Hot Milk (22 page)

I took a bite of the croissant.

‘You have a certain
je ne sais quoi
, Sofia Irina.’

‘Really?’

He nodded.

I was now devouring one of the croissants. I had an appetite beyond my status and size. When I’d finished, Gómez asked me if I would like the other one.

I shook my curls at him. ‘No, thanks. That would be unhealthy.’

Gómez glanced at his computer and then at me. ‘I don’t have good news,’ he said. ‘I cannot treat your mother. I doubt if she will walk again. Her symptoms are spectral like a ghost, they come and go. They have no physiological substance. While you were in Athens,
she was talking to me about amputation. In fact, that is her wish. She has asked for surgery.’

I started to laugh. ‘She’s joking,’ I said. ‘You don’t understand her Yorkshire humour. She’s always saying, “Do away with these feet.” It’s a turn of phrase.’

He shrugged. ‘It is perhaps a joke, certainly a threat. But I have already told her there is nothing I can do for her. She is defeated.’

He went on to say it was not in his remit to undo her words or indeed to undo her wish to sever parts of her body. Instead, he intended to reimburse a large portion of his fee. In fact, he had arranged for this sum to be transferred to her bank the next day.

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d stay away.

How could Gómez misinterpret my mother’s dark humour and then abandon her, as if she meant what she was saying?

She is my mother. Her legs are my legs. Her pains are my pains. I am her only and she is my only.
I wish, I wish, I wish
.

‘There is nothing I can do for her,’ he said again.

‘But she’s having you on,’ I shouted. ‘It’s not literally true, it’s not real.’

He touched his chin with the tips of his fingers. ‘You have some crumbs on your chin,’ he said.

‘
It’s not real!
’ I shouted again.

‘Yes, it is hard to accept. However, she intends to pursue her desire for amputation with a consultant in London. In fact, she has already made the appointment.’ He told me our conversation was over. I should understand that Mrs Papastergiadis was not his only patient.

I was so shocked I could not stand up. Instead, I glared at the vervet crouched in its glass cage. The rage of my gaze would shatter his final
home in Gómez’s consulting room. I would free him to run into the sea and drown.

Gómez’s gold teeth were on full display. ‘I think you would like to free our little primate so he can scamper around the room and read my early editions of Baudelaire. But first you must free yourself from that chair and walk to the door.’ His new tone was sharp. ‘Go for a hike in the mountains. You must be sure not to borrow your mother’s limp or step into her shoes.’ He pointed to my hands.

I was still holding my mother’s shoes which were no longer attached to her feet.

Yesterday the Greek beauty saw three hens tethered by one leg to the same tree at Señora Bedello’s. She started to weep. It is anguish. Angst. Four of the chickens have died in the heat. Let her think no one can see her suffering or how she drags her feet with sadness. Love explodes near her like a war but she never admits she started it. She pretends she has no weapons but she likes the smoke. Love is not all she needs even though she has no one to hold her hand under the stars and say god the moon. She wants a job. I have other things to do too.

I am lying naked on the Beach of the Dead. Playa de los Muertos. There is a tiny sliver of glass embedded above my left eyebrow. I don’t know how it got there. Playa de los Muertos is a nudist beach. There is no shelter for those who wish to be naked. Two slender girls, perhaps seventeen, are swimming naked in the clear, turquoise sea. A ragged, ugly dog swims between them. When they climb out of the water the girls search for sticks that have been washed up on the shore and hammer them like tent pegs into the shiny, white pebbles. When they drape a green sarong over the sticks to make a canopy of shade, the dog crawls under it and they sit with it in the full blaze of the sun. One of the girls takes out a bottle of water and pours it into a bowl for their beast. When she strokes its mangy fur it howls.

The dog is howling.

It is being stroked but it is still howling.

It is howling for nothing.

Life doesn’t get better than this and it is still howling.

