Hot Milk (3 page)

‘Yes. I retired early because of my health.'

‘Did you want to stop working?'

‘Yes.'

‘So you did not retire because of your health?'

‘It was a combination of circumstances.'

‘I see.' He looked neither bored nor interested.

‘My duties were to catalogue, index and classify the books,' she said.

He nodded and turned his gaze to his computer screen. While we waited for his attention, I looked around the consulting room. It was sparsely furnished. A basin. A bed on wheels that could be lowered or raised, a silver lamp placed near it.

A cabinet filled with leather-bound books stood behind his desk. And then I saw something looking at me. Its eyes were bright and curious. A small grey stuffed monkey was crouching in a glass box on a shelf halfway up the wall. Its eyes were fixed on its human brothers and sisters in an eternal frozen stare.

‘Mrs Papastergiadis, I see that your first name is Rose.'

‘Yes.'

He had pronounced Papastergiadis as easily as if he were saying Joan Smith.

‘May I refer to you now as Rose?'

‘Yes, you may. It is my name, after all. My daughter calls me Rose and I see no reason why you should not do the same.'

Dr Gómez smiled at me. ‘You call your mother Rose?'

It was the second time I had been asked this question in three days.

‘Yes,' I said quickly, as if it was of no importance. ‘Can we ask how we should address you, Dr Gómez?'

‘Certainly. I am a consultant, so I am Mr Gómez. But that is too formal so I will not be offended if you just refer to me as Gómez.'

‘Ah. That is useful to know.' My mother lifted her arm to check that the hairpin in her chignon was still in place.

‘And you are just sixty-four years old, Mrs Papastergiadis?'

Had he forgotten he'd been granted permission to call his new patient by her first name?

‘Sixty-four and flagging.'

‘So you were thirty-nine when you birthed your daughter?'

Rose coughed as if to clear her throat and then nodded and coughed
again. Gómez started to cough too. He cleared his throat and ran his fingers through the white streak in his hair. Rose moved her right leg and then she groaned. Gómez moved his left leg and then he groaned.

I was not sure if he was mimicking her or mocking her. If they were having a conversation in groans, coughs and sighs, I wondered whether they understood each other.

‘It is a pleasure to welcome you to my clinic, Rose.'

He held out his hand. My mother leaned forward as if to shake it but then suddenly decided not to. His hand was stuck in the air. Obviously, their non-verbal conversation had not elicited her trust.

‘Sofia, get me a tissue,' she said.

I passed her a tissue and shook Gómez's hand on behalf of my mother. Her arm is my arm.

‘And you are Ms Papastergiadis?' He emphasized the ‘Ms' so it sounded like
Mizzzzzz
.

‘Sofia is my only daughter.'

‘Do you have sons?'

‘As I said, she is my only.'

‘Rose.' He smiled. ‘I think you are going to sneeze soon. Is there pollen in the air today? Or something?'

‘Pollen?' Rose looked offended. ‘We are in a desert landscape. There are no flowers as I know them.'

Gómez mimicked looking offended, too. ‘Later I will take you for a tour of our gardens so you can see flowers as you do not know them. Purple sea lavender, jujube shrubs with their magnificent thorny branches, Phoenician junipers and various scrubland plants imported for your pleasure from near Tabernas.'

He walked towards her wheelchair, kneeled at her feet and stared into her eyes. She started to sneeze. ‘Get me another tissue, Sofia.'

I obliged. She now had two tissues, one in each hand.

‘I always get a pain in my left arm after I sneeze,' she said. ‘It's a sharp, tearing pain. I have to hold my arm until the sneeze is over.'

‘Where is the pain?'

‘The inside of my elbow.'

‘Thank you. We will conduct a full neurological examination, including a cranial-nerve examination.'

‘And I have chronic knuckle pain in my left hand.'

In response, he wiggled the fingers of his left hand in the direction of the monkey, as if encouraging it to do the same.

After a while he turned to me. ‘I can just see the resemblance. But you, Mizz Papastergiadis, are darker. Your skin is sallow. Your hair is nearly black. Your mother's hair is light brown. Your nose is longer than hers. Your eyes are brown. Your mother's eyes are blue, like my own eyes.'

