Deborah Levy - Hot Milk

‘You are so beautiful, Ingrid.’

She is laughing. She is actually laughing at me.

‘I can’t laze around all day like you. I have things to do.’

Her mobile starts to ring. I know it is Matthew, controlling her, keeping tabs on where she is and that he knows she is with me.

‘I’m on the beach, Matty. Can you hear the sea?’

I reach towards her and grab the phone from her hand.

Ingrid is shouting at me to give it back, but I am running with it towards the sea and she is running after me, tripping over the laces of her silver sandals, so she takes them off and throws them on the sand. She catches up with me and tugs at the hem of my satin dress. I hear it rip and at the same time I throw the phone into the sea.

We both watch it float for three seconds with the medusas, pulsating and calm, circling the phone, and then it sinks.

The sea laps round the hem of my torn satin dress.

Ingrid wipes the sand out of her eyes. ‘You are obsessed with me,’ she says.

I am certainly obsessed with her power to confuse me. To lift me out of all my certainties, even though I know she does not respect me. I am intrigued by the way she is served by the men who worship her beauty as I do, and how she likes to repair rips and tears with her needle as if she were doing some sort of surgery on herself.

Ingrid wades into the sea and grabs my hair with all her strength. ‘Go get my phone, you big animal.’

She pushes my head under the warm, murky water. When I struggle, she pushes me down again, this time with her knee against my shoulder. She keeps on pushing, just as she had pushed her sister on the swing. It is as if she is doing it all over again, repeating that childhood accident, except this time it is with me. Someone else is in the water now. I can feel an arm and then two arms circling my waist, trying to lift me up as Ingrid pushes me down. A wave folds over my head and knocks me over. When I find my balance and surface, Julieta Gómez is in the sea treading water by my side, wringing out her long, wet hair. We can both hear a woman screaming. Her high-pitched yelps are coming from the direction of the small bay by the rocks. Ingrid is hopping on the sand, clutching her right foot. She has stepped on the pile of medusas she collected in her net and then turned out on the sand.

It makes me feel less angry, as if somehow I have transferred the toxin of my rage into her foot.

Julieta looks at me, and then she laughs. ‘Your boundaries are made from sand, Sofia.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know that.’

A seagull drifts with us in the waves.

I return to the rocks and begin to pack up my towel. I do not want Ingrid to leave the beach without me. If anything, I find her more compelling now. Memory is my subject. Ingrid was repeating a traumatic memory from the past and playing it out with me because she knows my boundaries are made of sand.

‘Zoffie, you are unruly and chaotic, you are in debt and your beach house is untidy. Now you have thrown my phone into the sea. I don’t know what to do. I’m going to lose work.’

‘Your clients will have to speak to the fish.’

I slip off the drenched satin dress and start to dry my thighs. The small boy is still eating his giant tomato. He gazes at me for a few seconds and then he runs away.

‘You have frightened him, Zoffie, because your face is blue. Your eye shadow is dripping down your cheeks and you look like a sea monster.’ She has found the salami and is tearing off the rind. ‘I don’t want to stay here with the horseflies and medusas.’ She stuffs the meat into her mouth and glances up at the caves. ‘And, anyway, I don’t like your friends.’

Julieta waves at me and I wave back.

Ingrid peers at the raised welts on her stung foot. Her silver sandals are floating in the shallow end of the bay but she is too preoccupied with her stings to notice. ‘If you come to my house, you can plant the olive trees while I work and then we can go for a walk when it’s cooler.’

It is an invitation. It sounds like the sort of plans that lovers make together.

Ingrid squats down on the rock and pees on her stung foot.

‘That’s a myth,’ I said.

‘What is a myth?’

That is a big question. It would be true to say that I was probably obsessed with it.

The first thing Ingrid did when we arrived at her summer house was look for her reels of thread and then she tipped the basket of vintage-shop clothes on to the floor. The needle between her fingers was like a weapon, she sewed as if she were attacking the cloth.

‘You are so indolent, Zoffie! You are here to plant the olive trees. First you have to dig the planting holes.’

I don’t know how to plant a tree. There are so many things I don’t know how to do, but I do know how to keep a secret. Matthew and Julieta were on my mind as I gazed at the house Matthew and Ingrid had made together in Spain. One of the things they had made was an exhibition of their kinship structure. They had pinned up photographs on a cork noticeboard to display their respective families. Matthew’s mother and father and Ingrid’s father and what looked like Matthew’s two brothers and Ingrid’s brother or cousin. There were no photographs of her sister. She saw me looking for someone who wasn’t there while she pierced the cloth with her needle.

‘Can she be happy, Zoffie, without a mind?’

‘Who?’

‘You know who.’

‘Do you mean Hannah?’

Ingrid looked startled, as if she had forgotten she had named her sister that night she gave me the silk top with Beheaded embroidered in blue thread. She wanted to forget, but her needle had remembered for her. I am not idle. And I am not an impartial researcher because I have become involved with my informant.

‘Is her mind still like a leaf, Zoffie?’

‘A leaf is never still.’

‘Does she remember?’

‘A mind is never still.’

‘Sometimes I just want to blow myself up,’ Ingrid whispered.

I knelt at her feet and put my arms around her waist.

She reached for my hair and placed a strand between her lips. ‘Do you still like me, Zoffie?’

Someone was tapping at the window.

‘Everything is dark until you say yes.’

I said nothing. Nothing at all.

‘It is still dark, Zoffie. The whole world is dark.’ She peered over my head in the direction of the tapping. ‘It is Leonardo,’ she said, as if the light had suddenly come back again.

I never thought I would be pleased to see Leonardo again, but his arrival had saved me from answering her question. Ingrid limped slightly as she walked past me towards the front door. Her left foot was still smarting from the stings but she paid no attention to them. Stings were only fascinating to her if they were on my body. She seemed lit up by Leonardo’s arrival and shouted, ‘Bravo!’ when she saw he was clasping a pair of brown leather riding boots to his chest. He nodded curtly at me. Yes, I know you are here. It is unfortunate. You are always here when I am here .

The wind rattled the windows while Ingrid slipped her feet into the boots. She stuck her thumbs inside the leather and wriggled and pulled while we watched her. The boots came to just under her knees. She straightened her back, pushing her breasts forward, her head held high, while Leonardo rummaged in his leather bag and took out a helmet. She looked mean and victorious, a girl warrior fighting with the men. Who are her enemies? Am I on the list? What is she fighting for?

Leonardo stepped forward like a lustful slave. ‘You will need this helmet when you ride my horse.’

He gently placed it over her head, tucking in her two long plaits, his fingers fumbling with the clasp under her chin while she stood steady and silent. And then she kissed him formally on the cheek.