Hot Milk

Dr Gómez

We had begun the long journey to find a healer. The taxi driver hired to take us to the Gómez Clinic had no reason to understand how nervous we were or what was at stake.

We had begun a new chapter in the history of my mother’s legs and it had taken us to the semi-desert of southern Spain.

It is not a small matter. We had to remortgage Rose’s house to pay for her treatment at the Gómez Clinic. The total cost was twenty-five thousand euro, which is a substantial sum to lose, considering I have been sleuthing my mother’s symptoms for as long as I can remember.

My own investigation has been in progress for about twenty of my twenty-five years. Perhaps longer. When I was four I asked her what a headache meant. She told me it was like a door slamming in her head. I have become a good mind reader, which means her head is my head. There are plenty of doors slamming all the time and I am the main witness.

If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, does that make her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim? Attempting to decipher her aches and pains, their triggers and motivations, is a good training for an anthropologist. There have been times when I thought I was on the verge of a major revelation and knew where the corpses were buried, only to be thwarted once again. Rose merely presents a new and entirely mysterious symptom for which she is prescribed new and entirely mysterious medication. The UK doctors recently prescribed anti-depressants for her feet. That’s what she told me — they are for the nerve endings in her feet.

The clinic was near the town of Carboneras, which is famous for its cement factory. It would be a thirty-minute ride. My mother and I sat shivering in the back of the taxi because the air conditioner had transformed the desert heat into something more like a Russian winter. The driver told us that carboneras means coal bunkers, and the mountains had once been covered in a forest, which had been cut down for charcoal. Everything had been stripped for ‘the furnace’.

I asked him if he’d mind turning down the air conditioner.

He insisted the AC was automatic and out of his control, but he could advise us on where to find beaches with clear, clean water.

‘The best beach is Playa de los Muertos, which means “Beach of the Dead”. It is only five kilometres south of town. You will have walk down the mountain for twenty minutes. There is no access by road.’

Rose leaned forward and tapped his shoulder. ‘We are here because I have a bone disease and can’t walk.’ She frowned at the plastic rosary hanging from his mirror. Rose is a committed atheist, all the more so since my father had a religious conversion.

Her lips had turned blue due to the extreme weather inside the car. ‘As for the “Beach of the Dead”’ — she shivered as she spoke — ‘I’m not quite there yet, though I can see it would be more appealing to swim in clear water than to burn in the furnace of hell, for which all the trees in the world will have to be felled and every mountain stripped for coal.’ Her Yorkshire accent had suddenly become fierce, which it always does when she’s enjoying an argument.

The driver’s attention was on a fly that had landed on his steering wheel. ‘Perhaps you will need to book my taxi for your return journey?’

‘It depends on the temperature in your automobile.’ Her thin, blue lips stretched into something resembling a smile as the taxi became warmer.

We were no longer stranded in a Russian winter so much as a Swedish one.

I opened the window. The valley was covered in white plastic, just as the student in the injury hut had described. The desert farms were devouring the land like a dull, sickly skin. The hot wind blew my hair across my eyes while Rose rested her head on my shoulder, which was still smarting from the jellyfish sting. I dared not move to a less painful position because I knew she was scared and that I had to pretend not to be. She had no God to plead to for mercy or luck. It would be true to say she depended instead on human kindness and painkillers.

As the driver steered his cab into the palm-fringed grounds of the Gómez Clinic, we glimpsed the gardens that had been described in the brochure as ‘a mini-oasis of great ecological importance’. Two wild pigeons lay tucked into each other under the mimosa trees.

The clinic itself was carved into the scorched mountains. Built from cream-coloured marble in the shape of a dome, it resembled a massive, upside-down cup. I had studied it on Google many times, but the digital page did not convey how calming and comforting it felt to stand next to it in real time. The entrance, in contrast, was entirely made from glass. Thorny bushes with flowering purple blooms and low, tangled, silver cacti were planted abundantly around the curve of the dome, leaving the gravel entrance clear for the taxi to park next to a small, stationary shuttle bus.

