Swimming Home

by Deborah Levy

  Kitty dropped her slice of beef on the floor and leaned towards Nina. ‘Horseradish is not made out of horses. It’s related to the mustard family. It’s a root and your father probably eats so much of it because it’s good for his rheumatism.’

  Joe raised his thick eyebrows. ‘Whaat? I haven’t got rheumatism!’

  ‘You probably have,’ Kitty replied. ‘You’re a bit stiff when you walk.’

  ‘That’s because he’s old enough to be your father,’ Laura smiled nastily. She was still puzzled why Isabel had been so insistent that a young woman, who swam naked and obviously wanted her middle-aged husband’s attention should stay with them. Her friend was supposed to be the betrayed partner in their marriage. Hurt by his infidelities. Burdened by his past. Betrayed and lied to.

  ‘Laura congratulates herself on seeing through people and talking straight,’ Joe declared to the table. He squeezed the tip of his nose between his finger and thumb, a secret code between himself and his daughter, of what he wasn’t sure, perhaps of enduring love despite his flaws and foolishness and their mutual irritations with each other.

  Kitty smiled nervously at Laura. ‘Thank you all so much for letting me stay.’

  Nina watched her nibble on a slice of cucumber and then push it to the side of her plate.

  ‘You should thank Isabel,’ Laura corrected her. ‘She is very kind-hearted.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say Isabel is kind, would you, Nina?’

  Joe rolled another slice of bloody beef and pushed it into his mouth.

  This was the cue for Nina to say something critical about her mother to please her father, something like, ‘My mother doesn’t know me at all.’ In fact she was tempted to say, ‘My mother doesn’t know I know my father will sleep with Kitty Finch. She doesn’t even know I know what anorexic means.’

  Instead she said, ‘Kitty thinks walls can open and close.’

  When Mitchell whirled his left forefinger in circles around his ear as if to say, crazeee she’s crazeee, Joe reached over and violently slapped down Mitchell’s teasing pink finger with his tight brown fist.

  ‘It’s rude to be so normal, Mitchell. Even you must have been a child once. Even you might have thought there were monsters lurking under your bed. Now that you are such an impeccably normal adult you probably take a discreet look under the bed and tell yourself, well, maybe the monster is invisible!’

  Mitchell rolled his eyes and stared at the ceiling as if pleading with it for help and advice. ‘Has anyone ever actually told you how up yourself you are?

  The telephone was ringing. A fax was sliding and grinding its way on to the plastic tray next to the villa’s fact file. Nina stood up and walked over to pick it up. She glanced at it and brought it to her father.

  ‘It’s for you. About your reading in Poland.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He kissed her hand with his wine-stained lips and told her to read the fax out loud to him.

  LUNCH ON ARRIVAL.

  TWO MENUS. White borscht with boiled egg and sausage. Traditional hunter’s stew with mash potatoes. Soft drink.

  OR

  Traditional Polish cucumber soup. Cabbage leaves stuffed with meat and mash potatoes. Soft drink.

  KINDLY FAX YOUR CHOICE.

  Laura coughed. ‘You were born in Poland, weren’t you, Joe?’

  Nina watched her father shake his head vaguely.

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  Mitchell raised his eyebrows in what he imagined was disbelief. ‘You got to be a bit forgetful not to remember where you were born. You’re Jewish, aren’t you, sir?’

  Joe looked startled. Nina wondered if it was because her father had been called sir. Kitty was frowning too. She sat up straighter in her chair and addressed the table as if she was Joe’s biographer.

  ‘Of course he was born in Poland. It’s on all his book jackets. Jozef Nowogrodzki was born in western Poland in 1937. He arrived in Whitechapel, east London, when he was five years old.’

  ‘Right.’ Mitchell looked confused again. ‘So how come you’re Joe Jacobs, then?’

  Kitty once again took charge. She might as well have pinged her wine glass three times to create an expectant silence. ‘The teachers at his boarding school changed his name so they could spell it.’

