Tom is Dead

by Marie Darrieussecq

  Sydney. This picture postcard city. This Olympic city. My house, my poor house, this apartment that we were just passing through. We were on the streets, streets of the mind, a labyrinth.

  When Stuart told me, in Vancouver, that his next post was in Sydney, it seemed inconceivable to me to settle there without first taking an interest (and getting the children interested) in the Aborigines. This interest lasted until I landed, after which finding a place to live, then moving in, left me little time for Tjukurpa and ancestral paintings, or for Truganini, the last Tasmanian. Then Tom’s death rendered every genocide obsolete. Tom’s death wiped every race and every culture off the face of the earth.

  The world came back to me when we found the strength to move to the Blue Mountains. To kill time, to avoid the emptiness, I poured over the books in the local library and I plunged back into Tjurkurpa and the Dreamtime. It’s a time that lasts a long time. The creatures that inhabited it left traces. On Uluru, there are the fist imprints of a red lizard that defied the rock, and the marks of combat between the bellbirds and the blue Lizardmen. Etcetera. The book that I wanted to read to Tom was a collection of legends, a welcome present for a young immigrant. I’ve since read it to Stella, and it ended up back in circulation, a library that won’t be haunted by Tom’s death, but by everything, everything else, and, therefore, by Tom too.

  When I see the koalas in the Blue Mountains National Park, I think of Tom’s innocence, of his great kindness, and I cry. Grieving renders you simple-minded and cynical at the same time, solemn and damaged. Nothing of what I think anymore has the lightness and grace of former times.

  Uluru is one of the oldest rocks on Earth. It’s a piece of the bottom of the ocean, the ocean from the beginning of the world, which has come to surface in the Australian desert. The rock is three hundred metres high, and it is imbedded more than two kilometres into the ground, like an iceberg in the burning desert. The Aborigines disapprove of climbing it, but there are crowds of tourists at the summit. The newspapers count the dead, victims of heart attacks, heat and the steep slope. That a white child should disappear at Uluru, eaten by the rock, seemed logical to me. An immemorial, wild justice. The Dreamtime. I took an interest in this, in Vancouver, and then, ten years on, in the Blue Mountains. The time that separates these two periods is the time of Tom’s death, the time when I am not here.

  I heard maman all the time—it was neither Stella nor Vince; besides, they both said mummy. The house was empty. I was in the idleness of death. And Tom called to me. It was his voice. I answered oui in French. A whistling at the base of my throat. The apartment was silent. The doors didn’t creak, the taps didn’t drip. Sydney’s strange birds squawked on the other side of the windowpanes—and the regular bell of the buses, and the signal that spoke to the blind beep beep beep…Victoria Road’s song, familiar and muffled, familiar and terrible, was penetrated, seven storeys up, by Tom’s voice. Tom’s voice was clear, unique, recognisable. One night, as I was setting the table with four plates—a maman!, plaintive, furious, like often when he woke from his nap. ‘IN YOUR FUCKING HEAD!’ Stuart shouted picking up the fragments of plate, and he knocked on my head with his closed fist, five hard knuckles, knock knock.

  Stuart heard that I heard Tom. Stuart and I were so unhappy, so lonely, that it seems we spoke to each other all the same, a telepathy of misery. Maybe misery is a form of intense energy, a fluid that fills houses—we become swimmers, we invent strokes and ways of drowning, and the eddies of others reach us only in waves. Maybe he heard Tom, too, maybe he heard Tom like I heard him, saying p’pa or daddy; Tom didn’t mind speaking English with his father. The clatter of the plates had made Stella shriek, but maybe it was Tom’s voice that had frightened her, and that often woke her at night. The Knock Knock family. Tom jealous, Tom behind the windowpane, watching his brother and his sister who were still with us—the parent thieves, the love thieves (if we could still call love Stuart’s feeding routine, and my moments of panicked kisses)—Tom, full of hatred, trying hard to send the survivors mad.

  But when I was alone with him, I loved his calls. I stopped still. ‘Montretoi.’ Show yourself. I thought these words intensely, so that he’d hear me. The instant of his voice was so brief—the time to take notice, the time to get caught up in it—that the hubbub of Sydney, the vibrations of the windowpanes and that sort of permanent grating of the heat—the general sound that life emits closed immediately around his call again, like water.

