Hot Milk

by Deborah Levy

  I asked her what Gómez thought of her new regime from the hospital.

  ‘He has forbidden me to drive the car.’

  ‘You enjoyed driving the car.’

  ‘I’m enjoying this massage more. You have good hands. If only you could cut your hands off and leave them with me while you go to the beach all day.’

  I waited for Pablo’s dog to howl, but then I remembered I had freed him.

  Big Sea Animal

  ‘You are my inspiration and monster!’

  Ingrid and I are lying on the rocks in the shadow of the caves cut into the cliffs above us. We have wrapped big handfuls of black seaweed in our towels to make pillows. My eyelids are dusted with blue glitter, and I’m wearing the white satin halter-neck dress that Ingrid had rescued from the vintage-shop bargain box. It is stained around the hem, so she reckons it’s too much like hard work to do anything commercial with it. This time she’s embroidered a pattern of geometric blue circles and green lines around the neck. She says it is not abstract because these are the exact markings on the lizard she was trying to hunt before I stood in her way.

  I like the way the satin rests on my hips and slips like a wave between my thighs. My hair is starting to go lighter at the ends and I haven’t brushed it for almost a week. This morning, Ingrid rubbed coconut oil into my curls and on my shins and feet and on my cracked lips.

  ‘Move closer, Zoffie.’

  I move closer. Now her lips are pressed to my ear on our seaweed pillows.

  ‘You are a blue planet with your scary, dark eyes like small animals.’

  I have decided to accept the mistake I’d made when I misread the word Beheaded. It is not for me to censor how she thinks with her sewing needle, even if her thoughts hurt me.

  ‘Zoffie, why do you burn those citronella coils at night?’

  ‘How do you know that’s what I do?’

  ‘Because I can smell it on you.’

  ‘Mosquitos don’t like it,’ I say. ‘But it makes me feel calm.’

  ‘Are you anxious, then, Zoffie?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose I am.’

  ‘That’s what I like about you.’

  Ingrid is slapping her arms because there are horseflies on this particular beach. She usually avoids coming here but has made an exception for me. She tells me about Ingmar, who is doing good business since Pablo’s deranged dog drowned.

  ‘Don’t worry, Zoffie, you gave him the freedom to die.’

  ‘No No No’ (whispered in her ear).

  ‘You did him a favour. He was already dead when he was chained. It was not a life.’

  ‘He was not dead. He wanted to change his life.’

  ‘Animals do not have imagination, Zoffie.’ (Her hand rests on my stomach.)

  ‘He might not have drowned.’

  ‘Have you seen him anywhere?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you heard him howling recently?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shall I change the subject and tell you more about Ingmar?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She lies on her hip, facing me in her pale blue fringed bikini. Every now and again she flicks the jewel that pierces her belly button. ‘Are you ready, Zoffie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘While you were in Athens, the sea police arrived on a special motorboat on our local beach. They were testing the water and concluded there had been a gasoline spill. So they ordered everyone out of the water. Ingmar got annoyed because all the noise was disturbing his customers. He ran out of his tent in his shorts and told the sea police they were wrong, their machines were not accurate, the sea was clear and it was clean. They got annoyed and ordered him to taste the water. So he scooped an empty water bottle into the sea and drank the whole lot and then he agreed that, yes, there had been a gasoline spill. Now he is sick and can’t work and he wants to sue the sea police for forcing him to taste the water.’

  ‘It might be the corpse of Pablo’s dog.’

  ‘Definitely, Zoffie! That’s what it is! Pablo’s drowned dog has contaminated the water.’

  The sun beats down on her long, golden body.

  ‘So you ran away from me and went to visit your father?’

  ‘I didn’t run away from you.’

  ‘Tell me about your baby sister.’

  I describe Evangeline’s soft, dark hair, her olive skin and pierced ears.

  ‘Does she look like you?’

  ‘Yes, we have the same eyes. But she will speak three languages. Greek, Italian, English.’

  Ingrid lies down on her back again and stares at the sky. ‘Shall I tell you about why I am a big, bad sister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She puts her straw hat over her face and starts to talk under the hat so I have to move on to my side and lean on my elbow to hear her. She is speaking in a dull, flat voice, and I have to strain to hear what she is saying.

