The drive took a little less than an hour, and towards the end of the journey, after they had passed Saint-Laurent, there were vineyards as far as the eye could see, beautiful houses with turrets and slate roofs set in magnificent grounds, and the two adults – the director, who was driving, and Bernard – were marvelling at how close they were to the famous wineries advertised on the signs along the road. Victor, who had spent most of the trip dozing, turned around once to see a high-clearance tractor spraying copper sulphate, and the curious shape of the tractor surprised him at first, but then he remembered he had seen one before, though he could not remember where or when, and he stared at the machine, enveloped in a bluish haze, until it disappeared.
On the way into Pauillac they got lost, looked for the road to Saint-Estèphe, and ended up on the quays, driving along the swirling muddy estuary, past the forest of masts in the marina, until a woman gave them directions. Ten minutes later they pulled up outside one of the last houses in the village, after which the narrow road ran between the vineyards.
In spite of the heat that poured in as soon as the car doors were opened, Victor did not get out, leaving the two adults to go and ring at the blue front door. Almost immediately he saw a smiling woman with short brown hair, wearing floral-print leggings and a black T-shirt, bend down and give him a little wave through the car window. Bernard came back and gently told Victor he should come over and say hello, meet his new family, that he couldn’t stay in the car all day.
The boy took a deep breath, got out, and walked towards the smiling woman who held out her hand.
“Hello, Victor. Welcome. My name is Nicole.”
Victor looked at the woman, wondering how old she was. He felt an instinctive repulsion and was glad she had not kissed him. Obviously she was old, but he could not work out how old. Older than his mother, certainly. While she talked to the others, offering them a drink, Victor studied her plump features, her wide hips and her fat thighs in the floral-patterned leggings, the full breasts that heaved under her T-shirt.
“Aren’t you thirsty in all this heat?” she said.
She invited Bernard and the director to come into the garden and briefly laid a hand on Victor’s shoulder, urging him to come with them. She led them to a living room with drawn blinds where it was still relatively cool and told them to wait while she got some refreshments. When she asked what he wanted to drink, Victor mumbled inaudibly and had to repeat, “Some Coke”, as he shook his T-shirt to dry the sweat from his back. Seeing him standing there, Bernard gestured to the spot next to him on the sofa, and Victor sat down and crossed his legs, fiddling with the laces of his trainers. The social worker asked if he was alright and he nodded, still staring at his shoes.
“It’ll be fine,” the director said.
Victor did not react. He felt as though he were being tossed on an ocean, floating on the surface, the way it might feel when a current pulls you out to sea or a whirlpool drags you under and you’re shattered and don’t know what to do, except wait out what little time is left and hope that something will float past for you to cling to. He remembered the last scene in the film “Moby Dick” – a teacher had shown it to them at school one day, and it had made him want to read the book – in which the hero is floating all alone at sea, clinging to the coffin of his friend.
Nicole came back with drinks, explaining that the kids were at the beach at Hourtin with her sister, that they were having a picnic there and would be home at about five o’clock.
“You’ll have the whole day to yourself to get settled in,” she told Victor. “After that, we’ve got all the time in the world to get everyone introduced.”
The boy raised his eyes to hers, then averted them straight away.
“How many foster children do you have here at the moment?” the director said.
“Just one, Julien, he’s ten, and now Victor. And there’s Marilou, our daughter, who’s eleven.”
She smiled to herself, looking down, the gentle look of a contented woman, then, seeing that everyone had drained their glasses, she jumped to her feet.
“Follow me, I’ll show Victor his room.”
She led them up a staircase that creaked as they went, and opened a blue door. Victor stood behind Bernard and the director, and they had to urge him to step into the vast attic room, furnished with a big bed, a desk on which stood a large red lamp, and a little shelf on the wall with two books whose titles he could not make out. The woman turned on the bedside lamp, which gave off such a soft, welcoming glow in the dark room with its closed shutters that the boy immediately wanted to be alone in what would at least be a safe, peaceful refuge.
“You’ll be O.K. here,” Bernard whispered.
