Hot Milk by Deborah Levy Page A

of water ready for Rose, so it was not a problem. It was the right sort of water for Ingrid. She sat close to me.
    And then closer.
    ‘So you freed the dog?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Did you look him in the eye?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Did you give him meat?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You just untied him?’
    ‘Pablo untied him.’
    ‘And the dog was calm and licked his leg?’
    ‘No.’
    We both knew that Pablo had been seen in the village walking his dog that afternoon. It was a catastrophe. The dog had tried to bite off the hand of a woman from Belgium when she was waiting for change at the bar. He had to be muzzled and Pablo was shouting and kicking everything in his way. Pablo needed a muzzle but he was protected by his army of cops.
    ‘Congratulations, Zoffie!’
    She gave me a gift, a yellow silk halter-neck top. She said the silk would soothe my medusa stings and she pointed to where she had sewn my initials on the left-hand corner in blue silken thread. SP. Underneath SP she had embroidered the word Beloved.
    Beloved.
    To be Beloved was to be something quite alien to myself. The silk sun-top smelt of her shampoo and of manuka honey and pepper. Neither of us spoke about the Beloved but we knew it was there and that her needle had authored the word. She told me she can sew on to any kind of material if she has the right needle – a shoe, a belt, even thin metal and various kinds of plastic – but it was silk she liked to work with most.
    ‘It is alive like a bird,’ she said. ‘I have to catch it with my needle and make it obey me.’
    Sewing was her way of keeping things together. It pleased her to mend something that seemed beyond repair. She often worked with a magnifying glass to find solutions to a rip that was hidden in the weave. The needle was the instrument she thought with, she embroidered anything that surfaced in her mind. It was a rule she had made up for herself never to censor any word or image that revealed itself to her. Today she had embroidered a snake, a star and a cigar on two shirts and on the hem of a skirt.
    I asked her to repeat what she had just said.
    ‘A snake. A star. A cigar.’
    She said the idea for the word embroidered on my sun-top had been on her mind because she was thinking of her sister in Düsseldorf.
    ‘What’s your sister’s name?’
    ‘Hannah.’
    ‘Is she older or younger?’
    ‘I am her big, bad sister.’
    ‘Why are you bad?’
    ‘Ask Matty.’
    ‘I’m asking you.’
    ‘Okay, I’ll tell you.’
    She gulped down her glass of water and slammed it on the table. Tears welled in her green eyes. ‘No, I won’t tell you. I was talking about my sewing.’
    There were apparently piles of clothes from the vintage shop waiting to be transformed with her needle. It was the same in Berlin, and she now had a contact in China who was sending her parcels of clothes to redesign. She was mostly interested in geometry, that’s what she had studied at university, in Bavaria, and what she liked about the needle was its precision. Her taste was for symmetry and structure, it helped her thoughts drift. Symmetry did not chain her, it set her free. Freer than Pablo’s dog would ever be.
    She put her arm around my shoulders and her fingers were cold like a needle. I did not expect the weight of a word like Beloved to be delivered to me, written in blue silk with the initials of my name floating above it. She had let the word roam free, that’s what she said, whatever came to her mind became the design.
    Ingrid wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and told me she couldn’t stay.
    ‘Don’t go, Ingrid.’ I kissed her wet cheek and whispered my thanks for her precious gift. Her ears were pierced with tiny lustrous pearls.
    ‘You are always working anyway, Zoffie. I don’t want to disturb you.’
    ‘How do you mean, I am always working?’
    ‘Everyone is a field study to you. It makes me feel weird. Like you are watching me all the time. What is the difference between studying