  There had been an accident. When her sister was three and she was five she had pushed her on a swing in the garden and she pushed too hard, not knowing her strength. Her sister had fallen out of the swing. It was a bad accident. She had broken her arm and cracked three ribs. Ingrid stops talking.

  ‘You were only five. You were a child,’ I say.

  ‘But I was pushing her too high. She was screaming. She wanted to come down, but I kept on pushing.’

  I pick up a white feather lying on the rock and run my finger along its edge.

  ‘Something else happened,’ Ingrid says.

  I feel the panic I always feel when I’m with Ingrid start to rise in my chest.

  ‘My sister fell on her head. When they X-rayed her skull, they found it had cracked and that her brain was damaged.’

  While she speaks, I realize I am holding my breath. My fingers are tearing at the feather.

  Ingrid stands up and her hat falls to the ground. She grabs hold of the fishing net she has brought to the beach and walks across the rocks towards the smaller bay hidden round the corner from the main beach. I can see she wants to be alone, so I pick up her hat and place it on her seaweed pillow.

  Someone is calling my name.

  Julieta Gómez waves to me from the shade of one of the caves. Her hair is wet so she obviously has just been swimming. She is drinking from a bottle of water, tilting it up and taking small sips. When she waves the bottle at me she seems to be inviting me to join her.

  I climb across the rocks, tucking the white satin dress into my bikini to free my legs, and sit by her side.

  ‘It’s my day off,’ she says.

  I gaze at Ingrid who is leaning miserably against a rock in the shallows. Now and again she scoops up medusas with her fishing net.

  Julieta’s teeth are even whiter in the sunshine, her eyelashes long and silky.

  She offers me the bottle, but I shake my head. And then I change my mind. The water is cold and calming. The panic I felt when Ingrid told me about her baby sister is still alive in my body like the invisible insects that vibrate in trees at night.

  ‘You look like a pop star, Sofia,’ says Julieta. ‘All you need is a guitar and a band. My father will play the drums.’

  She laughs so loudly that I manage to sort of smile, but my attention is on Ingrid in the shallow bay. She has her back to me. She looks forlorn and alone.

  Julieta tells me that one of the paramedics at the clinic dropped her off on his motorbike and will pick her up at the end of the day. Her father was overprotective and instructed his staff to check she was wearing a helmet on the motorbike. He made her mad.

  She gestures to her bottle of water. ‘I prefer to drink vodka, because it inflames my father. He hates all drugs. He still mourns for my mother, and so he is offended by the idea that medication can dissolve the pain of his memories and reminiscences.’

  Ingrid is still scooping up jellyfish in her yellow net and turning them out on the sand.

  ‘Medusas,’ I say, as if it is important.

  ‘Yes,’ Julieta replies.‘It is a myth that if yo
u pee on the sting it calms the pain.’

  I jump down from Julieta’s cave and make my way back to the seaweed pillows. Early that morning, I had driven to a supermarket out of town to find Ingrid the German salami she likes, and lettuce and oranges and grapes. When she climbs back to the rock she tells me it is too hot for her on this ugly unsheltered beach. She glances towards the cave where Julieta is sunbathing and says she wants to go home.

  ‘Don’t go, Ingrid.’ My voice is horribly begging.

  I am still shocked about her brain-damaged sister and want to tell her, again, that it wasn’t her fault. She was a child and she made a mistake, but the word Beheaded keeps getting in the way.

  Ingrid pushes past me and starts to pack away her things. ‘I want to work, Zoffie. I need to sew. All I want to do now is to find the right thread and begin.’

  Near us, a six-year-old boy bites into a giant red tomato as if it were a peach. Juice spurts over his chest. He takes another bite and watches me help Ingrid lace her silver Roman sandals up her shins.

  ‘You are so beautiful, Ingrid.’

  She is laughing. She is actually laughing at me.

  ‘I can’t laze around all day like you. I have things to do.’

  Her mobile starts to ring. I know it is Matthew, controlling her, keeping tabs on where she is and that he knows she is with me.

  ‘I’m on the beach, Matty. Can you hear the sea?’