  The spoon Joe had been polishing all through supper was now silver and shiny. When he held it up as if to inspect his hard work, Nina could see Kitty’s distorted reflection floating on the back of it.

  ‘Boarding school? Where were your parents, then?’

  Mitchell noticed that Laura was squirming in her chair. Whatever it was he was supposed to know about Joe had totally gone from his mind. Laura had told him of course, but it hadn’t sunk in. He was relieved Kitty Finch did not take it upon herself to answer his question and sort of wished he hadn’t gone there.

  ‘Well, you’re more or less English, then, aren’t you, Joe?’

  Joe nodded. ‘Yes, I am. I’m nearly as English as you are.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t go along all the way with that, Joe,’ Mitchell asserted in the tone of a convivial customs official, ‘but, as I always say to Laura, it’s what we feel inside that counts.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Joe agreed.

  Mitchell thought he was on to something because Joe was being polite for a change.

  ‘So what do you feel inside, Joe?’

  Joe peered at the spoon in his hand as if it was a jewel or a small triumph over cloudy cutlery.

  ‘I’ve got an FFF inside.’

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  ‘A fucking funny feeling.’

  Mitchell, who was now drunk, slapped him on the back to confirm their new solidarity.

  ‘I’ll second that, Jozef whatever your surname is. I’ve got an FFF right here.’ He tapped his head. ‘I’ve got three of those.’

  Laura shuffled her long feet under the table and announced she had made a trifle for pudding. It was a recipe she had taken from Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course and she hoped the custard had set and the cream hadn’t curdled.

  SUNDAY

  Hemlock Thief

  The beginning of birdsong. The sound of pine cones falling into the stillness of the pool. The harsh scent of rosemary growing in wooden crates on the window ledge. When Kitty Finch woke up she felt someone breathing on her face. At first she thought the window had blown open in the night, but then she saw him and had to shove her hair into her mouth to stop herself screaming out loud. A black-haired boy was standing by her bed and he was waving to her. She guessed he was fifteen years old and he was holding a notebook in the hand that was not waving. The notebook was yellow. He was wearing a school blazer and his tie was stuffed in his pocket. Eventually he disappeared into the wall, but she could still feel the breeze of his invisible waving hand.

  He was inside her. He had trance-journeyed into her mind. She was receiving his thoughts and feelings and his intentions. She dug her fingernails into her cheeks and, when she was sure she was awake, she walked towards the French doors and climbed into the pool. A wasp stung her wrist as she swam to the half-deflated lilo and pulled it to the shallow end. She wasn’t sure if the spectral vision was a ghost or a dream or a hallucination. Whatever it was, he had been in her mind for a long time. She plunged her head under the water and started to count to ten.

  Someone was in the pool with her.

  Kitty could just make out the magnified tips of Isabel Jacobs’ fingers scooping up insects that were always dying in the deep end. When she surfaced, Isabel’s strong arms were now slicing through the cold green water, the insects writhing in a pile on the paving stone nearest the pool’s edge. The journalist wife, so silent and superior, apparently disappeared to Nice at mealtimes and no one talked about it. Least of all her husband, who, Kitty hoped, had read her poem by now. That’s what he said he was going to do after the endless supper last night. He was going to lie on his bed and read her words.

  ‘You’re shivering, Kitty.’

 
Isabel swam towards her until the two women stood shoulder-to-shoulder, watching the early-morning mist rise from the mountains. She told Isabel she had earache and she was feeling dizzy. It was the only way she could talk about what she had seen that morning.

  ‘You probably have an ear infection. It’s not surprising you’re unsteady on your feet.’

  Isabel was trying to sound like she was in control of everything. Kitty had seen her on the television about three years ago. Isabel Jacobs standing in the desert near a camel skeleton in Kuwait. She was leaning on a burnt-out army tank, pointing to a charred pair of soldier’s boots lying underneath it. Elegant and groomed, Isabel Jacobs was meaner than she looked. When she had dived into the pool yesterday and grabbed Kitty’s ankle, she had twisted it hard enough to give her a Chinese burn. Her foot still hurt from that. Isabel had hurt her deliberately, but Kitty couldn’t say anything because the next thing she did was offer her the spare room. No one dared say they minded, because the war correspondent was controlling them all. Like she had the final word or was daring them to contradict her. The truth was her husband had the final word because he wrote words and then he put full stops at the end of them. She knew this, but what did his wife know?

