Tom is Dead Read online

  ‘Why isn’t Tom coming with us?’ Vince asked. We were heading down Bondi hill, on foot, the four of us, tous les quatre. Stella on Stuart’s shoulders. The insects deafening in the flowering bushes. The ibises on the rubbish bins. The bus going into town stopped and, unconsciously, we watched the passengers get off, and the driver waited for us to get on, the nice little family, one boy and one girl. But we weren’t going into town, we were only going on foot to the bottom of the hill. ‘Why isn’t Tom here?’ Vince asked. We went into the shop, a sports shop full of school bags and tracksuits.

  I remember the violence in my head. The enormous effort not to cry, not to shout shut up! at Vince. An athlete, an athlete of grief in a sports shop. And Vince got repetitive and stubborn, the cleverness of repetition, with series of whys. He was doing what Tom used to do, the four-year-old child: a mise en abyme of the world.

  — Why are there waves in the sea?

  — Because the wind blows them.

  — Why does the wind blow them?

  — I don’t know, Tom. Because that’s what the wind does.

  — Why is there wind?

  — Um, because there is hot air and cold air: in between them wind is created.

  — Why is there hot air and cold air?

  And when Tom had covered the sun and the night, the poles, the rotation of the Earth and the blue of the sky, we had to move on to the stars, and our presence in the universe. So, sometimes, I’d wish for a little mute boy, or one already grown up, head already full. Digging his holes and his castles in silence, so that I could enjoy Bondi Beach in peace. But if you want peace don’t churn out three kids. Why did Tom die? Because the waves, because the wind?

  We passed little pairs of jeans, little tracksuits, piles of little T-shirts, as well as all kinds of shorts, because it’s hot in Sydney, late January, the beginning of the school year. But nothing they had was right. Even in death, it was difficult to choose for Tom: Mickey Mouse, baseball teams, sporting and surfing logos. We didn’t say: we can’t cremate him in that, or, he wouldn’t have liked that shirt, or, Tom never liked shirts. We said quelle horreur and Vince said yuck. We wrung material between our hands, unhooked and rehung hangers. We spoke of ugliness and marketing, we clung to our favourites, we clung to them intently.

  This might seem strange, but we chose underwear: underpants and a singlet, a marcel as we say in France. I imagined Tom laid out peacefully in white. White had become his colour. Angelic and beautiful, shoulders and neck well defined, his slender arms, his small hands, his thighs, his knees, his ankles and his little naked feet, and the white cotton, unspoiled. Tom neither dressed nor undressed. Come into being. As if he wasn’t about to leave for good, but that he was still preparing himself. A school morning. An in-between time. A new beginning.

  At the counter, stupidly, I feared for a second that he’d be cold.

  One memory still comes back to me, I’m trying to get everything down: Vince had chosen an outfit for Tom. The very same morning of the cremation. It was a Zorro outfit, his own Zorro outfit: the cape, the hat, the mask and the sword. A present for his brother, for Tom who coveted this dress-up costume, when he was still alive. It was the outfit that Vince had chosen, Vince who knew all too well that his brother was dead, who knew it in his own way, and, I would say, before we did. But we didn’t listen to him. We pushed Vince and his childishness aside. Yet it was a wish, Vince’s wish. And now… what respect for death! Tom as Zorro, with the sword. Tom as Spiderman. Tom with his hat and his mask, saying fuck off to death. But it was too early, too early for swear words. Yes, now I would know how to bury my son with dignity. As Zorro. With cheek and panache. With his brother’s hand in mine.

  I think I remember Vince’s kindness and patience. I say ‘I think I remember’ because I no longer saw him. We were incapable of taking care of our children. Vince and Stella should have taken care of us, taken charge of us. A little father and a little mother. With the greatest sensitivity, Vince managed to become invisible. He asked for nothing, he opened the fridge—and Stuart, if he was there, would rush in, make something to eat, thinking of Stella at the same time, who didn’t whinge much either—do I have her voice from that time in my head? Her very little girl’s voice? Her eighteen-month-old voice—do I remember it? Vince was such a polite and tactful child, he never asked questions again.

