The Ghost Who Fed Them Bones (2 page)

I see them al the time, and they are a lot more entertaining than almost anything I have ever been taught in Geography or Anthropology. It is like watching moths or bumble bees or dragon flies. They are exotic and mostly mind their own business.

I remember coming home and explaining to Mum that her friend Monica had an old man inside her. I could see his black skeleton (why was it black?) and several ghostly creatures tucked into folds inside her body. I never real y asked myself why they were there – they were like jewel ery, or bruises or something - but the black bit puzzled me. Mum explained that Monica had attempted to rid other people of invading entities and had ended up being infested with them herself because she wasn’t careful enough. She didn’t channel her healing light via the sun. I wasn’t much into the technicalities of psychic cleansing in those days, so I believed her.

And throughout my life, I have always picked up on suppressed emotions around me, which are forever disturbing and distracting me. Why are people so determined to box them away? When they are constrained, they become so violent, as do I. When I was young, these emotions used to overwhelm me far more than the passing entities, and sometimes they stil catch me off-guard. It can be beautiful. When two people are in love, their auras kiss and intermingle like gentle rainbow flames at play. That is awesome! Conversely, when two people are rivals, or furious with each other, they shoot sharp spectral darts at each others’ bodies, and those darts real y sting.

And auras flash so many colours. People ask those who claim to be psychics, “What colour is my aura?”, and I always think “When?” Auras are only a specific colour for a second or two. They flit al over the place, changing to reflect each passing emotion, although it is true that most people default to a unique pattern when they are asleep, rather like a fingerprint

The entities that get me are the frantic spirits, like the one at John’s place. They frighten me and there are a lot of them about. Many houses I visit have a resident disruptive ghost, although their fury has often waned over the years into pointless moaning. They remain profoundly discontented without remembering why. I often simply release them to the light, at which point people start commenting on how the house seems brighter suddenly. Sometimes Mum catches me doing it, because she is psychic too, although not as much as me, and she smiles at me indulgently.

Then there are the greatest horrors of al – the premonitions. I wish I couldn’t see those, and I often cut them out. I don’t want to glimpse people as they wil be; it is hard enough to deal with them as they are. The most persistent premonition I have is of the end of the world. I have seen it clearly time and time again, ever since I was seven or eight years old. What justice is there in that? I see the hâchéd flesh strewn across a landscape of pulped trees. I see us al holding hands, being blown into oblivion. I see the destruction of the planet. But, above al , I smel the devastation and sense the terror. I pick up so many sensations, but terror is the worst. Fear angers me. I should concentrate on reassuring others who are less aware of what is happening to them, but their panic only serves to heighten my own fears, so I become irritable and provocative instead.

Cats have adapted themselves better. They recognise frenzied thoughts and choose to nestle close to those whom they sense to be stricken, to comfort them, as the angels do. I just turn nasty and try to prod them into a better mood. I’l never make an angel but the job doesn’t appeal to me anyway. I certainly haven’t the patience for that The most terrifying paranormal entity I have ever encountered was at Geneviève’s house. It simply pounced out of nowhere and attacked me. I couldn’t work out what was going on, so I became flustered rather than playing it cool as I normal y try to do. I kept batting it off, with increasing desperation. Geneviève was watching me, astonished. She couldn’t see this thing any more than John could detect the creature in his house earlier. She couldn’t understand why I was flailing my arms around my head. Eventual y, I persuaded the thing to back off, but for several moments I was afraid for my life, except that my more rational self told me that if I was going to make it to the end of the world, I wasn’t exactly likely to die any time yet.

“Are you al right?” Geneviève asked me, almost as terrified by me as I was by it.

“Yes, it has gone away,” I assured her.

“What has?”

“I don’t know, exactly” I replied. “I was too busy defending myself. It was real y aggressive, whatever it was. Don’t you ever hear it?”

“Hear what? We lose a lot of china and vases and things. Papa thinks it's the cats. Maman disagrees. She says it is Papa’s dog, but things often get knocked over when neither the cats nor the dog are in the house, so Maman blames us instead, although I am sure she realises that it isn’t us either.”

