Hot Milk

History

My sister turns her face in my direction and opens her lustrous, brown eyes. She is lying across her father’s knee on the soft, blue sofa. Alexandra rests her head against his shoulder. When he cups her chin in his hand and moves her closer to his lips, I can’t help thinking he has seen this exact move in an old film with Clark Gable playing the lead and he’s trying it out. Evangeline is beloved by everyone in the room, including me. The word Beloved is like a wound. It hurts. In this sense, Beloved is not so different from Beheaded.

I have a headache, the kind of pain my mother described as a door slamming in her head. I put my hands up to my forehead and trail my fingers down to my eyes, and then I press the tips of my little fingers into my eyelids so everything is black and red and blue.

‘Have you got something in your eye, Sofia?’

‘Yes. A fly or something. Can I speak to you alone, Papa?’

Alexandra’s childish shoes are half slipping off her feet and she’s smiling at me, her braces glinting as the sun floods into their living space. That’s what it is, a living space, and I am living too intensely in their space. Alexandra now has her arm around my father’s shoulder and her fingers are in his hair. He has to disentangle himself from her girlmotherlove to speak to me alone.

We walk to my room, and he closes the door. I’m not sure what I want to say to him, but it’s something to do with needing help. I don’t know where to begin. So many years have passed in silence between us. Where shall I start? How do we begin a conversation? We would have to move around in time, the past the present and the future, but we are lost in all of them.

We are standing together in the storeroom but we are in a time warp. There is no air in this windowless room, yet the wind is up and we are in a gale. The wind is blowing hard and it is history. I have been lifted into the air, my hair is flying, my arms are stretched out towards him. This force lifts my father, too. His back is slamming against the wall, his arms are flailing.

He wants to cheat history and cheat the storm.

We are standing very still, about a foot away from each other.

I want to tell him that I am anxious about my mother and that I’m not sure I can cope any longer.

I’m wondering if he might be willing to step in.

I don’t know what ‘stepping in’ means. I could ask for financial help. I could ask him to listen while I update him on where we are now. It would take time to do that, and so I suppose I am asking for his time. Is it to his advantage to listen to me speak?

‘What is it, Sofia? What do you want to talk about?’

‘I am thinking of finishing my doctorate in America.’

He is already far away. He has shut down his eyes and his face has become tight.

‘I will need to fund my studies. I will also have to leave Rose alone in Britain. I don’t know what to do.’

He shoves his hands into the pockets of his grey trousers. ‘Do as you please,’ he says. ‘There are grants available for overseas study. As for your mother, she has chosen to live as she does. It is not my concern.’

‘I am asking for your advice.’

He steps backwards towards the closed door.

‘What shall I do, Papa?’

‘Please, Sofia. Alexandra needs to sleep because your sister is eating her alive. I need to rest, too.’

Christos. Alexandra. Evangeline.

They all need to nap.

All Greek myths are about unhappy families. I am the part of their family that sleeps on a camp bed in the spare room. Evangeline means ‘messenger of good news’. What is my news? I am looking after my father’s first wife.

I walk back with him as he makes his way to join his kin on the soft, blue sofa. I am fuming. I stare at the wall to try to become calmer. But the wall is not a clear, cool space, it is full of grinning ducks. My father is furtively looking at me as he folds himself into the sofa with his wife and daughter. He wants me to see his new, happy family from his point of view.

Look at our calm resting!

Listen to the way we do not shout!

Observe the way we all know our place!

Look at how my wife manages our needs!

My view on his family is required to be his view on his family. He would prefer me not to see them from any other point of view.

I do not see things from my father’s point of view.

Point of view is becoming my subject.

All my potency is in my head, but my head is not supposed to be the most attractive thing about me. Will my new sister make her father less uncomfortable than I do? She and I have a secret game. Every time I stroke her earlobe, she shuts her eyes. When I tickle the sole of her tiny foot she opens her eyes and gazes at me from her point of view. My father is always keen for them to all shut their eyes.

‘Time for some shut-eye’ is his favourite sentence.

I left them napping on the soft, blue sofa and walked in the direction of the Acropolis. After a while, I could not continue walking in the heat, so I bought a peach and sat on a bench in the shade. A policeman on a motorbike was chasing a dark-skinned, middle-aged man who was wheeling a supermarket trolley full of scrap metal to trade in at the end of the day. It was not like a high-speed chase in a film, because the man was walking slowly and sometimes he stopped and just stood while the motorbike circled him, but it was still a chase. In the end, he dumped the trolley and walked away. He looked like my teacher at junior school, except he did not have two pens poking out of his shirt pocket.

When I arrived back at the apartment in Kolonaki, Alexandra and Christos were sitting at the table eating white beans in tomato sauce. Alexandra told me they came out of a tin but that my papa had added some dill to the dish. He was partial to dill. I know nothing about him so was pleased to learn he liked dill. That will become a memory. In the future, I would say, yes, my father liked dill, especially on white beans.

Alexandra pointed to a parcel on the table. ‘It’s from your mother,’ she said. It was addressed to Christos Papastergiadis.

