by Deborah Levy
Kitty swam over and pointed to the silver snails on the paving stones. She said the stars laid their dust over everything. There were bits of broken stars on the snails. And then she blinked.
blah blah blah blah blah blinked
Standing naked in the water, Nina pretended she had a serious speech impediment and made stammering sounds in her head. She felt like someone else. Like someone who had started. Someone who wasn’t her. She felt unbearably happy and plunged her head into the water to celebrate the miracle of Kitty Finch’s arrival. She was not alone with Laura and Mitchell and her mother and father who she wasn’t sure liked each other never mind loved each other.
Nina threw the pebble into the sea, which seemed to annoy Kitty. She stood up and yanked Nina up too.
‘I need to collect more pebbles. That one you threw away was perfect.’
‘Why do you want them?’
‘To study them.’
Nina was hobbling because her trainers were rubbing up against the blisters on the back of her heels. ‘They’re too heavy to carry,’ she groaned. ‘I want to go now.’
Kitty was sweating and her breath smelt sweet.
‘Yeah, well, sorry to waste your time. Have you ever cleaned a floor, Nina? Ever got down on your hands and knees with a rag while your mother screams at you to clean the corners? Have you ever hoovered the stairs and taken out the bin bags?’
The pampered girl in her pricey shorts (she had seen the label) and all her split ends trimmed had obviously got to fourteen years old without lifting a finger.
‘You need some real problems to take back to your posh house in London with you.’
She flung down the rucksack full of pebbles and marched into the sea in the butter-coloured dress she said made her feel extra cheerful. Nina watched her dive into a wave. The house in London Kitty referred to wasn’t exactly cosy. Her father always in his study. Her mother away, her shoes and dresses lined up in the wardrobe like someone who had died. When she was seven and always had nits in her hair the house had smelt of the magic potions she used to make from her mother’s face creams and her father’s shaving foam. The big house in west London smelt of other things too. Of her father’s girlfriends and their various shampoos. And of her father’s perfume, made for him by a Swiss woman from Zurich who married a man who owned two show horses in Bulgaria. He said her perfumes ‘opened his mind’, especially his favourite, which was called Hungary Water. The posh house smelt of his special status and of the sheets he always put in the washing machine after his girlfriends left in the morning. And of the apricot jam he spooned into his mouth straight from the jar. He said the jam changed the weather inside him, but she didn’t know what the weather was in the first place.
She did sort of know. Sometimes when she walked into his study she thought he looked a sorry sight stooped in his dressing gown, silent and still as if he’d been pinned down by something. She’d got used to the days he was sunk in his chair and refused to look at her or even get up for nights on end. She’d close the door of his study and bring him mugs of tea he never touched, because they were still there when she talked to him from behind the door (a slimy beige skin grown over the tea) and asked him for lunch money or to sign a letter giving his permission for a school trip. In the end she signed them herself with his ink pen, which is why she always knew where it was, usually under her bed or upside down in the bathroom with the toothbrushes. She had designed a signature she could always replicate, J.H.J with a full stop between the letters and a flourish on the last J. After a while he usually cheered up and took her to the Angus Steak House, where they sat on the same faded red velvet banquette they always sat on. They never talked about his own childhood or his girlfriends. This was not so much an unspoken secret pact between them, more like having a tiny splinter of glass in the sole of her foot, always there, slightly painful, but she could live with it.
When Kitty came back, her dress dripping wet, she was saying something but the husky was barking at a seagull. Nina could just see Kitty’s lips moving and she knew, with an aching feeling inside her, that she was still angry or something was wrong. As they walked to the car Kitty said, ‘I’m meeting your father at Claude’s café tomorrow. He’s going to talk to me about my poem. Nina, I am so nervous. I should have got a summer job in a pub in London and not bothered. I don’t know what’s going to happen.’
