Hot Milk (24 page)

I began the long walk home in the midday sun in my bra and ripped jeans and sweaty trainers, iPod poking out of my back pocket, headphones again clamped to my ears. I felt alive and roaring as I gazed at the sea below me with its medusas floating in the most peculiar way.

As the desert birds cried out above my head, I was not sure Ingrid’s forbidden desire for me was a debt I could ever repay with a gift. Not even with the clothes off my back.

I am in love with Ingrid Bauer and she is in love with me.

She is not a safe person to love, but I’m prepared to take the risk.

Yes, some things are getting bigger, other things are getting smaller. Love is getting bigger and more dangerous. Technology is getting smaller, the human body is getting bigger, my low-rise jeans are cutting into my hips which are round and brown and toned from a month of swimming every day but I am still spilling over the waistband of these jeans not made for hips. I am overflowing like coffee leaking from a paper cup. I wonder, shall I make myself smaller? Do I have enough space on Earth to make myself less?

The coil of black smoke had melted into the sky.

By the time I had finally climbed down the mountain path that led to the beach, I had journeyed as far from myself as I have ever been, far, far away from any landmarks I recognized.

I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with an older man by my side and a baby on my lap.

As I got nearer to the beach I could see a rowing boat coming back to shore. It was the boat named
Angelita
that had been moored in the garden of the house with the arch of flowering desert jasmine. The muscled fisherman’s son had tied a leather necklace around his right bicep as he rowed his haul of two shining silver swordfish to shore. They lay in the boat like warriors, almost three feet long, their swords perhaps another foot. Two of his brothers waded in to help him drag the boat to the beach, but it was still too heavy and they called for help. I dropped my rucksack on the sand and still in my jeans and bra I ran into the sea and stood with them, gripping the rope and heaving the boat to shore. The fisherman’s son took out a heavy knife and started to cut off the sword. When it was severed from the blue-eyed, silver fish, he threw it to me like a matador tossing the ear of a bull into the crowd. It fell at my feet and in that moment I remembered my mother’s wish to sever her feet with the surgeon’s knife.

I waded into the sea up to my belly button, which is the oldest human scar, and discovered I was crying. My mother had finally succeeded in breaking me. I knelt down in the sea, my hands covering my eyes like they did when I wept as a child and imagined that no one could see me. No one at all. I had wanted to be unseen and misunderstood. If anyone had asked, I wouldn’t have known where to begin and where to end. After a while, I turned round to gaze at the space between one cliff and the other, and I saw her.

I saw Her.

A 64-year-old woman in a dress with a pattern of sunflowers printed across the skirt was walking along the shore. She held a hat in her left hand. Yes, it was her and she was walking. At first I thought she was a mirage because I had been in the desert sun all day, a hallucination or a vision or a long-held wish. She was oblivious to everyone and she did not see me. I was about to run to her, run to my mother and throw my arms around her, but she looked content with her own company as she walked the length of the beach. She had the resolve of someone who was wrestling with something impossible in her thoughts, reaching for something she could not grasp. The only way not to be seen by her was to get back into the sea. I waded in again and this time I swam far out with my back to her lively legs. When I eventually turned round to face the shore, Rose Papastergiadis was still walking. A woman in early old age in a pretty dress and a hat taking a stroll barefoot in the sand.

She made her way towards the shower on the wooden ramp where tourists wash the sand off their feet. That is what she was doing, too. Showering her feet that were still attached to her body. I stayed in the water until the sun set and when I swam back to shore the medusas were out in full. I kept on swimming in my jeans and this time I saw a crowd of them, a congregation of medusas, and I sliced through them with my arms, my head under water, kicking my way through the Mediterranean. I was stung on my belly and breasts, but it wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to me. When I got out of the water I searched for my mother’s footprints in the sand. There and there. I picked up a stick and drew a rectangle around the first two prints impressed and preserved in Almería, southern Spain. It was a trail of the footprints of Rose Papastergiadis.