  I reach towards her and grab the phone from her hand.

  Ingrid is shouting at me to give it back, but I am running with it towards the sea and she is running after me, tripping over the laces of her silver sandals, so she takes them off and throws them on the sand. She catches up with me and tugs at the hem of my satin dress. I hear it rip and at the same time I throw the phone into the sea.

  We both watch it float for three seconds with the medusas, pulsating and calm, circling the phone, and then it sinks.

  The sea laps round the hem of my torn satin dress.

  Ingrid wipes the sand out of her eyes. ‘You are obsessed with me,’ she says.

  I am certainly obsessed with her power to confuse me. To lift me out of all my certainties, even though I know she does not respect me. I am intrigued by the way she is served by the men who worship her beauty as I do, and how she likes to repair rips and tears with her needle as if she were doing some sort of surgery on herself.

  Ingrid wades into the sea and grabs my hair with all her strength. ‘Go get my phone, you big animal.’

  She pushes my head under the warm, murky water. When I struggle, she pushes me down again, this time with her knee against my shoulder. She keeps on pushing, just as she had pushed her sister on the swing. It is as if she is doing it all over again, repeating that childhood accident, except this time it is with me. Someone else is in the water now. I can feel an arm and then two arms circling my waist, trying to lift me up as Ingrid pushes me down. A wave folds over my head and knocks me over. When I find my balance and surface, Julieta Gómez is in the sea treading water by my side, wringing out her long, wet hair. We can both hear a woman screaming. Her high-pitched yelps are coming from the direction of the small bay by the rocks. Ingrid is hopping on the sand, clutching her right foot. She has stepped on the pile of medusas she collected in her net and then turned out on the sand.

  It makes me feel less angry, as if somehow I have transferred the toxin of my rage into her foot.

  Julieta looks at me, and then she laughs. ‘Your boundaries are made from sand, Sofia.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know that.’

  A seagull drifts with us in the waves.

  I return to the rocks and begin to pack up my towel. I do not want Ingrid to leave the beach without me. If anything, I find her more compelling now. Memory is my subject. Ingrid was repeating a traumatic memory from the past and playing it out with me because she knows my boundaries are made of sand.

  ‘Zoffie, you are unruly and chaotic, you are in debt and your beach house is untidy. Now you have thrown my phone into the sea. I don’t know what to do. I’m going to lose work.’

  ‘Your clients will have to speak to the fish.’

  I slip off the drenched satin dress and start to dry my thighs. The small boy is still eating his giant tomato. He gazes at me for a few seconds and then he runs away.

  ‘You have frightened him, Zoffie, because your face is blue. Your eye shadow is dripping down your cheeks and you look like a sea monster.’ She has found the salami and is tearing off the rind. ‘I don’t want to stay here with the horseflies and medusas.’ She stuffs the meat into her mouth and glances up at the caves. ‘And, anyway, I don’t like your friends.’

  Julieta waves at me and I wave back.

  Ingrid peers at the raised welts on her stung foot. Her silver sandals are floating in the shallow end of the bay but she is too preoccupied with her stings to notice. ‘If you come to my house, you can plant the olive trees while I work and then we can go for a walk when it’s cooler.’

  It is an invitation. It sounds like the sort of plans that lovers make together.

  Ingrid squats down on the rock and pees on her stung foot.

  ‘That’s a myth,’ I said.

  ‘What is a myth?’

  That is a big question. It would be true to say that I was probably obsessed with it.

  The first thing Ingrid did when we arrived at her summer house was look for her reels of thread and then she tipped the basket of vintage-shop clothes on to the floor. The needle between her fingers was like a weapon, she sewed as if she were attacking the cloth.

  ‘You are so indolent, Zoffie! You are here to plant the olive trees. First you have to dig the planting holes.’

  I don’t know how to plant a tree. There are so many things I don’t know how to do, but I do know how to keep a secret. Matthew and Julieta were on my mind as I gazed at the house Matthew and Ingrid had made together in Spain. One of the things they had made was an exhibition of their kinship structure. They had pinned up photographs on a cork noticeboard to display their respective families. Matthew’s mother and father and Ingrid’s father and what looked like Matthew’s two brothers and Ingrid’s brother or cousin. There were no photographs of her sister. She saw me looking for someone who wasn’t there while she pierced the cloth with her needle.

