by Deborah Levy
When Madame Dwighter came to inspect her properties, which to Jurgen’s relief was not often, she always invited Claude with his Mick Jagger looks to supper. The last time he ate with her she stuck an erect pineapple stalk into a moist melting Brie and asked him to help himself.
Jurgen finally put the phone down. He stared at the Picasso prints as if he wanted to murder them. He told Claude, who had now taken off his T-shirt and was lying face down on the floor in his boxer shorts, that he’d been instructed to hang Guernica in the corridor to hide the jagged cracks in the plaster. Dominatrix Dwighter was obviously impressed by the techniques the great artist employed to say something about the human condition. Claude just about managed to stand up and put on one of Jurgen’s battered CDs. It had been lying on top of an Indian jewellery box labelled ‘Prague Muzic. Ket’s Selection for Calm’.
Someone was knocking on the door. Jurgen disliked all visitors because they were always asking him to do his job. This time it was the pretty fourteen-year-old daughter of the arsehole British poet. She was wearing a short white skirt and naturally she wanted him to do something.
‘My mother asked me to come over to check you’d booked the horse-riding for tomorrow.’
He nodded wisely, as if nothing else had ever been on his mind. ‘Come in. Claude’s here.’
When Jurgen said Claude’s here, the CD seemed to jump or it got stuck or something happened. Nina heard a violin playing and under it the sound of a wolf howling and the female singer breathing a word that sounded like snowburst. She glanced at Claude, who was dancing in his boxer shorts. His back was so smooth and brown she stared at the wall instead.
‘Bonjour, Nina. The dogs ate my jeans so now I only have my shorts. The CD is scratched but I like it for calming.’
When she looked through him pitifully, he saw himself as a snail crushed on the rope sole of her red espadrilles. Jurgen had his hands on his bony hips, his elbows pointing out in triangles. He seemed to want her opinion on his dreadlocks.
‘So do you think I should cut off my hair?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I make my hair like this to be different from my father.’
He laughed and Claude laughed with him.
snowburst
drifting away
to the dark
Jurgen was trying to get a grip on geography. ‘Austria is the start of my childhood. Then I think it was Baden-Baden. My father taught me to cut timber in the old tradition.’ He scratched his head. ‘I think it was Austrian. Something old anyway. So what kind of music do you like?’
‘Nirvana is my favourite band.’
‘Ah, you are liking the Kurt Cobain with his blue eyes, yes?’
She told him she had made a shrine to Kurt Cobain in her bedroom after he had shot himself that spring. April the fifth to be precise but his body was found on April the eighth. She had played his album In Utero all that day.
Jurgen cocked his dreadlocks to one side. ‘Has your father read Kitty Ket’s poem yet?’
‘No. I’m going to read it myself.’
Claude pouted and strutted towards the fridge. ‘That is a good plan. Do you want a beer?’
She shrugged. Claude was so anxious to please her it was pathetic. Claude translated her shrug as an enthusiastic Yes.
‘I have to bring my own beer over to Jurgen’s because he only drinks carrot juice.’
Jurgen had just heard a motorbike pull up outside his cottage. It was his friend Jean-Paul, who always gave him a commission on horse-riding bookings. Jean-Paul only kept ponies, so it was not exactly going to be a horse ride, but the ponies had hooves and a nice tail all the same. When he ran out of the door to make the deal, Claude reached for his T-shirt and struggled to put it on.
Nina stared at everything that wasn’t him. And then she sat cross-legged on the floor, her back leaning against the wall, while he walked over with a beer in his hand. He opened it for her and sat down so close their thighs almost touched.
‘So are you enjoying your vacation?’
She took a swig of the sour-tasting beer. ‘It’s OK.’
‘If you come to my café I’ll show you the Extra Terrestrial I keep in my kitchen.’
What was he talking about? She found herself moving closer to his shoulder. And then she turned her face towards him and she made her eyes say you can kiss me kiss me kiss me and there was a second when she sensed he wasn’t sure what she meant. The beer was still in her hand and she put it down on the floor.
drifting away
to the dark
forest
His lips were warm and they were on hers. She was kissing Mick Jagger and he was devouring her like a wolf or something fierce but soft as well and definitely not calm. He was telling her she was so so everything. She moved even closer and then he stopped talking.
to the dark
forest
where trees bleed
snowburst
When she peeped her eyes open and saw he had his eyes shut she shut her eyes again, but then the door opened and Jurgen was standing in the middle of the room blinking at them.
‘So everything is cool with the horse-riding.’
There was a kissing coma in the atmosphere. Everything had gone dark red. Jurgen put his hands on his hips so his elbows would jut out and the vibes could flow through the triangles his elbows made.
‘Please, I am asking you to read the Ket’s poem so you can tell me the way to her heart.’
