And I am panging for artisan coffee.
The Coffee House storeroom seems quite spacious compared to the spare bedroom here in Athens. Now that Dan is sleeping in my ink-stained bed, did he gaze every morning at the wall with the Margaret Mead quote I had written with the marker pen?
It might be that the Coffee House is a field study that has been under my nose all along.
Alexandra is still talking at length about how stock markets would react to fears that Europe will unravel. After a while, she asks if my mother is missing me.
‘I hope not.’
She looks sad when I say that.
‘Is your mother missing you, Alexandra?’
‘I hope so.’
‘Do you have your own office in the bank in Brussels?’
‘Yes, and there are three subsidized canteens, and I get a good deal for maternity leave.’
‘Can you go on strike?’
‘I would have to give notice in writing. Are you anti-capitalist?’
I know she needs her husband’s first daughter to be anti-everything, so I do not bother to answer. Alexandra has climbed aboard the big boat with her husband and child and I am on a small dinghy heading in a different direction.
She tells me that she gets a 5 per cent household allowance because she is head of her household.
She is head of her household. I don’t even have a home that is not my mother’s home.
‘Does your mama still love your papa?’
‘My father only does things that are to his advantage,’ I reply.
She stares at me as if I am crazy. And then she laughs. ‘Why would he do things that are not to his advantage?’
A squirrel has jumped from the trees overhanging the balcony and is peering in through the locked window. What does it see? Three generations of my family, I suppose.
Why would my father do anything that was not to his advantage? She had said it so lightly, but her question is like a wind blowing through the calm blue folds of their homely sofa. A wind that has even brought the squirrel from the tree to the window. Do I do things that are not to my advantage? I lean against the soft, blue cotton with my hands behind my head, and stretch out my legs. I am wearing shorts and the yellow silk sun-top Ingrid gave me. Alexandra is trying to read the blue word embroidered above my left breast. She is squinting with her smaller eye and I can see her lips moving as she silently spells out Beloved. She is frowning, as if she can’t work out what it means but is too shy to ask me to translate.
She claps her hands and the squirrel runs off.
Alexandra has a career, a rich, devoted husband and a child. She has presumably signed her name on the contract for half a share in a valuable apartment in an affluent neighbourhood and her share of shares in her husband’s shipping business. She has faith in a god. Where does that leave me? I am living a vague, temporary life in the equivalent of a shed on the fringe of the village. What has stopped me from building a two-storey house in the centre of the village?
Neither a god nor my father is the major plot in my own life. I am anti the major plots.
As soon as I say that to myself, I am not so sure. My father is definitely mapped in the cosmology of my screen saver. He is shattered, but functioning. I do not have a plan B to replace my father. And then I see my mother’s blue eyes, small and fierce. They shine out at me in the wreck of her body. They are the brightest stars in the shattered galaxy. She has done things that were not to her advantage and I am chained to her sacrifice, mortified by it. What if she had said, Sofia, I am starting all over again. You are five now so I am off to Hong Kong, farewell, goodbye. I look forward to tasting the dishes from the hawker stalls in the market. I will start with fish-ball soup made from eels and when we next meet I will enchant you with my traveller’s tales. You will be living with your grandmother in Yorkshire while I take advantage of the good hospitals, affordable cost of living and the demand for my skills. Don’t forget to button your coat in the winter months and to look out for snowdrops on the Wolds in spring.
Even at five I was older than the stars made in China on my screen saver.
Why would your father do things that are not to his advantage?
Alexandra is still waiting for an answer. My baby sister is now suckling at her breast. Alexandra winces and taps her daughter’s nose while she removes her nipple from her lips. She says she is sucking in the wrong way and that her nipple has split. When Evangeline cries at this momentary separation, Alexandra lets her cry, taking time to organize herself into a more comfortable position. She is not too full of the milk of human kindness to do things that are to her disadvantage. And nor is my father. They are a perfect match and they have faith in a god who makes their world more certain than my own.
If only I believed in something like a god. I remember reading about a Christian mystic in the Middle Ages called Julian of Norwich. Julian was a woman who wrote about the motherhood of God — she believed that God was truly a mother and a father. It was an interesting belief, but I can barely cope with my own mother and father.
‘Why would my father do anything that was not to his advantage?’
This time, I repeat her question out loud. It is a grey area and I am lost in the grey, nodding and shaking my head at the same time. My head is doing all these movements, tipping my chin down and then up again to indicate yes and then moving my head to the left and the right to indicate no. She smiles, and it occurs to me that the steel across her teeth does not stop there, it probably runs through her whole body. She is literally a woman of steel, but then she lowers her voice and moves closer to me on her soft, blue sofa.
‘It is not easy to be with an older man. There is a forty-year gap between us, you know.’
I do know. It is hard to believe. All the same, does she think I am her best friend?
I reach for a jellied candy and unwrap it noisily to drown out her confidences.
‘Sixty-nine is early old age, really.’ She sticks out her tongue again and adjusts her brace. ‘He needs to pee all the time and he’s a little deaf now, and he’s tired all the time. His memory is a big problem. At the airport, when we came to fetch you, he forgot where he parked the car. I would be grateful if you could take the X95 back to the airport when you leave. When we walk together he cannot keep up with me. He needs a new hip. But he has now got four new teeth. When he goes to bed he takes out his lower plate on the ground floor and puts it in a jar of solution.’
At that moment my father walks in.
‘Hello, you two girls. It’s nice to see that you’re getting along.’
Other Things
On my second day in Athens I offered to walk through the park with my father because that was the route he took to get to work. It was the first time we had been alone together without his wife and new daughter, the human shields he used to defend himself from his sullen, sleepless creditor.
We both know that his absence from my life is not the sort of debt that can be paid back but it is exciting to pretend to negotiate a deal. In this sense, I agreed with the graffiti on a wall near the metro that said ‘WHAT NEXT?’
I was staggering through the park in black suede platform sandals, and my father was staggering through the park with the burden of the small portion of guilt that his god had not entirely absolved. We were staggering in silence.
It was a relief when he met a colleague from his shipping business, also on his way to the office. They talked about the proposed increased taxes on shipping and then about the large sum of euro in cash they had both hidden for emergencies.