Hot Milk

Bringing the Sea to Rose

I had promised to be totally silent at the table when Gómez took my mother to lunch. He had forbidden me to speak and asked for my trust in his judgement. In fact, he told me the staff would fetch Rose every day from the beach apartment and I was to do as I pleased. On Tuesdays he would call me into the clinic, given that I was my mother’s next of kin. Apart from that, it was my choice. He wanted to get to know Rose, because her case truly puzzled him. It was not why she could not walk that interested him. He wanted to know why she could intermittently walk. This seemed like an affliction that might very well be physical, but one must not be a slave to medical theory. What did I think?

I regarded Gómez as my research assistant. I have been on the case all my life and he is just starting. There are no clear boundaries between victory and defeat when it comes to my mother’s symptoms. As soon as he makes a diagnosis, she will grow another one to confound him. He seems to know this. Yesterday he told her to recite her latest ailment to the body of a dead insect, perhaps to a fly, because they are easy to swat. He suggested she surrender to this strange action and listen carefully to the monotony of the way it buzzes before it dies. It is likely, he said, that she will discover that the buzzing sound, often so irritating to the human ear, resembles the timbre and pitch of Russian folk music.

It is the first time I have ever seen her laugh out loud with her mouth open. At the same time, he has booked her in for various scans and his staff are attending to the silver-lined dressings on her right foot.

A table for three had been reserved in the village-square restaurant, because he assumed she could walk there with relative ease from the apartment. It had not been an easy walk. My mother had tripped over pistachio shells that had not been swept from the square the night before. I had spent an hour sorting out the laces of her shoes but, in the end, Rose had been felled by a nut that was no bigger than a large pea.

Gómez was already seated at the table. He sat opposite Rose and I sat next to him, as instructed. His formal pinstripe suit had been exchanged for elegant cream linen, not exactly informal but less businesslike than his first presentation of himself as a famous consultant. A yellow silk handkerchief was arranged in his jacket pocket in the old style, shaped into a round puff rather than folded at right angles. He was dapper, gentle and courteous. Both he and my mother peered at the menu and I just pointed to a salad, as if I were a mute out on a day trip. Rose took a while choosing a white-bean soup and Gómez flamboyantly ordered the house speciality, grilled octopus.

Rose rapidly informed him that she had allergies to fish and it made her lips swell. When he seemed not to understand, she leaned forward and poked my shoulder. ‘Tell him about my fish problem.’

I said nothing, as instructed by Gómez.

She turned her attention to him. ‘I cannot be in the vicinity of fish of any kind. The vapour from your octopus will waft towards me and I will come up in hives.’

Gómez nodded vaguely and reached for her hand. She was startled, but I think he might have been taking her pulse because I noticed he had a finger on her wrist. ‘Mrs Papastergiadis, you take fish-oil supplements and you take glucosamine. I have had these analysed in our laboratory. Your brand of glucosamine is made from the outer coatings of shellfish. The other supplement you take is derived from shark cartilage.’

‘Yes, but I am allergic to the other kind of fish.’

‘A shark is not a shellfish.’ His gold front teeth glinted in the sunshine. He had not reserved a table in the shade and the white stripe in his hair was damp from his sweat, which smelt of ginger.

When Rose reached for the wine list, he deftly grabbed it from her and moved it to the edge of the table. ‘No, Mrs Papastergiadis. I cannot work with an intoxicated patient. If you were in my consulting room, I would not offer you wine. I have merely changed the venue. This is a consultation but I see no reason why it should not take place under the sky.’

He waved his hand and asked the waitress for a bottle of a particular mineral water which he told Rose was bottled in Milan then exported to Singapore and then exported to Spain.

‘Ah, Singapore!’ He clapped his hands, presumably to signal that he required more attention. ‘I was very agitated at a conference in Singapore last month. I was advised to calm down by feeding the carp in the hotel fountain at breakfast and to look out at the South China Sea in the afternoon. Are those not beautiful words … “South China Sea”?’

Rose winced, as if the idea of anything beautiful was personally hurtful.