THURSDAY
The Plot
Nina opened the door of her parents’ bedroom and skated in her socks across the tiled floor. She was wearing socks despite the heat because her left foot was swollen from a bee sting. To give her courage for the task in hand she had spent the last hour smearing her eyelids with Kitty’s blue stick of kohl. When she looked in the mirror her brown eyes were glittering and certain. From the window by the bed she could see her mother and Laura talking by the pool. Her father had gone to Nice to see the Russian Orthodox Cathedral and Kitty Finch was with Jurgen as usual. They were going to collect cow dung from the fields and then spread it over Jurgen’s new allotment, which she said she had ‘taken over for the summer’. No one could work out why she wasn’t actually living with Jurgen in his cottage next door, but her mother had implied that Kitty might not be as ‘sweet’ on him as he was on her. She heard a bashing noise coming from the kitchen. Mitchell had wrapped a slab of dark chocolate in a tea cloth and was hammering at it excitedly. It was hot outside but she felt cold in her parents’ room, as if it was an ice rink after all. She knew what the envelope looked like but she couldn’t see it anywhere. What she needed was a torch, because she must not put the lights on and attract attention. If anyone came in she would slip into the bathroom and hide behind the door. On the table by her mother’s side of the bed she noticed a slab of waxy honeycomb half wrapped in a page of newspaper. It had obviously been tied with the green string that lay next to it. She walked towards it and saw it was a gift from her father, because he had written in black ink across the page,
To my sweetest with my whole love as always, Jozef.
Nina frowned at the thick golden honey oozing through the holes. If her parents quite liked each other after all it would ruin the story she had put together for herself. When she thought about her parents, which was most of the time, she was always trying to fit the pieces together. What was the plot? Her father had very gentle hands and yesterday they were all over her mother. She had seen them kissing in the hallway like something out of a film, pulled into each other while moths crashed into the light bulb above their heads. As far as she was concerned, her parents tragically couldn’t stand the sight of each other and only loved her. The plot was that her mother abandoned her only daughter to go and hug orphans in Romania. Tragically (so much tragedy) Nina had taken her mother’s place in the family home and become her father’s most precious companion, always second-guessing his moods and needs. But things started to wobble when her mother asked her
if she’d like to go to a special restaurant by the sea for an ice cream with a sparkler in it. What’s more, if her parents were kissing yesterday (the sheets on their unmade bed looked a bit frantic), and if they seemed to understand each other in a way that left her out, the plot was going off track.
It was only after six minutes of urgent searching that she eventually found the envelope with Kitty’s poem inside it. She had given up rummaging through the silk shirts and handkerchiefs her father always ironed so carefully and crawled on her knees to look under the bed. When she saw the envelope propped up against her father’s slippers and two dead brown cockroaches lying on their backs, she lay on her stomach and swept it up with her arm. There was something else under the bed too but she did not have time to find out what it was.
The window overlooking the pool was a problem. Her mother was sitting on the steps by the shallow end eating an apple. She could hear her asking Laura why she was learning Yoruba and Laura saying, ‘Why not? Over twenty million people speak it.’
She crouched on the floor where she could not be seen and tore the Sellotape off the lip of the envelope. It was empty. She peered inside it. A sheet of paper had been folded into a square the size of a matchbox and it was stuck at the bottom of the envelope like an old shoe wedged into the mud of a river. She scooped it out and began carefully to unfold it.
Swimming Home
by
Kitty Finch
After she read it Nina didn’t bother to fold the paper back into its intricate squares. She shoved it inside the envelope and put it back under the bed with the cockroaches. Why hadn’t her father read it? He would understand exactly what was going on in Kitty’s mind.
She made her way up the stairs to the open-plan living room and poked her head through the French doors.
Her mother was dangling her feet in the warm water and she was laughing. It made Nina frown because the sound was so rare. She found Mitchell frying liver in the kitchen. He was wearing one of his most flamboyant Hawaiian shirts to cook in.
‘Hello,’ he snorted. ‘Have you come for a morsel?’
Nina leaned her back against the fridge and folded her arms.
‘What have you done to your eyes?’ Mitchell peered at the blue sparkling kohl smeared over her eyelids. ‘Has someone punched your lights out?’
Nina took a deep breath to stop herself from screaming.
‘I think Kitty is going to drown herself in our pool.’
‘Oh dear,’ Mitchell grimaced. ‘Why’s that?’
‘I just get that impression.’
She did not want to say she had opened the envelope meant for her father. Mitchell switched the blender on and watched the chestnuts and sugar whirl into a paste and splatter over the palm trees on his shirt.
‘If I threw you into the pool now you would float. Even I with my big stomach would float.’
He was shouting over the noise of the blender. Nina waited for him to turn it off so she could whisper.
‘Yes. She’s been collecting stones. I was with her on the beach when she was looking for them.’ She explained how Kitty told her she was studying the drains in the pool and had said mental things like, ‘You don’t want to get hair caught in the plumbing.’
