Hot Milk (21 page)

It makes me feel less angry, as if somehow I have transferred the toxin of my rage into her foot.

Julieta looks at me, and then she laughs. ‘Your boundaries are made from sand, Sofia.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know that.’

A seagull drifts with us in the waves.

I return to the rocks and begin to pack up my towel. I do not want Ingrid to leave the beach without me. If anything, I find her more compelling now. Memory is my subject. Ingrid was repeating a traumatic memory from the past and playing it out with me because she knows my boundaries are made of sand.

‘Zoffie, you are unruly and chaotic, you are in debt and your beach house is untidy. Now you have thrown my phone into the sea. I don’t know what to do. I’m going to lose work.’

‘Your clients will have to speak to the fish.’

I slip off the drenched satin dress and start to dry my thighs. The small boy is still eating his giant tomato. He gazes at me for a few seconds and then he runs away.

‘You have frightened him, Zoffie, because your face is blue. Your eye shadow is dripping down your cheeks and you look like a sea monster.’ She has found the salami and is tearing off the rind. ‘I don’t want to stay here with the horseflies and medusas.’ She stuffs the meat into her mouth and glances up at the caves. ‘And, anyway, I don’t like your friends.’

Julieta waves at me and I wave back.

Ingrid peers at the raised welts on her stung foot. Her silver sandals are floating in the shallow end of the bay but she is too preoccupied with her stings to notice. ‘If you come to my house, you can plant the olive trees while I work and then we can go for a walk when it’s cooler.’

It is an invitation. It sounds like the sort of plans that lovers make together.

Ingrid squats down on the rock and pees on her stung foot.

‘That’s a myth,’ I said.

‘What is a myth?’

That is a big question. It would be true to say that I was probably obsessed with it.

The first thing Ingrid did when we arrived at her summer house was look for her reels of thread and then she tipped the basket of vintage-shop clothes on to the floor. The needle between her fingers was like a weapon, she sewed as if she were attacking the cloth.

‘You are so indolent, Zoffie! You are here to plant the olive trees. First you have to dig the planting holes.’

I don’t know how to plant a tree. There are so many things I don’t know how to do, but I do know how to keep a secret. Matthew and Julieta were on my mind as I gazed at the house Matthew and Ingrid had made together in Spain. One of the things they had made was an exhibition of their kinship structure. They had pinned up photographs on a cork noticeboard to display their respective families. Matthew’s mother and father and Ingrid’s father and what looked like Matthew’s two brothers and Ingrid’s brother or cousin. There were no photographs of her sister. She saw me looking for someone who wasn’t there while she pierced the cloth with her needle.

‘Can she be happy, Zoffie, without a mind?’

‘Who?’

‘You know who.’

‘Do you mean Hannah?’

Ingrid looked startled, as if she had forgotten she had named her sister that night she gave me the silk top with Beheaded embroidered in blue thread. She wanted to forget, but her needle had remembered for her. I am not idle. And I am not an impartial researcher because I have become involved with my informant.

‘Is her mind still like a leaf, Zoffie?’

‘A leaf is never still.’

‘Does she remember?’

‘A mind is never still.’

‘Sometimes I just want to blow myself up,’ Ingrid whispered.

I knelt at her feet and put my arms around her waist.

She reached for my hair and placed a strand between her lips. ‘Do you still like me, Zoffie?’

Someone was tapping at the window.

‘Everything is dark until you say yes.’

I said nothing. Nothing at all.

‘It is still dark, Zoffie. The whole world is dark.’ She peered over my head in the direction of the tapping. ‘It is Leonardo,’ she said, as if the light had suddenly come back again.

I never thought I would be pleased to see Leonardo again, but his arrival had saved me from answering her question. Ingrid limped slightly as she walked past me towards the front door. Her left foot was still smarting from the stings but she paid no attention to them. Stings were only fascinating to her if they were on my body. She seemed lit up by Leonardo’s arrival and shouted, ‘Bravo!’ when she saw he was clasping a pair of brown leather riding boots to his chest. He nodded curtly at me.
Yes, I know you are here. It is unfortunate. You are always here when I am here
.

