Hot Milk (23 page)

Mr James threw up his golf ball and caught it again.

‘So, please. How can I help you?' Gómez's tone was polite but abrupt.

Mr James from Los Angeles leaned forward and attempted to make eye contact with my mother. The first difficulty he had to overcome was pronouncing her surname. He came up with something that was not, strictly speaking, the name of the person he was referring to. ‘I believe that you were admitted into the clinic for two nights. Could you tell us more about this?'

‘I was dehydrated,' Rose said solemnly.

‘Indeed.' Gómez folded his pinstriped arms. ‘And then she was hydrated with intravenous saline. This is at the more basic end of what we do here at the Gómez Clinic. You are right to be concerned about hydration. My patient cannot easily swallow water, which means she cannot easily swallow her medication.'

Mr James nodded and turned to Rose. ‘But I understand that you have been taken off all medication?'

‘I am back on track now. The doctor at the hospital in Almería was concerned, too.'

Julieta took a step forward. ‘Good morning, gentlemen.' She glanced at her father.

Gómez nodded, as if some secret message had been transmitted between them. They both seemed preoccupied and on edge.

‘The treatment is proceeding,' Julieta said. ‘It is in progress. We have work to do. We wish to conclude this meeting as soon as possible and talk to Mrs Papastergiadis alone.'

‘The treatment is over,' my mother said. ‘It is not proceeding. I have made other medical arrangements for when I return to London.'

Señor Covarrubias flapped his tie. He spoke perfect English and pronounced my mother's surname with ease. He asked her to list her current medication, which she did at length, while Mr James ticked the questionnaire on his clipboard.

When Rose asked him for some information about one of her new pills, Mr James's tone was reassuring, perhaps even excited. He told her in a whisper that the doctor in Almería was a colleague and the
prescription he had given her was to help erase negative internal conversations that can be harmful to the patient.

‘What sort of conversations?' Rose leaned forward to hear him better.

‘Self-blaming or persecutory.' Mr James seemed to suggest there were other examples but the two he had just mentioned were enough to be getting on with.

‘It erases those sorts of conversations?'

‘Quietens,' he said.

‘Quietens,' she repeated.

‘I think in English you say “hushes”.' Señor Covarrubias seemed keen to get back to his conversation with my mother. His phone was vibrating in his pocket.

‘In the first instance,' he said, ‘I want to ask if your consultant has at any time presented you with a progress plan in regard to how your treatment is advancing and what has been achieved?'

‘I have not seen a progress plan as such,' Rose said.

‘Apologies for taking up your time, Mrs Papastergiadis, but I think we have common goals. We want to know if the treatment so far has helped you become more effective in your life.'

Rose considered the question. It seemed to have knocked her off track. She had become pale and her shoulders were trembling. She sat very still, silent and brooding. She lifted her hand and sort of waved her fingers at me. I don't know what she was attempting to convey but it reminded me of the child in the broken house near the airport who had waved her spoon at the car. Perhaps it meant go away.

Or hello. Or help.

‘Could you repeat the question?'

Julieta Gómez stepped in. ‘You do not have to answer, Rose. It is your choice.'

Rose stared into Julieta's kind, clear eyes. ‘Well, I get up in the morning. I get dressed. I do my hair.'

The men in suits ticked something on their questionnaires as she spoke.

‘As a child I ran for miles every day. Jumped over hedges and ditches. I could plait grass and make a whistle. But now I'm a poor owd horse.'

Señor Covarrubias looked up from his clipboard. ‘Owd?'

‘It's an old word for “old”,' she explained.

Mr James took over from his colleague. ‘We have called this meeting today because we are not convinced you are in safe hands.'

Gómez cleared his throat. ‘Please keep in mind, gentlemen, that so far my patient has been tested for evidence of a stroke, spinal-cord injury, nerve compression, nerve entrapment, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, motor neurone disease and spinal arthritis. We are yet to discuss the results of a recent endoscopy.'

