Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

He heard himself say, ‘Why don’t you pack a rucksack and see the poppy fields in Pakistan like you said you wanted to?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Will you come with me?’

He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain air stung his lips. She was driving too fast on this road that had once been a forest. Early humans had lived in it. They studied fire and the movement of the sun. They read the clouds and the moon and tried to understand the human mind. His father had tried to melt him into a Polish forest when he was five years old. He knew he must leave no trace or trail of his existence because he must never find his way home. That was what his father had told him. You cannot come home. This was not something possible to know but he had to know it all the same.

•

‘Why haven’t you read my pah pah pah?’

‘My sweetheart’ is what she heard him say as she pressed her white shoe on the brakes. The car lurched towards the edge of the mountain. His voice was truly tender when he said ‘My sweetheart’. Something had changed in his voice. Her head was buzzing as if she had knocked back fifteen espressos one after the other. And then eaten twelve lumps of sugar. She turned the engine off, pulled the handbrake up and leaned back in her seat. At last. At last he was talking to her.

‘It is dishonest to give me a poem and pretend to want my opinion when what you really want are reasons to live. Or reasons not to die.’

‘You want reasons to live too.’

He leaned towards her and kissed her eyes. First the left and then the right, as if she was already a corpse.

‘I’m not the right reader for your poem. You know that.’

She thought about this while she sucked on her blue mouse.

‘The important thing is not the dying. It’s making the decision to die that matters.’

He took out his handkerchief to hide his own eyes. He had vowed never to show the dread and worthlessness and panic in his own eyes to his wife and daughter. He loved them, his dark-haired wife and child, he loved them and he could never tell them what it was that had been on his mind for a long time. The unwelcome tears continued to pour out of him just as they had poured out of Kitty Finch in the orchard full of suffering trees and invisible growling dogs. He must apologise for not stamping on his own desires, for not fighting it all the way.

‘I’m sorry about what happened in the Negresco.’

‘What happened in the Negresco that you’re sorry about?’

Her voice was soft, confident and reasonable.

‘I know you like silk so I wore a silk dress.’

He felt her fingers tap his wet cheek and he could smell his perfume in her hair. To have been so intimate with her had brought him to the edge of something truthful and dangerous. To the edge of all the bridges he had stood on in European cities. The Thames flowing east across southern England and emptying into the North Sea. The Danube that started in the Black Forest of Germany and ended in the Black Sea. The Rhine that ended in the North Sea. Sex with her had brought him to the edge of the yellow line on the platforms of tube and train stations where he had stood thinking about it. Paddington. South Kensington. Waterloo. Once in the Metro in Paris. Twice in Berlin. Death had been on his mind for a long time. The thought, the throwing of himself into rivers and into trains lasted two seconds, a tremor, a twitch, a blink and a step forwards but, so far, a step backwards again. A step back to five beers for the price of four, back to roasting a chicken for Nina, back to tea, Yorkshire or Tetley’s, never Earl Grey, back to Isabel, who was always somewhere else.

He was the wrong reader for her to ask if she should live or die because he was barely here himself. He wondered what kind of catastrophe lived inside Kitty Finch. She told him she had forgotten what she remembered. He wanted to close down like Mitchell and Laura’s shop in Euston. Everything that was open must close. His eyes. His mouth. His nostrils. His ears that could still hear things. He told Kitty Finch he had read her poem and that it been ringing inside him ever since. She was a writer of immeasurable power and more than anything he hoped she would do the things she wanted to do. She must travel to the Great Wall in China, to the vitality and dream that is India, and she must not forget the mysterious luminous lakes closer to home in Cumbria. These were all things to look forward to.

It was getting dark and she told him the brakes on the hire car were fucked, she couldn’t see a thing, she couldn’t even see her hands.

He told her to keep her eyes on the road, to just do that, and while he was speaking she was kissing him and driving at the same time.

‘I know what you’re thinking. Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely. But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all. That is why I am here, Jozef. I have come to France to save you from your thoughts.’

When Nina woke up just after dawn on Saturday morning she knew immediately everything had changed. The doors of her balcony were wide open as if someone had been there in the night. When she saw a yellow square of paper rolled up like a scroll on her pillow she knew she would be wiser to go back to sleep and hide all day. The words on the yellow paper were written in shaky handwriting by someone who was in a hurry and who obviously liked writing things down. She finished reading the note and crept downstairs to the French doors that led to the pool. They were already open, as she thought they would be. She knew what she was going to see.

Something was floating in the pool and that did not surprise her. At a second glance she saw that Kitty’s body was not so much floating as submerged vertically in the water. She was wrapped in a tartan dressing gown but the gown had slipped. The yellow lilo bounced against the edges of the pool and floated towards the body. She heard herself call out.

‘Kitty?’

The head was low in the water, tilted back with its mouth open. And then she saw the eyes. The eyes were glassy and open and they were not Kitty’s eyes.

‘Dad?’

Her father did not reply. She thought he was playing a joke on her. Any second he would rise from the water and roar at her.

‘Dad?’

His body was so big and silent. All the noise that was her father, all the words and spluttering and utterances inside him, had disappeared into the water. All she knew was that she was screaming and then suddenly doors were banging and her mother had dived into the pool. Mitchell jumped in too. Together they steered the body around the lilo and with difficulty were trying to lift it out of the pool. Nina heard her mother shout something to Laura. She watched Mitchell lay the body down on the paving stones and press his hands up and down on it. She could hear the sound of water splashing as her mother heaved the dressing gown out of the water. She did not understand why it was so heavy but then she saw her mother pull something out of the pockets. It was a pebble the size of her hand and it had a hole in the middle of it. Nina could see her struggling with three more of the pebbles she had collected on the beach with Kitty and she thought it must have got later and the sun was rising over the pool because the water had changed colour. She shivered and searched for the sun in the sky but she could not see it.

Mitchell stuck his fingers in her father’s mouth. And then he pinched his nose. Mitchell was panting and actually kissing her father over and over again.