Deborah Levy - Hot Milk

‘Greece is a smaller country than Spain, but it can’t pay its bills. The dream is over.’

I asked him if he was referring to the economy. He said yes, he was studying for a master’s degree at the School of Philosophy at Granada University but he considered himself lucky to have a summer job on the beach at the injury hut. If the Coffee House was still hiring when he graduated, he would head for London. He didn’t know why he had said the dream was over because he didn’t believe it. He had probably read it somewhere and it stuck with him. But it wasn’t his own opinion, a phrase like ‘the dream is over.’ For a start, who is the dreamer? The only other public dream he could remember was from Martin Luther King’s speech ‘I had a dream …’, but the phrase about the dream being over implied that something had started and had now ended. It was up to the dreamer to say it was over, no one else could say it on their behalf.

And then he spoke a whole sentence to me in Greek and seemed surprised when I told him that I do not speak Greek.

It is a constant embarrassment to have a surname like Papastergiadis and not speak the language of my father.

‘My mother is English.’

‘Yes,’ he said in his perfect English. ‘I have only been to Skiathos in Greece once but I managed to pick up a few phrases.’

It was as if he was mildly insulting me for not being Greek enough. My father left my mother when I was five and she is English and mostly speaks to me in English. What did it have to do with him? And anyway the jellyfish sting was what he was supposed to be concerned about.

‘I have seen you in the plaza with your mother.’

‘Yes.’

‘She has difficulty walking?’

‘Sometimes Rose can walk, sometimes she can’t.’

‘Your mother’s name is Rose?’

‘Yes.’

‘You call her by her name?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t say Mama?’

‘No.’

The hum of the little fridge standing in the corner of the injury hut was like something dead and cold but with a pulse. I wondered if there were bottles of water inside it. Agua con gas, agua sin gas . I am always thinking of ways to make water more right than wrong for my mother.

The student looked at his watch. ‘The rule for anyone who has been stung is they have to stay here for five minutes. It’s so I can check you don’t have a heart attack or another reaction.’

He pointed again to ‘Occupation’ on the form, which I had left blank.

It might have been the pain of the sting, but I found myself telling him about my pathetic miniature life. ‘I don’t so much have an occupation as a preoccupation, which is my mother, Rose.’

He trailed his fingers down his shins while I spoke.

‘We are here in Spain to visit the Gómez Clinic to find out what is actually wrong with her legs. Our first appointment is in three days’ time.’

‘Your mother has limb paralysis?’

‘We don’t know. It’s a mystery. It’s been going on for a while.’

He started to unwrap a lump of white bread covered in cling film. I thought it might be part two of the jellyfish-sting cure but it turned out to be a peanut-butter sandwich, which he said was his favourite lunch. He took a small bite and his black, glossy beard moved around while he chewed. Apparently, he knows about the Gómez Clinic. It is highly thought of and he also knows the woman who has rented us the small, rectangular apartment on the beach. We chose it because it has no stairs. Everything is on one floor, the two bedrooms are next to each other, just off the kitchen, and it is near the main square and all the cafés and the local Spar. It is also next door to the diving school, Escuela de Buceo y Náutica, a white cube on two floors with windows in the shape of portholes. The reception area is being painted at the moment. Two Mexican men set to work every morning with giant tins of white paint. A howling, lean Alsatian dog is chained all day to an iron bar on the diving-school roof terrace. He belongs to Pablo who is the director of the diving school, but Pablo is on his computer all the time playing a game called Infinite Scuba . The crazed dog pulls at its chains and regularly tries to leap off the roof.

‘No one likes Pablo,’ the student agreed. ‘He’s the sort of man who would pluck a chicken while it’s still alive.’

‘That’s a good subject for an anthropological field study,’ I said.

‘What is?’

‘Why no one likes Pablo.’

The student held up three fingers. I assumed that meant I had to stay in the injury hut for three more minutes.

In the morning, the male staff at the diving school give a tutorial to student divers about how to put on their diving suits. They are uneasy about the dog being chained up all the time, but they get on with the things they have to do. Their second task is to pour petrol through a funnel into plastic tanks and wheel them out on an electric device across the sand to load on to the boat. This is quite complicated technology compared to the Swedish masseur, Ingmar, who usually sets up his tent at the same time. Ingmar transports his massage bed on to the beach by attaching ping-pong balls to its legs and sliding it across the sand. He has complained to me personally about Pablo’s dog, as if the accident of my living next door to the diving school means that I somehow co-own the miserable Alsatian. Ingmar’s clients can never relax because the dog whines, howls, barks and tries to kill itself all through their aromatherapy massage.

The student in the injury hut asked me if I was still breathing.

I’m starting to think he wants to keep me here.

He held up a finger. ‘You have to stay with me for one more minute, and then I will have to ask again how are you feeling.’

I want a bigger life.

What I feel most is that I am a failure but I would rather work in the Coffee House than be hired to conduct research into why customers prefer one washing machine to another. Most of the students I studied with ended up becoming corporate ethnographers. If ethnography means the writing of culture, market research is a sort of culture (where people live, the kind of environment they inhabit, how the task of washing clothes is divided between members of the community …) but in the end, it is about selling washing machines. I’m not sure I even want to do original fieldwork that involves lying in a hammock watching sacred buffalo grazing in the shade.

I was not joking when I said the subject of Why Everyone Hates Pablo would be a good field study.

The dream is over for me. It began when I left my lame mother alone to pick the pears from the tree in our East London garden that autumn I packed my bags for university. I won a first-class degree. It continued while I studied for my master’s. It ended when she became ill and I abandoned my Ph.D. The unfinished thesis I wrote for my doctorate still lurks in a digital file behind my shattered screen saver like an unclaimed suicide.

Yes, some things are getting bigger (the lack of direction in my life), but not the right things. Biscuits in the Coffee House are getting bigger (the size of my head), receipts are getting bigger (there is so much information on a receipt, it is almost a field study in itself), also my thighs (a diet of sandwiches, pastries …). My bank balance is getting smaller and so are passion fruit (though pomegranates are getting bigger and so is air pollution, as is my shame at sleeping five nights of the week in the storeroom above the Coffee House). Most nights in London I collapse on the childish single bed in a stupor. I never have an excuse for being late for work. The worst part of my job is the customers who ask me to sort out their traveller’s wireless mice and charging devices. They are on their way to somewhere else while I collect their cups and write labels for the cheesecake.