The Girl Who Wasn't There Read Online Free PDF Page A

lifted his case from the back seat. She can’t wave goodbye because of all the traffic, he thought as he watched her drive away.
     
    He found the train, sat in his reserved seat and looked out of the window. Feeling in his pocket, he took his father’s cigarette case out and ran his thumb over the jade stone in it. He thought of the wall behind the desk; it had already been repainted. As the train left the station, he placed the cigarette case on the folding table in front of him. The stone gleamed in the sun, its colour calm and regular. ‘Imperial jade,’ his father had once called it. The cigarette case dated from the twenties, and there were Japanese characters engraved inside it. Sebastian held the case up to his eyes. Sometimes the shadow of a tree or an electricity pylon fell on the jade stone, changing its colour.
    He saw the house before him, the dark green of his childhood, the bright days. The colours smelled of the dust covering everything, they smelled like freshly mown grass in the afternoon and like thyme after rain, and like the reeds between the planks of the landing stage. He thought of the silk dresses that his mother once used to wear, he thought of her skin in the sun and the picture of the Arctic Ocean in his father’s study. He didn’t know what was real any longer, and he didn’t know what was going to become of him.

8
    Over the next few years at boarding school, Sebastian spent nearly all his time sitting in the library, reading. He went to India, the Sierra Nevada, into the jungle, he drove dog-sleighs and rode dragons, he caught whales, he was a seafarer, an adventurer, a traveller in time. He didn’t distinguish between stories and reality.
    The librarian noticed it first. He saw Sebastian talking excitedly to someone, although the boy was alone in the reading room. It struck the librarian as strange, and he reported it to the school management. The prefects and teachers discussed the incident, phone calls were made to Sebastian’s mother, and finally it was decided to have the matter investigated.
    The Holy Father in charge of his year’s intake at the school went to the capital city with Sebastian. He said they were going to see a famous doctor who was a professor at the university.
    The doctor was fat, he smelled of pea soup and he was already very old. But he didn’t look like a medical doctor, and his consulting room didn’t look like a medical doctor’s surgery. African masks hung on its walls, and a chain made of bones lay on the desk. Sebastian and the Father went into the city to see the fat doctor five times. They were delightful excursions. After each visit, the Father always took Sebastian to a café, and he could choose whatever cake he liked.
    On the last visit, the fat man said there was no need for Sebastian to come any more. He discussed something with the Father. Sebastian wanted to take note of it, but the men were using words that he didn’t know. Visual hallucinations, said the fat man, and many other difficult terms.
    Outside, Sebastian asked the Father what the fat doctor had said, because he was slightly afraid that he was ill. The Father reassured him: there was nothing much the matter, he said, it was just that he, Sebastian, imagined people and things that didn’t exist. Children sometimes did that, he added, when the border between reality and what was in their heads wasn’t perfectly clear yet. In time it would put itself right. The Father looked sad when he said that. Then they went into the café. Sebastian ordered a slice of marble cake, and the Father had a beer.
    Sebastian didn’t like to think that part of him had to be put right. The cook at home had a crooked finger, and said it had just grown that way. Sebastian did not want to have anything crooked and ugly in his head. He thought about it for a long time on the way back, and decided that it didn’t matter if he went on talking to Odysseus, Hercules and Tom Sawyer. But he mustn’t tell