Hot Milk

A Case History

Rose stands naked under the shower. Her breasts droop, her belly folds and folds again, her skin is pale and smooth, her silver-blond hair is wet, her eyes are bright, she loves the warm water falling on her body. Her body. What is her body supposed to want and who is it supposed to please and is it ugly or is it something else? She is waiting for withdrawal symptoms from the lack of the three pills that have been deleted from her list of medication. So far they have not arrived. Yet she continues to wait for them like a lover, nervous and excited. Will she be disappointed if they don’t turn up?

Today, Julieta Gómez is going to take a case history of Rose’s body and I have been asked to be present. Where does a case history start?

‘It starts with family,’ Julieta Gómez says. ‘It is a history.’ She has swapped her dove-grey heels for trainers. Her thin chiffon blouse is tucked into tailored trousers which press tight against her hips. She walks Rose to a chair in the physiotherapy room and sits opposite her. ‘Are you ready to make a start?’

Rose nods while Julieta fiddles with a small sleek black box lying between them on the desk. She had reassured my mother that this device was used for all the clinic audio archiving and that it was confidential. So now the volume levels were set. Apparently they would both soon forget that their conversation was being recorded.

Julieta spoke first to give some facts. She noted the date, the time, my mother’s name, age, weight and height.

I sit uneasily in the corner of the physiotherapy room with my laptop on my knees, floating out of time in the most peculiar way. It seems wrong, even unethical, to have asked me to be there but I had agreed to Gómez’s request on the understanding that apart from Tuesdays I would be free for the rest of the treatment. I have to pay for my freedom by listening to my mother’s words.

She is speaking.

Her father had a temper problem. Which can be confused with having high levels of energy. Which can be confused with being manic. He needed no more than two hours of sleep a night. Her mother suffered from her father. Which can be confused with depression. She needed no less than twenty-three hours of sleep. I know this history but I don’t want to be connected to it. I put on my headphones and gaze at YouTube on my shattered screen with all my life in it. Some of that life is the thesis for my abandoned doctorate that is lurking under the digital constellations made in a factory on the outskirts of Shanghai.

Now and again I lift off the headphones.

My mother is giving a history of her present illness. Where does that history start? It moves around in time and merges into past history, childhood illness and all the rest of it. This is not chronological time. Julieta will have to later transcribe Rose’s words and author her case history. I have been trained to do something similar, except I am not a physiotherapist, I am an ethnographer. Julieta will at some stage have to describe the complaint that brought the patient to her clinic. Symptoms and their presentation. It is not one complaint. It is not even six. I overheard twenty complaints but there were more. The past the present and the future are simultaneously present in all these complaints.

Rose’s lips are moving and Julieta is listening but I’m not listening. I have been asked to be present but I am not present. I’m watching a Bowie concert from 1972 on YouTube and it is buffering while he sings. His hair is red like a blood orange, his glitter shirt is sparkling darkly to trigger associations of space travel and his platform shoes are stacked high to lift him off Earth. Bowie’s painted eyelids are silver spaceships. Girls are screaming and crying and stretching out their hands to touch the Space Oddity strutting the stage. He is a freak, like the medusa. The girls are feral and fertile and freaked out.

We are so pinned down on Earth.

If I had been there, I would have been the loudest screamer.

I am still the loudest screamer.

I want to get away from the kinship structures that are supposed to hold me together. To mess up the story I have been told about myself. To hold the story upside down by its tail.

Rose is coughing. A pattern is emerging where she always coughs when she is about to reveal something awkward and intimate. As if the cough is a plunger unblocking memory. She is giving a case history. Sometimes I can hear a few sentences. I am becoming interested in Julieta Gómez’s interviewing style. Anthropologists might describe it as ‘in-depth interviewing’. My mother would be called ‘the informant’. I notice her questions are minimal but my mother’s emotions are running high. I wish I was somewhere else. Julieta is relaxed but alert, she never seems to pry or push and she is not in a rush to fill in the silences. I have heard tapes where ethnographers have probed too deeply into the informants’ stories and made them silent, but my mother’s lips are mostly moving. ‘Physiotherapy’ does not seem an accurate description of the kind of conversation that is taking place. Perhaps Rose’s memories are in her bones. Is that why bones have been used as divination tools from the beginning of human history?

My mother has a lot of contempt for her body. ‘They should just cut off my toes,’ she says.

Julieta has finished the first case history and is helping her to stand up. ‘Move your left foot.’

‘I can’t. I can’t move my left foot.’

‘You need to do some weight-bearing exercise for strengthening and endurance.’

‘My whole life has been about endurance, Nurse Sunshine. Remember that my first enemy and adversary is endurance.’

‘How do you spell that in English?’

Rose tells her.

Julieta’s hands are now under Rose’s chin as she helps align her head.

Rose is looking for her wheelchair, which seems to have disappeared from the room.

‘Everything hurts. I might as well do away with these useless feet. It would be a relief.’

Julieta looked at me. Her eyelashes were mascaraed into spikes. ‘I think Rose does not stand up straight because she is tall.’

