Hot Milk (4 page)

A large industrial cargo ship floated near the horizon. It was flying a Greek flag. I looked away and gazed instead at a rusty child's swing that had been hammered into the coarse sand. The seat was made from a battered car tyre and it was swaying gently, as if a ghostly child had recently jumped off it. Cranes from the desalination plant sliced into the sky. Tall undulating dunes of greenish-grey cement powder lay in a depot to the right of the beach, where unfinished hotels and apartments had been hacked into the mountains like a murder.

I glanced at my phone. There was an old text message from Dan who worked with me at the Coffee House. He wanted to know where I had put the marker pen we use to label the sandwiches and pastries. Dan from Denver was texting me in Spain about a pen? As I took a sip of my large gin and tonic and nodded my thanks to the waiter, I wondered if I had put the pen somewhere obscure.

I unzipped my dress so the sun could reach my shoulders. The burn of the medusa sting had calmed down, but every now and again I felt a twinge. It wasn't the worst kind of pain. In a way, it was a relief.

Another more recent message from Dan. He has found the pen. It turns out that while I am in Spain he is sleeping in my room above the Coffee House because his landlord put up his rent last week. The pen was in my bed. With the lid off. Consequently, the sheets and duvet are now stained with black ink. In fact, he described it as a haemorrhage of ink.

He can no longer write things like this:

Sofia's bittersweet Amaretto cheesecake – in £3.90, out £3.20.

Dan's moist orange and polenta cake (wheat- and gluten-free) – in £3.70, out £3.

I am bittersweet.

He is moist.

Dan is definitely not moist.

We don't bake these cakes ourselves but our boss tells us that customers are more likely to buy them if they think we do. We put our names to things we do not make. I am glad the ink has run out of the lying pen.

I remember now that I must have left the pen in the bed when I used it to copy a quote from Margaret Mead, the cultural anthropologist. I wrote it straight onto the wall.

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalysed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.

There are five semicolons in that quote. I remember making the ;;;;; on the wall with the marker pen. I had underlined ‘religious conversion' twice.

My father suffered a religious conversion but as far as I know he has not got over it. In fact he has married a woman four years older than I am and they have a new baby. She is twenty-nine. He is sixty-nine. A few years before he met his new wife, he inherited a fortune from his grandfather's shipping business in Athens. He must have seen it as a sign that he was on the right track. God brought him money just as his country was going bankrupt. And love. And a baby girl. I have not seen my father since I was fourteen. He has seen no
reason to part with a single euro of his newly acquired wealth, so I am my mother's burden. She is my creditor and I pay her with my legs. They are always running around for her.

To sign off the loan to pay the Gómez Clinic we had to go together to Rose's mortgage provider for an interview.

I took the morning off work which meant I lost eighteen pounds and thirty pence for three hours. It was raining and the corporate red carpet was damp. Everywhere there were words on posters telling us how much our well-being meant to the bank, as if human rights were their major concern. The man sitting behind his computer had been trained to be cheerful and friendly; to imitate empathy as he understood it; to be approachable and energetic as he understood it; to love his ugly red tie with the bank's logo on it. His red badge displayed his name and job description, but it did not tell us his salary scale – probably somewhere in the region of dignified poverty. He was attempting to be personal; to be fair in his approach to our situation; to speak to us in simple language we would understand. A poster of three unattractive employees stared at us from the wall, all of them laughing. The woman was in a female suit (jacket with skirt), the men in male suits (jacket with trousers), their message conveyed our similarities and erased our differences; we are sensible dreamers with bad teeth just like you; we all want a place of our own to argue with the family on Christmas Day.

I could see that these posters were a rite of initiation (into property, investments, debt) and that the corporate suits signalled a sacrifice of the complexity of gender distinctions. Another poster displayed a photograph of a neat semi-detached house with a front garden the size of a grave. There were no flowers in that garden, just newly laid grass. It looked desolate. The squares of turf had not yet grown into each other. Perhaps a paranoid personality was lurking to the left of the story they were building for us. He had cut down all the flowers and murdered the household pets.

