Hot Milk

The Knocking

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.