Hot Milk (17 page)

‘No, Papa,’ I said. ‘No, do not come into my room without knocking first.’

‘Are you hurt, Sofia?’

I lay in silence among the broken furniture and continued to cycle my legs.

The table was set with three of their not-best plates and a jug of water. My father recited a prayer that started with ‘The poor shall eat and shall be filled’ and then he chanted the rest of the prayer in Greek. After that, he sat in silence while Alexandra ladled pasta on to his plate. Alexandra told me it was an Italian regional dish with anchovies and raisins. She had made it herself because she liked the sweet and salty tastes in one dish. My father did not say a single word after he said the prayer, so she had to speak for him. She asked me where I was staying in Spain and if I’d seen a bullfight and if I liked Spanish food and she enquired about the weather, but no one mentioned the turmoil in Athens or asked about my mother. If Rose is the elephant in the room, I can see that Donald Duck is not going to chase her out. He might take a ride on her back or flick a stone at her head with his catapult, but she is too massive a beast for him to see off with his orange, webbed feet.

My father suddenly spoke. ‘I unveiled my shame to our Lord, and he has shown himself to me in all his mercy.’ He was looking at his plate but I think he was speaking to me.

Things got worse. It turns out that Alexandra is a minor mainstream economist. This was useful, because I have come to Athens to call in a debt my father owes me for never being around. Perhaps in his own mind he has absolved himself by putting all his late paternal energy into my sister, Evangeline.

I think he understands that I am his confused and shabby creditor. I should smarten up, stiffen my jaw, put on a jacket and skirt and walk him into an airless room with strobe lighting and a translator to broker a deal, but my body is still thrumming with kisses and caresses in the hot desert nights. It would be easier for him to have me crash out of his life altogether, yet for some reason he wants me to sign off Alexandra. She is his most valuable collateral. He is proud of her and I can see why. She is attentive to her child and to her husband. This makes him gentle and calm.

But his debts go back a long way. As a result of his first default, my mother has a mortgage on my life.

Here I am in the birthplace of Medusa, who left the scars of her venom and rage on my body. I am sitting on a giant, soft, blue sofa next to Alexandra, who is adjusting her glinting braces. The windows are all closed and the air conditioner is on. Her daughter is sleeping on her breast, the cleaner is mopping the floors, and she is sucking a yellow jellied candy sprinkled with sugar.

Is the sting of being a creditor the sort of power that makes me feel happy? Are creditors happier than debtors?

Actually, I’m not sure what the rules are any more and what I want to achieve. It’s a total unknown.

What is money?

Money is a medium of exchange. Jade, oxen, rice, eggs, beads, nails, pigs and amber have all been used for making payments and recording debts and credits. And so have children. I have been traded off for Alexandra and Evangeline, but I am supposed to pretend not to notice.

Pretending not to notice and pretending to forget are my special skills. If I were to pluck out my eyes, it would please my father, but memory is like a bar code. I am the human scanner.

Alexandra has sugar stuck to her lips. ‘Sofia, I can tell you are anti-austerity. I am a conservative, so I prefer to take the medicine of reforms. We cannot come off our medication if we want to stay in the eurozone. Your papa has taken most of his money out of the bank and put it in a British bank. We don’t know what is going to happen.’

It sounds like she’s about to give me a lecture, so I stop her to check out her credentials. I blatantly ask her about her qualifications.

It turns out that she went to school in Rome and to university in Athens. Before she met my father she was research assistant to the former chief economist at somewhere important and then research assistant to the director of economic policy at the World Bank and then research assistant to the vice-president of somewhere less important but still massive.

Alexandra invites me to take one of the jellied candies she keeps in a glass bowl on the table. ‘If we do not meet our obligations and miss our payments, our creditors will want the clothes off our backs.’ She talked of the economic crisis as a serious illness that is contagious and contaminating. Debt is an epidemic raging through Europe, an outbreak that is infectious and needs a vaccine. It had been her job to monitor the behaviour and movements of this infection.

It is agony listening to her while I suck a jellied candy.

