Hot Milk (6 page)

Tonight someone is tapping at the windows of our beach apartment. I have checked twice and no one is there. It might be the seagulls or the wind blowing sand from the beach. When I look in the mirror, I do not recognize myself.

I am tanned, my hair has grown longer and wilder, my teeth look whiter against my dark skin, my eyes seem bigger, brighter – all the better to cry with, because my mother is shouting at me, shouting things like, You haven’t tied my shoelaces properly. Every time I run to kneel at her feet and tie them again, they come undone until I finally sit on the floor, put her feet on my lap and untie all the old knots to make new knots.

It was a long process of unpicking and unravelling and starting all over again. I asked her why she needed to wear shoes at all. Especially shoes with laces. It was night and she wasn’t planning on going out.

‘I can think better in shoes with laces,’ she said.

She is reclining on a chair, staring at the whitewashed wall while I attend to her feet. If she let me turn the chair, she would be staring at the night stars. It would be the smallest movement to change her view but she is not interested. The stars seem to insult her. Every one of them offends her. She tells me she already has a view in her mind. It is of the Yorkshire Wolds. She is walking the trail, the grass is lush and springy, rain falls softly on her hair, it is the lightest rain and she has a cheese roll in her rucksack. I would like to do that walk with
her in the Yorkshire Wolds, I’d be happy to butter the rolls and read the map. She half smiles when I tell her this but it’s as if she has already forsworn her feet to someone else. I am nervous tonight. I can still hear someone tapping at the windows. It might be the mice that hide in the wall.

‘You are always so far away, Sofia.’

It might be my father. He has come to look after my mother and give me a break. It might be a refugee who has swum to shore from North Africa. I will give her a home for the night. I would. I think I would do that.

‘Is there water in the fridge, Sofia?’

I am thinking about the signs on the doors of toilets in public places that tell us who we are.

Gentlemen Ladies

Hommes Femmes

Herren Damen

Signori Signore

Caballeros Señoras

Are we all of us lurking in each other’s sign?

‘Get me water, Sofia.’

I am thinking about the way Ingrid held her phone out towards the waves.
I’m on the beach, Matty. Can you hear the sea?

While she spoke to her boyfriend, she had placed her foot on the inside of my right thigh, just above my knee.

She had thrown her men’s shoes on to the seaweed, where they swayed like small boats as the tide came in. The salty mineral smell of the dark, free-floating weed was enticing and intense.

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

The sea with all the medusas floating in it.

The sea that had soaked her blue velvet shorts.

I continue to unknot the old knots in my mother’s laces and make
new knots. There is definitely someone tapping at the windows. This time it’s not so much a tap as a hard knock. I move my mother’s feet from my lap and walk to the door.

‘Are you expecting a visitor, Sofia?’

No. Yes. Maybe. Perhaps I am expecting a visitor.

Ingrid Bauer is wearing silver Roman sandals that lace up her shins and she is annoyed. ‘Zoffie, I have been knocking for ever.’

‘I didn’t see you.’

‘But I was here.’

She tells me that she has been talking over my situation with Matthew.

‘What situation?’

‘About having no transport. This is the desert, Zoffie! He has suggested he collect the car from the Gómez Clinic for you tomorrow.’

‘It would be good to have a car.’

‘Let me see your sting.’

I rolled up my sleeve and showed her the purple welts. They were beginning to blister.

She traced the sting with her finger. ‘You smell like the ocean,’ she whispered. ‘Like a starfish.’ Her finger was now in the crease of my armpit. ‘Those little monsters really came after you.’ She asked for my mobile number and I wrote it on the palm of her hand.

‘Next time, Zoffie, open the door when I knock.’

I told her I never lock the door.

Our beach house is dark. The walls are thick to keep it cool in the summer heat. We often have the lights on in the day as well as at night. Not long after Ingrid left, all the lights suddenly went out. I had to stand on a chair and open the fuse box on the wall near the bathroom to flip the trip switch. The lights came back on and I climbed down to make Rose a pot of tea. She had packed five boxes of Yorkshire teabags and brought them with her to Spain. There is a shop at the end of our road in Hackney that stocks these teabags and she had walked to it to make her bulk purchase. Then she had walked
back home. That is the mystery of my mother’s lame legs. Sometimes they step out into the world like phantom working legs.

