Gómez was gentle but persistent. ‘This business with names. It’s tricky.’ He pronounced ‘tricky’ to rhyme with ‘wee-fee’. ‘In fact, I have two surnames. Gómez is my father’s name, and my last name is my mother’s name, Lucas. I have made a shorter name for myself but my formal name is Gómez Lucas. Your daughter calls you Rose but your formal name is Mama. It is uncomfortable, is it not, this to-ing and fro-ing between “Rose” and “Mrs Papastergiadis” and “Mother”?’
‘It is very sentimental what you are saying,’ Rose said, holding on tight to his handkerchief.
My phone pinged.
You now have car
Come get key
Parked near bins
Inge
I whispered to Gómez, telling him that the hire car had arrived and I needed to leave the table. He ignored me because his attention was entirely focused on Rose. I suddenly felt jealous, as if I were missing some sort of attention that had never been bestowed on me in the first place.
The car park was a square of dry scrubland at the back of the beach where the village dumped its garbage. The rancid bins were overflowing with decaying sardines, chicken bones and vegetable peel. As I walked through a black cloud of flies, I paused to listen to the buzzing.
‘Zoffie! Quick, run. It’s hot standing here.’
Their wings were intricate and oily.
‘Zoffie!’
I started to run towards Ingrid Bauer.
And then I slowed down.
A fly had settled on my hand. I swatted it but I did not recite an ailment.
I made a wish.
To my surprise, the words I whispered were in Greek.
Ingrid was leaning against a red car. The doors were open and a man in his early thirties, presumably Matthew, was sitting in the driver’s seat. At first he appeared to be staring intensely at himself in the mirror, but as I got closer I saw that he was shaving with an electric razor.
Something was sparkling on Ingrid’s feet. She was wearing the silver Roman sandals that laced in a long criss-cross up her shins. She looked like she had been adorned with treasure. In ancient Rome, the higher the boot or sandal was laced up the leg, the higher the rank of the fighter.
In the dust and scrub of the car park I saw her as a gladiator fighting in the arena of the Colosseum. It would have been covered in sand to soak up the blood of her opponent.
‘This is my boyfriend, Matthew,’ she said. She gripped my sweaty hand in her cool hand and more or less pushed me into the car so that I fell on him and knocked the electric razor out of his hand. A sticker on the windscreen said ‘Europcar’.
‘Hey, Inge, go easy.’
Matthew’s hair was blond like hers and fell to just below his jaw, which was still covered in shaving foam. I had fallen into his lap and we had to disentangle ourselves while his razor whirred on the floor of the Europcar. When I climbed back out to the putrefying stench from the bins, the sting on my arm was throbbing because I had knocked it against the steering wheel.
‘Jeezus.’ Matthew glared at Ingrid. ‘What’s going on with you today?’ He picked up the razor and stepped out of the car. He switched it off and gave it to her to hold while he tucked his white T-shirt into the waistband of his beige chinos. He shook my hand. ‘Hiya, Sophie.’
I thanked him for getting the car.
‘Oh, it was no problem. A colleague I play golf with gave me a ride, which meant my lover girl could have a lie-in.’ He draped his arm around Ingrid’s shoulder. Even in flat sandals she was at least two heads taller than he was.
Half his jaw was still covered in foam. It looked like a tribal marking.
‘Hey, Sophie, isn’t the weather insane?’
Ingrid pushed his arm away and pointed to the Europcar. ‘Do you like it, Zoffie? It’s a Citroën Berlingo.’
‘Yes, but I’m not sure about the colour.’
Ingrid knew I did not drive, so I wasn’t sure why she had made such an effort to get the car on my behalf.
‘Do you want to come over to our house and taste my lemonade?’
‘I do, but I can’t. I’m in the middle of lunch with my mother’s doctor in the plaza.’
‘All right. See you on the beach maybe?’
Matthew suddenly became energetic and amiable. ‘I’ll lock up the Berlingo when I’ve finished my insane electro foam shave and bring the keys and paperwork over to your table. By the way, why didn’t they hire your mother an automatic? I mean, she can’t walk, right?’
Ingrid looked annoyed but I couldn’t work out why. When she playfully kicked his knee with the sole of her silver sandal, he grabbed her leg and then knelt down in the dust and kissed her tanned shins in the gaps between the criss-crossed straps.
When I got back to the plaza, my mother and Gómez seemed to be getting along. They were having an intense conversation and didn’t take any notice when I returned to the table. I had to admit that Rose looked excited. She was flushed and flirtatious. She had even slipped off her shoes and was sitting barefoot in the sun. The shoes with the laces I had unknotted for an hour had been abandoned. It occurred to me that she had slept alone for decades. When I was five six seven I had sometimes crept into bed with her when my father left, but I remember feeling uneasy. As if she were folding her growing child back into her womb in the way an aeroplane folds its wheels back into its body after take-off. Now she was saying something about needing the three pills she has been asked to abandon and how coming to Spain to heal her lame legs was like crying for the moon. By which I think she meant we were searching for a cure that was beyond our reach.
If I were to look at my mother just once in a certain way, I would turn her to stone. Not her, literally. I would turn the language of allergies, dizziness, heart palpitations and waiting for side effects to stone. I would kill this language stone dead.
The thin boy with the Mohican was still inflating his boat. His brother was showing him the oars and they were having a heated discussion while their sister prodded the blue plastic dinghy with her bare foot. They were all excited about an adventure in the sea with a new boat. That was the right sort of thing to be excited by. It made a change from waiting for withdrawal symptoms.
Gómez’s lips were black from the octopus he had eaten with such relish. ‘So you see, Rose, I have brought the sea to you with my polpo, and you have survived.’
When Rose smiled, she looked pretty and lively. ‘I have been robbed, Mr Gometh. I could have gone to Devon for less than one hundred pounds and sat by the sea with a packet of biscuits on my lap, patting one of many English dogs. You are more expensive than Devon. I am, frankly, disappointed.’
‘Disappointment is unpleasant,’ he agreed. ‘You have my sympathy.’
Rose waved her hand to the waiter and ordered a large glass of Rioja.
Gómez glanced at me and I could see he was annoyed about the wine. The table was unsteady and had been wobbling all through lunch. He took a prescription pad out of his pocket, ripped off five of the scripts and folded them into a square. ‘Sofia, kindly help me lift the table so I can wedge this under the leg.’
I stood up and gripped the edge nearest to me. It was surprisingly heavy for a table made from plastic. It was an effort to raise it half an inch off the ground while Gómez edged the paper into place.
Rose suddenly jumped. ‘The cat scratched me!’
I looked under the newly steady table. A cat was sitting on her left foot.
Gómez tugged at the lobe of his left ear. I began to sense that he was taking mental notes, just as I had been doing all my life. If she had no feeling in her legs, her mind had made some claws that were pricking her feet.
It was like he was Sherlock and I was Watson — or the other way round, given I had more experience. I could see the sense of him testing her apparent numbness by inviting the village cats to join us for lunch. When I looked under the table again, I saw a tiny prick of blood on her ankle. She had definitely felt that claw dig into her skin.