Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
‘Perhaps he is homesick. He wants to go home to his planet.’
Jurgen gargled with the green drink that Claude knew was mint syrup. Jurgen was more or less addicted to it in the same way some people are addicted to absinthe, which had the same fairy green colour.
‘No. He is just avoiding Kitty Ket. He has not read Ket’s thing and he is avoiding her. The Ket is like ET. She thinks she has a mental connection with the poet. He has not read her thing and she will be sad and her blood pressure will go up and she will murder them all with the fat man’s guns.’
MONDAY
The Trapper
Mitchell lay on his back sweating. It was three a.m. and he had just had a nightmare about a centipede. He had hacked it with a carving knife but it split in two and started to grow again. The more he hacked at it the more centipedes there were. They writhed at his feet. He was up to his ears in centipedes and the blade of his knife was covered in slime. They were crawling into his nostrils and trying to get into his mouth. When he woke up he wondered if he should tell Laura his heart was pounding so hard and fast he thought he might be about to have a heart attack. Laura was sleeping peacefully on her side, her feet poking out of the bed. There was no bed in the world that was long enough for Laura. Their bed in London had been specially designed for her height and his width by a Danish shipbuilder. It took up the whole room and resembled a galleon beached on a pond in a civic park. Something was crawling towards him along the whitewashed wall. He screamed.
‘What is it, Mitch?’ Laura sat up and put her hand on her husband’s heaving chest.
He pointed to the thing on the wall.
‘It’s a moth, Mitchell.’
Sure enough it spread its grey wings and flew out of the window.
‘I had a nightmare,’ he grunted. ‘A terrible, terrible nightmare.’
She squeezed his hot clammy hand. ‘Go back to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.’ She tugged the sheet over her shoulder and lay down again.
There was no way he could sleep. Mitchell got up and walked upstairs to the kitchen, where he felt most safe. He opened the fridge and reached for a bottle of water. As he put the bottle to his lips and thirstily gulped down the iced water, he felt in bits and pieces like the centipede. When he lifted up his aching head, he noticed something lying on the kitchen floor. It was the trap he had set for the rat. He had caught something. He swallowed hard and made his way towards it.
A small animal was lying on its side with its back to him, but it was not a rat. He recognised the creature. It was Nina’s brown nylon rabbit, its long floppy ear stapled under the wire. He could see its worn white ball of a tail and the grubby label sewn inside its leg. The green satin ribbon around its neck had somehow got tangled in the wires too. He found himself sweating as he bent down to free it from the wire and then noticed a shadow on the floor. Someone was there with him. Someone had broken into the villa and he didn’t have his guns with him. Even his ancient ebony weapon from Persia would see off whoever was there.
‘Hello, Mitchell.’
Kitty Finch was leaning naked against the wall, watching him struggle not to catch his fingers in his own trap. She was nibbling the chocolate he had left for the rat, her arms folded across her breasts.
‘I call you the trapper now, but I’ve warned all the owls about you.’
He pressed his hand on his pounding heart and stared at her pale, righteous face. He would shoot her. If he had his weapons with him he would do it. He would aim for her stomach. He imagined how he would hold the gun and timed the moment he would snap the trigger. She would fall to the ground, her glassy grey eyes wide open, a bloody hole gouged in her belly. He blinked and saw she was still standing against the wall, taunting him with the chocolate he had placed so carefully in the wires. She looked thin and pathetic and he realised he had scared her.
‘Sorry I was so abrupt.’
‘Yeah.’ She nodded as if they were suddenly best friends. ‘You gave me a fright, but I was frightened anyway.’
He was terrified too. For a moment he seriously considered telling her about his nightmare.
‘Why do you kill animals and birds, Mitchell?’
She was almost pretty, with her narrow waist and long hair glowing in the dark, but ragged too, not far off someone begging outside a train station holding up a homeless and hungry sign.
‘It takes my mind off things,’ he found himself saying as if he meant it, which he did.
‘What sorts of things?’
Again he considered telling her about some of the worries that weighed heavily on his mind but stopped himself just in time. He couldn’t go shooting his mouth off to someone crazy like her.
‘You’re a complete fuck-up, Mitchell. Stop killing things and you’ll feel better.’
‘Haven’t you got a home to go to?’ He thought he had meant this quite kindly, but even to his own ears it sounded like an insult.
‘Yeah, I live with my mother at the moment, but it’s not my home.’
As she knelt down to help him untangle the grubby toy rabbit that made a mockery of his trap, he couldn’t work out why he thought someone as sad as she was might be dangerous.
‘You know what?’ This time Mitchell thought he genuinely meant this kindly. ‘If you wore clothes more often instead of walking around in your birthday suit, you’d look more normal.’
Spirited Away
Nina’s disappearance was only discovered at seven a.m. after Joe called for her because he had lost his special ink pen. His daughter was the person who always found it for him, whatever the time, a drama Laura had heard at least twelve times that holiday. Whenever Nina returned the pen victoriously to her loud, forlorn father he wrapped her in his arms and bellowed melodramatically, ‘Thank you thank you thank you.’ Often in a number of languages: Polish, Portuguese, Italian. Yesterday it was, ‘Danke danke danke.’
