Swimming Home by Deborah Levy Page A

literally, green fingernails. She admired him, wanted his attention and intrigued him, but he need not have bothered to read her poem because he understood it already.
     
     
    Claude, with new humility and even-handedness, placed a bowl of green salad and fried potatoes on their table. Joe picked up a potato and dipped it in mustard.
    ‘I’ve been thinking about your title, “Swimming Home”.’
    His tone was offhand, more nonchalant than he felt. He did not tell her how he had been thinking about her title. The rectangular swimming pool that had been carved from stone in the grounds of the villa reminded him of a coffin. A floating open coffin lit with the underwater lights Jurgen swore at when he fiddled with the incandescent light bulbs he’d had to change twice since they arrived. A swimming pool was just a hole in the ground. A grave filled with water.
    Two paragliders drifted on yellow silk between the mountains. The narrow cobbled streets of the village were deserted. The paragliders were landing near the river instead of the usual base five kilometres away.
     
     
    Kitty stuffed her mouth with lettuce leaves. A thin cat purred against her ankles as she threw her potato chips under the table. She leaned forward.
    ‘Something happened to me this year. I’ve forgotten things.’ She frowned and he saw that the burn on her forehead was beginning to blister.
    ‘What sort of things?’
    ‘I can’t rah rah rah rah rah.’
    She was not a poet. She was a poem. She was about to snap in half. He thought his own poetry had made her la la la la love him. It was unbearable. He could not bear it. She was still trying to remember how to say remember.
    If he couldn’t talk about her poem what good was he? He might as well move to the countryside and run the tom-bola stand at the church fête. He might as well take up writing stories set in the declining years of empire featuring a dusty black Humber V8 Snipe with an aged loyal driver.
    She was an astute reader and she was troubled and she had suicidal thoughts, but then what did he want his readers to be like? Were they required to eat all their vegetables, have a regular monthly salary and pension fund with yearly gym membership and a loyalty card to their favourite supermarket?
    Her gaze, the adrenalin of it was like a stain, the etcs in her poem a bright light, a high noise. And if all this wasn’t terrifying enough, her attention to the detail of every day was even more so, to pollen and struggling trees and the instincts of animals, to the difficulties of pretending to be relentlessly sane, to the way he walked (he had kept the rheumatism that aged him a secret from his family), to the nuance of mood and feeling in them all. Yesterday he had watched her free some bees trapped in the glass of a lantern as if it were she who was held captive. She was as receptive as it was possible to be, an explorer, an adventurer, a nightmare. Every moment with her was a kind of emergency, her words always too direct, too raw, too truthful.
    There was nothing for it but to lie.
    ‘I’m sorry, Kitty, but I haven’t read your poem yet. AND I have a deadline with my publisher. AND I have to give a reading in Kraków in three weeks. AND I promised to take Nina fishing this afternoon.’
    ‘Right.’ She bit her lip and looked away. ‘Right,’ she said again, but her voice was breaking. Jurgen seemed to have disappeared and Kitty was biting her fingers.
    ‘Why don’t you give it to Jurgen to read?’ As soon as he said it he wished he hadn’t. She was literally changing colour in front of him. It was not so much a blush as a fuse. An electrical cable wire starting to melt. She fixed him with a glare of such intense hostility he wondered what it was he had actually done that was so bad.
    ‘My poem is a conversation with you and no one else.’
     
     
    It shouldn’t be happening, his search for love in her, but it was. He would go to the ends of the earth to find love. He was