Nina wasn’t listening. She had just seen a boy in silver shorts roller-skating down the esplanade with a bag of lemons tucked under his tanned arm. He looked a bit like Claude but he wasn’t. When she heard a bird screeching in what she thought sounded like agony, she dared not look back at the beach. She thought the husky or snow wolf might have caught the seagull after all. Maybe it wasn’t happening and anyway she had just spotted the old lady who lived next door walking on the promenade. She was talking to Jurgen, who was wearing purple sunglasses in the shape of hearts. Nina called out and waved.
‘That’s Madeleine Sheridan, our neighbour.’
Kitty gazed up. ‘Yes, I know. The evil old witch.’
‘Is she?’
‘Yes. She calls me Katherine and she nearly killed me.’
After she said that, Kitty did something so spooky that Nina told herself she hadn’t seen it properly. She leaned backwards so that her copper hair rippled down the back of her knees and shook her head from side to side very fast while her hands jerked and flailed above her head. Nina could see the fillings in her teeth. And then she lifted her head up and gave Madeleine Sheridan the finger.
Kitty Finch was mental.
Medical Help from Odessa
Madeleine Sheridan was trying to pay for a scoop of caramelised nuts she had bought from the Mexican vendor on the esplanade. The smell of burnt sugar made her greedy for the nuts that would at last, she hoped, choke her to death. Her nails were crumbling, her bones weakening, her hair thinning, her waist gone for ever. She had turned into a toad in old age and if anyone dared to kiss her she would not turn back into a princess because she had never been a princess in the first place.
‘These damn coins. What’s this one, Jurgen?’ Before Jurgen could answer she whispered, ‘Did you see Kitty Finch doing that thing to me?’
He shrugged. ‘Sure. Kitty Ket has something to say to you. But now she has some new friends to make her happy. I have to book the horse-riding for Nina. The Ket will take her.’
She let him take her arm and steer her (a little too fast) into one of the bars on the beach. He was the only person she talked to in any detail about her life in England and her escape from her marriage. She appreciated his stupor, it made him non-judgemental. Despite the difference in their age she enjoyed his company. Having nothing to do in life but live off other people and his wits, he always made her feel dignified rather than a sad case, probably because he wasn’t listening.
Today she was barely listening to him. The arrival of Kitty Finch was bad news. This is what she was thinking as she stared at a motorboat making white frothy scars on the chalky-blue sea. When he found a table in the shade and helped her into a chair that was much too small for a toad, he seemed not to realise she would have to twist her body into positions that made her ache. It was thoughtless of him, but she was too disorientated by the sight of Kitty Finch to care.
She tried to calm herself by insisting Jurgen take off his sunglasses.
‘It’s like looking into two black holes, Jurgen.’
It was her birthday in four days’ time and right now she was thirsty in the heat, almost crazed with thirst. She had been looking forward to their lunch appointment for weeks. That morning she had telephoned her favourite restaurant to find out what was on the menu, where their table was positioned and to request the maître d’ save her a parking space right outside the door in return for a healthy tip. She screamed at a waiter for a whisky and a Pepsi for Jurgen, who disliked alcohol for spiritual reasons. It was hard for an old woman to get a waiter’s attention when he was busy serving topless women sunbathing
in thongs. She had read about yogic siddhas who mastered human invisibility through a combination of concentration and meditation. Somehow she had managed to make her body imperceptible to the waiter without any of the training. She lifted both her arms and waved at him as if she were flagging down an aeroplane on a desert island. Jurgen pointed to the accordion player from Marseilles perched on a wooden box by the flashing pinball machine. The musician was sweating in a black suit three sizes too large for him.
‘He’s playing at a wedding this afternoon. The beekeeper from Valbonne told me. If I got married I would ask him to play at my wedding too.’
Madeleine Sheridan, sipping her hard-won whisky, was surprised at how his voice was suddenly so high-pitched.
‘Marriage is not a good idea, Jurgen.’
