Deborah Levy - Hot Milk

‘Everyone is a field study to you. It makes me feel weird. Like you are watching me all the time. What is the difference between studying anthropology and practising it?’

‘Well, I would get paid if I practised it.’

‘That’s not what I mean. Anyway, if you need some money, I can lend it to you. I have to go.’

Ingrid and Matthew were meeting friends at a tapas bar that night. Afterwards, they were going to a party in a field out of town given by a friend who was a DJ. Matthew was putting up lights there at the moment. She was supposed to have loaded bags of ice and some buckets in the car and driven them to the site but she had been embroidering my sun-top instead. The beer would still be warm by the time everyone arrived and it was sort of my fault.

‘Thanks for the water, Zoffie. I need it because I’m going to be wrecked later.’

When she walked out of the open door I watched her linger for a few seconds by the table set for two on the terrace. And then she moved on to her real life.

Is this what it is like to be beloved by Ingrid Bauer?

There were two sharp knives lying on the kitchen table next to a faux ancient Greek vase. I put them away in the drawer and looked more closely at the saffron-coloured vase. It was in the shape of an urn, with a frieze drawn on it in black resin of seven slave women balancing jugs on their heads while they queued by a fountain to collect water. Obviously the vase was a copy, but it did show a historically correct event in everyday life. It was difficult to channel water into the cities of ancient Greece, so it had to be collected at public fountains. Wealthy men would drink wine mixed with the water the female slaves had carried to their homes for them, but the women had no home of their own. Tonight was the first time I had invited someone to my temporary home in Spain. It had all gone wrong when I asked about Ingrid’s sister.

I turned off the heat on the dorado and found myself walking across the beach to the injury hut.

I was getting bolder.

I asked the student to join me for supper.

He looked surprised and then pleased. ‘You will want to know my name is Juan,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘and I will need to know your date of birth, country of origin and your occupation.’

He was stapling the day’s forms together (fourteen stings recorded), but he would be with me in twenty minutes and he thanked me for the invitation. Did I know that Pablo’s dog had dug up a row of sun umbrellas on the beach? Pablo’s brothers had chased him, so he had run into the sea in a panic. He had swum far out and then he had disappeared. No one knew where Pablo’s dog had got to or if it had drowned. If the German shepherd was still alive, the injury hut was going to have to handle a bite that was fiercer than the jellyfish. The student was laughing and scooping up his brown hair with his fingers. His neck was long and graceful.

‘Pablo is saying you threatened him.’

‘Yes, with the blood of the fish you are about to eat with me.’

Our eyes met and I looked at him with all the power of someone who was beloved. I knew I had been rejected by Ingrid but I left that out of what my eyes were telling him.

When he arrived he was carrying four bottles of beer, which he said he kept in the fridge in the injury hut. He asked after my mother. I told him that she was sleeping and, for once, she had not drawn the curtains to hide from ‘the clapped-out stars’. We ate the dorado sitting opposite each other at the table laid for two on the terrace. Its white flesh was tender under its silver skin. He told me it was succulent because it had a layer of fat between the skin and the flesh. Later, we swam naked in the warm night and he kissed every medusa sting on my body, the welts and blisters, until I was disappointed there were not more of them. I had been stung into desire. He was my lover and I was his conqueror. It would be true to say that I was very bold.

She has ripped out my heart with her monster claws.

Rose sat limply at the wheel of the hire car while I washed the dust off the windows with a cloth. It was 11 a.m. and the sun was already burning my neck. My mother was about to drive us to a Sunday market near the airport to buy fruit and vegetables for the week. Juan had told me about a stall that sold sweet green grapes from North Africa, and I also had to find a can of coconut milk to take over to Ingrid’s later, because she has invited me to make ice cream. Rose was quiet for a change and not as resentful as usual. That was my mother’s main expression: slightly resentful, a whiff of resentment, not personally against me (though there was that, of course) but a vague sense of grievance against the world.

‘You are always so far away, Sofia.’

I am not far away. I am always too close. To her grievances.

The medusa stings were throbbing but I liked to feel them there, just as I liked to feel the word Beloved threaded into my new silk sun-top. Beloved was the antidote to the sting. Rose had impatiently started the engine, so I threw the cloth into the bucket, hiding it under a sign that said HOTEL FAMILY. ROOMS VACANT, with an arrow pointing to a dust track that apparently led to families who had checked into Hotel Family. Simmering, fuming, seething families; monogamous, polygamous, matrilineal, patrilineal, nuclear.

We are a mother and daughter, but are we a family?

I slammed the car door.

How was my mother to drive with no feeling in her legs? But she did. She moved her feet from the clutch to the brakes to the accelerator and I just had to believe that she would not lose her grip and that I would return home unharmed to find her more of the wrong kind of water. The route to the market was a straight drive across the newly tarred motorway. Rose drove fast. She was enjoying herself, her left elbow hanging out of the window. When she asked me why I had never learned to drive, I reminded her that I had failed my driving test four times and my driving theory exam, too, and after that I’d decided to call it a day and buy a bicycle.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine you driving.’

How do we set about not imagining something? What if I said that I can’t imagine human sexuality? What if I can’t imagine human sexuality in a way that has not already been described to me? What if I can’t imagine another culture? How would the day start and how would it end if it was beyond me to imagine Greece, the birthplace of my father? What if it is impossible to imagine he is missing his abandoned daughter and that one day we might be reconciled?

I looked down at my mother’s foot on the brake. Her toes moved off and then landed on it with delicacy and confidence. ‘I can imagine you walking the entire length of the beach,’ I said.

In reply she started to sing the words to a hymn: ‘And did those feet in ancient time/ Walk upon England’s mountains green’.

If only. My mother’s feet are mostly on strike, but I’m not sure what she is negotiating for or what the deal breaker would be. Her feet are an English size nine. Her jaw is large. Our ancestors developed a protruding jaw because they were constantly fighting. Grievance is very strenuous. My mother needs her jaw to see off anyone who will separate her from her stash of resentment. I need to become interested in something else because I am not earning a living to support my interest in her symptoms. I have abandoned my doctorate, which might contribute to making my interest public rather than private and earn me a licence to teach the subject that takes up all my time. Getting a licence is another one of my problems.

Rose tapped the indicator and turned right on the motorway towards the sea. ‘You seem to have made some new friends here in Almería?’