  I dozed in the sunroom. The circles in the air marked the point where Tom was once again engulfed. I positioned myself in the centre for a few seconds, and they pulsated. I saw them, the circles, enough to touch them. Tom had been there. A lake materialised in the room, in the sunshine of that Sydney autumn, that drought sun, blue sky dulled by the heat, air blasted with dust. Tom had been there, his voice had hollowed out a brief point of silence in the noise and the nothingness of life in Bondi.

  I got used to hearing his calls, to listening out for them; but they always took me by surprise. Sometimes I heard them in the next room, too late to get there in time. One of my first conscious acts was to buy five tape recorders, one for each room, and a huge stock of cassettes. I turned the recorders on as soon as the apartment was empty: from nine in the morning till roughly four in the afternoon, then at night. I only missed those hours that were devoted to the family, meals, bath, bedtime. The rest of the time, the recorders were on, in the blinding midday light or in the stifling insomnia of the southern nights. I got up every two hours to change the cassettes. I quickly understood that I needed at least a sixth recorder, to listen to the tapes: I would’ve had to live several days in one to sort through this murmur, through these breaths; to listen to the previous days, while, with difficulty, I lived through the day that was being recorded.

  I heard my own breathing; or the noise of my footsteps. The fridge that I opened and closed. Sometimes the telephone, the answering machine, and, if it was my mother, the small click when I answered, followed by my silence, which was a tenser quality of silence, a rustling of the air trapped in the apartment. Beep beep beep. And the purring of the tape recorder on which I listened, constantly, but with an ever-increasing delay, to the tapes of the previous days, five recordings per day, one per room, and the sound that came out of this recorder was recorded in its turn—I didn’t want to use headphones for fear of missing Tom live. The playing times became overlaid, the silence unfolded, intensified, piled up, and I heard the abyss, the noise that is emitted by the interior of time. I reversed, I went back to the source. What can’t be heard was recorded throughout the day, and the day before that and the day before that, in the recording of the recording. The days that separated me from the present accumulated. And all of a sudden, amidst the boredom and the emptiness, on the cassettes, I heard Tom.

  It was a language made up of repetitions and thuds, a stammering; sometimes wet sounds; but also long modulated sequences, sentences. Bit by bit, I manage to isolate the two syllables of ma-man, or often m’ma, like when he was little. And, on two occasions, something else: a series of Vs and Cs, as if he was repeating vancouvervancouvervancouver, and Zs, like zone, a whistling. I played these few seconds over and over again, they became clearer and clearer, I learned to distinguish Tom above the incoherent noise of the world.

  That was how I became certain that Tom had stayed in Vancouver, maybe in that place they call the Zone of Silence, near Vancouver Island. It’s a place that’s been known about for a long time, no outside noise enters it, no siren is powerful enough, and ships shatter against its rocks.

  The cassettes recorded during the day captured a somnambulant voice, difficult to hear. It was at night that his activity was the most intense, because of the time difference. In the dazed silence of our insomnia. I hallucinated that I was at a ship’s rail, hands gripped, body tense, not wanting to let go. I was already asleep, but I didn’t want to sleep. I woke with a jolt. Tom was speaking to me. Stella was screaming. Vince got up too an
d turned on all the lights. We all landed up on the raft of the double bed. Stuart finished by collapsing on the lounge room sofa, I put Vince back in his bed, and, sometimes, Stuart would take Vince in with him or I’d fall asleep with Stella in the sunroom, or Vince and Stella would stay with me in our room. Morning would find us in whatever bed, in whatever position, with whoever. Orgies of despair, and us, marooned.

  One night, when Stella and I were alone (once a week Stuart took Vince to the pool) I attached her in her highchair, and I pressed play. Stella reached her hand out towards the recorder. At nearly two, Stella still wasn’t talking, even though she was saying daddy and mummy before Tom’s death. I rewound the cassette, isolated a sentence and turned up the volume, but Stella’s expression stayed the same, she leaned forward. I pressed stop; what she really wanted was the tape recorder, she wanted to play with the buttons. When I pressed play again, Tom’s voice was so clear, so incomprehensible yet clear, that I made Stella listen, I held her seated, recorder against her ear, shaking her so that she would translate. Then I was afraid Stuart would come home. The five recorders were all well hidden.