The wind rattled the windows while Ingrid slipped her feet into the boots. She stuck her thumbs inside the leather and wriggled and pulled while we watched her. The boots came to just under her knees. She straightened her back, pushing her breasts forward, her head held high, while Leonardo rummaged in his leather bag and took
out a helmet. She looked mean and victorious, a girl warrior fighting with the men. Who are her enemies? Am I on the list? What is she fighting for?

Leonardo stepped forward like a lustful slave. ‘You will need this helmet when you ride my horse.’

He gently placed it over her head, tucking in her two long plaits, his fingers fumbling with the clasp under her chin while she stood steady and silent. And then she kissed him formally on the cheek.

‘In return, I would like to give you an olive tree,’ she said.

She strode into the garden in her new boots and helmet and returned with a small sapling.

‘I have already planted four, Zoffie is going to plant two and the seventh is for you.’

Leonardo obviously felt that he was required to praise it. ‘It is healthy,’ he said gloomily.

Ingrid opened the fridge and took out two bottles of beer. She gave one to me and then slipped her hands into her back pocket, took out an opener and popped the lid off the other one for Leonardo. He lifted the cold bottle to his lips and took a gulp while I stood untended to, like the tree, my beer unopened. Ingrid had obviously broken through the glass ceiling of Leonardo’s approval. I asked her for the opener. She took the bottle from me and cracked off the lid in one clean movement. I was beginning to understand Ingrid Bauer. She was always pushing me to the edge in one way or another. My boundaries were made from sand so she reckoned she could push them over, and I let her. I gave my unspoken consent because I want to know what’s going to happen next, even if it’s not to my advantage. Am I self-destructive, or pathetically passive, or reckless, or just experimental, or am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?

There was something about Ingrid Bauer that touched me very deeply. It was to do with the boots and the helmet. They offered her the chance to gallop out of the story she had told herself about being a big, bad sister, but I suspected she was stuck in it. Perhaps she hadn’t
finished with it yet. I passed her my bottle of beer. She took it from me, crazed with power, loving her boots and helmet and, watched by foolish Leonardo, put it to her lips, downing the whole bottle in one. He shouted, ‘Whoooa!’ as if he were taming a wild horse, lifted the bottle to his lips and did not stop until he had finished his too. Ingrid turned to me, her slanted green eyes blazing, the eyes she had told me could see better in the dark than in the daylight. ‘Leonardo is going to teach me how to ride his Andalusian.’

There was one thing I knew. I was the most important person in the room. Ingrid’s mock-flirtation with Leonardo was designed to hide her desire for me.

She was a voyeur.

Of her own desire.

I understood now that Ingrid Bauer did not literally want to behead me. She wanted to behead her desire for me. Her own desire felt monstrous to her.

She had made of me the monster she felt herself to be.

She had been lurking near me for a long time, watching, secretly observing, waiting for me, spookily still, silent. I had heard her voice in my head all summer, I had seen her hiding and heard her breathing. Breathing the fire of her desire.

‘Zoffie, Leonardo and I want to schedule our riding lessons.’

I picked up my bag and slung it over my shoulder. Silver leaves of seaweed drifted in the air.

‘Take off Mrs Papastergiadis’s shoes, please.’

Gómez was sitting in his consulting room, staring at his watch. It was 7 a.m. and he seemed irritated to have to attend to my mother so early in the morning. Julieta Gómez slipped off Rose’s shoes and passed them to me.

My mother grimaced, the corners of her mouth falling down, her prominent chin lifted upwards as she spoke. ‘I have told you, Mr Gómez,’ she said, ‘there is no need for a further examination.’

Gómez knelt at her feet and started to wiggle her toes. His wrists were covered in soft black hair. ‘Do you feel this?’

‘Feel what?’

‘The pressure of my fingers on your toes.’

‘I have no toes.’

‘Is that a no?’

‘I no longer want these feet.’

‘Thank you.’ He nodded at Julieta Gómez, who was now taking notes. His silver eyebrows were fierce. Today, he was wearing a starched white coat that matched his stripe of white hair. The stethoscope that was wrapped around his neck made him look more clinical than usual.

