Hot Milk

by Deborah Levy

  I asked Alexandra if she would like an iced coffee because I was about to buy one at the kiosk. She said no, the caffeine would get into her breast milk and Evangeline would become too excited. She smiled, and her teeth braces made her seem much younger than I am. I wondered if she had given birth wearing braces, but she was asking me what I did for a living, and I told her (sipping my frappuccino through a straw) that I hadn’t yet figured what to do with my anthropology degree.

  ‘Well, you should go have a look at the Parthenon. Do you know, it is the most important surviving building of classical Greece?’

  I do know, yes.

  She asked me again, because I had answered in my mind and not spoken the words out loud.

  ‘The Parthenon,’ she repeated.

  ‘I have heard of it, yes.’

  ‘The Parthenon,’ she said again.

  ‘It’s a temple,’ I said.

  Alexandra wore slippers made from grey felt with white fluffy felt clouds glued on the toes. The clouds had two button eyes that rolled when she moved her feet. Do clouds have eyes? Sometimes storm clouds are represented as a face with puffed-out cheeks to suggest wind, but they don’t usually have rolling eyes. That’s because they were not clouds. They were lambs.

  Alexandra saw me staring at her feet and she laughed. ‘They are comforting. I paid just less than seventy euro for them. Really, they are slippers for inside, but they have sturdy rubber soles so I can wear them outside.’

  My father’s new bride child wore braces and animal shoes. My eyes started to roam around her, just in case I discovered ladybird earrings or a ring with a smiley face, but all I could see were two small moles on her neck and one just above her lip. I realized that my mother was sophisticated. Lurking behind the partition of her illness was a glamorous woman who knew how to put an outfit together.

  The car arrived. Alexandra and Evangeline were helped into the back seat by Papa. I have said ‘Papa’ out loud and to myself a few times now and I quite like the sound of it. He took a while arranging the seat belt over Alexandra’s lap while she held the baby. He unfolded a small white sheet and spread it over her knees and told her in English to catch up on some sleep. He gestured to me to get into the front seat. My suitcase was in the boot and my father was driving us down the motorway towards Athens, all the time looking in the mirror to check on the well-being of his family, smiling at Alexandra to reassure her he was here and not somewhere else.

  ‘Where are you living now, Sofia?’

  I told him I slept in the storeroom at the Coffee House during the week and at Rose’s on weekends.

  ‘Are you having a good rest in Spain? Do you snooze in the afternoons?’

  He often used words like ‘nap’, ‘snooze’, ‘rest’. I explained that I didn’t sleep much. Most nights, I lay awake, thinking about my unfinished Ph.D., and there were other duties, too, mostly to do with my mother, who was sick. I told him I could drive now. He congratulated me, then I explained how I didn’t have a licence but that was the next thing to do when I returned to London. When he heard Evangeline make a choking noise he said something to Alexandra in Greek, and she answered him back in Greek, and I didn’t understand a word. Papa explained there was a shortage of medicines due to ‘the crisis’ and they were concerned that Evangeline remained healthy. After a while, Alexandra asked me why I did not speak Greek. My father replied on my behalf in English.

  ‘Well, Sofia does not have much of an ear for languages. And she did not go to Greek school on Wednesdays and Saturdays, because her mother thought she had enough on her plate at English school.’

  Actually, I had nothing on my plate at English school. I had soup in a flask and, sometimes, it was a Greek soup made with lentils.

  ‘Alexandra speaks fluent Italian. In fact, she is more Italian than Greek.’ My father beeped his horn twice.

  I heard a high, childish voice whisper, ‘Si, parlo Italiano,’ and I jumped, which made my father swerve the car.

  When I turned round to look at Alexandra, she was giggling, her hand clapped over her mouth. ‘Were you born in Italy then?’ I don’t know why I sounded so put out. Perhaps she had punctured my status as the only outsider sitting in the family car, which smelt of vomit and milk.

  ‘I don’t know for certain.’ She shook her head as if it were a mystery.

