Tom is Dead (14 page)

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,
M
s and
A
s, 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 straight, 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.

Stella had been born on a planet where Tom already existed. Tom had always been in her world. But not in Vince's world, or in mine, or in Stuart's. In hardly anyone's world. Stella was the only one among us for whom Tom was a given. Like the trees, the sky, words, Tom was there. And Stella's forgetting was killing him, still. Stella's stubborn little head. Her head screwed on properly, this miracle, this gift—Stella survived by forgetting a given in her world, by forgetting her brother Tom.

Stella was barely talking when Tom died. She said
D-aa
and
M-aa
but she understood; language was about to take hold of her when Tom died. But afterwards she remained mute, concentrating instead on walking, racing, cavorting about. Looking at her, you might have thought she was a happy child, but now all she could depend on in the universe were the laws of gravity, the air that we breathe and certain constants of the physical world.

I'd kept a diary of Vince's and Tom's first words but Stella, my only daughter, memorised herself all on her own. And Stuart never wanted to believe that she said
T-aa
for Tom, that she remembered him, that she looked for him, understanding, little by little, that he wasn't playing hide-and-seek, or peek-a-boo, but that he was gone, gone—then, forgetting. Today, I look at her—she's twelve now—and I think again, fleetingly, I allow myself to wonder, if she saw him, the day of his death, if the last moment passed before her eyes, at naptime, through the bars of her cot.

Tom had seen himself dying, I knew it, I felt it; he'd had the time to die.
Instant death
they'd told me, but what does that mean—he'd had the time to meet his death, alone, at four-and-a-half.

It wasn't enough to go to Tasmania, it wasn't enough to tear ourselves away from time and to walk in forests that once saw dinosaurs. No, time was modern. Tom's death was modern. It was now, between two plane flights, that he wouldn't reappear. There I was again, devastated, crushed, incapable of looking after the living, incapable, yet again, for the umpteenth day; with tears welling up from the past, drawn from the craters beneath the dinosaurs' feet.

Crossing the threshold of this building, every day, in Victoria Road. Leaving, entering, passing through.

My living children, my machines. They had to keep functioning. I had enough to do with Tom's death. Tom had become the first in line. Perfect as a dead child, well behaved as in those old funerary photos, where the soul had to be captured before it took flight. Eyes closed.
He looks like he's asleep
. Vince, especially, always picked the wrong moment. One day I found him in tears and, when I understood, when I finally came back to my senses, I didn't take him in my arms. We cried alone, side by side, without touching each other. I don't know why. Vince had become untouchable, like our pain.

For months, maybe years, I treated them like they were koalas. They needed to be disturbed as little as possible. They needed to be protected, their feeding and comfort taken care of, their habits respected and their habitat preserved. It was as if Tom's death had erased my own childhood. I no longer knew anything about childhood. I believed that at four-and-a-half you're forty years old, and I believed that at the age of eight, Vince's age, you're devoid of thought, desire and anger.

I was like this Japanese couple I'd seen a long time ago in a documentary. They observed mourning for their son in accordance with an ancient ritual: the mother, a portrait of her son on her chest; the father, a small barrel under his neck containing his son's ashes. Except that the barrel was empty, the son lost at war. To a western mind, even one moved by this vision, there was an inevitable parallel with a Saint Bernard, a keg around its neck.

I hadn't lost Tom yet. Since then, I often think about this aging couple, clinging to the customs of mourning and the rituals of grief, encapsulated in the past, a past that grows increasingly distant from them. I'm carrying a small empty barrel and I drift further away, mislaid in time, planets pass by, pointless circles, and I'm turning too, in the emptiness, midway from the origin of things.

Maybe Tom never existed. Maybe I imagined everything, those four-and-a-half years plus nine months, in order to justify this horror in me, this empty place that I'm talking around, talking, talking, or else I'm silent. Sometimes the pain is displaced, Tom dissolves in time—the pain is there but I no longer know why.

