My father was obliged to introduce me as his earlier daughter, an artefact from the past he had left behind in Britain. As well as the platform sandals, I was wearing shorts and a gold-sequinned crop top. My belly was on display and my hair was piled on top of my head with the three flamenco flower clips. It must have been a shock for my father to discover that his full-breasted adult daughter from London was of sexual interest to his colleague.
‘I am Sofia.’ I shook his hand.
‘I am George.’ He held on to my hand.
‘I am just here for a few days.’ I let him continue to hold my hand.
‘I suppose you have to get back to work?’ He let go of my hand.
‘Sofia is a waitress, for the time being,’ my father said in Greek.
I am other things, too.
I have a first-class degree and a master’s.
I am pulsating with shifting sexualities.
I am sex on tanned legs in suede platform sandals.
I am urban and educated and currently godless.
I do not resemble an acceptable femininity from my father’s point of view. I’m not sure, but I think he thinks that I am not honouring the family. I don’t know the details. Papa hasn’t been in touch for a while to explain my duties and obligations.
‘Sofia wears flamenco flowers from Spain in her hair.’ My father looked depressed. ‘But she was born in Britain and doesn’t speak Greek.’
‘I last saw my father when I was fourteen,’ I explained to George.
‘Her mother is a hypochondriac,’ my father said in a brotherly tone to George.
‘I’ve been looking after her since I was five,’ I said in a sisterly tone to George.
My father started to speak over me. Although I did not understand much of what he said, it was clear that he did not see me as a credit to him. He told me not to bother coming into the office and said goodbye outside the revolving glass doors.
I spent all day in the anthropology museum, and then I walked to the Acropolis and slept in the shadow of the temple.
I think I might have dreamed about the ancient river that is now buried beneath the asphalt streets and modern buildings, the river Eridanos, which flowed through ancient Athens, coursing north of the Acropolis. I could hear the pull of its current as it flowed to the water fountains where slave women were waiting to fill the jars they balanced on their heads.
That night, the baby on her breast again, Alexandra sat on the soft, blue sofa reading a Jane Austen novel out loud to my father. She was practising her English, which was perfect anyway, and he was correcting her pronunciation. Alexandra was reading from Mansfield Park: ‘If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory.’
My father nodded.
‘Mem-orr-ray,’ he said in an exaggerated English accent.
‘Memory,’ Alexandra repeated.
He shoved an orange jelly and then a yellow jelly into his mouth, and he glanced at me. Listen to how clever she is. She’s cleverer than I am, except for choosing to marry me, of course, but I am not complaining.
I had forgotten to tell him that memory is the subject of my abandoned doctorate.
They were a stable family making new memories.
Or perhaps an unstable family anchored by their god. They went to church every Sunday. ‘God is the Lord and he has revealed himself to me,’ my father told me, more than once. I could see that the experience of his god was overwhelming. Various members of their congregation kissed Evangeline when we walked out on the streets together. Their priest wore black robes and sunglasses. His hands were kind when he grasped my hands. This was Papa’s last shot at another life, even if his wife did complain about the age difference between them on the sly. When he walked away from his old life, he knew he had to forget it had ever happened. I was the only obstacle in his way.
The Cut
Alexandra and I talk every morning on their soft, blue sofa.
We are eating the sweet cherries that I have bought with my few remaining euro for my new family. Cherries were grown in ancient Greece — Ovid mentions picking them on mountaintops. Some of the juice has spilt over the silk sun-top that Ingrid gave me to soothe my medusa stings.
‘What does it mean, Sofia?’
‘What does what mean?’
‘The word on your top?’
I start to think about how to describe the word Beloved. ‘It means to be very loved,’ I say. ‘A true, great love.’
She looks confused. ‘I don’t think that’s right.’
I wonder if she thinks that being very loved is not right for me.
‘The word is more violent than that,’ she continues.
‘Yes, it is a forceful feeling,’ I reply. ‘When we call someone beloved, it is a strong feeling.’
Last night I dreamed again of Ingrid.
We are lying on a beach and I put my hand on her breast. We both fall asleep. I am woken by Ingrid shouting, ‘LOOK!’ She is pointing to the print of my hand. It has left a white tattoo on her skin, where everything is brown. She tells me she will wear the print of my monster claws on her body to frighten her enemies.
Alexandra asks me if I could pick up half a kilo of minced lamb and deliver it to the cook. She will make a moussaka for dinner. ‘It’s a traditional Greek dish, Sofia.’
I can’t remember, but I think my mother used to make it.
I made my way to the meat market and stood near the sheep’s heads arranged on the stalls, illuminated by light bulbs attached to long, swinging leads. These were older sheep than the baby lambs on Alexandra’s slippers. They had been slaughtered. Blood had been shed and their livers piled on silver trays in the fridges. Ropes of their intestines were hanging on hooks. These lambs were killed without any formal rituals to make their death more bearable to the eaters of meat. Yet when early man went off to hunt, it was a traumatic, dangerous activity. He lived closely with the animals, it was not easy to hear their cries and see the blood fall, and so he made rites and rituals to make the murder easier. The women and children required endless bloodletting to keep them alive.
My mobile started to vibrate in my pocket. It was a message from Matthew in Spain.
Gómez must be stopped.
Your mother had to be rehydrated at his clinic yesterday.
All that quack needs is a drum.
Why has Matthew become involved in my mother’s care?
It seems to me that Matthew’s phone is his drum, but I’m not sure what kind of message he is trying to convey. Messages communicated on drums used to save people’s lives when there were no mobile phones or helicopters, no GPS. Without the messages banged out on the hide of animals stretched across a circle of wood, people would have starved to death or been destroyed by fire or warring tribes.
I perched on a stool near the sheep’s heads and called Gómez. He reassured me that Rose was in good health. A rota of various staff were with her every day. Now that her medication had been abandoned, ‘her morale was high.’ However, she refused to drink water, so she had become dehydrated. I explained how it was impossible to find the right water for Rose and this was a problem, given the climate in southern Spain in the summer months.
‘All the same,’ I said, gazing at the flies crawling into the gouged eye sockets of the sheep’s head, ‘if the water is always wrong, it gives her something to hope for. One day it will be right, so she will have to find something else to be always wrong.’
‘Perhaps,’ Gómez replied. ‘But I must inform you that I am no longer clinically interested in the walking problem so much as the water problem.’