All the Way by Marie Darrieussecq Read Free Book Online

species, unattainable. The air they breathe is not the air she struggles to get into her lungs.
    The women on the beach, all with different bodies, have they got it? Not now, not right away (or perhaps with a tampon), but in general, in their everyday lives? How is it possible for women to get this thing, and for everyone to act as if nothing was the matter? It must be dangerous to be bleeding with sharks around. Anyway, you’re not supposed to swim because the salt water triggers haemorrhages.
    Can I have an ice-cream?
    Her mother turns to her. ‘From now on, everything you eat will go straight to your hips.’ She flings herself back onto her lilo. Still fed up, she yanks down the straps of her bikini top so she won’t get any marks.
    The horizon is empty. No shark fin, no whale spout, no giant octopus. And yet, right now, in this very ocean, in these very molecules of water, unheard-of beasts are coexisting with swimmers.
    It’s her turn to tilt her head in the direction of the sky. Her lilo is whirling towards the yellow disc of the sun. Something is unwinding and rewinding, superimposing other skies over the sky, something that is slowly tipping her into empty space.
    Time is a long, wavy, blue ribbon, with wide stripes for the years to come—middle school, Grade Six, Year Seven, Year Eight. The stripes get narrower towards high school and become pale and blurred towards the year 2000 mark. Then they get even thinner, less and less clear: a fleecy, infinite sky.
    She is watching a western with Monsieur Bihotz. A squaw is tied up in the dust. Cowboys with hats on, yelling, riding horses that are missing her by a hair’s-breadth. The ropes wound around her thin body are tied tight across her fringed dress. She would like to be able to stop the picture, turn it into a photograph and keep it forever, to look at it when she’s alone.
    The squaw has been hitched onto a horse; the cowboy whacks the horse’s rump with the flat of his hand, yee-ha! It’s not the TV she’d need to be able to stop, but the galloping inside her, this horse which is gaining speed and thrashing along, endlessly thundering. How to react to being swept away like that?
    Or perhaps it’s all about Christian? In an issue of Jours de France , there is a drawing of a woman lying down and the caption says: ‘Dreaming about him, an exquisite shuddering overwhelms her.’ That’s exactly it. Dreaming about Christian, an exquisite shuddering overwhelms her. She can spend ages dreaming about Christian.
    About how she will go on outings with Christian. About how their house will be (with a fireplace). About the names of their children (Coralie, Aurélie, Athéna, Jennifer). She snuggles up against Bihotz, her arm around his waist, her head in the hollow of his pillow, her arm tenderly draped over the bolster of the bed.
    She rubs the flat of her palm just below the hard bit, where her bony part stops, at the top of the soft flesh like puff pastry, thick and hot. She stays on the edge of it. She doesn’t push and especially not lately when there’s been blood there. She rubs, in little circles. A knot swells and tightens, a mechanism that perks up simply and effectively, at the junction of the bones and the flesh, as if the skeleton was designed to carry at its centre this budding plump heart. Images flash past, the squaw on the horse, and a naked woman, on her knees, in her mother’s France-Loisirs shopping catalogue, on the ‘adults’ page. The pressure becomes almost unbearable, she holds herself back as much as she can, to let it erupt in one go—then, a familiar numb drowsiness. She wipes herself with the sheet and lets the vision of a horse carry her off to sleep.
    Rose invites her to the beach with her three cousins from Paris.
    She’s discovered the relaxing sensation of being covered only in skin, dry and dependable right into its creases, a sealed bag that moves