It took fourteen minutes to walk with Rose from the car to the glass doors. They seemed to anticipate our arrival, opening silently for us, as if gratifying our wish to enter without either of us having to make the request.

I gazed at the deep blue Mediterranean below the mountain and felt at peace.

When the receptionist called out for Señora Papastergiadis, I took Rose’s arm and we limped together across the marble floor towards the desk. Yes, we are limping together. I am twenty-five and I am limping with my mother to keep in step with her. My legs are her legs. That is how we find a convivial pace to move forwards. It is how adults walk with young children who have graduated from crawling and how adult children walk with their parents when they need an arm to lean on. Earlier that morning, my mother had walked on her own to the local Spar to buy herself some hairpins. She had not even taken a walking stick to lean on. I no longer wanted to think about that.

The receptionist directed me to a nurse who was waiting with a wheelchair. It was a relief to pass Rose over to someone else, to walk behind the nurse as she pushed the chair and admire the way she swayed her hips as she walked at a pace, her long, shining hair tied with a white, satin ribbon. This was another style of walking, entirely free of pain, of attachment to kin, of compromise. The heels of the nurse’s grey suede shoes sounded like an egg cracking as she made her way down the marble corridors. Stopping outside a door with the words Mr Gómez written in gold letters across a panel of polished wood, she knocked and waited.

Her nails were painted a deep glossy red.

We had travelled a long way from home. To be here at last in this curved corridor with its amber veins threading through the walls felt like a pilgrimage of sorts, a last chance. For years, an increasing number of medical professionals in the UK had been groping in the dark for a diagnosis, puzzled, lost, humbled, resigned. This had to be the final journey and I think my mother knew that, too. A male voice shouted something in Spanish. The nurse pushed the heavy door open and then beckoned to me to wheel Rose into the room, as if to say, She is all yours.

Dr Gómez. The orthopaedic consultant I had researched so thoroughly for months on end. He looked like he was in his early sixties, his hair was mostly silver but with a startling pure white streak running across the left side of his head. He wore a pinstripe suit, his hands were tanned, his eyes blue and alert.

‘Thank you, Nurse Sunshine,’ he said to the nurse, as if it were normal for an eminent doctor who specialized in musculoskeletal conditions to name his staff after the weather. She was still holding the door open, as if her thoughts had wandered off to roam on the Sierra Nevada.

He raised his voice and repeated in Spanish, ‘Gracias, Enfermera Luz del Sol.’

This time she shut the door. I could hear the cracking sound of her heels on the floor, first at an even pace and then suddenly faster. She had started to run. The echo of her heels remained in my mind long after she had left the room.

Dr Gómez spoke English with an American accent.

‘Please. How can I help you?’

Rose looked baffled. ‘Well, that is exactly what I want you to tell me.’

When Dr Gómez smiled, his two front teeth were entirely covered with gold. They reminded me of the teeth on a human male skull we studied in the first year of my anthropology degree, the task being to guess his diet. The teeth were full of cavities so it was likely he had chewed on tough grain. On further scrutiny of the skull, I discovered that a small square of linen had been stuffed into the larger cavity. It had been soaked in cedar oil to ease the pain and stop infection.

Dr Gómez’s tone was vaguely friendly and vaguely formal. ‘I have been looking at your notes, Mrs Papastergiadis. You were a librarian for some years?’

‘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.

A large industrial cargo ship floated near the horizon. It was flying a Greek flag. I looked away and gazed instead at a rusty child’s swing that had been hammered into the coarse sand. The seat was made from a battered car tyre and it was swaying gently, as if a ghostly child had recently jumped off it. Cranes from the desalination plant sliced into the sky. Tall undulating dunes of greenish-grey cement powder lay in a depot to the right of the beach, where unfinished hotels and apartments had been hacked into the mountains like a murder.