Our man spoke in a tone that was animated but robotic. At the
start he said, ‘Hi, you Guys,' but at least he did not say, ‘Hello, Ladies,' before he rattled off the products available to strip me of my inheritance. At one point he asked my mother if she ate steak. It was a question out of the blue, but we could see where he was heading (lavish lifestyle) so Rose told him she was a vegan because she wanted to promote a more humane and caring world. If she was feeling extravagant, she said she'd add a tablespoon of yogurt to the dahl and rice. He did not know that vegans do not eat dairy products, otherwise she would have fallen out of the corporate red chair at the first hurdle. He asked if she liked designer clothes. She said she only liked cheap, ugly clothes. Did she belong to a gym? A strange question, given that my mother was clutching a walking stick and a bandage was wrapped around each of her swollen ankles, despite the anti-inflammatory painkillers she knocked back every morning with a glass of wrong water.

He asked her to provide the estate agents' estimate for our property and he informed us that the bank's own surveyor would pay us a visit. The computer liked the information we had submitted so far because my mother had paid off the mortgage. Bricks and mortar are worth something in London, even if the Victorian bricks are held together with spit, piss and gaffer tape. He told us he was inclined to sign off our loan. My mother was excited about having an adventure that included a medical experience: the Gómez Clinic was like whale watching for her. I returned to work to make three types of espresso and Rose returned home to make a new list of aches and pains. I can't deny that her symptoms are of cultural interest to me, even though they drag me down with her. Her symptoms do all the talking for her. They chatter all the time. Even I know that.

I walked across the burning sand to cool my feet in the sea.

Sometimes, I find myself limping. It's as if my body remembers the way I walk with my mother. Memory is not always reliable. It is not the whole truth. Even I know that.

When I arrived back at the clinic at 2.15, Rose had swapped the
wheelchair for a chair and she was reading her horoscope in a newspaper for English expatriates.

‘Hello, Sofia. I can see you have been having a nice time at the beach.'

I told her the beach was desolate and that I had been staring for two hours at a pile of gas canisters. It was my special skill to make my day smaller so as to make her day bigger.

‘Look at my arms,' she said. ‘I'm all bruised from the blood tests.'

‘You poor thing.'

‘I am a poor thing. The doctor has taken me off three of my pills. Three!'

She screwed up her mouth to make a mock-crying expression and then waved her newspaper at Gómez, who was not so much walking as promenading across the white marble floor towards us.

He told me that my mother has a chronic iron deficiency, which could be why she lacks energy. Among other things, such as a silver-lined dressing to enhance the healing of her foot ulcers, he had prescribed vitamin B12.

A prescription for vitamins. Is that worth twenty-five thousand euro?

Rose began to list the names of the pills that had been erased from her medication ritual. She spoke about them as if she were grieving for absent friends. Gómez lifted his hand to wave at Nurse Sunshine, who was making her way towards him in her grey suede heels. When she was standing by his side, he brazenly put his arm around her shoulders while she fiddled with the watch pinned above her right breast. An ambulance had just pulled up in the car park. She told him in English that the driver needed a lunch break. He nodded and removed his arm from her shoulders so she could get a better grip on the watch.

‘Nurse Sunshine is my daughter,' he said. ‘Her real name is Julieta Gómez. Please feel free to call her what you wish. Today is her birthday.'

Julieta Gómez smiled for the first time. Her teeth were blindingly white. ‘I am now thirty-three. My childhood has officially ended. Please call me Julieta.'

Gómez gazed at his daughter with his eyes that were various shades of blue. ‘You will know there is high unemployment in Spain,' he said, ‘something like 29.6 per cent at the moment. So I am lucky my daughter had a good medical training in Barcelona and is the most respected physiotherapist in Spain. This means I am able to be a little bit corrupt and use my position to get her a job in my marble palace.'

He opened his pinstriped arms in a sweeping, royal gesture, as if to fold into himself the curved walls and flowering cacti, the shiny new ambulance, the receptionists and other nurses, and a couple of male doctors who unlike Gómez wore a uniform of blue T-shirts and brand-new trainers.