Victor forced himself to smile. Obviously, it was better than the children’s home, and obviously he had to live somewhere while he was waiting, though he did not know what it was he was waiting for, and suspected he might have to find it for himself.
Since he wanted to be alone, he mustered enough breath to ask the adults if he could go and get his things from the car and bring them up to his room, and they looked at each other in surprise and, smiling, gave their blessing. As he went downstairs he heard the director reassure Nicole that everything would be just fine, that there was no need to worry.
When he set down his two bags and his suitcase on the bedroom carpet, having refused to accept help, he shut the door and stood at the foot of the bed, breathless, letting the sweat drip from him, tiredness beating dully in his temples. He could smell clean sheets, old timber, and maybe damp. He listened carefully, but he could not make out the grown-ups’ conversation downstairs. The shutters kept out the birds’ distant muffled trilling and the luminous heat that pressed against the two diamond shapes cut out of the thick wood.
After a while he sat down on the bed, hands wedged under his thighs, looked around this peaceful room and nodded, perhaps in approval at the soothing half-light or perhaps at the vague notion that was gradually forming in his mind, less an idea than a foreboding that made his heart beat faster and brought a lump of bitter rage to his throat and made his eyes sting, a thought that he could not yet put into words, and one that he might never voice since he was beginning to think that words were futile, meaningless sounds whisked away by the wind like empty plastic bags to catch on fences and branches.
There was a knock at the door and he hurried to open it. It was Nicole, come to tell him that Bernard and the director were ready to go back to Bordeaux and wanted to say goodbye. He looked at her and realised she had a pretty smile that made those around her feel good, and made him feel handsome. The sort of smile a girl with a crush might give the boy she loved. He followed her downstairs and shook hands with the director, who said he was counting on Victor to build a new life for himself, a great future. Victor did not really understand what he meant by building a life, he often did not understand what the man was saying, with his flowery phrases and intellectual air. Then Bernard shook his hand and patted him on the arm, saying they were counting on him to be happy.
Victor did not go out to watch them leave, but stood for a long time listening to the car’s engine as it faded into the distance, and when Nicole came back in, rubbing her hands, and asked if he would mind helping her tidy up the glasses and the bottles from the coffee table he carried everything into the kitchen, put the glasses in the sink and ran some cold water over his hands, drinking a mouthful from his cupped palm before splashing some on his face and neck.
Afterwards they had lunch, because it was already past noon, and then, having tidied away his things in his bedroom, he waited there in its tranquil shade. He did not know what he was waiting for, but he was no longer afraid. At some point he picked up the urn, held it close and pictured his mother’s smile, her walk, the way she looked at him, the way she pulled her collar up when it was cold in winter, the smell of a tagine as she lifted the lid of the earthenware pot, eyes wide with hunger, then closing them to inhale the rich scent of the steaming broth.
He cried when he realised that all this was in the past. He cried that he did not have magical powers that could raise the dead or at least speak to them, so that he might be lulled again by her voice. He imagined finding a time machine in an old hangar and going back to that day, he would skip school, go home and force his mother to go out, even if she was furious with him, even if she was disappointed in him, at least she would not be there when the killer turned up. At least she would still be alive. Here. Her fingers running through his hair. My little boy. Manou.
He fell asleep. When the other children got back from the beach, Nicole came to wake him.
There was a girl and a boy. Marilou and Julien. Victor found it strange that they hugged him – they had probably been told to. The girl, who had wild black curly hair and big laughing eyes, put her hands on his shoulders and planted loud kisses on his cheeks, then sat on the sofa, holding a fizzy drink, and fluttered her long lashes at him. Victor felt obscurely flattered. Julien’s glasses hit Victor on the forehead as he hugged him and he stepped back, embarrassed. Everything seemed to make the boy self-conscious. His eyes darted around, suspicious or fearful. Perhaps frightened of being scolded, or of some imminent danger.
Marilou told him about their day at the beach, the swimming, the helicopter that had whirred back and forth. About Julien digging a huge hole, burying himself in the sand and pretending to be dead. Marilou had found it creepy. She thought pretending to be dead was stupid.
