Talking to Ghosts (9 page)

“But you're mourning already.”

“No. That's just it. I haven't cried for him. I choke and splutter, but the tears never come. It's like an endless nightmare … I … I don't even know whether it's rage or grief. There are times I feel like killing someone, times I feel like dying myself, it amounts to the same thing. It's worse than grief.”

Ana huddled into a ball and stared at the far end of the room, biting her lip, her cheeks wet with tears.

“Don't you understand?” he went on. “Searching for Pablo is the only thing that keeps me alive … I need to know how … I need to know what happened, what they did to him.”

Ana shuddered. “Stop, please … I'm begging you …”

Vilar despised himself for daring to mention such a thing. They were both condemned to live the same nightmare, each of them alone, each in their own way marshalling every ounce of strength to fight against it. Vilar got to his feet and stood forlornly for a moment. Ana stared up at him, her eyes shining.

“I should go. I'm so sorry. Every time we meet up, we hurt each other all over again.”

He tried to smile and stretched out his hand, and she brushed it with her fingertips.

In the car the heat of the day lingered, muggy and oppressive in spite of the gathering dusk. Vilar rolled down all the windows but still he could not feel even the slightest coolness as he sped through the narrow streets and plunged into the dark, airless car park of his apartment building. He called Morvan and left a message on his answerphone, then stood in the spray of a shower so cold it left him gasping, until finally his body relaxed to become a leaden, shapeless mass barely capable of movement. Later he dozed off in front of the television, a half-eaten sandwich in his hand, dreaming fitfully.

Someone was knocking. Someone was calling his name. He wondered where he was. The diamond of sunlight on the bed shifted as the boy's legs twitched. He could hear Bernard, the social worker, asking if he could come in. A great weight seemed to press him down on the mattress, and his voice died in his throat before he could say a word. When he did not answer, the man turned his key in the lock. Victor sat up suddenly, blinking into the harsh, blazing sunlight.

“You should have closed the shutters.”

Bernard went over to the window, stared out, then turned back to Victor.

“It's breakfast time. You hungry? We let you sleep in a bit. Did you see? The weather's lovely.”

Out in the hallway and again on the stairs Bernard patted him on the shoulder, telling him everything would be fine. He asked Victor why he didn't want to talk. Victor shrugged and stepped into the dining room which was bright and already uncomfortably hot, and sat down in front of a white bowl that cast a soft halo of light on the table. Bernard poured him some hot chocolate and the boy thanked him in a faint voice still thick with sleep. He ate heartily while Bernard sipped a cup of coffee, glancing at him anxiously from time to time. The boy avoided his gaze, staring at a hunk of bread, at the bottom of his bowl or at the far wall where there was a huge poster of a pride of lions being pestered by their cubs.

“Pretty hot,” Bernard said. “And it's only the middle of June.”

Victor turned to the window. Behind the lowered blinds the sun was gathering all its dazzling power.

“We're meeting with a judge this morning,” Bernard said. “A children's judge.”

Victor looked up at him in surprise.

“Don't panic, it's not what you think. She needs to think about your situation and decide what to do for the best. You can't stay here forever, I mean, it's not exactly much fun, is it? And since you don't have any family to look after you, she'll have to settle you with people who will be your new family. She'll talk to you about what you want, what you'd like, alright? She'll ask you questions, so you have to try and answer. Is that O.K.?”

On the poster one of the lion cubs was nipping at his mother's back and she let him, her big jaws gaping, her eyes closed. The boy finished his bowl of chocolate and started to gather the breadcrumbs into small piles.

“Victor, did you hear what I said?”

“Yes,” the boy said in a whisper.

Bernard smiled. He rarely smiled, so when he did he looked like a completely different person.

“See? We're making progress.”

Victor looked down at his feet. He wiggled his toes in his slippers for a minute, long enough for the social worker to get to his feet and clear away their bowls and their cutlery. He asked Victor to help by carrying the bread basket and the pot of jam, which the boy did straight away, and they went and stacked everything on the trolley at the end of the room.

Victor took a long shower, pushing his face into the powerful, cold spray, then scrubbed his body until patches of his skin were red raw. He sniffed his clothes before putting them back on, then brushed his shock of black hair back in front of a small mirror hanging on a wardrobe door. When he came down to the lobby, Bernard told him he looked very smart and said all the girls at his school must fancy him. Victor shrugged and followed him outside and over to a red car, squinting into the sun. They set off immediately.

