Hot Milk (12 page)

I stepped in front of her. ‘How much is that watch?’ I had placed my hands on my hips as if I was indignant, which I was not. That was odd. I was imitating indignation, but my heart wasn’t in it. Where did I learn to express indignation I did not feel, my voice veering up the scales to land on a note which could be described as accusing? Where did I learn to adopt an attitude that I do not believe in? And what about the word Beloved? Perhaps Ingrid was imitating something she did not feel when she embroidered that word in blue thread and gave it to me as if it were of no importance.

He told me the watch was only fifty euro.

I started to laugh, but sarcasm is not the same as laughing and he knew it.

Now he was delicately holding a tiny round disc of steel between his long fingers. Rose explained to me that it was a battery, as if this were an entirely new invention.

They both became very involved in the battery. He was nodding and smiling in agreement with her, pointing to the diamonds as if they were priceless. The anise liqueur had flushed Rose’s cheeks. When she started counting the number of diamonds in the circle, he understood that her wrist would not be naked for much longer. I realized my mother had charm and verve. If I blew on her name, ROSE, the letters would shuffle around and come out as EROS, the god of love, winged but lame.

She held out her wrist and the man attached the watch around it.

I could see it was too big for her small bones and always would be. He dragged a stool to the side of her wheelchair and invited her to rest her wrist on his knee while he fiddled with the links of the gold band. The hairs on her arm were trapped under the links. I found myself wincing as if I were feeling this small pain on her behalf. Empathy is more painful than medusa stings.

While my mother proceeded with the ritual of purchasing a time-keeping device to ‘see her out’, I walked to a stall selling brooms and mousetraps, among other things. An abundance of pink and blue birthday-cake candles were laid out on foil trays. Three candles for one euro. The more expensive ones were silver and had matching spiked silver holders to pierce the cake. I gazed at a variety of mops and buckets, pots and pans, wooden spoons and sieves. I have never had a home of my own in my adult life so far. If I made a home, what would I buy from this stall of domestic goods? I would apparently have moths and mice to kill and rats and flies. I picked up an aerosol of air freshener that had been designed in the shape of a curvaceous woman. She was wearing a polka-dot apron that did not disguise her massive belly and heavy breasts. Her eyelashes were long and curled, her lips tiny and puckered. The instructions for how to use her were
translated into Italian, Greek, German, Danish and a language I did not recognize, but she was ‘Extremely Flammable’ in every language.

There were instructions in English, too. Shake her well. Point her towards the centre of the room and spray. The scale of her belly and breasts was not unlike early fertility goddesses found in Greece around 6000
BC
, except they did not wear polka-dot aprons. Did they suffer from hypochondria? Hysteria? Were they bold? Lame? Too full of the milk of human kindness?

I bought the air freshener for four euro because it was a kind of artefact translated into many languages, and also because it was clearly an interpretation of a woman (breasts belly apron eyelashes) and I had become confused by the signs for
servicios
in public places. I could not figure out why one sign was male and the other female. The most common stick-figure sign was not particularly male or female. Did I need this aerosol to make things clearer to me? What kind of clarity was I after?

I had conquered Juan who was Zeus the thunderer as far as I was concerned, but the signs were all mixed up because his job in the injury hut was to tend the wounded with his tube of ointment. He was maternal, brotherly, he was like a sister, perhaps paternal, he had become my lover. Are we all lurking in each other’s sign? Do I and the woman on the air freshener belong to the same sign? Another aeroplane was flying above the market, its metal body heavy in the sky. A male pilot I had met in the Coffee House had told me that an aircraft was always referred to as ‘she’. His task was to keep her in balance, to make her an extension of his hands, to make her responsive to the lightest of touch. She was sensitive and needed to be handled delicately. A week later, after we had slept together, I discovered that he was also responsive to the lightest of touch.

It wasn’t clarity I was after. I wanted things to be less clear.

The African man and my mother seemed to be hitting it off. He was telling her about the history of Almería while he took the watch
off her wrist so she could soothe the fine hair that had been caught in the links. He was taking a long time to sell her that watch.

