The Deadly Space Between Read Online Free PDF Page A

distance. The huge black breasts of the lost African queens were an initiation ritual, a ravine traversed in the mind and only dimly remembered in all their uneventful lives to come.
     
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    It was October. My bedroom was at the top of the house, tucked into the peeling white gable. I hung damp towels on the radiator under the window and looked out down the street. Our front garden was overgrown with browning dying buddleia, a dwarf conifer which, unbidden, had magnified itself to giant size, a camellia sheltered in the lee of the porch, a hedge of eleagnus which had never flourished and remained in a stunted condition of disappointment. The banks of evergreen darkened the bay window of the sitting room. The only point from which the entire, quiet, suburban street was visible was my bedroom window. There was never anything to see. I could always hear the distant ebb and flow of shrieking children. I never saw them. The husbands came home every weekday after dark, washed their cars on fine Sundays, even in the winter if there was no frost. The neighbours marched their dogs forth to the commons. A flicker of gorse marked the end of cultivated domesticity over a hundred yards away. The view never, never changed.
    It began in October. I was perched in my bedroom translating French for my S-level exams. I was the only candidate. One of the passages was very mysterious.
     
J’appelle Triangle arithmétique, une figure dont la construction est telle. Je mène d’un point quelconque, G, deux lignes perpendiculaires l’une à l’autre, GV, GL, dans chacune desquelles je prends tant que je veux de parties égales et continue, à commencer par G que je nomme 1, 2, 3, etc; et ces nombres sont les exposants des divisions des lignes .
 
I have named the following construction the Arithmetical Triangle. From a random point, G, let there be two perpendicular lines, GV, GL, from each of which I take equal sections and continue, beginning with G, which I call 1, 2, 3, etc; and these numbers are the ‘exposants’ of the divisions of the lines.
     
    I ceased to translate. Idly, I began to draw the mathematical figure described in the text. Then I heard her voice, calling, calling from the bottom of the stairs. I did not move. She was going out. I shouted back, a noncommittal assent. I heard the door clamp shut behind her. Then, automatically, I rose and stood at the window looking down the street. She appeared in the fading grey light beyond the shadows of the evergreens. The orange lamps were already shimmering in the dimness. Her boots rapped the concrete. She never carried a handbag. I saw her hair, bobbed short like a 1920s good-time girl, swinging gently in the orange glare. I raised my hand to my own head. I imagined her hair in my hands. She walked past her own car, peering briefly into the back seat. Then she looked up and quickened her stride. I followed the line of her gaze. From the angle of the window I was secure at the apex of the triangle, watching her flicker across the void, converging on the obscure point, fixed, unseen. There was a slight movement, a hand descending. And my gaze came to rest on the figure in the coming dark.
    I saw the other man for the first time. He leaned against a heavy black car, a panzer with giant rutted wheels, bull bars and special plates. At first I could make no sense at all of the male shape, and understood only details, a loose black suit, very short grey hair, it shone slightly, a man like any other man, larger perhaps, no, much larger, I can see that now as he moves, a barrel chest, a heavy step as he turns to gaze at the woman coming. Then he looks up. He is clean-shaven, fifty years old, maybe more. His face is heavy, white, as if he is wearing an actor’s mask. I am too far away to see his eyes. Then he raises his hand to his lips. He is smoking. So this is the man whose smell engulfs her body. This is the man, whose hands, reeking of nicotine, enclose hers. This is the