Swimming Home (11 page)

‘She’s asking why don’t I find silver fish and pretty shells? The answer is they are there anyway.’

While he talked he poked his finger through the wet curls of Kitty’s hair. Nina saw her mother and Laura walking through the white gate. Her father let go of the towel and Kitty blushed. Nina stared miserably into the cypress trees, pretending to look for the hedgehog she knew sheltered in the garden. Joe walked over to the plastic recliner and lay down. He glanced at his wife, who had walked over to the bucket. There were leaves in her hair and grass stains on her bare shins. She had not so much distanced herself from him as moved out to another neighbourhood altogether. There was new vigour in the way she stood by the bucket. Her determination not to love him seemed to have renewed her energy.

Mitchell was still peering at the creature crawling up the sides of the red plastic bucket. It was perfectly camouflaged by the red markings on its spine.

‘What are you going to do with your slug?’

 Everyone looked at Joe.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My “thing” is freaking you all out. Let’s put it on a leaf in the garden.’

‘No.’ Laura squirmed. ‘It’ll only make its way back here.’

‘Or crawl through the plughole and come up in the water.’ Mitchell looked truly alarmed.

Laura shuddered and then screamed, ‘It’s climbing out. It’s nearly out.’ She ran to the bucket and threw a towel over it.

‘Do something to stop it, Joe.’

Joe limped to the bucket, removed the towel and flicked the creature back into the bottom of the water with his thumb.

‘It is really quite tiny.’ He yawned. ‘It’s just a strange tiny slimy thing.’

A clump of river weed trailed down his eyebrow. Everything had gone very quiet. Even the late-afternoon rasp of the cicadas seemed to have faded away. When Joe opened his eyes, everyone except Laura had disappeared into the villa. Laura was shaking but her voice was matter of fact.

‘Look, I know Isabel invited Kitty to stay.’ She stopped and started again. ‘But you don’t have to. I mean, do you? Do you have to? Do you? Do you have to keep doing it?’

Joe clenched his fists inside his pockets.

‘Doing what?’

Jurgen and Claude were smoking the hashish Jurgen had bought from the accordion player on the beach in Nice. He usually bought it from the driver who dropped the immigrant cleaners at the tourist villas, but they were organising a strike. What’s more the news last night forecast a gale and the entire village had spent the night preparing for it. Jurgen’s cottage was owned by Rita Dwighter but not yet ‘restored’ and he wanted to keep it that way. Sometimes he threw heavy objects at the walls in the hope that it would become unrestorable and keep its status as the ugly dysfunctional child in Rita Dwighter’s family of properties.

Now he was huddled over Claude’s mobile phone. Claude had recorded a cow mooing. He didn’t know why, but he had to do it. He had walked into a field and held his phone as close as he dared to the cow’s mouth. If Jurgen pressed the play button the cow mooed. Technology had made the cow sound familiar but uncomfortably strange as well. Every time the cow mooed they laughed hysterically, because the cow had trodden on Claude’s big toe and now his toenail was deformed.

Madame Dwighter had told Jurgen to wait in for her call. Jurgen didn’t mind. Waiting in made a change from being called out to change a light bulb in the ‘Provençal style’ villas he would never afford to buy. A pile of Picasso prints he had bought in a job lot at the flea market lay against the wall. He preferred the rubber model of ET he had found for Claude. Rita Dwighter had instructed him to frame and hang ‘the Picassos’ in every available space left in the three villas she owned, but he couldn’t be bothered. It was more interesting hearing the cow mooing on Claude’s mobile.

When Jurgen started to roll another joint he could hear a telephone ringing. Claude pointed to the telephone lying on the floor. Jurgen twisted his nose with his thumb and forefinger and eventually picked up the receiver.

Claude had to slap his hand over his mouth to stop himself from laughing as loudly as he would have liked. Jurgen didn’t want to be a caretaker. Madame Dwighter was always asking him to tell her what was on his mind, but he only ever told Claude what was on his mind. There was only ever one thing on Jurgen’s mind.

