All the Way by Marie Darrieussecq Page A

all of them? Do boys get into all of them? Do boys get wet, and scared, too?
    At the fountain that used to be a public washing place, a group of Saint-Jacques pilgrims are drinking water out of their scallop shells.
    Why? Her father gets to fly to Paris; why does she have to live here?
    Language hovers above the house like a cloud. All it needs is one word for a disaster to strike them, a catastrophe, a Boeing aeroplane in pieces.
    But Clèves is very pretty, says her father. Its eighteenth-century chateau. Its half-timbered houses. Its marina, its windsurfing. Its chestnut cakes. Its pewter-ware shops. Its statue of the Virgin Mary. Its scenic rock that you can climb on.
    Its pharmacy woman, someone adds—no, that can’t be right. It’s the voice in her head, saying things accumulated in the cloud.
    Under the arches there’s Christian on his moped, Rose and Sixtine, Nathalie and Delphine (the one who lives in the chateau), and Raphaël Bidegarraï. Raphaël is smoking a cigarette, which is pretty gutsy right in the middle of the village. He’s got a thin black moustache and pimples. Christian is giving him a hard time because he’s going out with Peggy Salami.
    â€˜A hole is a hole and my dick can’t see,’ he retorts.
    Sixtine is wearing 501s with a military belt under an XXL T-shirt, sleeves rolled-up; as if her little body had had to make do with old men’s clothes, from which her tanned, thin arms emerge, all the more graceful. Her ballerina flats under the frayed hem of her jeans make her feet look like they’re barely there. All legs, this girl would walk on air: no toes, no nails, no weight. And there she is, Solange, in a tracksuit, on a bike, in huge sneakers that aren’t even Adidas…
    According to Rose, Sixtine has done it. Can you tell from looking at her? Something about her body, about her attitude? It’s probably the opposite: it’s because she has that look—classy—that she’s been able to do it.
    The pilgrims are mesmerised. They can’t be looking at her, not the red-faced village girl—or are they sneaking looks? What’s the matter with that old guy? Has she got something on her face? Any minute now he’ll be taking her photo, making an offer for her mother’s pewter and scoffing chestnut cake.
    â€˜You look hot on that bike!’ he shouts at her in front of everyone.
    She turns even redder. Embarrassing. So embarrassing. And not far away, just when she’s reached the steep path where there are always dogs, who should she see but the other lunatic with his scallop shell from a pack of frozen Coquilles Saint Jacques. In an attempt to regain her composure, she starts patting the dogs.
    â€˜You’re kind to the dogs,’ says the pilgrim, ‘so what about me, don’t you want to be kind to me?’
    She rushes home to Monsieur Bihotz; too bad about self-possession.
    Rose has done it, too. In England. ‘A guy, you don’t know him.’ She refuses to tell her any more, for the sake of decency. ‘We’re like sisters.’ But she told Nathalie, who tells Solange that Rose was gritting her teeth waiting for it to stop. That at first it wouldn’t go in at all. Then it went in all at once and that was so horrible. Like her insides were being torn apart. And then there was blood everywhere. So much that she had to run to the showers, wrapped in a towel, and it was pissing blood. His dick was covered in blood, too. He cleaned himself up and told her through the door that it was okay, that he wasn’t the one who was bleeding. She bled like that for two days without daring to tell anyone. Then it stopped but she was still in pain. She wondered whether she should go to the hospital to get some stitches or something, but she couldn’t talk about it; she was in England, after all.
    â€˜Rose must be frigid,’ Nathalie reckons.
    Concepción says that if you’re in