Hot Milk: Now a major motion picture starring Emma Mackey and Fiona Shaw

by Deborah Levy

She had no God to plead to for mercy or luck. It would be true to say she depended instead on human kindness and painkillers.

‘Hello, Sofia. I can see you have been having a nice time at the beach.’ I told her the beach was desolate and that I had been staring for two hours at a pile of gas canisters. It was my special skill to make my day smaller so as to make her day bigger.

‘You have become used to administering your mother’s medication. So perhaps it is as if you are coming off medication, too? You are using your mother like a shield to protect yourself from making a life. Medication is a ritual which I have now erased from both your lives. Attention! You will have to invent another one.’

While he takes the tiny sliver of glass out of the skin above my eyebrow, I confess that I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened.