Tom is Dead (7 page)

I did what I could. You only have one mother, just as you only have one death. Tom was stuck in the morgue, under the ceiling, looking for a way out. The badly buried ones, the ridiculed ones who howl to the wind, the grave-less ones who bump up against windowpanes, these were now his gang and they had come back to haunt me. Tom demanded that we get it over with. It was with compassion that I began to think about his poor body. Tom was hanging about, hovering around his body.

For ten years, I've blamed myself. Now I'd like—not to breathe, not to rest or to forget, but—to relax the jaws a little, the talons and the claws between which I remain motionless, not struggling, held tight by the pain and maybe by a vague glow from above: I don't believe in signs anymore, but the pillars aren't the only things that have stayed in my mind from my visit to Souillac Abbey.

Putrefaction. In Vancouver, I read books by Patricia Cornwell, stuff about medical examiners, six months in a dry climate for mummification, eighteen months for a clean skeleton; for children it's quicker—how are you meant to cope with that? To be alive while Tom was beneath the earth…I think it was ghosts that presented me with the notion of the air. Not the Greek world, nor that of the Bible, but Anglo-Saxon fantasy. Stuart's heritage. That Tom's molecules drift freely in the air. Today, I regret this. As if grief had authorised me to make such blunders. Neither in my family nor Stuart's are the dead cremated. We want slabs, yew trees, plaques, weight. I would've liked to be able to visit him, I think. To sit down and tell him what's been going on in our lives. To change his flowers like I changed his nappies. To plant jonquils and boxwood. To water, at the edge of the desert, a grave in a temperate land. To drop by and see him. I would've known how to do that. How to earn my way back in, maybe. A good mother, after the event. A good mother in the hereafter. But I didn't know.

Not that I believe that he's anywhere; apart from in my mind, and in the minds of Stuart and the children, and our parents. A home where he survives, that radiates from us, that's bigger than us. He appears all of a sudden, and I think of him. He appears all of a sudden from nowhere. I see him. I raise my hand gently, and I caress the air.

I had a look on the internet to see where the crematorium is. When you move house, you worry about shops, schools, bus stops, and, if necessary, hospitals. The crematorium is more than an hour out of town. But they took care of the transfer of the body and all we had to do, the father and I, was to choose the clothes for the ceremony. They used the word
ceremony
instead of the word cremation. The clothes, on the other hand, were considered very important, and in this area, I must say, they employed a sophisticated level of psychology. Because the whole affair with the clothes kept Stuart and me very busy. The choice of clothing was the subject of our first real discussion, of our first
talk
, as they say. About Tom's death.

You tell yourself that flames are clean and quick, that there won't be weeks of insects and decomposition. The purity of flames. In fact, it's just as difficult. Ideally, you'd instantly become ash. My first thought was that Tom be naked. But it's just as difficult to imagine your child's body delivered up to flames as to worms. Now there's something I didn't know. Today, westerners know how to burn a body. This can no longer be ignored. The tales of the
Sonderkommandos
. The descriptions of the bodies in the ovens. The internal organs and the eyes explode first. I was incapable of forgetting this. This thing that I'd never seen, I saw it. Tom's eyes. Tom's entrails. His soft belly. It would need to be very quick, instantaneous. But at the crematorium, they'd warned me: two and a half hours for an adult, one hour for a small child. They must have a time per kilo, the speed calculated by the rule of three.

I spared Stuart these images. They came to me the day I called the morgue to inform them of our decision.
We were starting to lose hope
, one of the employees said to me. Sentences like that you never forget. The images hounded me, in fits. Maybe Stuart has the same ones. These aren't things you can talk about. So we talked about clothes. I wanted Tom naked after all, but it was Stuart who told me no. It was his way of saying that the flames shouldn't touch him. I think Stuart would've liked to wrap him up as hermetically as possible, his little Tom, to keep him intact, in a kind of petrification by flames. An incandescence. An ecstasy, for evermore. I understand the rich and the crazy. Those sort of space capsules, at minus 200°C, those portholes through which you can see the face.