Her toes are spread out, her feet are long because she is tall, perhaps over five foot eleven, she is a bi-ped and there is evidence that she walked in a leisurely fashion, These prints were a record of everything that she is; the first daughter in her family to get herself into
university; the first to marry a foreigner and cross the cold, grey Channel to the luminous, warm waters of the Aegean; the first to struggle with a new alphabet; the first to give up the god her mother prayed to and birth a daughter who was as dark as she was fair, short as she was tall; the first to bring up a child on her own. There she is, sixty-four years old, showering the sand off her feet. The tide would take away these footprints inscribed in the wet, firm sand before the surgeon could set upon them.

I am afraid of her and afraid for her.

What if she’s not joking about amputation? If she really did that, if she severed her feet, how am I to keep her whole and alive? How can I protect her, and how can I protect myself from her? I have been staring at Rose Papastergiadis from the day I was born, taking care to appear less alert than I am.

You are always so far away, Sofia.

No. I am always too close.

I must never look at her defeat with all I know, because I will turn it to stone with my disdain and my sorrow.

The tide was coming in. As I walked along the beach I saw the girl who was always lying in the sand while her sisters buried her legs to make a mermaid’s tail. They were replacing her legs with a stump. I walked over to the girl and dug my hands into the sand until I found her wrists, and with all my strength I pulled her out of her sandy grave. Her sisters screamed and ran to their mother who was sitting a few deckchairs away, smoking a cigarette. She threw it to the sand and ran towards me, the heavy gold chain around her neck swaying from right to left as she cursed me. I ran away fast, fast, faster than a lizard flashing through rocks, until I reached the injury hut.

The yellow medusa flag was flying high. Juan told me the district council was worried that tourists would stop coming to the beach. They were busy making a strategy called ‘Plan Medusa’, advising bathers ‘to beware of the stinging menace in the shallows’. He laughed and then bit into a juicy, red apple. ‘You know,’ he said, walking away
from me, ‘the infestation of the jellyfish is due to the decline of natural predators such as the turtle and the tuna, changes in global temperature and rainfall.’ He was pacing up and down in his sandals. He smelt of the sea. His beard was glossy. He was slim and brown and he was enjoying his crisp, fresh apple. He walked towards me and moved a few strands of hair away from my eyes. His fingers were wet from the juice of the apple. He was saying something to me in Spanish.

‘I appear to be softer than you are, and you appear to be harder than I am. Do you think this is true, Sofia?’

My mother was sitting in the chair facing the wall in her sunflower dress. Her slippers were back on her feet and the straw hat lay on the floor, as if she had tossed it there in anger.

‘Is that you?’

‘Yes, it is me.’

I waited for her to tell me the good news.

Her eyes were firmly fixed on the wall.

It is as if her legs are her co-conspirators, always whispering together and plotting. She had put on the slippers to hide her lively feet from me.

‘Get me some water, Sofia.’

Agua con gas, agua sin gas
. Which shall I choose?

I opened the fridge and laid my cheek against the door. She had betrayed me. In all these years, I had never lost hope for her recovery, but she did not want to give me hope. I poured her a glass of wrong water and wondered if she might have an appetite after her walk. I found a soft banana and mashed it with milk to give her energy to walk again. And again. And again. She took the plate as a perfectly formed female martyr suffering for an unfathomable cause would take it. Eyes lowered. Lips pinched. Limp hands.

She was hungry.

‘You are sunburnt and covered in sand,’ she said.

‘Yes, it was a great day. It was magnificent. What did you do?’

‘Nothing. Nothing, as usual. What is there to do?’

‘Well, if you’re bored you could cut off your feet.’ I shook out the sand and seaweed in my knotted, wet hair. ‘I’ve heard about your amputation plan. You remind me of a beggar who breaks a leg so people will give her money.’

After that she turned on me. It was a hymn of violence and she sang it to me like a full-throated, evil nightingale.

My unbrushed hair repulsed her. I had wasted my intelligence. I suffered from an excess of emotion, while she was restrained and stoic.

Her blue eyes were sad and stricken.

I grasped her hand to comfort her. It was papery and numb.

