Tom is Dead (18 page)

Tea, orange juice and cake were passed around. For once, smoking was permitted. They put me near the window that they opened despite the air-conditioning, I heard everything through the hum of the city. Canberra, its treed avenues, its museums, its lake, its administrative buildings. The capital of a country lost at the end of the oceans. This city where I gave myself up.

Canberra is where I was posted when I was finally persuaded to be dead. They assign you a place. You hang onto it, because you don't know what to do with yourself anymore. The lawns, the automatic sprinklers, the government buildings like huge Lego. Air-conditioning in summer, heating in winter. The mimosa. Three hundred thousand inhabitants. All dead, spread over hectares along with giant supermarkets and museums devoid of visitors. In Canberra, everything is a little too big, there's lots of space. People rarely touch each other, they smile, they are gentle and polite, the politeness of the dead. Whenever I drove back up to the mountains, I was exhausted. I missed the sea, but away from it I was calmer. There was no longer a way out. There was no more euphoria.

In the support group, there was a kind of sub-group, an added aristocracy: those who had lost their child to illness. They'd been to hospital like you go to war, and us, the others, we'd lost our children so stupidly. A very skinny woman, burned by living through her daughter's cancer, explained to me at length that it was worse for me, because it had all been so sudden. She took my hand despite my reticence: I had experienced in one second what she had experienced over a year; and I couldn't make any sense of what she was saying, apart from this extraordinary civility between us, this strange commonality, this
dignity
. I often thought of the woman with the hat—had she had other children? I can't remember anymore. I remember that hat, ten years on, and the little dead child hidden beneath it, thinking for her, breathing for her—she the mummy, mummified, she was the dead one.

You soon become a veteran. You find the words, the gestures. You greet, you answer the phone, you man the desk, you offer a biscuit. You transform yourself into a voluntary worker for the death of children. You listen, you nod, you issue warnings, you exist. And by the time you finally believe that you're not alone anymore, you're alone again. The journey from one solitude to another must have taken four years for me. The time to leave Sydney, the time to settle myself in the Blue Mountains, the time to fix up the house, the time to tell pieces of my story, until, one day, I stopped driving to Canberra. From one day to the next, I stopped going to the support group.

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 cries, 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.