  ‘Can she be happy, Zoffie, without a mind?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know who.’

  ‘Do you mean Hannah?’

  Ingrid looked startled, as if she had forgotten she had named her sister that night she gave me the silk top with Beheaded embroidered in blue thread. She wanted to forget, but her needle had remembered for her. I am not idle. And I am not an impartial researcher because I have become involved with my informant.

  ‘Is her mind still like a leaf, Zoffie?’

  ‘A leaf is never still.’

  ‘Does she remember?’

  ‘A mind is never still.’

  ‘Sometimes I just want to blow myself up,’ Ingrid whispered.

  I knelt at her feet and put my arms around her waist.

  She reached for my hair and placed a strand between her lips. ‘Do you still like me, Zoffie?’

  Someone was tapping at the window.

  ‘Everything is dark until you say yes.’

  I said nothing. Nothing at all.

  ‘It is still dark, Zoffie. The whole world is dark.’ She peered over my head in the direction of the tapping. ‘It is Leonardo,’ she said, as if the light had suddenly come back again.

  I never thought I would be pleased to see Leonardo again, but his arrival had saved me from answering her question. Ingrid limped slightly as she walked past me towards the front door. Her left foot was still smarting from the stings but she paid no attention to them. Stings were only fascinating to her if they were on my body. She seemed lit up by Leonardo’s arrival and shouted, ‘Bravo!’ when she saw he was clasping a pair of brown leather riding boots to his chest. He nodded curtly at me. Yes, I know you ar
e here. It is unfortunate. You are always here when I am here.

  The wind rattled the windows while Ingrid slipped her feet into the boots. She stuck her thumbs inside the leather and wriggled and pulled while we watched her. The boots came to just under her knees. She straightened her back, pushing her breasts forward, her head held high, while Leonardo rummaged in his leather bag and took out a helmet. She looked mean and victorious, a girl warrior fighting with the men. Who are her enemies? Am I on the list? What is she fighting for?

  Leonardo stepped forward like a lustful slave. ‘You will need this helmet when you ride my horse.’

  He gently placed it over her head, tucking in her two long plaits, his fingers fumbling with the clasp under her chin while she stood steady and silent. And then she kissed him formally on the cheek.

  ‘In return, I would like to give you an olive tree,’ she said.

  She strode into the garden in her new boots and helmet and returned with a small sapling.

  ‘I have already planted four, Zoffie is going to plant two and the seventh is for you.’

  Leonardo obviously felt that he was required to praise it. ‘It is healthy,’ he said gloomily.

  Ingrid opened the fridge and took out two bottles of beer. She gave one to me and then slipped her hands into her back pocket, took out an opener and popped the lid off the other one for Leonardo. He lifted the cold bottle to his lips and took a gulp while I stood untended to, like the tree, my beer unopened. Ingrid had obviously broken through the glass ceiling of Leonardo’s approval. I asked her for the opener. She took the bottle from me and cracked off the lid in one clean movement. I was beginning to understand Ingrid Bauer. She was always pushing me to the edge in one way or another. My boundaries were made from sand so she reckoned she could push them over, and I let her. I gave my unspoken consent because I want to know what’s going to happen next, even if it’s not to my advantage. Am I self-destructive, or pathetically passive, or reckless, or just experimental, or am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?

  There was something about Ingrid Bauer that touched me very deeply. It was to do with the boots and the helmet. They offered her the chance to gallop out of the story she had told herself about being a big, bad sister, but I suspected she was stuck in it. Perhaps she hadn’t finished with it yet. I passed her my bottle of beer. She took it from me, crazed with power, loving her boots and helmet and, watched by foolish Leonardo, put it to her lips, downing the whole bottle in one. He shouted, ‘Whoooa!’ as if he were taming a wild horse, lifted the bottle to his lips and did not stop until he had finished his too. Ingrid turned to me, her slanted green eyes blazing, the eyes she had told me could see better in the dark than in the daylight. ‘Leonardo is going to teach me how to ride his Andalusian.’