Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

Kitty Finch insisted she go away or she would shout for the police. Madeleine Sheridan could have left her there, but she did not do that. Kitty was too young to be talking to herself among the dead-eyed men staring at her breasts. To her surprise, the crazy girl suddenly changed her mind. Apparently she had left her jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of shoes, her favourite red polka-dot shoes, on the beach opposite the Hotel Negresco. Kitty leaned towards her and whispered in her ear, ‘Fanks. I’ll wait here while you get them.’ Madeleine Sheridan had walked round the corner and when she thought Kitty could no longer see her she called an ambulance.

In her view Katherine Finch was suffering from psychic anxiety, loss of weight, reduced sleep, agitation, suicidal thoughts, pessimism about the future, impaired concentration.

The musician raised his glass of beer in a thank-you gesture to the snake-hipped man sitting with the old woman.

Kitty Finch had survived her summary. Her mother took her home to Britain and she spent two months in a hospital in Kent, the Garden of England. Apparently the nurses were from Lithuania, Odessa and Kiev. In their white uniforms they looked like snowdrops on the mown green lawns of the hospital. That was what Kitty Finch told her mother and what Mrs Finch told Madeleine, who was astonished to learn that the nurses all chain-smoked in their lunch break.

Jurgen nudged her with his elbow. The accordion player from Marseilles was playing a tune for her. She felt too agitated to listen. Kitty had survived and now she had come to punish her. Perhaps even kill her. Why else was she here? She did not think Kitty was a safe person to drive Nina to the beach and up dangerous mountain roads. She should tell Isabel Jacobs that but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to have that conversation. If she had been on her way to buy soap and ended up calling an ambulance, Transport Sanitaire in French, she did not feel her hands were entirely clean. All the same, to be naked in a public place, to be jumping forwards and then backwards while chanting something incoherent, this had made her frightened for the wretched young woman. It was impossible to believe that someone did not want to be saved from their incoherence.

When the accordion player nodded at Jurgen, the caretaker knew he was in luck. He would buy some hashish and he and Claude would smoke it and get out of the Riviera while all the tourists wanted to get into it. He put his purple sunglasses on again and told Madeleine Sheridan that he was very, very happy today but he was also a little tight in the bowels. He thought his colon was blocked and this was because he had not lived his dream. What was his dream? He took a sip of Pepsi and noticed the English doctor had dressed up for lunch. She had put lipstick on and her hair, what was left of it, had been washed and curled. He could not tell her his dream was to win the lotto and marry Kitty Ket.

Joe Jacobs lay on his back in the master bedroom, as it was described in the villa’s fact sheet, longing for a curry. The place he most wanted to be at this moment was in his Hindu tailor’s workshop in Bethnal Green. Surrounded by silk. Drinking sweet tea. What he was missing in the Alpes-Maritimes was dhal. Rice. Yoghurt. And buses. He missed the top deck of buses. And newspapers. And weather forecasts. Sometimes he sat in his study in west London with the radio on and listened intently to what the weather was going to be like in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. If the sun was shining in west London, it comforted him to know it would be snowing in Scotland and raining in Wales. Now he was going to have to sit up and not lie down. Worse, he was going to have to stand up and search the master bedroom for Kitty Finch’s poem. In the distance he could hear Mitchell shooting rabbits in the orchard. He knelt on the floor and grabbed the envelope he had kicked under the bed. He held the battered envelope in his hands and found himself staring at the title written in the neat scientific handwriting of a botanist used to making precise drawings of plants and labelling them.

Swimming Home

by

Kitty Finch

When he finally prised out the sheet of paper inside it, he was surprised to feel his hand trembling in the way his father’s hand might have trembled if he had lived long enough to mend kettles in his old age. He held the page closer to his eyes and forced himself to read the words floating on the page. And then he moved the page further away from his eyes and read it again. There was no angle that made it easier to comprehend. Her words were all over the place, swimming round the edges of the rectangle of paper, sometimes disappearing altogether but coming back to the centre of the lined page with its sad and final message. What did she hope he might say to her after he had read it? He was mystified. A fish van had pulled up outside the villa. The voice bellowing through a loudspeaker was shouting out the names of fish. Some were grand , some were petit . Some were six francs and some were thirteen francs. None of them had swum home. They were all caught on the way. The Sellotape that had sealed the lip of the envelope reminded him of a plaster on a graze. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He was going to have to busk it at lunch with her. He checked the inside of his jacket pocket to make sure his wallet was there and kicked the envelope under the bed, telling himself once again how much he hated Tuesdays. And Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, etc.

et cetera

A Latin expression meaning ‘and other things’ or ‘so forth’ or ‘the rest of such things’. The poem, ‘Swimming Home’, was mostly made up of etcs; he had counted seven of them in one half of the page alone. What kind of language was this?

My mother says I’m the only jewel in her crown

But I’ve made her tired with all my etc,

So now she walks with sticks

To accept her language was to accept that she held him, her reader, in great esteem. He was being asked to make something of it and what he made of it was that every etc concealed some thing that could not be said.

Kitty was waiting for him on the terrace of Claude’s café. To his displeasure he noticed that Jurgen was sitting at the table opposite her. He seemed to be playing with a piece of string, weaving it between his fingers to make a spider’s web. It was becoming clear to him that Jurgen was a sort of guard dog to Kitty Finch, not exactly baring his teeth at all intruders but he was protective and possessive all the same. He seemed to have forgotten that it was she who was the intruder. All the same Jurgen was obviously there to make sure anyone who came near her was a welcome visitor and not a trespasser. He did not seem to elicit much affection from her. It was as if she knew he must never be patted and cuddled and made to feel anything less than alert on her behalf.

‘Hi, Joe.’ Kitty smiled. Her forehead looked as if she had pressed it against a hot iron. She was a redhead and the sun had been brutal to her pale skin.

He nodded, jangling the coins in his jacket pocket as he sat down. ‘You should use sun block, Kitty,’ he said paternally.

Claude, who knew he looked more like Mick Jagger every day and worked quite hard on this happy genetic accident, strutted to their table carrying a large bottle of mineral water and two glasses. Joe saw this as an opportunity to pass some time and avoid talking about the poem he had kicked under his bed with the cockroaches, etc.

He turned to Kitty. ‘Did you order this?’

She shook her head and made a glum face at Claude. Joe heard himself bellowing at the pouting waiter.

‘What’s wrong with tap water?’