Hot Milk

Boldness

The local fish market turned out to be near the Romanian pizzeria in the basement of a block of apartments. Not many tourists knew it was there, but when I walked in there was already a crowd of women from the village buying the day’s catch.

Gómez had suggested I steal a fish to achieve more courage and purpose. I regarded this task as an anthropological experiment, though it crossed a border into something approaching magic, or perhaps magical thinking. When I googled how to gut a fish, there were over 9 million results.

The first fish to snare my attention from the point of view of a thief was a monkfish with a monster face, mouth gaping open to reveal its two rows of sharp little teeth. I lightly poked my finger into its mouth and discovered a world that was totally unknown to me, like Columbus discovering the Bahamas. The cashier, a fierce woman in a yellow rubber apron, shouted in Spanish not to touch the fish. Already I had made myself visible, when the point of a thief is to slip unseen into the night and not into the mouth of a fish. I had slung a basket bag with leather straps over my shoulder and it chafed the stings, which were now raised welts, a sprawling, crazy web of tattoos inked in venom. The cashier, who was now weighing three mackerel on an old-fashioned brass scale, had her eye on everyone, including the criminal in the room. This catch was her livelihood, she would pay her sea hunters from the sale of their hard-won bounty, but I couldn’t think about that now.

I walked towards the silver sardines. I could easily steal one but that would be a token, not worth the risk. Women were frowning and shaking their heads at the scales, as if they couldn’t believe what it told them. Sometimes they included me in this conversation, throwing up their hands in mock-despair at the heaviness of fish which looked deceptively delicate.

I considered the whiskery langoustines, pale grey with protruding, black, beady eyes. They were the professors of the ocean but they did not make me feel bolder. A huge tuna lay on a bed of ice. What if I slipped it into my basket? It wouldn’t fit. I would have to pick it up with both hands, clasp it to my chest and run with my eyes shut into the village and see what happened next. It was the most precious jewel in the market, the emerald of the sea. My hand reached towards it, but I couldn’t follow it through. A tuna was too ambitious, not so much bold as reckless.

Ingmar’s Swedish girlfriend, who owned one of the more expensive restaurants on the beach, walked in and shouted her greetings to the crowd. Someone complimented her on her turquoise suede shoes, which had a row of gold bells sewn across the toes. She was young and wealthy so everyone knew she was going to barter a good deal for her restaurant. She wore a pink crocheted dress and her lips were lined with pink pencil so they were just an outline. I don’t know why someone would want an outline for lips. She commanded the cashier to scoop up the three lobsters and the monkfish and heave the tuna on to the scales. Her voice was too loud. Perhaps she couldn’t hear herself, but we could hear her. The bells on her shoes jangled every time she changed the position of her feet. She was making her offer for the tuna, everyone was listening, and then she delivered her threat. As she barely made a profit, it stood to reason that if the price wasn’t friendly she would buy all her fish in Almería.

Obviously, raising the voice compels attention and incites fear, but was she bold? Did I want to be bold like her? What shade of bold was I after?

I moved away from her elbows to get a better look at the pile of slimy octopus, the polpo that Gómez had eaten with such relish. It would be relaxing to steal because it was shapeless and soft. I slipped my basket under the marble slab and mentally prepared myself to slide the polpo in with my hand. I paused. It did not make me feel bold so much as uneasy. If it was alive, it would change its identity and imitate its predator. It might even mimic the colour and texture of my human skin, which can also change colour, in excitement, in humiliation or fear. Its skin could express mood, it could blush like I always blush when I am asked to spell my name. I felt ashamed to look into its clever, dead, strange eyes with the pupils dilated, so I looked away and that’s when I saw my fish. It was looking straight at me and its eyes were furious. It was a plump dorado in a rage. I knew it was destined to be mine.

Ingmar’s girlfriend was helpful to me because everyone’s attention was on her. She did not inspire affection in her community. She was audacious but she was not bold.

To steal the dorado, I had to conquer my fear of being found out and shamed. I relaxed all my muscles until I was as still as a leaf — perhaps as still as a tea leaf, which is cockney rhyming slang for ‘thief’. Very slowly, I moved closer to the dorado, and with my left hand I touched the price tag on the langoustines to distract the cashier from my right hand, which was sliding the grumpy dorado into my basket.

