Hot Milk (7 page)

I knew she had been thinking about her enemies because she had written a list. Perhaps I am on that list?

To my surprise, her voice was calm and her tone almost friendly.

‘My parents were my first adversaries, of course. They did not like foreigners so, naturally, I married a Greek man.’

When Gómez smiled his lips were black from the octopus ink.

He gestured to my mother to continue.

‘Both my parents breathed their last holding the kindly dark-skinned hands of the nurses who tended them. But it seems churlish to have a go at them now. I will, anyway. To my parents on the Other Side. Remind me to spell for you the names of the hospital staff who sat with you on the day you died.’

Gómez rested his knife and fork on the edge of the plate. ‘You are talking about your National Health Service. But I note that you have chosen some private care?’

‘That is true and I feel a little ashamed. But Sofia researched your clinic and encouraged me to give it a go. We were at the end of the road. Weren’t we, Fia?’

I gazed at the boat being pumped up in the square. It was blue with a yellow stripe across its side.

‘So, you married your Greek man?’

‘Yes, for eleven years we waited for a child. And when we at last conceived and our daughter was five, Christos was summoned by the voice of God to find a younger woman in Athens.’

‘I am myself of the Catholic faith.’

Gómez shovelled more extraterrestrial octopus into his mouth. ‘By the way, Mrs Papastergiadis, “Gómez” is pronounced “Gómeth”.’

‘I respect your beliefs, Mr Gómeth. When you get to heaven, may the pearly gates be draped in an octopus drying for your welcome dinner.’

He seemed up for everything she threw at him and had lost the chiding tone of their first meeting. Her eyes were no longer pink and the welts on her left cheek had subsided. ‘’Twas a long wait for my only.’

Gómez reached for the silk handkerchief arranged in a puff in his jacket pocket and passed it to her. ‘God and walking. Maybe they are your enemies?’

Rose dabbed her eyes. ‘It is not walking. It is walking out.’

I stared miserably at the cigarette butts on the floor. It was such a relief to be mute.

Gómez was gentle but persistent. ‘This business with names. It’s tricky.’ He pronounced ‘tricky’ to rhyme with ‘wee-fee’. ‘In fact, I have two surnames. Gómez is my father’s name, and my last name is my mother’s name, Lucas. I have made a shorter name for myself but my formal name is Gómez Lucas. Your daughter calls you Rose but your formal name is Mama. It is uncomfortable, is it not, this to-ing and fro-ing between “Rose” and “Mrs Papastergiadis” and “Mother”?’

‘It is very sentimental what you are saying,’ Rose said, holding on tight to his handkerchief.

My phone pinged.

You now have car

Come get key

Parked near bins

Inge

I whispered to Gómez, telling him that the hire car had arrived and I needed to leave the table. He ignored me because his attention was entirely focused on Rose. I suddenly felt jealous, as if I were missing some sort of attention that had never been bestowed on me in the first place.

The car park was a square of dry scrubland at the back of the beach where the village dumped its garbage. The rancid bins were overflowing with decaying sardines, chicken bones and vegetable peel. As I walked through a black cloud of flies, I paused to listen to the buzzing.

‘Zoffie! Quick, run. It’s hot standing here.’

Their wings were intricate and oily.

‘Zoffie!’

I started to run towards Ingrid Bauer.

And then I slowed down.

A fly had settled on my hand. I swatted it but I did not recite an ailment.

I made a wish.

To my surprise, the words I whispered were in Greek.

Ingrid was leaning against a red car. The doors were open and a man in his early thirties, presumably Matthew, was sitting in the driver’s seat. At first he appeared to be staring intensely at himself in the mirror, but as I got closer I saw that he was shaving with an electric razor.

Something was sparkling on Ingrid’s feet. She was wearing the silver Roman sandals that laced in a long criss-cross up her shins. She looked like she had been adorned with treasure. In ancient Rome, the higher the boot or sandal was laced up the leg, the higher the rank of the fighter.

In the dust and scrub of the car park I saw her as a gladiator fighting in the arena of the Colosseum. It would have been covered in sand to soak up the blood of her opponent.

‘This is my boyfriend, Matthew,’ she said. She gripped my sweaty hand in her cool hand and more or less pushed me into the car so that I fell on him and knocked the electric razor out of his hand. A sticker on the windscreen said ‘Europcar’.