No one could believe Joe was actually shouting for his daughter to find his pen so early in the morning, but that was what he did and Nina did not answer. Isabel walked into her daughter’s bedroom and saw the doors to her balcony were wide open. She whipped off the duvet, expecting to see her hiding under the covers. Nina wasn’t there and the sheet was stained with blood. When Laura heard Isabel sobbing, she ran into the room to find her friend pointing to the bed, strange choking sounds coming out of her mouth. She was pale, deathly white, uttering words that sounded to Laura like ‘bone’ or ‘hair’ or ‘she isn’t there’; it was hard to make sense of what she was saying.
Laura suggested they go together to look for Nina in the garden and steered her out of the room. Small birds swooped down to drink from the still, green water of the pool. A box of cherry chocolates from the day before lay melting on Mitchell’s big blue chair, covered in ants. Two damp towels were draped on the canvas recliners and in the middle of them, like an interrupted conversation, was the wooden chair Isabel had dragged out for Kitty Finch. Under it was Joe’s black ink pen.
This was the rearranged space of yesterday. They walked through the cypress trees and into the parched garden. It had not rained for months and Jurgen had forgotten to water the plants. The honeysuckle was dying, the soil beneath the brown grass cracked and hard. Under the tallest pine tree, Laura saw Nina’s wet bikini lying on the pine needles. When she bent down to pick it up, even she could not help thinking the cherry print on the material looked like splashes of blood. Her fingers started to fumble in her pocket for the little stainless-steel calculator she and Mitchell had brought with them to do their accounts.
‘Nina’s OK, Isabel.’ She ran her fingers over the calculator as if the numbers and symbols she knew were there, the m+ and m–, the x and the decimal point, would somehow end in Nina’s appearance. ‘She’s probably gone for a walk. I mean, she’s fourteen you know, she really has not been’ – she was about to say ‘slaughtered’ but changed her mind and said ‘spirited away’ instead.
She didn’t finish her sentence because Isabel was r
Mothers and Daughters
The spare room was dark and hot because the windows were closed and the curtains drawn. A pair of grubby flip-flops lay on top of the tangle of drying weeds lying on the floor. Kitty’s red hair streamed over a lumpy stained pillow, her freckled arms wrapped around Nina, who was clutching the nylon fur rabbit that was her last embarrassed link with childhood. Isabel knew Nina was awake and that she was pretending to be asleep under what seemed to be a starched white tablecloth. It looked like a shroud.
‘Nina, get up.’ Isabel’s voice was sharper than she meant it to be.
Kitty opened her grey eyes and whispered, ‘Nina started her period in the night so she got into bed with me.’
The girls were drowsy and content in each other’s arms. Isabel noticed the tattered books Kitty had put on the shelves, about six of them, were all her husband’s books. Two pink rosebuds stood in a glass of water next to them. Roses that could only have been picked from Madeleine Sheridan’s front garden, her attempt to create a memory of England in France.
She remembered Kitty’s strange comment yesterday morning, after their swim together: ‘Joe’s poetry is a more like a conversation with me than anything else.’ What sort of conversation was Kitty Finch having with her husband? Should she insist her daughter get out of bed and leave this room that was as hot as a greenhouse? Kitty was obviously trapping energy to heat her plants. She had made a small, hot, chaotic world, full of books and fruit and flowers, a sub-state in the country of the tourist villa with its Matisse and Picasso prints clumsily framed and hanging on the walls. Two plump bumblebees crawled down the yellow curtains, searching for an open window. The cupboard was open and Isabel glimpsed a short white feather cape hanging in the corner. Slim and pretty in her flip-flops and ragged summer dresses, it would seem Kitty Finch could make herself at home anywhere. Should she insist that Nina get up and return to her clean lonely room upstairs? Tearing her away from Kitty’s arms felt like a violent thing to do. She bent down and kissed her daughter’s dark eyebrow, which was twitching slightly.
‘Come and say hello when you’re awake.’
Nina’s eyes were shut extra tight. Isabel closed the door.
When she walked into the kitchen she told Jozef and Laura that Nina was sleeping with Kitty.
‘Ah. Thought as much.’ Her husband scratched the back of his neck and disappeared into the garden to get his pen, which, Laura informed him, was ‘under Kitty’s chair’. He had covered his bare shoulders with a white pillowcase and looked like a self-ordained holy man. He did this to stop his shoulders burning when he wrote in the sun, but it infuriated Laura all the same. When she looked at him again he was examining the gold nib as if it had been damaged in some way. She opened the fridge. Mitchell wanted a piece of stale cheese to trap the brown rat he had seen scuttling about in the kitchen at night. It had gnawed through the salami hung on a hook above the sink and he’d had to throw it away. Mitchell was not so much squeamish as outraged by the vermin who devoured the morsels he bought with his hard-earned money. He took it personally, as if slowly but surely the rats were gnawing through his wallet.
