Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

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.

‘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.’

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.’

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.