I glanced at my phone. There was an old text message from Dan who worked with me at the Coffee House. He wanted to know where I had put the marker pen we use to label the sandwiches and pastries. Dan from Denver was texting me in Spain about a pen? As I took a sip of my large gin and tonic and nodded my thanks to the waiter, I wondered if I had put the pen somewhere obscure.

I unzipped my dress so the sun could reach my shoulders. The burn of the medusa sting had calmed down, but every now and again I felt a twinge. It wasn’t the worst kind of pain. In a way, it was a relief.

Another more recent message from Dan. He has found the pen. It turns out that while I am in Spain he is sleeping in my room above the Coffee House because his landlord put up his rent last week. The pen was in my bed. With the lid off. Consequently, the sheets and duvet are now stained with black ink. In fact, he described it as a haemorrhage of ink.

He can no longer write things like this:

Sofia’s bittersweet Amaretto cheesecake — in £3.90, out £3.20.

Dan’s moist orange and polenta cake (wheat- and gluten-free) — in £3.70, out £3.

I am bittersweet.

He is moist.

Dan is definitely not moist.

We don’t bake these cakes ourselves but our boss tells us that customers are more likely to buy them if they think we do. We put our names to things we do not make. I am glad the ink has run out of the lying pen.

I remember now that I must have left the pen in the bed when I used it to copy a quote from Margaret Mead, the cultural anthropologist. I wrote it straight onto the wall.

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalysed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.

There are five semicolons in that quote. I remember making the;;;;; on the wall with the marker pen. I had underlined ‘religious conversion’ twice.

My father suffered a religious conversion but as far as I know he has not got over it. In fact he has married a woman four years older than I am and they have a new baby. She is twenty-nine. He is sixty-nine. A few years before he met his new wife, he inherited a fortune from his grandfather’s shipping business in Athens. He must have seen it as a sign that he was on the right track. God brought him money just as his country was going bankrupt. And love. And a baby girl. I have not seen my father since I was fourteen. He has seen no reason to part with a single euro of his newly acquired wealth, so I am my mother’s burden. She is my creditor and I pay her with my legs. They are always running around for her.

To sign off the loan to pay the Gómez Clinic we had to go together to Rose’s mortgage provider for an interview.

I took the morning off work which meant I lost eighteen pounds and thirty pence for three hours. It was raining and the corporate red carpet was damp. Everywhere there were words on posters telling us how much our well-being meant to the bank, as if human rights were their major concern. The man sitting behind his computer had been trained to be cheerful and friendly; to imitate empathy as he understood it; to be approachable and energetic as he understood it; to love his ugly red tie with the bank’s logo on it. His red badge displayed his name and job description, but it did not tell us his salary scale — probably somewhere in the region of dignified poverty. He was attempting to be personal; to be fair in his approach to our situation; to speak to us in simple language we would understand. A poster of three unattractive employees stared at us from the wall, all of them laughing. The woman was in a female suit (jacket with skirt), the men in male suits (jacket with trousers), their message conveyed our similarities and erased our differences; we are sensible dreamers with bad teeth just like you; we all want a place of our own to argue with the family on Christmas Day.

I could see that these posters were a rite of initiation (into property, investments, debt) and that the corporate suits signalled a sacrifice of the complexity of gender distinctions. Another poster displayed a photograph of a neat semi-detached house with a front garden the size of a grave. There were no flowers in that garden, just newly laid grass. It looked desolate. The squares of turf had not yet grown into each other. Perhaps a paranoid personality was lurking to the left of the story they were building for us. He had cut down all the flowers and murdered the household pets.

Our man spoke in a tone that was animated but robotic. At the start he said, ‘Hi, you Guys,’ but at least he did not say, ‘Hello, Ladies,’ before he rattled off the products available to strip me of my inheritance. At one point he asked my mother if she ate steak. It was a question out of the blue, but we could see where he was heading (lavish lifestyle) so Rose told him she was a vegan because she wanted to promote a more humane and caring world. If she was feeling extravagant, she said she’d add a tablespoon of yogurt to the dahl and rice. He did not know that vegans do not eat dairy products, otherwise she would have fallen out of the corporate red chair at the first hurdle. He asked if she liked designer clothes. She said she only liked cheap, ugly clothes. Did she belong to a gym? A strange question, given that my mother was clutching a walking stick and a bandage was wrapped around each of her swollen ankles, despite the anti-inflammatory painkillers she knocked back every morning with a glass of wrong water.

