Talking to Ghosts (16 page)

Julien, sitting opposite Victor, was staring at the T.V. screen, his mouth hanging open, forgetting to chew, his almost translucent blue eyes wide behind his glasses.

“Julien!” Nicole said.

The boy flinched and swallowed noisily, then looked at Victor, who avoided his expressionless blue eyes. Julien was tall for his age and frighteningly thin. His bony arms moved with slow precision: he never let so much as a crumb fall from his fork and speared his food as though hunting animals on his plate. When not staring at the television, he managed methodically to wolf down a considerable amount of food. Nicole or Denis would ask whether he wanted more, and he never refused, always nodding, saying, “Thank you,” in his shrill falsetto without looking at anyone.

Watching the boy furtively, Victor managed to distract himself from his own nervousness. Julien reminded him a little of the twins he had met in the children's home, and it comforted him somewhat to realise that there were children who seemed even more lost and unhappy than he was, whose misery was as evident in their faces and on their bodies as bruises or scars. He realised then that he was floating between two worlds, that he was just below the surface, yet close enough to it that he could see the light, while others were drowning and drifting into darkness and mud.

Marilou asked if she could be excused to watch the television in the living room until it was time to clear the table, and when she brushed against his back as she passed, Victor felt a cold shiver run up to his neck.

“You can go too, if you want,” Nicole said to Victor. “You can go up to bed, if you're tired. It'll be time enough for us to talk tomorrow.”

“Can I go outside? To the garden.”

Denis assented by blowing cigarette smoke through his nose.

The moment he stepped onto the terrace, Victor felt as though he could breathe again; he sat on the steps that led down to the lawn, offering his face to the soft breeze that glided through the darkness, rustling the leaves of the trees. When he looked up, he was struck by the brightness of the sky in which he could even make out the gossamer shawl of the Milky Way. He picked out the three or four constellations he knew, then waited for a shooting star, as he used to do with his mother in their garden at home, on summer nights like this one, when the heat of the day forced them to stay up late into the night to gorge themselves on shade and cooler air. He waited several minutes, but nothing crossed the sky and he had the impression, as he sat here, that he could see the star-strewn heavens wheel around him with a crushing slowness until the tears misted his eyes, trickling down his cheeks and onto his neck, while the lump in his throat swelled again as though it would choke him.

He got to his feet, shaken with silent sobs, and walked onto the lawn so that he could surrender to them, wiping his eyes, his nose, his face with the hem of his T-shirt. He stood for a long while, his chest hiccup-ping in the silence, until he thought he could hear a sigh, the whisper of a breath, and when he turned he saw Marilou standing on the terrace, hands behind her back, trying to smile at him.

After that, she smiled at him constantly. Or at least that was how it seemed to Victor. Marilou's smile lingered for a long while, long after she had stopped smiling and moved on to something else. Like a cool balm on the skin, or the taste of a strong mint, her smile had a lasting effect. And it was something light and bright and utterly spontaneous, there was no hesitation, no guile. A sun appearing suddenly from behind a bank of clouds. It was probably the first scrap of happiness the boy had managed to claw back. It was unlike anything he had ever known. The simpering or the effrontery of the first girls he had had crushes on in primary and secondary school paled before this brilliance. He did not want to kiss or touch Marilou, it was nothing like that. He just wanted to take her in his arms and hold her, his face pressed into her black hair.

For the next few days he let himself be led around, listening as they showed him around the village and introduced him to their friends, telling him that they were the best friends in the whole world, you'll see, she's cool, he's really funny – Paola, Karine, Driss, Michael, and others whose names he instantly forgot – a whirl of children trapped there for the summer or waiting to go away on holiday, to get away from this godforsaken hole where they were already bored, cycling around on bikes and mopeds.

He thought they would get lost in this sea of vines whose carefully combed furrows he pedalled up, his legs stiff. He saw wine
châteaux
, spotted luxury cars he had only ever seen in photographs or on television. The rich drove past in solemn silence behind tinted windows or sped past in red or black sports cars. Marilou explained that vintage wines could fetch astronomical prices, and together they tried to work out how many bottles of Coke you could buy for the money and agreed that it was ridiculous, spending so much money on wine.