  The only memory I’ve retained is that repeated one of the two children asleep, when, despite the sleeping pills, I got up to see them. Night after night, image upon image, this fixed image, suspended in time: Vince up the top to the left; Stella to the right in her cot. I suppose Vince brushed his teeth, put his pyjamas on and read a story by himself. I don’t remember any bedtime from that period. We were absolutely useless. Did I explain, later, what was implicit in the words ‘Tom is dead’? It wasn’t like an announcement, but was it like a marker in time, like a before and an after, like a blow to our language?… It was before Tom’s death…No. That’s not how we talk. Too big a swear word.

  No church service. The coffin must be closed. Here we are, forsaken in front of our son’s corpse. What we are witnessing is so brutal, so silent, that I think I know now what purpose priests and ministers serve: to intervene. Somebody to go between. To keep our minds busy. To stop us from seeing. Or someone, I don’t know, a friend, to officiate, to do a reading, anything, a text, the death of Gavroche, the Little Matchgirl or even the death of ET, a text for Tom, the Tom that we had known. Sound, words, to occupy the ears—so that the eyes don’t see. To distract our gaze. Not understanding, not explaining, knowing nothing. Where I am, what’s happening, what’s around me. There is only Stuart’s presence. He’s not got his back to me anymore, he’s beside me. Tom in front of us, lying in a box; a coffin—we chose, Stuart chose, a coffin then? To burn, with Tom inside. His face is purple. His mouth is black. His lips are swollen and cracked. He has no hair left but a kind of fur patch, like an animal squashed on the road. The only constructive thought I have at this time is that we’d waited too long. We’d done this to our son: waited too long. This indignity. But we didn’t know. We didn’t know that death does this. We stand before this, but this is not Tom.

  I’m only hanging by a thread, swinging. In the moments when this is not Tom, in the moments when Tom is not there, I am not there, I have become a child’s corpse, a piece of human meat deprived of meaning. There’s a word in English— roadkill—for what you find squashed on the road. But when it’s Tom, I’d like him to get up and take me into his world. To offer up my life to his teeth, to hold my flesh up to his black mouth, to open my arms as I would to nobody.

  Later on, I’m sitting somewhere. When I think about it now, someone must’ve dressed this thing, Tom. With the little white clothes we chose. Time moves on without me. Time kills Tom. Roadkill. Become a carcass. Before and after Tom’s death. Time passes. I’m sitting somewhere on a chair. Nothing happens. No music, no nothing. Tom’s cremation takes place somewhere and in silence.

  I realise now that we were very hard on ourselves. We didn’t take care of ourselves. Tom was no longer there, anyway, was no longer there as Tom, the ceremony was for us. But we didn’t know that. We should’ve tried something, a ritual, a few words…got somebody to speak or sing for us. But which songs? Which lyrics? Organising all that. I struggled with this. Somebody other than us. Vince, at the age that he is now. He’d know what to do, he’d know how to choose for us, like he’d known how to choose the Zorro costume.

  Stuart comes back up from I don’t know where. He was the one who gave the order to light the flame, I understood afterwards what they were suggesting I do, and he went down there, alone. That’s good. Stuart needed to find a moment to be with Tom. I think he also found him those first few days, when he went out to find food for us. I think back to the sculptor in his studio. Stuart got to have the very last moment. And Vince is the one who looks after me. Stella sleeps in my arms. Vince runs between the chairs and I have to stop him. Have to stop him like Serg
eant Garcia wants to stop Zorro. I told Vince off nearly all the way through that interminable time. The semblance of order that the world maintains. Vince did that for me.

  How long does it take? Other people sitting on chairs— who?—in this strange ceremony during which my son’s body burns. I concentrate, try to think about what’s happening and why I am here. Tom. He’s struggling between a wild cat and a vulture. I know what kind of scream a dying child makes. What kind of wail. I’m banished, because I have seen and I have heard. I still believe I roam among the innocents, just a little more lonely perhaps; I believe I’m still among the others (who?) sitting on my chair, stopping Vince from running, with Stella heavy and asleep in my arms. But I’m banished. And I already pretend to be unaware of it. I’m slightly bored. Stella gets increasingly heavy. My arms ache. I’m hot. I wait till I’m allowed to leave. A circle of ashes, and the world of the living is closed to me from now on. And I wait patiently, stopping Vince from running between the seats, shifting position because the baby’s heavy.

