The Deadly Space Between Read Online Free PDF

man whose voice displaces hers, drowns her out. This is the man whose outline bulks in the doorway. This is the man whose weight crushes her ribs. This is the man who opens her secrets. This is the man she loves.
     
Ensuite je joins les points de la première division qui sont dans chacune des deux lignes par une autre ligne qui forme un triangle dont elle est la base.
 
Then I join the points of the first division which are in each of the two lines by another line which forms the base of the triangle.
     
    I crumbled over the French translation. I knew I was going to be sick, a hot wave of acid rose up from my stomach. But when I reached the lavatory nothing came, just raw waves of wretchedness. I sat there gripping the bowl that I had carefully cleaned earlier in the day, feeling lonely and cold.
    She came home late that night, smelling of cigarettes.
    I knew I would always remember that night as the first sighting. It was October. I was eighteen. I had never been separated from her. I had never left home.
     
    *  *  *
     
    It was a great mystery to me why this huge, heavy man with the black car was never introduced. I had a fairly clear memory of her other lovers and of the friends who appeared on rare occasions. She always brought them home. Indeed, I had the distinct impression that I was the acid test they had to pass. My inspection was a sort of initiation ritual. She was proud of me. She said so. She boasted how clever I was. If I liked the look of her companions, and she never misread my unspoken judgements, they were warmly welcomed through the external foliage and over the threshold. Usually, I did like them, although I persuaded myself that I had been wary of the man with the butterfly tattoo. She had no very close friends outside the Amazonian triangle. When she went out, it was either to attend public functions or to do something – eat, discuss, raise money – with a group. No one took precedence over me. She held others at a distance. But she used to tell me about her work, her fears, her plans. Like all children confronting adult confidences, I didn’t always understand what she said, but I hoarded every word. I was intensely jealous of our quiet evenings snuggled together, half asleep, in front of an unsuitably violent thriller on the television. We were like a comfortably married pair, confident of each other’s silences, weaknesses and rhythms. Apart from the great mystery of my origins and my alienated grandparents, I had never been aware of anything hidden, unspoken, taboo. So why did this man remain her open, but unacknowledged secret? If I had wanted to raise the matter I would have had to make a scene. She gave me no opportunity to ask.
    I no longer had to be in school every day. Sometimes I came home early in the afternoon, smelling the fumes of coal fires already lit, hanging in the damp air. If she was still at college I listened to the messages on her answerphone. Her French friends of frequent phone calls and illegible postcards, ringing from the rooms dark with woodsmoke, antiques, and dim, ancestral memories of generations and generations.
    ‘Ecoute, Isobel – c’est moi, Françoise. Tu me rappelles? J’ai déjà des idées pour Noël. Bisous, bisous à toi et Toby . . .’
    The woman at the gallery who exhibited her work, and occasionally sold giant canvases for thousands, sharptoothed, aggressive, much criticized by Aunt Luce: ‘I may have a lead on that gallery in Cologne. After that huge success in Munich we mustn’t let Germany go off the boil . . . call me back asap . . .’
    Aunt Luce herself, resplendent, confident, on the crest of another huge financial connection: ‘Can you both come to dinner next Saturday? Let me know. Liberty and I are definitely off to New York at the beginning of November. It’s all fixed and I can’t wait to tell you . . .’
    . . . and at last, the voice I had waited to hear, feared to hear recorded, fixed, implicated in demand. ‘Hello’ –