Free Hot Milk by Deborah Levy Page B

transcribe Rose’s words and author her case history. I have been trained to do something similar, except I am not a physiotherapist, I am an ethnographer. Julieta will at some stage have to describe the complaint that brought the patient to her clinic. Symptoms and their presentation. It is not one complaint. It is not even six. I overheard twenty complaints but there were more. The past the present and the future are simultaneously present in all these complaints.
    Rose’s lips are moving and Julieta is listening but I’m not listening. I have been asked to be present but I am not present. I’m watching a Bowie concert from 1972 on YouTube and it is buffering while he sings. His hair is red like a blood orange, his glitter shirt issparkling darkly to trigger associations of space travel and his platform shoes are stacked high to lift him off Earth. Bowie’s painted eyelids are silver spaceships. Girls are screaming and crying and stretching out their hands to touch the Space Oddity strutting the stage. He is a freak, like the medusa. The girls are feral and fertile and freaked out.
    We are so pinned down on Earth.
    If I had been there, I would have been the loudest screamer.
    I am still the loudest screamer.
    I want to get away from the kinship structures that are supposed to hold me together. To mess up the story I have been told about myself. To hold the story upside down by its tail.
    Rose is coughing. A pattern is emerging where she always coughs when she is about to reveal something awkward and intimate. As if the cough is a plunger unblocking memory. She is giving a case history. Sometimes I can hear a few sentences. I am becoming interested in Julieta Gómez’s interviewing style. Anthropologists might describe it as ‘in-depth interviewing’. My mother would be called ‘the informant’. I notice her questions are minimal but my mother’s emotions are running high. I wish I was somewhere else. Julieta is relaxed but alert, she never seems to pry or push and she is not in a rush to fill in the silences. I have heard tapes where ethnographers have probed too deeply into the informants’ stories and made them silent, but my mother’s lips are mostly moving. ‘Physiotherapy’ does not seem an accurate description of the kind of conversation that is taking place. Perhaps Rose’s memories are in her bones. Is that why bones have been used as divination tools from the beginning of human history?
    My mother has a lot of contempt for her body. ‘They should just cut off my toes,’ she says.
    Julieta has finished the first case history and is helping her to stand up. ‘Move your left foot.’
    ‘I can’t. I can’t move my left foot.’
    ‘You need to do some weight-bearing exercise for strengthening and endurance.’
    ‘My whole life has been about endurance, Nurse Sunshine. Remember that my first enemy and adversary is endurance.’
    ‘How do you spell that in English?’
    Rose tells her.
    Julieta’s hands are now under Rose’s chin as she helps align her head.
    Rose is looking for her wheelchair, which seems to have disappeared from the room.
    ‘Everything hurts. I might as well do away with these useless feet. It would be a relief.’
    Julieta looked at me. Her eyelashes were mascaraed into spikes. ‘I think Rose does not stand up straight because she is tall.’
    ‘No, I hate these feet,’ my mother shouted at her.
    Julieta led her back to the wheelchair which had now materialized, carried in by a porter who was trying to read the newspaper he had balanced on the armrest. On the front page was a photograph of Alexis Tsipras, the Prime Minister of Greece. I noticed he had a cold sore on his bottom lip.
    ‘Cut off my feet, that’s what I want,’ my mother told Julieta.
    In reply, Julieta gave the wheelchair a deft kick with her left trainer. ‘What is your point, Rose?’
    My mother started to make small circles with her shoulders, moving them forwards then backwards as if limbering up for a