Talking to Ghosts

by Hervé Le Corre

  The rest of the day he hung around Marilou, unable to pluck up the courage to talk to her. She pretended not to notice his little game, or perhaps she was truly oblivious: she scarcely looked at him, besides she was busy making jam with Nicole. He lurked around on his own since Julien hardly set foot outside the garage these days, though his restoration job on the moped was making very little headway as he bounded like a dwarf on springs among the confusion of engine parts, one minute excited, the next discouraged.

  That evening, Victor went up to Marilou, who was lying in the hammock playing on her mobile phone.

  “I know about Rebecca.”

  The girl sat up quickly and turned towards him, her legs dangling over the mesh of rope. She stared at him, trying to work out how to react.

  “You know about what?”

  “About her little brother.”

  “Her little brother?”

  Marilou was rigid, leaning her weight on her arms, her eyes wide.

  Victor knew he had hit a nerve. She sat on the end of the hammock, clutching the ropes, her feet on the ground. Suddenly she looked as though she were carved of wood or stone.

  “Can you just stop it about Rebecca? Leave her in peace.”

  “Her little brother is buried at the other end of the vineyards, where the grove of trees is,” he said. “I saw the grave.”

  “What grave? Where?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. You’ve known all along. There’s flowers on it and everything, just like in a cemetery.”

  “I don’t know anything about it, I don’t even know where you mean.”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Marilou got to her feet and glanced back at the house.

  “Is it far?”

  When they got to the grave, breathless and soaked in sweat after cycling in silence without stopping through the oppressive heat of the evening, Marilou took Victor’s hand, squeezed it hard and moved so close to him that he could hear her breathing and feel her warm breath on his shoulder.

  “We shouldn’t go too close.”

  “Why not? Are you scared?”

  She did not answer, but pressed herself against him.

  “What does Rebecca do when she comes here?”

  “I only saw her once. She knelt down and put down some flowers and then she just stayed there.”

  “You think she’s praying?”

  They were whispering now. A sudden breeze from the estuary almost drowned out their voices.

  “I don’t know any prayers – if I did I’d say one,” Marilou said softly.

  “To pray there has to be a god, and you don’t believe in God. You’d just be talking to yourself. Actually that’s what people who pray are doing, because God is just bullshit.”

  “No, but I could talk to him, to the little boy there. Tell the poor thing we’re thinking about him. Sometimes they like it when you say things to them.”

  “He probably wouldn’t even understand what you said, I mean he died when he was only a baby, he wouldn’t have been able to talk or anything.”

  They stood there, pressed against each other, while the wind carrying its acrid smell of mud swirled around them like a spirit. They said nothing for a moment, because they could find no words, then Marilou started to sob. When Victor asked her why she was crying, she said she was thinking about Rebecca and the baby and she cried harder, letting go of his arm and turning away, her shoulders now shaking with sobs. The boy was silent for a minute, then he said that maybe they should head back now, because Nicole would wonder where they’d been and ask awkward questions.

  When they got back to their bikes, Marilou put a hand on Victor’s arm.

  “I have to tell you something.”

  She sniffled again, wiped her eyes with the hem of her T-shirt. Victor tried to meet her gaze, but she stared back at the place from which they’d come.

  “The dead boy … he’s not Rebecca’s brother.”

  Victor felt something stab him in the back, leaving him unable to breathe.

  “It’s her son. She had him when she was thirteen.”

  Victor shook his head. He grabbed his bike by the handlebars then let it fall back onto the grass. The bicycle bell rang faintly and he stared at the little chrome casing, unable to move.

  “It was her father, he … Ever since she was little he did things to her, you know what I mean … Her mother went to the police and now he’s in prison. But Rebecca told me that Grandpa Georges used to try and touch her up whenever she went to his house, so now she doesn’t go anymore, but she never told anyone about it. She says she wants to kill him herself. Anyway, he’s just old paedo, everyone knows that. Apparently he got in trouble when he was younger and his wife even left him because of it.”

  Victor managed to find a gulp of air and could speak again.

  “How d’you know all this?”

  “Rebecca told me. She tells me everything. We tell each other secrets, even really private things.”

  “But she didn’t tell you about the grave?”

  Marilou finally looked at him, her eyes still glittering with tears.

  “No. She told me she got an abortion … you know what that is? She had it in Lesparre from some woman.”

  Victor nodded. His mother had explained it to him once.

  “She didn’t come to school much that year, her mother didn’t want her going, said she was too ashamed. She never really cared about school anyway … Even in primary, she used to wind up the teachers and fight with everyone. Then, the year she got pregnant, well, that’s when they came and arrested Christophe, her father.”

  Without thinking about it, they had sat down side by side on a bank of dry grass, and Victor was almost shocked to find himself sitting there, dazed, with a buzzing in his head that made it impossible for him to hear Marilou’s soft, droning voice. They had begun to whisper again as though the wind might carry their secret all over the village, but now they said nothing, hunched over, suddenly years older.

