Talking to Ghosts by Hervé Le Corre, Frank Wynne Page A

worried, tense, half swallowed by the darkness. He knew nothing about this film either. He unhooked the calendar and laid it on the counter next to the draining board, where two plates and two glasses had long ago finished drying, the last that they had used. He picked up the glasses, held them up to the light, trying to make out a lipstick smear, some trace his mother might have left when she last had a drink. But there was nothing, the curved glass was immaculately, devastatingly transparent.
    He went up to his bedroom, running his fingertips over random objects, uncertain what to do. He sat in front of his computer and was about to turn it on to read his email, then decided against it and sat staring at his faint reflection in the black screen. None of it mattered anymore. All the hours he had spent playing in fantastical familiar universes, with their rules and their strange creatures, their vicious and preposterous battles, all the time he had spent flying around only to find himself, with a sigh of relief, on the edge of an accursed forest or on some battlefield where he was to wage war against some enemy, all the while sending instant messages to other players, mocking or berating some prince of darkness – it all seemed so remote now, it was in the past, a crumpled memory, a scrap of paper to be tossed away, a vanished childhood.
    Slowly he got up and went over to the bookcase to look at a photograph taken the previous winter: snuggled together on the sofa, he and his mother were staring solemnly into the lens. The resemblance between them was striking: they had the same big, dark eyes and thick lashes, the same black hair, their mouths were the same shape. They might have been mistaken for brother and sister, something she often joked about until one day when he had asked her if it was possible for him to be both her brother and her son. She had gazed at him for a long time, then shook her head, shrugging as though to shake off a spider’s web, then with a cheery smile said don’t be ridiculous, just think about it for a second, you silly goose! “That really would be the last straw,” she added. She planted a loud kiss right on his ear and he shook his head, laughing, to banish the ringing noise.
    He took the photograph from its frame and slipped it into his backpack, then rummaged through another drawer for more fresh batteries for the Walkman and a few cassettes that she had given him that he never listened to, some pens and a new exercise book; from his bedside table he picked up a knife she had given him a year ago, running his finger over the embossed Laguiole logo, a copper bee, examining the sharp blade in the lamplight. He sat on his bed for a long time staring at the wall above the shelves of school textbooks, plastered with postersof football players, musicians or singers, and the big poster for “Lord of the Rings”, a film he had seen in April. He studied every inch of these few square metres where his past life was frozen in time. He let himself slip into the confusion of memories that came unbidden. Sensations and precise images flooded back, he was powerless to stop them. He would have liked to cry, to hack up this bitter sadness lodged in his throat. He wanted to sleep here, in his own bed, one last time. To pretend. To wake to the promise of the dawn glow, to lie in bed a little longer, watching sunlight move across the shutters. To hope that maybe the bedroom door would open: ‘You not up yet? Have you seen the time?” He could hear his mother’s sing-song voice and remembered the pleasurable laziness that made him turn over in bed and go straight back to sleep, and the memory of this ghostly pleasure made him shudder.
    He stripped off the bedspread and curled up, his cheek pressed against the coolness of the pillow, turned off the light and lay in the dark listening to the silence, expecting a whispered voice, a rustle of fabric, expecting a miracle, staring