‘Ah, how wonderful that would be.’
Again, I wasn’t sure what to make of him. His tone was vague. Vaguely mocking and vaguely amiable. Which meant it was a bit bent. I reached for Rose’s hand and pressed it. I wanted to say goodbye to her but Gómez was now listening with complete focus to her heart. I kissed the top of her head instead.
My mother said, ‘Ouch!’ She shut her eyes and leaned her head back as if she was in agony — or it might have been ecstasy. It was hard to tell.
*
The sun was fierce by the time I arrived at the deserted beach opposite the cement factory. I made my way towards a small café near a row of gas canisters and ordered a gin and tonic from the friendly waiter. He pointed to the sea and warned me not to swim because three people had been badly stung that morning by medusas. He had seen the welts on their limbs turn white and then purple. He grimaced and then shut his eyes and waved his hands as if to push away the ocean and all the medusas living in it. The gas canisters looked like strange desert plants growing out of the sand.
A large industrial cargo ship floated near the horizon. It was flying a Greek flag. I looked away and gazed instead at a rusty child’s swing that had been hammered into the coarse sand. The seat was made from a battered car tyre and it was swaying gently, as if a ghostly child had recently jumped off it. Cranes from the desalination plant sliced into the sky. Tall undulating dunes of greenish-grey cement powder lay in a depot to the right of the beach, where unfinished hotels and apartments had been hacked into the mountains like a murder.
I glanced at my phone. There was an old text message from Dan who worked with me at the Coffee House. He wanted to know where I had put the marker pen we use to label the sandwiches and pastries. Dan from Denver was texting me in Spain about a pen? As I took a sip of my large gin and tonic and nodded my thanks to the waiter, I wondered if I had put the pen somewhere obscure.
I unzipped my dress so the sun could reach my shoulders. The burn of the medusa sting had calmed down, but every now and again I felt a twinge. It wasn’t the worst kind of pain. In a way, it was a relief.
Another more recent message from Dan. He has found the pen. It turns out that while I am in Spain he is sleeping in my room above the Coffee House because his landlord put up his rent last week. The pen was in my bed. With the lid off. Consequently, the sheets and duvet are now stained with black ink. In fact, he described it as a haemorrhage of ink.
He can no longer write things like this:
Sofia’s bittersweet Amaretto cheesecake — in £3.90, out £3.20.
Dan’s moist orange and polenta cake (wheat- and gluten-free) — in £3.70, out £3.
I am bittersweet.
He is moist.
Dan is definitely not moist.
We don’t bake these cakes ourselves but our boss tells us that customers are more likely to buy them if they think we do. We put our names to things we do not make. I am glad the ink has run out of the lying pen.
I remember now that I must have left the pen in the bed when I used it to copy a quote from Margaret Mead, the cultural anthropologist. I wrote it straight onto the wall.
I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalysed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.
There are five semicolons in that quote. I remember making the;;;;; on the wall with the marker pen. I had underlined ‘religious conversion’ twice.
My father suffered a religious conversion but as far as I know he has not got over it. In fact he has married a woman four years older than I am and they have a new baby. She is twenty-nine. He is sixty-nine. A few years before he met his new wife, he inherited a fortune from his grandfather’s shipping business in Athens. He must have seen it as a sign that he was on the right track. God brought him money just as his country was going bankrupt. And love. And a baby girl. I have not seen my father since I was fourteen. He has seen no reason to part with a single euro of his newly acquired wealth, so I am my mother’s burden. She is my creditor and I pay her with my legs. They are always running around for her.
To sign off the loan to pay the Gómez Clinic we had to go together to Rose’s mortgage provider for an interview.
I took the morning off work which meant I lost eighteen pounds and thirty pence for three hours. It was raining and the corporate red carpet was damp. Everywhere there were words on posters telling us how much our well-being meant to the bank, as if human rights were their major concern. The man sitting behind his computer had been trained to be cheerful and friendly; to imitate empathy as he understood it; to be approachable and energetic as he understood it; to love his ugly red tie with the bank’s logo on it. His red badge displayed his name and job description, but it did not tell us his salary scale — probably somewhere in the region of dignified poverty. He was attempting to be personal; to be fair in his approach to our situation; to speak to us in simple language we would understand. A poster of three unattractive employees stared at us from the wall, all of them laughing. The woman was in a female suit (jacket with skirt), the men in male suits (jacket with trousers), their message conveyed our similarities and erased our differences; we are sensible dreamers with bad teeth just like you; we all want a place of our own to argue with the family on Christmas Day.
I could see that these posters were a rite of initiation (into property, investments, debt) and that the corporate suits signalled a sacrifice of the complexity of gender distinctions. Another poster displayed a photograph of a neat semi-detached house with a front garden the size of a grave. There were no flowers in that garden, just newly laid grass. It looked desolate. The squares of turf had not yet grown into each other. Perhaps a paranoid personality was lurking to the left of the story they were building for us. He had cut down all the flowers and murdered the household pets.
Our man spoke in a tone that was animated but robotic. At the start he said, ‘Hi, you Guys,’ but at least he did not say, ‘Hello, Ladies,’ before he rattled off the products available to strip me of my inheritance. At one point he asked my mother if she ate steak. It was a question out of the blue, but we could see where he was heading (lavish lifestyle) so Rose told him she was a vegan because she wanted to promote a more humane and caring world. If she was feeling extravagant, she said she’d add a tablespoon of yogurt to the dahl and rice. He did not know that vegans do not eat dairy products, otherwise she would have fallen out of the corporate red chair at the first hurdle. He asked if she liked designer clothes. She said she only liked cheap, ugly clothes. Did she belong to a gym? A strange question, given that my mother was clutching a walking stick and a bandage was wrapped around each of her swollen ankles, despite the anti-inflammatory painkillers she knocked back every morning with a glass of wrong water.
He asked her to provide the estate agents’ estimate for our property and he informed us that the bank’s own surveyor would pay us a visit. The computer liked the information we had submitted so far because my mother had paid off the mortgage. Bricks and mortar are worth something in London, even if the Victorian bricks are held together with spit, piss and gaffer tape. He told us he was inclined to sign off our loan. My mother was excited about having an adventure that included a medical experience: the Gómez Clinic was like whale watching for her. I returned to work to make three types of espresso and Rose returned home to make a new list of aches and pains. I can’t deny that her symptoms are of cultural interest to me, even though they drag me down with her. Her symptoms do all the talking for her. They chatter all the time. Even I know that.