Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

‘You shouldn’t cover yourself with so much sun lotion, Mitchell.’

Kitty Finch was obviously upset about something. She had taken off all her clothes and stood naked at the edge of the pool as if no one else was there. ‘It changes the chemical balance of the water.’

Mitchell put a protective hand on the dome of his stomach and groaned.

‘The water is actually CLOUDY.’ Kitty sounded furious. She ran around the sides of the pool staring into it from every angle. ‘Jurgen has got the chemical treatment all wrong.’ She stamped her bare foot on the hot paving stones. ‘It’s chemistry that does the fine-tuning. He’s added chlorine tablets to the skimmer box and now it’s too concentrated in the deep end.’

Once again Mitchell took it upon himself to tell her to fuck off. Why didn’t she make herself a cheese sandwich and go and get lost in the woods? In fact he would even drive her there if she could see her way to putting some petrol in his Mercedes.

‘You’re so easily frightened, Mitchell.’

She jumped towards him. Two long leaps as if she was playing at being a gazelle or a deer and was taunting him to come and hunt her down. Her ribs poked out of her skin like the wires of the trap Mitchell had bought for the rat.

‘It’s a good thing Laura’s so tall, isn’t it? She can peer over your head when you shoot animals and never have to look at the ground where they lie wounded.’

Kitty leapt into the cloudy water holding her nose. Mitchell sat up and immediately felt dizzy. The sun always made him ill. Next year he would suggest they hire a chalet on the edge of an icy fjord in Norway, as far away from the Jacobs family as possible. He would catch seals and thrash himself with birch twigs in saunas and then he’d run out into the snow and scream while Laura practised speaking Yoruba and longed for Africa.

‘THE WATER IS FUCKED.’

What had got into her? Adjusting the umbrella over his pink bald head, he could see Joe limping towards the small gate that led to the back of the garden. Nina followed him through the cypress trees carrying a red bucket and a net.

‘Hi, Joe.’

Kitty jumped out of the pool and started to shake water out of the copper coils of her hair. He nodded at her, relieved that despite their unpleasant meeting earlier she sounded genuinely pleased to see him. He pointed to the bucket Nina was carrying with some difficulty to the edge of the pool.

‘Come and see what we found in the river.’

They crowded around the bucket, which was half full of muddy water. A slimy grey creature with a red stripe down its spine clung to a clump of weed. It was as thick as Mitchell’s thumb and seemed to have some sort of pulse because the water trembled above it. Every now and again it curled into a ball and slowly straightened out again.

‘What is it?’ Mitchell couldn’t believe they had bothered to lug this vile creature across the fields all the way back to the villa.

‘It’s a thing.’ Joe smirked.

Mitchell groaned and moved away. ‘Nasty.’

‘Dad always finds gross things.’

Nina stared over Kitty’s shoulder, making sure not to look at her breasts, which were now hanging over the bucket as she peered in. She didn’t want to look at naked Kitty Finch and her father standing too near her. Nina could count the bones that ran like beads down her spine. Kitty was a starver. Her room was full of rotting food she had hidden under cushions. As far as Nina was concerned, she’d rather stare at the blotches of chewing gum on London pavement than at her father and Kitty Finch.

Kitty reached for a towel. She was all fingers and thumbs, dropping it and picking it up again until Joe finally took it from her and helped wrap it around her waist.

‘What do you think it is?’ Kitty stared into the bucket.

‘It’s a creepy-crawly,’ Joe announced. ‘My best find yet.’

Nina thought it might be a centipede. It had hundreds of tiny legs that were frantically waving around in the water, trying to find something to grip on to.

‘What exactly is it you are looking for when you go fishing?’ Kitty lowered her voice, as if the creature might hear her. ‘Do you find the things you want to find?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Mitchell sounded like a schoolteacher irritated with a child.

‘Don’t talk to her like that.’ Joe’s arms were now clasped around Kitty’s waist, holding up the towel as if his life depended on it.

‘She’s asking why don’t I find silver fish and pretty shells? The answer is they are there anyway.’

While he talked he poked his finger through the wet curls of Kitty’s hair. Nina saw her mother and Laura walking through the white gate. Her father let go of the towel and Kitty blushed. Nina stared miserably into the cypress trees, pretending to look for the hedgehog she knew sheltered in the garden. Joe walked over to the plastic recliner and lay down. He glanced at his wife, who had walked over to the bucket. There were leaves in her hair and grass stains on her bare shins. She had not so much distanced herself from him as moved out to another neighbourhood altogether. There was new vigour in the way she stood by the bucket. Her determination not to love him seemed to have renewed her energy.

Mitchell was still peering at the creature crawling up the sides of the red plastic bucket. It was perfectly camouflaged by the red markings on its spine.

‘What are you going to do with your slug?’

Everyone looked at Joe.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My “thing” is freaking you all out. Let’s put it on a leaf in the garden.’

‘No.’ Laura squirmed. ‘It’ll only make its way back here.’

‘Or crawl through the plughole and come up in the water.’ Mitchell looked truly alarmed.

Laura shuddered and then screamed, ‘It’s climbing out. It’s nearly out.’ She ran to the bucket and threw a towel over it.

‘Do something to stop it, Joe.’

Joe limped to the bucket, removed the towel and flicked the creature back into the bottom of the water with his thumb.

‘It is really quite tiny.’ He yawned. ‘It’s just a strange tiny slimy thing.’

A clump of river weed trailed down his eyebrow. Everything had gone very quiet. Even the late-afternoon rasp of the cicadas seemed to have faded away. When Joe opened his eyes, everyone except Laura had disappeared into the villa. Laura was shaking but her voice was matter of fact.

‘Look, I know Isabel invited Kitty to stay.’ She stopped and started again. ‘But you don’t have to. I mean, do you? Do you have to? Do you? Do you have to keep doing it?’

Joe clenched his fists inside his pockets.

‘Doing what?’

Jurgen and Claude were smoking the hashish Jurgen had bought from the accordion player on the beach in Nice. He usually bought it from the driver who dropped the immigrant cleaners at the tourist villas, but they were organising a strike. What’s more the news last night forecast a gale and the entire village had spent the night preparing for it. Jurgen’s cottage was owned by Rita Dwighter but not yet ‘restored’ and he wanted to keep it that way. Sometimes he threw heavy objects at the walls in the hope that it would become unrestorable and keep its status as the ugly dysfunctional child in Rita Dwighter’s family of properties.

Now he was huddled over Claude’s mobile phone. Claude had recorded a cow mooing. He didn’t know why, but he had to do it. He had walked into a field and held his phone as close as he dared to the cow’s mouth. If Jurgen pressed the play button the cow mooed. Technology had made the cow sound familiar but uncomfortably strange as well. Every time the cow mooed they laughed hysterically, because the cow had trodden on Claude’s big toe and now his toenail was deformed.