Hot Milk

by Deborah Levy

  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?’

  I told him I have not seen my father for eleven years.

  He seemed keen to reassure me that should I wish to visit my father, a rota of staff would be assigned to care for Rose every day.

  ‘If you don’t mind me saying, Sofia Irina, you are a little weak for a young healthy woman. Sometimes you limp, as if you have picked up on your mother’s emotional weather. You c
ould do with more physical strength. This is not a substantial table to lift, yet for you it was an effort. I do not believe you need to do more exercise. It is a matter of having purpose, less apathy. Why not steal a fish from the market to make you bolder? It need not be the biggest fish, but it must not be the smallest either.’

  ‘Why do I need to be bolder?’

  ‘That is for you to answer.’ His tone was reassuring, calm and serious, considering he was probably mad. ‘Now, there is something else I must talk to you about.’ Gómez seemed genuinely upset.

  He told me that someone had graffitied a wall of his clinic with blue paint. It had happened this morning. The word painted on the wall was ‘QUACK’. Meaning that he was a charlatan, a con man, not a reputable doctor. He thought it might have involved the friend of mine who came to collect the car. This man Matthew. Nurse Sunshine had given him the documents and keys and not long after he had left they had found the right side of the marble dome defaced with this word.

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  Gómez looked for the handkerchief in his jacket pocket and discovered it was not there. He wiped his lips on the back of his hand and then wiped his hand with a napkin. ‘I am aware he plays golf with an executive for a pharmaceutical company which has been bothering me for some years. They have offered to fund research at my clinic. In return, they would be pleased if I were to buy their medication and prescribe it to my patients.’

  Gómez was clearly distressed. He shut his agitated, bright eyes and rested his hands on his knees. ‘My staff will clean the paint off the marble exterior, but I can only think that someone wants to discredit my practice.’

  The Mohican boy and his little sister were now dragging the inflated blue boat across the square and down to the beach. Their brother followed them holding the oars.

  Was Gómez a quack? Rose had already voiced this thought.

  I no longer care about the twenty-five thousand euro we struggled to pay him. He can have my house. If he slaughters a deer and divines a walking cure from its entrails I would be grateful. My mother thinks her body is prey to malevolent forces, so I am not paying him to be complicit with her command on reality.

  That evening when I was wandering around the village, I picked two sprigs of jasmine growing on a bush outside the house built halfway up the hill. A blue rowing boat was moored in the yard with the name ‘Angelita’ painted on its side. I crushed the fragile white petals in my fingers. The scent was like oblivion, a trance. The arch of desert jasmine was a coma zone. I shut my eyes and when I opened them again, Matthew and Ingrid were walking up the hill towards the vintage shop. Ingrid ran towards me and kissed my cheek.

  ‘We’re here to collect my sewing from the shop,’ she said.

  She was wearing an orange dress with feathers sewn around the neckline and matching peep-toe shoes.

  Matthew caught up with her. ‘Inge sewed her dress. I don’t think she gets paid enough. I’m going to negotiate a raise for her.’ He tucked his hair behind his ears and laughed when she punched him in the arm. ‘You wouldn’t want to be cursed by Inge. She’s insane when she’s angry. In Berlin she goes three times a week to her kick-boxing class, so don’t mess with her.’

  He walked over to the woman who owned the vintage shop, lit her cigarette and turned his back on us.

  Ingrid reached out and touched my hair. ‘You have a knot. I am embroidering two dresses with a stitch called a French knot. I have to wind the thread around the needle twice. When I’ve finished, I’m going to sew something for you.’

  The feathers trembled against her neck as I pressed the jasmine under her nose.

  A motorbike with two teenage boys perched on the seat roared past us.

  ‘I think you picked those flowers for me, Zoffie.’

  The smell of petrol and jasmine made me feel faint.

  ‘Yes, I picked these flowers for you.’

  I stood behind her and slid the petals into the band of her plait. Her neck was soft and warm.

  When she turned round to face me, the pupils in her eyes were big and black as the sea glittering in the distance.

  A Case History

  Rose stands naked under the shower. Her breasts droop, her belly folds and folds again, her skin is pale and smooth, her silver-blond hair is wet, her eyes are bright, she loves the warm water falling on her body. Her body. What is her body supposed to want and who is it supposed to please and is it ugly or is it something else? She is waiting for withdrawal symptoms from the lack of the three pills that have been deleted from her list of medication. So far they have not arrived. Yet she continues to wait for them like a lover, nervous and excited. Will she be disappointed if they don’t turn up?