Christos was obviously nervous, because he was shovelling the beans into his mouth and pretending the parcel wasn’t there.

‘Open it, Papa. It’s not a severed head or anything.’ As soon as I said that, I didn’t quite believe it. Maybe the diving-school dog hadn’t drowned after all and Rose had cut off its head and sent it by registered post to Athens.

My father picked up a knife and slid it into the brown paper with all its stamps and abundant sticky tape. ‘It’s something square,’ he said. ‘It’s a box.’

The box had a picture of the Yorkshire Dales on it. Rolling green hills, low stone walls, a stone cottage with a red front door. He turned it over and gazed at the illustration of a tractor parked in a field next to three grazing sheep. ‘Teabags. A box of Yorkshire teabags.’ And a note. He read it out loud. ‘With solidarity in these times of austerity to the family in Kolonaki from the family in East London via our temporary residence in Almería.’ Christos glanced at Alexandra.

‘He doesn’t like tea,’ she said.

My father’s lips were covered in tomato sauce and dill.

Alexandra passed him a paper napkin. There were several of them neatly folded into a triangle and placed in a glass on the table. ‘I always keep napkins on the table because your father likes to make flowers from them. It helps him think.’

I never knew that.

‘So,’ he said, wiping his mouth on the napkin. ‘On your last night, I will take you out for Greek coffee.’

Alexandra was reading the box of Yorkshire teabags, her spectacles perched in her short black hair. ‘Sofia, where is Yorkshire?’

‘Yorkshire is in northern England. That is where my mother was born. Her maiden name was Booth. Rose Kathleen Booth.’ When I said that, I felt like I belonged somewhere that Alexandra did not. To my mother and to her Yorkshire family.

My father threw the napkin down on the table. ‘Yorkshire is famous for a beer called bitter.’

On my last day, he took me for the promised Greek coffee in a café called Rosebud. I wondered if this was an unconscious bonding with his first wife. He did after all marry her when she was just a bud, but I didn’t feel like asking him in case he started to talk about her thorns. A name like Rose encourages that kind of thing. All the same, it would not be true to say that he was the invisible worm that had destroyed her life. Even I knew that. We sat next to each other and sipped the sweet, muddy coffee from its tiny cup.

‘I am very pleased you have met your sister,’ he said.

We both watched an old woman begging at various tables. She held a white plastic cup in her hands. She was dignified in her skirt and blouse, her clothes were ironed and darned, a cardigan was draped over her shoulders, just like my mother. Most people dropped a few coins into the cup.

‘I am pleased to have met Evangeline, too.’

I noticed that he never smiled. ‘To be happy, she must open her heart to our Lord.’

‘She will have her own point of view, Papa.’

He waved at some men playing cards nearby. After a while, he told me how much it meant to him that I had gone to the expense of paying for an air ticket to Athens. And of course for driving the hire car all the way from Almería to the airport at Granada.

‘Before you leave tomorrow, I would like to give you some spending money.’

I wasn’t sure why he wanted to give me spending money the night before I was leaving, but I was touched all the same. He had not given me spending money, as he called it, since I was fourteen, so perhaps that’s why it sounded so childish. He took out his wallet, laid it on the table and then prodded the worn, brown leather with his thumb. He seemed surprised when it didn’t react.

His two fingers started to search inside it. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I forgot to go to the bank.’ He dipped his fingers into the wallet again and rummaged around for a long time, finally scooping out a single ten-euro note. He held it up to his eyes. Then he placed it on the table, smoothed it down with the palm of his hand and handed it to me with a flourish.

I finished my coffee and when the woman begging came to my table I slipped the ten-euro note into her plastic cup. She said something in Greek and then she limped nearer to me and kissed my hand. It was the first time anyone had shown me any affection in Athens. It was hard to accept that the first man in my life would do things that were to my disadvantage if they were to his advantage. Yet it was a revelation that somehow set me free.

Christos Papastergiadis seemed to be praying. His eyes were half shut and his lips were moving. At the same time, his fingers hovered above the paper napkins. He pulled the thin tissue out of the stainless-steel box and started to fold it, first in two, then into a square which became a circle, and then, miraculously, a flower with three dense layers of paper petals.

He held it in his hand as if it were an offering, perhaps a votive offering made to gain favour or to be cast into a fountain to make a wish.

I pointed to the flower in his hand and he looked vague, as if he was surprised it was there at all.

I had become bolder. ‘I think you have made that flower for me.’

At last he looked at me. ‘Yes, I have made it for you, Sofia. You like wearing flowers in your hair.’ He gave it to me and I thanked him for the thought, which he had not wanted to claim. He was happy to have given me something after all, and even happier that I had not given it away.

I have no plan B to replace my father because I am not sure that I want a husband who is like a father, though I can see this is part of the mix in kinship structures. A wife can be a mother to her husband and a son can be a husband or a mother to his mother and a daughter can be a sister or a mother to her mother who can be a father and a mother to her daughter, which is probably why we are all lurking in each other’s sign. It’s my bad luck that my father never showed up for me, but I had not changed my surname to Booth, even though it was tempting to have a name that people could spell. He had given me his name and I had not given it away. I had found something to do with it. The name of my father had placed me in a bigger world of names that cannot be easily said or spelt.

