Free Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

telephoned her favourite restaurant to find out what was on the menu, where their table was positioned and to request the maître d’ save her a parking space right outside the door in return for a healthy tip. She screamed at a waiter for a whisky and a Pepsi for Jurgen, who disliked alcohol for spiritual reasons. It was hard for an old woman to get a waiter’s attention when he was busy serving topless women sunbathing in thongs. She had read about yogic siddhas who mastered human invisibility through a combination of concentration and meditation. Somehow she had managed to make her body imperceptible to the waiter without any of the training. She lifted both her arms and waved at him as if she were flagging down an aeroplane on a desert island. Jurgen pointed to the accordion player from Marseilles perched on a wooden box by the flashing pinball machine. The musician was sweating in a black suit three sizes too large for him.
    ‘He’s playing at a wedding this afternoon. The beekeeper from Valbonne told me. If I got married I would ask him to play at my wedding too.’
    Madeleine Sheridan, sipping her hard-won whisky, was surprised at how his voice was suddenly so high-pitched.
    ‘Marriage is not a good idea, Jurgen.’
    Not at all. She began to tell him (again) how the two biggest departures in her life were leaving her family to study medicine and leaving her husband to live in France. She had come to the conclusion that she was not satiated with love for Peter Sheridan and exchanged a respectable life of unhappiness for the unrespectable unhappiness of being a woman who had cut her ties with love. Now it seemed, staring at her companion, whose voice was shaking all over the place, that in his damaged heart (too many cigarettes) he wanted to tie the knot, to close the circle of his life alone, which frankly was an affront.
    It reminded her of the time they were walking on the beach in Villefranche and saw a wedding taking place in the harbour. The bridesmaids were dressed in yellow taffeta and the bride in cream and yellow satin. She had scoffed out loud, but what did the hippy Jurgen say?
    ‘Give them a chance.’
    This was the same man who only a few months before had told his girlfriend that nothing had taught him marriage was a good idea. She didn’t believe him and took him to an Argentinian barbecue to propose to him. Great piles of scented wood. Hunks of beef from the pampas thrown on to the fire. His girlfriend ate her way through the red meat until she noticed Jurgen was not eating and remembered he was a militant vegetarian. Perhaps she had laughed too loudly when he told her that.
    ‘I think Kitty Finch wants to harm me.’
    ‘ Ach, nein .’ Jurgen frowned as if he was in pain. ‘The Ket she only harms herself. Claude asked me why Madame Jacobs insisted she stay. But I have no idea why.’
    She gazed at her friend with her cloudy, short-sighted eyes. ‘I believe she wants the beautiful mad girl to distract her husband so she can finally leave him.’
    Jurgen suddenly wanted to buy the accordion player a drink. He called the waiter and told him to offer the man in the big suit a beer. Madeleine watched the waiter whisper in the musician’s ear and tried to forget how she came across Kitty Finch in the tunnel by the flower market in Cours Saleya four months ago. Their encounter was one more thing she wanted to add to the long list of things she wanted to forget.
     
     
    She had found the flame-haired English girl on a cool spring morning on her way to buy two slabs of Marseilles soap, one made from palm oil, the other from olive oil, both mixed with sea plants from the Mediterranean by the local soap master. Kitty was naked and talking to herself on a box of rotten plums the farmers had thrown out at the end of the day. The homeless men who slept in the tunnel were laughing at her, making lewd remarks about her naked body. When Madeleine Sheridan asked her what had happened to her clothes, she said