All the Way Read Online Free PDF

he’s writhing on the edge of the bed. Those times when he stands up, drapes himself in his dressing-gown and says, ‘I stand on my dignity.’
    When she finds him in the kitchen, armed with the coffee grinder, his head beneath the lampshade, his dressing-gown belted around him, she reminds herself that the distance she has just put between herself and him is the same distance that he sometimes insists on, as if he also, in his own way, was holding something back.
    There’s no MY, or MUMMY tattooed on Monsieur Bihotz’s dick, no get fucked to anyone. There’s nothing tattooed there at all. When she was little and Monsieur Bihotz gave her a bath, he always came in and had a piss. He pisses on the hydrangeas, too. He says it makes them go blue. He has two dicks. The one for pissing, and the other one. The other one is much bigger, the colour of a turkey’s comb, like the canna lilies.
    Monsieur Bihotz can spend whole days in bed. Not the same way as her mother, who groans when you open the door and who needs absolute silence and complete darkness for her migraines. He has the shutters closed but the light turned on and he reads the newspaper, or listens to the radio, or goes as far as turning AC/DC on full bore, or he just lies there doing nothing, drinking lots of coffee. If he stays there too long, he tells her, ‘I’m having a coffee meltdown.’
    On one of the coffee meltdown days, Monsieur Bihotz was lying on his bed with the newspapers around him, his dressing-gown open, holding his big red dick in his hand. They looked at each other for what seemed like ages, but as long as she was looking at his eyes, she was not looking at his hand. Monsieur Bihotz’s face became more and more mournful and thoughtful. Then he wrapped himself up in his dressing-gown and turned on his side and he started groaning, a bit like her mother.
    Under the shower the water runs red. Every now and again a little black twisty thing pops out, like it’s alive, caught in the current. A maxi-plus sanitary napkin for the night. ‘The flow’s heavier at night,’ her mother said.
    The engines of her father’s plane are roaring on the tarmac. She knows the noise by heart. It gets more and more high-pitched, and then holds the note, loud. The plane flies just above the house. It’s her father saying goodnight to her, on the weekends when he doesn’t sleep at home. He veers off course especially for her. The lights traverse the black sky. They blink through the clouds, illuminating them, then they disappear.
    She goes down the hall without turning on the light, careful where she places her feet, avoiding the lines between the tiles. Quietly she opens the door to her mother’s room. She recoils because the colour is strange. It’s sparkling like gold dust in the shadows. The glossy paper from the bouquets of flowers. Her mother has gathered all the flowers onto her bed and it looks like she’s dead.
    She gets some empty jam jars and fills them with water, and then she gives up, there are too many of them, it’s so stupid, all these flowers her father bought.
    â€˜You’ll live to see the last of the animals,’ her father tells her. ‘There’ll only be useful animals left. Edible or ornamental. Rats and mosquitoes will survive. And seagulls.’ Disgusted, he points his Dunhill towards the only thing still moving on the lake. ‘Seagulls are indestructible. They breathe any old air, they float on any old bit of water, they eat anything and everything. They’ve even adapted to Clèves, and that’s saying something.
    â€˜I wanted to live near the sea. But your mother didn’t, because of the sea air. It rusts the shutters.
    â€˜The only thing left at the end of everything will be cockroaches. Their shells are atomic bomb shelters. They can live under water and without food. The planet will be colonised by cockroaches crawling around in a