Mitchell looked at the fourteen-year-old fondly. He realised she was jealous of the attention her father had been paying Kitty and probably wanted the girl to drown.
‘Cheer up, Nina. Have some sweet chestnut purée on a spoon. I’m going to mix it with chocolate.’ He licked his fingers. ‘And I’m going to save a little square for the rat tonight.’
She knew a terrible secret no one else knew. And there were other secrets too. Yesterday when she was sitting on the bed in Kitty’s room helping her nudge out the seeds from her plants, a bird was singing in the garden. Kitty Finch had put her head in her hands and sobbed like there was no tomorrow.
She must speak to her father, but he was in Nice making his way to some Russian church even though he had told her that if she was ever tempted to believe in God she might be having a nervous breakdown. Something else worried her. It was the thing under the bed, but she didn’t want to think about that because it was something to do with Mitchell and anyway now her mother was calling her to go horse-riding.
Ponyland
The ponies were drinking water from a tank in the shade. Flies crawled over their swollen bellies and short legs and into their brown eyes that always seemed wet. As Nina watched the woman who hired them out brush their tails, she decided she would have to tell her mother about Kitty’s drowning poem, as she now called it. Kitty was speaking in French to the pony woman and didn’t look like someone who was about to drown herself. She was wearing a short blue dress and there were small white feathers in her hair, as if her pillow had burst in the night.
‘We have to follow the trail. There’s an orange plastic bag tied to the branches of the trees. The woman says we have to follow the orange plastic and walk either side of the pony.’
Nina, who wanted to be alone with her mother, found herself forced to choose a grey pony with long scabby ears and pretend she was having a perfect childhood.
The little pony was not in the mood to be hired out for an hour. She stopped every two minutes to graze the grass and nuzzle her head against the bark of trees. Nina was impatient. She had important things on her mind, not least the stones she had collected with Kitty on the beach, because she thought they were in the poem. She had seen the words ‘The Drowning Stones’ underlined in the middle of the page.
She noticed her mother was suddenly taking notice of things. When Kitty pointed out trees and different kinds of grasses, Isabel asked her to repeat their names. Kitty was saying that certain types of insects needed to drink nectar in the heatwave. Did Isabel know that honey is just spit and nectar? When bees suck nectar they mix it with their saliva and store the mixture in their honey sacs. Then they throw up their honey sacs and start all over again. Kitty was talking as if they were one big happy family, all the while holding the rope between her thumb and finger. Nina sat in silence on the pony, staring moodily at the cracks of blue sky she could see through the trees. If she turned the sky upside down the pony would have to swim through clouds and vapour. The sky would be grass. Insects would run across the sky. The trail seemed to have disappeared, because there were no more orange plastic bags tied to the branches of trees. They had come out of the pine forest into a clearing near a café. The café was opposite a lake. Nina scanned the trees for bits of ripped orange plastic and knew they were lost, but Kitty didn’t care. She was waving at someone, trying to get the attention of a woman sitting alone on the terrace outside the café.
‘It’s Dr Sheridan. Let’s go and say hello.’
She walked the pony straight off what remained of the trail and led it up the three shallow concrete steps towards Madeleine Sheridan, who had taken off her spectacles and placed them on the white plastic table next to her book.
Nina found herself stranded on the pony as Kitty led her past the bemused waitress carrying a tray of Orangina to a family at a nearby table. The old woman seemed to have frozen on her chair at the moment she was about to put a cube of sugar into her cup of coffee. It was as if the sight of a slender young woman in a short blue dress, her red hair snaking down her back, leading a grey pony on to the terrace of a café was a vision that could only be glanced at sideways. No one felt able to intervene because they did not fully know what it was they were seeing. It reminded Nina of the day she watched an eclipse through a hole in coloured paper, careful not to be blinded by the sun.
‘How are you, Doctor?’
Kitty pulled at the rope and gave the pony a sugar cube. With one hand still holding the rope, she draped her arm around the old woman’s shoulder.
Madeleine Sheridan’s voice when she finally spoke was calm, authoritative. She was wearing a red shawl that looked like a matador’s cloak with pom-poms sewn across the edge.
‘Stick to the track, Kitty. You can’t
bring ponies in here.’
‘The track has disappeared. There’s no track to stick to.’ She smiled. ‘I’m still waiting for you to bring me back my shoes like you said you would. The nurses told me I had dirty feet.’
Nina glanced at her mother, who was now standing on the left side of the pony. Kitty’s hands were shaking and she was speaking too loudly.
‘I’m surprised you haven’t told my new friends what you did to me.’ She turned to Isabel and imitated a horror-film whisper: ‘Dr Sheridan said I have a morbid predisposition.’
To Nina’s dismay, her mother actually laughed as if she and Kitty were sharing a joke.
The waitress brought out a plate of sausages and green beans and thumped it in front of Madeleine Sheridan, muttering to her in French about getting the pony out of the café.