  Tom had stayed in Vancouver. His voice on the cassettes became briefly decipherable as I listened to them; I recognised certain sequences of syllables. They resembled the language of the Indians of Vancouver Island. Once I took Vince and Tom to see their annual concert. Tom had adored their songs and I remember their name, Kwakiutl—unpronounceable for a western tongue. Maybe it came back to me because what I heard on the cassette made me think of it. Their language really amused Vince and Tom. They imitated the little explosions and clicks at the base of the throat. These gentle sons of assassins. The Kwakiutl invented the potlatch. Only twenty percent of their original population remains, and many died in prison because the potlatch was forbidden by the Whites. All the countries where I’ve lived had first been emptied of their inhabitants so that the Whites could move in, so that I could move in, me and my children.

  I outlined with two red marks the little bit of cassette tape where the word Vancouver was recorded. I listened to it and listened again, rewinding endlessly: I learned this word like we learn a language, my Berlitz course in Tom. I heard him better and better.

  I said consonants; all the ones that can be projected out of your throat with air alone. I tried hard, t, f, k, p, s, and Tom replied to me in the same incomplete language; we found words that were nothing but breath. I formed my mouth into a big circle to make grimacing, mute Os, and Tom took shape. Air propelled out, spherically; I heard the sound of air in the apartment and in the city. The screams of the tortured whose vocal chords had been cut. But Tom was there, with his spectral voice, and sometimes, his voice from before, vowels and consonants, and my heart burst.

  I visited our Vancouver apartment in my mind. We’d left behind us papers, clothes, old toys. Not all our furniture followed us; it was cheaper to buy the same shelves in all the Ikeas in the world. We’d left Tom. I could see him at Sydney airport, his arrival, his landing; we’d welcomed an ectoplasm that had vanished after three weeks. We’d left the real one behind, over there, out of negligence, out of lovelessness. Tom wandered aimlessly around Vancouver. He returned to the apartment. He passed through the walls. He slept the sleep of ghosts. I alone could find him, remake him. Reassemble him and once more give him life. ‘Sydney,’ said Tom at the airport. ‘Like in Nemo.’ He’s happy but exhausted, very pale, he whinges. We put him straight to bed. It seems to me that this is where Tom’s death begins. A process that I should’ve spotted, and that took three weeks, like a vanishing sickness. Slowly, layer by layer. And I didn’t see a thing.

  I revisit the apartment as it was when we left it. I remember, the day of our departure, having taken a last look at the deserted rooms. Without knowing that this brief check, this brief sequence of unfurnished images, would come back later, obsessively. Without knowing that my memory would be capable of conserving such harmless images, square metre by square metre, and docilely serving them up to me again, months from then, after Tom’s death.

  Vancouver. I Vancouver. It’s the city from before. A huge living room, with bay windows giving out onto nothing, the sky. Two white bedrooms, a hall, a blue bathroom. That last minute check is superimposed upon the images of my first visit. The walk through inspection. Very clean. A harmless apartment, where not one of our children died. I remember a drawer full of out-of-date warranties, discount vouchers, bills, prescriptions, official mail…The same pile would form again from country to country. We used the apartments briefly, then we moved on.

  Tom got lost between the two. I could see him in the empty apartment, in that bluish light of morning. The thick fog of Vancouver, a fog like nowhere else; we opened the windows and it entered, damp and white, it moved around the rooms, and melted on our cheeks.

  Of course the apartment must have been re-let, of course another family must have moved in, salvaging the shelves, the little bits and pieces. It didn’t bother me. Another family with Tom. Keeping him company, the dad, the mum, the children. Their furniture, their things. I superimposed their clutter on our own, like two different films in the same décor, one domestic but foreign, the other static, walls and rubbish. And Tom encountering these strangers.

  I also looked at planispheres, one planisphere that I’d bought specially, the ones you find in Sydney: centred on Australia, not on Europe. The Pacific is the centre of the world, pierced with little islands, solid ground washed up on the sides like a splash. Sydney to the left, and Vancouver to the right, are on a diagonal that passes through Hawaii. The planet is full of water. America is thinner, more vertical from north to south. Africa and Europe become accessories, especially Western Europe, deformed by the projection. France, right on the edge, is a slanting strip, Brittany is levelled off, the Bay of Biscay open and flattened: a sort of Norway. China, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, stand up straight, compact, cramped.

