‘Yes. Why?’
‘Because I know so little about you, Isabel.’
He would poke his paw inside every hollow of every tree to scoop up the honeycomb and lay it at her feet if he thought she might stay a little longer with him and their cub. She looked hostile and lonely and he understood it. He obviously disgusted her. She even preferred Mitchell’s company to his.
He heard her say, ‘The main thing to do for the rest of the summer is to make sure Nina is all right.’
‘Of course Nina is all right,’ he snapped. ‘I’ve looked after her since she was three years old and she’s bloody all right, isn’t she?’
And then he took out his notebook and the black ink pen that had disappeared that morning, knowing that Isabel was defeated every time he appeared to be writing and every time he talked about their daughter. These were his weapons to silence his wife and keep her in his life, to keep his family intact, flawed and hostile but still a family. His daughter was his main triumph in their marriage, the one thing he had done right.
— yes yes yes she said yes yes yes she likes honey — his pen scratched these words aggressively across the page while he watched a white butterfly hover above the pool. It was like breath. It was a miracle. A wonder. He and his wife knew things it was impossible to know. They had both seen life snuffed out. Isabel recorded and witnessed catastrophes to try and make people remember. He tried to make himself forget.
Collecting Stones
‘It has a hole in the middle.’
Kitty held up a pebble the size of her hand and gave it to Nina to look through. They were sitting on one of the public beaches in Nice below the Promenade des Anglais. Kitty said on the private beaches they had to pay a fortune for sunloungers and umbrellas. Everyone looked like patients on hospital beds and gave her the creeps. The sun was burning pink blotches in her waxy pale face.
Nina obediently looked through the hole. She saw a young woman smiling, a purple jewel drilled into her front tooth. When she turned the pebble round the woman was unpacking a carrier bag of food. There was another woman there too, sitting on a low striped canvas chair, and she was holding a large white dog by the lead with her right hand. The dog looked like a snow wolf. A husky with blue eyes. Nina stared into its blue eyes from the hole in the pebble. She couldn’t be sure of this but she thought the snow wolf was undoing the shoelaces of the woman with the jewel in her tooth. Nina saw all of this in fragments through the hole in the pebble. When she looked again she saw the woman in the black T-shirt only had one arm. She turned the pebble lengthways and peered through it, squeezing her eye half shut. An electric wheelchair decorated with shells was parked near the canvas chair. Now the women were kissing. Like lovers. Watching them lean into each other, Nina heard her own breath get louder. She had been thinking all holiday about what she would do if she ever found herself alone with Claude. He had invited her to come to his café for what he described as an aperitif. She wasn’t sure what that was and anyway something had happened that changed everything.
Last night when she woke up she discovered she was menstruating for the first time. She had dared herself to put on her bikini because it was the only thing she could find and knock on Kitty’s door to tell her the news. Kitty was lying awake under an old tablecloth and she had rolled up one of her dresses to make a pillow.
‘I’ve started.’
At first Kitty didn’t know what she meant. And then she grabbed Nina’s hand and they ran into the garden. Nina could see her own shadow in the pool and in the sky at the same time. She was tall and long, there was no end to her and no beginning, her body stretched out and vast. She wanted to swim and when Kitty insisted it didn’t matter about the blood, she dared herself to take off her bikini and be naked, watching her twin shadow untie the straps more bravely than the real-sized Nina actually felt. She finally jumped into the pool and hid herself in the blanket of leaves that floated in the water, not sure what to do with her new body because it was morphing into something alien and perplexing to her.
Kitty swam over and pointed to the silver snails on the paving stones. She said the stars laid their dust over everything. There were bits of broken stars on the snails. And then she blinked.
blah blah blah blah blah blinked
Standing naked in the water, Nina pretended she had a serious speech impediment and made stammering sounds in her head. She felt like someone else. Like someone who had started. Someone who wasn’t her. She felt unbearably happy and plunged her head into the water to celebrate the miracle of Kitty Finch’s arrival. She was not alone with Laura and Mitchell and her mother and father who she wasn’t sure liked each other never mind loved each other.
Nina threw the pebble into the sea, which seemed to annoy Kitty. She stood up and yanked Nina up too.
‘I need to collect more pebbles. That one you threw away was perfect.’
‘Why do you want them?’
‘To study them.’
Nina was hobbling because her trainers were rubbing up against the blisters on the back of her heels. ‘They’re too heavy to carry,’ she groaned. ‘I want to go now.’
Kitty was sweating and her breath smelt sweet.
‘Yeah, well, sorry to waste your time. Have you ever cleaned a floor, Nina? Ever got down on your hands and knees with a rag while your mother screams at you to clean the corners? Have you ever hoovered the stairs and taken out the bin bags?’
The pampered girl in her pricey shorts (she had seen the label) and all her split ends trimmed had obviously got to fourteen years old without lifting a finger.
‘You need some real problems to take back to your posh house in London with you.’