Read Online All the Way by Marie Darrieussecq - Free Book Online

gaze, his specialist’s gaze. Apparently he goes out with the bombshells at high school.
    â€˜What’re you doing?’ he asks her, tilting his chin to exhale the smoke.
    She hesitates: what’s she doing in the future (going into Year Ten), or what’s she doing there, in the present, right now, being a girl, at the carnival, this same carnival where her father flashed his dick—what’s she doing?
    She decides to reply seriously, sincerely (she’s noticed that to sound sincere about what you think makes you seem interesting). She leans in to him: ‘I’d like to go out with the English guy.’
    Raphaël looks at Terry. Then at her. He gives his verdict. ‘You can only go out with someone who’s in the same league as you.’
    Does he really think he’s as good-looking as the girls he goes out with? It’s too late to answer.
    Who do you think you are?
    You think it’s only about looks?
    The same league as your bullshit?
    Like when you were going out with Peggy Salami?
    She has no sense of repartee. She is hopeless.
    Christian says it fucks you up, gives you cancer, but in the end he takes one and Nathalie does too and so does she. Her father has already made her take a drag of a Dunhill, to put her off. She lets her hand hang down along the seam of her jeans. Smoking—she’s been doing it all her life. No one coughs.
    Some children are squirting them with a water pistol. Nathalie yells at them. On the merry-go-round other kids are fighting over the plane that goes up and down.
    And then this amazing thing happens: Terry gives her a sign that he wants to talk with her. They sit down away from the others. Terry seems to be looking for his courage and his words, it’s not easy in Fwench. Firecrackers explode, he jumps out of his skin, they both laugh. He says Wose something—she can’t hear with all this noise.
    Rose is the last person she wants to talk about—but let him talk as much as he likes, let his upper lip go up and down, ‘u’ pronounced ou , the warm breath exhaled by those lips that are not closing—let him talk, let him talk about Wose who is cwuel and ignaws him in the stweet, in the what, in the stweet.
    Loud thuds from inside the booth they’re leaning against, like neighbours complaining. Heavy neighbours. It’s the animal enclosure, part of the circus that comes back every year for the carnival. Madame Bihotz used to take her along when she was little. There was an old lion the same colour as the beige carpet in her parents’ bedroom, a woolly camel, and an uncomfortable-looking sea lion. Animals so displaced (what on earth is that tewwible noise?) that they probably see this village (does Wose talk to you about me at all?) as just another moment of disillusion in the false promise of a round trip back home—but it’s never the savannah, the steppe, the desert, or the sea. She’s got to do it—Wose, Wose, the only thing coming out of his mouth is Wose—just concentrate for a minute—kiss a boy, go out with a boy, him or another one, him rather than another one. And whatever happens, this Terry will leave the village, and whatever happens—she reminds herself suddenly—she too will leave the village one day.
    Air rushes into her lungs. Air from way beyond the carnival and the circus and the clouds, air from the steppes and from the Milky Way.
    Do you want to go out with me? she asks him clearly and super-comprehensibly, much more clearly and comprehensibly than she would have thought credible (cwedible).
    â€˜Go out,’ he repeats, ‘yes, go out, gwate idea.’
    He stretches to the full British extent of his height, she stretches her neck giraffe-like, but nothing happens.
    They are going out.
    They are going out of what? Of the carnival? Of the village? He’s walking fast, she scurries behind him.
    But she’s pretty sure it’s the same in English: