Hot Milk by Deborah Levy Read Free Book Online

three.’
    There was obviously nothing to recommend me to anyone.
    ‘Sorry about the mix-up,’ I said. I walked out of the Señoras as fast I could without actually running.
    Where shall I go? I have nowhere to go. This is the fear the posters on the wall of my mother’s mortgage company were signalling we shared. They are right. I walked to the plaza near the Café Playa to pretend to buy a watermelon.
    I am saving the rinds for the chickens which are still, miraculously,laying eggs in the summer heat. They belong to Señora Bedello, whose husband died in the civil war, fighting Franco’s fascist army.
    It’s not a man selling watermelons, it’s a woman.
    She’s sitting in the driving seat of the van and she is beeping the horn with her small brown hand. I am so confused. I had an image in my mind of a sweaty male driver with stubble on his face, but she is a middle-aged woman in a straw hat. Her blue dress is dusty from the desert road and she’s leaning her vast breasts against the steering wheel.
    And then I remembered I hadn’t finished my coffee.
    I returned to Café Playa and gulped down my cortado like the village alcoholic downing his morning cognac.
    There she is.
    The woman in the men’s shoes is standing by my table. Straight and tall, like a soldier girl. Looking out to sea. At the boats. At the children swimming in giant plastic rings. At the tourists who have laid out umbrellas and chairs and towels on the sand. The diving-school boat is now loaded with all its equipment and pulls away into the ocean. The brown Alsatian, who I have not yet freed, is still rattling his chains.
    ‘My name is Ingrid Bauer.’
    What is she doing standing so close to me?
    ‘I am Sophie, but Sofia is my Greek name.’
    ‘How do you do, Zoffie?’
    The way she says my name is like a whole other life. I’m ashamed of my sad white flip-flops. They have turned grey in the summer.
    ‘Your lips are splitting from the sun,’ she says. ‘Like the almonds split on the trees of Andalucía when they are ripening.’
    Pablo’s dog starts to howl.
    Ingrid looks up at the diving-school roof terrace. ‘That German shepherd is a working dog and should not be chained all day.’
    ‘He belongs to Pablo. Everyone hates him.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘I’m going to free the dog today.’
    ‘Oh. How are you going to do that?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    She looks up at the sky. ‘Will you make eye contact with him when you undo the chains?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Wrong. Never do that. Will you make your body still like a tree when you approach him?’
    ‘A tree is never still.’
    ‘Like a log, then.’
    ‘Yes, I will be still like a log.’
    ‘Like a leaf.’
    ‘A leaf is never still.’
    She was still looking at the sky. ‘There is a problem, Zoffie. Pablo’s dog has been badly treated. He will not know what to do with his freedom. The dog will run through the village and eat all the babies. If you are going to unchain him, you will have to take him to the mountains and let him run wild. In that way he will be truly free.’
    ‘But he will die in the mountains without water.’
    Now she was looking at me. ‘What is worse? To be chained all day with a bowl of water, or to be free and die of thirst?’ Her left eyebrow was raised, as if to ask, Are you a bit of a hysteric? You’ve had a waiter push open two doors to find a man who isn’t there, you don’t know how to turn off a tap, you don’t know how to drive a car and you want to free a feral dog .
    She asked me if I wanted to walk on the beach.
    I do.
    I kicked off my flip-flops and we jumped over the three concrete steps that separate the café terrace from the beach. There was something about that jump, the fact that we did not walk down those steps, which made us both run at the same time. We ran fast across the sand, as if we were chasing something we knew was there but couldn’t yet see. After a while we slowed down and walked along the shore. Ingridtook off her shoes and