Swimming Home Read Free

through. A window that she guessed was a little broken anyway. She couldn’t be sure of this, but it seemed to her that Joe Jacobs had already wedged his foot into the crack and his wife had helped him. She cleared her throat and was about to speak her mind, but what was on her mind was so unutterable the hippy caretaker got there first.
    ‘So, Kitty Ket, shall I carry your valises to your room?’
    Everyone looked to where Jurgen was pointing with his nicotine-stained finger. Two blue canvas bags lay to the right of the French doors of the villa.
    ‘Thanks, Jurgen.’ Kitty dismissed him as if he was her personal valet.
    He bent down and picked up the bags.
    ‘What are the weeds?’ He lifted up a tangle of flowering plants that had been stuffed into the second blue bag.
    ‘Oh, I found those in the churchyard next to Claude’s café.’
    Jurgen looked impressed.
    ‘You’ll have to call them the Kitty Ket plant. It is a historical fact. Plant hunters often named the plants they found after themselves.’
    ‘Yeah.’ She stared past him in to Joe Jacobs’ dark eyes as if to say, ‘Jurgen’s special name for me is Kitty Ket.’
     
     
    Isabel walked to the edge of the pool and dived in. As she swam low under the water, her arms stretched out in front of her head, she saw her watch lying on the bottom of the pool. She flipped over and scooped it up from the green tiles. When she surfaced she saw the old English woman who lived next door waving from her balcony. She waved back and then realised Madeleine Sheridan was waving to Mitchell, who was calling out her name.
     

Interpreting a Smile
     
    ‘Madel-eeene!’
    It was the fat man who liked guns calling up to her. Madeleine Sheridan lifted up her arthritic arm and waved with two limp fingers from her straw chair. Her body had become a sum of flawed parts. At medical school she had learned she had twenty-seven bones in each hand, eight in the wrist alone, five in the palm. Her fingers were rich in nerve endings but now even moving two fingers was an effort.
    She wanted to remind Jurgen, whom she could see carrying Kitty Finch’s bags into the villa, that it was her birthday in six days’ time, but she was reluctant to appear so begging of his company in front of the English tourists. Perhaps she was dead already and had been watching the drama of the young woman’s arrival from the Other Side? Four months ago, in March, when Kitty Finch was staying alone at the tourist villa (apparently to study mountain plants), she had informed Madeleine Sheridan that a breeze would help her tomatoes grow stronger stems and offered to thin the leaves for her. This she proceeded to do, but she was whispering to herself all the while, pah pah pah, kah kah kah, consonants that made hard sounds on her lips. Madeleine Sheridan, who believed human beings had to suffer real hardships before they agreed to lose their minds, told her in a steely voice to stop making that noise. To stop it. To stop it right now. Today was Saturday and the noise had come back to France to haunt her. It had even been offered a room in the villa.
    •
     
    ‘Madel-eeene, I’m cooking beef tonight. Why don’t you join us for supper?’
    She could just make out the pink dome of Mitchell’s balding head as she squinted at him in the sun. Madeleine Sheridan, who was quite partial to beef and often lonely in the evenings, wondered if she had it in herself to decline Mitchell’s invitation. She thought she did. When couples offer shelter or a meal to strays and loners, they do not really take them in. They play with them. Perform for them. And when they are done they tell their stranded guest in all sorts of sly ways she is now required to leave. Couples were always keen to return to the task of trying to destroy their lifelong partners while pretending to have their best interests at heart. A single guest was a mere distraction from this task.
     
     
    ‘Madel-eeene.’
    Mitchell seemed more anxious than