The Book of Revelation Read Online Free PDF

her last. Yes, look. There was the shape of her foot in the wet sand. He was aware of the weight of the sun on his head, on his shoulders. The beach, grey and ochre, curved away towards a rocky promontory. Its emptiness seemed natural. It even had a quality of indifference about it, as if any feelings he might have were of no interest, no relevance.
    What if somebody had raped her, then hit her with a rock? What if somebody had killed her? What if she just vanished? Brigitte, who he couldn’t live without. Brigitte, who he adored.
    He had an image of her with nothing on, drinking water from the spring. At a distance of a hundred yards, it was not her face you recognised her by, it was the way she bent forwards from the waist, as only a dancer can, the way her spine and the backs of her thighs formed a right-angle, a perfect right-angle. . . . This is how it happens, he thought, when someone disappears. An empty beach. A stillness. Brigitte had been his responsibility. Her disappearance, if that was what it was, would be his fault. Her death, his fault. He swallowed. Turning away from the spring, he began to walk towards the promontory, but he had no hope now. She had been missing for an hour at least. He couldn’t imagine circumstances that would account for that. He couldn’t come up with a single explanation.
    Then he heard a voice call his name. He stopped, looked up. Brigitte was standing on a rock above him, her body pale-grey, every part of her pale-grey, in fact, even her face, and, for a moment, he thought that his nightmare had come true, that she had been killed and was now returning as a ghost. . . . The truth was far less dramatic, of course: while exploring the promontory, she had discovered some special mud, mud that was good for the skin. . . .
    That evening, as they sat outside the village bar, drinking glasses of chilled retsina, he watched her turn her head to blow her cigarette smoke into the street. He was still astonished that she hadn’t come to any harm. He couldn’t quite believe she wasn’t dead and gone, as he had feared.
    “What is it?” she said.
    He shook his head. Being Brigitte, it had never occurred to her that he might have missed her, that he might have been worried, and he knew her well enough to realise that, if he told her, she would not have understood. She might even have thought less of him for it. She would herself have been astonished.
    “Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
    In retrospect, you could resent people who lived so entirely in their own skin that they had no idea of what it was like to be in yours. Not just no idea either, but no interest in trying to find out. The thought simply wouldn’t have entered their heads.
    This was why he was finding it so difficult to envisage how Brigitte would react to his disappearance. She was so used to being the centre of attention—how would it be when that situation was reversed? Every time he tried to imagine what she might be doing, all he saw were the ordinary things, some element or other of her everyday routine. She was sprinkling food into the fish tank. She was lying in a hot bath, listening to Bob Dylan tapes (which she loved, and he always teased her about). She was sitting on the floor in the corner of the studio, stretching her legs out sideways, or touching her forehead to her knees. She was behaving normally, in other words. She was behaving as if he was still there . Was there a grain of truth in these images (not that his absence wouldn’t affect her, but that she would carry on regardless)? Or did they simply indicate the poverty of his own imagination?
    Another memory came to him. It had happened years ago, when they first knew each other. After rehearsal one afternoon he had gone to fetch his car, which he had parked a few streets away. He waited for her outside the studio, the engine running. At last the door opened and she climbed in, her skin smelling of the Chanel soap she always used back