Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

wore a gold ring on his little finger. His flesh seemed to be growing over the band of gold.
    ‘If you do not leave my property,’ he said, ‘I will call the police.’
    I strained to hear the rest because the dog had accelerated his bid for freedom, but it was something like ‘The cop in this village is my brother and the cop in the next village is my cousin and the cop in Carboneras is my best friend.’
    I grabbed his hand, with the gold embedded in it, and pressed my forehead to his forehead while his right hand groped for something under his desk. Perhaps it was a panic button wired to his extended family of cops. He asked me to get out of his way so he could walk up the stairs to the roof terrace.
    I took a step backwards. He was a big man. To steady myself, I pressed my hand against the newly painted white wall while I waited for him to move. It left a bloody handprint, and so I made another. And then another. The wall of the diving school was starting to look like a cave painting.
    Pablo shouted and cursed me in Spanish and made his way up the stairs. He was holding a bone, a yellow, stinking bone. That is what he had been reaching for under his desk.
    Pablo was on the roof terrace with his bone and his dog. He was kicking a chair. The dog had stopped barking and started to snarl while Pablo made clicking sounds, which seemed to have a calming effect.
    I heard a pot plant fall and shatter.
    It was cool inside the diving-school reception. The phone wasringing on Pablo’s desk, next to a burning coil of citronella and his glass of vermouth. An answer-machine picked up the call: ‘We speak German, Dutch, English and Spanish and are able to teach beginners up to master diver.’
    I lifted the glass to my cracked lips and calmly, slowly, took a tiny sip. In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and the spider crabs moving between weeds.

Austerity and Abundance
    ‘Zoffie! There is going to be a massacre!’
    I called Ingrid and invited her to share the dorado with me to celebrate freeing Pablo’s dog. She said yes, she would come over at 9 p.m.
    I showered and oiled my hair and then walked over to the plaza to buy a watermelon from the woman in the truck who I had first thought was a man. She was sitting in the driver’s seat with her young grandson sprawled on her lap. They were eating figs. Purple dusty figs, the colour of twilight. She told the boy to choose me a melon, which he did, and when she took the money she put it in a cotton wallet that was strapped around the waist of her black dress. She had taken off her sandals and placed them in the compartment of the truck door. I noticed a ball of bone growing like a small island on the side of her right foot. Her arms were brown and strong, her cheekbones sun-lashed, her hips wide as she moved to make space for her grandson when he clambered back on to her lap. Her body. Who is her body supposed to please? What is it for and is it ugly or is it something else? She silently pressed another fig into the boy’s hand, resting her chin on his head. She was a farmer and grandmother running her own economy with her money bag pressed against her womb.
    Ingrid Bauer walked through the open door without knocking, just as I had started to grill the dorado. She was wearing silver shorts and her silver Roman sandals were laced up her shins to just belowthe knee. She had painted her toenails silver, too. I showed her the table on the terrace, which I had laid for a feast. I had even found matching plates and cutlery and wine glasses. A bowl of chopped watermelon and mint was chilling in the fridge. I had made a cheesecake. Yes, this time I had baked my own bittersweet amaretto cheesecake with amaretti biscuits and sweet amaretto liqueur and the bitter peel of Seville oranges.
    It was the start of a bolder life.
    I offered Ingrid wine but she wanted water. I always have plenty