  Kitty leapt out of the water and walked to the edge of the pool, picking bay leaves off a small tree that grew in a pot by the shallow end. Isabel got out too and sat on the edge of a white recliner. The journalist wife was lighting a cigarette absent-mindedly, as if she was thinking about something more important than what was happening now. She must have seen the battered A4 envelope Kitty had left propped against the bedroom door.

  Swimming Home

  by

  Kitty Finch

  She did not tell Isabel that she was feeling hot and her vision was blurred. Her skin was itching and she thought her tongue might be swollen too. Nor did she tell her about the spectral boy who had walked out of the wall to greet her when she woke up. He had stolen some of her plants, because when he walked back into the wall he had a bundle of them in his arms. She thought he might be searching for ways to die. The words she heard him say were words she heard in her head and not with her ears. He was waving as if to greet her, but now she thought he might have been saying goodbye.

  ‘So did you come here because you’re a fan of Jozef’s poetry?’

  Kitty chewed slowly on a silver bay leaf until she could mask the anxiety in her voice. ‘I suppose I am a fan. Though I don’t see it like that.’

  She paused, waiting for her voice to steady itself. ‘Joe’s poetry is more like a conversation with me than anything else. He writes about things I often think. We are in nerve contact.’

  She turned round to see Isabel stub out her cigarette with her bare foot. Kitty gasped.

  ‘Didn’t that hurt?’

  If Isabel had burned herself she seemed not to care.

  ‘What does “nerve contact” with Jozef mean?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything. I just thought of it now.’

  Kitty noticed how Isabel Jacobs always used her husband’s full name. As if she alone owned the part of him that was secret and mysterious, the part of him that wrote things. How could she tell her that she and Joe were transmitting messages to each other when she didn’t understand it herself? This was something she would discuss with Jurgen. He would explain that she had extra senses because she was a poet and then he would say words to her in German that she knew were love words. It was always tricky to get away from him at night, so she was grateful to have the spare room to escape to. Yes, in a way she was grateful to Isabel for saving her from Jurgen’s love.

  ‘What’s your poem about?’

  Kitty studied the bay leaf, her fingertips tracing the outline of its silver veins.

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  Isabel laughed. This was offensive. Kitty was offended. No longer grateful, she glared at the woman who had offered her the spare room but had not bothered to provide sheets or pillows or notice the windows did not open and the floor was covered in mouse droppings. The journalist was asking her questions as if she was about to file her copy. She was curvaceous and tall, her black hair dark as an Indian woman’s, and she wore a gold band on her left hand to show she was married. Her fingers were long and smooth, like she’d never scrubbed a pot clean or poked her fingers into the earth. She had not even bothered to offer her guest a few clothes hangers. Nina had had to bring down an armful from her own cupboard. Nevertheless Isabel Jacobs was still asking questions, because she wanted to be in control.

  ‘You said you know the owner of this villa?’

  ‘Yeah. She’s a shrink called Rita Dwighter and she’s a friend of my mother’s. She’s got houses everywhere. In fact she’s got twelve properties in London alone worth about two million each. She probably asks her patients if they’ve got a mortgage.’

  Isabel laughed and this time Kitty laughed too.

  ‘Thank you for letting me stay, by the way.’

  Isabel nodded dismissively and said something about going inside to make toast and honey. Kitty watched her run through the glass doors, bumping into Laura, who was now sitting at the kitchen table, a pair of earphones clamped on her head and a tangle of wires around her neck. Laura was learning some sort of African language, her thin lips mouthing the words out loud.

