Hot Milk

Lame

I haven’t slept for three nights. The heat. The mosquitos. The medusas in the oily sea. The stripped mountains. The German shepherd I freed who might have drowned. The relentless knocking on the door of the beach house. I have locked it now and don’t answer, except for yesterday, when it was Juan. It was his day off and he offered to take me on his moped to Cala San Pedro. It is the only beach with a freshwater spring. He said we could drive half the way on the road, then his friend would take us there by boat. I told him my mother was in a melancholy mood. I am her legs and she is lame. I don’t know what to do with myself. I have started to limp again. I have lost the car keys and I can’t find my hairbrush.

The incident with the snake and then Leonardo undermining me kept colliding with my other thoughts.

I was frightened when I took the axe from Ingrid’s hand. But not frightened enough not to want to know what will happen next.

Leonardo has become her new shield.

My mother was speaking to me but I was not listening, and she could tell because she raised her voice. ‘I suppose you had another happy day in the sunshine?’

I told her I did nothing, nothing at all.

‘How wonderful to do nothing. Nothing is such a privilege. I have been stripped of my medication and I am waiting for something to happen.’

She glanced at the gangster watch on her wrist. It was still ticking. It told perfect time. She was waiting for something while her watch ticked. It was hard for her to come off all her medication. Waiting for new pain was the big adventure in her life. While she waited she tore off small pieces of soft white bread, rolled them into a ball in the palm of her hand and sucked them for hours. The bread pellets resembled her pills and gave her some comfort. She was waiting. Waiting every day for something that might not appear. A rhyme I had learned in junior school came to mind.

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d stay away.

‘Whatever you are waiting for may not arrive,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t there yesterday, and it is not here today.’ I asked her if she would like something more substantial to eat than bread.

‘No. I only eat because I can’t take medication on an empty stomach.’

I puzzled over this and then turned away from her and gazed at the shattered screen saver on my laptop.

‘I suppose I am boring you, Sofia. Well, I am bored, too. How are you going to entertain me tonight?’

‘No. You entertain me.’ I was getting bolder.

She adjusted her lips to look even more hard done by than usual. ‘Do you think a person in pain with no help is a sort of clown?’

‘No, I do not.’

The constellations of my screen saver floated past my eyes, misty, undefined shapes. One of them looked like a calf. Where will it find grass in this galaxy? It will have to eat stars.

Rose prodded my shoulder. ‘I told the doctor I have a chronic degenerative condition. He confesses he knows very little about chronic pain. He says this might surprise modern patients, and I am surprised, because what are we paying him to do? He said my pain has not yet yielded up its secrets. All I know is that my pain magnifies every day.’

‘Do your feet hurt?’

‘No, they are numb.’

‘So what kind of pain magnifies every day?’

She shut her eyes. She opened her eyes. ‘You could help me. You could go to the farmacia and buy me my painkillers, Sofia. You don’t need a prescription here in Spain.’

When I refused, she told me I was getting plump. She demanded a cup of tea, Yorkshire tea. She was missing the Wolds, which she hadn’t seen for twenty years. I brought the tea to her in a mug with ‘ELVIS LIVES’ written across its side. She grabbed it from me and looked aggrieved, as if I had given her something she had not requested and was forcing her to drink. Was it the ‘ELVIS LIVES’ that made her do that scowling thing with her lips? Would it cheer her up to remind her that Elvis was actually dead? Grievance. Grief. Grieving. She more or less inhabited a building called Grievance Heights. Is this where I will have to live, too? Is it? Has Rose already put my name down for an apartment in Grievance Heights? What if I can’t afford to live anywhere else? I must remove my name from that waiting list, that long queue of forlorn daughters trailing back to the beginning of time.

