Hot Milk by Deborah Levy Page B

anthropology and practising it?’
    ‘Well, I would get paid if I practised it.’
    ‘That’s not what I mean. Anyway, if you need some money, I can lend it to you. I have to go.’
    Ingrid and Matthew were meeting friends at a tapas bar that night. Afterwards, they were going to a party in a field out of town given by a friend who was a DJ. Matthew was putting up lights there at the moment. She was supposed to have loaded bags of ice and some buckets in the car and driven them to the site but she had been embroidering my sun-top instead. The beer would still be warm by the time everyone arrived and it was sort of my fault.
    ‘Thanks for the water, Zoffie. I need it because I’m going to be wrecked later.’
    When she walked out of the open door I watched her linger for a few seconds by the table set for two on the terrace. And then she moved on to her real life.
    Is this what it is like to be beloved by Ingrid Bauer?
    There were two sharp knives lying on the kitchen table next to a faux ancient Greek vase. I put them away in the drawer and looked more closely at the saffron-coloured vase. It was in the shape of an urn, with a frieze drawn on it in black resin of seven slave women balancing jugs on their heads while they queued by a fountain to collect water. Obviously the vase was a copy, but it did show a historically correct event in everyday life. It was difficult to channel water into the cities of ancient Greece, so it had to be collected at public fountains. Wealthy men would drink wine mixed with the water the female slaves had carried to their homes for them, but the women had no home of their own. Tonight was the first time I had invited someone to my temporary home in Spain. It had all gone wrong when I asked about Ingrid’s sister.
    I turned off the heat on the dorado and found myself walking across the beach to the injury hut.
    I was getting bolder.
    I asked the student to join me for supper.
    He looked surprised and then pleased. ‘You will want to know my name is Juan,’ he said.
    ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘and I will need to know your date of birth, country of origin and your occupation.’
    He was stapling the day’s forms together (fourteen stings recorded), but he would be with me in twenty minutes and he thanked me for the invitation. Did I know that Pablo’s dog had dug up a row of sun umbrellas on the beach? Pablo’s brothers had chased him, so he had run into the sea in a panic. He had swum far out and then he had disappeared. No one knew where Pablo’s dog had got to or if ithad drowned. If the German shepherd was still alive, the injury hut was going to have to handle a bite that was fiercer than the jellyfish. The student was laughing and scooping up his brown hair with his fingers. His neck was long and graceful.
    ‘Pablo is saying you threatened him.’
    ‘Yes, with the blood of the fish you are about to eat with me.’
    Our eyes met and I looked at him with all the power of someone who was beloved. I knew I had been rejected by Ingrid but I left that out of what my eyes were telling him.

    When he arrived he was carrying four bottles of beer, which he said he kept in the fridge in the injury hut. He asked after my mother. I told him that she was sleeping and, for once, she had not drawn the curtains to hide from ‘the clapped-out stars’. We ate the dorado sitting opposite each other at the table laid for two on the terrace. Its white flesh was tender under its silver skin. He told me it was succulent because it had a layer of fat between the skin and the flesh. Later, we swam naked in the warm night and he kissed every medusa sting on my body, the welts and blisters, until I was disappointed there were not more of them. I had been stung into desire. He was my lover and I was his conqueror. It would be true to say that I was very bold.

     

    She has ripped out my heart with her monster claws.

Bling
    Rose sat limply at the wheel of the hire car while I washed the dust off the windows