‘This marble is extracted from the earth of Cobdar. Its colour resembles the pale skin of my deceased wife. Yes, I have built my clinic in homage to my daughter's mother. In the spring months we are enchanted by the abundance of butterflies that are attracted to my dome. They always lift the spirits of the afflicted. By the way, Rose, you might like to visit the statue of the Virgen del Rosario. She is sculpted from the purest marble from the Macael mountains.'

‘I am an atheist, Mr Gómez,' Rose said sternly. ‘And I do not believe that women who give birth are virgins.'

‘But Rose, she is made from a delicate marble that is the colour of mother's milk. It is white, but slightly yellow. So perhaps the sculptor was merely paying his respects to the act of nurturing. I wonder, did the virgin's only child call his mother by her first name?'

‘It doesn't matter,' Rose said. ‘It's all lies, anyway. And by the way, Jesus called his mother “woman”. It translates in Hebrew as “Madam”.'

The receptionist suddenly appeared and started to speak very fast in Spanish to Gómez. She was carrying a fat white cat in her arms
and she put it down on the floor by Gómez's polished black shoes. When it started to circle his legs he knelt down and stretched out his hand. ‘Jodo is my true love,' he said. The cat rubbed its face against his open palm. ‘She is very gentle. I am just sorry we do not have mice, because she has nothing to do all day long except to love me.'

Rose began to sneeze. After the fourth sneeze she clapped her hand to her eye. ‘I am allergic to cats.'

Gómez slipped his little finger into Jodo's mouth. ‘The gums should be firm and pink, and Jodo is okay in this respect. But her stomach is bulging in a new way. I am worried that she might have a kidney disease.'

He reached into his pocket, took out a bottle of sanitizer and sprayed it on his hands, while Julieta asked Rose if she would like some drops for her itching eye.

‘Oh, yes, please.'

It's not often my mother says ‘please'. She sounded as if she had just been offered a box of chocolates.

Julieta Gómez took out a small, white plastic bottle from her pocket. ‘They are anti-histamines. I have just helped someone else with this problem.' She walked over to Rose, tipped her chin back and squeezed two drops into each eye.

My mother now looked daintily tearful, reproachful, as if the tears were welling but had not yet spilt on to her cheeks.

Jodo the cat had disappeared in the arms of one of the paramedics.

Nurse Sunshine, who was really Julieta, was neither friendly nor hostile. She was matter of fact, efficient, serene. She had none of her father's exuberance, although I observed that she listened very carefully to Rose, without appearing to do so. I was starting to rethink the way she had lingered by the door when we had walked into the consulting room. Perhaps she had not been as far away in her thoughts as I had imagined. She noticed things because she asked if she could help me do up my dress. I had forgotten I had loosened it at the beach.
Julieta fiddled discreetly with the zip, then placed her hands on her tiny waist and informed us that our taxi had arrived.

‘Goodbye, Rose.' Gómez vigorously shook her hand. ‘By the way, you should drive the hire car we have organized for you. It is included in my fee.'

‘But how can I drive? I have no feeling in my legs.' Rose once again looked affronted.

‘You have my permission to drive the car. Pick it up on your next visit. There is some paperwork to do, but it is ready for you in our car park.'

Julieta put her hand on my mother's shoulder. ‘If you have any problems with the driving, Sofia can call us to come and fetch you. She has all our contact numbers.' The Gómez Clinic was obviously a family business.

Not only were we going to be provided with a car, Gómez informed my mother that he would be pleased to take her out for lunch. He asked Julieta to put a date in his diary for two days' time, bowed his silver head and turned on his heels to talk to one of the young doctors waiting for him by a marble pillar.

As I limped with Rose to the taxi, I asked her what kind of exercise Gómez had given her to do.

‘It is not a physical exercise. He has asked me to write a letter in which I name all my enemies.' She snapped open her handbag and wrestled with a tissue that was stuck in the clasp. ‘You know, Sofia, when Nurse Sunshine – or Julieta Gómez, or whoever she is – squeezed those drops into my eyes, I'm sure she smelt of alcohol. In fact, she smelt of vodka.'