  Then, what? Oh, yes, one detail: I’d bought Tom a book. A little present, a surprise. I had something I needed to be forgiven for, I suppose, and he did like surprises. It was the story of a little Aboriginal boy, like an introduction to this new country. Forgiven for what? I don’t need to go far to find that: on top of the move, the little time that I devoted to him. This unrelenting impression that I devoted very little time to him. And it wasn’t because I admitted it to myself that it wasn’t true. But how to quantify such things? How to know? Tom seemed happy. He asked for nothing. Vince, the eldest, asked a lot. And Stella too, Stella, the baby of the family, had the needs of an eighteen-month-old human being. So I gave Tom presents.

  My father is the second of three, like Tom. A curse, he always insisted. But my father is the second of three brothers. At least the birth of Stella had made Tom the last boy, the smaller of our boys, the smallest boy forever.

  The little Aboriginal boy met a wolf. Though in this case, it was a dingo, one of those big red Australian dogs. I don’t remember anymore how he got away, but he got away. Modern fairytales are misleading. The ogre, the witch, the cruel mother and the big bad wolf, the unpunished monsters of true fairytales know what happens to children that we let out of our sight.

  The little Aborigine escaped from his family at dawn and returned at night, unscathed and victorious, taller.

  When I came across this book, still gift-wrapped, and hidden so that Tom wouldn’t find it…Vince was too big to like it, and Stella too small. It was Tom’s book. Nobody would replace Tom. I would never read it to him. Never again would I hold Tom on my knees, attentive. Silent, warm, in my arms, his shape…The only moments, reading or singing, when our bodies were close. Vince had been cuddly, Stella was still a baby, but Tom, he was happy to put a bit of distance between us. And I respected that. I admired his strength. I counted on him, I guess.

  But I left the present there, for no one. A detail. A simple detail. His absence began with details. His desertion. I won’t get to see him, all excited, opening his present. There was a monstrous gap between these details and the truth they revealed. Between the little boy and death. For a long time, a big part of me assumed it was obvious that we could catch up on the delay we’d had with our storytime, our time of joy. And then, bit by bit, the consciousness grew, the narrow pathways to awareness…My skin, my eyes, my hands, my internal organs, the folds of my brain that, bit by bit, became conscious of Tom’s absence…The knowledge was immediate. His death. Then it takes years to learn.

  I have no memory of going home after the cremation, of going home without Tom. It seems that’s how it is, you go home, a hot urn on your knees.

  Stuart had chosen the urn. There are catalogues for coffin handles, there are also catalogues for urns. For the remains of your beloved little one. Different sizes according to the age of the child. There’s a whole industry, with a wide range of choice. In porcelain, in marble, in cherry wood, in crystal. In all kinds of shapes: teddy bears, rabbits, little pink or blue shoes, little trucks, dolls with heads you can unscrew, seagulls flying off. The business of death is inevitably kitsch. Maybe kitsch is soothing.

  Tom was in a big urn for adults, the most sober possible, though still decorated with a little gilt because in Australia all solemn objects have at least a bit of gold. Tom’s urn didn’t suit him, it wasn’t Tom. But it was an insoluble problem, an impossible choice. How to solve such puzzles?

  We’d wanted to trick the truth of death, trick the rotting, and the earth, but now, we were alone with this unbelievable, impossible object, the thing just appeared, a sort of black vase with a Greek frieze on the lid, and something of Tom was inside it.

  Where do you put it? What do you do with it? There are no mantelpieces in Australian apartments. There are TVs—could we put it on the TV? Up high, out of Stella’s reach, at our height, adult height, not on the ground, not at the back of a cupboard—or in the sunroom, maybe? On the ledge of the bay window? In the sun with a view? Mad, stark raving mad, mad with cynicism and pain, you’re a mother and then you become this? Where were Tom’s eyes? The urn’s eyes? On which side? Stuart took the urn with him to his office. Most probably put it in his desk. In the city, amongst the bay windows and skyscrapers, and Stuart always away on building sites. I wondered if cremation preserves the teeth, the little baby teeth—the tooth fairy will never come for Tom. A few vertebrae, maybe? A few bits of bone intact, something of Tom? I’d made him, I’d carried him in my womb. Who can possibly understand? We weren’t ready for this cremation, for such a sudden, such a complete disappearance.

