Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

Whenever I dream my twentieth-century dream about my father, I wake up and immediately forget my passwords for EasyJet and Amazon. It is as if they have disappeared from my head into his head and somewhere in the twenty-first century he is sitting with me on a bus crossing London Bridge watching the rain fall on the chimney of Tate Modern. The conversations I have with him do not belong to this century at all, but all the same I ask him why he never really told me about his childhood? He replies that he hopes my own childhood wasn’t too bad and do I remember the kittens?

Our family kittens (Agnieska and Alicja) always smelt a bit feral and my childhood pleasure was to groom them with my father’s hairbrush. They lay on my lap and I combed out their fur while they purred and patted my hand with their soft paws. When I got near their bottoms the fur was stuck together and tangled because they were still too young to lick themselves clean. Sometimes I left the fur balls on the sofa and my father pretended to swallow them. He’d open his mouth very wide and make out he’d gulped one down and that it was stuck in his throat and he was choking. My father spent his life trying to work out why people had frogs in their throat, butterflies in their stomach, pins and needles in their legs, a thorn in their side, a chip on their shoulder and indeed if they had coughed up fur balls he would have studied them too.

No, he says. I would not have studied the fur balls.

We agree that he and I learned to muddle along together. He washed my vests and tights and T-shirts, sewed buttons on my cardigans, searched for missing socks and insisted I should never be afraid of people talking to themselves on buses.

Yes, my father says. That’s what you are doing now.

No, I reply, that’s not what I am doing now. I am not saying what I’m thinking out loud. That would be mad. No one on this bus can hear me talking to you.

Yes, he says, but it wouldn’t matter anyway because everybody’s talking out loud on their phones.

I still have the beach towel he bought me in a souvenir shop in Nice. The words Côte d’Azur Nice Baie des Anges fly across a big blue sky in a sunny yellow font. Tourists on the beach are rendered in black dots and just behind it is a road lined with palm trees. On the right is the pink dome of the Hotel Negresco with a French flag flying into the towelly blue sky. What it’s missing is Kitty Finch with her copper hair rippling down her waist waiting for my father to read her poem. If she was named after a bird it’s possible she was making a strange call, perhaps an emergency call to my father, but I cannot think about her, or the pebbles we collected together, without wanting to fall through their holes out of the world. So I will replace her with my father walking through France’s fifth biggest city on his way past its monuments and statues to buy a wedge of honeycomb for my mother. The year is 1994 but my father (who has an ice cream in his hand and not a phone) is having a conversation with himself and it’s probably something sad and serious to do with the past. I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made from bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.

The next time I’m sitting on a bus crossing London Bridge and the rain is falling on the chimney of Tate Modern I must tell my father that when I read biographies of famous people, I only get interested when they escape from their family and spend the rest of their life getting over them. That is why when I kiss my daughter goodnight and wish her sweet dreams, she understands my wish for her is kind, but she knows, as all children do, that it’s impossible to be told by our parents what our dreams are supposed to be like. They know they have to dream themselves out of life and back into it, because life must always win us back. All the same, I always say it.

I say it every night, especially when it rains.

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