Talking to Ghosts (35 page)

When Lataste had finally left, and the office was silent once more, Vilar tried to call Daras but was told that she was on her way back to
the station having stopped off at the court. As soon as he hung up, the telephone rang. It was Ledru.

“We've tracked down the wife. Well, when I say wife … They're not married. Her name is Céline Bosc, she lives in Mérignac, at Résidence Paul-Éluard, Apartment 28, Block D.”

Vilar had the man's name, an address, almost a whole family. He could see a figure begin to form around the mocking voice that had been hounding him; soon he knew he would put a face to the voice. He felt the man was close, almost within his grasp. It was a feeling he had had once before, in Paris while tailing a suspect in the
métro
, a serial rapist: Vilar was standing right behind him, less than two metres away, inhaling the clouds of cheap aftershave the suspect had a habit of wearing.

He reread the note he had jotted on the piece of paper: “I'm coming, you little shit, I'm coming.”

The sky widened as it paled, and racing towards the daylight from the west a vast flock of clouds came galloping, their flanks first bronze, then pink, then blood red, fleeing some terrible massacre that had just occurred. From where he was lying, on his back, his head against his rolled-up shirt, Victor could see nothing of the world but this massive heavenly exodus. As he sat up, there suddenly appeared the quivering outline of a small thicket of trees in which he could hear birds bickering. He sat on the rough boards of the trailer and, feeling cold, slipped on his shirt and hugged himself as he watched the daylight bleach away the last blue wisps of night. The silence was broken by cries and bird-song, Victor could hear the occasional car passing on the invisible road at the foot of the hill, the gusts of cool air sweeping in from the estuary without disturbing the neat rows of vines in between the trellises.

He heaved a loud sigh. He felt at home here, beneath the sky now wreathed with light, completely alone, and far away. He would have liked to stay right here, completely still, and wait for the heat to pour down on him and wash away the early morning chill that clung to him. He noticed that since he had woken, he had not thought about anything, that no memories had come to him, as though his mind had been wiped clean under the star-strewn blanket of darkness which had kept him warm, and whose powdery glow had startled him when he woke in the night, disoriented, bathed in sweat. Knowing only who he was. This was something he had never felt before, this sensation of time suspended, a pure instant in a world that might easily have stopped turning.

He lay down again, arms behind his head. His chest heaved with two or three sobs that caught in his throat and which he managed to dispel by breathing deeply though his mouth to catch his breath.

A laugh rang out in the distance, clear. A pretty, girlish laugh. And shouting.

Rebecca. Marilou. It all came back to him. It was not over.

He jumped down from the trailer, his feet raising a little puff of dust as he hit the ground and immediately he felt the heavy heat, slick on his neck. He turned away from the village and ran towards the other side of the hill, heading north. He arrived at a small tarmac road that ran down to the estuary and he set off that way, panting for breath, his stomach rumbling, with a craving for hot chocolate or cereal that made him slow his pace as he passed an isolated house and imagined the people inside sitting around the breakfast table. As he ran along a fence, a dog suddenly hurled itself against the chicken wire with a shrill bark that made him jump. He kicked out at the wire, hitting the dog on the snout, sending it bounding away shaking its head.

He walked on, and felt in his legs the heat already radiating from the tarred road. The air was still and the sky had the glossy whiteness of metal. Before he saw it, he could smell the estuary, the stench of mud that forever hung over it. Then, behind a curtain of trees, he glimpsed the glassy, murky water and raced to get into the shade. When he arrived at the water's edge, he sat at the bottom of the bank so he could not be seen from the road and he watched as, with not a ripple or an eddy, the vast coffee-coloured torrent ran sluggishly to spill into the sea.

He tried to get his bearings. The nuclear power plant was just to his right, shimmering white in the sun. There were a few fishermen's shacks like the one where he and Julien had fired pebbles at the river rats, but he remembered that they had cycled a long way that day. He knew the village was south of here, to his right. He enjoyed orientation, liked always knowing where the cardinal points were. It was something his mother had taught him. All the time she would ask him: “Which direction is Marseille, where I'm from? What about Paris? So if we go there some day, you'll know which direction it is.” And he would answer
without hesitation, proud and happy to know his place in the world. More often than not, not far from her.

