Rose was sitting in her chair. Her back view was terrible to behold. It was vulnerable. People look more like how they really are from the back. Her hair was pinned up and I could see her neck. Her hair was thinning. There were a few curls on her neck, but it was the cardigan she had neatly draped over her shoulders in the heat of the desert that made me think she had inherited this ritual from her mother and exported it to Almería. It was very touching, that cardigan. My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.
‘Are you okay?’
For as long as I can remember, it was me asking her that question. If I wasn’t asking it out loud, I was asking it in my head: is my mother okay, is she okay? Rose’s tone was cross, perhaps a little bewildered, and it occurred to me she might not have asked me because she did not want to hear the answer. Questions and answers are a complex code, as are the structures of kinship.
F = Father. M = Mother. S S = Same sex. OS = Opposite sex. I have no G (Siblings) or C (Children) or H (Husband), nor do I have a Godparent (who we classify as fictive kin because godparents can make up their responsibilities and duties).
I am not okay. Not at all and haven’t been for some time.
I did not tell her how discouraged I felt and that I was ashamed I was not more resilient and all the rest of it which included wanting a bigger life but that so far I had not been bold enough to make a bid for the things I wanted to happen and I feared it was written in the stars that I might end up with a reduced life like hers which is why I was searching for the answer to the conversation her lame legs were having with the world but I was also scared there might be something wrong with her spine or that she had a major illness. The word ‘major’ was in my mind that night in southern Spain. It was 7 p.m., which is twilight, the end of the long day of sunshine and the start of early evening, and with my eyes firmly on the cracked cosmology of shattered lonely stars and milky clouds, I heard a kind of lament slipping from my lips about losing my way, stuff about a lost spaceship and putting my helmet on and how something was wrong and how I had lost contact with Earth but no one could hear me.
I could see Rose shuffling her legs, her left ankle twisting in her slipper, and I was not really sure who it was I was singing to, whether it was M or F or H or G or the fictive Godparent or even Ingrid Bauer. I could smell calamari being fried in the café in the square, but I was missing England, toast and milky tea and rainclouds. I heard my voice was very London because that’s where I was born, and then I left the room. My mother was calling to me, she called my name over and over — ‘Sofia Sofia Sofia’ — and then she shouted, but it was not an angry shout, and I suppose I wanted my ghostly mother to rise from the shattered stars made in China and say tomorrow is another day, you will land safely you will you will.
I walked into the kitchen and on the table was the fake ancient Greek vase with the frieze of female slaves carrying jugs of water on their heads. I grabbed it and threw it on the floor. As it crashed and shattered, the venom from the medusa stings made me feel like I was floating in the most peculiar way.
When I looked up, my mother was standing — she was actually standing — in the kitchen among the shards of fake ancient Greece. She was tall. A cardigan was lightly draped over her shoulders. She had worked all her life and she had a driving licence, but she would have been neither a citizen nor a foreigner in ancient Greece. She would have had no rights in these ruins that were once a whole civilization which saw her as a vessel to impregnate. I was the daughter who had thrown the vessel to the floor and smashed it. My mother had tried to keep it together for a while. She taught herself how to make salty goat’s cheese for my father I remember I remember, warming the milk, adding the yogurt, stirring in the rennet, cutting the curds, doing something with muslin and brine, pickling cheese in jars. She put herbs on the lamb she roasted for him, herbs she had never heard of in Warter, Yorkshire, but when he left she could not pay the bills with herbs and cheese I remember, I do remember, she had to walk out of the kitchen and do something else, I remember she turned the oven off and put her coat on and she opened the front door and there was a wolf waiting for us on the mat but she chased it away and found a job and her lips were not puckered, her eyelashes were not curled when she sat in the library day after day indexing books, but her hair was always perfect and it was held up with one pin.
‘Sofia, what’s wrong with you?’
I started to tell her but a children’s entertainer in the square was letting off firecrackers. I could hear the children laughing and knew he was on a unicycle, blowing fire out of his mouth. I looked at the broken pieces of the fake Greek vase and reckoned it was a sign to fly to my father in Athens.
Nothing to Declare
My father was waiting for me at Athens International Airport, but he was not alone. I was alone with my suitcase and he was standing in the company of his new wife, who was holding their new baby daughter in her arms. I waved to him and the sound between us was the wheels of my suitcase on the marble floor. We had not seen each other for eleven years but we recognized each other with no hesitation. As I got closer he walked towards me and took my suitcase, then he kissed my cheek and said, ‘Welcome.’ He was tanned and relaxed. If anything his hair had become blacker, but I remembered it as silver, and he was wearing a blue shirt that had been ironed with care, its creases sharp at the elbow and collar.
‘Hello, Christos.’
‘Call me Papa.’
I’m not sure I can do that, but if I write it down I’ll see what it looks like.
As we made our way towards his new family, Papa asked me about the flight. Had I managed to have a nap and did they serve a snack and did I have a window seat and were the toilets clean, and then we were standing next to his wife and younger daughter.
‘This is Alexandra, and this is your sister, Evangeline. Her name means “messenger”, like an angel.’
Alexandra had short, straight, black hair and she was wearing spectacles. She was quite plain but young, and her blue denim shirt (made by Levi Strauss) was damp from the milk in her breasts. She was sallow and looked tired. A steel brace was clamped across her front teeth. She peered at me from behind the lenses of her spectacles, and she was open and friendly, a little wary but, most of all, welcoming. I took a look at Evangeline, who also had black hair, lots of it. My sister opened her eyes. They were brown and lustrous, like rain glittering on a roof.
When my father and his new wife gazed down at Evangeline I could see the truest love in their eyes, the sort of love that is naked and without shame.
They were a family. They looked as right together as a 69-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman can possibly look. Mostly they looked wrong, like a father and daughter and grandchild, but as wrong goes, the affection between them was right. My father, Christos Papastergiadis, was caring for two new women. He had made another life, and I was part of the old life that had made him unhappy. To give myself courage I had pinned up my hair with three scarlet flamenco flower hairgrips I had bought in Spain.
He told me he would get the car and we were to wait outside at the pick-up point, then he gave me some information. Apparently, there was a bus — number X95 — parked right outside the airport exit. It cost five euro and I should know the next time I was in Athens that it would take me to Syntagma Square in the centre. Papa jangled the car keys above Evangeline’s head like a kindly grandfather and then disappeared through a glass door.