Hot Milk (8 page)

I told him I have not seen my father for eleven years.

He seemed keen to reassure me that should I wish to visit my father, a rota of staff would be assigned to care for Rose every day.

‘If you don’t mind me saying, Sofia Irina, you are a little weak for a young healthy woman. Sometimes you limp, as if you have picked up on your mother’s emotional weather. You could do with more physical strength. This is not a substantial table to lift, yet for you it was an effort. I do not believe you need to do more exercise. It is a matter of having purpose, less apathy. Why not steal a fish from the market to make you bolder? It need not be the biggest fish, but it must not be the smallest either.’

‘Why do I need to be bolder?’

‘That is for you to answer.’ His tone was reassuring, calm and serious, considering he was probably mad. ‘Now, there is something
else I must talk to you about.’ Gómez seemed genuinely upset.

He told me that someone had graffitied a wall of his clinic with blue paint. It had happened this morning. The word painted on the wall was ‘QUACK’. Meaning that he was a charlatan, a con man, not a reputable doctor. He thought it might have involved the friend of mine who came to collect the car. This man Matthew. Nurse Sunshine had given him the documents and keys and not long after he had left they had found the right side of the marble dome defaced with this word.

‘Why would he do that?’

Gómez looked for the handkerchief in his jacket pocket and discovered it was not there. He wiped his lips on the back of his hand and then wiped his hand with a napkin. ‘I am aware he plays golf with an executive for a pharmaceutical company which has been bothering me for some years. They have offered to fund research at my clinic. In return, they would be pleased if I were to buy their medication and prescribe it to my patients.’

Gómez was clearly distressed. He shut his agitated, bright eyes and rested his hands on his knees. ‘My staff will clean the paint off the marble exterior, but I can only think that someone wants to discredit my practice.’

The Mohican boy and his little sister were now dragging the inflated blue boat across the square and down to the beach. Their brother followed them holding the oars.

Was Gómez a quack? Rose had already voiced this thought.

I no longer care about the twenty-five thousand euro we struggled to pay him. He can have my house. If he slaughters a deer and divines a walking cure from its entrails I would be grateful. My mother thinks her body is prey to malevolent forces, so I am not paying him to be complicit with her command on reality.

That evening when I was wandering around the village, I picked two sprigs of jasmine growing on a bush outside the house built
halfway up the hill. A blue rowing boat was moored in the yard with the name ‘Angelita’ painted on its side. I crushed the fragile white petals in my fingers. The scent was like oblivion, a trance. The arch of desert jasmine was a coma zone. I shut my eyes and when I opened them again, Matthew and Ingrid were walking up the hill towards the vintage shop. Ingrid ran towards me and kissed my cheek.

‘We’re here to collect my sewing from the shop,’ she said.

She was wearing an orange dress with feathers sewn around the neckline and matching peep-toe shoes.

Matthew caught up with her. ‘Inge sewed her dress. I don’t think she gets paid enough. I’m going to negotiate a raise for her.’ He tucked his hair behind his ears and laughed when she punched him in the arm. ‘You wouldn’t want to be cursed by Inge. She’s insane when she’s angry. In Berlin she goes three times a week to her kick-boxing class, so don’t mess with her.’

He walked over to the woman who owned the vintage shop, lit her cigarette and turned his back on us.

Ingrid reached out and touched my hair. ‘You have a knot. I am embroidering two dresses with a stitch called a French knot. I have to wind the thread around the needle twice. When I’ve finished, I’m going to sew something for you.’

The feathers trembled against her neck as I pressed the jasmine under her nose.

A motorbike with two teenage boys perched on the seat roared past us.

‘I think you picked those flowers for me, Zoffie.’

The smell of petrol and jasmine made me feel faint.

‘Yes, I picked these flowers for you.’

I stood behind her and slid the petals into the band of her plait. Her neck was soft and warm.

When she turned round to face me, the pupils in her eyes were big and black as the sea glittering in the distance.