The sun is shining outside.

Sunshine is sexy.

It turns out that before she had Evangeline she was working in a bank in Brussels. The offices closed on Friday so she could fly home to my ‘papa’.

This time she unwraps a green jelly candy and pops it into her mouth. ‘Sofia, we all have to wake up from this nightmare and take our pills.’

I thought about Gómez deleting the pills on my mother’s menu of medication, but I did not discuss this with my new stepmother.

Alexandra peers anxiously at me with her smaller brown eye. ‘For some years, it was my job to make sure that finance ministers convinced the markets that everything was under control and to insist that the euro would survive.’ She is rubbing my new baby sister’s back. Now and again, she sort of sticks out her tongue, which is green from the green jelly. I don’t know why she does that. Perhaps it’s something to do with her braces.

She’s four years older than I am and she’s making sure the euro survives.

Alexandra has two spots on her chin. Perhaps my father is lying about her age and Evangeline was the result of a teenage pregnancy. I’m starting to get the impression Alexandra hasn’t spoken to anyone apart from Christos Papastergiadis for about a year.

‘Don’t think that a disorderly exit from the eurozone will not affect America, Sofia.’

Actually, I am thinking about Ingrid, and the night she put honey on my cracked lips and how I felt as if I had been embalmed. I am thinking about lying on the beach with Juan after midnight and how when I bought six bottles of
agua sin gas
at the village Spar I had yearned to buy a particular summer glossy magazine with its free gift of Jackie Kennedy sunglasses which was on sale by the tills. The bug-eyed shades attached to the magazine were an approximate copy, it has to be said, the white frames inlaid with her signature Greek-key detail, but all the same I wanted to tear them out of their wrapping and wear them to stroll among the cacti in my very own Camelot of
Lust with Ingrid and Juan at my side. The word Beloved embroidered into the silk of my sun-top has changed my life more than the word euro. Beloved is like a spotlight in the centre of a stage. I have peered at this circle of light from behind the curtains, but it’s never occurred to me that I could be a major player.

I am not sure how much desire I am entitled to possess.

Alexandra’s left eye is definitely smaller than her right eye.

‘I was talking about the USA, Sofia.’

I have always wanted to visit America. Dan from Denver is my closest friend at the Coffee House. I liked to feel his big energy close to me while I ground the coffee beans and labelled the cakes. I even missed doing star jumps with him in between making the flat whites and listening to him talk about his lack of health insurance all over again. Last time we did the jumps he was wondering if he should work in Saudi Arabia to make fast bucks, but he said he’d have to take Prozac to come to terms with the fact that women couldn’t drive there. When I thought about him saying that, it occurred to me for the first time that he might have been flirting with me.

And I am panging for artisan coffee.

The Coffee House storeroom seems quite spacious compared to the spare bedroom here in Athens. Now that Dan is sleeping in my ink-stained bed, did he gaze every morning at the wall with the Margaret Mead quote I had written with the marker pen?

It might be that the Coffee House is a field study that has been under my nose all along.

Alexandra is still talking at length about how stock markets would react to fears that Europe will unravel. After a while, she asks if my mother is missing me.

‘I hope not.’

She looks sad when I say that.

‘Is your mother missing you, Alexandra?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Do you have your own office in the bank in Brussels?’

‘Yes, and there are three subsidized canteens, and I get a good deal for maternity leave.’

‘Can you go on strike?’

‘I would have to give notice in writing. Are you anti-capitalist?’

I know she needs her husband’s first daughter to be anti-everything, so I do not bother to answer. Alexandra has climbed aboard the big boat with her husband and child and I am on a small dinghy heading in a different direction.

She tells me that she gets a 5 per cent household allowance because she is head of her household.

She is head of her household. I don’t even have a home that is not my mother’s home.

‘Does your mama still love your papa?’

‘My father only does things that are to his advantage,’ I reply.

She stares at me as if I am crazy. And then she laughs. ‘Why would he do things that are not to his advantage?’