‘My father is Greek but I was born in Britain.'

I wasn't sure if having sallow skin was an insult or a compliment.

‘Then you are like me,' he said. ‘My father is Spanish, my mother is American. I grew up in Boston.'

‘Like my laptop. It was designed in America and made in China.'

‘Yes, identity is always difficult to guarantee, Mizz Papastergiadis.'

‘I am from near Hull, Yorkshire,' Rose suddenly announced, as if she felt left out.

When Gómez reached for my mother's right foot, she gave it to him as if it were a gift. He started to press her toes with his thumb and forefinger, watched by myself and the monkey in the glass box. His thumb moved to her ankle. ‘This bone is the talus. And before that I was pressing the phalanges. Can you feel my fingers?'

Rose shook her head. ‘I feel nothing. My feet are numb.'

Gómez nodded, as if he already knew this to be true. ‘How is your morale?' he asked, as if enquiring about a bone called The Morale.

‘Not bad at all.'

I bent down and picked up her shoes.

‘Please,' Gómez said. ‘Leave them where they are.' He was now feeling the sole of my mother's right foot. ‘You have an ulcer here, and here. Have you been tested for diabetes?'

‘Oh, yes,' she said.

‘It is a small area on the surface of the skin, but it is slightly infected. We must attend to this immediately.'

Rose nodded gravely, but she looked pleased. ‘Diabetes,' she exclaimed. ‘Perhaps that's the answer.'

He did not seem to want to continue this conversation because he stood up and walked to the basin to wash his hands. He turned towards me while he reached for a paper towel. ‘You will probably be interested in the architecture of my clinic?'

I
was
interested. I told him that as far as I knew, the earliest domes had been built from mammoth tusks and bones.

‘Ye-es. And your beach apartment is a rectangle. But at least it has an ocean view –'

‘It's unpleasant,' Rose interrupted. ‘I think of it as a rectangle built on noise. It has a concrete terrace that is supposed to be private but isn't because it's right on the beach. My daughter likes to sit there looking at her computer all the time, to get away from me.'

Rose was in full flow as she made a list of her grievances. ‘At night there are magic shows for the children on the beach. So much noise. The clattering of plates from the restaurants, the shouting tourists, the mopeds, the screaming children, the fireworks. I never get to the sea unless Sofia wheels me to the beach and it is always too hot anyway.'

‘In which case I will have to bring the sea to you, Mrs Papastergiadis.'

Rose sucked in her bottom lip with her front teeth and kept it tucked like that for a while. Then she freed it. ‘I find all the food here in southern Spain very hard to digest.'

‘Sorry to hear that.' His blue gaze settled on her stomach like a butterfly landing on a flower.

My mother had lost weight in the last few years. She was shrinking and she seemed to have become shorter, because her dresses, once knee length, now fell just above her ankles. I had to remind myself
that she was an attractive woman in early old age. Her hair, always styled in a chignon and held in place with a single hairpin, was her one expense. Every three months when the silver came through, it was wrapped in foils and lightened by a fashionable colour technician who had shaved off all her own hair. She had suggested I do the same to my wayward black curls which turned to frizz whenever it rained, which was often.

I regarded the hairdresser's shaving of her scalp as a ritual I could not participate in. At the time, I had wondered if she thought of her hair as the weight of the past and the shedding of it as a move towards the future, in the Hindu tradition, but she told me (a square of foil in her mouth) that she shaved her hair because it was less work. The weight of my own hair is the least of my burdens.

‘Sofia Irina, sit down here.' Gómez patted the chair opposite his computer. He had casually called me by the full name written in my passport. When I sat down as instructed, he swung the screen round to show me a black-and-white image on the screen, with my mother's name written above it: R. B. PAPASTERGIADIS (F).

He was now standing behind me. I could smell a bitter herb in the soap he had used to wash his hands, perhaps sage. ‘You are looking at a high-definition X-ray of your mother's spine. This is the back view.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I asked the doctors in Britain to send them to you. They are now out of date.'

‘Of course. We will take our own and compare. We are looking for abnormalities, something out of the ordinary.' His finger moved from the screen to press the button on a small, grey radio standing on his desk. ‘Excuse me,' he said. ‘I want to hear what's happening with the austerity programme.'

