When Madame Dwighter came to inspect her properties, which to Jurgen’s relief was not often, she always invited Claude with his Mick Jagger looks to supper. The last time he ate with her she stuck an erect pineapple stalk into a moist melting Brie and asked him to help himself.
Jurgen finally put the phone down. He stared at the Picasso prints as if he wanted to murder them. He told Claude, who had now taken off his T-shirt and was lying face down on the floor in his boxer shorts, that he’d been instructed to hang Guernica in the corridor to hide the jagged cracks in the plaster. Dominatrix Dwighter was obviously impressed by the techniques the great artist employed to say something about the human condition. Claude just about managed to stand up and put on one of Jurgen’s battered CDs. It had been lying on top of an Indian jewellery box labelled ‘Prague Muzic. Ket’s Selection for Calm’.
Someone was knocking on the door. Jurgen disliked all visitors because they were always asking him to do his job. This time it was the pretty fourteen-year-old daughter of the arsehole British poet. She was wearing a short white skirt and naturally she wanted him to do something.
‘My mother asked me to come over to check you’d booked the horse-riding for tomorrow.’
He nodded wisely, as if nothing else had ever been on his mind. ‘Come in. Claude’s here.’
When Jurgen said Claude’s here, the CD seemed to jump or it got stuck or something happened. Nina heard a violin playing and under it the sound of a wolf howling and the female singer breathing a word that sounded like snowburst. She glanced at Claude, who was dancing in his boxer shorts. His back was so smooth and brown she stared at the wall instead.
‘Bonjour, Nina. The dogs ate my jeans so now I only have my shorts. The CD is scratched but I like it for calming.’
When she looked through him pitifully, he saw himself as a snail crushed on the rope sole of her red espadrilles. Jurgen had his hands on his bony hips, his elbows pointing out in triangles. He seemed to want her opinion on his dreadlocks.
‘So do you think I should cut off my hair?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I make my hair like this to be different from my father.’
He laughed and Claude laughed with him.
snowburst
drifting away
to the dark
Jurgen was trying to get a grip on geography. ‘Austria is the start of my childhood. Then I think it was Baden-Baden. My father taught me to cut timber in the old tradition.’ He scratched his head. ‘I think it was Austrian. Something old anyway. So what kind of music do you like?’
‘Nirvana is my favourite band.’
‘Ah, you are liking the Kurt Cobain with his blue eyes, yes?’
She told him she had made a shrine to Kurt Cobain in her bedroom after he had shot himself that spring. April the fifth to be precise but his body was found on April the eighth. She had played his album In Utero all that day.
Jurgen cocked his dreadlocks to one side. ‘Has your father read Kitty Ket’s poem yet?’
‘No. I’m going to read it myself.’
Claude pouted and strutted towards the fridge. ‘That is a good plan. Do you want a beer?’
She shrugged. Claude was so anxious to please her it was pathetic. Claude translated her shrug as an enthusiastic Yes.
‘I have to bring my own beer over to Jurgen’s because he only drinks carrot juice.’
Jurgen had just heard a motorbike pull up outside his cottage. It was his friend Jean-Paul, who always gave him a commission on horse-riding bookings. Jean-Paul only kept ponies, so it was not exactly going to be a horse ride, but the ponies had hooves and a nice tail all the same. When he ran out of the door to make the deal, Claude reached for his T-shirt and struggled to put it on.
Nina stared at everything that wasn’t him. And then she sat cross-legged on the floor, her back leaning against the wall, while he walked over with a beer in his hand. He opened it for her and sat down so close their thighs almost touched.
‘So are you enjoying your vacation?’
She took a swig of the sour-tasting beer. ‘It’s OK.’
‘If you come to my café I’ll show you the Extra Terrestrial I keep in my kitchen.’
What was he talking about? She found herself moving closer to his shoulder. And then she turned her face towards him and she made her eyes say you can kiss me kiss me kiss me and there was a second when she sensed he wasn’t sure what she meant. The beer was still in her hand and she put it down on the floor.
drifting away
to the dark
forest
His lips were warm and they were on hers. She was kissing Mick Jagger and he was devouring her like a wolf or something fierce but soft as well and definitely not calm. He was telling her she was so so everything. She moved even closer and then he stopped talking.
to the dark
forest
where trees bleed
snowburst
When she peeped her eyes open and saw he had his eyes shut she shut her eyes again, but then the door opened and Jurgen was standing in the middle of the room blinking at them.
‘So everything is cool with the horse-riding.’
There was a kissing coma in the atmosphere. Everything had gone dark red. Jurgen put his hands on his hips so his elbows would jut out and the vibes could flow through the triangles his elbows made.
‘Please, I am asking you to read the Ket’s poem so you can tell me the way to her heart.’
THURSDAY
The Plot
Nina opened the door of her parents’ bedroom and skated in her socks across the tiled floor. She was wearing socks despite the heat because her left foot was swollen from a bee sting. To give her courage for the task in hand she had spent the last hour smearing her eyelids with Kitty’s blue stick of kohl. When she looked in the mirror her brown eyes were glittering and certain. From the window by the bed she could see her mother and Laura talking by the pool. Her father had gone to Nice to see the Russian Orthodox Cathedral and Kitty Finch was with Jurgen as usual. They were going to collect cow dung from the fields and then spread it over Jurgen’s new allotment, which she said she had ‘taken over for the summer’. No one could work out why she wasn’t actually living with Jurgen in his cottage next door, but her mother had implied that Kitty might not be as ‘sweet’ on him as he was on her. She heard a bashing noise coming from the kitchen. Mitchell had wrapped a slab of dark chocolate in a tea cloth and was hammering at it excitedly. It was hot outside but she felt cold in her parents’ room, as if it was an ice rink after all. She knew what the envelope looked like but she couldn’t see it anywhere. What she needed was a torch, because she must not put the lights on and attract attention. If anyone came in she would slip into the bathroom and hide behind the door. On the table by her mother’s side of the bed she noticed a slab of waxy honeycomb half wrapped in a page of newspaper. It had obviously been tied with the green string that lay next to it. She walked towards it and saw it was a gift from her father, because he had written in black ink across the page,
To my sweetest with my whole love as always, Jozef.
Nina frowned at the thick golden honey oozing through the holes. If her parents quite liked each other after all it would ruin the story she had put together for herself. When she thought about her parents, which was most of the time, she was always trying to fit the pieces together. What was the plot? Her father had very gentle hands and yesterday they were all over her mother. She had seen them kissing in the hallway like something out of a film, pulled into each other while moths crashed into the light bulb above their heads. As far as she was concerned, her parents tragically couldn’t stand the sight of each other and only loved her. The plot was that her mother abandoned her only daughter to go and hug orphans in Romania. Tragically (so much tragedy) Nina had taken her mother’s place in the family home and become her father’s most precious companion, always second-guessing his moods and needs. But things started to wobble when her mother asked her if she’d like to go to a special restaurant by the sea for an ice cream with a sparkler in it. What’s more, if her parents were kissing yesterday (the sheets on their unmade bed looked a bit frantic), and if they seemed to understand each other in a way that left her out, the plot was going off track.