Gómez leaned back in his chair. ‘In the rooftop pool of this hotel, the British tourists drank beer. They were up to their bellies in the water and they were drinking beer but they did not look out once on the South China Sea.’

‘Drinking beer in a swimming pool sounds very nice to me,’ Rose said sharply, as if to remind him that she was not a great fan of drinking water with lunch.

His gold teeth were like flames. ‘You are sitting in the sunshine, Mrs Papastergiadis. The vitamin D is good for your bones. You must drink water. Now, I have a serious question. Tell me why you English say “wi-fi” and in Spain we say “wee-fee”?’

Rose sipped her water as if she had been asked to drink her own urine. ‘Obviously, it’s about a different emphasis on the vowel, Mr Gómez.’

A plastic boat was being inflated in the middle of the square by a thin boy of about twelve. His Mohican had been dyed green and he had his foot pressed against a plastic pump while he devoured an ice cream. Every now and again his five-year-old sister ran to the crumpled plastic to check the progress of its metamorphosis into something seaworthy.

The waiter brought out the salad and bean soup, each plate balanced on the curve of his arm. He leaned over Gómez’s shoulder to theatrically place a vast dish of purple-tentacled pulpo alla griglia on his paper mat.

‘Oh yes, gracias,’ Gómez said in his American Spanish accent. ‘I cannot get enough of these creatures!’ They place a vast dish of purple-tentacled pulpo on his paper mat. ‘The marinade is its crowning glory … the chillis, the lemon juice, the paprika! I give thanks to this ancient inhabitant of the deep. Gracias, polpo, for your intelligence, mystery and remarkable defence mechanisms.’

Rose now had two red welts on her left cheek.

‘Did you know, Mrs Papastergiadis, the octopus can change the colour of its skin to camouflage itself? As an American, I still find the polpo mysterious, a little monstruo, but the Spanish part of me finds it a very familiar monster.’

He picked up his knife and cut a blistered livid tentacle off the octopus. Instead of eating it, he threw it on to the ground, which was a blatant invitation to the cats in the village to join him for lunch. They started to circle his shoes under the table, coming from all directions to fight each other for a piece of the sea monster. He delicately sawed into the rubbery flesh of the polpo and pushed it into his mouth with relish. After a while he saw no reason not to drop three more tentacles into their paws.

My mother had become quiet and shockingly still. Not still like a tree or a leaf or a log. Still like a corpse.

‘We were talking about Wi-Fi,’ Gómez continued. ‘I will tell you the answer to my riddle. I say “wee-fee” to rhyme with “Francis of Assisi”.’

Three thin cats were now sitting on his shoes.

Rose must have been breathing after all, because she turned on him. The whites of her eyes were pink and swollen. ‘Where did you go to medical school?’

‘Johns Hopkins, Mrs Papastergiadis. In Baltimore.’

‘Think he jests,’ Rose whispered loudly.

I stabbed a tomato with my fork and did not respond. All the same, I was concerned about the way her left eye was closing up.

Gómez asked if she was enjoying her bean soup.

‘“Enjoying” is too strong a word. It is wet but tasteless.’

‘How is “enjoyment” too strong a word?’

‘It is not an accurate word to describe my attitude to the soup.’

‘I hope your appetite for enjoyment will get its strength back,’ he said.

Rose rested her pink eyes on my eyes. I removed my gaze like a traitor.

‘Mrs Papastergiadis,’ said Gómez. ‘You have some enemies to discuss with me?’

She leaned back in her chair and sighed.

What is a sigh? That would be another good subject for a field study. Is it just a long, deep, audible exhalation of breath? Rose’s sigh was intense but not subdued. It was frustrated but not yet sad. A sigh resets the respiratory system so it was possible that my mother had been holding her breath, which suggests she was more nervous than she appeared to be. A sigh is an emotional response to being set a difficult task.

I knew she had been thinking about her enemies because she had written a list. Perhaps I am on that list?

To my surprise, her voice was calm and her tone almost friendly.

‘My parents were my first adversaries, of course. They did not like foreigners so, naturally, I married a Greek man.’