A squirrel has jumped from the trees overhanging the balcony and is peering in through the locked window. What does it see? Three generations of my family, I suppose.

Why would my father do anything that was not to his advantage? She had said it so lightly, but her question is like a wind blowing through the calm blue folds of their homely sofa. A wind that has even brought the squirrel from the tree to the window. Do I do things that are not to my advantage? I lean against the soft, blue cotton with my hands behind my head, and stretch out my legs. I am wearing shorts and the yellow silk sun-top Ingrid gave me. Alexandra is trying to read the blue word embroidered above my left breast. She is squinting with her smaller eye and I can see her lips moving as she silently spells out Beloved. She is frowning, as if she can’t work out what it means but is too shy to ask me to translate.

She claps her hands and the squirrel runs off.

Alexandra has a career, a rich, devoted husband and a child. She has presumably signed her name on the contract for half a share in a
valuable apartment in an affluent neighbourhood and her share of shares in her husband’s shipping business. She has faith in a god. Where does that leave me? I am living a vague, temporary life in the equivalent of a shed on the fringe of the village. What has stopped me from building a two-storey house in the centre of the village?

Neither a god nor my father is the major plot in my own life. I am anti the major plots.

As soon as I say that to myself, I am not so sure. My father is definitely mapped in the cosmology of my screen saver. He is shattered, but functioning. I do not have a plan B to replace my father. And then I see my mother’s blue eyes, small and fierce. They shine out at me in the wreck of her body. They are the brightest stars in the shattered galaxy. She has done things that were not to her advantage and I am chained to her sacrifice, mortified by it. What if she had said,
Sofia, I am starting all over again. You are five now so I am off to Hong Kong, farewell, goodbye. I look forward to tasting the dishes from the hawker stalls in the market. I will start with fish-ball soup made from eels and when we next meet I will enchant you with my traveller’s tales. You will be living with your grandmother in Yorkshire while I take advantage of the good hospitals, affordable cost of living and the demand for my skills. Don’t forget to button your coat in the winter months and to look out for snowdrops on the Wolds in spring.

Even at five I was older than the stars made in China on my screen saver.

Why would your father do things that are not to his advantage?

Alexandra is still waiting for an answer. My baby sister is now suckling at her breast. Alexandra winces and taps her daughter’s nose while she removes her nipple from her lips. She says she is sucking in the wrong way and that her nipple has split. When Evangeline cries at this momentary separation, Alexandra lets her cry, taking time to organize herself into a more comfortable position. She is not too full of the milk of human kindness to do things that are to her disadvantage. And nor is my father. They are a perfect match and they have faith in a god who makes their world more certain than my own.

If only I believed in something like a god. I remember reading about a Christian mystic in the Middle Ages called Julian of Norwich. Julian was a woman who wrote about the motherhood of God – she believed that God was truly a mother and a father. It was an interesting belief, but I can barely cope with my own mother and father.

‘Why would my father do anything that was not to his advantage?’

This time, I repeat her question out loud. It is a grey area and I am lost in the grey, nodding and shaking my head at the same time. My head is doing all these movements, tipping my chin down and then up again to indicate yes and then moving my head to the left and the right to indicate no. She smiles, and it occurs to me that the steel across her teeth does not stop there, it probably runs through her whole body. She is literally a woman of steel, but then she lowers her voice and moves closer to me on her soft, blue sofa.

‘It is not easy to be with an older man. There is a forty-year gap between us, you know.’

I do know. It is hard to believe. All the same, does she think I am her best friend?

I reach for a jellied candy and unwrap it noisily to drown out her confidences.

‘Sixty-nine is early old age, really.’ She sticks out her tongue again and adjusts her brace. ‘He needs to pee all the time and he’s a little deaf now, and he’s tired all the time. His memory is a big problem. At the airport, when we came to fetch you, he forgot where he parked the car. I would be grateful if you could take the X95 back to the airport when you leave. When we walk together he cannot keep up with me. He needs a new hip. But he has now got four new teeth. When he goes to bed he takes out his lower plate on the ground floor and puts it in a jar of solution.’