Rose was sitting in her chair. Her back view was terrible to behold. It was vulnerable. People look more like how they really are from the back. Her hair was pinned up and I could see her neck. Her hair was thinning. There were a few curls on her neck, but it was the cardigan she had neatly draped over her shoulders in the heat of the desert that made me think she had inherited this ritual from her mother and exported it to Almería. It was very touching, that cardigan. My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.

‘Are you okay?’

For as long as I can remember, it was me asking her that question. If I wasn’t asking it out loud, I was asking it in my head: is my mother okay, is she okay? Rose’s tone was cross, perhaps a little bewildered, and it occurred to me she might not have asked me because she did not want to hear the answer. Questions and answers are a complex code, as are the structures of kinship.

F = Father. M = Mother. S S = Same sex. OS = Opposite sex. I have no G (Siblings) or C (Children) or H (Husband), nor do I have a Godparent (who we classify as fictive kin because godparents can make up their responsibilities and duties).

I am not okay. Not at all and haven’t been for some time.

I did not tell her how discouraged I felt and that I was ashamed I was not more resilient and all the rest of it which included wanting a bigger life but that so far I had not been bold enough to make a bid for the things I wanted to happen and I feared it was written in the stars that I might end up with a reduced life like hers which is why I was searching for the answer to the conversation her lame legs were having with the world but I was also scared there might be something wrong with her spine or that she had a major illness. The word ‘major’ was in my mind that night in southern Spain. It was 7 p.m., which is twilight, the end of the long day of sunshine and the start of early evening, and with my eyes firmly on the cracked cosmology of shattered lonely stars and milky clouds, I heard a kind of lament slipping from my lips about losing my way, stuff about a lost spaceship and putting my helmet on and how something was wrong and how I had lost contact with Earth but no one could hear me.

I could see Rose shuffling her legs, her left ankle twisting in her slipper, and I was not really sure who it was I was singing to, whether it was M or F or H or G or the fictive Godparent or even Ingrid Bauer. I could smell calamari being fried in the café in the square, but I was missing England, toast and milky tea and rainclouds. I heard my voice was very London because that’s where I was born, and then I left the room. My mother was calling to me, she called my name over and over — ‘Sofia Sofia Sofia’ — and then she shouted, but it was not an angry shout, and I suppose I wanted my ghostly mother to rise from the shattered stars made in China and say tomorrow is another day, you will land safely you will you will.

I walked into the kitchen and on the table was the fake ancient Greek vase with the frieze of female slaves carrying jugs of water on their heads. I grabbed it and threw it on the floor. As it crashed and shattered, the venom from the medusa stings made me feel like I was floating in the most peculiar way.

When I looked up, my mother was standing — she was actually standing — in the kitchen among the shards of fake ancient Greece. She was tall. A cardigan was lightly draped over her shoulders. She had worked all her life and she had a driving licence, but she would have been neither a citizen nor a foreigner in ancient Greece. She would have had no rights in these ruins that were once a whole civilization which saw her as a vessel to impregnate. I was the daughter who had thrown the vessel to the floor and smashed it. My mother had tried to keep it together for a while. She taught herself how to make salty goat’s cheese for my father I remember I remember, warming the milk, adding the yogurt, stirring in the rennet, cutting the curds, doing something with muslin and brine, pickling cheese in jars. She put herbs on the lamb she roasted for him, herbs she had never heard of in Warter, Yorkshire, but when he left she could not pay the bills with herbs and cheese I remember, I do remember, she had to walk out of the kitchen and do something else, I remember she turned the oven off and put her coat on and she opened the front door and there was a wolf waiting for us on the mat but she chased it away and found a job and her lips were not puckered, her eyelashes were not curled when she sat in the library day after day indexing books, but her hair was always perfect and it was held up with one pin.

‘Sofia, what’s wrong with you?’

I started to tell her but a children’s entertainer in the square was letting off firecrackers. I could hear the children laughing and knew he was on a unicycle, blowing fire out of his mouth. I looked at the broken pieces of the fake Greek vase and reckoned it was a sign to fly to my father in Athens.