Swimming Home by Deborah Levy Read Free Book Online Page A

me stay, by the way.’
    Isabel nodded dismissively and said something about going inside to make toast and honey. Kitty watched her run through the glass doors, bumping into Laura, who was now sitting at the kitchen table, a pair of earphones clamped on her head and a tangle of wires around her neck. Laura was learning some sort of African language, her thin lips mouthing the words out loud.
    Kitty sat naked and shivering at the end of the pool, listening to the tall blonde woman with scared blue eyes repeat singsong sentences from another continent. She could hear the church bells ringing in the village and she could hear someone sighing. When she looked up she had to stop herself from losing it for the second time that morning. Madeleine Sheridan was sitting on her balcony as usual, staring at her as if she was scanning the ocean for a shark. That was too much. Kitty jumped up and shook her fist at the shadowy figure drinking her morning tea.
    ‘Don’t fucking watch me all the time. I’m still waiting for you to get my shoes, Dr Sheridan. Have you got them yet?’
     

Homesick Aliens
     
    Jurgen was dragging an inflatable three-foot rubber alien with a wrinkled neck into the kitchen of Claude’s café. He had bought it at the flea market on Saturday and he and Claude were having three conversations at once. Claude, who had only just turned twenty-three and knew he looked like Mick Jagger, owned the only café in the village and was planning to sell it to Parisian property developers next year. What Claude wanted to know was why the tourists had offered Kitty Finch a room.
    Jurgen scratched his scalp and swung his dreadlocks to get an angle on the question. The effort was exhausting him and he could not find an answer. Claude, whose silky shoulder-length hair was expensively cut to make it look as if he never bothered with it, reckoned Kitty must secretly be repulsed by the dreadlocks Jurgen cultivated, because she knew she could stay with him whenever she wanted. At the same time they were both jeering at Mitchell, who was sitting on the terrace stuffing himself with baguettes and jam while he waited for the grocery store to open. The fat man with his collection of old guns was running up a tab at the café and the grocery store, which was run by Claude’s mother. Mitchell was going to bankrupt Claude’s entire family. Meanwhile Jurgen was explaining the plot of the film ET while Claude peeled potatoes. Jurgen whipped the cigarette butt out of his friend’s thick lips and sucked on it while he tried to remember the film he’d seen in Monaco three years ago.
    ‘ET is this baby alien who finds himself lost on earth, three million light years away from home. He makes friends with a ten-year-old boy and they start to have a very special connection with each other.’
    Claude gave the little alien in his kitchen a leering wink. ‘What sort of connection?’
    Jurgen swung his dreadlocks over a freshly baked pear tart cooling under the kitchen window as if to summon a plot he had long forgotten.
    ‘So … if ET gets sick the earth boy gets sick, if ET is hungry earth boy gets hungry, if ET is tired or sad then earth boy suffers with him. The alien and his friend are in touch with each other’s thoughts. They are mentally connected.’
    Claude grimaced, because he was being called by Mitchell for another basket of bread and a slice of the pear tart, newly written into the menu. Claude told Jurgen he couldn’t work out why the fat man never had any money on him despite staying in the luxurious villa. His tab had gone off the scale. ‘So anyway how does ET end?’
    Jurgen, who was usually too stoned to remember anything, had just spotted Joe Jacobs in the distance, walking among the sheep grazing in the mountains. For some reason he could remember every line the baby alien uttered in the film. He thought this was because he was also an alien, a German nature boy living in France. He explained that ET has to disconnect