Fathers and Daughters
So his lost daughter was asleep in Kitty’s bed. Joe sat in the garden at his makeshift desk, waiting for the panic that had made his fingers tear the back of his neck to calm as he watched his wife talking to Laura inside the villa. His breathing was all over the place, he was fighting to breathe. Did he think Kitty Finch, who had stopped taking Seroxat and must be suffering, had lost her grip and murdered his daughter? His wife was now walking towards him through the gaps in the cypress trees. He shifted his legs as if part of him wanted to run away from her or perhaps run towards her. He truly did not know which way to go. He could try to tell Isabel something, but he wasn’t sure how to begin because he wasn’t sure how it would end. There were times he thought she could barely look at him without hiding her face in her hair. And he could not look at her either, because he had betrayed her so often. Perhaps now he should at least try and tell her that when she abandoned her young daughter to lie in a tent crawling with scorpions, he understood it made more sense of her life to be shot at in war zones than lied to by him in the safety of her own home. All the same, he knew his daughter had cried for her in the early years, and then later learned not to because it didn’t bring her back. In turn (this subject turned and turned and turned regularly in his mind), his daughter’s distress brought to him, her father, feelings he could not handle with dignity. He had told his readers how he was sent to boarding school by his guardians and how he used to watch the parents of his school friends leave on visiting day (Sundays), and if his own parents had visited him too, he would have stood for ever in the tyre marks their car had made in the dust. His mother and father were night visitors, not afternoon visitors. They appeared to him in dreams he instantly forgot, but he reckoned they were trying to find him. What had worried him most was he thought they might not have enough English words between them to make themselves understood. Is Jozef my son here? We have been looking for him all over the world. He had cried for them and then later learned not to because it didn’t bring them back. He looked at his clever tanned wife with her dark hair hiding her face. This was the conversation that might start something or end something, but it came out wrong, just too random and fucked. He heard himself ask her if she liked honey.
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Because I know so little about you, Isabel.’
He would poke his paw inside every hollow of every tree to scoop up the honeycomb and lay it at her feet if he thought she might stay a little longer with him and their cub. She looked hostile and lonely and he understood it. He obviously disgusted her. She even preferred Mitchell’s company to his.
He heard her say, ‘The main thing to do for the rest of the summer is to make sure Nina is all right.’
‘Of course Nina is all right,’ he snapped. ‘I’ve looked after her since she was three years old and she’s bloody all right, isn’t she?’
And then he took out his notebook and the black ink pen that had disappeared that morning, knowing that Isabel was defeated every time he appeared to be writing and every time he talked about their daughter. These were his weapons to silence his wife and keep her in his life, to keep his family intact, flawed and hostile but still a family. His daughter was his main triumph in their marriage, the one thing he had done right.
– yes yes yes she said yes yes yes she likes honey – his pen scratched these words aggressively across the page while he watched a white butterfly hover above the pool. It was like breath. It was a miracle. A wonder. He and his wife knew things it was impossible to know. They had both seen life snuffed out. Isabel recorded and witnessed catastrophes to try and make people remember. He tried to make himself forget.
Collecting Stones
‘It has a hole in the middle.’
Kitty held up a pebble the size of her hand and gave it to Nina to look through. They were sitting on one of the public beaches in Nice below the Promenade des Anglais. Kitty said on the private beaches they had to pay a fortune for sunloungers and umbrellas. Everyone looked like patients on hospital beds and gave her the creeps. The sun was burning pink blotches in her waxy pale face.
Nina obediently looked through the hole. She saw a young woman smiling, a purple jewel drilled into her front tooth. When she turned the pebble round the woman was unpacking a carrier bag of food. There was another woman there too, sitting on a low striped canvas chair, and she was holding a large white dog by the lead with her right hand. The dog looked like a snow wolf. A husky with blue eyes. Nina stared into its blue eyes from the hole in the pebble. She couldn’t be sure of this but she thought the snow wolf was undoing the shoelaces of the w
Last night when she woke up she discovered she was menstruating for the first time. She had dared herself to put on her bikini because it was the only thing she could find and knock on Kitty’s door to tell her the news. Kitty was lying awake under an old tablecloth and she had rolled up one of her dresses to make a pillow.
‘I’ve started.’
At first Kitty didn’t know what she meant. And then she grabbed Nina’s hand and they ran into the garden. Nina could see her own shadow in the pool and in the sky at the same time. She was tall and long, there was no end to her and no beginning, her body stretched out and vast. She wanted to swim and when Kitty insisted it didn’t matter about the blood, she dared herself to take off her bikini and be naked, watching her twin shadow untie the straps more bravely than the real-sized Nina actually felt. She finally jumped into the pool and hid herself in the blanket of leaves that floated in the water, not sure what to do with her new body because it was morphing into something alien and perplexing to her.