  Truth is in geography. Time had undone Tom, but he remained fixed in space, immutable, a telluric point that I had identified: Vancouver Island. On this planisphere I could trace a perfect and unrecognised isosceles triangle, with Sydney, Vancouver and Lima as its points. There was, no doubt, something of Tom to be found in Lima, but also in Hawaii, isocentre of the triangle. Pearl Harbor is in Hawaii. Everything started to make sense. The signs evolved on the map around an absent capital called Tom.

  One evening, I took Vince to the Bondi Baths. Vince packed his bag on his own, without forgetting anything, because he knew that from now on his mother was totally incapable of thinking of his bathers, his towel and his goggles.

  It was like a glimpse of what would one day be possible— that day of forgetting, ten years on, at the beach.

  Pelicans on the letterboxes. Flowering vines weighing down trees. The bitumen soft from the heat, the empty residential streets that descend towards the sea. I saw the suburb of Bondi differently, a bright patch appearing amidst the hate. And the little round park, the one I’d chosen Victoria Road for. Deserted, along with its four bench seats, even though it offers a vertiginous view of the harbour and the sea. The summit of an ancient hill, from where the Aborigines contemplated the open sea long before Vince and me, long before Tom. A circle from which to look out over things, except that I’m at the bottom of a hole. And it starts all over again. The sun doesn’t touch my skin. The trees don’t provide me with any shade. Beauty is not for me. A chasm with this hill for a mouth: a patch of sun up high, and the sea above me.

  It’s the park and it’s not the same park, the park I visited innocently before Victoria Road. A dark, crazy lens is before my eyes. An unspilled sob, thick, glassy. And the trees, the bench seats, the sun, the sea, the round lawn, Vince, are all merely the elements of a catastrophe.

  I gesture to Vince that I’m going to sit down for a moment. From a grieving mother, wishes are orders. The heat has relented. It must be around seven. I’m tired like a little old woman. I realise that I’ve been very, very tired since Tom’s death.
I suddenly feel really sorry for Vince. I wrap my arms around him. He lets me. Between the four of us, we keep a sick body functioning: Stuart speaks, Stella eats, I clean, and Vince tries to live. The city, the sea and the wind wrap themselves around us and breathe for us, and in the park I think I understand: this bad city is not responsible, this godforsaken city, as they say, with its indifferent inhabitants.

  ‘Let’s go, Mum,’ Vince says to me, thinking, quite rightly, about the pool’s opening hours and his friends who are already there. He takes me with him. From now on he knows the world better than me. He holds me by the arm and he’s the one that takes the lead; he makes me cross the road, he makes me avoid obstacles. Bondi has become his suburb, he greets people for me, he guides me towards the pool.

  Bondi’s seawater pool hadn’t been renovated since at least the fifties. From certain angles, the mythical beach of Bondi, around the time of Tom’s death, looked quite grubby. The footpaths were rutted and the surf schools camped in huts. The pool was built into a hollow in the rocks, propped up by a seawall at right angles. The type of pool that fills up at high tide and empties little by little at low tide. The storms of a hundred equinoxes had little by little devoured the changing-rooms. We’d undress in doorless cabins, with dug out floors, or behind a pillar eaten down to the framework. In another life I would’ve taken photos. Invented triptychs: the rusted flesh of walls, the puddles of sea water, the anemones in the concrete. I remember coming up with this thing about the photos without emotion, like an official finding: such desires no longer existed. Even the idea of taking photographs, of keeping a record of shapes, was useless. And of seeing beauty where there was only a ruined changing-room. But I had thought about it. I’d seen the walls, the puddles, the sea. Like in a Henri Lartigue photo, but dilapidated. I wasn’t completely dead. I still had some of my old reflexes, that I had to locate and disable. Become empty. No longer suffer. No longer desire anything. As I waded into the pool, Vince screamed out: ‘Mummy!’ What was it, a great white shark? I’d just forgotten to put my bikini top on. Anyway, I hardly have any breasts; three breastfed babies put an end to that. I’m mixing everything up. I put my top on, two triangles and a bit of string, and I entered the water avoiding Vince’s friends; he was ashamed enough of me as it was.