Read All the Way for Free Online Page B

an egg about to crack.
    â€˜This is fucking,’ he explains. He throws the ring up in the air, and in precisely one go, only one, it lands on the pin.
    Sometimes dogs stick their muzzles between her legs. She pushes them away, her hand on their hard little skulls. They are like small children, harmless and a bit crazy.
    Another summer day in the hills outside town. There’s a pack of dogs. They come and go as if the road belongs to them, roving around in a world without humans, a world on four legs and itinerant ears. She is invisible and odourless, she calls to them but they don’t answer to names anymore. She is just an obstacle between them and what’s under a tree over there.
    Lulu is under the tree. Big Yellow is on top of Lulu. Some of the other dogs want to climb on top of Lulu but Big Yellow growls and bares his teeth. They are all panting and whimpering. Most of them have a big, glistening, red dick under their bodies. The dogs are circling, stalking, and Big Yellow won’t stop, and the panting and the tongues, and the paws are scraping on the ground and on top of Lulu, and everywhere the same staring, glittering eyes. Lulu groans and her back legs give way. She sits but keeps struggling to get up. Big Yellow is bigger than her, and the smaller dogs have a go at her with their little dicks, and Lulu looks like she wants it and doesn’t want it, swept away in her panting by something that has possessed them all and has lodged itself in all their eyes—it’s like a giant eye under the tree.
    She throws stones at them. She kicks them. She screams but nothing happens, they continue to be dogs, without her, with whatever it is under the tree that sweeps them up and envelops them, something terrifyingly adult, ancient, something that is no longer about playing a game.
    There’s no sign of dogs in Rose’s house. Behind the hedge, there are afternoon teas with buns, music and elegant boots. There is no blood, no pubic hair and no dicks. It’s as if Rose lives in a different housing development, in a parallel world, to which she has no access, even though it is right there within earshot. You can hear the loud splashing and the squeals of summer, and Rose’s bubbly laughter, and the high-pitched voices of the boys from school. The gunshot explosions when they jump in the pool.
    In her house, the shifting shadows, and the doorbell that tinkles, without the wind.
    She’s in pain and it won’t go away. Her mother makes an appointment with the gynaecologist.
    Kilometres of ripe corn. An advertisement with a woman holding a bottle between her breasts. The incandescent white of the co-op silos. The open windows let in four blasts of scorching air that whip around their heads with a roar.
    â€˜Your reproductive system is gearing up,’ says the gynaecologist. She makes her lie down naked on a metal bed and open her legs. She should relax, it’s a virgin speculum . She feels a cold pain and she wants to close her legs but the gynaecologist tells her that the examination will soon be over, oohh but it’s so tight in there.
    As she writes out the prescription, she talks with her mother about the arrival of the holiday-makers. About Georges’ girlfriend who’s expecting a baby.
    Her mother rents two deckchairs on the promenade. They lie there; her mother’s in a bikini and she’s in shorts. Last year she was making sandcastles down there in the sand. Her mother has put on her dark glasses; her gaze and her mouth are set in the direction of the invisible distance. Blinding light. The hotels and casinos are cut out against the sky like big blue stickers.
    She puts on her Vuarnet sunglasses, a present from her father. The red-and-white bathing boxes, the strip of sand, the bodies, the sea. The boys jump off the low wall with their surfboards under their arms. Their legs in skin-tight black pants, muscly torsos, long blond hair, creatures from a different