  The peaks of memory have almost faded. The memory of Tom no longer holds surprises for me; I have, I suppose, nothing left to discover in that territory. All the memories arrived like letters. Ten years on, yes, everything has come back to me, the mislaid parcels, the booby-trapped packages, the registered mail, everything that Tom sent me since his death. Anyway, there aren’t that many memoires linked uniquely to Tom.

  But reminiscences. This territory that we visit unexpectedly, suddenly thrown into a well of time—the trapdoor under our feet, the way your heart misses a beat. Recently, it was the Johnson’s baby shampoo that we used to buy in Vancouver. That smell, all of a sudden. Fourteen years on. And Tom was there, baby Tom, contained in the bottle. Johnson’s baby shampoo smells of camomile and some chemical base, like tarmac. Tom is a Canadian baby from the nineties, suspended in a time of abundance. A big baby, vaccinated and white, destined for wealth. I open the bottle and I’m with Tom, at bath time in our apartment in Vancouver. At home. In these accidents of geography.

  We don’t know, we couldn’t know. It’s the only truth. Nothing destined Tom to this life of four-and-a-half years, to follow his parents from city to city, hot on our heels, as if he mustn’t lose sight of them, these restless parents.

  I open the bottle and I intoxicate myself with Tom. The past enclosed in the bottle. The past present, in the present, as soon as I open it. My heart stops beating in my chest and I’m in pain. Tom is in this bottle. Time stops. A laughing mouth, a rubber duck, dark wet hair, steam. He’s there. You can never wear out pain.

  The effect eases with time. Bit by bit, the scent becomes the same as any old shampoo. I open the bottle only rarely, as if economising Tom. I need another surprise.

  If Tom is the genie in the bottle, I have only one wish: to pick up where we left off. That he be given back to me, the morning before his death, and to pick up where we left off. Four-and-a-half, and then five, and then six, all the way to my own death. It’s my only wish. When a shooting star passes overhead, this is the wish I make.

  These memories that I accumulate, collected like stamps— why is that that he didn’t use them as his memory? A childhood not transformed into childhood memories. A childhood for nothing. Where is he? What is Tom?

  My memory—hallucinations from the past. Apparently, prisoners isolated for months are capable of recalling poems word for word, w
hole novels, or of revisiting museums painting by painting. All these jumbled images, not necessarily moving: Tom eating his first ice-cream, it must be strawberry, his chin smeared with pink, wearing little black sunglasses that belong to Vince, behind him an umbrella creates a bright patch and the sky in the corner is a blue crescent.

  Maybe this memory has taken because a photo of it remains. There has been a photo of this first ice-cream. Tom sticks his chin out going, ‘Yum’, the ice-cream runs down his fingers and at the same time he licks his hand, the ice-cream, and his other hand that’s full of sand. And I let him do it—I don’t grab the packet of wipes like I did for Vince, I know that children eat sandy ice-creams, that their fingers are always sticky, their hair messy and their clothes unbuttoned, I have two children and I’m pregnant with Stella, children lose their hats, their sunglasses, they’re not perfectly coated with sunscreen, they don’t always have a nap, they don’t always eat their vegetables, they don’t die from this, tomorrow we start again, ice-cream, sand, sticky hands and lost hats, happiness itself.

  So, I can make myself suffer. I fall into a net. The sensation of sinking into the depths, of a vanishing point at the centre of curved lines, of time being siphoned. I try to remember, little bit by little bit, what surrounds this ice-cream. Forwards, or backwards: if it was Tom who chose the flavour; if it fell in the sand; how he reacted. Not ‘forwards or backwards’, actually. It’s not a video. These are layers that spread out and collect around a point; that intersect, like ripples when you throw a stone in water.

  A few years ago, lost in these chasms of remembrance, I sometimes asked Stuart, or Vince, to help me fill in a detail. Stuart never wanted to get involved, but sometimes Vince helped me, conscientiously. After Tom’s death, Vince’s favourite game was painting by numbers, filling them in colour by colour, an image emerging, the ones then the twos and the threes…In the same way, he helped me remember Tom. I know that the strawberry ice-cream is connected to Tom because the photo testifies to that. But without photos, Vince sometimes gets annoyed, shouts at me, because it was him and not Tom, or Tom and not him, and I mix everything up.