When Gómez smiled his lips were black from the octopus ink.

He gestured to my mother to continue.

‘Both my parents breathed their last holding the kindly dark-skinned hands of the nurses who tended them. But it seems churlish to have a go at them now. I will, anyway. To my parents on the Other Side. Remind me to spell for you the names of the hospital staff who sat with you on the day you died.’

Gómez rested his knife and fork on the edge of the plate. ‘You are talking about your National Health Service. But I note that you have chosen some private care?’

‘That is true and I feel a little ashamed. But Sofia researched your clinic and encouraged me to give it a go. We were at the end of the road. Weren’t we, Fia?’

I gazed at the boat being pumped up in the square. It was blue with a yellow stripe across its side.

‘So, you married your Greek man?’

‘Yes, for eleven years we waited for a child. And when we at last conceived and our daughter was five, Christos was summoned by the voice of God to find a younger woman in Athens.’

‘I am myself of the Catholic faith.’

Gómez shovelled more extraterrestrial octopus into his mouth. ‘By the way, Mrs Papastergiadis, “Gómez” is pronounced “Gómeth”.’

‘I respect your beliefs, Mr Gómeth. When you get to heaven, may the pearly gates be draped in an octopus drying for your welcome dinner.’

He seemed up for everything she threw at him and had lost the chiding tone of their first meeting. Her eyes were no longer pink and the welts on her left cheek had subsided. ‘’Twas a long wait for my only.’

Gómez reached for the silk handkerchief arranged in a puff in his jacket pocket and passed it to her. ‘God and walking. Maybe they are your enemies?’

Rose dabbed her eyes. ‘It is not walking. It is walking out.’

I stared miserably at the cigarette butts on the floor. It was such a relief to be mute.

Gómez was gentle but persistent. ‘This business with names. It’s tricky.’ He pronounced ‘tricky’ to rhyme with ‘wee-fee’. ‘In fact, I have two surnames. Gómez is my father’s name, and my last name is my mother’s name, Lucas. I have made a shorter name for myself but my formal name is Gómez Lucas. Your daughter calls you Rose but your formal name is Mama. It is uncomfortable, is it not, this to-ing and fro-ing between “Rose” and “Mrs Papastergiadis” and “Mother”?’

‘It is very sentimental what you are saying,’ Rose said, holding on tight to his handkerchief.

My phone pinged.

You now have car

Come get key

Parked near bins

Inge

I whispered to Gómez, telling him that the hire car had arrived and I needed to leave the table. He ignored me because his attention was entirely focused on Rose. I suddenly felt jealous, as if I were missing some sort of attention that had never been bestowed on me in the first place.

The car park was a square of dry scrubland at the back of the beach where the village dumped its garbage. The rancid bins were overflowing with decaying sardines, chicken bones and vegetable peel. As I walked through a black cloud of flies, I paused to listen to the buzzing.

‘Zoffie! Quick, run. It’s hot standing here.’

Their wings were intricate and oily.

‘Zoffie!’

I started to run towards Ingrid Bauer.

And then I slowed down.

A fly had settled on my hand. I swatted it but I did not recite an ailment.

I made a wish.

To my surprise, the words I whispered were in Greek.

Ingrid was leaning against a red car. The doors were open and a man in his early thirties, presumably Matthew, was sitting in the driver’s seat. At first he appeared to be staring intensely at himself in the mirror, but as I got closer I saw that he was shaving with an electric razor.

Something was sparkling on Ingrid’s feet. She was wearing the silver Roman sandals that laced in a long criss-cross up her shins. She looked like she had been adorned with treasure. In ancient Rome, the higher the boot or sandal was laced up the leg, the higher the rank of the fighter.

In the dust and scrub of the car park I saw her as a gladiator fighting in the arena of the Colosseum. It would have been covered in sand to soak up the blood of her opponent.

‘This is my boyfriend, Matthew,’ she said. She gripped my sweaty hand in her cool hand and more or less pushed me into the car so that I fell on him and knocked the electric razor out of his hand. A sticker on the windscreen said ‘Europcar’.

‘Hey, Inge, go easy.’