‘Hey, Inge, go easy.’

Matthew’s hair was blond like hers and fell to just below his jaw, which was still covered in shaving foam. I had fallen into his lap and we had to disentangle ourselves while his razor whirred on the floor of the Europcar. When I climbed back out to the putrefying stench from the bins, the sting on my arm was throbbing because I had knocked it against the steering wheel.

‘Jeezus.’ Matthew glared at Ingrid. ‘What’s going on with you today?’ He picked up the razor and stepped out of the car. He switched it off and gave it to her to hold while he tucked his white T-shirt into the waistband of his beige chinos. He shook my hand. ‘Hiya, Sophie.’

I thanked him for getting the car.

‘Oh, it was no problem. A colleague I play golf with gave me a ride, which meant my lover girl could have a lie-in.’ He draped his
arm around Ingrid’s shoulder. Even in flat sandals she was at least two heads taller than he was.

Half his jaw was still covered in foam. It looked like a tribal marking.

‘Hey, Sophie, isn’t the weather insane?’

Ingrid pushed his arm away and pointed to the Europcar. ‘Do you like it, Zoffie? It’s a Citroën Berlingo.’

‘Yes, but I’m not sure about the colour.’

Ingrid knew I did not drive, so I wasn’t sure why she had made such an effort to get the car on my behalf.

‘Do you want to come over to our house and taste my lemonade?’

‘I do, but I can’t. I’m in the middle of lunch with my mother’s doctor in the plaza.’

‘All right. See you on the beach maybe?’

Matthew suddenly became energetic and amiable. ‘I’ll lock up the Berlingo when I’ve finished my insane electro foam shave and bring the keys and paperwork over to your table. By the way, why didn’t they hire your mother an automatic? I mean, she can’t walk, right?’

Ingrid looked annoyed but I couldn’t work out why. When she playfully kicked his knee with the sole of her silver sandal, he grabbed her leg and then knelt down in the dust and kissed her tanned shins in the gaps between the criss-crossed straps.

When I got back to the plaza, my mother and Gómez seemed to be getting along. They were having an intense conversation and didn’t take any notice when I returned to the table. I had to admit that Rose looked excited. She was flushed and flirtatious. She had even slipped off her shoes and was sitting barefoot in the sun. The shoes with the laces I had unknotted for an hour had been abandoned. It occurred to me that she had slept alone for decades. When I was five six seven I had sometimes crept into bed with her when my father left, but I remember feeling uneasy. As if she were folding her growing child back into her womb in the way an aeroplane folds its wheels back into
its body after take-off. Now she was saying something about needing the three pills she has been asked to abandon and how coming to Spain to heal her lame legs was like crying for the moon. By which I think she meant we were searching for a cure that was beyond our reach.

If I were to look at my mother just once in a certain way, I would turn her to stone. Not her, literally. I would turn the language of allergies, dizziness, heart palpitations and waiting for side effects to stone. I would kill this language stone dead.

The thin boy with the Mohican was still inflating his boat. His brother was showing him the oars and they were having a heated discussion while their sister prodded the blue plastic dinghy with her bare foot. They were all excited about an adventure in the sea with a new boat. That was the right sort of thing to be excited by. It made a change from waiting for withdrawal symptoms.

Gómez’s lips were black from the octopus he had eaten with such relish. ‘So you see, Rose, I have brought the sea to you with my polpo, and you have survived.’

When Rose smiled, she looked pretty and lively. ‘I have been robbed, Mr Gometh. I could have gone to Devon for less than one hundred pounds and sat by the sea with a packet of biscuits on my lap, patting one of many English dogs. You are more expensive than Devon. I am, frankly, disappointed.’

‘Disappointment is unpleasant,’ he agreed. ‘You have my sympathy.’

Rose waved her hand to the waiter and ordered a large glass of Rioja.

Gómez glanced at me and I could see he was annoyed about the wine. The table was unsteady and had been wobbling all through lunch. He took a prescription pad out of his pocket, ripped off five of the scripts and folded them into a square. ‘Sofia, kindly help me lift the table so I can wedge this under the leg.’