He asked her to provide the estate agents’ estimate for our property and he informed us that the bank’s own surveyor would pay us a visit. The computer liked the information we had submitted so far because my mother had paid off the mortgage. Bricks and mortar are worth something in London, even if the Victorian bricks are held together with spit, piss and gaffer tape. He told us he was inclined to sign off our loan. My mother was excited about having an adventure that included a medical experience: the Gómez Clinic was like whale watching for her. I returned to work to make three types of espresso and Rose returned home to make a new list of aches and pains. I can’t deny that her symptoms are of cultural interest to me, even though they drag me down with her. Her symptoms do all the talking for her. They chatter all the time. Even I know that.

I walked across the burning sand to cool my feet in the sea.

Sometimes, I find myself limping. It’s as if my body remembers the way I walk with my mother. Memory is not always reliable. It is not the whole truth. Even I know that.

When I arrived back at the clinic at 2.15, Rose had swapped the wheelchair for a chair and she was reading her horoscope in a newspaper for English expatriates.

‘Hello, Sofia. I can see you have been having a nice time at the beach.’

I told her the beach was desolate and that I had been staring for two hours at a pile of gas canisters. It was my special skill to make my day smaller so as to make her day bigger.

‘Look at my arms,’ she said. ‘I’m all bruised from the blood tests.’

‘You poor thing.’

‘I am a poor thing. The doctor has taken me off three of my pills. Three!’

She screwed up her mouth to make a mock-crying expression and then waved her newspaper at Gómez, who was not so much walking as promenading across the white marble floor towards us.

He told me that my mother has a chronic iron deficiency, which could be why she lacks energy. Among other things, such as a silver-lined dressing to enhance the healing of her foot ulcers, he had prescribed vitamin B12.

A prescription for vitamins. Is that worth twenty-five thousand euro?

Rose began to list the names of the pills that had been erased from her medication ritual. She spoke about them as if she were grieving for absent friends. Gómez lifted his hand to wave at Nurse Sunshine, who was making her way towards him in her grey suede heels. When she was standing by his side, he brazenly put his arm around her shoulders while she fiddled with the watch pinned above her right breast. An ambulance had just pulled up in the car park. She told him in English that the driver needed a lunch break. He nodded and removed his arm from her shoulders so she could get a better grip on the watch.

‘Nurse Sunshine is my daughter,’ he said. ‘Her real name is Julieta Gómez. Please feel free to call her what you wish. Today is her birthday.’

Julieta Gómez smiled for the first time. Her teeth were blindingly white. ‘I am now thirty-three. My childhood has officially ended. Please call me Julieta.’

Gómez gazed at his daughter with his eyes that were various shades of blue. ‘You will know there is high unemployment in Spain,’ he said, ‘something like 29.6 per cent at the moment. So I am lucky my daughter had a good medical training in Barcelona and is the most respected physiotherapist in Spain. This means I am able to be a little bit corrupt and use my position to get her a job in my marble palace.’

He opened his pinstriped arms in a sweeping, royal gesture, as if to fold into himself the curved walls and flowering cacti, the shiny new ambulance, the receptionists and other nurses, and a couple of male doctors who unlike Gómez wore a uniform of blue T-shirts and brand-new trainers.

‘This marble is extracted from the earth of Cobdar. Its colour resembles the pale skin of my deceased wife. Yes, I have built my clinic in homage to my daughter’s mother. In the spring months we are enchanted by the abundance of butterflies that are attracted to my dome. They always lift the spirits of the afflicted. By the way, Rose, you might like to visit the statue of the Virgen del Rosario. She is sculpted from the purest marble from the Macael mountains.’