Matthew’s hair was blond like hers and fell to just below his jaw, which was still covered in shaving foam. I had fallen into his lap and we had to disentangle ourselves while his razor whirred on the floor of the Europcar. When I climbed back out to the putrefying stench from the bins, the sting on my arm was throbbing because I had knocked it against the steering wheel.

‘Jeezus.’ Matthew glared at Ingrid. ‘What’s going on with you today?’ He picked up the razor and stepped out of the car. He switched it off and gave it to her to hold while he tucked his white T-shirt into the waistband of his beige chinos. He shook my hand. ‘Hiya, Sophie.’

I thanked him for getting the car.

‘Oh, it was no problem. A colleague I play golf with gave me a ride, which meant my lover girl could have a lie-in.’ He draped his arm around Ingrid’s shoulder. Even in flat sandals she was at least two heads taller than he was.

Half his jaw was still covered in foam. It looked like a tribal marking.

‘Hey, Sophie, isn’t the weather insane?’

Ingrid pushed his arm away and pointed to the Europcar. ‘Do you like it, Zoffie? It’s a Citroën Berlingo.’

‘Yes, but I’m not sure about the colour.’

Ingrid knew I did not drive, so I wasn’t sure why she had made such an effort to get the car on my behalf.

‘Do you want to come over to our house and taste my lemonade?’

‘I do, but I can’t. I’m in the middle of lunch with my mother’s doctor in the plaza.’

‘All right. See you on the beach maybe?’

Matthew suddenly became energetic and amiable. ‘I’ll lock up the Berlingo when I’ve finished my insane electro foam shave and bring the keys and paperwork over to your table. By the way, why didn’t they hire your mother an automatic? I mean, she can’t walk, right?’

Ingrid looked annoyed but I couldn’t work out why. When she playfully kicked his knee with the sole of her silver sandal, he grabbed her leg and then knelt down in the dust and kissed her tanned shins in the gaps between the criss-crossed straps.

When I got back to the plaza, my mother and Gómez seemed to be getting along. They were having an intense conversation and didn’t take any notice when I returned to the table. I had to admit that Rose looked excited. She was flushed and flirtatious. She had even slipped off her shoes and was sitting barefoot in the sun. The shoes with the laces I had unknotted for an hour had been abandoned. It occurred to me that she had slept alone for decades. When I was five six seven I had sometimes crept into bed with her when my father left, but I remember feeling uneasy. As if she were folding her growing child back into her womb in the way an aeroplane folds its wheels back into its body after take-off. Now she was saying something about needing the three pills she has been asked to abandon and how coming to Spain to heal her lame legs was like crying for the moon. By which I think she meant we were searching for a cure that was beyond our reach.

If I were to look at my mother just once in a certain way, I would turn her to stone. Not her, literally. I would turn the language of allergies, dizziness, heart palpitations and waiting for side effects to stone. I would kill this language stone dead.

The thin boy with the Mohican was still inflating his boat. His brother was showing him the oars and they were having a heated discussion while their sister prodded the blue plastic dinghy with her bare foot. They were all excited about an adventure in the sea with a new boat. That was the right sort of thing to be excited by. It made a change from waiting for withdrawal symptoms.

Gómez’s lips were black from the octopus he had eaten with such relish. ‘So you see, Rose, I have brought the sea to you with my polpo, and you have survived.’

When Rose smiled, she looked pretty and lively. ‘I have been robbed, Mr Gometh. I could have gone to Devon for less than one hundred pounds and sat by the sea with a packet of biscuits on my lap, patting one of many English dogs. You are more expensive than Devon. I am, frankly, disappointed.’

‘Disappointment is unpleasant,’ he agreed. ‘You have my sympathy.’

Rose waved her hand to the waiter and ordered a large glass of Rioja.

Gómez glanced at me and I could see he was annoyed about the wine. The table was unsteady and had been wobbling all through lunch. He took a prescription pad out of his pocket, ripped off five of the scripts and folded them into a square. ‘Sofia, kindly help me lift the table so I can wedge this under the leg.’

