by Deborah Levy
X is about to go into a meeting. He is collecting the paperwork he needs with one hand, and speaking on the telephone with the other. A colleague mimes something and points to his watch. X nods. A secretary brings him a cup of coffee. He mimes thank you. Through the glass windows of the open-plan office he can see bodies at work. Sitting, standing, leaning. Another colleague hands him a wad of papers which he flicks through whilst speaking on the telephone, considers this new information, stands up and reaches for his jacket, all the time still speaking on the telephone. Someone knocks on the glass window and tells him to hurry up. This is also mimed.
Mim-e-sis: Imitation. Representation. An ancient farcical play of real life with mimicry. A person’s supposed or imagined words.
The person X is speaking to is Y.
Y is in her hotel room, bags packed, speaking on the telephone to X.
X: I’ve called to say goodbye.
Y: Goodbye.
X: I can’t speak here. I’m about to go to a meeting.
Y: Bye then.
X: Don’t go without saying goodbye properly.
Y: What does saying goodbye properly mean?
X: Can I call you later?
Y: I won’t be here.
X: Where will you be? Give me a telephone number.
Y: Why haven’t you asked me that before?
X: Look, I have to go.
Y: Bye then.
Z is carrying an armful of books when she sees B.
‘You’re moving things,’ B says. ‘Why?’
Z drops the books on the newly positioned sofa and walks over to her. ‘I got a postcard from you yesterday. I can’t believe you’re here. I thought you were there. I’ve been imagining you there.’
B is tanned. Her shoulders are smooth and brown. ‘I got back three days ago.’ She looks around at the front room. ‘I’ve been imagining this room,’ she says. ‘I knew exactly where the table is, or was. You sat there,’ she points, ‘and I sat here. But you’ve changed it.’ She smiles. ‘It’s like waking up on the wrong side of the bed.’ She runs her fingers through Z’s short hair. ‘Oh honey,’ she says. They kiss in the disordered room. This is the first time they have kissed. Like that. Slow and long. Z strokes B’s bare shoulder and then moves her hand to her breasts.
X is having a drink after work with a male colleague. ‘I think I am in love,’ he says. ‘But I don’t want to hurt my wife.’
Y is about to get on a train. She is returning to the city she knows better than other cities. She knows how its transport works, where its most obscure coffee bars are hidden, opening and closing times, its swimming pools, banks, nightclubs, cheap restaurants, theatres and cinemas.
‘Oh honey.’
‘You’re lovely.’
‘Oh.’
‘There.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Like that?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Oh.’
‘Sweetheart.’
‘Hmm.’
‘There.’
‘Is that nice?’
‘Harder.’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh baby.’
‘Oh.’
‘Aren’t you beautiful?’
X walks in to find his co-settler Z naked in the arms of their co-friend B who at this moment has her head buried between the thighs of Z. In addition this is happening in his front room which has been re-arranged and he does not know where anything is. Nor, it occurs to him, does he know who his co-settler is, how she might want to be touched, or where she wants to live, because he hears these words fall from her lips into the crease of B’s brown neck.
‘Take me somewhere else.’
Y is lying in a bath in the place she calls her home in the city she knows best. She is listening to music and the kettle is boiling. On the small desk next to her computer, she has placed five white goose feathers in a tin can. Her clothes hang on a rail. Her bed-linen is familiar and cool. Her cupboard is full of spices in labelled glass jars. She knows every book on her shelf. She knows what the view out of her window will be. So now she is lying in her bath looking out of the window and she knows that at about nine o’clock she will meet a friend and they will eat out somewhere in the centre of the city. They will link arms and walk through the traffic as if they have nine lives.
Z looks up into the eyes of her co-settler X.
His hands are in his pockets.
B puts on her T-shirt and smiles at X.
‘Hello,’ she says. And then she zips up her jeans and asks Z if she has any wine in the house.
‘No,’ X says.
‘Yes,’ Z says. She slips her hands into the pocket of her silk blouse, bought with X’s money, and gives him the piece of paper folded into a small square she found that morning. X unfolds it. It says HOTEL EUROPA, BAR LEONARDO, 6 P.M.
‘Go and find her,’ Z says.
B calls out to the cat who is hiding under the table.
After a while, X says, ‘I don’t know where she is.’
Y is eating pasta in a café in the centre of the city with her friend. It is busy and hot and the tables are full of pimps, lovers, prostitutes, friends, students, tourists and loners reading journals. They stare, talk, fight, shout out for ashtrays, ask for advice, borrow money, joke, cry, tell lies, describe their families, romances, children, and some even tell their companion that they love them.
What does Y possess? She who owns no property, has no inheritance, husband, children, savings or pension plan? Y is a first, second and third person. These are all her voices. XYZ. Z and X will reconcile their differences, buy things for their home and grow old together. Will Y grow old? Have we met her elderly and survived and occupying public space, not with melancholy or eccentricity, but as a matter of fact?
Y dips her bread in her wine.
‘Fear is an invented thing,’ she says.
‘How do you uninvent it then?’ J.K. asks in Spanish.
‘You ask too many questions,’ Y replies in English.
At that moment B walks in and they invite her to sit at their table.
Don’t miss Deborah Levy’s other sharp, insightful,
and eloquent books:
Swimming Home: A Novel
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Two families gather at a villa in the hills above Nice. When they arrive, there’s a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She walks naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday.
“Exquisite.” —The New Yorker
“Readers will have to resist the temptation to hurry up in order to find out what happens . . . Our reward is the enjoyable, if unsettling, experience of being pitched into the deep waters of Levy’s wry, accomplished novel.”
—Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review
The Unloved: A Novel
A group of hedonistic international tourists gathers to celebrate the holidays in a remote French chateau. When a woman is brutally murdered, the subsequent inquiry into the death proves to be more of an investigation into the nature of identity, love, insatiable rage, and sadistic desire.
“Graphic, claustrophobic and fractured, this is emotionally violent and challenging work from a bold modern writer.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Impressively ambitious . . . Unusual and memorable.”
—Times Literary Supplement
Black Vodka: Ten Stories
“These ominous, odd, erotic stories burrow deep into your brain.”
—Financial Times
Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing
A luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss.
“A profound and vivid little volume that is less about the craft than the necessity of making literature.”
—Los Angeles Times Page-Turner blog
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Beautiful Mutants first published by Jonathan Cape 1989
Swallowing Geography first published by Jonathan Cape 1993
This collection first published with the title Early Levy by Penguin Books 2014
This electronic edition published May 2015
© Deborah Levy, 1989, 1993, 2014
Introduction © Lauren Elkin, 2014
‘The Innocents’ song lines from William Blake
‘Falling in Love Again’ by Hollander and Connelly
Copyright © 1930 Ufaton-Verlag GmbH.
Reproduced by permission of Campbell Connelly & Co., Ltd,
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ISBN: TPB: 978-1-62040-675-5
ePub: 978-1-62040-676-2
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