“You have a ghost,” I informed her. “A real bastard of a ghost.”

Geneviève flinched. My naming it made it too much of a reality for her. She believed in ghosts, whatever she was pretending. “My parents don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Wel , that’s what you have.”

“Someone else told us that. They said we should bring in a priest to exorcise it. Papa declared it the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard, and Maman agreed with him.”

“So they don’t mind things getting smashed?”

“They just blame us.”

“Don’t things get lost?”

“Al the time. Papa and Maman blame that on us too.”

I snorted. “I think that it would be easier simply to believe in ghosts, not least because that is what you’ve got.”

“I am not sure that it is a ghost. It might be just a poltergeist or something.”

(Um). “Poltergeists are ghosts.”

“Oh, oh wel . I’l tel Maman and Papa that you think there is a ghost in the house too, and see how they react.”

Either Geneviève didn’t tel them, or they didn’t react at al , because nobody has ever said anything to me except to update me on al the stuff they’ve lost. I once tried to exorcise it myself when nobody was looking, but it just ignored me.

* * *

The house at Valflaunès is a complete tip. We haven’t tidied up for days – not since Mum and Dad left in fact. I make less mess than my brother Mike in the ordinary course of things, but he cleans the place up more vigorously when he is ready to do so. I hate housework; it’s a total waste of time. Mike gets motivated once the debris builds to a point where it is seriously obstructive of our everyday activities, but it is a few days off reaching that point yet.

The other trigger for tidying up is when we expect to invite people back, specifical y women. I was briefly at school here in Valflaunes when I was eight years old, and I have managed to keep in touch with a few friends from that time when we have visited here during summer holidays. Mike didn’t real y make any friends at his school in Claret as he was only five years old then, but he has developed his own relationships now off the back of mine. My best friend here is Thierry with whom I used to trade and compare Pokémon cards – those were the days! The other is Luc. Anyway, through them and al the other people around here who accept us as quasi-locals, we have managed to infiltrate the university crowd in Montpel ier which is a rich source of romantic encounters, even over summer, as many students stay on rather than go back to sing on the hil tops of the Auvergne, or whatever they are supposed to do.

Most of our focus is on women, of course, however much we pretend to be self-sufficiently enjoying each other’s company. And they play the same game. We are forever concentrating our efforts on the one we are least looking at until we move in to close the deal. I like the pretty stroppy ones – that is both ‘pretty, stroppy’ and ‘pretty stroppy’ – a bit like me, I suppose. We hook up at a party, or even sometimes in the street having been introduced to each other by friends, there is an explosion, we do our thing – go swimming, drink a lot, hang around in bars, restaurants and clubs, go for walks, get passionate about each other – fol owed by a series of minor explosions as we gradual y decouple, finalised by a massive bang as one of us slams the metaphorical door on the other and vows never to see the other again – a promise we usual y manage to keep for at least a year or so (the fact that Mike and I live in Brussels for ten and a half months of the year more or less ensures that).

Mike is very different from me. I sometimes wonder whether he is that bothered about the athletic side of relationships, as against the homely cuddly bit. He loves a cuddle, he always has, but he seems much less interested in ripping off their panties which I have to admit is the primary appeal of relationships to me – the chase. It is hackneyed, I know, but it happens to be true. If you see a piece of mouth-watering candy, why wouldn’t you want to unwrap it, peel it, suck it, savour it, and spit it out when the flavour has turned flat and sour.

I don’t know what Mike is real y up to in his love life. I wondered at one time whether he mightn’t be gay. It wouldn’t have bothered me if he had been but it wouldn’t have been quite right either. Anyway, we both lost our virginity in the same room with two girls from school, Nele and Laura, and he was appropriately enthusiastic about it al then, so that probably settles that.