‘No, I hate these feet,’ my mother shouted at her.

Julieta led her back to the wheelchair which had now materialized, carried in by a porter who was trying to read the newspaper he had balanced on the armrest. On the front page was a photograph of Alexis Tsipras, the Prime Minister of Greece. I noticed he had a cold sore on his bottom lip.

‘Cut off my feet, that’s what I want,’ my mother told Julieta.

In reply, Julieta gave the wheelchair a deft kick with her left trainer. ‘What is your point, Rose?’

My mother started to make small circles with her shoulders, moving them forwards then backwards as if limbering up for a wrestling match. ‘There is no point.’

Julieta looked pale and exhausted. She walked over to me and gave me what looked like a business card. ‘Come and see me in my studio, if you like. I live in Carboneras.’

I was still puzzling over this when Gómez entered the room, followed by his white cat, Jodo. The stripe in his hair matched Jodo’s white fur. The cat was plump and serene, purring loudly at her master’s feet.

‘How is your physiotherapy, Mrs Papastergiadis?’

‘Call me Rose.’

‘Ah yes, it is good to let these formalities go.’

‘If you forget things, Mr Gómez, write them down on the back of your hand.’

‘I will,’ he said.

Julieta told her father she had taken the first case history and now she was tired and would like twenty minutes to have a coffee and a pastry. Gómez lifted his hand and smoothed down his vivid white streak. ‘There is no such thing as tired so early in the day, Nurse Sunshine. The young do not rest. The young must be up all night with the lighthouse keepers. The young must argue till dawn.’

He asked her to repeat to him the relevant sections of the Hippocratic oath. She walked to the recording device and turned it off. ‘I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgement and never do any harm to anyone,’ she said gloomily.

‘Very good. If the young are tired, they must improve their lifestyle.’

It seemed as if he was chastising her in some way. Had he somehow seen the kick his daughter had lashed out at the wheelchair?

Gómez’s attention was entirely focused on my mother. He was taking her pulse but from a distance it looked quite intimate, as if they were holding hands. His voice was gentle, even flirtatious. ‘I note you are not using the car yet, Rose.’

‘No. I will need to practise before I drive Sofia on these mountain roads.’

His fingers pressed lightly on her wrist. They were still, but moving. Like a leaf. Like a stone in a stream.

‘You see, Sofia Irina, Mrs Papastergiadis is concerned for your safety.’

‘My daughter is wasting her life,’ Rose replied. ‘Sofia is plump and idle and she is living off her mother at quite an advanced age.’

It is true that I have shape-shifted from thin to various other sizes all my life. My mother’s words are my mirror. My laptop is my veil of shame. I hide in it all the time.

I tucked it under my arm and walked out of the physiotherapy room. Jodo followed me for a while. Her paws were soft and soundless, and then she disappeared. I must have taken a wrong turning because I was lost in a labyrinth of milky marble corridors. I began to feel smothered by the veined walls, as if they were closing in on me. The echo of my heels hitting the marble floor reminded me of that first visit to the clinic, when I heard the amplified echo of Julieta’s heels as she ran away from her father. Now I was running away from my mother. It was a relief to find the glass exit, to at last breathe in the mountain air and stand among the succulents and mimosa trees.

In the distance below the mountain I could see the ocean and a yellow flag planted in the coarse sand on the beach. It was like a haunting, that flag. Where would the Medusa’s case history begin and end? Was she shocked, devastated, appalled to discover she was no longer admired for her beauty? Did she feel de-feminized? Would she walk through the door labelled ‘Ladies’ or the door labelled ‘Gentlemen’? ‘Hommes’ or ‘Femmes’, ‘Caballeros’ or ‘Señoras’? I began to wonder if she had more power in her life as a monster. Where had I got to in my own life by trying to please everyone all the time? Right here. Wringing my hands.

A blast of fine sand lashed my cheeks. It was as if the sky had opened and it was raining sand. I saw a flash of white fur as Jodo ran for cover under the silver leaves of a succulent that was shaped like an umbrella. A male cleaner in overalls and a protective eye shield was hosing down the wall near the exit to the clinic. After a while I realized that it was not water pouring through his hose. He was sandblasting the wall. As I walked closer I saw that three words had been spray-painted in blue on the walls. They were fading now, so the cleaner had obviously tried more than once to remove them. Was this the graffiti that Gómez had referred to a few days earlier? But it did not say ‘QUACK’. I could clearly see the shape of the letters, despite the effort that had gone into erasing the paint. Gómez had obviously wanted to demonstrate that he knew my mother thought he was a quack. As if the thought had already committed the crime and defaced the walls of his clinic. The blue grafitti was not one single word.

It was three words.

SUNSHINE IS SEXY

She wears a sombrero some days, drifting around. No one to row her in a boat to the smaller bays, no one to hear her say the water’s so clear here oh wow I’m going to dive for that sea star. It has come to my attention that she has two credit cards to help her get through the month. Maybe I should offer to lend her some money?