‘“Almería” in Arabic means “the mirror of the sea”.’

Rose was pretending to listen but all her attention was on her diamond-studded watch. ‘It’s ticking! I can feel the ticking because my arms are not numb like my feet.’

It is a time-keeping device to see her out and it is ticking.

‘I have difficulty walking,’ Rose told the African salesman. He shook his head in commercial sympathy as she waved a fifty-euro note in the air with a flourish and then graciously passed it to him. ‘Thank you for your time.’

He waved us goodbye as the sun warmed the brine in the bucket of olives and giant capers nearby. Everything smelt of harsh, dark vinegar.

‘Do you want to know the time, Sofia?’

‘Oh Yes Please.’

‘It is twelve forty-five. Time for my dwindling medication.’

When we arrive back at the car I invite Rose to get out of her wheelchair and stand while I fold and stack it in the boot.

‘It’s not a matter of will, Sofia. I can’t stand today.’

By the time I had heaved my mother into the car, her groans, moans, hisses and then insults all directed at me, and then my flaws, imperfections and irritating habits, I felt that she was indeed a gangster and that she was mugging my life.

I sat down on the passenger seat, slammed the door and waited for her to drive us away, but she had become very still, as if she was in shock. We had parked outside the ruin of a house that we thought was uninhabited. But now we saw that people were living there despite the holes in the roof and broken windows. A mother and her young daughter were eating soup on the porch. Everything was broken, the wheelbarrow, the pram, the chairs, the table and the doll with one arm that was lying near the car.

It was a broken home in every sense.

My mother was the head of her own small, broken family.

It was her responsibility to stop wild animals sneaking in through the door and terrifying her child. It was as if this sad house was a spectre she carried inside her, the fear of not keeping the wolf from our door in Hackney, London. I had been entitled to free school meals at my school and Rose knew I was ashamed. She had made me soup in a flask most days before she left for work. I carried it in my heavy schoolbag while it leaked all over my homework. That flask of soup was a torment but it was proof to my mother that the wolf had not yet arrived. My guidebook has a whole page on the Iberian wolves (
Canis lupus signatus
) that once flourished in Almería. Apparently, during Franco’s dictatorship, there was a special campaign to exterminate the wolves. Obviously some of them had survived and hadn’t bothered to knock on the door of this house. They had crashed through the windows.

An aeroplane cut a white trail in the sky.

The child waved her spoon at my mother.

‘Sofia, drive us home.’ Rose threw the keys into my lap.

‘I can’t drive.’

‘Yes, you can. Anyway, that anise liqueur was too strong and I can’t drive either.’

She started to edge her body into the passenger seat so I had to jump out of the car. I walked round to the driver’s seat, sat down, inserted the key into the ignition. The engine started. I fiddled with the handbrake and began to reverse.

‘That’s perfect,’ Rose said. ‘A perfect reverse.’

Something crunched under the wheels.

‘It’s that poor child’s doll,’ my mother said, peering out of the window. ‘Never mind, change gear, indicator on, put your seat belt on, very good, off we go.’

I was driving at ten miles an hour while Rose leaned forward to adjust the mirror. ‘Faster.’

I was in the wrong gear but then I corrected the gear stick’s
position and even dared to increase the speed along the new, empty motorway.

‘Sofia, I feel completely safe in your hands. Just one observation.’

‘What?’

‘In Spain, you drive on the right-hand side of the road.’

I laughed and Rose told me the time on her new watch.

‘We are going uphill, so you need to change gear. Can you see there is a car trying to overtake us?’

‘Yes, I can see him.’

‘It’s a her,’ she said. ‘A her is trying to overtake you because she has perfect visibility, she can see there are no vehicles coming in her direction. It’s one o’clock, by the way.’

Driving was a breeze after working the coffee machines, just as Rose said it would be.

Something was rolling around in the boot. Every time I turned a corner it banged against the sides. I slowed down and the car suddenly jerked and stopped.

‘You have to find a better balance between the brake and the accelerator. Into neutral and start again.’

The Berlingo lurched forward and the object in the boot rattled around.

