Free Swimming Home by Deborah Levy Page A

they were on the beach. Madeleine offered to drive to the beach and get her clothes for her. Kitty could stay exactly where she was and wait for her. And then she’d drive her back to the tourist villa where she was staying to study mountain plants. She often stayed there when Rita Dwighter had not let it out to retired hedge-fund managers because Kitty’s mother used to clean for her. Mrs Finch was Rita Dwighter’s right-hand woman, her secretary and cook but mostly her cleaner, because her right hand always had a mop in it.
    Kitty Finch insisted she go away or she would shout for the police. Madeleine Sheridan could have left her there, but she did not do that. Kitty was too young to be talking to herself among the dead-eyed men staring at her breasts. To her surprise, the crazy girl suddenly changed her mind. Apparently she had left her jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of shoes, her favourite red polka-dot shoes, on the beach opposite the Hotel Negresco. Kitty leaned towards her and whispered in her ear, ‘Fanks. I’ll wait here while you get them.’ Madeleine Sheridan had walked round the corner and when she thought Kitty could no longer see her she called an ambulance.
    In her view Katherine Finch was suffering from psychic anxiety, loss of weight, reduced sleep, agitation, suicidal thoughts, pessimism about the future, impaired concentration.
     
     
    The musician raised his glass of beer in a thank-you gesture to the snake-hipped man sitting with the old woman.
     
     
    Kitty Finch had survived her summary. Her mother took her home to Britain and she spent two months in a hospital in Kent, the Garden of England. Apparently the nurses were from Lithuania, Odessa and Kiev. In their white uniforms they looked like snowdrops on the mown green lawns of the hospital. That was what Kitty Finch told her mother and what Mrs Finch told Madeleine, who was astonished to learn that the nurses all chain-smoked in their lunch break.
     
     
    Jurgen nudged her with his elbow. The accordion player from Marseilles was playing a tune for her. She felt too agitated to listen. Kitty had survived and now she had come to punish her. Perhaps even kill her. Why else was she here? She did not think Kitty was a safe person to drive Nina to the beach and up dangerous mountain roads. She should tell Isabel Jacobs that but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to have that conversation. If she had been on her way to buy soap and ended up calling an ambulance, Transport Sanitaire in French, she did not feel her hands were entirely clean. All the same, to be naked in a public place, to be jumping forwards and then backwards while chanting something incoherent, this had made her frightened for the wretched young woman. It was impossible to believe that someone did not want to be saved from their incoherence.
    When the accordion player nodded at Jurgen, the caretaker knew he was in luck. He would buy some hashish and he and Claude would smoke it and get out of the Riviera while all the tourists wanted to get into it. He put his purple sunglasses on again and told Madeleine Sheridan that he was very, very happy today but he was also a little tight in the bowels. He thought his colon was blocked and this was because he had not lived his dream. What was his dream? He took a sip of Pepsi and noticed the English doctor had dressed up for lunch. She had put lipstick on and her hair, what was left of it, had been washed and curled. He could not tell her his dream was to win the lotto and marry Kitty Ket.

TUESDAY
     
     

Reading and Writing
     
    Joe Jacobs lay on his back in the master bedroom, as it was described in the villa’s fact sheet, longing for a curry. The place he most wanted to be at this moment was in his Hindu tailor’s workshop in Bethnal Green. Surrounded by silk. Drinking sweet tea. What he was missing in the Alpes-Maritimes was dhal. Rice. Yoghurt. And buses. He missed the top deck of buses. And newspapers. And weather forecasts.