Talking to Ghosts Read Free

her tongue poking through shattered teeth.
    Victor searched in this ruined visage for his mother’s face, but he recognised only her left eye, the long curling lashes, the pupil cloudy and unmoving, staring but now sightless.
    He could barely bring himself to look at her body, which was a constellation of bruises. On her breasts, on her ribs. One leg was black from knee to groin.
    He got to his feet again and stood there for a few seconds, hands clasped behind his neck. Now and then he could hear a car passing in the street, and the silence that followed was all the more devastating. He crouched down, grasped his mother’s body under the armpits and lifted her, staggering back with the weight and bumping into the wall behind him. He stayed leaning against it to catch his breath andsummoned all his strength. He adjusted his grip and the mutilated head lolled against his arm and in that moment he almost screamed, but gritted his teeth and shed silent tears as, step by step, he dragged the body to the bed, her heels scraping across the carpet with a dull rasp. He grunted and grimaced from the effort and from grief, then finally felt the edge of the mattress against his legs and collapsed onto it, the body falling on top of him, his dead mother’s head between his thighs; he wriggled out, contorting himself so that he could pull the legs onto the bed, then, finally, got to his feet again and pulled her arms, managing to lay her out more or less naturally and prop a pillow under her head.
    He tried to catch his breath, his heart pounding, sweat dripping from his chin, and took deep breaths, bent double, his hands on his legs, a trickle of snot hanging from his nose because every breath came out as a sob.
    He stood up straight, wiped his mouth and chin with the back of his hand and drew a sheet over his mother who now looked as though she were asleep, then wiped the sweat from his neck, leaned over the body and stroked this mother’s face; he pressed his fingertips to her eyelids but could not bring himself to close them because there was a fixedness in her stare that he could not comprehend, so he traced a finger over her battered lips, over her teeth, then, holding his breath, he gently kissed her forehead. He stepped back from the bed and stood for a moment, arms dangling by his sides in the middle of the room, listening to the buzzing of an invisible fly. Standing stock-still, his mouth open, he tried to take a deep breath, struggling to swell his scrawny chest.
    A car passing outside made him start and shook him from his trance. He went and sat on the swivel stool in front of the dressing table, stared at the lifeless body, the glistening eyes, then turned to look in the mirror, hoping to see his mother’s image come alive again. He stared at the dressing table, cluttered with women’s things, perfumed and gleaming: brushes, bottles, tubes, expensive-looking packages, jewellery that glittered like gold. He pressed his palms to his cheeks,pulled his eyelids downwards, distorting his face, in an effort to make it seem grotesque or monstrous. Gurning into the mirror, he seemed ageless. Already too old, or forever trapped in this day, imprisoned in this grim moment. He took the rings lying on the dressing table and slipped them on his fingers, stretching his hand out to admire the effect, but the half-light of the room dulled any sparkle so he took them off, having to tug at the ones that were too tight. Then he trailed his fingers over the pots of creams, the lipsticks, brought the soft makeup brushes to his face and the feeling – like small docile animals – made him shudder. He sat for a long time staring at this collection of beauty products, carefully, painstakingly going through the vanity cases and soundlessly replacing everything, spraying perfumes at the mirror which mingled in the sultry heat to form a mist of heady scents.
    He opened drawers, rummaging in them at random, aimlessly taking