It is Pablo’s dog. The Alsatian. The German shepherd. The diving-school dog. I’d recognize his howl anywhere. Pablo’s dog is alive and howling on the Beach of the Dead.

One of the girls takes out a comb and pulls it through her long, wet hair. The rhythmic movement of the comb seems to calm the agitated animal as he laps up water from the bowl. She is combing her hair and he is lapping up water.

The girls turn their attention away from their forlorn beast and lean their backs against his breathing, wet body. They are facing the horizon. A naked man in his late thirties is throwing pebbles into the sea with his young son. When he senses the naked girls are looking at him, he turns away from their beauty and suddenly throws a small rock into the sea. He is displaying his strength to the girls and they are pretending not to notice, but they have noticed him. The man is a father. He is standing with his son and he is forsworn to someone else. Perhaps he has snared a woman as enchanting as these young girls, at ease with their bodies, attending to the tangles in their wet hair. He has already been caught but he wants to be caught again. It is a hunt. The only sort of hunt where the prey wants to be jumped on and mauled by its predators.

The hot rocks. The transparent sea.

The medusas are in abeyance. They have disappeared from the ocean today. Where have they gone? My face is pressed down on the white pebbles. I am naked apart from the glass sliver near my eyebrow. I no longer want to know what anything means.

The heat of the white pebbles warms my belly, the salty sea leaves white streaks on my brown skin. It is paradise, but I am not happy. I am like the dog that used to belong to Pablo. History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.

There is a whole day to kill on the Beach of the Dead.

Dan from Denver called to say he has given the walls of the storeroom in the Coffee House a new coat of white paint. It is as if his minor refurbishment has now made my room his room. He pointed out that I had left some of my anthropology textbooks under the bed. What did I want him to do with my shoes and winter coat, both of them hanging on a hook behind the door? It was a catastrophe. The storeroom was my place. It might be a modest, temporary place, but it was my home. I had made my mark on the walls when I wrote out the Margaret Mead quote, using the five semicolons (;;;;;) that are also used in a text message to represent a wink.

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalysed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.

That evening I met Matthew, who was carrying a box of clothes from the vintage shop. He told me it was work for Ingrid to take home to Berlin and asked me if I had a message I would like him to give to her. It was as if I was forbidden to speak to her and could do so only through him.

I stood there in the fiercest late-August sun, sweating, freaked out.

What kind of message did I want to give Ingrid?

I let him wait.

‘By the way, Sophie, that bottle of wine you and Inge stole from my cellar? It’s a mid-range wine, worth about three hundred pounds. So I reckon you should pay half.’

His hands were full because of the box of clothes, so he waggled one of his white espadrilles in my direction for emphasis.

When I laughed I sounded monstrous to my own ears. ‘Tell her that Pablo’s dog is alive and free. He can swim because he has a sea past.’

‘What do you mean, a sea past?’

‘Someone must have trained him to swim when he was a puppy.’

‘You’re so insane, Sophie.’

Matthew walked towards me, struggling with the box, and kissed me on the cheek. I could tell that his body was cleverer than he was because I liked the feeling of him being close to me. I offered my other insane cheek to his insane lips.

It is 11 p.m. and I am naked again, but this time with Juan.

Our bodies are shaking. We are lying on a Turkish rug on the floor of the room he has rented while he has his summer job at the injury hut.

‘Sofia,’ he says, ‘I know your age and I know your country of origin. But I don’t know anything about your occupation.’

I like how he is not in love with me.

I like how I am not in love with him.

I like the yellow flesh of the two tiny wild pineapples he bought in the market.

He is kissing my shoulder. He knows I am reading an email from Alexandra.

He asks me to read it out loud.

It is written in Greek, so I will have to translate it into English.

