‘You are always so far away, Sofia.’
It might be my father. He has come to look after my mother and give me a break. It might be a refugee who has swum to shore from North Africa. I will give her a home for the night. I would. I think I would do that.
‘Is there water in the fridge, Sofia?’
I am thinking about the signs on the doors of toilets in public places that tell us who we are.
Gentlemen Ladies
Hommes Femmes
Herren Damen
Signori Signore
Caballeros Señoras
Are we all of us lurking in each other’s sign?
‘Get me water, Sofia.’
I am thinking about the way Ingrid held her phone out towards the waves. I’m on the beach, Matty. Can you hear the sea?
While she spoke to her boyfriend, she had placed her foot on the inside of my right thigh, just above my knee.
She had thrown her men’s shoes on to the seaweed, where they swayed like small boats as the tide came in. The salty mineral smell of the dark, free-floating weed was enticing and intense.
I’m on the beach, Matty. Can you hear the sea?
The sea with all the medusas floating in it.
The sea that had soaked her blue velvet shorts.
I continue to unknot the old knots in my mother’s laces and make new knots. There is definitely someone tapping at the windows. This time it’s not so much a tap as a hard knock. I move my mother’s feet from my lap and walk to the door.
‘Are you expecting a visitor, Sofia?’
No. Yes. Maybe. Perhaps I am expecting a visitor.
Ingrid Bauer is wearing silver Roman sandals that lace up her shins and she is annoyed. ‘Zoffie, I have been knocking for ever.’
‘I didn’t see you.’
‘But I was here.’
She tells me that she has been talking over my situation with Matthew.
‘What situation?’
‘About having no transport. This is the desert, Zoffie! He has suggested he collect the car from the Gómez Clinic for you tomorrow.’
‘It would be good to have a car.’
‘Let me see your sting.’
I rolled up my sleeve and showed her the purple welts. They were beginning to blister.
She traced the sting with her finger. ‘You smell like the ocean,’ she whispered. ‘Like a starfish.’ Her finger was now in the crease of my armpit. ‘Those little monsters really came after you.’ She asked for my mobile number and I wrote it on the palm of her hand.
‘Next time, Zoffie, open the door when I knock.’
I told her I never lock the door.
Our beach house is dark. The walls are thick to keep it cool in the summer heat. We often have the lights on in the day as well as at night. Not long after Ingrid left, all the lights suddenly went out. I had to stand on a chair and open the fuse box on the wall near the bathroom to flip the trip switch. The lights came back on and I climbed down to make Rose a pot of tea. She had packed five boxes of Yorkshire teabags and brought them with her to Spain. There is a shop at the end of our road in Hackney that stocks these teabags and she had walked to it to make her bulk purchase. Then she had walked back home. That is the mystery of my mother’s lame legs. Sometimes they step out into the world like phantom working legs.
‘Get me a spoon, Sofia.’
I got her a spoon.
I can’t live like this. I must flip the trip in every way.
Time has shattered, it’s cracking like my lips. When I note down ideas for field studies, I don’t know whether I’m writing in the past or present tense or both of them at the same time.
And I still have not freed Pablo’s dog.
When the Greek girl burns the coils of citronella at night to keep the mosquitos away I can see the curve of her belly and breasts. Her nipples are darker than her lips. She should give up the habit of sleeping naked if she does not want to be devoured by the mosquitos in the perfumed darkness of her room.
Bringing the Sea to Rose
I had promised to be totally silent at the table when Gómez took my mother to lunch. He had forbidden me to speak and asked for my trust in his judgement. In fact, he told me the staff would fetch Rose every day from the beach apartment and I was to do as I pleased. On Tuesdays he would call me into the clinic, given that I was my mother’s next of kin. Apart from that, it was my choice. He wanted to get to know Rose, because her case truly puzzled him. It was not why she could not walk that interested him. He wanted to know why she could intermittently walk. This seemed like an affliction that might very well be physical, but one must not be a slave to medical theory. What did I think?
I regarded Gómez as my research assistant. I have been on the case all my life and he is just starting. There are no clear boundaries between victory and defeat when it comes to my mother’s symptoms. As soon as he makes a diagnosis, she will grow another one to confound him. He seems to know this. Yesterday he told her to recite her latest ailment to the body of a dead insect, perhaps to a fly, because they are easy to swat. He suggested she surrender to this strange action and listen carefully to the monotony of the way it buzzes before it dies. It is likely, he said, that she will discover that the buzzing sound, often so irritating to the human ear, resembles the timbre and pitch of Russian folk music.
It is the first time I have ever seen her laugh out loud with her mouth open. At the same time, he has booked her in for various scans and his staff are attending to the silver-lined dressings on her right foot.
A table for three had been reserved in the village-square restaurant, because he assumed she could walk there with relative ease from the apartment. It had not been an easy walk. My mother had tripped over pistachio shells that had not been swept from the square the night before. I had spent an hour sorting out the laces of her shoes but, in the end, Rose had been felled by a nut that was no bigger than a large pea.
Gómez was already seated at the table. He sat opposite Rose and I sat next to him, as instructed. His formal pinstripe suit had been exchanged for elegant cream linen, not exactly informal but less businesslike than his first presentation of himself as a famous consultant. A yellow silk handkerchief was arranged in his jacket pocket in the old style, shaped into a round puff rather than folded at right angles. He was dapper, gentle and courteous. Both he and my mother peered at the menu and I just pointed to a salad, as if I were a mute out on a day trip. Rose took a while choosing a white-bean soup and Gómez flamboyantly ordered the house speciality, grilled octopus.
Rose rapidly informed him that she had allergies to fish and it made her lips swell. When he seemed not to understand, she leaned forward and poked my shoulder. ‘Tell him about my fish problem.’
I said nothing, as instructed by Gómez.
She turned her attention to him. ‘I cannot be in the vicinity of fish of any kind. The vapour from your octopus will waft towards me and I will come up in hives.’
Gómez nodded vaguely and reached for her hand. She was startled, but I think he might have been taking her pulse because I noticed he had a finger on her wrist. ‘Mrs Papastergiadis, you take fish-oil supplements and you take glucosamine. I have had these analysed in our laboratory. Your brand of glucosamine is made from the outer coatings of shellfish. The other supplement you take is derived from shark cartilage.’