Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

had somehow got tangled in the wires too. He found himself sweating as he bent down to free it from the wire and then noticed a shadow on the floor. Someone was there with him. Someone had broken into the villa and he didn’t have his guns with him. Even his ancient ebony weapon from Persia would see off whoever was there.
    ‘Hello, Mitchell.’
    Kitty Finch was leaning naked against the wall, watching him struggle not to catch his fingers in his own trap. She was nibbling the chocolate he had left for the rat, her arms folded across her breasts.
    ‘I call you the trapper now, but I’ve warned all the owls about you.’
    He pressed his hand on his pounding heart and stared at her pale, righteous face. He would shoot her. If he had his weapons with him he would do it. He would aim for her stomach. He imagined how he would hold the gun and timed the moment he would snap the trigger. She would fall to the ground, her glassy grey eyes wide open, a bloody hole gouged in her belly. He blinked and saw she was still standing against the wall, taunting him with the chocolate he had placed so carefully in the wires. She looked thin and pathetic and he realised he had scared her.
    ‘Sorry I was so abrupt.’
    ‘Yeah.’ She nodded as if they were suddenly best friends. ‘You gave me a fright, but I was frightened anyway.’
    He was terrified too. For a moment he seriously considered telling her about his nightmare.
    ‘Why do you kill animals and birds, Mitchell?’
    She was almost pretty, with her narrow waist and long hair glowing in the dark, but ragged too, not far off someone begging outside a train station holding up a homeless and hungry sign.
    ‘It takes my mind off things,’ he found himself saying as if he meant it, which he did.
    ‘What sorts of things?’
    Again he considered telling her about some of the worries that weighed heavily on his mind but stopped himself just in time. He couldn’t go shooting his mouth off to someone crazy like her.
    ‘You’re a complete fuck-up, Mitchell. Stop killing things and you’ll feel better.’
    ‘Haven’t you got a home to go to?’ He thought he had meant this quite kindly, but even to his own ears it sounded like an insult.
    ‘Yeah, I live with my mother at the moment, but it’s not my home.’
    As she knelt down to help him untangle the grubby toy rabbit that made a mockery of his trap, he couldn’t work out why he thought someone as sad as she was might be dangerous.
    ‘You know what?’ This time Mitchell thought he genuinely meant this kindly. ‘If you wore clothes more often instead of walking around in your birthday suit, you’d look more normal.’
     

Spirited Away
     
    Nina’s disappearance was only discovered at seven a.m. after Joe called for her because he had lost his special ink pen. His daughter was the person who always found it for him, whatever the time, a drama Laura had heard at least twelve times that holiday. Whenever Nina returned the pen victoriously to her loud, forlorn father he wrapped her in his arms and bellowed melodramatically, ‘Thank you thank you thank you.’ Often in a number of languages: Polish, Portuguese, Italian. Yesterday it was, ‘Danke danke danke.’
    No one could believe Joe was actually shouting for his daughter to find his pen so early in the morning, but that was what he did and Nina did not answer. Isabel walked into her daughter’s bedroom and saw the doors to her balcony were wide open. She whipped off the duvet, expecting to see her hiding under the covers. Nina wasn’t there and the sheet was stained with blood. When Laura heard Isabel sobbing, she ran into the room to find her friend pointing to the bed, strange choking sounds coming out of her mouth. She was pale, deathly white, uttering words that sounded to Laura like ‘bone’ or ‘hair’ or ‘she isn’t there’; it was hard to make sense of what she was saying.
    Laura suggested they go together to look for Nina in the garden and steered her out