Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

Kitty leapt out of the water and walked to the edge of the pool, picking bay leaves off a small tree that grew in a pot by the shallow end. Isabel got out too and sat on the edge of a white recliner. The journalist wife was lighting a cigarette absent-mindedly, as if she was thinking about something more important than what was happening now. She must have seen the battered A4 envelope Kitty had left propped against the bedroom door.

Swimming Home

by

Kitty Finch

She did not tell Isabel that she was feeling hot and her vision was blurred. Her skin was itching and she thought her tongue might be swollen too. Nor did she tell her about the spectral boy who had walked out of the wall to greet her when she woke up. He had stolen some of her plants, because when he walked back into the wall he had a bundle of them in his arms. She thought he might be searching for ways to die. The words she heard him say were words she heard in her head and not with her ears. He was waving as if to greet her, but now she thought he might have been saying goodbye.

‘So did you come here because you’re a fan of Jozef’s poetry?’

Kitty chewed slowly on a silver bay leaf until she could mask the anxiety in her voice. ‘I suppose I am a fan. Though I don’t see it like that.’

She paused, waiting for her voice to steady itself. ‘Joe’s poetry is more like a conversation with me than anything else. He writes about things I often think. We are in nerve contact.’

She turned round to see Isabel stub out her cigarette with her bare foot. Kitty gasped.

‘Didn’t that hurt?’

If Isabel had burned herself she seemed not to care.

‘What does “nerve contact” with Jozef mean?’

‘It doesn’t mean anything. I just thought of it now.’

Kitty noticed how Isabel Jacobs always used her husband’s full name. As if she alone owned the part of him that was secret and mysterious, the part of him that wrote things. How could she tell her that she and Joe were transmitting messages to each other when she didn’t understand it herself? This was something she would discuss with Jurgen. He would explain that she had extra senses because she was a poet and then he would say words to her in German that she knew were love words. It was always tricky to get away from him at night, so she was grateful to have the spare room to escape to. Yes, in a way she was grateful to Isabel for saving her from Jurgen’s love.

‘What’s your poem about?’

Kitty studied the bay leaf, her fingertips tracing the outline of its silver veins.

‘I can’t remember.’

Isabel laughed. This was offensive. Kitty was offended. No longer grateful, she glared at the woman who had offered her the spare room but had not bothered to provide sheets or pillows or notice the windows did not open and the floor was covered in mouse droppings. The journalist was asking her questions as if she was about to file her copy. She was curvaceous and tall, her black hair dark as an Indian woman’s, and she wore a gold band on her left hand to show she was married. Her fingers were long and smooth, like she’d never scrubbed a pot clean or poked her fingers into the earth. She had not even bothered to offer her guest a few clothes hangers. Nina had had to bring down an armful from her own cupboard. Nevertheless Isabel Jacobs was still asking questions, because she wanted to be in control.

‘You said you know the owner of this villa?’

‘Yeah. She’s a shrink called Rita Dwighter and she’s a friend of my mother’s. She’s got houses everywhere. In fact she’s got twelve properties in London alone worth about two million each. She probably asks her patients if they’ve got a mortgage.’

Isabel laughed and this time Kitty laughed too.

‘Thank you for letting me stay, by the way.’

Isabel nodded dismissively and said something about going inside to make toast and honey. Kitty watched her run through the glass doors, bumping into Laura, who was now sitting at the kitchen table, a pair of earphones clamped on her head and a tangle of wires around her neck. Laura was learning some sort of African language, her thin lips mouthing the words out loud.

Kitty sat naked and shivering at the end of the pool, listening to the tall blonde woman with scared blue eyes repeat singsong sentences from another continent. She could hear the church bells ringing in the village and she could hear someone sighing. When she looked up she had to stop herself from losing it for the second time that morning. Madeleine Sheridan was sitting on her balcony as usual, staring at her as if she was scanning the ocean for a shark. That was too much. Kitty jumped up and shook her fist at the shadowy figure drinking her morning tea.

‘Don’t fucking watch me all the time. I’m still waiting for you to get my shoes, Dr Sheridan. Have you got them yet?’

Jurgen was dragging an inflatable three-foot rubber alien with a wrinkled neck into the kitchen of Claude’s café. He had bought it at the flea market on Saturday and he and Claude were having three conversations at once. Claude, who had only just turned twenty-three and knew he looked like Mick Jagger, owned the only café in the village and was planning to sell it to Parisian property developers next year. What Claude wanted to know was why the tourists had offered Kitty Finch a room.

Jurgen scratched his scalp and swung his dreadlocks to get an angle on the question. The effort was exhausting him and he could not find an answer. Claude, whose silky shoulder-length hair was expensively cut to make it look as if he never bothered with it, reckoned Kitty must secretly be repulsed by the dreadlocks Jurgen cultivated, because she knew she could stay with him whenever she wanted. At the same time they were both jeering at Mitchell, who was sitting on the terrace stuffing himself with baguettes and jam while he waited for the grocery store to open. The fat man with his collection of old guns was running up a tab at the café and the grocery store, which was run by Claude’s mother. Mitchell was going to bankrupt Claude’s entire family. Meanwhile Jurgen was explaining the plot of the film ET while Claude peeled potatoes. Jurgen whipped the cigarette butt out of his friend’s thick lips and sucked on it while he tried to remember the film he’d seen in Monaco three years ago.

‘ET is this baby alien who finds himself lost on earth, three million light years away from home. He makes friends with a ten-year-old boy and they start to have a very special connection with each other.’

Claude gave the little alien in his kitchen a leering wink. ‘What sort of connection?’

Jurgen swung his dreadlocks over a freshly baked pear tart cooling under the kitchen window as if to summon a plot he had long forgotten.

‘So … if ET gets sick the earth boy gets sick, if ET is hungry earth boy gets hungry, if ET is tired or sad then earth boy suffers with him. The alien and his friend are in touch with each other’s thoughts. They are mentally connected.’

Claude grimaced, because he was being called by Mitchell for another basket of bread and a slice of the pear tart, newly written into the menu. Claude told Jurgen he couldn’t work out why the fat man never had any money on him despite staying in the luxurious villa. His tab had gone off the scale. ‘So anyway how does ET end?’

Jurgen, who was usually too stoned to remember anything, had just spotted Joe Jacobs in the distance, walking among the sheep grazing in the mountains. For some reason he could remember every line the baby alien uttered in the film. He thought this was because he was also an alien, a German nature boy living in France. He explained that ET has to disconnect himself from the boy because he fears he will make him too sick and he doesn’t want to harm him. And then he finds a way of getting home to his own planet.