It was only after six minutes of urgent searching that she eventually found the envelope with Kitty’s poem inside it. She had given up rummaging through the silk shirts and handkerchiefs her father always ironed so carefully and crawled on her knees to look under the bed. When she saw the envelope propped up against her father’s slippers and two dead brown cockroaches lying on their backs, she lay on her stomach and swept it up with her arm. There was something else under the bed too but she did not have time to find out what it was.
The window overlooking the pool was a problem. Her mother was sitting on the steps by the shallow end eating an apple. She could hear her asking Laura why she was learning Yoruba and Laura saying, ‘Why not? Over twenty million people speak it.’
She crouched on the floor where she could not be seen and tore the Sellotape off the lip of the envelope. It was empty. She peered inside it. A sheet of paper had been folded into a square the size of a matchbox and it was stuck at the bottom of the envelope like an old shoe wedged into the mud of a river. She scooped it out and began carefully to unfold it.
Swimming Home
by
Kitty Finch
After she read it Nina didn’t bother to fold the paper back into its intricate squares. She shoved it inside the envelope and put it back under the bed with the cockroaches. Why hadn’t her father read it? He would understand exactly what was going on in Kitty’s mind.
She made her way up the stairs to the open-plan living room and poked her head through the French doors.
Her mother was dangling her feet in the warm water and she was laughing. It made Nina frown because the sound was so rare. She found Mitchell frying liver in the kitchen. He was wearing one of his most flamboyant Hawaiian shirts to cook in.
‘Hello,’ he snorted. ‘Have you come for a morsel?’
Nina leaned her back against the fridge and folded her arms.
‘What have you done to your eyes?’ Mitchell peered at the blue sparkling kohl smeared over her eyelids. ‘Has someone punched your lights out?’
Nina took a deep breath to stop herself from screaming.
‘I think Kitty is going to drown herself in our pool.’
‘Oh dear,’ Mitchell grimaced. ‘Why’s that?’
‘I just get that impression.’
She did not want to say she had opened the envelope meant for her father. Mitchell switched the blender on and watched the chestnuts and sugar whirl into a paste and splatter over the palm trees on his shirt.
‘If I threw you into the pool now you would float. Even I with my big stomach would float.’
He was shouting over the noise of the blender. Nina waited for him to turn it off so she could whisper.
‘Yes. She’s been collecting stones. I was with her on the beach when she was looking for them.’ She explained how Kitty told her she was studying the drains in the pool and had said mental things like, ‘You don’t want to get hair caught in the plumbing.’
Mitchell looked at the fourteen-year-old fondly. He realised she was jealous of the attention her father had been paying Kitty and probably wanted the girl to drown.
‘Cheer up, Nina. Have some sweet chestnut purée on a spoon. I’m going to mix it with chocolate.’ He licked his fingers. ‘And I’m going to save a little square for the rat tonight.’
She knew a terrible secret no one else knew. And there were other secrets too. Yesterday when she was sitting on the bed in Kitty’s room helping her nudge out the seeds from her plants, a bird was singing in the garden. Kitty Finch had put her head in her hands and sobbed like there was no tomorrow.
She must speak to her father, but he was in Nice making his way to some Russian church even though he had told her that if she was ever tempted to believe in God she might be having a nervous breakdown. Something else worried her. It was the thing under the bed, but she didn’t want to think about that because it was something to do with Mitchell and anyway now her mother was calling her to go horse-riding.
Ponyland
The ponies were drinking water from a tank in the shade. Flies crawled over their swollen bellies and short legs and into their brown eyes that always seemed wet. As Nina watched the woman who hired them out brush their tails, she decided she would have to tell her mother about Kitty’s drowning poem, as she now called it. Kitty was speaking in French to the pony woman and didn’t look like someone who was about to drown herself. She was wearing a short blue dress and there were small white feathers in her hair, as if her pillow had burst in the night.
‘We have to follow the trail. There’s an orange plastic bag tied to the branches of the trees. The woman says we have to follow the orange plastic and walk either side of the pony.’
Nina, who wanted to be alone with her mother, found herself forced to choose a grey pony with long scabby ears and pretend she was having a perfect childhood.
The little pony was not in the mood to be hired out for an hour. She stopped every two minutes to graze the grass and nuzzle her head against the bark of trees. Nina was impatient. She had important things on her mind, not least the stones she had collected with Kitty on the beach, because she thought they were in the poem. She had seen the words ‘The Drowning Stones’ underlined in the middle of the page.
She noticed her mother was suddenly taking notice of things. When Kitty pointed out trees and different kinds of grasses, Isabel asked her to repeat their names. Kitty was saying that certain types of insects needed to drink nectar in the heatwave. Did Isabel know that honey is just spit and nectar? When bees suck nectar they mix it with their saliva and store the mixture in their honey sacs. Then they throw up their honey sacs and start all over again. Kitty was talking as if they were one big happy family, all the while holding the rope between her thumb and finger. Nina sat in silence on the pony, staring moodily at the cracks of blue sky she could see through the trees. If she turned the sky upside down the pony would have to swim through clouds and vapour. The sky would be grass. Insects would run across the sky. The trail seemed to have disappeared, because there were no more orange plastic bags tied to the branches of trees. They had come out of the pine forest into a clearing near a café. The café was opposite a lake. Nina scanned the trees for bits of ripped orange plastic and knew they were lost, but Kitty didn’t care. She was waving at someone, trying to get the attention of a woman sitting alone on the terrace outside the café.
‘It’s Dr Sheridan. Let’s go and say hello.’
She walked the pony straight off what remained of the trail and led it up the three shallow concrete steps towards Madeleine Sheridan, who had taken off her spectacles and placed them on the white plastic table next to her book.