Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

The ponies were drinking water from a tank in the shade. Flies crawled over their swollen bellies and short legs and into their brown eyes that always seemed wet. As Nina watched the woman who hired them out brush their tails, she decided she would have to tell her mother about Kitty’s drowning poem, as she now called it. Kitty was speaking in French to the pony woman and didn’t look like someone who was about to drown herself. She was wearing a short blue dress and there were small white feathers in her hair, as if her pillow had burst in the night.

‘We have to follow the trail. There’s an orange plastic bag tied to the branches of the trees. The woman says we have to follow the orange plastic and walk either side of the pony.’

Nina, who wanted to be alone with her mother, found herself forced to choose a grey pony with long scabby ears and pretend she was having a perfect childhood.

The little pony was not in the mood to be hired out for an hour. She stopped every two minutes to graze the grass and nuzzle her head against the bark of trees. Nina was impatient. She had important things on her mind, not least the stones she had collected with Kitty on the beach, because she thought they were in the poem. She had seen the words ‘The Drowning Stones’ underlined in the middle of the page.

She noticed her mother was suddenly taking notice of things. When Kitty pointed out trees and different kinds of grasses, Isabel asked her to repeat their names. Kitty was saying that certain types of insects needed to drink nectar in the heatwave. Did Isabel know that honey is just spit and nectar? When bees suck nectar they mix it with their saliva and store the mixture in their honey sacs. Then they throw up their honey sacs and start all over again. Kitty was talking as if they were one big happy family, all the while holding the rope between her thumb and finger. Nina sat in silence on the pony, staring moodily at the cracks of blue sky she could see through the trees. If she turned the sky upside down the pony would have to swim through clouds and vapour. The sky would be grass. Insects would run across the sky. The trail seemed to have disappeared, because there were no more orange plastic bags tied to the branches of trees. They had come out of the pine forest into a clearing near a café. The café was opposite a lake. Nina scanned the trees for bits of ripped orange plastic and knew they were lost, but Kitty didn’t care. She was waving at someone, trying to get the attention of a woman sitting alone on the terrace outside the café.

‘It’s Dr Sheridan. Let’s go and say hello.’

She walked the pony straight off what remained of the trail and led it up the three shallow concrete steps towards Madeleine Sheridan, who had taken off her spectacles and placed them on the white plastic table next to her book.

Nina found herself stranded on the pony as Kitty led her past the bemused waitress carrying a tray of Orangina to a family at a nearby table. The old woman seemed to have frozen on her chair at the moment she was about to put a cube of sugar into her cup of coffee. It was as if the sight of a slender young woman in a short blue dress, her red hair snaking down her back, leading a grey pony on to the terrace of a café was a vision that could only be glanced at sideways. No one felt able to intervene because they did not fully know what it was they were seeing. It reminded Nina of the day she watched an eclipse through a hole in coloured paper, careful not to be blinded by the sun.

‘How are you, Doctor?’

Kitty pulled at the rope and gave the pony a sugar cube. With one hand still holding the rope, she draped her arm around the old woman’s shoulder.

Madeleine Sheridan’s voice when she finally spoke was calm, authoritative. She was wearing a red shawl that looked like a matador’s cloak with pom-poms sewn across the edge.

‘Stick to the track, Kitty. You can’t bring ponies in here.’

‘The track has disappeared. There’s no track to stick to.’ She smiled. ‘I’m still waiting for you to bring me back my shoes like you said you would. The nurses told me I had dirty feet.’

Nina glanced at her mother, who was now standing on the left side of the pony. Kitty’s hands were shaking and she was speaking too loudly.

‘I’m surprised you haven’t told my new friends what you did to me.’ She turned to Isabel and imitated a horror-film whisper: ‘Dr Sheridan said I have a morbid predisposition.’

To Nina’s dismay, her mother actually laughed as if she and Kitty were sharing a joke.

The waitress brought out a plate of sausages and green beans and thumped it in front of Madeleine Sheridan, muttering to her in French about getting the pony out of the café.

Kitty winked at Nina. First with her left eye. And then with her right eye. ‘The waitress isn’t used to ponies coming in for breakfast.’

On cue the pony started to lick the sausages on the plate and all the children at the next table laughed.

Kitty took a small sip of the doctor woman’s untouched coffee. Her eyes had stopped winking. ‘Actually’ — her knuckle suddenly turned white as she gripped the rope that was supposed to keep the pony on the trail — ‘she had me locked up.’ She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I EMBARRASSED HER SO SHE CALLED AN AMBULANCE.’

Kitty picked up the knife from the plate, a sharp knife, and waved it at Madeleine Sheridan’s throat. All the children in the café screamed, including Nina. She heard the old woman, her voice straining, telling her mother that Kitty was sick and unpredictable. Kitty was shaking her head and shouting at her.

‘You said you’d get my clothes. I waited for you. You’re a LIAR. I thought you were kind but they electrocuted me because of you. They did it THREE times. The nurse wanted to shave off some of my HAIR.’

The point of her knife hovered a centimetre away from Madeleine Sheridan’s milky pearl necklace.

‘I want to go!’ Nina shouted at her mother, trying to keep her balance as the pony, its pointed ears now alert, jerked forward to find the bowl of sugar cubes.

Isabel tried to undo the stirrups so Nina could get off the pony. The waitress was helping her with the buckles and Nina managed to swing her legs over the saddle but didn’t dare jump because the pony suddenly reared up.

Someone in the café was calling the park keeper on the telephone.

‘THEY BURNED MY THOUGHTS TO MAKE THEM GO AWAY.’

As she moved closer to Madeleine Sheridan, waving the knife at her stricken frozen face, two small white feathers caught in her hair drifted towards Nina, who was still struggling to get off the pony.

‘The doctors PEEPED at me through a spyhole. They forced MEAT down my throat. I tried to put on face cream but my jaws HURT from the shocks. I would rather DIE than have that done to me again.’

Nina heard herself speak.

‘Kitty is going to drown herself.’

It was as if she was the only person who could hear her own voice. She was saying important things but apparently not important enough.

‘Katherine is going to drown herself.’

Even to her own ears it sounded like a whisper, but she thought the old woman doctor might have heard her all the same. Her mother had somehow managed to grab the knife out of Kitty’s hand and Nina heard Madeleine Sheridan’s wobbling voice say, ‘I must telephone the police. I’m going to call her mother. I must call her straight away.’ She stopped because Jurgen had suddenly arrived.

It was as if Kitty had conjured him in her mind. He was talking to the park keeper, who was shaking his head and looked flustered.

‘I have witnesses.’ The pom-poms on Madeleine Sheridan’s red cape were jumping up and down as if they were the witnesses she referred to.