‘Get me a spoon, Sofia.’

I got her a spoon.

I can’t live like this. I must flip the trip in every way.

Time has shattered, it’s cracking like my lips. When I note down ideas for field studies, I don’t know whether I’m writing in the past or present tense or both of them at the same time.

And I still have not freed Pablo’s dog.

When the Greek girl burns the coils of citronella at night to keep the mosquitos away I can see the curve of her belly and breasts. Her nipples are darker than her lips. She should give up the habit of sleeping naked if she does not want to be devoured by the mosquitos in the perfumed darkness of her room.

I had promised to be totally silent at the table when Gómez took my mother to lunch. He had forbidden me to speak and asked for my trust in his judgement. In fact, he told me the staff would fetch Rose every day from the beach apartment and I was to do as I pleased. On Tuesdays he would call me into the clinic, given that I was my mother’s next of kin. Apart from that, it was my choice. He wanted to get to know Rose, because her case truly puzzled him. It was not why she could not walk that interested him. He wanted to know why she could intermittently walk. This seemed like an affliction that might very well be physical, but one must not be a slave to medical theory. What did I think?

I regarded Gómez as my research assistant. I have been on the case all my life and he is just starting. There are no clear boundaries between victory and defeat when it comes to my mother’s symptoms. As soon as he makes a diagnosis, she will grow another one to confound him. He seems to know this. Yesterday he told her to recite her latest ailment to the body of a dead insect, perhaps to a fly, because they are easy to swat. He suggested she surrender to this strange action and listen carefully to the monotony of the way it buzzes before it dies. It is likely, he said, that she will discover that the buzzing sound, often so irritating to the human ear, resembles the timbre and pitch of Russian folk music.

It is the first time I have ever seen her laugh out loud with her mouth open. At the same time, he has booked her in for various
scans and his staff are attending to the silver-lined dressings on her right foot.

A table for three had been reserved in the village-square restaurant, because he assumed she could walk there with relative ease from the apartment. It had not been an easy walk. My mother had tripped over pistachio shells that had not been swept from the square the night before. I had spent an hour sorting out the laces of her shoes but, in the end, Rose had been felled by a nut that was no bigger than a large pea.

Gómez was already seated at the table. He sat opposite Rose and I sat next to him, as instructed. His formal pinstripe suit had been exchanged for elegant cream linen, not exactly informal but less businesslike than his first presentation of himself as a famous consultant. A yellow silk handkerchief was arranged in his jacket pocket in the old style, shaped into a round puff rather than folded at right angles. He was dapper, gentle and courteous. Both he and my mother peered at the menu and I just pointed to a salad, as if I were a mute out on a day trip. Rose took a while choosing a white-bean soup and Gómez flamboyantly ordered the house speciality, grilled octopus.

Rose rapidly informed him that she had allergies to fish and it made her lips swell. When he seemed not to understand, she leaned forward and poked my shoulder. ‘Tell him about my fish problem.’

I said nothing, as instructed by Gómez.

She turned her attention to him. ‘I cannot be in the vicinity of fish of any kind. The vapour from your octopus will waft towards me and I will come up in hives.’

Gómez nodded vaguely and reached for her hand. She was startled, but I think he might have been taking her pulse because I noticed he had a finger on her wrist. ‘Mrs Papastergiadis, you take fish-oil supplements and you take glucosamine. I have had these analysed in our laboratory. Your brand of glucosamine is made from the outer coatings of shellfish. The other supplement you take is derived from shark cartilage.’

‘Yes, but I am allergic to the other kind of fish.’

‘A shark is not a shellfish.’ His gold front teeth glinted in the sunshine. He had not reserved a table in the shade and the white stripe in his hair was damp from his sweat, which smelt of ginger.

When Rose reached for the wine list, he deftly grabbed it from her and moved it to the edge of the table. ‘No, Mrs Papastergiadis. I cannot work with an intoxicated patient. If you were in my consulting room, I would not offer you wine. I have merely changed the venue. This is a consultation but I see no reason why it should not take place under the sky.’

He waved his hand and asked the waitress for a bottle of a particular mineral water which he told Rose was bottled in Milan then exported to Singapore and then exported to Spain.