  When finally they got to their feet and picked up their bikes, Marilou grabbed Victor roughly by the neck of his polo shirt.

  “If Rebecca finds out I told you, she’ll kill me, O.K.? And I’ll tell her you showed me the grave and she’ll split your skull. She can be really cruel, you know …”

  “What do you take me for? You don’t talk about stuff like this, you just don’t.”

  “All the same, I’m glad we talked about it. This way, there’s two of us.”

  Nicole was grappling with a supplier on the telephone and Denis was not home yet, so they did not have to find an excuse for being late. Marilou went to set the table and Victor ran into Julien on the patio.

  “Where were you? Fuck’s sake, been looking for you all over the place.”

  “We went for a ride, we felt like cycling.”

  The boy laughed and gave him a wink.

  “Yeah, yeah, I believe you. Just the two of you, was it?”

  “Don’t say anything, will you?” Victor whispered.

  “No sweat! I’ll even lend you my moped. I’ll have it working soon.”

  *

  Victor had trouble finding sleep, so overwhelmed was he by the confusion of sinister and violent thoughts and images. As dawn began to break, he felt that the sadness that had haunted him for weeks was now giving way to something that welded his jaws shut and made his heart pound so hard he could feel it in the pit of his stomach. It seemed to him that such evil could not go unpunished; he did not know how, did not know whether he would be capable, but he knew he could no longer make do with being sad.

  It was while talking about old Georges with Julien that the two of them decided to catch vipers. There was a tumbledown house to the north, on the road that ran along the estuary. There were thousands of them there, Julien assured him. They spent the whole morning plotting, settling all the details of their expedition. The kid prepared by practising the intense concentration of great hunters, or of warriors in a movie before a decisive
battle. He wielded his forked bamboo stick, tested the bottom of an old canvas bag he had found in a cupboard in the garage. Victor surprised him, off on his own, learning to control his breathing, swelling and emptying his bony ribcage.

  The smaller boy forced his way through the brambles in rubber boots so big his skinny legs disappeared into what looked like the mouths of subterranean monsters, then he stopped and balanced on the crumbled foundations of the ramshackle house, only one wall of which was still standing among the broken beams; he bent down, hands on his knees, forked stick tucked under one arm, to peer into the dark corners, stir up a mound of gravel with his stick, looking for any vipers nesting there. Victor stood a few metres away, legs slightly apart, clutching a piece of wood, vigilant, ready to repel anything that might appear, telling Julien to be careful, feeling a cold shudder run down his back in spite of the fire falling from the incandescent sky.

  Suddenly, Julien started and seemed to plunge into the rubble. He poked about for several seconds that to Victor seemed interminable. All that was visible of him now was the curve of his back, the vertebrae poking through the faded T-shirt that had probably once been red.

  “Got one! Quick, gimme the bag!”

  Victor crept closer and saw the snake writhing between the supple tines of the forked bamboo. About fifty centimetres long, it was coiling and uncoiling itself furiously around the stick that held it captive. It had been trapped a few centimetres below the triangular head it was struggling to lift, its mouth wide, its tongue flickering in short, quick darts. Victor bent lower and saw the vertical pupils, like those of a cat, but lifeless, cold, and he felt an urge to trample the terror this lethal gaze inspired in him. It was the first time he had seen a snake up close without being protected by a wall of glass and his whole body quivered with an almost painful tremor and he thought that this might well be the feeling caused by the poison from the bite as it circulated through a living creature before it died. He felt sweat pour from him, saturating his T-shirt, trickling down his temples. He sucked as much air as he could into his lungs, grabbed the snake just behind the head and held it at arm’s length, studying it. The long, tepid body coiled about his wrist, embracing it with a sort of gentleness that made him whimper with disgust. He tightened his hand around the neck of the beast and felt beneath his fingers the firm muscles harden and move beneath the rough skin.

  Julien stared at him open-mouthed. He looked terrified.

  “Careful! Don’t let it go! Jesus Christ, you’re mad, you are.”

  His voice was choked, he seemed lost, swaying in his huge rubber boots, still balanced on the rubble.

  “Open the bag,” Victor said in a low voice. “Move it!”

  The kid did as he was told, pulled apart the edges of the jute sack, which as soon as Victor had dropped the viper into the bottom he quickly tied again with string.

  They walked away from the ruins and sat on the parched grass. Julien set the bag down in front of him and stared at it as he took off his boots and wiggled his toes, red from the friction and the heat. Inside the bag, the serpent was still moving a little.

  “One should be enough,” he said, wiping sweat from his damp ankles. “Why did you do that?”

  Victor did not reply. He all but turned his back and looked through the trees and the swirling, foaming waters of the river. His legs were trembling and he pressed his knees together to control the shock wave that fear still sent shuddering through him.

  “Me, I never touch ’em, I kill ’em. I only touch them when they’re dead,” Julien said. “One’ll be enough, won’t it?”