Stuart did nothing but work between Tom's death and the holiday in Tasmania. I had a glimpse of what he was going through whenever I managed to go out and make myself do the shopping. The
good morning
of the woman at the checkout irritated me. Her movements, the way she passed objects over the scanner, yoghurt, steak; the enthusiastic colours of the ads, the impeccable cleanliness of the aisles, the studious stupidity of the customers, everything, anything, felt like an attack, felt beside the point. That was the most difficult thing: the transitions. For Stuart, it happened every day. I imagined him diving into a pool, with his cap and his goggles, but naked, terribly naked. He entered into one hallucination, work, and at night he entered into another, the apartment. From one to the other, from one side of the world to the other, driving in the car was his transition, the fast, modern transition; this moment of solitude that's considered polluting and selfish. Stuart, all alone in his car, went from one place to another.

Two marine animals, alone. At the bottom of the sea or just below the surface. Cruising, as we say of boats. We didn't feel less alone when we made love. Like everything else,
making love
had been coloured by Tom's death. I remember a certain rage, a need to feel alive, to feel hatred. To hurt myself, at times.
Make love
is a stupid expression, or maybe, yes, to
make
love, to build it from scratch out of this embattled story. Tell each other tales of love above the tangled bodies. I'd never really understood the connection between two bodies and love. Between the solitude of orgasm, and the everything of love. This annoys Stuart; in fact, we never talk about it—he says I'm French, that's the word he turns to when he doesn't know how to categorise me. I say to him; we could have not been together. Except that at one point in my life I decided to make my way in the world with him, his furniture, and, later, his children. And that it made me happier to follow him into the world than to stay where I was; that's what love is, I tell Stuart.

I have only vague memories of why Stuart and not somebody else. Except that all of a sudden, the air tore apart. Was sort of hacked away, as if the stuff of space somehow got broken down, became unstable. We were drinking tea or whatever in my student dorm in Paris, we were talking about something; and space tipped. There we were, clothed and neutral, then all of a sudden—dripping and hard with desire. His elbow brushed my elbow, the most harmless part of my body touched the most harmless part of his—and we became totally engorged with blood. We had to have each other, fast. To intertwine, to hold onto each other. To caress each other, too, gently. A total upheaval, sounds that no longer echoed, the horizontal slanted, the vertical turned upside down. And time bumped up against us, time, hard with blood, with beating heat.

There remains a place in us from where all this begins. This place has not been destroyed. I don't know why.

I started going to a support group in Sydney. I needed to find others like me, people who know that you can lose all composure over a simple ‘hello', who can't manage to go through a door anymore or choose between two articles of clothing. Don't know anymore how to get up, how to wash.

There were twenty of us working with a
moderator
who was in mourning himself. And I saw us all as pathetic mutants, each with an extra little head on our shoulders, the head of the dead one. And each of us was the medium through which this head could think, and speak, stammer—through us…The two-headed ones, the mourners, saying whatever, as long as we were together, together crying over our dead with the eyes of our two heads.

After Tom's death, my comprehension of English had sort of shrunk. When two people spoke at the same time, I was lost. I missed a word and meaning unravelled, my strength abandoned me. The sentence became impenetrable and this flowed into the following sentences; I was out of my depth. But with the support group I knew
what
we were talking about. So I managed to follow. It was almost relaxing. It was with them that I really learned to speak again. My language classes.

I'd found my words and I talked a lot. I cut other people off. I believed that my suffering gave me every right. I behaved badly, as if grieving stood in the way of politeness. I remember a woman who'd lost her only son; he was fifteen, I think. She dressed elegantly. Elegantly for Australia. Pastel suits, white stockings, white stilettos, always a hat. She seemed permanently about to go to a wedding. With her painted nails and blow-dried hair, she cried discreetly, eyes behind a tissue. She didn't come to all the meetings, because we terrible ones, we wanted, I wanted, to trample her hat and make her bawl, like we did at school. That first group was no good at all.

There were widows and widowers, inconsolable mummies and daddies, and grieving brothers and sisters. I was attuned to these brothers and sisters, this brotherhood. I was missing a brother. My mother had lost a son, still a baby. One death per generation—I tried not to think about this too much. A curse, a tithe for the dead child. My mother seemed to have recovered from it (my father, no), recovered in her own way, like an old couch, the awful mess of grief concealed beneath the new upholstery.

I'm still crazy, in a way. Maybe I was looking for a brother or sister among those support groups. Are brothers and sisters better than friends at hearing grief? There were twenty of us in that group, I think. There were some who spoke better than the others. Some who listened better than the others. Different social classes. And also an aristocracy that were in a league of their own: those who'd lost a child. Us. There were only four of us, including the woman in the hat.