Not at all. She began to tell him (again) how the two biggest departures in her life were leaving her family to study medicine and leaving her husband to live in France. She had come to the conclusion that she was not satiated with love for Peter Sheridan and exchanged a respectable life of unhappiness for the unrespectable unhappiness of being a woman who had cut her ties with love. Now it seemed, staring at her companion, whose voice was shaking all over the place, that in his damaged heart (too many cigarettes) he wanted to tie the knot, to close the circle of his life alone, which frankly was an affront.
It reminded her of the time they were walking on the beach in Villefranche and saw a wedding taking place in the harbour. The bridesmaids were dressed in yellow taffeta and the bride in cream and yellow satin. She had scoffed out loud, but what did the hippy Jurgen say?
‘Give them a chance.’
This was the same man who only a few months before had told his girlfriend that nothing had taught him marriage was a good idea. She didn’t believe him and took him to an Argentinian barbecue to propose to him. Great piles of scented wood. Hunks of beef from the pampas thrown on to the fire. His girlfriend ate her way through the red meat until she noticed Jurgen was not eating and remembered he was a militant vegetarian. Perhaps she had laughed too loudly when he told her that.
‘I think Kitty Finch wants to harm me.’
‘Ach, nein.’ Jurgen frowned as if he was in pain. ‘The Ket she only harms herself. Claude asked me why Madame Jacobs insisted she stay. But I have no idea why.’
She gazed at her friend with her cloudy, short-sighted eyes. ‘I believe she wants the beautiful mad girl to distract her husband so she can finally leave him.’
Jurgen suddenly wanted to buy the accordion player a drink. He called the waiter and told him to offer the man in the big suit a beer. Madeleine watched the waiter whisper in the musician’s ear and tried to forget how she came across Kitty Finch in the tunnel by the flower market in Cours Saleya four months ago. Their encounter was one more thing she wanted to add to the long list of things she wanted to forget.
She had found the flame-haired English girl on a cool spring morning on her way to buy two slabs of Marseilles soap, one made from palm oil, the other from olive oil, both mixed with sea plants from the Mediterranean by the local soap master. Kitty was naked and talking to herself on a box of rotten plums the farmers had thrown out at the end of the day. The homeless men who slept in the tunnel were laughing at her, making lewd remarks about her naked body. When Madeleine Sheridan asked her what had happened to her clothes, she said they were on the beach. Madeleine offered to drive to the beach and get her clothes for her. Kitty could stay exactly where she was and wait for her. And then she’d drive her back to the tourist villa where she was staying to study mountain plants. She often stayed there when Rita Dwighter had not let it out to retired hedge-fund managers because Kitty’s mother used to clean for her. Mrs Finch was Rita Dwighter’s right-hand woman, her secretary and cook but mostly her cleaner, because her right hand always had a mop in it.
Kitty Finch insisted she go away or she would shout for the police. Madeleine Sheridan could have left her there, but she did not do that. Kitty was too young to be talking to herself among the dead-eyed men staring at her breasts. To her surprise, the crazy girl suddenly changed her mind. Apparently she had left her jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of shoes, her favourite red polka-dot shoes, on the beach opposite the Hotel Negresco. Kitty leaned towards her and whispered in her ear, ‘Fanks. I’ll wait here while you get them.’ Madeleine Sheridan had walked round the corner and when she thought Kitty could no longer see her she called an ambulance.
In her view Katherine Finch was suffering from psychic anxiety, loss of weight, reduced sleep, agitation, suicidal thoughts, pessimism about the future, impaired concentration.
The musician raised his glass of beer in a thank-you gesture to the snake-hipped man sitting with the old woman.
Kitty Finch had survived her summary. Her mother took her home to Britain and she spent two months in a hospital in Kent, the Garden of England. Apparently the nurses were from Lithuania, Odessa and Kiev. In their white uniforms they looked like snowdrops on the mown green lawns of the hospital. That was what Kitty Finch told her mother and what Mrs Finch told Madeleine, who was astonished to learn that the nurses all chain-smoked in their lunch break.
