The Girl Who Wasn't There Read Free Page A

were at an angle and small, his eyes were open, bulging and clouded, his red tongue was strangely twisted. Sebastian knew the old jargon of hunters, who said ‘lights’ instead of eyes, and muzzle instead of mouth. His father had said that hunters were superstitious, and you mustn’t use ordinary words in the forest for fear of warning the game. But now the deer was dead, and words made no difference any more.
    His father bent over the animal, spread its back legs and knelt on them. He cut the abdominal wall from the anus to the throat, and blood and guts spilled out. His father removed the rumen, heart, spleen and lungs from the body and placed them on the grass beside him.
    Sebastian felt as he had when he was out walking and had looked down into a ravine. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from it. He had gone on staring down into the depths, defenceless, bereft of his own will, until his father had snatched him back from the brink. And now it was the cut that his father had made with his knife. It both attracted and repelled Sebastian. He couldn’t move, he looked at the white parts of the deer’s body, the muscle fibres and the bones. At last his father had finished, and put the deer over his shoulders. Sebastian carried the rucksack and followed his father back to the car. It was going to be a hot day, vapour was beginning to rise from the meadows, the light was glaring, and it was better to stay in the shade of the trees.
     
    At home, Sebastian’s mother was sitting out of doors at the iron table under the chestnut trees having breakfast, with her two dogs dozing on the lawn. It was Thursday, and she would be going to a horse show today; Sebastian had seen the horsebox. A few years ago his mother had had the stables renovated, and now her two dressage horses lived in them. Sebastian kissed his mother on both cheeks, then ran up to his room and took her present out of the case. He had made a nutcracker in the workshop at school, a nutcracker in the shape of a little man with white teeth, a red beard and a black hat with a wooden pheasant feather in it. Sebastian had spent a long time working on it, and had painted the feather brown and green. But now the present seemed to him silly. He looked down at the ground when he gave it to her. He still had resin on his hands from the hide, and now it stuck to the nutcracker because he hadn’t handled it carefully enough. His mother thanked him. Twice, she made the nutcracker open its mouth. Then she went on reading her
Equestrian Review
. The registration papers for her horse shows lay on the table. Sebastian told her the news from his boarding school. Sometimes she asked a question without looking up from her papers. After a while she said that she’d better be going. She folded her napkin carefully so that the edges coincided perfectly. She kissed him on the forehead. The dogs jumped up and trotted down the avenue to the stables at her side.
     
    Sebastian stayed sitting in the shade of the old chestnut trees. The long summer holidays lay ahead. Maybe he would go down to the boathouse and work on the wooden canoe, which could do with a new coat of paint. Sebastian remembered all three of them crossing the lake in the boat, his father rowing, while he lay on his front, chin propped on the gunwale. He had still been very young, maybe five or six years old. His mother had been wearing a pale linen dress, and she sat stiffly on the seat in the middle of the boat. She still used to laugh a lot at the time, and she squealed when his father splashed water on her with the paddle. Sebastian had dipped his hands in the cold lake, he had seen trout, perch and whitefish, and sometimes he could smell his mother’s warm perfume: roses, jasmine and oranges wafting over the water.
    All that seemed to him very long ago. He knew, now, that his parents did not love each other any more. He often looked at the album with their wedding photographs in his father’s study. In those pictures,