The Girl Who Wasn't There Read Online Free PDF

anyone; he must be more careful.

9
    After Sebastian’s mother had sold the house by the lake, she bought a modern equestrian centre near Freiburg. She lived there in a detached house with thin walls and a double garage.
    There were twelve boxes in the stables; there was an indoor riding arena and a square paddock for dressage. A groom cleaned the way leading through the stables, the tack room and the inner courtyard every day; Sebastian’s mother made a fuss if she spotted any cobwebs.
    She rose at six every morning, and rode all her twelve horses until afternoon. From spring to autumn she went to horse shows at the weekends, and once reached the rank of national number two in dressage. She lived on the proceeds from the sale of the house by the lake and its woods.
    Because of the long intervals between school holidays, Sebastian noticed the changes in her: her chin and nose grew more pointed, her mouth was thinner, veins stood out on her forearms.
    When Sebastian visited her, he slept in a small room under the roof, where it was stuffy in summer and dark in winter. His mother used the room as her office when he wasn’t occupying it. His own things, packed into two crates, were kept up in the attic.
    In the holidays he went to horse shows with her. The show grounds were muddy, water collected in the ruts left by the motorized horseboxes, and the tents smelled of onions and burnt fat. In summer the horse droppings dried on the grass, heat turned people’s faces red, and the air was full of the acrid smell of the horses’ sweat. Men sat on folding chairs round the dressage paddock, watching their wives and daughters. They had a language of their own: a horse being ridden on the bit; they spoke of travers, flying changes, an extended trot. Sebastian realized that the women riders were addicted to their horses.
    His mother didn’t talk to him much; riding left her tired. She said she found her body a trial these days, the pain in her knees and her back and her hand. A doctor had warned her that the constant strain on the nerves of her throat meant they were wearing thin, and it would be dangerous to go on riding, too much of a risk. She tried giving it up for a week, and then got back on her horses. She had to ride, she said, there was no other option.
     
    When Sebastian was sixteen his mother introduced him to her new boyfriend. He was in his mid-forties, half a head shorter than she was, with short grey hair, thick eyebrows and manicured fingernails. They met Sebastian at the station when he came home from boarding school.
    They’d go and eat now, said the new boyfriend. He drove to a restaurant which he said was the best; his boss ate there, too. As the menu said, ‘a former butcher’s shop has been turned into the perfect replica of a French café of the turn of the century’, and was now ‘an authentic piece of France in the middle of Freiburg’. The tables were packed close together, there were too many customers in the room, the chairs were uncomfortable. It was very noisy. The new boyfriend shouted that the food here was excellent, and he addressed the waiter by his first name.
    The new boyfriend looked at his watch and ordered for everyone. He knew what was good here, he said. While they waited for the food to come, he told Sebastian that he was a sales rep for plasterboard panels, in which there was ‘a huge trade’. An article about him had once appeared in a local tabloid paper, when he had been doing all he could to get a Swedish car supplier to open an outlet in this city. The supplier had changed his mind before anything could come of it, but he himself was described as ‘the fixer’ in the newspaper story, and a name like that stuck, he said. He raised his eyebrows and spoke in a tone suggesting that it was a humorous idea, but Sebastian realized that he was proud of it. His mother said nothing, and seemed to have heard the story before.
    ‘Everything has its price,’ said the fixer. ‘But if