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

you can move your arse it makes no difference where you come from.’
    The fixer put his hand on Sebastian’s mother’s thigh and looked down her neckline. The waiter brought a bottle of Clos de Beaujeu, although no one had ordered it. He could have a drink, the fixer told Sebastian, ‘in honour of the day’. Sebastian asked for water.
    Then the fixer shouted across the table at Sebastian, ‘What are you planning to be?’
    Sebastian shrugged. The fixer was playing with the salt shaker. He had fat fingers, although he wasn’t fat otherwise. He wore a gold watch on a gold bracelet, with a magnifying section over the date on the face of the watch. Saliva was drying in the corners of the fixer’s mouth. Sebastian imagined the fixer’s mouth on his mother’s.
    ‘Don’t you have any plans? Going to such an expensive school, and you don’t have any plans?’ asked the fixer.
    Sebastian did not reply.
    ‘What’s that you have there?’ asked the fixer. He reached into the pocket of Sebastian’s coat, which was lying over the chair, and took out the book that Sebastian had been reading in the train.
    ‘
Down the rivers of the windfall light,
’ read the fixer slowly. ‘What’s this supposed to mean?’ He laughed uproariously, holding the book aloft.
    ‘It’s a poem,’ said Sebastian. He snatched the book from the fixer’s hand, accidentally knocking a glass over. Wine soaked the tablecloth and ran on to the fixer’s trousers. Sebastian apologized, saying he must get some fresh air.
    He went outside. A homeless man was searching a rubbish bin at the bus stop. A very long, shiny car drove soundlessly past. The air weighed down on the street with a smell of asphalt and petrol. A woman walked by, shouting into a mobile phone, ‘You’ve been a single long enough, that’s what it is.’ Sebastian smoked two cigarettes, one after the other and too fast. A photograph of the green fisherman’s hut where Dylan Thomas had written the poems hung over his desk at the boarding school. He thought of it now.
    When he returned to the restaurant, the ‘Homemade Galloway Meatballs’ that the fixer had ordered for him were cold.
     
    The fixer drove home too fast. Sebastian felt the seat-belt cutting into his throat. The fixer and Sebastian’s mother went to bed at once. Sebastian read from his book of poems for a little while longer, and then went out into the garden to smoke; his mother wouldn’t have smoking in the house.
    There was a light on in the bedroom. The fixer was standing beside the bed, naked, while Sebastian’s mother slept. The fixer was holding a video camera in one hand, with the red diode blinking to show that filming was in progress. He was masturbating with the other hand. Sebastian could see himself reflected in the outside of the large panoramic window.
    He went up to the room under the roof and sat at the Perspex desk in front of the window. He wanted to write a letter, but didn’t know who to. He stared at the point of his pencil, and then got an Opinel knife with a wooden handle out of his case. He usually took it hiking with him. He cut off the top of his left forefinger, and watched the blood come out, dripping on the desk. For a moment he felt alive. Then he went into the bathroom and bandaged the wound.
     
    Sebastian’s mother and the fixer got married just under a year later. They celebrated the wedding in a castle hotel, known to the fixer from a reps’ conference that was held there. The bridal couple went to the register office in a horse-drawn carriage, and Sebastian’s mother wore a white dress. A marquee was erected outside the hotel, an entertainer with a Hammond organ was booked to provide music. The guests could dance only out there; the hotel manager had said the parquet flooring in the castle was too easily harmed.
    The fixer had taken dancing lessons for the bridal waltz. All the same, he stumbled and fell hard on the wooden floor. The music stopped for a moment, and a