“Wine makes you drunk,” Julien said. “It gets you plastered quickly. Papa used to fall over after three glasses.”

The first morning when they stopped by the estuary, Victor did not recognise it as the Garonne. The river stretched away to the far bank in the distance, the water rushing, swirling past. Victor suspected that the roar he could hear was the ocean, but he was immediately drawn to the power of the river. It was the first time he had seen something so immense. It occurred to him that, at ebb tide, you could drift out to the sea. Go in search of this roaring, which must surely come from the rough waves and the wind.

Early in the morning they would head down to the beach. Nicole preferred to take them around 9.00 a.m., and Victor enjoyed walking in the still, cool shade of the pine trees, amidst the heady scent of resin with a sea breeze borne on the rising tide, that whispered in the high branches. Julien always walked more slowly, armed with a stick that he had picked up, poking through thickets for something interesting: a huge green lizard, an exoskeleton shed by a grasshopper, a coin. Nicole would call him back if he strayed too far. He would come right up to
her then and take her hand and walk a few metres, head bowed, only to dash off again. Marilou hummed the songs she listened to on her MP3 player, and sometimes held out one of the earphones to Victor so he could share her enthusiasm.

He walked in front most of the time. He liked that there was nothing but the trees and brushwood and brambles with their ripening blackberries. Marilou told him that one day a roe deer had stopped on the path and stared at them before leaping into the undergrowth, and Victor hoped it would happen again, that he would be the first to see the animal so he might take a few steps closer, the better to see its big black eyes, its ears aquiver at any hint of danger.

One morning, seeing a woman in a blue summer dress coming towards them, Victor froze, and everything inside him stopped dead because the woman in the distance was his mother, carrying a red towel in one hand and a yellow bag in the other. He started to walk forward again, without saying a word to the others, suppressing the urge to run and at the same time unsure that his legs could hold him up. As he drew closer his mother's face became clearer, and in that moment he was convinced that she had come to get him, come back from some trip, from running away. He knew she had run away from home once when she was a girl; she had told him about it one night when she was sad and a little drunk, she talked about leaving home, about starting a new life somewhere else, and as she talked he had thought she was thinking of leaving without him, he had felt the blood drain from his body, and his head become so empty, so dead that his mother noticed and quickly hugged him and told him she would never leave, that he was her whole life. Ever since, he had been haunted by the fear that she might leave, might run away again from whatever was threatening to catch up with her, and so he was not upset to see her coming back now, having escaped the mortal dangers he had always sensed surrounded her. For a few seconds he felt a giddy, almost painful joy; all his sadness drained from him. Her death had been a dirty trick his mind had played on him, his mother was not dead, thirty seconds from now she would be hugging him.

He waved and smiled and he felt tears well up, because he had been scared that he would never see her again, because she was dead, because he had seen her body, had smelled the foul stench of death mingled with an impenetrable darkness.

The woman, who was astonishingly beautiful, stared as she passed the smiling boy, her face glazed over with surprise or amusement, and just as Victor stopped to watch her she gave him an icy, empty look that made him look away. He fell against the rough trunk of a pine tree, feeling the bark graze his palm, and a moment later Nicole was bent over him, cradling his head in the crook of her arm, asking him what was wrong, and Victor said, “Nothing, I don't know,” as he watched this ghost disappear along the path.

“What is it?” Nicole said.

He shook his head and tears trickled down his cheeks. Nicole looked at him, nodding, perhaps she understood. She glanced back at the woman, and hugged the boy, who did not resist. “It's perfectly natural,” she said quietly. Then she whispered something sweet which he did not quite hear, and he found the strength to get to his feet.