Jurgen nudged her with his elbow. The accordion player from Marseilles was playing a tune for her. She felt too agitated to listen. Kitty had survived and now she had come to punish her. Perhaps even kill her. Why else was she here? She did not think Kitty was a safe person to drive Nina to the beach and up dangerous mountain roads. She should tell Isabel Jacobs that but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to have that conversation. If she had been on her way to buy soap and ended up calling an ambulance, Transport Sanitaire in French, she did not feel her hands were entirely clean. All the same, to be naked in a public place, to be jumping forwards and then backwards while chanting something incoherent, this had made her frightened for the wretched young woman. It was impossible to believe that someone did not want to be saved from their incoherence.
When the accordion player nodded at Jurgen, the caretaker knew he was in luck. He would buy some hashish and he and Claude would smoke it and get out of the Riviera while all the tourists wanted to get into it. He put his purple sunglasses on again and told Madeleine Sheridan that he was very, very happy today but he was also a little tight in the bowels. He thought his colon was blocked and this was because he had not lived his dream. What was his dream? He took a sip of Pepsi and noticed the English doctor had dressed up for lunch. She had put lipstick on and her hair, what was left of it, had been washed and curled. He could not tell her his dream was to win the lotto and marry Kitty Ket.
TUESDAY
Reading and Writing
Joe Jacobs lay on his back in the master bedroom, as it was described in the villa’s fact sheet, longing for a curry. The place he most wanted to be at this moment was in his Hindu tailor’s workshop in Bethnal Green. Surrounded by silk. Drinking sweet tea. What he was missing in the Alpes-Maritimes was dhal. Rice. Yoghurt. And buses. He missed the top deck of buses. And newspapers. And weather forecasts. Sometimes he sat in his study in west London with the radio on and listened intently to what the weather was going to be like in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. If the sun was shining in west London, it comforted him to know it would be snowing in Scotland and raining in Wales. Now he was going to have to sit up and not lie down. Worse, he was going to have to stand up and search the master bedroom for Kitty Finch’s poem. In the distance he could hear Mitchell shooting rabbits in the orchard. He knelt on the floor and grabbed the envelope he had kicked under the bed. He held the battered envelope in his hands and found himself staring at the title written in the neat scientific handwriting of a botanist used to making precise drawings of plants and labelling them.
Swimming Home
by
Kitty Finch
When he finally prised out the sheet of paper inside it, he was surprised to feel his hand trembling in the way his father’s hand might have trembled if he had lived long enough to mend kettles in his old age. He held th
e page closer to his eyes and forced himself to read the words floating on the page. And then he moved the page further away from his eyes and read it again. There was no angle that made it easier to comprehend. Her words were all over the place, swimming round the edges of the rectangle of paper, sometimes disappearing altogether but coming back to the centre of the lined page with its sad and final message. What did she hope he might say to her after he had read it? He was mystified. A fish van had pulled up outside the villa. The voice bellowing through a loudspeaker was shouting out the names of fish. Some were grand, some were petit. Some were six francs and some were thirteen francs. None of them had swum home. They were all caught on the way. The Sellotape that had sealed the lip of the envelope reminded him of a plaster on a graze. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He was going to have to busk it at lunch with her. He checked the inside of his jacket pocket to make sure his wallet was there and kicked the envelope under the bed, telling himself once again how much he hated Tuesdays. And Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, etc.
et cetera
A Latin expression meaning ‘and other things’ or ‘so forth’ or ‘the rest of such things’. The poem, ‘Swimming Home’, was mostly made up of etcs; he had counted seven of them in one half of the page alone. What kind of language was this?
My mother says I’m the only jewel in her crown
But I’ve made her tired with all my etc,
So now she walks with sticks
To accept her language was to accept that she held him, her reader, in great esteem. He was being asked to make something of it and what he made of it was that every etc concealed some thing that could not be said.