Dear Sofia,

Your sister is missing you. A friend said to me that I have two daughters. I corrected her, no I have one, and she said, no you have two. She meant you. I regard you as a sister, but then I remembered it is my daughter who is your sister. Your papa has told me he will leave all our money to the church when he dies. I tell you this as a sister. Although I too have faith, I need to take care of my daughter, who is your sister too. You should know that I lost my job at the bank in Brussels. I am concerned that my two daughters, yes, one of them is you, and his wife, that is me, will be sacrificed to his god and we will lose our investments and our home. This is also to say I hope the health of your real mother is improving and that her legs are getting better.

Kind wishes to you, Sofia

Alexandra

He asks me to read it to him in Greek. ‘It is the right language to read that sort of email.’ He knows he is touching me somewhere that makes me tremble.

We discuss America. The country that gave a home to Claude Lévi-Strauss the anthropologist and to Levi Strauss & Co., the
manufacturer of blue jeans, and which might also give me a temporary home to finish my doctorate. If its theme is memory, Juan wonders where will I begin and where I will end. While he takes the tiny sliver of glass out of the skin above my eyebrow, I confess that I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened.

The faux ancient Greek vase I smashed before I left for Athens is still lying in pieces on the table of the beach apartment. I wonder if I should attempt to put it together again. The seven female slaves collecting water by the fountain are shattered. Their slave bodies are broken, their heads cracked. I gaze at them for a long time and then decide not to restore them with putty and a paintbrush. Instead, I open a bottle of wine and drink it on the terrace.

‘Get me water, Sofia. Water that is not cold.’

I am a female slave and a female wine drinker.

I bring my mother water that has been boiled in the kettle but has not been chilled in the fridge. It is still the wrong sort of water. I am learning that there are more acceptable shades of wrong. I no longer speak to her. The news of her wish for the amputation has shocked me to the core. She has forsaken her right to any kind of conversation with me because she has replaced words with the surgeon’s knife. I cannot live with the violence of her intention or her imagination. In fact, I’m not sure what kind of reality I am living in right now. I don’t know what is real. In this sense my own feet are not firmly touching the ground. I no longer have a grip. My mother has abdicated, resigned, relinquished, declined, waived, disclaimed everything and she has taken me down with her. My love for her is like an axe. She has grabbed it from me and is threatening to chop off her feet.

It is also true that this threat of hers, the severing of her limbs, has galvanized me. I am discovering that sleep is for happier people. I am awake all night making my application to complete my doctorate in America. I want to be as far away from Rose as possible. Last night I hammered the keyboard and the sentences found their shape on the shattered digital page under the desert stars. I watched the sun rise. It slips backwards and forwards across the sky but it is the Earth that is moving around the sun, tipping, spinning.

I am spinning with it and I am pressing Send.

I dreamed again of the Greek girl. We are lying on a beach and I put my hand on her breast. We both fall asleep. When she wakes up she shouts, LOOK! She is pointing to the print of my hand. It leaves a white tattoo on her skin where everything is brown. She says, I will wear the print of your monster claws on my body to frighten my enemies.

The senior executive from the pharmaceutical company and the health official from Barcelona were seated on hard wooden chairs below the vervet perched in Gómez's consulting room. One was gaunt with close-cut silver hair. His colleague was plumper with flabby cheeks, thinning black hair greased over his scalp and small wet lips.

The gaunt executive fidgeted with a golf ball in his right hand, tapping it with his thumb, sometimes throwing it a few inches in the air then catching it again. Gómez stood in front of his desk and Julieta perched on it, her legs crossed under what looked like a brand-new, white clinician's coat. My mother sat regally in her wheelchair and I was standing by her side.

Gómez gestured towards the two men. ‘Please, may I introduce Mr James from Los Angeles.' He pointed to the gaunt, silver-haired man. ‘And Señor Covarrubias from Barcelona.'

He waved his hand in my mother's direction. ‘This is my patient Mrs Papastergiadis and her daughter, Sofia Irina.'

The plump official smiled flirtatiously at my mother. ‘I hope you are comfortable today,' he said.

‘It's nice to be out and about,' she replied.