  Identity is always difficult to guarantee.

  I unpinned the flowers from my hair and let the tangle of curls fall past my shoulders. My lips were still cracking. Like the economies of Europe. Like financial institutions everywhere.

  That night, I heard Papa singing to Evangeline in Greek when he put her to bed. My sister will have an ear for the language of her father. She will learn the alphabet with its twenty-four letters in its ancient and modern forms from alpha to omega.

  Truest love will be her first language. She will learn to say ‘Papa’ from an early age and mean it. I have more of an ear for the language of symptoms and side effects, because that is my mother’s language. Perhaps it is my mother tongue.

  The walls of their apartment in the leafy neighbourhood of Kolonaki are entirely covered with framed Donald Duck posters. Outside their apartment, the walls are graffitied with ‘OXI OXI OXI’. Alexandra explained that ‘OXI’ in Greek means ‘no’. I said yes, I know oxi means no, but why so many ducks? Apparently they were digitally printed on to panels of plywood and arrived in the post with picture hooks in place for easy hanging. She said they cheered her up, because she had never seen any cartoons when she was a child. She pointed to Donald in a sailor outfit, Donald in a Superman outfit, Donald running away from a crocodile, Donald dressed in a purple wizard’s hat, Donald jumping through a hoop in a circus ring.

  Alexandra smiled. ‘He is a child. He likes to have adventures.’

  Is Donald Duck a child or a hormonal teenager or an immature adult? Or is he all of those things at the same time, like I probably am? Does he ever weep? What effect does rain have on his mood? When does he say no and when does he say yes?

  My mother has seven Lowry prints hanging on the walls of her home. She likes his scenes of everyday life in the rain of industrial north-west England. Lowry’s own mother was ill and depressed, so he looked after her and painted at night while she slept. She and I never talk about that part of his life.

  Alexandra asks my father to set the table for supper while she shows me the spare bedroom.

  ‘Don’t use the best plates,’ she says, but he knows that already. If my mother and Lowry’s mother were plates – not the best plates, but not the worst plates either – they would have the name of the place they were made stamped on the back: ‘Made in Suffering’.

  The plates would be displayed on a shelf as heirlooms to be inherited by their unfortunate children.

  My little sister, Evangeline. What will she inherit?

  A shipping business.

  ‘Sofia,’ my father says. ‘I have put your flower hairclips on the table in your room. Alexandra will show you where it is.’

  The spare bedroom has no windows. It is stifling. The bed is a hard canvas camping bed. It is a storeroom more than a bedroom, just like my room at the Coffee House. Alexandra shut the door with intense focus so as not to wake Evangeline, making sshh shhh sounds, until, finally, when she had conquered its very last squeak, she tiptoed down the corridor in her lamb slippers. I lay down on the bed. Twelve seconds passed. I changed the position of the pillow and the bed collapsed to the floor, tipping over the little bedside table with my scarlet flower hairgrips neatly placed on it. Evangeline woke up and started to cry. I remained on the floor with the table lying across my chest and made cycling movements with my legs to stretch them after the plane journey. The door opened and my father walked in.

  ‘No, Papa,’ I said. ‘No, do not come into my room without knocking first.’

  ‘Are you hurt, Sofia?’

  I lay in silence among the broken furniture and continued to cycle my legs.

  The table was set
with three of their not-best plates and a jug of water. My father recited a prayer that started with ‘The poor shall eat and shall be filled’ and then he chanted the rest of the prayer in Greek. After that, he sat in silence while Alexandra ladled pasta on to his plate. Alexandra told me it was an Italian regional dish with anchovies and raisins. She had made it herself because she liked the sweet and salty tastes in one dish. My father did not say a single word after he said the prayer, so she had to speak for him. She asked me where I was staying in Spain and if I’d seen a bullfight and if I liked Spanish food and she enquired about the weather, but no one mentioned the turmoil in Athens or asked about my mother. If Rose is the elephant in the room, I can see that Donald Duck is not going to chase her out. He might take a ride on her back or flick a stone at her head with his catapult, but she is too massive a beast for him to see off with his orange, webbed feet.

