Hot Milk

by Deborah Levy

I stand up to find the women’s toilet and have to walk past the village alcoholic, who is eating a plate of luminous orange crisps with his morning cognac.

I want to write a sentence this perfect and decadent someday.

I think she thinks she’s a cowboy in her work shirt, always alone with no one to look at the mountain horizon at night and say my god those stars.

He is a freak, like the medusa. The girls are feral and fertile and freaked out.

They were about nine years old. Will they get their driving licence, as I never did, and all the other licences they need to function on Earth? Will they be fluent in multiple languages and will they have lovers, some of them female, some of them male, and will they survive the earthquakes, floods and droughts of a changing climate and will they slip a coin into the supermarket-trolley slot to search the aisles for tomatoes and courgettes grown in the furnace of the slave farms?

Truest love will be her first language. She will learn to say ‘Papa’ from an early age and mean it.

My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume. I do not want to be the girl whose job it is to wail in a high-pitched voice at funerals. A snake. A star. A cigar.

It was hard to accept that the first man in my life would do things that were to my disadvantage if they were to his advantage. Yet it was a revelation that somehow set me free.

Am I self-destructive, or pathetically passive, or reckless, or just experimental, or am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?

Love explodes near her like a war but she never admits she started it. She pretends she has no weapons but she likes the smoke.

I wanted big music like fire to burn away the random terror that was crawling under my skin.