While Mr James listened to Gómez, he was nervously fiddling with the golf ball. He was frowning as if Gómez were speaking a foreign language, which he was, because he was speaking in English in Spain even though Mr James, who was from Southern California, spoke fluent Spanish.

He threw the golf ball up in the air and it bounced against the shelf above his head.

It was the smallest sound of something shattering, not exactly a tinkle so much as a sharp, clean break. It made the executives jump. They turned around to look at the monkey, its small head fringed with white fur, its fierce, alarmed eyebrows, the long tail held high as if it was about to chirp and chitter,
kek kek kek kek
.

‘I apologize,' Mr James said. ‘I had no idea it was there.'

From where I was standing, it looked as if the electrocuted monkey was levitating above their heads. Its dead, bright eyes gazed at the senior consultants from Europe and North America. They were the new Great White Hunters with their teams of porters, tent attendants, armed guards and gun bearers, enslaving the people and shooting for ivory. The ivory was my mother. Mr James couldn't even pronounce
her name, yet she had bartered with him and exchanged her legs for his stimulants. He had won the land.

Señor Covarrubias leaned forward. ‘Do you have concerns you would like to share with us, Sofia?'

The only sound in the room was the ticking of Rose's gangster watch, its circle of fake diamonds sparkling on her thin wrist.

‘I don't know if my mother is dead or alive,' I said.

Julieta stared at the wall as if she had disowned me.

‘Please continue, Sofia. Don't feel you have to use jargon.' Mr James smiled encouragingly.

Rose thumped her hand on the side of her wheelchair. ‘Jargon is not a problem for my daughter. She has a first-class degree.'

She turned to me and spoke in Greek. It was a long time since she had done that. My mother had taught me Greek from about the age of three. We rarely spoke it at home, probably to punish my father. I had worked very hard to erase a whole language, yet it would not hush itself. I wanted to cut off its tongue but it had been in conversation with me every day since my father had left the family house. The odd thing was that she was speaking Greek to make a joke that referred to a stereotype about being born in Yorkshire. The only sentence she spoke in English was ‘And I don't own a whippet either.'

I smiled and she laughed. When Julieta glanced at us, she looked anguished. Perhaps the rare complicity she observed between mother and daughter had lifted her own lost mother out of her coffin and placed her somewhere in the room with us. Rose and I looked happier than we actually were. I had spoken freely but my mother had stopped my words with a joke. She had banged her fist, insisting I did not have a problem, and she had made it sound like a compliment.

All the same, Mr James seemed confused and dejected. We had veered way off track. There had been a detour, a diversion, a delay. Rose might be in a wheelchair, but she had been strolling through the
alphabet, lingering in the lonely spaces between alpha and omega, and she had come up with words like ‘owd' and ‘whippet'. They did not fit the story he was making with his questionnaire which sat like The Truth on his lap.

He lifted up his hand and held it in front of his mouth while he whispered to Señor Covarrubias, who nodded and then probed his pocket for his phone. I could see he had received seventy-three emails while he had been ticking and circling with his ballpoint.

‘The Gómez Clinic has given me hope.' My voice trembled, but I think I meant it.

Gómez swiftly interrupted me and began to speak in Spanish to the senior executives. It was a long conversation. Now and again, Julieta interrupted. Her tone was efficient, even harsh, but I observed that her emotions were running high. Her left hand was touching her throat. When she raised her voice her father shook his finger at her.

The electrocuted vervet gazed at us all.

Mr James stood up. ‘It has been a pleasure to meet you,' he said, lowering his silver head in the direction of my mother's lame feet.

Señor Covarrubias kissed Rose's hand. His nose was slightly flattened, as if he had been in a fight.

‘Profunda tristeza,' he said in a deep, tired voice. He dipped his plump fingers into his pocket and took out his car keys with new energy, as if he wanted nothing more than to run to his white limousine parked in the grounds of the clinic and break the speed limit to Barcelona.

After they had left Gómez asked me to leave the room. ‘I wish to speak to my patient in private,' he said.

Rose shook her bent arthritic finger at her solemn, unsmiling doctor. ‘Mr Gómez, your stuffed primate's glass cage shattered very near my daughter's head. She has a small glass splinter near her eyebrow. Please put a cloth over the cage in future.'