Rose stands naked under the shower. Her breasts droop, her belly folds and folds again, her skin is pale and smooth, her silver-blond hair is wet, her eyes are bright, she loves the warm water falling on her body. Her body. What is her body supposed to want and who is it supposed to please and is it ugly or is it something else? She is waiting for withdrawal symptoms from the lack of the three pills that have been deleted from her list of medication. So far they have not arrived. Yet she continues to wait for them like a lover, nervous and excited. Will she be disappointed if they don’t turn up?

Today, Julieta Gómez is going to take a case history of Rose’s body and I have been asked to be present. Where does a case history start?

‘It starts with family,’ Julieta Gómez says. ‘It is a history.’ She has swapped her dove-grey heels for trainers. Her thin chiffon blouse is tucked into tailored trousers which press tight against her hips. She walks Rose to a chair in the physiotherapy room and sits opposite her. ‘Are you ready to make a start?’

Rose nods while Julieta fiddles with a small sleek black box lying between them on the desk. She had reassured my mother that this device was used for all the clinic audio archiving and that it was confidential. So now the volume levels were set. Apparently they would both soon forget that their conversation was being recorded.

Julieta spoke first to give some facts. She noted the date, the time, my mother’s name, age, weight and height.

I sit uneasily in the corner of the physiotherapy room with my laptop on my knees, floating out of time in the most peculiar way. It seems wrong, even unethical, to have asked me to be there but I had agreed to Gómez’s request on the understanding that apart from Tuesdays I would be free for the rest of the treatment. I have to pay for my freedom by listening to my mother’s words.

She is speaking.

Her father had a temper problem. Which can be confused with having high levels of energy. Which can be confused with being manic. He needed no more than two hours of sleep a night. Her mother suffered from her father. Which can be confused with depression. She needed no less than twenty-three hours of sleep. I know this history but I don’t want to be connected to it. I put on my headphones and gaze at YouTube on my shattered screen with all my life in it. Some of that life is the thesis for my abandoned doctorate that is lurking under the digital constellations made in a factory on the outskirts of Shanghai.

Now and again I lift off the headphones.

My mother is giving a history of her present illness. Where does that history start? It moves around in time and merges into past history, childhood illness and all the rest of it. This is not chronological time. Julieta will have to later transcribe Rose’s words and author her case history. I have been trained to do something similar, except I am not a physiotherapist, I am an ethnographer. Julieta will at some stage have to describe the complaint that brought the patient to her clinic. Symptoms and their presentation. It is not one complaint. It is not even six. I overheard twenty complaints but there were more. The past the present and the future are simultaneously present in all these complaints.

Rose’s lips are moving and Julieta is listening but I’m not listening. I have been asked to be present but I am not present. I’m watching a Bowie concert from 1972 on YouTube and it is buffering while he sings. His hair is red like a blood orange, his glitter shirt is
sparkling darkly to trigger associations of space travel and his platform shoes are stacked high to lift him off Earth. Bowie’s painted eyelids are silver spaceships. Girls are screaming and crying and stretching out their hands to touch the Space Oddity strutting the stage. He is a freak, like the medusa. The girls are feral and fertile and freaked out.

We are so pinned down on Earth.

If I had been there, I would have been the loudest screamer.

I am still the loudest screamer.

I want to get away from the kinship structures that are supposed to hold me together. To mess up the story I have been told about myself. To hold the story upside down by its tail.

Rose is coughing. A pattern is emerging where she always coughs when she is about to reveal something awkward and intimate. As if the cough is a plunger unblocking memory. She is giving a case history. Sometimes I can hear a few sentences. I am becoming interested in Julieta Gómez’s interviewing style. Anthropologists might describe it as ‘in-depth interviewing’. My mother would be called ‘the informant’. I notice her questions are minimal but my mother’s emotions are running high. I wish I was somewhere else. Julieta is relaxed but alert, she never seems to pry or push and she is not in a rush to fill in the silences. I have heard tapes where ethnographers have probed too deeply into the informants’ stories and made them silent, but my mother’s lips are mostly moving. ‘Physiotherapy’ does not seem an accurate description of the kind of conversation that is taking place. Perhaps Rose’s memories are in her bones. Is that why bones have been used as divination tools from the beginning of human history?

