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anti-inflammatory painkillers she knocked back every morning with a glass of wrong water.
    He asked her to provide the estate agents’ estimate for our property and he informed us that the bank’s own surveyor would pay us a visit. The computer liked the information we had submitted so far because my mother had paid off the mortgage. Bricks and mortar are worth something in London, even if the Victorian bricks are held together with spit, piss and gaffer tape. He told us he was inclined to sign off our loan. My mother was excited about having an adventure that included a medical experience: the Gómez Clinic was like whale watching for her. I returned to work to make three types of espresso and Rose returned home to make a new list of aches and pains. I can’t deny that her symptoms are of cultural interest to me, even though they drag me down with her. Her symptoms do all the talking for her. They chatter all the time. Even I know that.
    I walked across the burning sand to cool my feet in the sea.
    Sometimes, I find myself limping. It’s as if my body remembers the way I walk with my mother. Memory is not always reliable. It is not the whole truth. Even I know that.
    When I arrived back at the clinic at 2.15, Rose had swapped thewheelchair for a chair and she was reading her horoscope in a newspaper for English expatriates.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Look at my arms,’ she said. ‘I’m all bruised from the blood tests.’
    â€˜You poor thing.’
    â€˜I am a poor thing. The doctor has taken me off three of my pills. Three!’
    She screwed up her mouth to make a mock-crying expression and then waved her newspaper at Gómez, who was not so much walking as promenading across the white marble floor towards us.
    He told me that my mother has a chronic iron deficiency, which could be why she lacks energy. Among other things, such as a silver-lined dressing to enhance the healing of her foot ulcers, he had prescribed vitamin B12.
    A prescription for vitamins. Is that worth twenty-five thousand euro?
    Rose began to list the names of the pills that had been erased from her medication ritual. She spoke about them as if she were grieving for absent friends. Gómez lifted his hand to wave at Nurse Sunshine, who was making her way towards him in her grey suede heels. When she was standing by his side, he brazenly put his arm around her shoulders while she fiddled with the watch pinned above her right breast. An ambulance had just pulled up in the car park. She told him in English that the driver needed a lunch break. He nodded and removed his arm from her shoulders so she could get a better grip on the watch.
    â€˜Nurse Sunshine is my daughter,’ he said. ‘Her real name is Julieta Gómez. Please feel free to call her what you wish. Today is her birthday.’
    Julieta Gómez smiled for the first time. Her teeth were blindingly white. ‘I am now thirty-three. My childhood has officially ended. Please call me Julieta.’
    Gómez gazed at his daughter with his eyes that were various shades of blue. ‘You will know there is high unemployment in Spain,’ he said, ‘something like 29.6 per cent at the moment. So I am lucky my daughter had a good medical training in Barcelona and is the most respected physiotherapist in Spain. This means I am able to be a little bit corrupt and use my position to get her a job in my marble palace.’
    He opened his pinstriped arms in a sweeping, royal gesture, as if to fold into himself the curved walls and flowering cacti, the shiny new ambulance, the receptionists and other nurses, and a couple of male doctors who unlike Gómez wore a uniform of blue T-shirts and brand-new