  Kitty sat naked and shivering at the end of the pool, listening to the tall blonde woman with scared blue eyes repeat singsong sentences from another continent. She could hear the church bells ringing in the village and she could hear someone sighing. When she looked up she had to stop herself from losing it for the second time that morning. Madeleine Sheridan was sitting on her balcony as usual, staring at her as if she was scanning the ocean for a shark. That was too much. Kitty jumped up and shook her fist at the shadowy figure drinking her morning tea.

  ‘Don’t fucking watch me all the time. I’m still waiting for you to get my shoes, Dr Sheridan. Have you got them yet?’

  Homesick Aliens

  Jurgen was dragging an inflatable three-foot rubber alien with a wrinkled neck into the kitchen of Claude’s café. He had bought it at the flea market on Saturday and he and Claude were having three conversations at once. Claude, who had only just turned twenty-three and knew he looked like Mick Jagger, owned the only café in the village and was planning to sell it to Parisian property developers next year. What Claude wanted to know was why the tourists had offered Kitty Finch a room.

  Jurgen scratched his scalp and swung his dreadlocks to get an angle on the question. The effort was exhausting him and he could not find an answer. Claude, whose silky shoulder-length hair was expensively cut to make it look as if he never bothered with it, reckoned Kitty must secretly be repulsed by the dreadlocks Jurgen cultivated, because she knew she could stay with him whenever she wanted. At the same time they were both jeering at Mitchell, who was sitting on the terrace stuffing himself with baguettes and jam while he waited for the grocery store to open. The fat man with his collection of old guns was running up a tab at the café and the grocery store, which was run by Claude’s mother. Mitchell was going to bankrupt Claude’s entire family. Meanwhile Jurgen was explaining the plot of the film ET while Claude peeled potatoes. Jurgen whipped the cigarette butt out of his friend’s thick lips and sucked on it while he tried to remember the film he’d seen in Monaco three years ago.

  ‘ET is this baby alien who finds himself lost on earth, three million light years away from home. He makes friends with a ten-year-old boy and they start to have a very special connection with each other.’

  Claude gave the little alien in his kitchen a leering wink. ‘What sort of connection?’

  Jurgen swung his dreadlocks over a freshly baked pear tart cooling under the kitchen window as if to summon a plot he had long forgotten.

  ‘So … if ET gets sick the earth boy gets sick, if ET is hungry earth boy gets hungry, if ET is tired or sad then earth boy suffers with him. The alien and his friend are in touch with each other’s thoughts.
They are mentally connected.’

  Claude grimaced, because he was being called by Mitchell for another basket of bread and a slice of the pear tart, newly written into the menu. Claude told Jurgen he couldn’t work out why the fat man never had any money on him despite staying in the luxurious villa. His tab had gone off the scale. ‘So anyway how does ET end?’

  Jurgen, who was usually too stoned to remember anything, had just spotted Joe Jacobs in the distance, walking among the sheep grazing in the mountains. For some reason he could remember every line the baby alien uttered in the film. He thought this was because he was also an alien, a German nature boy living in France. He explained that ET has to disconnect himself from the boy because he fears he will make him too sick and he doesn’t want to harm him. And then he finds a way of getting home to his own planet.

  Jurgen nudged Claude and pointed to the English poet in the distance. He looked like he was saluting something invisible, because his fingers were touching his forehead. Claude quite liked the poet, because he always left big tips and had somehow managed to produce a gorgeous, long-legged teenage daughter whom Claude had personally invited to the café for an aperitif. So far she had not taken him up on his offer, but he lived in hope because, as he told Jurgen, what else was there to live in?

  ‘He is superstitious, he’s just seen a magpie. He is famous. Do you want to be famous?’

  Jurgen nodded. And then shook his head and helped himself to a swig from a bottle of green liquid leaning against the cooking oil.

  ‘Yes. Sometimes I think it would be nice to no longer be a caretaker and everyone wants to kiss my arse. But there is one problem. I don’t have the energy to be famous. I have too much to do.’

  Claude pointed to the poet, who looked like he was still saluting magpies.