Surreptitiously Nicole looked at Victor, who was still staring at the dark-haired girl.
The afternoon stretched on like this as he sat, his bare feet on the tiled floor, in front of the television while the others went and showered to wash off the salt and the sand.
Then came dinner. Victor had to sit with these people, sit right next to them, under their watchful eyes.
Victor felt as though he were at the bottom of a pit.
He was not hungry, and he felt again an acrid lump in his throat. He weighed up these strangers one by one as they sat at the table, unable to believe that they truly existed, that this meal – the five of them sitting around the big dining-room table with the windows wide open to the night in the hope of a cool breeze – was not some sort of performance for his benefit, whose actors, completely engrossed in their roles, intimidated him slightly. He longed to wake up from this nightmare in which he felt himself shrinking, rooted to his chair, while the others around the table seemed gigantic, distant, strange. He did not know what he was supposed to do or say, he stared at his plate, eating slowly so that no-one would offer him second helpings. He said, “Not too much, thanks,” when he was served, not daring to say that he could not bring himself to eat anything, then he methodically chewed everything, making it easier to swallow.
Nicole had sat him next to Marilou, and he could feel her studying him, observing the way he ate or maybe how he used his knife and fork, anything that she could tell her friends the next day. He knew that girls talked, teased each other, made up secrets about things they found out, laughing and shrieking. Marilou constantly squirmed in her chair as though incapable of sitting still, swinging her tanned legs, of which, out of the corner of his eye, Victor could see only an area of thigh between her shorts and the tablecloth. Victor had liked the way Marilou smiled, the way she walked, twirling around the living room when they got back from the beach, showing off her suntanned back, her stomach, her legs. But now as she sat next to him he suddenly found her too quiet, too curious about his every gesture; he wanted her to go on talking in that soft, hoarse voice that made the boy want to clear his own throat.
In fact no-one talked much over dinner, glued to the television that was broadcasting news from all over the world, images of famines, massacres and natural disasters which seamlessly segued into news reports about holidaymakers, of hoteliers and restaurant owners worried that their takings were down. But the babble of the television could not fill the long silences, interrupted only by the clink of cutlery and the smack of wet lips.
Then there was the man, silently bent over his plate, who sat up only to sip his wine or glance indifferently at the children. The conversations had already trailed off by the time he arrived.
This was Denis, Nicole’s husband. He had got home just before seven, moody and exhausted, and had gone straight into the kitchen where he drank down two beers, standing in front of the open refrigerator, before coming into the sitting room to say hello, to shake the hand that Victor shyly proffered and ask how old he was.
“Thirteen.”
“The awkward age. You’d better be careful. Otherwise …”
He had said this with a tired, forced smile, and Nicole had immediately said that of course he would be careful, that he was a responsible boy.
When Denis had turned his face towards him, slick with sweat, Victor had caught the sour smell of alcohol as if the man’s sweat were made of the stuff, and he noticed a weary, doubtful gleam in his eyes, half hidden by his constant blinking. Victor had put it down to the fact that he was worn out after a day working on a building site near Bordeaux. During the afternoon Nicole had told him her husband was a builder, who had set up his own business three years ago, and he worked harder than the two labourers he employed because it was tough to make ends meet. It was not a job that Victor would have liked. Working under the heat of the sun or in the rain, as he often saw labourers do; they were badly paid too, his mother had told him, it was a shitty job.
Now everyone was watching a news report about the terrible fires in Portugal, huge flames leaping across roads, forcing the firefighters to flee while the locals complained about how their few belongings had been destroyed by the fire. Victor felt relieved that no-one was looking at him, and tried to make as little noise as possible with his cutlery so they might forget about him a while longer. Even Marilou seemed to have stopped studying him, and he could look up without risking meeting anyone’s gaze.
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.
