Swimming Home (6 page)

‘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.

Jurgen nudged Claude and pointed to the English poet in the distance. He looked like he was saluting something invisible, because his fingers were touching his forehead. Claude quite liked the poet, because he always left big tips and had somehow managed to produce a gorgeous, long-legged teenage daughter whom Claude had personally invited to the café for an aperitif. So far she had not taken him up on his offer, but he lived in hope because, as he told Jurgen, what else was there to live in?

‘He is superstitious, he’s just seen a magpie. He is famous. Do you want to be famous?’

Jurgen nodded. And then shook his head and helped himself to a swig from a bottle of green liquid leaning against the cooking oil.

‘Yes. Sometimes I think it would be nice to no longer be a caretaker and everyone wants to kiss my arse. But there is one problem. I don’t have the energy to be famous. I have too much to do.’

Claude pointed to the poet, who looked like he was still saluting magpies.

‘Perhaps he is homesick. He wants to go home to his planet.’

Jurgen gargled with the green drink that Claude knew was mint syrup. Jurgen was more or less addicted to it in the same way some people are addicted to absinthe, which had the same fairy green colour.

‘No. He is just avoiding Kitty Ket. He has not read Ket’s thing and he is avoiding her. The Ket is like ET. She thinks she has a mental connection with the poet. He has not read her thing and she will be sad and her blood pressure will go up and she will murder them all with the fat man’s guns.’

Mitchell lay on his back sweating. It was three a.m. and he had just had a nightmare about a centipede. He had hacked it with a carving knife but it split in two and started to grow again. The more he hacked at it the more centipedes there were. They writhed at his feet. He was up to his ears in centipedes and the blade of his knife was covered in slime. They were crawling into his nostrils and trying to get into his mouth. When he woke up he wondered if he should tell Laura his heart was pounding so hard and fast he thought he might be about to have a heart attack. Laura was sleeping peacefully on her side, her feet poking out of the bed. There was no bed in the world that was long enough for Laura. Their bed in London had been specially designed for her height and his width by a Danish shipbuilder. It took up the whole room and resembled a galleon beached on a pond in a civic park. Something was crawling towards him along the whitewashed wall. He screamed.

‘What is it, Mitch?’ Laura sat up and put her hand on her husband’s heaving chest.

He pointed to the thing on the wall.

‘It’s a moth, Mitchell.’

Sure enough it spread its grey wings and flew out of the window.

‘I had a nightmare,’ he grunted. ‘A terrible, terrible nightmare.’

She squeezed his hot clammy hand. ‘Go back to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.’ She tugged the sheet over her shoulder and lay down again.

There was no way he could sleep. Mitchell got up and walked upstairs to the kitchen, where he felt most safe. He opened the fridge and reached for a bottle of water. As he put the bottle to his lips and thirstily gulped down the iced water, he felt in bits and pieces like the centipede. When he lifted up his aching head, he noticed something lying on the kitchen floor. It was the trap he had set for the rat. He had caught something. He swallowed hard and made his way towards it.

A small animal was lying on its side with its back to him, but it was not a rat. He recognised the creature. It was Nina’s brown nylon rabbit, its long floppy ear stapled under the wire. He could see its worn white ball of a tail and the grubby label sewn inside its leg. The green satin ribbon around its neck had somehow got tangled in the wires too. He found himself sweating as he bent down to free it from the wire and then noticed a shadow on the floor. Someone was there with him. Someone had broken into the villa and he didn’t have his guns with him. Even his ancient ebony weapon from Persia would see off whoever was there.

‘Hello, Mitchell.’

Kitty Finch was leaning naked against the wall, watching him struggle not to catch his fingers in his own trap. She was nibbling the chocolate he had left for the rat, her arms folded across her breasts.

‘I call you the trapper now, but I’ve warned all the owls about you.’

He pressed his hand on his pounding heart and stared at her pale, righteous face. He would shoot her. If he had his weapons with him he would do it. He would aim for her stomach. He imagined how he would hold the gun and timed the moment he would snap the trigger. She would fall to the ground, her glassy grey eyes wide open, a bloody hole gouged in her belly. He blinked and saw she was still standing against the wall, taunting him with the chocolate he had placed so carefully in the wires. She looked thin and pathetic and he realised he had scared her.

‘Sorry I was so abrupt.’

‘Yeah.’ She nodded as if they were suddenly best friends. ‘You gave me a fright, but I was frightened anyway.’

He was terrified too. For a moment he seriously considered telling her about his nightmare.

‘Why do you kill animals and birds, Mitchell?’

She was almost pretty, with her narrow waist and long hair glowing in the dark, but ragged too, not far off someone begging outside a train station holding up a homeless and hungry sign.

‘It takes my mind off things,’ he found himself saying as if he meant it, which he did.

‘What sorts of things?’

Again he considered telling her about some of the worries that weighed heavily on his mind but stopped himself just in time. He couldn’t go shooting his mouth off to someone crazy like her.

‘You’re a complete fuck-up, Mitchell. Stop killing things and you’ll feel better.’