‘That is not neutral.’ Rose adjusted the gears for me and we were off. ‘It is not your lack of a licence that worries me, it is your lack of spectacles. I will have to be your eyes.’

She is my eyes. I am her legs.

After we arrived in the car park at the end of the village and I had pulled up the handbrake, Rose announced she had a new chauffeur.

My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.

She stretched out her finger to touch the oiled curls on the nape of my neck. ‘I’m not sure what you’re doing to your hair, Fia. You remind me of the taxi driver who got lost taking your father and myself to our hotel in Kefalonia for our honeymoon.’

She gestured to me to pass her the keys. ‘Your father was very
proud of his hair, and I was forbidden to touch it. In those days his hair was long and fell to his shoulders in soft black curls. In the end, I began to regard it as symbolic hair.’

I did not want to know any of this. But as she had told Gómez, I was her only.

When I opened the door for her in my new role as chauffeur, she told me she would walk home. Walking was, apparently, no problem at all. I turned my back on her and searched the boot for the object that had been rattling around. When I eventually found it, I guessed that Matthew must have hidden it in the boot after he picked up the hire car and signed off the papers with Nurse Sunshine.

It was an aerosol of blue spray-paint.

Rose was leaning against the trunk of the palm tree at the end of the car park. She was bent over as if carrying something too heavy to bear.

The Kiss. We don’t talk about it but it’s there in the coconut ice cream we are making together. It’s there in the space between us as Ingrid scrapes the seeds from a vanilla pod with her penknife. It’s lurking in her long eyelids and in the egg yolks and cream and it’s written in blue silken thread with the needle that is Ingrid’s mind. I don’t know what I want from Ingrid or why she enjoys humiliating me or why I put up with it.

It seems that I have consented to being undermined.

She shows me the clothes piled in baskets all over the floor of their Spanish house and pulls out a white satin dress with thin, fraying straps. It has a stain on the hem but she says it would suit me. She’ll mend it when she gets round to it because she knows my medusa stings hurt all the time.

They don’t hurt all the time but I don’t want to disappoint her. While we wait for the ice cream to set in the freezer she twists a strand of my hair around her finger. ‘Let me cut out this knot,’ she says.

She reaches for a pair of ornate, sharp scissors lying on top of one of the baskets of clothes. The blades saw through my hair. When I turn round she is holding a thick strand of my curls like a trophy in her hand. I feel uneasy but it is more exciting than waiting for my mother’s side effects and withdrawal symptoms. Perhaps feeling uneasy is a side effect?

‘Zoffie, do anthropologists steal heads from graves to measure and classify them?’

‘No, that was in the old days. I’m not looking for heads in graves.’

‘What are you looking for, then?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Really, Zoffie?’

Yes.

‘Why is nothing interesting?’

‘Because it covers up everything.’

She punched my arm. ‘You spend too much time on your own. You should make something with your hands.’

‘Like what?’

‘A bridge.’

If Ingrid is a bridge leading me across the swamp beneath it, she keeps taking a few of the bricks out every time we meet. It is like an erotic rite of passage. If I manage to cross the bridge without falling into the swamp, perhaps I will be compensated for my suffering? Ingrid’s lips are luscious, soft and full. She is poised, a woman of few words, but the word she has chosen, Beloved, is a big word.

She commands me to sit in the garden with Matthew who has just returned from work.

He is lying in a hammock slung between two trees in the shade. ‘To-day was an ex-per-i-ence.’ Matthew pushes his foot against the tree and the hammock starts to sway from left to right. ‘The hardest thing, Sophie, is to get people to be themselves.’

He waves his hands at the leaves above his head, as if conjuring a self that might be true enough for him.

It turns out that Matthew is a life coach. He teaches senior managers to communicate better, to sell their brand and put it across with humour and vigour.

Is Matthew being himself?

He is friendly but shifty, and I don’t blame him because his girlfriend is messing with me and he’s messing with something too, but
I’m not sure what’s going on. Something like his right hand wrote a blue message to Julieta Gómez while his left hand caressed Ingrid Bauer’s long, tanned thighs.