We discussed the clothes, inch by inch. By him being naked, I also hoped to avoid hampering him with talismans, to let him go alone, with dignity, without trinkets. A little comfort, in the oven? Apart from the Winnie the Pooh he sometimes took with him, Tom never had a ‘comforter'. If he'd had one, I would've found it inappropriate or, I don't know, unpleasant, to burn a soft toy under the pretext of keeping him company. Put it in a grave, perhaps. Maybe. In the oven, when the flames lick the coffin, as they say, would the corpse hug the lifeless object tightly in its arms? Yet without warning Stuart would've loaded him up for the journey. He even talked about biscuits (Tom's favourite biscuits: chocolate Prince biscuits, that we could only get in France, and that my mother sent over in bulk.) Let him, at least, wear his favourite T-shirt (Stuart knew these things), the striped one, Stuart said—and if I hadn't stopped him, he would've placed by his side a photo of us, of him, me, Stella and Vince.

In ancient times, they slid a gold coin under the tongues of the dead for the hereafter, for the passage, to see them through the beginning—a bit like certain migrants who landed in Australia with a pound in their pockets. These skeletons are found, mouth open, the gold fallen amongst the vertebrae.

I wanted all these fetishes removed from Tom. I wanted him naked, and pure, if this word has any meaning. In the purity of the flames, and in their harshness too. I was torn. No tenderness. It was too late, for tenderness.

I remember the days that preceded the cremation: eyes dry, heart dry, brain enraged, and the
bang
of the eyes exploding. He was dead. He was dead. The truth. The end of the world. The vitrification.

Cremation. Ashes. Air. That's all. The objects, our whims, seemed more childish to me than Tom's tastes themselves. Ridiculous, when nothing about Tom was ridiculous.

New clothes, never worn. Clothes that had no history. A sort of uniform for death, as neutral as possible. Nothing that adds to the grief. Nothing. His approval: we felt that he would've agreed with what we chose for him. And with our discussions, our talks, our quarrels. Tom knew so much about us. He was so far ahead of us. We were children.

A few days ago, on the beach, I watched Vince surf. It seems to me that, at that moment, the fear that I felt was normal, and reasonable. I was the mother of a young man, seventeen years of age, clever, well balanced, who was surfing, a wild coast, medium-sized waves. My view of my son wasn't blurred by the death, ten years earlier, of my other son. Tom wasn't dancing between my eyes and Vince. I was afraid for Vince, and for Vince only.

Fear was normal, and beauty overflowed it. My son's body a brushstroke, a human silhouette where the water shouldn't have let him in. Vince nonchalant on his long board, walking on the crest of waves, vertical at the edge of chaos. Tom stayed a very small boy, and his brother grew and grew. On the beach then, I wasn't wondering, I'm pretty sure I wasn't wondering, yet again, whether the death of one son was necessary for the life of the other, this triumphant son here.

It seems to me that, during those two hours on the beach, I experienced a window of sanity. I didn't spin the fantasy of Tom surfing. Or of a pink and white Tom, covered in sun block, sitting reading under a beach umbrella. Or left behind at home surfing on the internet. An apprentice
pâtissier
somewhere in Europe. A chess champion. Saviour of the world. Institutionalised schizophrenic. I don't know. It's true that on the beach a few days ago, I wasn't telling myself that Tom would've made a proud surfer too. At that time, the question of breathing wouldn't have been so crucial, so I wasn't telling myself that, anyway, a different life would've lifted us off these shores and away from these forests, brought us back inland. I wasn't telling myself that Tom would be fifteen now. I wasn't telling myself that we would've, no doubt, been able to breathe anywhere, with our two lungs, without thinking about it, just like other humans.

The future perfect tense is painful, but much more benign, in any case, than real memories. Images in the future perfect are without substance, like a daydream that leaves me as tired and empty as if I'd watched TV for too long.

Was it a good idea to bring Vince and Stella to the crematorium? We hesitated. The smell, we'd been warned, can be disturbing. They left us the choice: with or without children. Each new stage required a decision. So we all went together to the shops, at least, the morning itself of the cremation. Our first outing as a family of four. To choose his clothes.

‘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.