Deborah Levy - Hot Milk

‘And so?’

‘My father has written me off.’

‘Oh. Like a crashed car beyond repair?’

‘No.’

‘How have you been written off?’

‘He is trying to forget I exist.’

‘Is he succeeding?’

‘He is trying to exist by forgetting.’

‘Is forgetting the opposite of memory?’

‘No.’

‘So you have not been written off?’

‘No.’

He was kinder to me than my own father had been. In the one telephone conversation we’d had while I was in Athens, he had insisted that I was Leonardo da Vinci. Apparently da Vinci also wanted to fly back to the father who abandoned him and that’s why he became obsessed with flight. As far as I know, the home-made flying machines he had strapped to his body fell apart and threw him to the ground.

My elbow jutted into the glass of orange juice and knocked it over. The impending visit from the pharmaceutical executive had unnerved me too.

Gómez did not appear to notice as the juice dripped on to the floor. He gestured again towards the untouched croissants. He seemed nervous, but I trusted him. I could sense he had paternal feelings for me.

I took a bite of the croissant.

‘You have a certain je ne sais quoi , Sofia Irina.’

‘Really?’

He nodded.

I was now devouring one of the croissants. I had an appetite beyond my status and size. When I’d finished, Gómez asked me if I would like the other one.

I shook my curls at him. ‘No, thanks. That would be unhealthy.’

Gómez glanced at his computer and then at me. ‘I don’t have good news,’ he said. ‘I cannot treat your mother. I doubt if she will walk again. Her symptoms are spectral like a ghost, they come and go. They have no physiological substance. While you were in Athens, she was talking to me about amputation. In fact, that is her wish. She has asked for surgery.’

I started to laugh. ‘She’s joking,’ I said. ‘You don’t understand her Yorkshire humour. She’s always saying, “Do away with these feet.” It’s a turn of phrase.’

He shrugged. ‘It is perhaps a joke, certainly a threat. But I have already told her there is nothing I can do for her. She is defeated.’

He went on to say it was not in his remit to undo her words or indeed to undo her wish to sever parts of her body. Instead, he intended to reimburse a large portion of his fee. In fact, he had arranged for this sum to be transferred to her bank the next day.

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d stay away.

How could Gómez misinterpret my mother’s dark humour and then abandon her, as if she meant what she was saying?

She is my mother. Her legs are my legs. Her pains are my pains. I am her only and she is my only. I wish, I wish, I wish .

‘There is nothing I can do for her,’ he said again.

‘But she’s having you on,’ I shouted. ‘It’s not literally true, it’s not real.’

He touched his chin with the tips of his fingers. ‘You have some crumbs on your chin,’ he said.

‘ It’s not real! ’ I shouted again.

‘Yes, it is hard to accept. However, she intends to pursue her desire for amputation with a consultant in London. In fact, she has already made the appointment.’ He told me our conversation was over. I should understand that Mrs Papastergiadis was not his only patient.

I was so shocked I could not stand up. Instead, I glared at the vervet crouched in its glass cage. The rage of my gaze would shatter his final home in Gómez’s consulting room. I would free him to run into the sea and drown.

Gómez’s gold teeth were on full display. ‘I think you would like to free our little primate so he can scamper around the room and read my early editions of Baudelaire. But first you must free yourself from that chair and walk to the door.’ His new tone was sharp. ‘Go for a hike in the mountains. You must be sure not to borrow your mother’s limp or step into her shoes.’ He pointed to my hands.

I was still holding my mother’s shoes which were no longer attached to her feet.

Yesterday the Greek beauty saw three hens tethered by one leg to the same tree at Señora Bedello’s. She started to weep. It is anguish. Angst. Four of the chickens have died in the heat. Let her think no one can see her suffering or how she drags her feet with sadness. Love explodes near her like a war but she never admits she started it. She pretends she has no weapons but she likes the smoke. Love is not all she needs even though she has no one to hold her hand under the stars and say god the moon. She wants a job. I have other things to do too.

I am lying naked on the Beach of the Dead. Playa de los Muertos. There is a tiny sliver of glass embedded above my left eyebrow. I don’t know how it got there. Playa de los Muertos is a nudist beach. There is no shelter for those who wish to be naked. Two slender girls, perhaps seventeen, are swimming naked in the clear, turquoise sea. A ragged, ugly dog swims between them. When they climb out of the water the girls search for sticks that have been washed up on the shore and hammer them like tent pegs into the shiny, white pebbles. When they drape a green sarong over the sticks to make a canopy of shade, the dog crawls under it and they sit with it in the full blaze of the sun. One of the girls takes out a bottle of water and pours it into a bowl for their beast. When she strokes its mangy fur it howls.

The dog is howling.

It is being stroked but it is still howling.

It is howling for nothing.

Life doesn’t get better than this and it is still howling.

It is Pablo’s dog. The Alsatian. The German shepherd. The diving-school dog. I’d recognize his howl anywhere. Pablo’s dog is alive and howling on the Beach of the Dead.

One of the girls takes out a comb and pulls it through her long, wet hair. The rhythmic movement of the comb seems to calm the agitated animal as he laps up water from the bowl. She is combing her hair and he is lapping up water.

The girls turn their attention away from their forlorn beast and lean their backs against his breathing, wet body. They are facing the horizon. A naked man in his late thirties is throwing pebbles into the sea with his young son. When he senses the naked girls are looking at him, he turns away from their beauty and suddenly throws a small rock into the sea. He is displaying his strength to the girls and they are pretending not to notice, but they have noticed him. The man is a father. He is standing with his son and he is forsworn to someone else. Perhaps he has snared a woman as enchanting as these young girls, at ease with their bodies, attending to the tangles in their wet hair. He has already been caught but he wants to be caught again. It is a hunt. The only sort of hunt where the prey wants to be jumped on and mauled by its predators.

The hot rocks. The transparent sea.

The medusas are in abeyance. They have disappeared from the ocean today. Where have they gone? My face is pressed down on the white pebbles. I am naked apart from the glass sliver near my eyebrow. I no longer want to know what anything means.

The heat of the white pebbles warms my belly, the salty sea leaves white streaks on my brown skin. It is paradise, but I am not happy. I am like the dog that used to belong to Pablo. History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.

There is a whole day to kill on the Beach of the Dead.

Dan from Denver called to say he has given the walls of the storeroom in the Coffee House a new coat of white paint. It is as if his minor refurbishment has now made my room his room. He pointed out that I had left some of my anthropology textbooks under the bed. What did I want him to do with my shoes and winter coat, both of them hanging on a hook behind the door? It was a catastrophe. The storeroom was my place. It might be a modest, temporary place, but it was my home. I had made my mark on the walls when I wrote out the Margaret Mead quote, using the five semicolons (;;;;;) that are also used in a text message to represent a wink.