Deborah Levy - Hot Milk

He was the shaman of the village. He would show me the way. ‘Run up six flights of stairs before you return home,’ he said.

Gómez is useless. He doesn’t know anything. Run up six flights of stairs. It’s the sort of thing my grandmother used to say when she wanted to get rid of me.

‘We have to mourn our dead, but we cannot let them take over our life.’

Those were his last words. He walked back into the consulting room and closed the door. It seemed like a final goodbye. As if he were saying, Job done . Gómez had trance-danced into the mind of the afflicted and with his daughter’s help put some sort of cure in motion, yet I was not sure if it was my mother’s mind or my own that was afflicted.

Rose stood by the window of our beach apartment, looking out at the silver sea. The beach was more or less empty. A few teenagers lay barefoot on the sand, laughing under the night stars.

My mother is so tall.

‘Good evening, Fia.’ Her voice was calm and dangerous.

I sat down and watched her standing up. She towered over me. It was interesting to see my mother vertical. Like something uncoiled. In my strange state of mind, I thought she might be a ghost. That she had died and come back as a new sort of woman. A tall woman with energy and focus, a woman whose attention was not on unwrapping a pill. She told me years ago that I must write Milky Way like this — γαλαξίας κύκλος — and that Aristotle gazed up at the milky circle in Chalcidice, thirty-four miles east of modern-day Thessaloniki, where my father was born. Yet she never spoke about the stars she gazed upon when she was seven years old in the village of Warter in East Yorkshire, four miles from Pocklington. Did she lie on her back in the Yorkshire Wolds among the snowdrops and make big plans for her life?

I think she did. Where is she mapped in the haunted sky?

‘Jodo has had her kittens,’ I said.

‘How many?’

‘Three.’

‘Ah. I take it the mother is in good health after the birth?’

I noted she had not asked after the babies.

‘I’d like a glass of water,’ I said.

She thought about this. ‘Say “please”.’

‘Please.’

I watched her walk into the kitchen, heard the fridge open, the sound of liquid being poured into a glass. She carried the water towards me.

I had been waiting on her all my life. I was the waitress. Waiting on her and waiting for her. What was I waiting for? Waiting for her to step into her self or step out of her invalid self. Waiting for her to take the voyage out of her gloom, to buy a ticket to a vital life. With an extra ticket for me. Yes, I had been waiting all my life for her to reserve a seat for me.

‘Cheers.’ I raised my glass.

The door to the concrete terrace on the beach opened of its own accord. A breeze filled the room. A warm desert breeze carrying with it the deep, salt smell of seaweed and hot sand. The waves were crashing on the beach, the table on the terrace had my laptop resting on it, the night stars made in China were open under the real night stars in Spain. All summer, I had been moonwalking in the digital Milky Way. It’s calm there. But I am not calm. My mind is like the edge of motorways where foxes eat the owls at night. In the starfields, with their faintly glowing paths running across the screen, I have been making footprints in the dust and glitter of the virtual universe. It never occurred to me that, like the medusa, technology stares back and that its gaze might have petrified me, made me fearful to come down, down to Earth, where all the hard stuff happens, down to the check-out tills and the barcodes and the too many words for profit and the not enough words for pain.

‘I went for a walk today,’ my mother said. ‘I was too overwhelmed to share the good news with you.’

‘Yes. You have never shared good news with me.’

‘I did not want to raise your hopes.’

‘You have never wanted to raise my hopes.’

‘Do you want to know about the lorry driver who gave me a lift home?’

‘No. I don’t want to know anything about him.’

‘It was a her. The driver was a her.’

Rose put down her glass of water and walked towards me. ‘Give up the driving without a licence, Sofia. It was night, and your lights were not switched on. I was in fear for your life. I can’t imagine you as a driver.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but you are a driver. You are head of your household. You need to start doing things that are to your advantage.’

‘I will try.’

She sat next to me on the hard, green sofa of our rented apartment without any effort at all. ‘I will try to do things that are to my advantage, but in the meanwhile I can imagine you finishing your doctorate in America.’

And what did I imagine for her?

I imagine that she is wearing smart shoes with straps over her ankles. She is pointing to her diamond bling watch, inviting me to walk faster so we will not be late for the cinema. She has booked the tickets. Yes, she has chosen our seats. Walk faster, Sofia, faster (she points to her watch), I don’t want to miss the trailers.

‘There is something else, Sofia.’

‘Gómez has already told me.’

‘What did he tell you?’

‘That he’s refunding the money.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘He is a very good doctor. He doesn’t have to do that.’

She continued talking. At first I thought she was saying Sophocles. She repeated Sophocles about three times. I realized she was saying ‘oesophageal’. Oesophageal.

And then she told me the results of the endoscopy.

A long time passed. Her gangster watch ticking. The waves breaking on the sand.

I rested my head on her shoulder. ‘It can’t be true, Mum.’ Is it easier to surrender to death than to life?

I turned to look at her.

She held my gaze for a long time. Her eyes were dry.

‘You have such a blatant stare,’ she said, ‘but I have watched you as closely as you have watched me. It’s what mothers do. We watch our children. We know our gaze is powerful so we pretend not to look.’

The tide was coming in with all the medusas floating in its turbulence. The tendrils of the jellyfish in limbo, like something cut loose, a placenta, a parachute, a refugee severed from its place of origin.