Kitty Finch. If pressed he would include: sex, drugs, Buddhism as a means to achieve oneness in life, no meat, no vivisection, Kitty Finch, no vaccination, no alcohol, Kitty Finch, purity of body and soul, herbal remedies, playing slide guitar, Kitty Finch, becoming what Jack Kerouac described as a Nature Boy Saint. He heard his friend telling Madame Dwighter that yes, everything was very serene in the villa this year. Yes, the famous English poet and his family were enjoying their vacation. In fact they had a surprise visitor. Mademoiselle Finch was staying in the spare room and she was charming them all. Yes, she had very good equilibrium this year and she had written something to show the poet.

Claude unbuttoned his jeans and let them fall to his knees. Jurgen had to hold the phone away from his ear while he doubled over, making obscene gestures to Claude, who was now doing press-ups in his Calvin Klein boxer shorts on the floor. Jurgen tapped the joint against his knee and continued speaking to Rita Dwighter, who was phoning from tax exile in Spain. He would soon have to call her
Señora
.

Yes, the fact sheet was up to date. Yes, the water in the pool was perfect. Yes, the cleaners were doing a good job. Yes, he had replaced the broken window. Yes, he was feeling good in himself. Yes, the heatwave was coming to an end. Yes, there were going to be thunderstorms. Yes, everyone knew about the weather forecast. Yes, he would secure the shutters.

Claude could hear the voice of Rita Dwighter fall out of the receiver and disappear into the clouds of hashish smoke. Everyone in the village laughed at the mention of the wealthy psychoanalyst and property developer who paid Jurgen so handsomely for his lack of skill. They liked to joke that she had built a helicopter pad for businessmen to land outside her consulting room in west London. They sat on designer chairs while their pilots, usually former alcoholics struck off by the commercial airlines, smoked duty-free cigarettes in the rain. Claude had been thinking of spreading a rumour that one of her most affluent clients had managed to get his arm stuck in the blades of the propeller just as she had sorted out why he liked to dress up in a Nazi uniform and whip prostitutes. He had had to have his arm amputated and stopped seeing her, which meant she could not afford to buy the postman’s cottage after all.

When Madame Dwighter came to inspect her properties, which to Jurgen’s relief was not often, she always invited Claude with his Mick Jagger looks to supper. The last time he ate with her she stuck an erect pineapple stalk into a moist melting Brie and asked him to help himself.

Jurgen finally put the phone down. He stared at the Picasso prints as if he wanted to murder them. He told Claude, who had now taken off his T-shirt and was lying face down on the floor in his boxer shorts, that he’d been instructed to hang
Guernica
in the corridor to hide the jagged cracks in the plaster. Dominatrix Dwighter was obviously impressed by the techniques the great artist employed to say something about the human condition. Claude just about managed to stand up and put on one of Jurgen’s battered CDs. It had been lying on top of an Indian jewellery box labelled ‘Prague Muzic. Ket’s Selection for Calm’.

Someone was knocking on the door. Jurgen disliked all visitors because they were always asking him to do his job. This time it was the pretty fourteen-year-old daughter of the arsehole British poet. She was wearing a short white skirt and naturally she wanted him to do something.

‘My mother asked me to come over to check you’d booked the horse-riding for tomorrow.’

He nodded wisely, as if nothing else had ever been on his mind. ‘Come in. Claude’s here.’

When Jurgen said Claude’s here, the CD seemed to jump or it got stuck or something happened. Nina heard a violin playing and under it the sound of a wolf howling and the female singer breathing a word that sounded like snowburst. She glanced at Claude, who was dancing in his boxer shorts. His back was so smooth and brown she stared at the wall instead.

‘
Bonjour
, Nina. The dogs ate my jeans so now I only have my shorts. The CD is scratched but I like it for calming.’

When she looked through him pitifully, he saw himself as a snail crushed on the rope sole of her red espadrilles. Jurgen had his hands on his bony hips, his elbows pointing out in triangles. He seemed to want her opinion on his dreadlocks.

‘So do you think I should cut off my hair?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I make my hair like this to be different from my father.’