‘I suppose you will listen to my heart with that contraption at some stage,’ Rose said.

‘You have told me there is no point, and I believe you.’ Gómez
turned towards me and folded his arms across his white coat. ‘Your mother has filed a complaint in regard to my clinical practice. We therefore have a visit in two days’ time from an executive from Los Angeles and a health official from Barcelona. I will require you both to attend it. I believe the gentleman from Los Angeles is a client of Mr Matthew Broadbent. Mr Broadbent has been coaching him how to communicate effectively with investors.’

When I glanced at Julieta, she was engrossed in her notes.

I asked Rose why she had filed a complaint.

She was sitting very straight and had obviously been arranging her hair since five o’clock that morning. It was immaculately pinned in a chignon. ‘Because I have complaints to make. I feel very much better now that I have my medication under control.’

‘It is very unlikely,’ Gómez replied, ‘that your new medication will succeed in making you well. Please keep in mind that we are now waiting for the result of the endoscopy.’

I did not know what an endoscopy was and he explained. ‘It is a procedure in which the inside of the body – in this case, the throat – is examined by a device called an endoscope. It is a long, flexible tube with a video camera attached to one end of it.’

‘Yes,’ Rose said, ‘it was uncomfortable but it was not painful.’

Gómez nodded to Julieta who was also in a strange mood because she announced that from now on all further consultations would be minuted by herself. When she wheeled Rose towards the door she did not look at me.

‘Sofia Irina, stay behind, please.’ Gómez gestured to me to sit on the chair opposite his desk.

I sat down and waited while another nurse came in, carrying a silver tray, and placed it on his desk. On it were two croissants and a glass of orange juice.

Gómez thanked the nurse for his breakfast and instructed her to tell the next patient he was running late. ‘I want to talk to you about two matters,’ he said to me. ‘First, we must discuss the
gentleman from the pharmaceutical company. I think you would be interested.’

He lifted the glass of orange juice to his lips, changed his mind and put it down again, untouched. ‘Our visitor Señor James from LA needs to find effective strategies to expand his market. He has been harassing me for some years. What he does is very fascinating. First, he creates a disease and then he offers a cure.’ He pressed his thumb into the white stripe in his hair.

‘How does he create a disease?’

‘Let me explain.’

He continued making small circles on his head with his thumb, as if he were trying to remove something unpleasant from inside. After a while, he took the stethoscope from around his neck and placed it on his desk.

‘Imagine that you, Sofia Irina, are a little introverted. Let us say that you are shy and need to be bolder and to learn how to protect yourself in the everyday of your life. He would like me to call this a social-anxiety disorder. In this way, I can sell you his medication for the disorder he has invented.’ His lips parted and suddenly his smile was so wide I could see myself reflected in his gold teeth. ‘But you, Sofia Irina, being a warm-blooded anthropologist, and I, being a warm-blooded man of science, must let out minds wander freely across Las Alpujarras. We must not always be a slave to the pharmaceuticals.’ Gómez moved the plate of croissants towards me. ‘Please help yourself.’

It felt like a bribe. His tone was kindly but he was definitely on edge. He glanced at the computer on his desk. ‘You saw your father in Athens?’

‘Yes.’

‘And so?’

‘My father has written me off.’

‘Oh. Like a crashed car beyond repair?’

‘No.’

‘How have you been written off?’

‘He is trying to forget I exist.’

‘Is he succeeding?’

‘He is trying to exist by forgetting.’

‘Is forgetting the opposite of memory?’

‘No.’

‘So you have not been written off?’

‘No.’

He was kinder to me than my own father had been. In the one telephone conversation we’d had while I was in Athens, he had insisted that I was Leonardo da Vinci. Apparently da Vinci also wanted to fly back to the father who abandoned him and that’s why he became obsessed with flight. As far as I know, the home-made flying machines he had strapped to his body fell apart and threw him to the ground.

My elbow jutted into the glass of orange juice and knocked it over. The impending visit from the pharmaceutical executive had unnerved me too.

Gómez did not appear to notice as the juice dripped on to the floor. He gestured again towards the untouched croissants. He seemed nervous, but I trusted him. I could sense he had paternal feelings for me.