*

The town flashed past. He watched the stream of buildings, shop windows, passers-by whisked out of his field of vision as they sped by. Bernard was talking about the judge again, using simple words that made everything sound complicated, so Victor stopped listening. At some point, while they were stopped at a red light, Victor asked if he could turn on the radio. A drawling voice immediately filled the car; the song was something about a fisherman's cabin, and the social worker whistled along until the signal faded into static as the car turned into an underground car park opposite the soaring columns of the courthouse. Victor glanced around at the vast empty car park, divided up by concrete pillars and banks of strip lights. From time to time he could hear a squeal of tyres or the sound of a car door slamming, but it was impossible to tell where it came from, since there was not a living soul in sight and the few cars there looked as though they had been abandoned.

They were asked to sit on a bench in a long hall lit by tall, grubby windows through which he could see pigeons launching themselves into the blue sky. The social worker tried to reassure him, telling him the lady judge was very nice, that she was caring and kind, that Victor could ask her anything he liked. The boy simply nodded, staring down at the chequerboard of black and white tiles. He only looked up when a teenage boy came and sat opposite with his police escort, a huge, fat man in a pale blue shirt stretched to bursting over his pot belly. They were handcuffed together, their hands flat on the bench, seemingly indifferent to the short chain connecting them.

A few people passed while they sat waiting: a lawyer, two policemen, harried clerks carrying piles of case files, and each time Victor would stare into their faces, trying to interpret their worried or tired expressions, then watch until they disappeared through a door or into the stairwell. He was vaguely intrigued by these people, but spent much of his time trying to guess from which side of the lofty window the next pigeon would appear. When they were finally called, Victor tried again to catch the teenager's eye, but the boy, his face now almost on his knees, was slowly scratching his cropped hair, apparently oblivious to
what was going on around him, he looked like a meditating penitent on the verge of withdrawing into himself completely.

The judge, a young woman in a red jacket and a black blouse, was by turns solemn and smiling. She jotted constantly in her notebook without ever taking her eyes off Victor, who wondered how she could write without looking at the page. Whenever he tried, his writing scuttered all over the place, heedless of lines and margins. The judge wrote even during the silences, of which there were many, when all that could be heard was the rasp of pen on paper, the sound of breathing, and the creak of the woman's joints every time she moved. Perhaps she was taking notes about the silence or about the unseasonal heat stealing through the half-open window that made their faces shine. Victor answered her questions only with a “yes” or a “no”, the rest of the time he simply stared into the judge's eyes, his mouth half open, his bottom lip glistening with saliva. At the end of a particular silence that seemed longer than the others, the judge asked whether he enjoyed school, mentioning his good grades and the positive assessments of his teachers. Victor nodded and immediately thought about his friends, about Mourad, about Camille who sat in front of him in class, flicking her blonde plaits under his nose, Camille who had once kissed him on the lips, teasing him with the pointed tip of her tongue. He remembered the brightness of the art room when, bent over a big sheet of paper, he carefully drew a line in Indian ink, remembered break times last winter and the talk about whether or not it would snow. He thought back to those days that now seemed idyllic, and realised he could not remember them all. He wished he had a photographic memory so that he could call them up at will and replay them like a D.V.D., because suddenly there were too many things he could not remember, and he had the agonising feeling that his life was full of holes, that he had only lived those scant few things he could remember, as though the rest of the time he had been asleep, unconscious, or dead.

The judge talked about a foster family in the country, about the fresh air, about how kind they were, and Victor had to brush aside his meagre memories to focus on her words, which seemed to buzz around
his ears like flies threatening to land on him, the same flies he had seen swarm into his mother's bedroom.

“A family with children your own age, you'll be able to play in the woods and the fields, the sea isn't far, you'll be able to go to the beach every day, you'll see, Victor, life goes on and I'll help you, we'll all help, me, your guardian
ad litem
, that's what we call the social worker looking after your case, do you understand? If you have any problems you can call me, but I don't think you'll need to, usually everything works out just fine, these families are used to looking after children like you who need help to get a new start in life. Did you know that little by little you can create a new family? Do you think you'd like that?”

Silence returned, more sticky and oppressive than ever. The boy felt all eyes staring at him, so he scratched the back of his hand with a fingernail, hunching his head into his shoulders, and desperately tried to think of something to say the way he did when a teacher suddenly sprang a question on him in class, finally filling his lungs and whispering:

“In the country?”