I stood up and gripped the edge nearest to me. It was surprisingly
heavy for a table made from plastic. It was an effort to raise it half an inch off the ground while Gómez edged the paper into place.

Rose suddenly jumped. ‘The cat scratched me!’

I looked under the newly steady table. A cat was sitting on her left foot.

Gómez tugged at the lobe of his left ear. I began to sense that he was taking mental notes, just as I had been doing all my life. If she had no feeling in her legs, her mind had made some claws that were pricking her feet.

It was like he was Sherlock and I was Watson – or the other way round, given I had more experience. I could see the sense of him testing her apparent numbness by inviting the village cats to join us for lunch. When I looked under the table again, I saw a tiny prick of blood on her ankle. She had definitely felt that claw dig into her skin.

Now I understood why he gave her permission to drive the hire car.

Someone was hovering by our table. Matthew, who was now clean-shaven, was standing behind my mother. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Rose, as he leaned over her to pass me the car keys and a purple plastic wallet. ‘You’ll find all the paperwork in there.’

‘Who are you?’ Rose looked mystified.

‘I am the partner of Ingrid, a friend of your daughter. She told me you were a bit strapped for wheels so I picked up the hire car for you this morning. It drives pretty smoothly.’ He glanced at a cat chewing a polpo tentacle and grimaced. ‘These street cats have diseases, you know.’

Rose blew out her cheeks and nodded slyly in agreement. ‘How do you know this man, Sofia?’

I had been forbidden to speak so I was silent.

How did I know Matthew?

I’m on the beach, Matty. Can you hear the sea?

I’m on the beach, Matty. Can you hear the sea?

I need not have worried because Gómez took over.

He formally thanked Matthew for delivering the car to us and hoped that Nurse Sunshine had made sure the insurance was in order.
Matthew confirmed that all was well and that it had been a pleasure to walk through the ‘insane’ gardens of the clinic with the colleague who had been kind enough to give him a lift. He had more to say but was interrupted by my mother who was tapping his arm.

‘Matthew, I need some help. Please escort me home. I need to rest.’

‘Ah,’ said Gómez. ‘You could be lying in bed, resting! But why? It is not as if you have been breaking cobblestones with a pickaxe from dawn to dusk.’

Rose tapped Matthew’s arm again. ‘I can barely walk, you see, and I have just been attacked by a cat. Your arm would be appreciated.’

‘Certainly.’ Matthew grinned. ‘But first I’m going to see off these scabby moggies.’

He stamped his brown two-tone brogues on the cement. With his pageboy haircut, he looked like a short European prince having a tantrum. All the cats ran off except one fearless tomcat, which Matthew started to chase in zigzags across the plaza. When he had seen it off he beckoned to my mother, who had already slipped on her shoes.

Matthew was standing four yards away from our table but he did not understand how long it would take Rose to walk to his arm. He glanced twice at the watch on his wrist while she hobbled in his direction. It was painful to witness the effort it took her to walk towards a man who did not particularly want her to arrive in the first place. At last she attached her arm to his arm.

‘Have a good rest, Mrs Papastergiadis.’ Gómez lifted his hand and waved two fingers in her direction.

When Rose turned round to take one last look at Gómez, she was appalled to see he was finishing off her soup.

After a while he congratulated me on my silence. ‘You did not speak on your mother’s behalf. That is an achievement.’

I was silent.

‘You will notice how in anger, or perhaps with a sense of grievance, she is walking.’

‘Yes, she does walk sometimes.’

‘My staff will be conducting various investigations to test her bone health, in particular the spine, hips and forearms. But I observed that on the way to the restaurant, when she tripped, she did not strain or sprain or fracture anything at all. Osteoporosis can be ruled out on this observation alone. It is the vitality she puts into not walking that concerns me. I’m not sure I can help her.’

I was about to beg him not to give up on her but I hadn’t got my voice back.

‘Let me ask you, Sofia Irina, where is your father?’

‘In Athens,’ I croaked.

‘Ah. Do you have a photograph of him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

My voice had been seen off like the cat.

Gómez filled a glass with the water that was bottled in Milan but had something to do with Singapore and passed it to me. I took a sip and cleared my throat.

‘My father has married his girlfriend. They have had a baby girl.’

‘So you have a sister in Athens you have never met?’