  My father suddenly spoke. ‘I unveiled my shame to our Lord, and he has shown himself to me in all his mercy.’ He was looking at his plate but I think he was speaking to me.

  The Plot

  Things got worse. It turns out that Alexandra is a minor mainstream economist. This was useful, because I have come to Athens to call in a debt my father owes me for never being around. Perhaps in his own mind he has absolved himself by putting all his late paternal energy into my sister, Evangeline.

  I think he understands that I am his confused and shabby creditor. I should smarten up, stiffen my jaw, put on a jacket and skirt and walk him into an airless room with strobe lighting and a translator to broker a deal, but my body is still thrumming with kisses and caresses in the hot desert nights. It would be easier for him to have me crash out of his life altogether, yet for some reason he wants me to sign off Alexandra. She is his most valuable collateral. He is proud of her and I can see why. She is attentive to her child and to her husband. This makes him gentle and calm.

  But his debts go back a long way. As a result of his first default, my mother has a mortgage on my life.

  Here I am in the birthplace of Medusa, who left the scars of her venom and rage on my body. I am sitting on a giant, soft, blue sofa next to Alexandra, who is adjusting her glinting braces. The windows are all closed and the air conditioner is on. Her daughter is sleeping on her breast, the cleaner is mopping the floors, and she is sucking a yellow jellied candy sprinkled with sugar.

  Is the sting of being a creditor the sort of power that makes me feel happy? Are creditors happier than debtors?

  Actually, I’m not sure what the rules are any more and what I want to achieve. It’s a total unknown.

  What is money?

  Money is a medium of exchange. Jade, oxen, rice, eggs, beads, nails, pigs and amber have all been used for making payments and recording debts and credits. And so have children. I have been traded off for Alexandra and Evangeline, but I am supposed to pretend not to notice.

  Pretending not to notice and pretending to forget are my special skills. If I were to pluck out my eyes, it would please my father, but memory is like a bar code. I am the human scanner.

  Alexandra has sugar stuck to her lips. ‘Sofia, I can tell you are anti-austerity. I am a conservative, so I prefer to take the medicine of reforms. We cannot come off our medication if we want to stay in the eurozone. Your papa has taken most of his money out of the bank and put it in a British bank. We don’t know what is going to happen.’

  It sounds like she’s about to give me a lecture, so I stop her to check out her credentials. I blatantly ask her about her qualifications.

  It turns out that she went to school in Rome and to university in Athens. Before she met my father she was research assistant to the former chief economist at somewhere important and then research assistant to the director of economic policy at the World Bank and then research assistant to the vice-president of somewhere less important but still massive.

  Alexandra invites me to take one of the jellied candies she keeps in a glass bowl on the table. ‘If we do not meet our obligations and miss our payments, our creditors will want the clothes off our backs.’ She talked of the economic crisis as a serious illness that is contagious and contaminating. Debt is an epidemic raging through Europe, an outbreak that is infectious and needs a vaccine. It had been her job to monitor the behaviour and movements of this infection.

  It is agony listening to her while I suck a jellied candy.

  The sun is shining outside.

  Sunshine is sexy.

  It turns out that before she had Evangeline she was working in a bank in Brussels. The offices closed on Friday so she could fly home to my ‘papa’.

  This time she unwraps a green jelly candy and pops it into her mouth. ‘Sofia, we all have to wake up from this nightmare and take our pills.’

  I thought about Gómez deleting the pills on my mother’s menu of medication, but I did not discuss this with my new stepmother.

  Alexandra peers anxiously at me with her smaller brown eye. ‘For some years, it was my job to make sure that finance ministers convinced the markets that everything was under control and to insist that the euro would survive.’ She is rubbing my new baby sister’s back. Now and again, she sort of sticks out her tongue, which is green from the green jelly. I don’t know why she does that. Perhaps it’s something to do with her braces.