As I made my way to the door, I thought I saw the light go out of my mother. At the same time, I saw her beauty come in. Her cheekbones, her soft skin – she was suddenly vivid, as if she had become herself.

All is calm. All is quiet.

The sun is rising.

A black column of smoke is coiling in the sky. There has been an explosion somewhere far away.

I set off on a hike in the mountains as Gómez had advised, surrendering to the harsh landscape, discovering its detail, the perfect form of the small succulents growing between rocks, the lustre of their skin, their geometry and fleshiness. A bottle of water was stashed in my rucksack, headphones clamped over my ears as I listened to an opera,
Akhnaten
, by Philip Glass. I wanted big music like fire to burn away the random terror that was crawling under my skin. Lizards flashed under my trainers as I walked away from the black smoke in the sky and into the arid valley, heading in the direction of what looked like the ruins of an ancient Arabian castle. After about an hour I stopped to rest in their shade and look for a trace of the path that would take me back to the beach.

She was waiting for me in the distance.

Ingrid sat astride the Andalusian in her helmet and boots. High in the dizzying sky an eagle spread its wings and circled the horse. The delirium of the music thundered through my headphones as she galloped towards me. Her upper arms were muscled, her long hair braided, she gripped the horse with her thighs and the sea glittered below the mountains.

At first I was watching passively, as if I were staring out of a train window at the disappearing landscape, but as she got nearer I became aware of how fast she was riding. I knew that Ingrid played her own strength right to the edge. She took risks and made calculations but sometimes it didn’t work out. She had beheaded her sister and she was coming to get me too.

I fell to the ground as if I had been shot, lying flat on my stomach with my hands over my head, the blood in my own body pushing and pulsing like a dark river while the sound of hooves pounded in my ears. The sun turned to shade as the horse jumped over me. The heat of its body was fierce and feral as my heartbeat hammered into the warm earth beneath me.

Ingrid had merged with the sky as she sat high on her kingly horse. My headphones and iPod were lying in a tangle between clumps of thistles and the sunbaked stones but the music was still playing. Its swell and might were now a trickle of tinny sound merging with the bigger sound of the Andalusian’s high cries and the smaller cries of invisible desert animals.

‘Zoffie, why are you lying on the ground like a cowboy?’

She was pulling at the reins. I realized she had stopped at a distance away from me. I had panicked and flung myself on to the dust and thistles but it had been my own hands that had ripped the headphones off my head.

‘Did you really think I was going to run you over with my horse?’

I looked up into the ancient, black, glassy eyes of the Andalusian while Ingrid shouted above it, ‘Do you think I am a murderer, Zoffie?’

It is true that I believed she would break my bones with Leonardo’s horse.

I must have skinned my knees when I fell to the ground because when I eventually stood up my jeans were ripped.

I limped across the thistles and stones towards the horse.

‘Have you written me off, Zoffie?’

‘No.’

‘Then give me your shirt.’

Standing on tiptoes, I lifted my sweat-soaked shirt over my head and placed it in Ingrid’s outstretched hand.

The sun lashed my shoulders.

‘Why do you want my shirt?’

She held on to my hand and pulled me closer. ‘I gave you a gift, but you gave me nothing back in return. It’s hard to embroider silk. It’s not easy. It slips away. I sewed your name with a thread called August Blue.’ She was still gripping my hand while she worked the reins, as if she was nervous that I would slip away, too.

I had broken the rules of exchange. She had given and I had taken, but I had not reciprocated.

A gift like love is never free.

August Blue.

Blue is my fear of failing and falling and feeling and blue is the August sky above us in Almería. Her helmet has slipped over her eyes. Blue are her tears and the struggle to live in all the dimensions between forgetting and remembering.

She let go of my hand and nudged the horse with her knees.

I watched her adjust her helmet and disappear into the dust with my shirt tucked into the saddle. And then I untangled my headphones from the thistles and put them over my ears, took out my bottle of water which was now hot, and drained the lot.