  Today, Julieta Gómez is going to take a case history of Rose’s body and I have been asked to be present. Where does a case history start?

  ‘It starts with family,’ Julieta Gómez says. ‘It is a history.’ She has swapped her dove-grey heels for trainers. Her thin chiffon blouse is tucked into tailored trousers which press tight against her hips. She walks Rose to a chair in the physiotherapy room and sits opposite her. ‘Are you ready to make a start?’

  Rose nods while Julieta fiddles with a small sleek black box lying between them on the desk. She had reassured my mother that this device was used for all the clinic audio archiving and that it was confidential. So now the volume levels were set. Apparently they would both soon forget that their conversation was being recorded.

  Julieta spoke first to give some facts. She noted the date, the time, my mother’s name, age, weight and height.

  I sit uneasily in the corner of the physiotherapy room with my laptop on my knees, floating out of time in the most peculiar way. It seems wrong, even unethical, to have asked me to be there but I had agreed to Gómez’s request on the understanding that apart from Tuesdays I would be free for the rest of the treatment. I have to pay for my freedom by listening to my mother’s words.

  She is speaking.

  Her father had a temper problem. Which can be confused with having high levels of energy. Which can be confused with being manic. He needed no more than two hours of sleep a night. Her mother suffered from her father. Which can be confused with depression. She needed no less than twenty-three hours of sleep. I know this history but I don’t want to be connected to it. I put on my headphones and gaze at YouTube on my shattered screen with all my life in it. Some of that life is the thesis for my abandoned doctorate that is lurking under the digital constellations made in a factory on the outskirts of Shanghai.

  Now and again I lift off the headphones.

  My mother is giving a history of her present illness. Where does that history start? It moves around in time and merges into past history, childhood illness and all the rest of it. This is not chronological time. Julieta will have to later transcribe Rose’s words and author her case history. I have been trained to do something similar, except I am not a physiotherapist, I am an ethnographer. Julieta will at some stage have to describe the complaint that brought the patient to her clinic. Symptoms and their presentation. It is not one complaint. It is not even six. I overheard twenty complaints but there were more. The past the present and the future are simultaneously present in all these complaints.

  Rose’s lips are moving and Julieta is listening but I’m not listening. I have been asked to be present but I am not present. I’m watching a Bowie concert from 1972 on YouTube and it is buffering while he sings. His hair is red like a blood orange, his glitter shirt is sparkling darkly to trigger associations of space travel and his platform shoes are stacked high to lift him off Earth. Bowie’s painted eyelids are silver spaceships. Girls are screaming and crying and stretching out their hands to touch the Space Oddity strutting the stage. He is a freak, like the medusa. The girls are feral and fertile and freaked out.

  We are so pinned down on Earth.

  If I had been there, I would have been the loudest screamer.

  I am still the loudest screamer.

>   I want to get away from the kinship structures that are supposed to hold me together. To mess up the story I have been told about myself. To hold the story upside down by its tail.

  Rose is coughing. A pattern is emerging where she always coughs when she is about to reveal something awkward and intimate. As if the cough is a plunger unblocking memory. She is giving a case history. Sometimes I can hear a few sentences. I am becoming interested in Julieta Gómez’s interviewing style. Anthropologists might describe it as ‘in-depth interviewing’. My mother would be called ‘the informant’. I notice her questions are minimal but my mother’s emotions are running high. I wish I was somewhere else. Julieta is relaxed but alert, she never seems to pry or push and she is not in a rush to fill in the silences. I have heard tapes where ethnographers have probed too deeply into the informants’ stories and made them silent, but my mother’s lips are mostly moving. ‘Physiotherapy’ does not seem an accurate description of the kind of conversation that is taking place. Perhaps Rose’s memories are in her bones. Is that why bones have been used as divination tools from the beginning of human history?

  My mother has a lot of contempt for her body. ‘They should just cut off my toes,’ she says.

  Julieta has finished the first case history and is helping her to stand up. ‘Move your left foot.’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t move my left foot.’

  ‘You need to do some weight-bearing exercise for strengthening and endurance.’

  ‘My whole life has been about endurance, Nurse Sunshine. Remember that my first enemy and adversary is endurance.’

  ‘How do you spell that in English?’

  Rose tells her.

  Julieta’s hands are now under Rose’s chin as she helps align her head.

  Rose is looking for her wheelchair, which seems to have disappeared from the room.