I stood up and gripped the edge nearest to me. It was surprisingly heavy for a table made from plastic. It was an effort to raise it half an inch off the ground while Gómez edged the paper into place.

Rose suddenly jumped. ‘The cat scratched me!’

I looked under the newly steady table. A cat was sitting on her left foot.

Gómez tugged at the lobe of his left ear. I began to sense that he was taking mental notes, just as I had been doing all my life. If she had no feeling in her legs, her mind had made some claws that were pricking her feet.

It was like he was Sherlock and I was Watson — or the other way round, given I had more experience. I could see the sense of him testing her apparent numbness by inviting the village cats to join us for lunch. When I looked under the table again, I saw a tiny prick of blood on her ankle. She had definitely felt that claw dig into her skin.

Now I understood why he gave her permission to drive the hire car.

Someone was hovering by our table. Matthew, who was now clean-shaven, was standing behind my mother. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Rose, as he leaned over her to pass me the car keys and a purple plastic wallet. ‘You’ll find all the paperwork in there.’

‘Who are you?’ Rose looked mystified.

‘I am the partner of Ingrid, a friend of your daughter. She told me you were a bit strapped for wheels so I picked up the hire car for you this morning. It drives pretty smoothly.’ He glanced at a cat chewing a polpo tentacle and grimaced. ‘These street cats have diseases, you know.’

Rose blew out her cheeks and nodded slyly in agreement. ‘How do you know this man, Sofia?’

I had been forbidden to speak so I was silent.

How did I know Matthew?

I’m on the beach, Matty. Can you hear the sea?

I’m on the beach, Matty. Can you hear the sea?

I need not have worried because Gómez took over.

He formally thanked Matthew for delivering the car to us and hoped that Nurse Sunshine had made sure the insurance was in order. Matthew confirmed that all was well and that it had been a pleasure to walk through the ‘insane’ gardens of the clinic with the colleague who had been kind enough to give him a lift. He had more to say but was interrupted by my mother who was tapping his arm.

‘Matthew, I need some help. Please escort me home. I need to rest.’

‘Ah,’ said Gómez. ‘You could be lying in bed, resting! But why? It is not as if you have been breaking cobblestones with a pickaxe from dawn to dusk.’

Rose tapped Matthew’s arm again. ‘I can barely walk, you see, and I have just been attacked by a cat. Your arm would be appreciated.’

‘Certainly.’ Matthew grinned. ‘But first I’m going to see off these scabby moggies.’

He stamped his brown two-tone brogues on the cement. With his pageboy haircut, he looked like a short European prince having a tantrum. All the cats ran off except one fearless tomcat, which Matthew started to chase in zigzags across the plaza. When he had seen it off he beckoned to my mother, who had already slipped on her shoes.

Matthew was standing four yards away from our table but he did not understand how long it would take Rose to walk to his arm. He glanced twice at the watch on his wrist while she hobbled in his direction. It was painful to witness the effort it took her to walk towards a man who did not particularly want her to arrive in the first place. At last she attached her arm to his arm.

‘Have a good rest, Mrs Papastergiadis.’ Gómez lifted his hand and waved two fingers in her direction.

When Rose turned round to take one last look at Gómez, she was appalled to see he was finishing off her soup.

After a while he congratulated me on my silence. ‘You did not speak on your mother’s behalf. That is an achievement.’

I was silent.

‘You will notice how in anger, or perhaps with a sense of grievance, she is walking.’

‘Yes, she does walk sometimes.’

‘My staff will be conducting various investigations to test her bone health, in particular the spine, hips and forearms. But I observed that on the way to the restaurant, when she tripped, she did not strain or sprain or fracture anything at all. Osteoporosis can be ruled out on this observation alone. It is the vitality she puts into not walking that concerns me. I’m not sure I can help her.’

I was about to beg him not to give up on her but I hadn’t got my voice back.

‘Let me ask you, Sofia Irina, where is your father?’

‘In Athens,’ I croaked.

‘Ah. Do you have a photograph of him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

My voice had been seen off like the cat.

Gómez filled a glass with the water that was bottled in Milan but had something to do with Singapore and passed it to me. I took a sip and cleared my throat.