The problem with the house looking a mess when people come back is less that they care and more that it gets in the way of the smooth progress of conquest. They start asking if a wild boar has hit it (we actual y get sanglier in our garden), and then they begin to twitch about, sliding a few things back into place, and cleaning caked food off surfaces (like the floor) when I want them to be applying 110% of their attention to me instead.

So the place has to get sorted, and I therefore have to work on Mike for a few hours, persuading him to accomplish his pre-party trick of making the place devoid of messy distractions. I normal y have to bribe him in some way and then forget to pay him, a fact that he only recal s about a week later in the middle of a heated argument.

We stil have fantastic arguments, usual y at a time and a place that suits my bio-rhythms, if I am being honest. I get

“bedornered”, I poke Mike, he reacts, we scream at each other ever louder, we swear at each other, we slam real doors in each other’s faces, we do our own thing for a few hours, then we settle down with a glass of wine and have a good laugh, go out, whatever.

It is a pattern we have repeated for twenty years, and I suspect that it wil only change after we reach forty and lose al interest in life, or something, if we should ever get that far. I privately reckon that I wil go in a car crash and that Mike wil mourn himself into terminal il ness a couple of years later, although maybe we wil end up as brothers in our nineties sharing a bachelor pad on some coastline somewhere, the loves of our lives having slipped away, time passing slowly but peaceably as the sun bakes the day and a gentle wind ruffles our hair.

I hope that neither of us becomes bald. That real y ages you, makes you look like you have been stripped of al further romantic use. I’l settle for losing my hearing or teeth or something. You don’t real y need those at ninety. You no longer feel hungry and you cannot bear loud noises. Mike wil have problems with his legs, and I’l sit there grunting like a farty old bul dog whose sleep has been disturbed.

That’s seventy years off, but I sometimes like to think about it. It puts things into rosy perspective. Better than the premonition of the end of the world that keeps assaulting me, anyway.

So forget seventy. It’s hamburgerisation for al of us, apparently.

* * *

Mike has prepared lunch – saucisson, cheese, bread, salad (which I used to hate and now love), tomatoes, wine and peaches. He has set up the table on the terrace because the one in the house is laden to bursting with other stuff. We’l knock back a couple of bottles of wine and have a lazy afternoon - what generations of us Lamberts (men at least) have cal ed 'paradise', and we wil not be the first to argue.

Natalie is lying here beside me. She is a typical French girl - stick legs, pinhead butt, minimal waist, tea-cup breasts, slinky face, dol -like. I picked her up last night in the boîte. I was doing my cocky, cock-you dance which mostly has the desired effect, and she slithered into my terrain until we were official y dancing together. She is a friend of a friend –

Bernard. I watched her checking me out. It was because she sort of knew me that she agreed to come home with us.

We have had a couple of girls go hysterical on us when we have driven them out to lonely Valflaunès, fearing rape, murder, the lot no doubt, and we have had to take them home promptish to calm them down. There was no problem with Natalie.

Mike was showing no interest in the boîte last night, in fact I think he spent half the time walking the streets of Montpel ier, breathing the air. I thought at first that perhaps there wasn’t anybody his type on the floor but, on reflection, I think he is probably pining for Sarah. She is exactly the woman for him – tragic, miserable, soulful, four to five years older than him. I actual y find her quite interesting myself, but if Mike wants her, he can have her.

That’s brotherly love for you.

I think that is where he has gone now, up to the château in Freyrargues. I heard the car scrunching on the gravel earlier.

Too bad that there is only one car, but we cannot afford to rent two. If Natalie wants to go home, I wil have to stal her or she wil have to ask someone else to col ect her.

We got in at four or five this morning. Mike was driving and was more-or-less sober. Natalie and I were wrecked. We tumbled into bed. When I woke up just now, I wasn’t sure whether I had even penetrated her, but I am more or less stil inside her, so I must have done. I wonder if she wil remember. I wouldn’t mind getting up and having a pee, some cereal and a cup of coffee. That wil mean waking her. I have no choice. She is pressing on my bladder, and my bladder is urging me towards the toilet.