‘Ah, Singapore!’ He clapped his hands, presumably to signal that he required more attention. ‘I was very agitated at a conference in Singapore last month. I was advised to calm down by feeding the carp in the hotel fountain at breakfast and to look out at the South China Sea in the afternoon. Are those not beautiful words … “South China Sea”?’

Rose winced, as if the idea of anything beautiful was personally hurtful.

Gómez leaned back in his chair. ‘In the rooftop pool of this hotel, the British tourists drank beer. They were up to their bellies in the water and they were drinking beer but they did not look out once on the South China Sea.’

‘Drinking beer in a swimming pool sounds very nice to me,’ Rose said sharply, as if to remind him that she was not a great fan of drinking water with lunch.

His gold teeth were like flames. ‘You are sitting in the sunshine, Mrs Papastergiadis. The vitamin D is good for your bones. You must drink water. Now, I have a serious question. Tell me why you English say “wi-fi” and in Spain we say “wee-fee”?’

Rose sipped her water as if she had been asked to drink her own urine. ‘Obviously, it’s about a different emphasis on the vowel, Mr Gómez.’

A plastic boat was being inflated in the middle of the square by a thin boy of about twelve. His Mohican had been dyed green and he had his foot pressed against a plastic pump while he devoured an ice cream. Every now and again his five-year-old sister ran to the crumpled plastic to check the progress of its metamorphosis into something seaworthy.

The waiter brought out the salad and bean soup, each plate balanced on the curve of his arm. He leaned over Gómez’s shoulder to theatrically place a vast dish of purple-tentacled
pulpo alla griglia
on his paper mat.

‘Oh yes, gracias,’ Gómez said in his American Spanish accent. ‘I cannot get enough of these creatures!’ They place a vast dish of purple-tentacled
pulpo
on his paper mat. ‘The marinade is its crowning glory … the chillis, the lemon juice, the paprika! I give thanks to this ancient inhabitant of the deep. Gracias, polpo, for your intelligence, mystery and remarkable defence mechanisms.’

Rose now had two red welts on her left cheek.

‘Did you know, Mrs Papastergiadis, the octopus can change the colour of its skin to camouflage itself? As an American, I still find the polpo mysterious, a little
monstruo
, but the Spanish part of me finds it a very familiar monster.’

He picked up his knife and cut a blistered livid tentacle off the octopus. Instead of eating it, he threw it on to the ground, which was a blatant invitation to the cats in the village to join him for lunch. They started to circle his shoes under the table, coming from all directions to fight each other for a piece of the sea monster. He delicately sawed into the rubbery flesh of the polpo and pushed it into his mouth with relish. After a while he saw no reason not to drop three more tentacles into their paws.

My mother had become quiet and shockingly still. Not still like a tree or a leaf or a log. Still like a corpse.

‘We were talking about Wi-Fi,’ Gómez continued. ‘I will tell you the answer to my riddle. I say “wee-fee” to rhyme with “Francis of Assisi”.’

Three thin cats were now sitting on his shoes.

Rose must have been breathing after all, because she turned on him. The whites of her eyes were pink and swollen. ‘Where did you go to medical school?’

‘Johns Hopkins, Mrs Papastergiadis. In Baltimore.’

‘Think he jests,’ Rose whispered loudly.

I stabbed a tomato with my fork and did not respond. All the same, I was concerned about the way her left eye was closing up.

Gómez asked if she was enjoying her bean soup.

‘“Enjoying” is too strong a word. It is wet but tasteless.’

‘How is “enjoyment” too strong a word?’

‘It is not an accurate word to describe my attitude to the soup.’

‘I hope your appetite for enjoyment will get its strength back,’ he said.

Rose rested her pink eyes on my eyes. I removed my gaze like a traitor.

‘Mrs Papastergiadis,’ said Gómez. ‘You have some enemies to discuss with me?’

She leaned back in her chair and sighed.

What is a sigh? That would be another good subject for a field study. Is it just a long, deep, audible exhalation of breath? Rose’s sigh was intense but not subdued. It was frustrated but not yet sad. A sigh resets the respiratory system so it was possible that my mother had been holding her breath, which suggests she was more nervous than she appeared to be. A sigh is an emotional response to being set a difficult task.