As far as I could make out, this was the model that most politicians had adopted to run their democracies and dictatorships. If the reality of the right hand is being messed up with the left hand, it would be true to say that reality is not a stable commodity. Someone banged my back, quite close to my stings, but I took no notice and walked straight out of the door. I noted that I did not loiter and that I had a new sense of purpose and intention. My sense of purpose was quite loud. It had closed all the portals to my senses, nostrils, eyes, mouth, ears. I had become single-minded, blinkered to everything else going on. A sense of purpose requires the subject to lose some things and gain others, but I wasn’t sure it was worth it.

Standing in the kitchen in the beach apartment, I grasped the dorado by the tail and stared back at it. Yes, it was still furious. Its mood had not changed. It was heavy. Plump and shiny and sleek. It was a big fish. I took off my shoes and let my toes spread on the floor. The diving-school dog howled miserably while I felt all of gravity pulling me down. I held the fish by its head and scraped at the scales with a blunt knife. Pablo’s dog was going berserk, he did not leave a second of silence between one bark and the next. I placed the fish on its side, inserted the knife into its tail and slid it all the way to the head. The Greek side of my family, from Thessaloniki, did not need Google to tell them how to gut a fish. I opened its belly and cut away at the guts, which were white and slimy. The ancient Greek side of my family would have caught plaice in the shallows of the Aegean. The Yorkshire side of my family bought fish from the trawlermen at the docks, men who had survived the arctic seas and were on deck for ten hours in the raw winds.

There was a lot of blood in this fish. My hands were dripping with it. If someone had banged on the door to claim their stolen goods, I would literally have been caught red-handed.

The miserable Alsatian had found new howling energy. He was unstable and he was tipping me into complete lunacy. I threw down the knife and ran barefoot across the sand to the entrance of the diving school, pushing open the door with my blistered shoulder.

PABLO PABLO PABLO. Where is he?

Pablo was bent over his computer with a glass of vermouth in his hand. A heavy, middle-aged man with thick, greasy black hair parted at the side, he looked up at me with his big, sleepy brown eyes, and he flinched.

‘Untie your dog, Pablo.’

A mirror was hanging on the wall behind him. My cheeks were marked with streaks of fish blood and some of the entrails were caught in my hair, which had become a coarse tangle of knotted curls from swimming every day. I looked like some sort of sea monster rising from the shells and starfish that decorated the mirror’s frame. I was terrifying myself all over again and I was terrifying Pablo.

He moved his chair, as if preparing to run, and then he must have changed his mind because he sat down again and lifted his hand up to his eyes. He wore a gold ring on his little finger. His flesh seemed to be growing over the band of gold.

‘If you do not leave my property,’ he said, ‘I will call the police.’

I strained to hear the rest because the dog had accelerated his bid for freedom, but it was something like ‘The cop in this village is my brother and the cop in the next village is my cousin and the cop in Carboneras is my best friend.’

I grabbed his hand, with the gold embedded in it, and pressed my forehead to his forehead while his right hand groped for something under his desk. Perhaps it was a panic button wired to his extended family of cops. He asked me to get out of his way so he could walk up the stairs to the roof terrace.

I took a step backwards. He was a big man. To steady myself, I pressed my hand against the newly painted white wall while I waited for him to move. It left a bloody handprint, and so I made another. And then another. The wall of the diving school was starting to look like a cave painting.

Pablo shouted and cursed me in Spanish and made his way up the stairs. He was holding a bone, a yellow, stinking bone. That is what he had been reaching for under his desk.

Pablo was on the roof terrace with his bone and his dog. He was kicking a chair. The dog had stopped barking and started to snarl while Pablo made clicking sounds, which seemed to have a calming effect.

I heard a pot plant fall and shatter.

It was cool inside the diving-school reception. The phone was ringing on Pablo’s desk, next to a burning coil of citronella and his glass of vermouth. An answer-machine picked up the call: ‘We speak German, Dutch, English and Spanish and are able to teach beginners up to master diver.’

I lifted the glass to my cracked lips and calmly, slowly, took a tiny sip. In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and the spider crabs moving between weeds.