Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

drifting away

to the dark

forest

His lips were warm and they were on hers. She was kissing Mick Jagger and he was devouring her like a wolf or something fierce but soft as well and definitely not calm. He was telling her she was so so everything. She moved even closer and then he stopped talking.

to the dark

forest

where trees bleed

snowburst

When she peeped her eyes open and saw he had his eyes shut she shut her eyes again, but then the door opened and Jurgen was standing in the middle of the room blinking at them.

‘So everything is cool with the horse-riding.’

There was a kissing coma in the atmosphere. Everything had gone dark red. Jurgen put his hands on his hips so his elbows would jut out and the vibes could flow through the triangles his elbows made.

‘Please, I am asking you to read the Ket’s poem so you can tell me the way to her heart.’

Nina opened the door of her parents’ bedroom and skated in her socks across the tiled floor. She was wearing socks despite the heat because her left foot was swollen from a bee sting. To give her courage for the task in hand she had spent the last hour smearing her eyelids with Kitty’s blue stick of kohl. When she looked in the mirror her brown eyes were glittering and certain. From the window by the bed she could see her mother and Laura talking by the pool. Her father had gone to Nice to see the Russian Orthodox Cathedral and Kitty Finch was with Jurgen as usual. They were going to collect cow dung from the fields and then spread it over Jurgen’s new allotment, which she said she had ‘taken over for the summer’. No one could work out why she wasn’t actually living with Jurgen in his cottage next door, but her mother had implied that Kitty might not be as ‘sweet’ on him as he was on her. She heard a bashing noise coming from the kitchen. Mitchell had wrapped a slab of dark chocolate in a tea cloth and was hammering at it excitedly. It was hot outside but she felt cold in her parents’ room, as if it was an ice rink after all. She knew what the envelope looked like but she couldn’t see it anywhere. What she needed was a torch, because she must not put the lights on and attract attention. If anyone came in she would slip into the bathroom and hide behind the door. On the table by her mother’s side of the bed she noticed a slab of waxy honeycomb half wrapped in a page of newspaper. It had obviously been tied with the green string that lay next to it. She walked towards it and saw it was a gift from her father, because he had written in black ink across the page,

To my sweetest with my whole love as always, Jozef .

Nina frowned at the thick golden honey oozing through the holes. If her parents quite liked each other after all it would ruin the story she had put together for herself. When she thought about her parents, which was most of the time, she was always trying to fit the pieces together. What was the plot? Her father had very gentle hands and yesterday they were all over her mother. She had seen them kissing in the hallway like something out of a film, pulled into each other while moths crashed into the light bulb above their heads. As far as she was concerned, her parents tragically couldn’t stand the sight of each other and only loved her. The plot was that her mother abandoned her only daughter to go and hug orphans in Romania. Tragically (so much tragedy) Nina had taken her mother’s place in the family home and become her father’s most precious companion, always second-guessing his moods and needs. But things started to wobble when her mother asked her if she’d like to go to a special restaurant by the sea for an ice cream with a sparkler in it. What’s more, if her parents were kissing yesterday (the sheets on their unmade bed looked a bit frantic), and if they seemed to understand each other in a way that left her out, the plot was going off track.

It was only after six minutes of urgent searching that she eventually found the envelope with Kitty’s poem inside it. She had given up rummaging through the silk shirts and handkerchiefs her father always ironed so carefully and crawled on her knees to look under the bed. When she saw the envelope propped up against her father’s slippers and two dead brown cockroaches lying on their backs, she lay on her stomach and swept it up with her arm. There was something else under the bed too but she did not have time to find out what it was.

The window overlooking the pool was a problem. Her mother was sitting on the steps by the shallow end eating an apple. She could hear her asking Laura why she was learning Yoruba and Laura saying, ‘Why not? Over twenty million people speak it.’

She crouched on the floor where she could not be seen and tore the Sellotape off the lip of the envelope. It was empty. She peered inside it. A sheet of paper had been folded into a square the size of a matchbox and it was stuck at the bottom of the envelope like an old shoe wedged into the mud of a river. She scooped it out and began carefully to unfold it.

Swimming Home

by

Kitty Finch

After she read it Nina didn’t bother to fold the paper back into its intricate squares. She shoved it inside the envelope and put it back under the bed with the cockroaches. Why hadn’t her father read it? He would understand exactly what was going on in Kitty’s mind.

She made her way up the stairs to the open-plan living room and poked her head through the French doors.

Her mother was dangling her feet in the warm water and she was laughing. It made Nina frown because the sound was so rare. She found Mitchell frying liver in the kitchen. He was wearing one of his most flamboyant Hawaiian shirts to cook in.

‘Hello,’ he snorted. ‘Have you come for a morsel?’

Nina leaned her back against the fridge and folded her arms.

‘What have you done to your eyes?’ Mitchell peered at the blue sparkling kohl smeared over her eyelids. ‘Has someone punched your lights out?’

Nina took a deep breath to stop herself from screaming.

‘I think Kitty is going to drown herself in our pool.’

‘Oh dear,’ Mitchell grimaced. ‘Why’s that?’

‘I just get that impression.’

She did not want to say she had opened the envelope meant for her father. Mitchell switched the blender on and watched the chestnuts and sugar whirl into a paste and splatter over the palm trees on his shirt.

‘If I threw you into the pool now you would float. Even I with my big stomach would float.’

He was shouting over the noise of the blender. Nina waited for him to turn it off so she could whisper.

‘Yes. She’s been collecting stones. I was with her on the beach when she was looking for them.’ She explained how Kitty told her she was studying the drains in the pool and had said mental things like, ‘You don’t want to get hair caught in the plumbing.’

Mitchell looked at the fourteen-year-old fondly. He realised she was jealous of the attention her father had been paying Kitty and probably wanted the girl to drown.

‘Cheer up, Nina. Have some sweet chestnut purée on a spoon. I’m going to mix it with chocolate.’ He licked his fingers. ‘And I’m going to save a little square for the rat tonight.’

She knew a terrible secret no one else knew. And there were other secrets too. Yesterday when she was sitting on the bed in Kitty’s room helping her nudge out the seeds from her plants, a bird was singing in the garden. Kitty Finch had put her head in her hands and sobbed like there was no tomorrow.

She must speak to her father, but he was in Nice making his way to some Russian church even though he had told her that if she was ever tempted to believe in God she might be having a nervous breakdown. Something else worried her. It was the thing under the bed, but she didn’t want to think about that because it was something to do with Mitchell and anyway now her mother was calling her to go horse-riding.