  He slipped his bare feet into an oversize pair of trainers, then jumped to his feet. The thick soles, doubtless designed to break world records or make one believe this was possible, made his spindly legs look like two matchsticks planted in pieces of chewing gum. He walked back to his bike, picked up his bag.

  “We should go there, while the bastard’s not in.”

  Once on his feet, Victor found that his legs supported him without weakening. He grabbed the sack containing the snake and hung it from the handlebars. Then they headed off, riding breathless along the road towards Artigues where the old man lived.

  They leaned their bicycles against an E.D.F. substation next to a vineyard and wiped their sweaty faces on their T-shirts. They gulped warm lemonade from the flasks they had brought, finding it delicious, then decided to keep some for later because the sun was beating down, and a heat haze drifted above the rows of vines heavy with grapes which were already ripening here and there.

  From where they were, all they could see of old Georges’ house was the rooftop rising above the shrubs and trees of his garden. They had encountered the old man on his moped, a rifle slung over his shoulder, a juddering trailer hitched to the back. He was heading towards the estuary wearing a faded cotton sunhat. He often went down there to hunt river rats off the fishermen’s wharf with his .22, then feed them to his dogs. They walked along the narrow deserted road, its tarmac melting in pools that Julien carefully avoided because he was afraid of getting stuck.

  “What if it suddenly went hard? I mean you never know. You could be stuck there with a car heading straight for you.”

  “Then you get out of your shoes, dumb-ass,” Victor said.

  The kid slowed his pace, glanced over at Victor, pulling a face beneath the huge peak of his baseball cap, then bowed his head, staring at his shoes, perhaps, or at the road.

  “Yeah, but then you’d be in your bare fuckin’ feet on the hot tarmac. Think about it, you’d end up with blisters on your soles! Fifth-degree burns!”

  Victor put a hand on the kid’s shoulder to shut him up. They were no more than thirty metres from the house now. Here and there pyracanthas spilled out through gaps in the broken railings and this botanic barbed wire represented a barrier more impenetrable than a wire fence – even an electrified one. As they stepped towards it, a blackbird flew out of the tangle of thorns with a raucous cry, making them both jump. They stopped in front of the gate, a crude metal frame, set with bars, some of which were warped as though someone – or some animal – had tried to escape without bothering to jump the gate. A few smudges of black paint were still visible on the rusted ironwork.

  They never heard the dogs approach. From Victor’s scream it sounded as though one of the beasts had its jaws around his throat, and Julien started violently and found himself sitting on the road. A pair of Rottweilers had leapt at the railings, pushing their jaws between the bars. The two boys had felt warm breath and wet drool on their faces. They had seen the fangs up close, seen the jaws snap right under their noses. The gate shook from the dogs’ assault.

  “Fucking dogs!” Julien screamed.

  Victor watched the dogs leap and howl, their dead eyes rolling back in their heads. He had brought his hand to his heart to calm the terror in his chest, the hammering fit to break his ribs; he tried to catch a little breath, just enough to give him the strength to get away from here.

  “C’mon, let’s get out of here!” he managed to say. Julien had moved closer to the railings and Victor tried to drag the kid away.

  “Hey, don’t panic. I know this kind of dog. Papa used to have one. They’re fine with me most times.”

  “Well, this isn’t most times, Jesus, you can see for yourself they’re fucking savage! They’ll eat us alive! Now, come on!”

  Victor screamed when he saw Julien place his hand flat against the gate. Rearing up on his hind leg the larger dog, the male, was taller than Julien; it sniffed loudly at the little fingers, forcing its snout between the bars. The other dog, a bitch, stood back, barking frantically, teeth bared, muscles trembling, moving beneath her sleek coat like fists. The kid whispered gently to the dog, calling him “Pépère”, his nose only inches from the gaping maw.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Victor said again. “Shit, that thing’ll rip your face off!”

  But the dog had stopped growling. It was now licking at Julien, whose hand was stroki
ng its head, scratching between its ears, disappearing into its huge mouth. With his other hand, Julien lifted the latch on the gate and pushed gently.

  “Come on,” he said without looking around. “It’s all cool. Follow me.”

  They walked across an area of gravel that crunched under their feet. Tufts of grass had tried to force their way between the pebbles, but the drought – or a dose of weedkiller – had completely shrivelled them. The bitch lumbered over to a sort of tumbledown lean-to, moving slowly at first as though exhausted; she thrust her snout into a bowl and lapped greedily, then trotted back, describing a semicircle, her nose pressed to the ground, her eyes fixed on Victor. The boy froze, arms pressed against his body so as not to agitate the animal as it growled and sniffed, first at his ankles, then at the bag.

  “She can smell the snake,” Victor said.

  Julien turned, one skinny arm wrapped around the neck of the other dog as it strained to lick his face.

  “Don’t worry about her. She’s scared. Don’t say anything, just ignore her.”

  He whistled. The bitch looked up at him and yapped, jumping up and raising a small cloud of dust.

  “Fucking hell, how d’you do it?” Victor said.

  “Are you using some kind of magic words or what? It’s like they know you.”