Hot Milk (25 page)

The glass doors of the dome opened soundlessly as I stepped into this marble tomb, not understanding why I was here or what I hoped to find. A young male doctor leaned against a pillar with his back to me while he prodded his phone. The lighting was dim like twilight. I made my way to Gómez’s consulting room with no idea if he would be there or what to do if he was, but there was no other place for me to go. I knocked on the oak-panelled door. The noise of my knuckles on the wood made a deep, resonant sound, in contrast to the marble, on which anything that was dropped would shatter. There was no answer so I pushed the heavy door with my shoulder and it opened. It was dark in the room. The computer was switched off, the blinds were down and Gómez’s chair was empty. Yet I could sense someone was there. The room smelt odd, like liver or blood, a dark, visceral
smell. I looked down at the floor. Gómez was lying on his stomach in the far corner of the room, peering into a cardboard box. I could see the soles of his shoes and his spectacles, which were perched on top of his silver hair. He turned his head to see who was there and looked startled to see it was me. He put his finger to his lips and beckoned me to walk further into the room. I tiptoed towards the box and knelt down next to him. Jodo had birthed her kittens. Three tiny, wet, wrinkled creatures were suckling their mother. She lay outstretched on her side, now and again licking dried blood off their fur.

Gómez moved closer to my ear. ‘You see how their eyes are closed? They can smell her, though they cannot yet see her. Each has his favorite teat. The strongest, this white one here, is kneading his paws against his mama to stimulate the flow of her milk.’

Jodo looked anxiously at Gómez as he lightly stroked the fur between her ears with his finger.

‘She’s licking this one here to keep him warm. See how he is the weakest of the litter? When she licks the weakling she puts her scent on him.’

I told him I had to speak to him urgently. Right now.

He shook his head. ‘This is not the right time. You have to have an appointment, Sofia. And you are talking too loudly and scaring my animals.’

I started to sob. ‘I think I have killed my mother.’

He had been stroking Jodo. Now, his finger paused. ‘And how have you done that?’

‘I left her in the road. She can’t walk.’

His finger resumed stroking the white fur.

‘How do you know she can’t walk?’

‘She can. But she can’t.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘She can’t walk fast.’

‘How do you know she can’t walk fast? She is not old.’

‘Not fast enough.’

‘But she can walk?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘If you left her in the road, then you know she can walk.’

We were whispering over the kittens, which were suckling and pummelling, licking and pushing.

‘Your mother will stand up and walk to the side of the road.’

‘What if the lorry doesn’t stop?’

‘What lorry?’

‘There was a lorry in the distance.’

‘In the distance?’

‘Yes. It was getting closer.’

‘But it was in the distance?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then she will walk away from the lorry.’

My tears dripped over the kittens.

Gómez moved me away from the box.

I sat on the floor with my arms around my knees. ‘What is wrong with my mother?’

‘You are disturbing Jodo.’

He helped me to my feet and walked me briskly out of his consulting room. ‘I have refunded your fee. Now I must get on with watering my garden and attending to my animals.’ He looked at his watch. ‘But my question is this. What is wrong with you?’

‘I don’t know if my mother is dead or alive.’

‘Yes. That is what all the children of mournful mothers fear. They ask themselves this question every day. Why is she dead when she is alive? You have left your mother in the middle of the road. Perhaps she will accept your challenge to save her own life. It is her life. They are her legs. If she wants to live, she will walk out of danger. But you will have to accept her decision.’

It had never occurred to me that she might not want to live.

‘Your confusion is wilful,’ he said. ‘You are finding a home in
ignorance. I told you I was no longer interested in the walking problem. Pay attention, please.’

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.

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First published by Hamish Hamilton 2016

First U.S. edition 2016

© Deborah Levy, 2016

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ISBN:     HB:        978-1-62040-669-4

               ePub:      978-1-62040-671-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levy, Deborah

Hot milk : a novel / Deborah Levy.

p.cm.

ISBN 978-1-62040-669-4 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-62040-671-7 (ebook)

Parent and adult child—Fiction. | Mothers and daughters—Fiction. | Self-realization in women—Fiction. | Self-actualization (Psychology) in women—Fiction.

LCC PR6062.E9255 H68 2016 (print) | LCC PR6062.E9255 (ebook)

DDC 823/.914—dc23

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