to stand up, we marked their heights with a felt-tip pen beside their name. We photographed the door in Vancouver. Because we couldn’t really remove the door of a rented apartment and take it across the Pacific. But the one at Victoria Road?

  Stuart took the door off its hinges, and I wrapped it up like a big painting, then we loaded it into the removal van. We drove out of Sydney at four; the door had become transportable by road, and what had also changed, above all, was our attitude to the law, to tastes and customs, to what’s done and what’s not done. Stealing a door, getting a rental car dirty, parking wherever, smoking in public or having strange ideas; since Tom’s death none of this mattered anymore—we didn’t mind paying the fines, we said as little as possible, and in our defence, in general, we took things as they came.

  We’d carried out the measuring ceremony only once on the Victoria Road door. Stella, 80 cm; Vince, 120cm; and Tom, 105cm, a few days before he was reduced to the dimensions of an urn.

  Because there was not only the door. There was also the urn.

  ‘One more thing that you haven’t talked about,’ Stuart pointed out.

  Apparently there are laws, in the western world, about what should become of ashes. About the limits to their private use. A couple divorces, the ashes are divided in two. With the next generation, they’re divided further, between the children. Lots of urns end up, at best, in storage, at worst, in the bin.

  These days, they sell biodegradable urns with the seed of a tree inside—a choice of trees, depending on the country, the climate and individual tastes. You bury the urn and the tree grows. Frankly, I think it’s a good idea. Sap, pollen, leaves. Diving into the ground and breathing in the wind, standing straight and solid, venerable and old. A tree is good when you don’t believe in anything and you’re grieving. You do what you can.

  I wanted to scatter his ashes at sea, in the sea at the end of the world, in a circle at the bottom of the planet: the Antarctic Ocean. When he saw me do it, open the boot of the 4WD, take the urn out and head for the edge of the cliff, Stella attached in her seat and Vince asking why we’d stopped, Stuart spoke up. After my weeks and weeks of silence, he finally gave in and expressed his opinion about Tom’s death. About what should be done with Tom.

  Tasmania. I’d come to Tasmania with Tom’s urn. And Stuart said that the sea wasn’t a possibility. He said that Tom wasn’t a swimmer like Vince, and that the bottom of the water, such cold water, between all the gelatinous creatures and the sharks, wasn’t for him.

  I was grateful to Stuart. I put the urn back in the boot, and we left.

  Stuart was driving and, without another word, he headed back, he plunged back into the rainforest. I thought he was doing the right thing. Mutely, we chose a big tree.

  Stella is on Stuart’s shoulders, Vince gambolling under the giant ferns, happy because we talked about having a picnic. Under the tree, we stop and out of my backpack I take Tom’s urn, some bread and chocolate bars. We drink water from a spring that tastes of iron and moss.

  Tom’s urn was bulky but light, maybe just on a kilo. While we ate, it sat beside us in the moss, covered in condensation. There was a possible (or impossible) life to be had with Tom. We’d put him on the table at restaurants. We’d sit him in the back of the car. I’d put him on my knee in front of the telly. The damned laugh too, the laugh of the damned. A Tom always in agreement, a little scout always at the ready. You can’t say that. Vince was eating his chocolate and bread. I suppose he was. All I can remember is a huge fern like a cave that dripped silently around him. Fine seams of water, slipping in rivulets from leaves.

  Could Vince see the urn? His face bent in the shade of the fern. Did he have an opinion? What was he thinking?

  Every now and then, small hard nuts fell on us. Some kind of pouched squirrels bombarded us. We screamed as we jumped up, and we burst into high-pitched laughter. I remember thinking about the chestnut trees in Ile-de-France, and how far away we were, desperate and alone beneath the primitive trees.

  Without Vince, without Stella, would we have done things differently? Would we have resembled the bent-over peasant couple, on a French field, in Millet’s L’Angelus? No school, no country, no book, no conversation, had prepared us for this.

  At one point, Stuart got up and he picked the urn up as if it were, I don’t know, a piece of bulky, complicated camping equipment—the tree was beautiful, huge above the ferns, masking the sun, vines like water—Stuart wanted to open the urn but it wouldn’t open.

  Then, we squatted around the urn, all four of us, Stella, Vince, Stuart and I, each giving our opinion, each suggesting to Tom, in some way or other, to come out of there. Stuart has a go at the seal with his penknife, but it makes no difference, it’s stuck too well; I tell him to stop, afraid that it will break, the nuts continue to fall, making a poc sound on the solid urn.

  Later, we find an internet café and the number of the crematorium in Sydney. ‘You should’ve told us they were for scattering.’ It’s not the same model—our urn is sealed with glycerine. You can melt it with a lighter.

  When we took the plane back to Sydney, I noticed Stuart doing something. As we were checking in, all our gear around us, the tent, the luggage, the stroller, Stella’s portable cot and our walking boots, Stuart left the little backpack behind, the one with the urn in it. He left it under a bench seat, one of those airport bench seats, modern, made for waiting. Apparently, in the lost property office in the rue des Morillons, in Paris, there is, amongst the umbrellas and the keys, a wooden leg, a stuffed lobster, and a funerary urn forgotten at Père-Lachaise metro station.

  I continued to queue up in the middle of all our luggage with
Stella in my arms, and Vince running around everywhere. And then I said to myself that in an airport, it wouldn’t surprise me if they sent in the bomb squad and blew up the bag, Tom’s ashes scattered Pompeii-style, and that maybe we could try to have a little dignity in this family, take things a little more seriously, even though I’m sure it would’ve really pleased Tom, it would’ve amused him, if his ashes had created a little havoc along the way.

  I pulled the backpack up onto my shoulder, Stella in one arm, Vince holding my hand, but there was still some room left, some energy left in my exhaustion, energy for grief.

  ‘Have another child,’ those close to us said, those few still close to us, on the phone thousands of kilometres away. They’d had enough tact to postpone this sentence, for a while.

  That young couple from the group in Sydney administered themselves this kind of shock treatment. I remember that pregnancy, from week to week, her stomach acquiring the weight and the roundness of death; I didn’t dare say, you can’t say that. How did that baby not, week by week, become impregnated with the smell of death, like a doll goes musty? How did it not hear the tears, how did it not feel the death around it—it became death, little by little, molecule by molecule, we fed it and shaped it. She had a girl and we were all invited to the baptism, it was almost joyous.

  A little one, in my arms. Vince was tall. Stella was growing. Stuart said nothing. He pretended to be interested in his work. And maybe he really was. I envied him. A baby, yes, maybe. Maybe I could’ve taken an interest in that. Or maybe not. I tried to think about it. Tom envious, drawing me into his world. Dizzy at the edge of a window. Abandoned crossing the road. Nocturnal smothering, oversight, cursed milk. Or sending the child mad because of the dead child, the replacement child, the ersatz child of the child.