Hot Milk

Matricide

My mother was sitting in the chair facing the wall in her sunflower dress. Her slippers were back on her feet and the straw hat lay on the floor, as if she had tossed it there in anger.

‘Is that you?’

‘Yes, it is me.’

I waited for her to tell me the good news.

Her eyes were firmly fixed on the wall.

It is as if her legs are her co-conspirators, always whispering together and plotting. She had put on the slippers to hide her lively feet from me.

‘Get me some water, Sofia.’

Agua con gas, agua sin gas. Which shall I choose?

I opened the fridge and laid my cheek against the door. She had betrayed me. In all these years, I had never lost hope for her recovery, but she did not want to give me hope. I poured her a glass of wrong water and wondered if she might have an appetite after her walk. I found a soft banana and mashed it with milk to give her energy to walk again. And again. And again. She took the plate as a perfectly formed female martyr suffering for an unfathomable cause would take it. Eyes lowered. Lips pinched. Limp hands.

She was hungry.

‘You are sunburnt and covered in sand,’ she said.

‘Yes, it was a great day. It was magnificent. What did you do?’

‘Nothing. Nothing, as usual. What is there to do?’

‘Well, if you’re bored you could cut off your feet.’ I shook out the sand and seaweed in my knotted, wet hair. ‘I’ve heard about your amputation plan. You remind me of a beggar who breaks a leg so people will give her money.’

After that she turned on me. It was a hymn of violence and she sang it to me like a full-throated, evil nightingale.

My unbrushed hair repulsed her. I had wasted my intelligence. I suffered from an excess of emotion, while she was restrained and stoic.

Her blue eyes were sad and stricken.

I grasped her hand to comfort her. It was papery and numb.

She told me she was afraid to sleep.

She freed her hand and she started to shout. It was as if a match had been carelessly dropped into a pool of petroleum. She was insatiable as she continued to insult everyone and anything that came to her mind. Her breathing quickened, her cheeks were flushed, her voice was high and trembling. What does rage look like? It looks like my mother’s lame legs.

When I crept to the bathroom, I could still hear the hate sentences pouring out of her. She was electrocuting me with her words. She was the electric pylon and I was the vervet slumped on the ground, quivering but still breathing. I showered and felt the medusa stings throb under the warm water. They were inciting me to do something monstrous but I wasn’t yet sure what this might be. Sunstroked, blistered and bruised, I was preparing for it. I combed my hair and lined my eyelids with an extra flick at the sides. I was not too sure what I was getting dressed up for, but I knew it was for something big. Ingrid and her horse were still in my mind. She had given me an idea that had probably always lurked inside me anyway. I could hear Rose shouting for more milk to be mixed into her banana.

‘Of course.’

I walked into the living room, gently took the plate from her lying, cheating hand (but not as attacking as her lips) and poured more milk into the mixture. This time, I added honey. ‘Let me take you out for a drive, at least,’ I said.

To my surprise, she agreed. ‘Where shall we go?’

‘We’ll take the route towards Rodalquilar.’

‘Very good. I haven’t been out all day.’ She was ravenous after her walk and spooned the banana mixture through her thin lips with new appetite.

It was a long haul to push her wheelchair to the car. It was Saturday night and the village was crowded with families and their children. I suppose she and I are a family. All the heavy lifting felt like nothing to me. I could have lifted the chair above my head with my new monster fury. My mother had chosen to keep her daughter in her place, forever suspended between hope and despair.

When she was eventually seated in the Berlingo and I was puzzling over the gear called neutral, she told me she couldn’t be bothered to put on her seat belt.

‘I’ll take that as a vote of confidence.’

‘Are you expecting someone to turn up in Rodalquilar, Sofia?’

‘Not that I know of.’

I took the rough road to cut across the mountains before we joined the motorway. The night was warm. She opened her window to peer at the darkening sky. There were ruins with FOR SALE signs on rusty poles poked into the hard earth. Near the ruins, someone had made a garden. A tall, flowering cactus had toppled over from the weight of its fruit, an abundance of yellow prickly pears. The road was a hazard of holes and small rocks, spraying dust over the windscreen.

I was driving fast and blind by the time I turned left on to the new motorway.

‘Water, Sofia, I need water.’

I pulled into a service station and ran into the shop to buy a bottle of water for Rose. A pile of porn films lay on the counter with an assortment of key rings, a solitary bottle of rough country wine and a clay pig moneybox.

By the time we were on the road again the clock on the hire car was positioned at 8.05, the temperature at 25C, my speed 120kph. A decaying Ferris wheel stood abandoned in the desert like an open mouth, a last, cheap laugh.

I stopped the car on the hard shoulder. ‘Let’s have a look at the sunset,’ I said.

There was no sunset to look at but Rose did not seem to notice.

Out came the wheelchair and fifteen minutes of heavy lifting. Rose leaned on my arm and then on my shoulder as she lowered herself into it.

‘What are you waiting for, Sofia?’

‘I’m just getting my breath back.’

A white lorry was making its way towards us in the distance. It was loaded with tomatoes grown under plastic on the sweltering desert slave farms.

I wheeled my mother into the middle of the road and I left her there.