‘I am an atheist, Mr Gómez,’ Rose said sternly. ‘And I do not believe that women who give birth are virgins.’

‘But Rose, she is made from a delicate marble that is the colour of mother’s milk. It is white, but slightly yellow. So perhaps the sculptor was merely paying his respects to the act of nurturing. I wonder, did the virgin’s only child call his mother by her first name?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Rose said. ‘It’s all lies, anyway. And by the way, Jesus called his mother “woman”. It translates in Hebrew as “Madam”.’

The receptionist suddenly appeared and started to speak very fast in Spanish to Gómez. She was carrying a fat white cat in her arms and she put it down on the floor by Gómez’s polished black shoes. When it started to circle his legs he knelt down and stretched out his hand. ‘Jodo is my true love,’ he said. The cat rubbed its face against his open palm. ‘She is very gentle. I am just sorry we do not have mice, because she has nothing to do all day long except to love me.’

Rose began to sneeze. After the fourth sneeze she clapped her hand to her eye. ‘I am allergic to cats.’

Gómez slipped his little finger into Jodo’s mouth. ‘The gums should be firm and pink, and Jodo is okay in this respect. But her stomach is bulging in a new way. I am worried that she might have a kidney disease.’

He reached into his pocket, took out a bottle of sanitizer and sprayed it on his hands, while Julieta asked Rose if she would like some drops for her itching eye.

‘Oh, yes, please.’

It’s not often my mother says ‘please’. She sounded as if she had just been offered a box of chocolates.

Julieta Gómez took out a small, white plastic bottle from her pocket. ‘They are anti-histamines. I have just helped someone else with this problem.’ She walked over to Rose, tipped her chin back and squeezed two drops into each eye.

My mother now looked daintily tearful, reproachful, as if the tears were welling but had not yet spilt on to her cheeks.

Jodo the cat had disappeared in the arms of one of the paramedics.

Nurse Sunshine, who was really Julieta, was neither friendly nor hostile. She was matter of fact, efficient, serene. She had none of her father’s exuberance, although I observed that she listened very carefully to Rose, without appearing to do so. I was starting to rethink the way she had lingered by the door when we had walked into the consulting room. Perhaps she had not been as far away in her thoughts as I had imagined. She noticed things because she asked if she could help me do up my dress. I had forgotten I had loosened it at the beach. Julieta fiddled discreetly with the zip, then placed her hands on her tiny waist and informed us that our taxi had arrived.

‘Goodbye, Rose.’ Gómez vigorously shook her hand. ‘By the way, you should drive the hire car we have organized for you. It is included in my fee.’

‘But how can I drive? I have no feeling in my legs.’ Rose once again looked affronted.

‘You have my permission to drive the car. Pick it up on your next visit. There is some paperwork to do, but it is ready for you in our car park.’

Julieta put her hand on my mother’s shoulder. ‘If you have any problems with the driving, Sofia can call us to come and fetch you. She has all our contact numbers.’ The Gómez Clinic was obviously a family business.

Not only were we going to be provided with a car, Gómez informed my mother that he would be pleased to take her out for lunch. He asked Julieta to put a date in his diary for two days’ time, bowed his silver head and turned on his heels to talk to one of the young doctors waiting for him by a marble pillar.

As I limped with Rose to the taxi, I asked her what kind of exercise Gómez had given her to do.

‘It is not a physical exercise. He has asked me to write a letter in which I name all my enemies.’ She snapped open her handbag and wrestled with a tissue that was stuck in the clasp. ‘You know, Sofia, when Nurse Sunshine — or Julieta Gómez, or whoever she is — squeezed those drops into my eyes, I’m sure she smelt of alcohol. In fact, she smelt of vodka.’

‘Well, it is her birthday,’ I said.

The sea below the mountain was calm.

The Greek girl is lazy. The windows are dirty in their beach house but she has not cleaned them. She never locks the door. That is careless. It is like an invitation. It is like riding a bicycle without a helmet. That is careless too. It is an invitation to be hurt very badly should there be an accident.