Cars passed from time to time on the narrow road that ran behind him and he wondered if the police were looking for him and whether they might search along the riverbanks, so he climbed down the bank to the water's edge and watched the lapping of the water between the withered reeds and rubbish covered over with a crust of dried mud. He sat on a tree trunk that had been washed up at high tide and contemplated the indomitable force of the river which seemed capable of carrying off all the soil with it, washing everything away to leave nothing but sharp, jagged rocks. Before long, sleep overcame him and he dozed off, his head resting on his knees.

He was woken by the banging of a gate and lurched unsteadily to his feet, then threw himself on the ground next to the tree stump, amid the tall, prickly grass. From here he could see the top of the bank and the strip of sky beyond and, framed against the light, he saw the figure of a man who stood, staring down at the river's edge, glancing to left and right. He moved his hands from his hips to his flies and began to piss, sighing with relief. Victor shrank back, afraid the stream would reach him, disgusted at the sight and at the splashing sound it made as it hit the ground, of the repulsive, ridiculous lump of flesh the man was now shaking with a sort of groan.

The car drove off and the boy looked around him at the debris washed up on the shore by the river. Dead trees, branches, twigs, reeds, hunks of plastic, shoes; he realised he was reduced to hiding out in this rubbish tip after the magical night that, despite his fear, he had spent in the open, in that crystalline solitude. He spun around several times and knew that everything here was dead, and indeed would soon be buried beneath the patient shroud of water gorged with mud. He thought about the dead dog he had found one day with Julien and Marilou, a gaping carcass crawling with vermin that had made them start back in horror, then creep forward in spite of the smell, hands clamped over their mouths, so they could see the devastation washed up by the high tide. Suddenly he was afraid to stay where he was. From
time to time a sickly stench caught in his throat and filled his mouth with a taste of putrefaction he could not spit out. He climbed a little way back up the bank and listened to the murmur of the water. A mute, relentless keening, almost a shriek. Here and there were large eddies. The tide was rising; this was the ocean's unceasing effort to plug this current of shit, to prevent itself being polluted. Victor pictured a convoluted struggle between two mythological giants of the sort he had been told were merely hidden forces constantly at work in the world.

He came back to the road, but he did not know what to do. He felt as though he had escaped the insidious threat of putrefaction, but here, in the dazzling sunshine, he was at the mercy of those who were looking for him. He dashed across the road, jumped the ditch and plunged into a dense thicket of acacia trees and brambles. He could just make out an overgrown path which he followed, gingerly at first for fear of snakes, then running hard to escape their fangs. He came to a dirt track that ran along a vineyard and he stepped with relief between two rows of vines from which he once more picked a handful of grapes that were nearly black, and whose sweet juice hit the spot. He rubbed them on his shirt to remove the sulphate and examined the firm, glistening berries before biting into them.

He could hear the whirr of tractors, the sound of voices shouting or calling. He dodged between the vines, ran past the storehouses, inhaling the pungent smell of wine, then found himself at the foot of the water tower that dominated the village and the estuary. He tried to pinpoint the house, wondering what Marilou and Julien would be doing now and whether Rebecca had eaten lunch alone again with her mother sprawled on the sofa in front of the television.

A cold hand gripped his heart, alternately shaking it and stopping it from beating. He thought about her, alone in the wardrobe. The secret glow of the urn that such a long time spent in darkness might have extinguished forever.

He blindly ran down the hill, his eyes filled with tears. Before he came to the road, he turned left and ran on, hidden by the vines. There was a high-clearance tractor up ahead. He could just make out
the driver, stripped to the waist and wearing a red cap, amid the blue clouds of sulphate. As he approached the village, he could already hear a dog barking. He hunkered down in a ditch and waited until there were no cars, then dashed across and ran to the nearest house. He leaned against the back of a truck, catching his breath.

Just as he stepped onto the pavement, he saw four police vans drive past followed by a covered lorry. He knew what was happening. He had seen searches for missing children on the news. The officers would move forward in a line through fields and woodland with dogs on leashes. He knew that within half an hour he would not be able to move without being recognised. Rebecca's house was nearby, so he ran there, rushed inside and stood, pressed against the front door trying to think.

Suddenly he saw her at the far end of the hall, a cigarette dangling from her fingers. She was wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, her hair had fallen over her face. She brushed it away.

“Shit, I was wondering who it was. What the fuck are you doing? Everyone's looking for you. Come on!”