She told me she was afraid to sleep.

She freed her hand and she started to shout. It was as if a match had been carelessly dropped into a pool of petroleum. She was insatiable as she continued to insult everyone and anything that came to her mind. Her breathing quickened, her cheeks were flushed, her voice was high and trembling. What does rage look like? It looks like my mother’s lame legs.

When I crept to the bathroom, I could still hear the hate sentences pouring out of her. She was electrocuting me with her words. She was the electric pylon and I was the vervet slumped on the ground, quivering but still breathing. I showered and felt the medusa stings throb under the warm water. They were inciting me to do something monstrous but I wasn’t yet sure what this might be. Sunstroked, blistered and bruised, I was preparing for it. I combed my hair and lined my eyelids with an extra flick at the sides. I was not too sure what I was getting dressed up for, but I knew it was for something big. Ingrid and her horse were still in my mind. She had given me an idea that had probably always lurked inside me anyway. I could hear Rose shouting for more milk to be mixed into her banana.

‘Of course.’

I walked into the living room, gently took the plate from her lying, cheating hand (but not as attacking as her lips) and poured more milk into the mixture. This time, I added honey. ‘Let me take you out for a drive, at least,’ I said.

To my surprise, she agreed. ‘Where shall we go?’

‘We’ll take the route towards Rodalquilar.’

‘Very good. I haven’t been out all day.’ She was ravenous after her walk and spooned the banana mixture through her thin lips with new appetite.

It was a long haul to push her wheelchair to the car. It was Saturday night and the village was crowded with families and their children. I suppose she and I are a family. All the heavy lifting felt like nothing to me. I could have lifted the chair above my head with my new monster fury. My mother had chosen to keep her daughter in her place, forever suspended between hope and despair.

When she was eventually seated in the Berlingo and I was puzzling over the gear called neutral, she told me she couldn’t be bothered to put on her seat belt.

‘I’ll take that as a vote of confidence.’

‘Are you expecting someone to turn up in Rodalquilar, Sofia?’

‘Not that I know of.’

I took the rough road to cut across the mountains before we joined the motorway. The night was warm. She opened her window to peer at the darkening sky. There were ruins with
FOR SALE
signs on rusty poles poked into the hard earth. Near the ruins, someone had made a garden. A tall, flowering cactus had toppled over from the weight of its fruit, an abundance of yellow prickly pears. The road was a hazard of holes and small rocks, spraying dust over the windscreen.

I was driving fast and blind by the time I turned left on to the new motorway.

‘Water, Sofia, I need water.’

I pulled into a service station and ran into the shop to buy a bottle of water for Rose. A pile of porn films lay on the counter with an
assortment of key rings, a solitary bottle of rough country wine and a clay pig moneybox.

By the time we were on the road again the clock on the hire car was positioned at 8.05, the temperature at 25C, my speed 120kph. A decaying Ferris wheel stood abandoned in the desert like an open mouth, a last, cheap laugh.

I stopped the car on the hard shoulder. ‘Let’s have a look at the sunset,’ I said.

There was no sunset to look at but Rose did not seem to notice.

Out came the wheelchair and fifteen minutes of heavy lifting. Rose leaned on my arm and then on my shoulder as she lowered herself into it.

‘What are you waiting for, Sofia?’

‘I’m just getting my breath back.’

A white lorry was making its way towards us in the distance. It was loaded with tomatoes grown under plastic on the sweltering desert slave farms.

I wheeled my mother into the middle of the road and I left her there.

At night the marble dome of the Gómez Clinic resembled a spectral, solitary breast illuminated by the lights hidden in the surrounding succulents. A maternal lighthouse perched on the mountain, its veined, milky marble thrusting out of the purple sea lavender. A nocturnal breast, serene but sinister under the bright night stars. If it was a lighthouse, what did it signal to me, panicking in the desert, all my body shaking? A lighthouse is supposed to help us navigate away from hazards, to steer us into safe harbours. And yet it had seemed to me that for much of my life it had been my mother who was the hazard.