That image of him praying at the Rosebud Café was in my mind when we walked back to Kolonaki. I suddenly felt concerned for Alexandra. I had been startled by his disconnection, the way he zoned out when things got difficult between us and how he often spoke out loud to the god who was like a telephone implanted inside his head.

Alexandra was pretending to sleep on the soft, blue sofa when we arrived home. Christos tiptoed towards her, gently took off her slippers with the lambs on the toes and placed them neatly on the floor. He turned off the main light and switched on a lamp, then put his finger to his lips. Ssssssssh.

‘Don’t wake her.’

Alexandra was wide awake.

He was always ready at her side with a blanket, a sheet, a cushion. He seemed keen to put her to sleep at every opportunity and she played along with her husband’s role as the anaesthetist of their household.

Alexandra was definitely awake. We were looking at each other with our various points of view.

The next morning, I packed my suitcase and folded up the camp bed they had provided for my stay. My father had already left the apartment for work and had not woken me up to say goodbye. I found Alexandra standing in her nightdress on the balcony. She seemed engrossed by the tame squirrel that was leaping across the branches of a tree nearby. She turned Evangeline away from her breast so she could look at it, too.

I think I must have startled her because she jumped when I said goodbye.

‘Oh, it is only you, Sofia.’

Who else would it be? If it had been my father, would she have yawned and declared herself ready for a nap on the soft, blue sofa?

When I thanked her for making a space for me in her home, she told me she was sad to see me go because she would have no one to talk to in the mornings.

Her long cotton nightdress was white and virginal, trimmed with lace on the sleeves and neck, unbuttoned so she could feed Evangeline. Today, her short hair was greasy and unbrushed.

I realized that I had never seen her with a friend.

‘Do you have brothers and sisters, Alexandra?’

She gazed again at the squirrel. ‘Not that I know of.’ She told me that she was adopted. She had grown up in Italy but now her parents — not her biological parents — were elderly, so it was not easy for them to make the journey from Rome to Athens to see their granddaughter. She was worried about their pensions because there was austerity in Italy, too, but she had regularly sent them money when she was working. Now it was not so easy to do that because my papa had other plans and ideas, but she thought it would sort itself out in the end.

She turned Evangeline towards her again and kissed her daughter’s plump cheeks.

It was almost a holy experience to see the orphaned young mother with her own beloved child clasped to her breast.

Perhaps she had been easy prey for Christos because she longed for a father who was also a husband. The Donald Duck posters and lamb slippers and jellied candies and pretending to sleep on my papa’s shoulder might be her attempt to make another childhood for herself. A childhood in which she had not been abandoned.

My sister was clasped to her nipple, her little toes waving in the air as she suckled, her eyes wide open and dazed, oblivious to everything except the dizzying milk in her mother’s breast.

Alexandra blinked. ‘Would you mind bringing me a glass of water? I haven’t got a free hand.’

I filled a glass with water from a bottle in the fridge and put ice in it and a slice of lemon, and then for Alexandra’s extra pleasure I threw in a strawberry.

She looked wrung out.

I kissed her pale cheek. ‘My sister is lucky to have such a gentle and patient mother.’

She wanted to say something to me but kept swallowing the thought.

‘What is it, Alexandra?’

I was getting bolder.

‘If you would like me to teach you Greek, I would be happy to have something to do when the baby is sleeping.’

‘How will you do that?’

She looked at the squirrel again and pointed out how trusting it was to have come so close. ‘Well, if you look at the alphabet while you are in Spain and get familiar with it, then I can email you sentences in Greek and you can reply in Greek, and this way we are having a conversation.’

‘Yes, let’s give it a go.’

I thanked her again, and then I said in Greek that she should feel more free to help her parents in Rome financially.

It was quite a complicated few sentences to formulate in a language I don’t speak, and it was even more complicated because it’s she who is the economist.

She smiled and replied in Greek. ‘Did you say I should feel “more free”?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am freer than I have ever been.’

I wanted to ask about this, but I don’t have an ear for languages. Anyway, it would take a while for me not to think of the Greek language as the father who walked out on me. I kissed my little sister on the soles of each of her brown feet and then I kissed her hands.

As I wheeled my suitcase to the bus station to catch the X95 to the airport, I suddenly felt more like myself.

Alone.

Lying on top of my clothes in the suitcase was the flower my father had made from his struggling thoughts. A flower made with paper, like the books that my librarian mother had spent her life indexing. She had catalogued over a billion words but she could not find words for how her own wishes for herself had been dispersed in the winds and storms of a world not arranged to her advantage.

The Greek girl is on her way back to Spain. Back to the medusas. The sweaty nights. The dusty alleys. Back to Almería’s massive heat. Back to me. I will invite her to plant my olive trees. Her job will be to dig a planting hole. Afterwards, I will have to tie the trees to bamboo poles so the wind will not determine their shape. A tree cannot be given form by the vagaries of the wind.