He laughed and Claude laughed with him.

snowburst

drifting away

to the dark

Jurgen was trying to get a grip on geography. ‘Austria is the start of my childhood. Then I think it was Baden-Baden. My father taught me to cut timber in the old tradition.’ He scratched his head. ‘I think it was Austrian. Something old anyway. So what kind of music do you like?’

‘Nirvana is my favourite band.’

‘Ah, you are liking the Kurt Cobain with his blue eyes, yes?’

She told him she had made a shrine to Kurt Cobain in her bedroom after he had shot himself that spring. April the fifth to be precise but his body was found on April the eighth. She had played his album
In Utero
all that day.

Jurgen cocked his dreadlocks to one side. ‘Has your father read Kitty Ket’s poem yet?’

‘No. I’m going to read it myself.’

Claude pouted and strutted towards the fridge. ‘That is a good plan. Do you want a beer?’

She shrugged. Claude was so anxious to please her it was pathetic. Claude translated her shrug as an enthusiastic Yes.

‘I have to bring my own beer over to Jurgen’s because he only drinks carrot juice.’

Jurgen had just heard a motorbike pull up outside his cottage. It was his friend Jean-Paul, who always gave him a commission on horse-riding bookings. Jean-Paul only kept ponies, so it was not exactly going to be a horse ride, but the ponies had hooves and a nice tail all the same. When he ran out of the door to make the deal, Claude reached for his T-shirt and struggled to put it on.

Nina stared at everything that wasn’t him. And then she sat cross-legged on the floor, her back leaning against the wall, while he walked over with a beer in his hand. He opened it for her and sat down so close their thighs almost touched.

‘So are you enjoying your vacation?’

She took a swig of the sour-tasting beer. ‘It’s OK.’

‘If you come to my café I’ll show you the Extra Terrestrial I keep in my kitchen.’

What was he talking about? She found herself moving closer to his shoulder. And then she turned her face towards him and she made her eyes say you can kiss me kiss me kiss me and there was a second when she sensed he wasn’t sure what she meant. The beer was still in her hand and she put it down on the floor.

drifting away

to the dark

forest

His lips were warm and they were on hers. She was kissing Mick Jagger and he was devouring her like a wolf or something fierce but soft as well and definitely not calm. He was telling her she was so so everything. She moved even closer and then he stopped talking.

to the dark

forest

where trees bleed

snowburst

When she peeped her eyes open and saw he had his eyes shut she shut her eyes again, but then the door opened and Jurgen was standing in the middle of the room blinking at them.

‘So everything is cool with the horse-riding.’

There was a kissing coma in the atmosphere. Everything had gone dark red. Jurgen put his hands on his hips so his elbows would jut out and the vibes could flow through the triangles his elbows made.

‘Please, I am asking you to read the Ket’s poem so you can tell me the way to her heart.’

Nina opened the door of her parents’ bedroom and skated in her socks across the tiled floor. She was wearing socks despite the heat because her left foot was swollen from a bee sting. To give her courage for the task in hand she had spent the last hour smearing her eyelids with Kitty’s blue stick of kohl. When she looked in the mirror her brown eyes were glittering and certain. From the window by the bed she could see her mother and Laura talking by the pool. Her father had gone to Nice to see the Russian Orthodox Cathedral and Kitty Finch was with Jurgen as usual. They were going to collect cow dung from the fields and then spread it over Jurgen’s new allotment, which she said she had ‘taken over for the summer’. No one could work out why she wasn’t actually living with Jurgen in his cottage next door, but her mother had implied that Kitty might not be as ‘sweet’ on him as he was on her. She heard a bashing noise coming from the kitchen. Mitchell had wrapped a slab of dark chocolate in a tea cloth and was hammering at it excitedly. It was hot outside but she felt cold in her parents’ room, as if it was an ice rink after all. She knew what the envelope looked like but she couldn’t see it anywhere. What she needed was a torch, because she must not put the lights on and attract attention. If anyone came in she would slip into the bathroom and hide behind the door. On the table by her mother’s side of the bed she noticed a slab of waxy honeycomb half wrapped in a page of newspaper. It had obviously been tied with the green string that lay next to it. She walked towards it and saw it was a gift from her father, because he had written in black ink across the page,