Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

‘It’s my birthday today.’

She heard the small begging voice that came out of her mouth but it was too late to try and catch another tone. If she could have said it again it would have been light, airy, amused at being alive at all. Isabel looked genuinely taken aback.

‘Happy birthday! If you’d told me I would have bought a bottle of champagne.’

‘Yes. Thank you for the thought.’ Madeleine Sheridan heard herself speaking in entitled middle-class English again.

‘Someone has burgled my garden. My roses have been stolen and of course I know that Kitty Finch is very angry with me.’

The exotic wife of the poet was saying something about how stealing a rose was not exactly proof of insanity and anyway it was getting late and she wanted to say goodnight to her daughter. From the window opposite she saw a full moon float across the sky. What was the poet’s wife doing? She was walking towards her. She was getting closer. She could smell honey.

Isabel Jacobs was wishing her happy birthday again and her lips were warm on her cheek. The kiss hurt as much as the pains in her throat.

Nina was asleep but in her dream she was awake and she found herself walking towards the spare room where Kitty lay on the bed. Her face was swollen and her lip was split. She looked like Kitty but not a lot. She heard Kitty whisper her name.

Nina crept closer. Kitty’s eyelids were dusted with green eyeshadow. They looked like leaves. Nina sat on the end of the bed. Kitty was forbidden because she was dangerous. She did dangerous things. Nina swallowed hard and gave dead Kitty some information.

Your mother is coming to get you.

She placed a blue sugar mouse on the edge of Kitty’s foot. It had a tiny tail made from string. Nina had found it under Kitty’s bed.

And I’ve bought you some soap.

She had seen Kitty look for soap lots of times but there wasn’t any in her bathroom and she said she’d spent all her money on the hire car.

I read your poem. I think it’s brilliant. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read in my life.

She quoted Kitty’s lines to her. Not like how they were in the poem but how she remembered them.

Jumping forwards with both feet

Jumping backwards with both feet

Thinking of ways to live

Kitty’s eyelids trembled and Nina knew she had got the poem all wrong and hadn’t remembered it properly. And then she asked Kitty to stick out her tongue, but Kitty was speaking to her in Yiddish or it might have been German and she was saying, ‘Get up!’, which is what made Nina wake up.

He slipped his hands around her neck and untied the white satin ribbon of her feather cape. The four-poster bed draped in heavy gold curtains resembled a cave. She heard a car alarm go off while seagulls screamed on the window ledge and her eyes were fixed on the wallpaper. The white feathers of her cape lay scattered on the sheet as if it had been attacked by a fox. She had bought it in a flea market in Athens but had never worn it until now. A swan was a symbol of the dying year in autumn, she had read that somewhere. It had stuck in her head and made her think of the way swans stick their heads in the water and turn themselves upside down. She had been saving the cape for something, perhaps for this; it was hard to know what she had had in mind when she exchanged money for the feathers that had insulated this water-bird from the cold and were also made from quills that were once used as pens. He was inside her now but he was inside her anyway, that was what she couldn’t tell him but she had told him in her poem which he had not read and now the car alarm had stopped and she could hear voices outside the window. A thief must have broken into a car, because someone was sweeping up broken glass.

After a while he ran her a bath.

They walked down to reception and she stood under the blinding Austrian crystals of the chandelier while Joe signed something with his pen. The Italian receptionist gave him back his credit card and the porter opened the glass doors for them. Everything was like it was before but a little bit different. The pianist was still playing ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in the bar they had left two hours ago, except now he was singing the words. The palm trees planted along the two lanes of traffic were lit up with golden fairy lights. Kitty jangled the car keys in her hand and told Joe to wait while she bought herself a sugar mouse from the candy stall on the esplanade. The mice were lined up on a silver tray. Pink white yellow blue. She pushed in front of a Vietnamese woman buying strawberry marshmallows and examined the tiny tails made from string. She eventually chose a blue mouse, dropping the car keys as she searched her bag for coins. When they got to the car she told him she was hungry. Her stutter had returned to torment them both. Would he mind if she stopped somewhere for a pah pah pah? Of course, he said, I’d like a pizza too, and they found a restaurant with tables outside in the warm night next to a church. It was the first time he had seen her eat. She devoured the thin pizza with anchovies and he bought her another one with capers and they drank red wine as if they were indeed the lovers they were not supposed to be. She played with the night-lights burning on the table, making prints of her fingertips from the wax, and when he requested she give him one to keep for ever she told him her fingerprints were all over his body anyway. And then she told him about the hospital in Kent and how the nurses from Odessa compared their love bites in the lunch break. She had written about that too but she was not asking him to read it — she was just telling him it would be part of her first collection of poetry. He helped her to salad and spooned artichokes on to her plate and watched her long fingers mop up the oil with bread. They clinked glasses and she told him how after the shock treatment when she lay damaged on the white sheets she knew the English doctors had not erased the thoughts inside her head, etc, but he would know all about that and why go into it now because the night was soft here in the alleyways of old Nice in contrast to the day when it was hard and smelt of money. To all of this he nodded and though he asked her no questions he knew that in a way they were talking about her poem. Two hours later, when they were halfway up the mountain road, Kitty hunched over the steering wheel as she manoeuvred the car around perilous bends, he glanced at his watch. She was a skilled driver. He admired her firm hands with their waxy fingertips on the steering wheel as she pulled the car round the mountain bends. Kitty beeped the horn as a rabbit ran across the road and the car swerved.

She asked him to open his window so she could hear the animals calling to each other in the dark. He wound down the window and told her to keep her eyes on the road. ‘Yes,’ she said again, her eyes now back on the road. Her silk dress was falling off her shoulders as she bent over the steering wheel. He had something to ask her. A delicate request which he hoped she would understand.

‘It would be better for Isabel if she does not know what happened tonight.’

Kitty laughed and the blue mouse bounced in her lap.

‘Isabel already knows.’

‘Knows what?’ He told her he was feeling dizzy. Would she slow down?

‘That’s why she invited me to stay. She wants to leave you.’

He needed the car to move slowly. He had vertigo and could feel himself falling although he knew he was sitting in the passenger seat of a hire car. Was it true that Isabel had started the beginning of the end of their marriage and invited Kitty Finch to be the last betrayal? He dared not look down at the waterfalls roaring against the rocks or the uprooted shrubs that clung to the sides of the mountain.