Hot Milk Read Free

else while I collect their cups and write labels for the cheesecake.
    I stamped my feet to distract myself from the throbbing pain in my arm. And then I noticed that the halter-neck strap of my bikini top had broken and my bare breasts were juddering up and down as I stamped about. The string must have snapped when I was swimming, which means that when I ran across the beach and into the injury hut I was topless. Perhaps that is why the student did not know where to rest his eyes through our conversation. I turned my back on him while I fiddled with the straps.
    â€˜How are you feeling?’
    â€˜I’m okay.’
    â€˜You are free to leave.’
    When I turned round, his eyes flickered across my newly covered breasts.
    â€˜You haven’t filled in “Occupation”.’
    I took the pencil and wrote WAITRESS.

    My mother had instructed me to wash her yellow dress with the sunflower print on it because she will wear it to her first appointment at the Gómez Clinic. That is fine by me. I like washing clothes by hand and hanging them out to dry in the sun. The burn of the sting started to throb again, despite the ointment the student had smeared all over it. My face was burning up but I think it was because of the difficulty I’d had filling in ‘Occupation’ on the form. It was as if the poison from the medusa sting had in turn released some venom that was lurking inside me. On Monday, my mother will display her various symptoms to the consultant like an assortment of mysterious canapés. I will be holding the tray.

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    There she goes. The beautiful Greek girl is walking across the beach in her bikini. There is a shadow between her body and my own. Sometimes she drags her feet in the sand. She has no one to rub sun-cream on her back and say here yes no yes there.

Dr Gómez
    We had begun the long journey to find a healer. The taxi driver hired to take us to the Gómez Clinic had no reason to understand how nervous we were or what was at stake.
    We had begun a new chapter in the history of my mother’s legs and it had taken us to the semi-desert of southern Spain.
    It is not a small matter. We had to remortgage Rose’s house to pay for her treatment at the Gómez Clinic. The total cost was twenty-five thousand euro, which is a substantial sum to lose, considering I have been sleuthing my mother’s symptoms for as long as I can remember.
    My own investigation has been in progress for about twenty of my twenty-five years. Perhaps longer. When I was four I asked her what a headache meant. She told me it was like a door slamming in her head. I have become a good mind reader, which means her head is my head. There are plenty of doors slamming all the time and I am the main witness.
    If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, does that make her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim? Attempting to decipher her aches and pains, their triggers and motivations, is a good training for an anthropologist. There have been times when I thought I was on the verge of a major revelation and knew where the corpses were buried, only to be thwarted once again. Rose merely presents a new and entirelymysterious symptom for which she is prescribed new and entirely mysterious medication. The UK doctors recently prescribed anti-depressants for her feet. That’s what she told me – they are for the nerve endings in her feet.
    The clinic was near the town of Carboneras, which is famous for its cement factory. It would be a thirty-minute ride. My mother and I sat shivering in the back of the taxi because the air conditioner had transformed the desert heat into something more like a Russian winter. The driver told us that carboneras means coal bunkers, and the mountains had once been covered in a forest, which had been cut down for charcoal. Everything had been stripped for ‘the furnace’.
    I asked him if