Fiona fell feet first into the middle of my grief, plouf, with her speech about Rodin, she was out of context, everything she said was out of context. Yet some of her sentences resonated beneath my bumps, in the middle of my jumbled organs, in the straw, in the sawdust that I was made of. My body a butcher’s shop, or the trampled floor of a stable. Maybe it had been years since I’d listened to anyone. Fiona chatted away and her sentences jostled against unformulated, untouched things. In the lake that I’d become, there were abutments, dykes, water catchments. Grief distanced itself for a moment, I kept it like a consciousness, a weight moored at the back of my head. If she knew…But she didn’t know. She didn’t need to know. She smiled gently at me, as if at someone nice and slightly handicapped. She had the right to be there, to tell me about her life, her misfortunes and her questions, without me dragging my son’s corpse before her eyes.
Memory makes hollows and bumps. But, sometimes, below the uneven surface there is nothing. The pain withdraws into the o of Tom, red. Or sometimes, the huge submerged mass is undetectable from above. Or sometimes, memory raises up these flat images and shatters them like concrete slabs. And what’s warm and alive flows once more.
A geography in motion, with landslides, erosion, a particular light upon an everyday landscape, or a word, or Rodin, or a simple martini…I’m in the bar of the Mountain Lounge with Fiona and I tell myself that he’d be fourteen now. Though, more and more often, I leave him in peace. Even though he takes up the whole sky. A permanent background, my colour, my climate, the true complexion of the world.
Traversed by images. A systolic rhythm. My heart beats, Tom, Tom. I get up, I can’t stay at home any longer, I look out the window, and I see him.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust… What is my suffering for, if it’s of no use to him? If it’s not the coin in his mouth, if it’s not paying for anything? What would I have said to him, given to him, if I had known, if a goodbye had been possible? Wherever he is—I know that he’s nowhere—wherever he is, I send him a little each day, to my child who stayed in the homeland. He turns around and says hello to me, in the lift, wearing his raincoat. We blow kisses to each other, fair weather, foul weather. Maybe that’s the last image. Tom turning around to say hello to me, fair weather foul weather, come rain or shine. And not Tom in a Spiderman T-shirt, given his marching orders at naptime, and not, no, not Stella in her cot (with Vince finally asleep, I was going to be able to rest a little) and not Tom getting up again, grizzly and sweaty, I’m too hot, without any idea of the weather, or what time it is (from Vancouver to Sydney in a single flight) and not me, shouting.
Vancouver. An Indian summer so scorching that the lake only reaches our ankles. I’m with Stuart and Tom. No doubt Vince and Stella are there, surely Stella is in my arms, but I can’t see them. I see Tom in front of me, and Stuart. Tom’s carrying a yellow inflatable toy in the shape of a duck, but I know that’s wrong—later I found an inflatable toy in the cupboard: a green turtle.
We’ve come for a swim, but the lake isn’t deep enough. So Stuart heads into the river. The water is dark behind him, the disturbed silt swirls. I think about this abstract thing we have in common, he and I, being born far from where we live. He drags the water behind him swaying his hips, and the trees close in around his head. He pushes back the vines, he straddles tree trunks. He moves away, arms half raised: a GI, Apocalypse Now.
Dragonflies. Stuart held out his hands and the dragon flies landed on them. It was difficult for Tom. Staying still waiting for dragonflies, between the frogs, the trees, water running around his ankles, all those dams to build, and the fish, the small swirls of silt—the world was too desirable to focus for very long on only one of its creatures, for such an uncertain result.
Stuart, his hands trembling with blue dragonflies, two big blue flowers at the end of his fingers. Though, from time to time, a dragonfly landed in Tom’s outstretched hand, as if the world were gentle.
So Tom made himself into a statue. Gentle dragonflies, big as his hand, the body electric blue, the wings vivid red, the head green. As if the world were a carnival. Tom motionless for a second, eyes marvelling at the offering, marvelling at the world, blue eyes matching the dragonfly in the harmony of the world, wide with joy and with exquisite fear. ‘Maman!’ Tom whispers. A photo from my memory. Where are Vince and Stella? They are the ones who have disappeared.
I don’t know where Tom is. I know that he’s dead, I know that he’s not anywhere, but what about chronology? When is he? Did it all really happen one day? One stupid day, one day on the calendar? It seems to me that this information still hasn’t reached the slowest areas in my brain, and that I will die believing Tom is alive, given that Tom has always been alive, he’s never been anything but alive. Tom will die at the end of this grief, with its highs and lows, its tides and episodes; Tom is dead because of this grief. It was before the Tasmanian devils, before Fiona, before still, before that beautiful day at the beach, but it’s also unending, fair weather, foul weather, messy, jumbled, rising and falling beneath my skull, Tom dying, horizon after horizon. And my mouth is full of a salty ocean, my mouth is immense and empty, lapping and huge.
Vince will leave home soon. My mother offered to have him—a year in France, at the University of Rouen. Stella is still here. Apart from being the mother of a dead child, I have little idea of who I am.
Maybe, by dying at four-and-a-half, Tom, fulfilled all that he was, because dead, he’s that too. I don’t know how to say this. I see my hand held out and then dropped, and Tom at mid-distance—he doesn’t hold his hand out to me, no, but he raises it a little, in a strange gesture. Neither goodbye nor wait. A small signal, at the end of his fingers. He’s half turned, he doesn’t come, he doesn’t move away; he’s there without being there.
There’s the image of Vince when he leaves, when we take him to the airport and he’s half-impatience, half-affection; the image of a sulky Stella, who’s still with us, still a bit too young, still having to put up with her parents. And Tom, Tom missing between the two, Tom much younger than them, four-and-a-half years old plus ten years, Tom whom I’m trying to leave in peace, to whom I’m trying to give the right to his death.
I’d sent him off to have his nap; he’d protested. I’d locked the door to the apartment, and the windows, as I always do when I want to sleep, and I’d lain down, exhausted, all those boxes, three young children, and the jet lag, and Stella monstrous, and Tom who wasn’t sleeping well. I’d forgotten the sunroom. When I woke up, in the bedroom there was Vince, there was Stella, there was no Tom. In the sunroom, the window was open, I leant out, and I saw him.
Tom is Dead Page 15