He sat a little way off in a hammock and watched her. Rebecca was dressing the doll in some sort of evening gown, biting her lower lip and frowning. Her hair fell over her face and she constantly had to push the heavy black locks behind her ear with a hand or a thumb, a gesture the boy decided he liked. Her fingers moved quickly, her rings shining. The plastic creature was soon dressed in its sequinned gown. Victor counted seven rings. He knew what his first present to her would be. She had crossed her legs and was nervously swinging her foot, a sandal decorated with coloured beads balanced precariously on the end of her toes. He did not dare look at her thighs, at the hem of the white cotton shorts that sometimes gaped over her brown skin.
“You want some more Coke?”
At first he did not realise she was talking to him. He emerged from a sort of daze to see that she was holding the bottle towards him.
“Here, I’ve hardly touched it, I wasn’t really thirsty.”
He got up, took the drink, mumbled his thanks. He took long gulps. The coldness and the sugar did him good. He stood there in front of the table. The girls paid no attention to him, bent over what they were doing, concentrating like couturiers. They did not talk to each other. They handled the tiny pieces of cloth with the deftness of skilled workers. It was like a job.
He sat down again, unsure what to do. Eventually, he stretched out in the hammock, turned towards the girls. He had tried to tear his eyes from Rebecca, to stop undressing her inch by inch, almost physically able to feel the touch of her skin beneath his fingertips. He decided to make her a character in his novel about the survivor. She would appear from nowhere on a motorway, dressed in rags, and throw herself under the wheels of his 4 × 4. Naturally he would swerve just in the nick of time, then comfort her. They would be alone in the world, amid the utter chaos. He liked this idea. Rebecca and him in the first days of the end of the world.
Marilou’s voice pulled him from his daydream.
“Do you want to play with us? You can dress this one,” she said with a big smile.
She waved a doll representing a man, or a boy, and Rebecca burst out laughing and hid her face in a tiny tulle dress which she balled up in her fist.
“That’s Ken the gay boy,” she said in a hoarse voice.
Victor shivered. He felt ill. He stood up, about to leave, and asked where Julien was.
“I wasn’t talking about you,” Rebecca said. “Shit, I was just joking. Wasn’t I, Marilou?”
“Yeah, it’s nothing,” Marilou said, hunched over her mobile phone, tapping out an S.M.S.
“Who’re you texting?”
“Paola. She’s in Portugal at her nan’s house.”
“So are you happy here?” Rebecca asked Victor. “Denis and Nicole are so cool. I love them. Where did you live before?”
She didn’t look at him, busy putting together some sort of pink camper van. Victor wondered whether there was any point in replying. He would have liked to see her eyes on him.
“I lived with my mother,” he said eventually.
Bent over her task, the girl said nothing. She might not even have heard.
“She’s dead,” Victor whispered, feeling his lungs empty of every last atom of air, unsure whether he would ever be able to speak again.
“Oh yeah, that’s right. Marilou told me.”
She turned her eyes on him. Grey, or green, they captured all the light which stole between the leaves. She blinked twice, three times. She settled back in the deckchair and looked away.
Victor felt as though he were suspended in mid-air by a steel hook buried in his chest. The girls said something he could not make out, tapping away on their phones. He managed to get a little breath back, leaning on the table because his head was spinning.
“What about you?” he said.
Marilou put down her phone and looked at Rebecca.
“Yeah, I’m cool. Next year I’m going to study at La Maison rurale in Lesparre. To learn a shitty trade, so I can earn a shitty living. And so I can get out of here.”
“Do you live with your parents?”
She shrugged and went back to listening to her voicemail. Marilou, her huge eyes wide, seemed to be trying to signal something to him.
He stared at the low neckline of Rebecca’s T-shirt, at the curve of her breasts. He could not help himself. He was two metres from her, yet he thought he could feel the heat of her body, as if he was standing in front of a fire. She talked quickly, swallowing her words, her voice hoarse, and shrill. Her gestures were often brusque and her looks callous. She frightened him. She probably got into a lot of fights.
They did not say much more for a while. Then Rebecca got up suddenly, because she had to go, she said. She kissed Marilou goodbye and walked away without so much as a glance at Victor, and the boy did not know if he was disappointed or relieved to see her go.