  She’s four years older than I am and she’s making sure the euro survives.

  Alexandra has two spots on her chin. Perhaps my father is lying about her age and Evangeline was the result of a teenage pregnancy. I’m starting to get the impression Alexandra hasn’t spoken to anyone apart from Christos Papastergiadis for about a year.

  ‘Don’t think that a disorderly exit from the eurozone will not affect America, Sofia.’

  Actually, I am thinking about Ingrid, and the night she put honey on my cracked lips and how I felt as if I had been embalmed. I am thinking about lying on the beach with Juan after midnight and how when I bought six bottles of agua sin gas at the village Spar I had yearned to buy a particular summer glossy magazine with its free gift of Jackie Kennedy sunglasses which was on sale by the tills. The bug-eyed shades attached to the magazine were an approximate copy, it has to be said, the white frames inlaid with her signature Greek-key detail, but all the same I wanted to tear them out of their wrapping and wear them to stroll among the cacti in my very own Camelot of Lust with Ingrid and Juan at my side. The word Beloved embroidered into the silk of my sun-top has changed my life more than the word euro. Beloved is like a spotlight in the centre of a stage. I have peered at this circle of light from behind the curtains, but it’s never occurred to me that I could be a major player.

  I am not sure how much desire I am entitled to possess.

  Alexandra’s left eye is definitely smaller than her right eye.

  ‘I was talking about the USA, Sofia.’

  I have always wanted to visit America. Dan from Denver is my closest friend at the Coffee House. I liked to feel his big energy close to me while I ground the coffee beans and labelled the cakes. I even missed doing star jumps with him in between making the flat whites and listening to him talk about his lack of health insurance all over again. Last time we did the jumps he was wondering if he should work in Saudi Arabia to make fast bucks, but he said he’d have to take Prozac to come to terms with the fact that women couldn’t drive there. When I thought about him saying that, it occurred to me for the first time that he might have been flirting with me.

  And I am panging for artisan coffee.

  The Coffee House storeroom seems quite spacious compared to the spare bedroom here in Athens. Now that Dan is sleeping in my ink-stained bed, did he gaze every morning at the wall with the Margaret Mead quote I had written with the marker pen?

  It might be that the Coffee House is a field study that has been under my nose all along.

  Alexandra is still talking at length about how stock markets would react to fears that Europe will unravel. After a while, she asks if my mother is missing me.

 
‘I hope not.’

  She looks sad when I say that.

  ‘Is your mother missing you, Alexandra?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Do you have your own office in the bank in Brussels?’

  ‘Yes, and there are three subsidized canteens, and I get a good deal for maternity leave.’

  ‘Can you go on strike?’

  ‘I would have to give notice in writing. Are you anti-capitalist?’

  I know she needs her husband’s first daughter to be anti-everything, so I do not bother to answer. Alexandra has climbed aboard the big boat with her husband and child and I am on a small dinghy heading in a different direction.

  She tells me that she gets a 5 per cent household allowance because she is head of her household.

  She is head of her household. I don’t even have a home that is not my mother’s home.

  ‘Does your mama still love your papa?’

  ‘My father only does things that are to his advantage,’ I reply.

  She stares at me as if I am crazy. And then she laughs. ‘Why would he do things that are not to his advantage?’

  A squirrel has jumped from the trees overhanging the balcony and is peering in through the locked window. What does it see? Three generations of my family, I suppose.

  Why would my father do anything that was not to his advantage? She had said it so lightly, but her question is like a wind blowing through the calm blue folds of their homely sofa. A wind that has even brought the squirrel from the tree to the window. Do I do things that are not to my advantage? I lean against the soft, blue cotton with my hands behind my head, and stretch out my legs. I am wearing shorts and the yellow silk sun-top Ingrid gave me. Alexandra is trying to read the blue word embroidered above my left breast. She is squinting with her smaller eye and I can see her lips moving as she silently spells out Beloved. She is frowning, as if she can’t work out what it means but is too shy to ask me to translate.