Deborah Levy - Hot Milk

‘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.

‘Zoffie! There is going to be a massacre!’

I called Ingrid and invited her to share the dorado with me to celebrate freeing Pablo’s dog. She said yes, she would come over at 9 p.m.

I showered and oiled my hair and then walked over to the plaza to buy a watermelon from the woman in the truck who I had first thought was a man. She was sitting in the driver’s seat with her young grandson sprawled on her lap. They were eating figs. Purple dusty figs, the colour of twilight. She told the boy to choose me a melon, which he did, and when she took the money she put it in a cotton wallet that was strapped around the waist of her black dress. She had taken off her sandals and placed them in the compartment of the truck door. I noticed a ball of bone growing like a small island on the side of her right foot. Her arms were brown and strong, her cheekbones sun-lashed, her hips wide as she moved to make space for her grandson when he clambered back on to her lap. Her body. Who is her body supposed to please? What is it for and is it ugly or is it something else? She silently pressed another fig into the boy’s hand, resting her chin on his head. She was a farmer and grandmother running her own economy with her money bag pressed against her womb.

Ingrid Bauer walked through the open door without knocking, just as I had started to grill the dorado. She was wearing silver shorts and her silver Roman sandals were laced up her shins to just below the knee. She had painted her toenails silver, too. I showed her the table on the terrace, which I had laid for a feast. I had even found matching plates and cutlery and wine glasses. A bowl of chopped watermelon and mint was chilling in the fridge. I had made a cheesecake. Yes, this time I had baked my own bittersweet amaretto cheesecake with amaretti biscuits and sweet amaretto liqueur and the bitter peel of Seville oranges.

It was the start of a bolder life.

I offered Ingrid wine but she wanted water. I always have plenty of water ready for Rose, so it was not a problem. It was the right sort of water for Ingrid. She sat close to me.

And then closer.

‘So you freed the dog?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you look him in the eye?’

‘No.’

‘Did you give him meat?’

‘No.’

‘You just untied him?’

‘Pablo untied him.’

‘And the dog was calm and licked his leg?’

‘No.’

We both knew that Pablo had been seen in the village walking his dog that afternoon. It was a catastrophe. The dog had tried to bite off the hand of a woman from Belgium when she was waiting for change at the bar. He had to be muzzled and Pablo was shouting and kicking everything in his way. Pablo needed a muzzle but he was protected by his army of cops.

‘Congratulations, Zoffie!’

She gave me a gift, a yellow silk halter-neck top. She said the silk would soothe my medusa stings and she pointed to where she had sewn my initials on the left-hand corner in blue silken thread. SP. Underneath SP she had embroidered the word Beloved.

Beloved.

To be Beloved was to be something quite alien to myself. The silk sun-top smelt of her shampoo and of manuka honey and pepper. Neither of us spoke about the Beloved but we knew it was there and that her needle had authored the word. She told me she can sew on to any kind of material if she has the right needle — a shoe, a belt, even thin metal and various kinds of plastic — but it was silk she liked to work with most.

‘It is alive like a bird,’ she said. ‘I have to catch it with my needle and make it obey me.’

Sewing was her way of keeping things together. It pleased her to mend something that seemed beyond repair. She often worked with a magnifying glass to find solutions to a rip that was hidden in the weave. The needle was the instrument she thought with, she embroidered anything that surfaced in her mind. It was a rule she had made up for herself never to censor any word or image that revealed itself to her. Today she had embroidered a snake, a star and a cigar on two shirts and on the hem of a skirt.

I asked her to repeat what she had just said.

‘A snake. A star. A cigar.’

She said the idea for the word embroidered on my sun-top had been on her mind because she was thinking of her sister in Düsseldorf.

‘What’s your sister’s name?’

‘Hannah.’

‘Is she older or younger?’

‘I am her big, bad sister.’

‘Why are you bad?’

‘Ask Matty.’

‘I’m asking you.’

‘Okay, I’ll tell you.’

She gulped down her glass of water and slammed it on the table. Tears welled in her green eyes. ‘No, I won’t tell you. I was talking about my sewing.’

There were apparently piles of clothes from the vintage shop waiting to be transformed with her needle. It was the same in Berlin, and she now had a contact in China who was sending her parcels of clothes to redesign. She was mostly interested in geometry, that’s what she had studied at university, in Bavaria, and what she liked about the needle was its precision. Her taste was for symmetry and structure, it helped her thoughts drift. Symmetry did not chain her, it set her free. Freer than Pablo’s dog would ever be.

She put her arm around my shoulders and her fingers were cold like a needle. I did not expect the weight of a word like Beloved to be delivered to me, written in blue silk with the initials of my name floating above it. She had let the word roam free, that’s what she said, whatever came to her mind became the design.

Ingrid wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and told me she couldn’t stay.

‘Don’t go, Ingrid.’ I kissed her wet cheek and whispered my thanks for her precious gift. Her ears were pierced with tiny lustrous pearls.

‘You are always working anyway, Zoffie. I don’t want to disturb you.’

‘How do you mean, I am always working?’