‘My father has married his girlfriend. They have had a baby girl.’

‘So you have a sister in Athens you have never met?’

I told him I have not seen my father for eleven years.

He seemed keen to reassure me that should I wish to visit my father, a rota of staff would be assigned to care for Rose every day.

‘If you don’t mind me saying, Sofia Irina, you are a little weak for a young healthy woman. Sometimes you limp, as if you have picked up on your mother’s emotional weather. You could do with more physical strength. This is not a substantial table to lift, yet for you it was an effort. I do not believe you need to do more exercise. It is a matter of having purpose, less apathy. Why not steal a fish from the market to make you bolder? It need not be the biggest fish, but it must not be the smallest either.’

‘Why do I need to be bolder?’

‘That is for you to answer.’ His tone was reassuring, calm and serious, considering he was probably mad. ‘Now, there is something else I must talk to you about.’ Gómez seemed genuinely upset.

He told me that someone had graffitied a wall of his clinic with blue paint. It had happened this morning. The word painted on the wall was ‘QUACK’. Meaning that he was a charlatan, a con man, not a reputable doctor. He thought it might have involved the friend of mine who came to collect the car. This man Matthew. Nurse Sunshine had given him the documents and keys and not long after he had left they had found the right side of the marble dome defaced with this word.

‘Why would he do that?’

Gómez looked for the handkerchief in his jacket pocket and discovered it was not there. He wiped his lips on the back of his hand and then wiped his hand with a napkin. ‘I am aware he plays golf with an executive for a pharmaceutical company which has been bothering me for some years. They have offered to fund research at my clinic. In return, they would be pleased if I were to buy their medication and prescribe it to my patients.’

Gómez was clearly distressed. He shut his agitated, bright eyes and rested his hands on his knees. ‘My staff will clean the paint off the marble exterior, but I can only think that someone wants to discredit my practice.’

The Mohican boy and his little sister were now dragging the inflated blue boat across the square and down to the beach. Their brother followed them holding the oars.

Was Gómez a quack? Rose had already voiced this thought.

I no longer care about the twenty-five thousand euro we struggled to pay him. He can have my house. If he slaughters a deer and divines a walking cure from its entrails I would be grateful. My mother thinks her body is prey to malevolent forces, so I am not paying him to be complicit with her command on reality.

That evening when I was wandering around the village, I picked two sprigs of jasmine growing on a bush outside the house built halfway up the hill. A blue rowing boat was moored in the yard with the name ‘Angelita’ painted on its side. I crushed the fragile white petals in my fingers. The scent was like oblivion, a trance. The arch of desert jasmine was a coma zone. I shut my eyes and when I opened them again, Matthew and Ingrid were walking up the hill towards the vintage shop. Ingrid ran towards me and kissed my cheek.

‘We’re here to collect my sewing from the shop,’ she said.

She was wearing an orange dress with feathers sewn around the neckline and matching peep-toe shoes.

Matthew caught up with her. ‘Inge sewed her dress. I don’t think she gets paid enough. I’m going to negotiate a raise for her.’ He tucked his hair behind his ears and laughed when she punched him in the arm. ‘You wouldn’t want to be cursed by Inge. She’s insane when she’s angry. In Berlin she goes three times a week to her kick-boxing class, so don’t mess with her.’

He walked over to the woman who owned the vintage shop, lit her cigarette and turned his back on us.

Ingrid reached out and touched my hair. ‘You have a knot. I am embroidering two dresses with a stitch called a French knot. I have to wind the thread around the needle twice. When I’ve finished, I’m going to sew something for you.’

The feathers trembled against her neck as I pressed the jasmine under her nose.

A motorbike with two teenage boys perched on the seat roared past us.

‘I think you picked those flowers for me, Zoffie.’

The smell of petrol and jasmine made me feel faint.

‘Yes, I picked these flowers for you.’

I stood behind her and slid the petals into the band of her plait. Her neck was soft and warm.

When she turned round to face me, the pupils in her eyes were big and black as the sea glittering in the distance.