“Don't you like the countryside?” Bernard said.

Victor shrugged.
The countryside
, he repeated to himself again, as the hearing drew to a close. Everyone stood up and the judge patted him on the head and solemnly shook his hand. “Come on, Victor, you're a brave boy, you're almost a man. And we all have to be brave, don't you think?” She turned to the social worker. “It should take about eight to ten days, things aren't too busy just now, so the placement should come through quickly. I'll have a word with Monsieur Castet at the D.D.A.S.S.”

“Did you hear that, Victor? You won't have to stay at the children's home for long. Did you hear what
madame la juge
said?”

Victor nodded and stepped out into the hallway while the judge and the social worker murmured something he made no attempt to hear. He looked along the benches, hoping to see the teenage prisoner and the fat policeman, but the hall was deserted and the deep silence was broken only by the creak of distant doors.

*

He spent the afternoon aboard the
Nautilus
with Professor Aronnax, watching hundreds of fish swim past the vast picture window of the submarine. Sitting in a deckchair under a large oak tree, he listened to the melancholy of Captain Nemo's organ-playing. More than once he set down his copy of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
to watch the birds flitting among the shadows of the trees or to doze for a while. Time passed quickly. Without quite knowing why, he was waiting for nightfall, perhaps because it meant a relief from the heat. He thought about his mother. Over and over he pictured her, terrified that he might not be able to remember what she looked like, leafing through memories that were clear and sharp as photographs, but sometimes the pages of this mental photo album were too heavy, they refused to turn or became muddled and the images were incomprehensible. When he did manage to isolate a clean, clear and luminous image that showed the softness of her look, the glint of sunlight on her hair, the strange sad smile she sometimes had when she looked at him, he replayed it over and over, studying every detail, storing it carefully in a corner of his brain, the way he might have learnt by heart a poem.

He allowed the evening to slip by, watching the frantic activities of the other children out of the corner of his eye. The two brothers were constantly together, each mimicking the other's actions to the point where, without a word, they would simultaneously turn and focus on the same point with the same flutter of their eyelids, which could as easily signify boredom as fear. At some point, in a perfectly synchronised action, they got to their feet and, with small, quick steps, walked towards the stairs leading to the bedrooms. The older children spent the evening gathered around the table football, but this time Victor kept his distance, happy just to watch their wild gestures, to listen to the dull thwacks and obscenities that were a raucous running commentary on the fiercely contested games.

Bernard and another social worker came and sat next to the boy and asked him how he was doing, and he said, “Fine, I'm fine,” but when Bernard wanted to know how he felt about the hearing Victor stared at him so intently, his eyes glistening with sadness and confusion, that
Bernard had to turn away. The other social worker, Farid, suggested a game of table tennis, “a quiet game, just the two of us,” but Victor shook his head, staring down, and the three of them sat motionless in this pocket of silence, the adults staring at the boy who sat, curled up, his head in his hands. After a while Victor said quietly that he was going to bed, the two men wished him goodnight, and he rushed off.

He took the urn containing his mother's ashes from the wardrobe and sat on the bed, cradling it, running his hand over the smooth surface that glowed red in the evening light. For some minutes, he stared sightlessly into some dark corner of the room, then he began to weep silently, his body wracked by sobs, his forehead pressed to the lid of the urn, sniffling and murmuring inarticulately as those who have a god do when they pray.

Shortly before 10.00 p.m. the other children came upstairs, there were doors slammed, muffled noises, pounding on the walls, pipes rumbling. Shouts, laughter and curses erupted in the corridor. The noise brought Victor to his feet again and he stood in the middle of the room, listening to the uproar, anxious and wary. He stared in alarm as his door shuddered from the racket outside, petrified lest someone come in and steal what little he had salvaged from this tragedy.

But no-one was interested in Victor's pitiful belongings or his relics, and he was not called on to protect them. After a while, the commotion faded and he could hear only hushed voices, creaking doors, the throbbing bass of some unrecognisable piece of music, and within an hour everything had fallen silent and the night, with its rustling of trees, its rumble of cars and honking trucks on the motorway, had prevailed. For a long time Victor listened in the darkness to the obdurate, varied life of the city, all the while staring at the shelf where he had placed the urn, watching it intermittently flicker with a crimson glow, or rather a radiance, since no light could cling to its metallic surface.