Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

Claude stared at him with blatant dislike. ‘Tap water is full of hormones.’

‘No, it’s not. Bottled water is a trick to get more money from tourists.’

Joe could hear Claude laughing. The only other sound was the birds. And the nervous hum inside Kitty Finch, who was a bird or something fairyish anyway. He couldn’t look at her. Instead he fixed his eyes on Claude.

‘Tell me, sir. Is your country incapable of processing water that is safe to drink?’

Claude, with the flourish of a low-rent pimp showing off his new diamond cufflinks, unscrewed the cap on the ice-cold bottle of water and walked towards his dogs, who were sleeping under the chestnut tree. He winked at Jurgen as he poured the water into the chipped ceramic bowls that lay by their paws. The dogs lapped at the water indifferently and then gave up. Claude patted their heads and strutted back into the café. When he came out again he was holding a glass of warm cloudy tap water, which he handed to the English poet.

Joe held the glass up to the sun. ‘I assume,’ he shouted to the caretaker, who was still untangling his string, ‘that this glass of water comes from a putrid swamp.’ He gulped the water down in one go and pointed to the empty glass. ‘This is water. It can be found in oceans and polar ice caps … It can be found in clouds and rivers … it will …’

Claude snapped his fingers under the poet’s nose. ‘Thank you, monsieur, for the geography lesson. But what we want to know is have you read the poetry of our friend here?’ He pointed to Kitty. ‘Because she tells us you are a very respected poet and she says you have so kindly offered to give her an opinion.’

Joe had to finally look at Kitty Finch. Her grey eyes that were sometimes green seemed to shine with extra radiance in her sunburnt face. She did not seem in the least embarrassed by Claude’s intervention on her behalf. In fact she appeared to be amused, even grateful. Joe reckoned this was the worst day of his holiday so far. He was too old, too busy to have to endure a village full of idiots more fascinated with him than he was with them.

‘That is a private conversation between two writers,’ he said quietly to no one in particular.

Kitty blushed and stared at her feet. ‘Do you think I’m a writer?’

Joe frowned. ‘Yeah, I think you probably are.’

He stared nervously at Jurgen, who appeared to be lost in the puzzle of his string. The dogs were now lapping up the expensive bottled water in their bowls. Claude danced into the café, where he had pinned up a poster of Charlie Chaplin standing white-faced in a circle of light, his walking stick between his legs. Underneath it were the words Les Temps modernes . Next to it stood the new rubber model of ET, his baby alien neck garlanded with a string of fake plastic ivy. He started to fry yesterday’s potatoes in duck fat, peering out of the window to see what the poet and Kitty Ket were up to.

Kitty leaned forward and touched Joe’s shoulder with her hand. It was a strange gesture. As if she were testing that he was there.

‘I’ve got all your books in my room.’

She sounded vaguely threatening. As if by owning his books, he in turn owed her something. The copper curls of her long unbrushed hair falling over her shoulders resembled a marvellous dream he might have invented to cheer himself up. How had she managed to hog so much beauty? She smelt of roses. She was soft and slender and supple. She was interesting and lovely. She loved plants. She had green fingers. And more literally, green fingernails. She admired him, wanted his attention and intrigued him, but he need not have bothered to read her poem because he understood it already.

Claude, with new humility and even-handedness, placed a bowl of green salad and fried potatoes on their table. Joe picked up a potato and dipped it in mustard.

‘I’ve been thinking about your title, “Swimming Home”.’

His tone was offhand, more nonchalant than he felt. He did not tell her how he had been thinking about her title. The rectangular swimming pool that had been carved from stone in the grounds of the villa reminded him of a coffin. A floating open coffin lit with the underwater lights Jurgen swore at when he fiddled with the incandescent light bulbs he’d had to change twice since they arrived. A swimming pool was just a hole in the ground. A grave filled with water.

Two paragliders drifted on yellow silk between the mountains. The narrow cobbled streets of the village were deserted. The paragliders were landing near the river instead of the usual base five kilometres away.

Kitty stuffed her mouth with lettuce leaves. A thin cat purred against her ankles as she threw her potato chips under the table. She leaned forward.

‘Something happened to me this year. I’ve forgotten things.’ She frowned and he saw that the burn on her forehead was beginning to blister.

‘What sort of things?’

‘I can’t rah rah rah rah rah.’

She was not a poet. She was a poem. She was about to snap in half. He thought his own poetry had made her la la la la love him. It was unbearable. He could not bear it. She was still trying to remember how to say remember.

If he couldn’t talk about her poem what good was he? He might as well move to the countryside and run the tom-bola stand at the church fête. He might as well take up writing stories set in the declining years of empire featuring a dusty black Humber V8 Snipe with an aged loyal driver.

She was an astute reader and she was troubled and she had suicidal thoughts, but then what did he want his readers to be like? Were they required to eat all their vegetables, have a regular monthly salary and pension fund with yearly gym membership and a loyalty card to their favourite supermarket?

Her gaze, the adrenalin of it was like a stain, the etcs in her poem a bright light, a high noise. And if all this wasn’t terrifying enough, her attention to the detail of every day was even more so, to pollen and struggling trees and the instincts of animals, to the difficulties of pretending to be relentlessly sane, to the way he walked (he had kept the rheumatism that aged him a secret from his family), to the nuance of mood and feeling in them all. Yesterday he had watched her free some bees trapped in the glass of a lantern as if it were she who was held captive. She was as receptive as it was possible to be, an explorer, an adventurer, a nightmare. Every moment with her was a kind of emergency, her words always too direct, too raw, too truthful.

There was nothing for it but to lie.

‘I’m sorry, Kitty, but I haven’t read your poem yet. AND I have a deadline with my publisher. AND I have to give a reading in Kraków in three weeks. AND I promised to take Nina fishing this afternoon.’

‘Right.’ She bit her lip and looked away. ‘Right,’ she said again, but her voice was breaking. Jurgen seemed to have disappeared and Kitty was biting her fingers.

‘Why don’t you give it to Jurgen to read?’ As soon as he said it he wished he hadn’t. She was literally changing colour in front of him. It was not so much a blush as a fuse. An electrical cable wire starting to melt. She fixed him with a glare of such intense hostility he wondered what it was he had actually done that was so bad.

‘My poem is a conversation with you and no one else.’

It shouldn’t be happening, his search for love in her, but it was. He would go to the ends of the earth to find love. He was trying not to, but the more he tried not to search, the more there was to find. He could see her on a British beach with a Thermos of tea in her bag, dodging the cold waves, tracing her name in the sand, looking out at the nuclear power stations built in the distance. This was more her landscape, a catastrophic poem in itself. He had touched her with his words, but he knew he must not touch her in any other sort of way, in a more literal way, with his lips for example. That would be taking advantage. He had to fight it all the way. The way to where? He didn’t know, but he would fight it to the very end. If he were religious he would get down on his knees and pray. Father, take all this away. Away. Let all this fade away. He knew it was as much a plea or a wish or a chant to his own father, the sombre bearded patriarch, the shadow he had chased all his life, etc. His father said goodbye, etc. His mother said goodbye, etc. He hid in a dark forest in western Poland, etc.