Kitty reached for a towel. She was all fingers and thumbs, dropping it and picking it up again until Joe finally took it from her and helped wrap it around her waist.
‘What do you think it is?’ Kitty stared into the bucket.
‘It’s a creepy-crawly,’ Joe announced. ‘My best find yet.’
Nina thought it might be a centipede. It had hundreds of tiny legs that were frantically waving around in the water, trying to find something to grip on to.
‘What exactly is it you are looking for when you go fishing?’ Kitty lowered her voice, as if the creature might hear her. ‘Do you find the things you want to find?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Mitchell sounded like a schoolteacher irritated with a child.
‘Don’t talk to her like that.’ Joe’s arms were now clasped around Kitty’s waist, holding up the towel as if his life depended on it.
‘She’s asking why don’t I find silver fish and pretty shells? The answer is they are there anyway.’
While he talked he poked his finger through the wet curls of Kitty’s hair. Nina saw her mother and Laura walking through the white gate. Her father let go of the towel and Kitty blushed. Nina stared miserably into the cypress trees, pretending to look for the hedgehog she knew sheltered in the garden. Joe walked over to the plastic recliner and lay down. He glanced at his wife, who had walked over to the bucket. There were leaves in her hair and grass stains on her bare shins. She had not so much distanced herself from him as moved out to another neighbourhood altogether. There was new vigour in the way she stood by the bucket. Her determination not to love him seemed to have renewed her energy.
Mitchell was still peering at the creature crawling up the sides of the red plastic bucket. It was perfectly camouflaged by the red markings on its spine.
‘What are you going to do with your slug?’
Everyone looked at Joe.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My “thing” is freaking you all out. Let’s put it on a leaf in the garden.’
‘No.’ Laura squirmed. ‘It’ll only make its way back here.’
‘Or crawl through the plughole and come up in the water.’ Mitchell looked truly alarmed.
Laura shuddered and then screamed, ‘It’s climbing out. It’s nearly out.’ She ran to the bucket and threw a towel over it.
‘Do something to stop it, Joe.’
Joe limped to the bucket, removed the towel and flicked the creature back into the bottom of the water with his thumb.
‘It is really quite tiny.’ He yawned. ‘It’s just a strange tiny slimy thing.’
A clump of river weed trailed down his eyebrow. Everything had gone very quiet. Even the late-afternoon rasp of the cicadas seemed to have faded away. When Joe opened his eyes, everyone except Laura had disappeared into the villa. Laura was shaking but her voice was matter of fact.
‘Look, I know Isabel invited Kitty to stay.’ She stopped and started again. ‘But you don’t have to. I mean, do you? Do you have to? Do you? Do you have to keep doing it?’
Joe clenched his fists inside his pockets.
‘Doing what?’
WEDNESDAY
Body Electric
Jurgen and Claude were smoking the hashish Jurgen had bought from the accordion player on the beach in Nice. He usually bought it from the driver who dropped the immigrant cleaners at the tourist villas, but they were organising a strike. What’s more the news last night forecast a gale and the entire village had spent the night preparing for it. Jurgen’s cottage was owned by Rita Dwighter but not yet ‘restored’ and he wanted to keep it that way. Sometimes he threw heavy objects at the walls in the hope that it would become unrestorable and keep its status as the ugly dysfunctional child in Rita Dwighter’s family of properties.
Now he was huddled over Claude’s mobile phone. Claude had recorded a cow mooing. He didn’t know why, but he had to do it. He had walked into a field and held his phone as close as he dared to the cow’s mouth. If Jurgen pressed the play button the cow mooed. Technology had made the cow sound familiar but uncomfortably strange as well. Every time the cow mooed they laughed hysterically, because the cow had trodden on Claude’s big toe and now his toenail was deformed.
Madame Dwighter had told Jurgen to wait in for her call. Jurgen didn’t mind. Waiting in made a change from being called out to change a light bulb in the ‘Provençal style’ villas he would never afford to buy. A pile of Picasso prints he had bought in a job lot at the flea market lay against the wall. He preferred the rubber model of ET he had found for Claude. Rita Dwighter had instructed him to frame and hang ‘the Picassos’ in every available space left in the three villas she owned, but he couldn’t be bothered. It was more interesting hearing the cow mooing on Claude’s mobile.
When Jurgen started to roll another joint he could hear a telephone ringing. Claude pointed to the telephone lying on the floor. Jurgen twisted his nose with his thumb and forefinger and eventually picked up the receiver.
Claude had to slap his hand over his mouth to stop himself from laughing as loudly as he would have liked. Jurgen didn’t want to be a caretaker. Madame Dwighter was always asking him to tell her what was on his mind, but he only ever told Claude what was on his mind. There was only ever one thing on Jurgen’s mind.
Kitty Finch. If pressed he would include: sex, drugs, Buddhism as a means to achieve oneness in life, no meat, no vivisection, Kitty Finch, no vaccination, no alcohol, Kitty Finch, purity of body and soul, herbal remedies, playing slide guitar, Kitty Finch, becoming what Jack Kerouac described as a Nature Boy Saint. He heard his friend telling Madame Dwighter that yes, everything was very serene in the villa this year. Yes, the famous English poet and his family were enjoying their vacation. In fact they had a surprise visitor. Mademoiselle Finch was staying in the spare room and she was charming them all. Yes, she had very good equilibrium this year and she had written something to show the poet.
Claude unbuttoned his jeans and let them fall to his knees. Jurgen had to hold the phone away from his ear while he doubled over, making obscene gestures to Claude, who was now doing press-ups in his Calvin Klein boxer shorts on the floor. Jurgen tapped the joint against his knee and continued speaking to Rita Dwighter, who was phoning from tax exile in Spain. He would soon have to call her Señora.
Yes, the fact sheet was up to date. Yes, the water in the pool was perfect. Yes, the cleaners were doing a good job. Yes, he had replaced the broken window. Yes, he was feeling good in himself. Yes, the heatwave was coming to an end. Yes, there were going to be thunderstorms. Yes, everyone knew about the weather forecast. Yes, he would secure the shutters.
Claude could hear the voice of Rita Dwighter fall out of the receiver and disappear into the clouds of hashish smoke. Everyone in the village laughed at the mention of the wealthy psychoanalyst and property developer who paid Jurgen so handsomely for his lack of skill. They liked to joke that she had built a helicopter pad for businessmen to land outside her consulting room in west London. They sat on designer chairs while their pilots, usually former alcoholics struck off by the commercial airlines, smoked duty-free cigarettes in the rain. Claude had been thinking of spreading a rumour that one of her most affluent clients had managed to get his arm stuck in the blades of the propeller just as she had sorted out why he liked to dress up in a Nazi uniform and whip prostitutes. He had had to have his arm amputated and stopped seeing her, which meant she could not afford to buy the postman’s cottage after all.