She dragged him into her bedroom. From the sofa, her mother called to ask who was at the door.

“No-one. Go back to sleep.”

She locked the bedroom door behind her, sat on a garden chair piled high with cushions, jerked her chin towards the bed and Victor sat down.

“What happened? Marilou told me some guy came and kidnapped you, everyone thinks you're with some paedo or something. Can you believe it? She saw the car drive off and she was crying when she called to tell me about it.”

Victor shuddered.

“You got anything to eat?”

“Don't move.”

She came back three minutes later carrying a tray with a bottle of milk and a packet of biscuits. Victor painfully swallowed the saliva flooding his mouth. Rebecca took a biscuit and handed him the packet.
He wolfed them down two at a time and washed them down with long gulps of milk.

“I've got to go back and get my mother's urn. I can't leave her like that.”

“The feds will be looking for you everywhere, you'll be lucky to go to the bog without them finding you. You have to go back and explain everything – don't you realise Nicole and Denis think you're dead, or that some fucking pervert is molesting you, Jesus, you can't let them go on worrying.”

Rebecca picked up her phone.

“I'll call them and they'll come get you, O.K.? That way you don't have to go back and be all ashamed.”

“I'm out of here.” He got up and stepped towards the door, but Rebecca grabbed his arm and he liked the feel of her hand around his wrist. She was standing next to him.

“I just need to go back and get her,” he said in a whisper. “Don't tell on me, Rebecca, please.”

She snapped her phone shut and looked at him seriously. He sat down again, brushing away a tear with the back of his hand, drank a little more milk. It left him with a white moustache and Rebecca came over and ran a fingertip along his upper lip, then she leaned down and kissed him tenderly.

“You're so sweet, and you're really handsome.”

Then she took his head between her hands and forced her tongue between his lips. She pushed him back and lay on top of him, gripping him with her thighs, moving on top of him so that he did not know what to do with his hands, suffocating under the weight of her body rocking slowly above him and then she wriggled, rolled off him onto her back and guided his fingers into her shorts and said, “Just there.”

Victor immediately felt the warm, welcoming dampness, his fingers slipping in and out of the folds of flesh he could only dimly imagine but whose secrets he already seemed to know, because Rebecca was now moaning softly, eyes closed, biting her lower lip. He wanted her to touch him too, even though he felt sure that he would not be able to
withstand even the slightest touch and he shivered when he felt her put her hand on his crotch and massage it gently. He almost said “no”, but he could not summon the breath; he did not know whether he wanted her to carry on or give up, to finish or to stop.

He was moving inside a bubble, no longer knowing if anything existed in the world other than the body pressed against his. He could feel her kisses on his face, his neck, could feel each of her fingers as they fondled his penis through his shorts, could hear her breathing, the little cries that lodged in her throat like a nest of baby birds; felt these intense, prickling sensations coursing through him, these pinheads, these grains of sand that tingled all over his body.

Then Rebecca suddenly sat up, got to her feet almost brusquely and Victor studied her face, glistening with sweat and streaked with wisps of hair, waiting for her to say something rude; instead, she unbuttoned her shorts and in a flash she was naked, then, making the most of the boy's shock, she unfastened the belt of his shorts and he lifted himself up and, motionless, almost comatose, allowed her to undress him. The little room was bright. Everything was yellow. Rebecca's face was expressionless now, her eyes half closed and the boy did not know whether she was concentrating or whether she was thinking about something else. She straddled him and slipped him inside her, her face and her mane of hair like night suddenly falling around his neck as she told him not to move.

When it was over they lay, their skin fused together by sweat, still, silent, their wet, parted lips pressed against each other's necks. Then slowly, Rebecca sat up on the edge of the bed, her head down, her back curved, her hair falling over her face. When she stood up silently to get dressed and Victor saw her again after what they had just done, her whole body, her legs, her arse, the soft curve of her breasts, he felt something surge through him, a pleasurable electricity that swelled his chest with a huge sigh.

He felt light-headed and he swayed a little when he stood up. She turned away from him, rummaging in one of the dresser drawers so he quickly pulled on his clothes, ashamed now to let her see his thin, puny
body, his penis which seemed now a hindrance, heavy, useless and out of proportion. As soon as he was dressed, she turned to him and gave him an almost astonished expression and smiled and he realised this was the first time he had seen her smile.