Deborah Levy - Hot Milk

I waded into the sea up to my belly button, which is the oldest human scar, and discovered I was crying. My mother had finally succeeded in breaking me. I knelt down in the sea, my hands covering my eyes like they did when I wept as a child and imagined that no one could see me. No one at all. I had wanted to be unseen and misunderstood. If anyone had asked, I wouldn’t have known where to begin and where to end. After a while, I turned round to gaze at the space between one cliff and the other, and I saw her.

I saw Her.

A 64-year-old woman in a dress with a pattern of sunflowers printed across the skirt was walking along the shore. She held a hat in her left hand. Yes, it was her and she was walking. At first I thought she was a mirage because I had been in the desert sun all day, a hallucination or a vision or a long-held wish. She was oblivious to everyone and she did not see me. I was about to run to her, run to my mother and throw my arms around her, but she looked content with her own company as she walked the length of the beach. She had the resolve of someone who was wrestling with something impossible in her thoughts, reaching for something she could not grasp. The only way not to be seen by her was to get back into the sea. I waded in again and this time I swam far out with my back to her lively legs. When I eventually turned round to face the shore, Rose Papastergiadis was still walking. A woman in early old age in a pretty dress and a hat taking a stroll barefoot in the sand.

She made her way towards the shower on the wooden ramp where tourists wash the sand off their feet. That is what she was doing, too. Showering her feet that were still attached to her body. I stayed in the water until the sun set and when I swam back to shore the medusas were out in full. I kept on swimming in my jeans and this time I saw a crowd of them, a congregation of medusas, and I sliced through them with my arms, my head under water, kicking my way through the Mediterranean. I was stung on my belly and breasts, but it wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to me. When I got out of the water I searched for my mother’s footprints in the sand. There and there. I picked up a stick and drew a rectangle around the first two prints impressed and preserved in Almería, southern Spain. It was a trail of the footprints of Rose Papastergiadis.

Her toes are spread out, her feet are long because she is tall, perhaps over five foot eleven, she is a bi-ped and there is evidence that she walked in a leisurely fashion, These prints were a record of everything that she is; the first daughter in her family to get herself into university; the first to marry a foreigner and cross the cold, grey Channel to the luminous, warm waters of the Aegean; the first to struggle with a new alphabet; the first to give up the god her mother prayed to and birth a daughter who was as dark as she was fair, short as she was tall; the first to bring up a child on her own. There she is, sixty-four years old, showering the sand off her feet. The tide would take away these footprints inscribed in the wet, firm sand before the surgeon could set upon them.

I am afraid of her and afraid for her.

What if she’s not joking about amputation? If she really did that, if she severed her feet, how am I to keep her whole and alive? How can I protect her, and how can I protect myself from her? I have been staring at Rose Papastergiadis from the day I was born, taking care to appear less alert than I am.

You are always so far away, Sofia.

No. I am always too close.

I must never look at her defeat with all I know, because I will turn it to stone with my disdain and my sorrow.

The tide was coming in. As I walked along the beach I saw the girl who was always lying in the sand while her sisters buried her legs to make a mermaid’s tail. They were replacing her legs with a stump. I walked over to the girl and dug my hands into the sand until I found her wrists, and with all my strength I pulled her out of her sandy grave. Her sisters screamed and ran to their mother who was sitting a few deckchairs away, smoking a cigarette. She threw it to the sand and ran towards me, the heavy gold chain around her neck swaying from right to left as she cursed me. I ran away fast, fast, faster than a lizard flashing through rocks, until I reached the injury hut.

The yellow medusa flag was flying high. Juan told me the district council was worried that tourists would stop coming to the beach. They were busy making a strategy called ‘Plan Medusa’, advising bathers ‘to beware of the stinging menace in the shallows’. He laughed and then bit into a juicy, red apple. ‘You know,’ he said, walking away from me, ‘the infestation of the jellyfish is due to the decline of natural predators such as the turtle and the tuna, changes in global temperature and rainfall.’ He was pacing up and down in his sandals. He smelt of the sea. His beard was glossy. He was slim and brown and he was enjoying his crisp, fresh apple. He walked towards me and moved a few strands of hair away from my eyes. His fingers were wet from the juice of the apple. He was saying something to me in Spanish.

‘I appear to be softer than you are, and you appear to be harder than I am. Do you think this is true, Sofia?’

My mother was sitting in the chair facing the wall in her sunflower dress. Her slippers were back on her feet and the straw hat lay on the floor, as if she had tossed it there in anger.

‘Is that you?’

‘Yes, it is me.’

I waited for her to tell me the good news.

Her eyes were firmly fixed on the wall.

It is as if her legs are her co-conspirators, always whispering together and plotting. She had put on the slippers to hide her lively feet from me.

‘Get me some water, Sofia.’

Agua con gas, agua sin gas . Which shall I choose?

I opened the fridge and laid my cheek against the door. She had betrayed me. In all these years, I had never lost hope for her recovery, but she did not want to give me hope. I poured her a glass of wrong water and wondered if she might have an appetite after her walk. I found a soft banana and mashed it with milk to give her energy to walk again. And again. And again. She took the plate as a perfectly formed female martyr suffering for an unfathomable cause would take it. Eyes lowered. Lips pinched. Limp hands.

She was hungry.

‘You are sunburnt and covered in sand,’ she said.

‘Yes, it was a great day. It was magnificent. What did you do?’

‘Nothing. Nothing, as usual. What is there to do?’

‘Well, if you’re bored you could cut off your feet.’ I shook out the sand and seaweed in my knotted, wet hair. ‘I’ve heard about your amputation plan. You remind me of a beggar who breaks a leg so people will give her money.’

After that she turned on me. It was a hymn of violence and she sang it to me like a full-throated, evil nightingale.

My unbrushed hair repulsed her. I had wasted my intelligence. I suffered from an excess of emotion, while she was restrained and stoic.

Her blue eyes were sad and stricken.

I grasped her hand to comfort her. It was papery and numb.

She told me she was afraid to sleep.

She freed her hand and she started to shout. It was as if a match had been carelessly dropped into a pool of petroleum. She was insatiable as she continued to insult everyone and anything that came to her mind. Her breathing quickened, her cheeks were flushed, her voice was high and trembling. What does rage look like? It looks like my mother’s lame legs.

When I crept to the bathroom, I could still hear the hate sentences pouring out of her. She was electrocuting me with her words. She was the electric pylon and I was the vervet slumped on the ground, quivering but still breathing. I showered and felt the medusa stings throb under the warm water. They were inciting me to do something monstrous but I wasn’t yet sure what this might be. Sunstroked, blistered and bruised, I was preparing for it. I combed my hair and lined my eyelids with an extra flick at the sides. I was not too sure what I was getting dressed up for, but I knew it was for something big. Ingrid and her horse were still in my mind. She had given me an idea that had probably always lurked inside me anyway. I could hear Rose shouting for more milk to be mixed into her banana.