Swimming Home (7 page)

‘Come and say hello when you’re awake.’

Nina’s eyes were shut extra tight. Isabel closed the door.

When she walked into the kitchen she told Jozef and Laura that Nina was sleeping with Kitty.

‘Ah. Thought as much.’ Her husband scratched the back of his neck and disappeared into the garden to get his pen, which, Laura informed him, was ‘under Kitty’s chair’. He had covered his bare shoulders with a white pillowcase and looked like a self-ordained holy man. He did this to stop his shoulders burning when he wrote in the sun, but it infuriated Laura all the same. When she looked at him again he was examining the gold nib as if it had been damaged in some way. She opened the fridge. Mitchell wanted a piece of stale cheese to trap the brown rat he had seen scuttling about in the kitchen at night. It had gnawed through the salami hung on a hook above the sink and he’d had to throw it away. Mitchell was not so much squeamish as outraged by the vermin who devoured the morsels he bought with his hard-earned money. He took it personally, as if slowly but surely the rats were gnawing through his wallet.

So his lost daughter was asleep in Kitty’s bed. Joe sat in the garden at his makeshift desk, waiting for the panic that had made his fingers tear the back of his neck to calm as he watched his wife talking to Laura inside the villa. His breathing was all over the place, he was fighting to breathe. Did he think Kitty Finch, who had stopped taking Seroxat and must be suffering, had lost her grip and murdered his daughter? His wife was now walking towards him through the gaps in the cypress trees. He shifted his legs as if part of him wanted to run away from her or perhaps run towards her. He truly did not know which way to go. He could try to tell Isabel something, but he wasn’t sure how to begin because he wasn’t sure how it would end. There were times he thought she could barely look at him without hiding her face in her hair. And he could not look at her either, because he had betrayed her so often. Perhaps now he should at least try and tell her that when she abandoned her young daughter to lie in a tent crawling with scorpions, he understood it made more sense of her life to be shot at in war zones than lied to by him in the safety of her own home. All the same, he knew his daughter had cried for her in the early years, and then later learned not to because it didn’t bring her back. In turn (this subject turned and turned and turned regularly in his mind), his daughter’s distress brought to him, her father, feelings he could not handle with dignity. He had told his readers how he was sent to boarding school by his guardians and how he used to watch the parents of his school friends leave on visiting day (Sundays), and if his own parents had visited him too, he would have stood for ever in the tyre marks their car had made in the dust. His mother and father were night visitors, not afternoon visitors. They appeared to him in dreams he instantly forgot, but he reckoned they were trying to find him. What had worried him most was he thought they might not have enough English words between them to make themselves understood. Is Jozef my son here? We have been looking for him all over the world. He had cried for them and then later learned not to because it didn’t bring them back. He looked at his clever tanned wife with her dark hair hiding her face. This was the conversation that might start something or end something, but it came out wrong, just too random and fucked. He heard himself ask her if she liked honey.

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Because I know so little about you, Isabel.’

He would poke his paw inside every hollow of every tree to scoop up the honeycomb and lay it at her feet if he thought she might stay a little longer with him and their cub. She looked hostile and lonely and he understood it. He obviously disgusted her. She even preferred Mitchell’s company to his.

He heard her say, ‘The main thing to do for the rest of the summer is to make sure Nina is all right.’

‘Of course Nina is all right,’ he snapped. ‘I’ve looked after her since she was three years old and she’s bloody all right, isn’t she?’

And then he took out his notebook and the black ink pen that had disappeared that morning, knowing that Isabel was defeated every time he appeared to be writing and every time he talked about their daughter. These were his weapons to silence his wife and keep her in his life, to keep his family intact, flawed and hostile but still a family. His daughter was his main triumph in their marriage, the one thing he had done right.

–
yes yes yes she said yes yes yes she likes honey
– his pen scratched these words aggressively across the page while he watched a white butterfly hover above the pool. It was like breath. It was a miracle. A wonder. He and his wife knew things it was impossible to know. They had both seen life snuffed out. Isabel recorded and witnessed catastrophes to try and make people remember. He tried to make himself forget.

‘It has a hole in the middle.’

Kitty held up a pebble the size of her hand and gave it to Nina to look through. They were sitting on one of the public beaches in Nice below the Promenade des Anglais. Kitty said on the private beaches they had to pay a fortune for sunloungers and umbrellas. Everyone looked like patients on hospital beds and gave her the creeps. The sun was burning pink blotches in her waxy pale face.

Nina obediently looked through the hole. She saw a young woman smiling, a purple jewel drilled into her front tooth. When she turned the pebble round the woman was unpacking a carrier bag of food. There was another woman there too, sitting on a low striped canvas chair, and she was holding a large white dog by the lead with her right hand. The dog looked like a snow wolf. A husky with blue eyes. Nina stared into its blue eyes from the hole in the pebble. She couldn’t be sure of this but she thought the snow wolf was undoing the shoelaces of the woman with the jewel in her tooth. Nina saw all of this in fragments through the hole in the pebble. When she looked again she saw the woman in the black T-shirt only had one arm. She turned the pebble lengthways and peered through it, squeezing her eye half shut. An electric wheelchair decorated with shells was parked near the canvas chair. Now the women were kissing. Like lovers. Watching them lean into each other, Nina heard her own breath get louder. She had been thinking all holiday about what she would do if she ever found herself alone with Claude. He had invited her to come to his café for what he described as an aperitif. She wasn’t sure what that was and anyway something had happened that changed everything.

Last night when she woke up she discovered she was menstruating for the first time. She had dared herself to put on her bikini because it was the only thing she could find and knock on Kitty’s door to tell her the news. Kitty was lying awake under an old tablecloth and she had rolled up one of her dresses to make a pillow.

‘I’ve started.’

At first Kitty didn’t know what she meant. And then she grabbed Nina’s hand and they ran into the garden. Nina could see her own shadow in the pool and in the sky at the same time. She was tall and long, there was no end to her and no beginning, her body stretched out and vast. She wanted to swim and when Kitty insisted it didn’t matter about the blood, she dared herself to take off her bikini and be naked, watching her twin shadow untie the straps more bravely than the real-sized Nina actually felt. She finally jumped into the pool and hid herself in the blanket of leaves that floated in the water, not sure what to do with her new body because it was morphing into something alien and perplexing to her.

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.

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?’