That was all. Nicole did not ask him anything more, and Victor never spoke of what he thought he had seen. But sometimes when she saw him stare at something or someone on the beach, shielding his eyes with his hand, staring over at the glistening strip at the water's edge, the luminous haze from which walkers sometimes appeared shimmering like will-o'-the-wisps, she would watch him, find some excuse to talk to him, trying to rouse him from his daydream, bring him back from this vision that held him spellbound.

Aside from this, every time he crossed the dunes, Victor always felt the same surge of joy, felt his chest swell with a kind of sob because the ocean as it lay upon the golden sands was so beautiful in the soft morning light, it was exactly how he had felt when he and his mother were out walking together and the elemental power of the landscape suddenly opened up before them. Everything was here, the insistent roar of the waves, the wide empty spaces glistening at low tide, the blue horizon where he could just make out the vast curve of the Earth. He
would always stop for a moment to drink it in, while Marilou and Julien raced down the sandy hill to the beach, shrieking.

Several times he brought along his copy of
I Am Legend
and wandered through the uninhabited city with Robert Neville, frantically turning the pages when the vampires attacked. Sometimes, he thought he would have liked to be the lone survivor of an apocalypse, to be the absolute ruler of a dead world.

Lying on his front on the beach towel, in the drowsy shade afforded by his baseball cap, he worked out an elaborate scenario. He pictured himself wandering the streets of a Bordeaux full of stationary cars, their doors wide open, their occupants long gone or else lying rotting on the seats. He saw himself looting shops for food or anything else he wanted. He had trouble imagining the silence of a ravaged world. Would he be able to hear his own heartbeat? Would there still be birds singing and flitting from branch to branch? This was a question he returned to again and again. Of course there would be. He had seen it in the movie. They would land wherever they liked, having nothing to fear. They would peck at the open eyes of the dead. The world would revert to its wild state: animals would no longer be afraid of anything. He would have to arm himself, but that would be easy. He would find a house that was easy to defend. He would have to fight off starving dogs and even cats, since even the millions of corpses would not feed them for long. Maybe the wolves would come back, as in the olden days.

This terrifying solitude, of being hunted and living on borrowed time, seemed preferable to him to the shifting swampland in which, day after day, he felt himself sinking and where nothing he could do, no shouting, no waving, could bring him any help. He felt the urge to write. He even started one afternoon, in an exercise book, alone in his bedroom. He wrote
NOVEL
on the front cover and wrote a dozen pages without pausing, immersed in another world where he could forget himself.

Marilou knocked at his door one day when he had shut himself away, dozing in the half-light of his room and trying to finish reading
The Mysterious Island
.

“Come downstairs, Rebecca's here. You remember, my cousin, I told her about you. She wants to meet you.”

By the time he opened the bedroom door she had gone, and he padded down the stairs, barefoot and still half asleep. There was not a sound in the house, apart from Nicole talking on the telephone. The girls had set up camp under the trees at the bottom of the garden, sitting on plastic chairs, near a table piled with blonde-haired dolls with pink and gold accessories. Rebecca looked at him with her big, black, needlessly made-up eyes. She looked like a woman. A woman who played with dolls. He couldn't tell. If Marilou had not told him Rebecca was at secondary school in Pauillac, Victor would have guessed that she was twenty. He wondered if she was beautiful or pretty. He did not have words to express what he was experiencing. By the time he reached them, Rebecca had lowered her eyes and was looking at a flaxen mane of doll's hair, spraying it with glitter.

Now he could see only her long, tanned legs, a little gold chain around one ankle, and her breasts beneath her sleeveless T-shirt, the curve of which he could see through the large armholes.

He immediately wanted to touch her. To kiss her. He had to restrain himself. He felt this desire stiffen between his legs. Never had he felt it so strongly. He found it disturbing and was scared she might notice, even through his baggy shorts.

When he reached them, Rebecca jumped up and hugged him, mumbling an apathetic “Hi”. She proffered her round, firm face, on which he barely had time to plant a kiss. It felt like kissing a fist. He barely felt his lips brush her cheek. She sat down again and took a swig of Coke.