‘Haven’t you got a home to go to?’ He thought he had meant this quite kindly, but even to his own ears it sounded like an insult.

‘Yeah, I live with my mother at the moment, but it’s not my home.’

As she knelt down to help him untangle the grubby toy rabbit that made a mockery of his trap, he couldn’t work out why he thought someone as sad as she was might be dangerous.

‘You know what?’ This time Mitchell thought he genuinely meant this kindly. ‘If you wore clothes more often instead of walking around in your birthday suit, you’d look more normal.’

Nina’s disappearance was only discovered at seven a.m. after Joe called for her because he had lost his special ink pen. His daughter was the person who always found it for him, whatever the time, a drama Laura had heard at least twelve times that holiday. Whenever Nina returned the pen victoriously to her loud, forlorn father he wrapped her in his arms and bellowed melodramatically, ‘Thank you thank you thank you.’ Often in a number of languages: Polish, Portuguese, Italian. Yesterday it was, ‘Danke danke danke.’

No one could believe Joe was actually shouting for his daughter to find his pen so early in the morning, but that was what he did and Nina did not answer. Isabel walked into her daughter’s bedroom and saw the doors to her balcony were wide open. She whipped off the duvet, expecting to see her hiding under the covers. Nina wasn’t there and the sheet was stained with blood. When Laura heard Isabel sobbing, she ran into the room to find her friend pointing to the bed, strange choking sounds coming out of her mouth. She was pale, deathly white, uttering words that sounded to Laura like ‘bone’ or ‘hair’ or ‘she isn’t there’; it was hard to make sense of what she was saying.

Laura suggested they go together to look for Nina in the garden and steered her out of the room. Small birds swooped down to drink from the still, green water of the pool. A box of cherry chocolates from the day before lay melting on Mitchell’s big blue chair, covered in ants. Two damp towels were draped on the canvas recliners and in the middle of them, like an interrupted conversation, was the wooden chair Isabel had dragged out for Kitty Finch. Under it was Joe’s black ink pen.

This was the rearranged space of yesterday. They walked through the cypress trees and into the parched garden. It had not rained for months and Jurgen had forgotten to water the plants. The honeysuckle was dying, the soil beneath the brown grass cracked and hard. Under the tallest pine tree, Laura saw Nina’s wet bikini lying on the pine needles. When she bent down to pick it up, even she could not help thinking the cherry print on the material looked like splashes of blood. Her fingers started to fumble in her pocket for the little stainless-steel calculator she and Mitchell had brought with them to do their accounts.

‘Nina’s OK, Isabel.’ She ran her fingers over the calculator as if the numbers and symbols she knew were there, the m+ and m–, the x and the decimal point, would somehow end in Nina’s appearance. ‘She’s probably gone for a walk. I mean, she’s fourteen you know, she really has not been’ – she was about to say ‘slaughtered’ but changed her mind and said ‘spirited away’ instead.

She didn’t finish her sentence because Isabel was running through the cypress trees so fast and with such force the trees were shaking for minutes afterwards. Laura watched the momentary chaos of the trees. It was as if they had been pushed off balance and did not quite know how to find their former shape.

The spare room was dark and hot because the windows were closed and the curtains drawn. A pair of grubby flip-flops lay on top of the tangle of drying weeds lying on the floor. Kitty’s red hair streamed over a lumpy stained pillow, her freckled arms wrapped around Nina, who was clutching the nylon fur rabbit that was her last embarrassed link with childhood. Isabel knew Nina was awake and that she was pretending to be asleep under what seemed to be a starched white tablecloth. It looked like a shroud.

‘Nina, get up.’ Isabel’s voice was sharper than she meant it to be.

Kitty opened her grey eyes and whispered, ‘Nina started her period in the night so she got into bed with me.’

The girls were drowsy and content in each other’s arms. Isabel noticed the tattered books Kitty had put on the shelves, about six of them, were all her husband’s books. Two pink rosebuds stood in a glass of water next to them. Roses that could only have been picked from Madeleine Sheridan’s front garden, her attempt to create a memory of England in France.

She remembered Kitty’s strange comment yesterday morning, after their swim together: ‘Joe’s poetry is a more like a conversation with me than anything else.’ What sort of conversation was Kitty Finch having with her husband? Should she insist her daughter get out of bed and leave this room that was as hot as a greenhouse? Kitty was obviously trapping energy to heat her plants. She had made a small, hot, chaotic world, full of books and fruit and flowers, a sub-state in the country of the tourist villa with its Matisse and Picasso prints clumsily framed and hanging on the walls. Two plump bumblebees crawled down the yellow curtains, searching for an open window. The cupboard was open and Isabel glimpsed a short white feather cape hanging in the corner. Slim and pretty in her flip-flops and ragged summer dresses, it would seem Kitty Finch could make herself at home anywhere. Should she insist that Nina get up and return to her clean lonely room upstairs? Tearing her away from Kitty’s arms felt like a violent thing to do. She bent down and kissed her daughter’s dark eyebrow, which was twitching slightly.