We listened to a news broadcast in Spanish, interrupted now and again by Gómez, who told us the name of the Spanish financial analyst for the radio station. When Rose frowned, as if to ask what was going on – is he seriously a doctor? – Gómez dazzled us with his gold teeth.

‘Yes, I am definitely a doctor, Mrs Papastergiadis. I wish to spend this afternoon going through your medication with you. I have the information of course, but I want you to tell me which of your medication you are most attached to and which you can let go. By the way, you will be pleased to know that the weather forecast says it will be dry and sunny in most parts of Spain.'

Rose shuffled in her wheelchair. ‘I need a glass of water, please.'

‘Very good.' He walked over to the basin, filled a plastic cup and carried it over to her.

‘Is it safe to drink tap?'

‘Oh yes.'

I watched my mother sip the cloudy water. Was it the right sort of water? Gómez asked her to stick out her tongue.

‘My tongue? Why?'

‘The tongue presents strong visual indicators of our general health.'

Rose obliged.

Gómez, who had his back to me, seemed to intuit that I was looking at the stuffed monkey on his shelf.

‘That is a vervet from Tanzania. An electricity pylon killed him, then he was taken to the taxidermist by one of my patients. After some thought, I accepted his gift because vervet monkeys have many human characteristics, including hypertension and anxiety.' He was still staring intently at my mother's tongue. ‘What we can't see is his blue scrotum and red penis. I think the taxidermist removed them. And what we have to imagine is how this boy played in the trees with his brothers and sisters.' He lightly tapped my mother's knee and her tongue slid back into her mouth. ‘Thank you, Rose. You are right to ask for water. Your tongue tells me you are dehydrated.'

‘Yes, I'm always thirsty. Sofia is lazy when it comes to putting a glass of water by my bed at night.'

‘Where in Yorkshire do you come from, Mrs Papastergiadis?'

‘Warter. It's a village five miles east of Pocklington.'

‘Warter,' he repeated. His gold teeth were on full display. He turned to me. ‘I think, Sofia Irina, that you would like to free our little castrated primate so he can scamper around the room and read my early editions of Cervantes. But first you must free yourself.' His eyes were so blue they could cut through a rock like a laser. ‘I need to talk to Mrs Papastergiadis and make a treatment plan. It is something we must discuss alone.'

‘No. She must stay.' Rose rapped her knuckles on one arm of her wheelchair. ‘I will not be abandoning my medication in a foreign country. Sofia is the only person who knows all about it.'

Gómez shook his finger at me. ‘Why would you want to wait in reception for two hours? No, what you must do is take the little bus which leaves from the entrance of my clinic. It will drop you near the beach in Carboneras. It is only a twenty-minute drive to town from the hospital.'

Rose looked affronted but Gómez ignored her. ‘Sofia Irina, I suggest you make your way now. It is noon, so we will see you at two.'

‘I wish I could enjoy a swim,' my mother said.

‘It is always good to wish for more enjoyment, Mrs Papastergiadis.'

‘If only.' Rose sighed.

‘If only what?' Gómez knelt on the floor and placed his stethoscope on her heart.

‘If only I were able to swim and lie in the sun.'

‘Ah, how wonderful that would be.'

Again, I wasn't sure what to make of him. His tone was vague. Vaguely mocking and vaguely amiable. Which meant it was a bit bent. I reached for Rose's hand and pressed it. I wanted to say goodbye to her but Gómez was now listening with complete focus to her heart. I kissed the top of her head instead.

My mother said, ‘Ouch!' She shut her eyes and leaned her head back as if she was in agony – or it might have been ecstasy. It was hard to tell.

*

The sun was fierce by the time I arrived at the deserted beach opposite the cement factory. I made my way towards a small café near a row of gas canisters and ordered a gin and tonic from the friendly waiter. He pointed to the sea and warned me not to swim because three people had been badly stung that morning by medusas. He had seen the welts on their limbs turn white and then purple. He grimaced and then shut his eyes and waved his hands as if to push away the ocean and all the medusas living in it. The gas canisters looked like strange desert plants growing out of the sand.