My mother has a lot of contempt for her body. ‘They should just cut off my toes,’ she says.

Julieta has finished the first case history and is helping her to stand up. ‘Move your left foot.’

‘I can’t. I can’t move my left foot.’

‘You need to do some weight-bearing exercise for strengthening and endurance.’

‘My whole life has been about endurance, Nurse Sunshine. Remember that my first enemy and adversary is endurance.’

‘How do you spell that in English?’

Rose tells her.

Julieta’s hands are now under Rose’s chin as she helps align her head.

Rose is looking for her wheelchair, which seems to have disappeared from the room.

‘Everything hurts. I might as well do away with these useless feet. It would be a relief.’

Julieta looked at me. Her eyelashes were mascaraed into spikes. ‘I think Rose does not stand up straight because she is tall.’

‘No, I hate these feet,’ my mother shouted at her.

Julieta led her back to the wheelchair which had now materialized, carried in by a porter who was trying to read the newspaper he had balanced on the armrest. On the front page was a photograph of Alexis Tsipras, the Prime Minister of Greece. I noticed he had a cold sore on his bottom lip.

‘Cut off my feet, that’s what I want,’ my mother told Julieta.

In reply, Julieta gave the wheelchair a deft kick with her left trainer. ‘What is your point, Rose?’

My mother started to make small circles with her shoulders, moving them forwards then backwards as if limbering up for a wrestling match. ‘There is no point.’

Julieta looked pale and exhausted. She walked over to me and gave me what looked like a business card. ‘Come and see me in my studio, if you like. I live in Carboneras.’

I was still puzzling over this when Gómez entered the room, followed by his white cat, Jodo. The stripe in his hair matched Jodo’s white fur. The cat was plump and serene, purring loudly at her master’s feet.

‘How is your physiotherapy, Mrs Papastergiadis?’

‘Call me Rose.’

‘Ah yes, it is good to let these formalities go.’

‘If you forget things, Mr Gómez, write them down on the back of your hand.’

‘I will,’ he said.

Julieta told her father she had taken the first case history and now she was tired and would like twenty minutes to have a coffee and a pastry. Gómez lifted his hand and smoothed down his vivid white streak. ‘There is no such thing as tired so early in the day, Nurse Sunshine. The young do not rest. The young must be up all night with the lighthouse keepers. The young must argue till dawn.’

He asked her to repeat to him the relevant sections of the Hippocratic oath. She walked to the recording device and turned it off. ‘I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgement and never do any harm to anyone,’ she said gloomily.

‘Very good. If the young are tired, they must improve their lifestyle.’

It seemed as if he was chastising her in some way. Had he somehow seen the kick his daughter had lashed out at the wheelchair?

Gómez’s attention was entirely focused on my mother. He was taking her pulse but from a distance it looked quite intimate, as if they were holding hands. His voice was gentle, even flirtatious. ‘I note you are not using the car yet, Rose.’

‘No. I will need to practise before I drive Sofia on these mountain roads.’

His fingers pressed lightly on her wrist. They were still, but moving. Like a leaf. Like a stone in a stream.

‘You see, Sofia Irina, Mrs Papastergiadis is concerned for your safety.’

‘My daughter is wasting her life,’ Rose replied. ‘Sofia is plump and idle and she is living off her mother at quite an advanced age.’

It is true that I have shape-shifted from thin to various other sizes all my life. My mother’s words are my mirror. My laptop is my veil of shame. I hide in it all the time.

I tucked it under my arm and walked out of the physiotherapy room. Jodo followed me for a while. Her paws were soft and soundless, and then she disappeared. I must have taken a wrong turning because I was lost in a labyrinth of milky marble corridors. I began to feel smothered by the veined walls, as if they were closing in on me. The echo of my heels hitting the marble floor reminded me of that first visit to the clinic, when I heard the amplified echo of Julieta’s heels as she ran away from her father. Now I was running away from my mother. It was a relief to find the glass exit, to at last breathe in the mountain air and stand among the succulents and mimosa trees.