Spilt Milk
by Jackie Anderson
I stand at the entrance of the byre, my feet rooted to the caked dung that lines the concrete. I shiver despite the intensity of heat which does not diminish even at this late hour, long after the siesta has passed. The crash of the milk bucket still echoes around the grey walls. The lowing of the angry cows, a
they lurch and yank at their halters, hurts inside my ears.
I look up for help at the row
of faces that line the gap between the wall and the corrugated metal ceiling of
the byre. But they are as shocked as I,
and all they can offer are shrugs and the waving of hands urging me to
run. But the sweating, heaving flanks of
the cows are the waves of an oncoming tide, cutting me off from the safety of
the street.
“What’s going on here?”
bellows the farmer. El Calvo, we call him, the bald man. At my feet splashes the milk, flooding out of
its clattering bucket, sweeping over my toes like the silk from the train of a
wedding dress. At the rasp of his voice
and the stench of fetid dung that clings to his boots, I let out a wail. Then, the tears I have managed to hold back with
all the strength of my nine years pour from my eyes.
He turns from me and goes to
calm the cows, their hip and rib bones stark under skin that is pulled by the
weight of their swollen udders. He
clicks his tongue and lavishes tender whispers on them. Their lowing eases and they return to their
calm chewing of hay from the bags that hang along the wall. I look up at the row of faces, to my
audience, but they have gone. They have
left me alone, and I, betrayed, stay to accept my fate.
“You’re one of those blasted
kids, aren’t you?” El Calvo roars, whipping towards me.
I can’t speak. My tongue has grown thick and spongy in my
mouth and it is too heavy to move. So I
shake my head instead. I am not one of
those blasted kids. At least, not
yet.
I have only been in Madrid
for two days, and they have not yet made me part of the crowd, their gang. The leader is Juan, or Juanito, as the family
call him. I am his cousin, visiting from
our little seaside village. I can call
him Juanito, which, indoors, he doesn’t seem to mind, but, when we’re out with
the gang, he refuses to answer. He
doesn’t speak to me much at all when we’re outdoors playing with the others in
the dust and the shade of the tumbledown buildings at the bottom of my aunt’s
road. They are a poor family, and my
mother makes sure we buy fresh bread and milk every day so we don’t burden my
aunt.
Juanito is twelve,
devastatingly handsome and a head and shoulders taller than all the other
boys. To my childish eyes he is perfect:
unusually light-haired with amber eyes and cherry-red lips that curl into a
smile or dip into a scowl but always beckon, teasing.
It was Juanito’s idea to send
me to fetch a bucket of milk.
“Isabel has to do something
to be able to hang around with us,” said Lydia, the eldest girl in the
group. I hate Lydia. She always walks next to Juanito, and that’s
where I want to be. It’s only indoors,
after supper, that we all sit together and chat, and he treats me as a friend.
“We shouldn’t hate anyone,
Jesus and the saints in Heaven wouldn’t like it,” Marta told me when I
confessed it. Marta was my guardian
angel. Small and dark with impish eyes
and cascades of dark hair framing her perfect face, she took me under her wing
and bullishly protected me from all the teasing that Juanito and his gang flung
at me. It’s easy for Marta to stand up
to them. She’s eleven years old on
Saturday, and, being Juanito’s sister, she’s learned to fight with her fists
from as soon as she left the cradle. I,
living hundreds of miles in the country, surrounded by sea and goats and lemon
trees, know nothing of the harshness of the city streets. I am the eldest in my family, with only a
baby sister to contend with and a mother whose side I barely leave. I can run, and I can ride a bike, and I can
climb trees. But when I do it with these
kids, who have grown up together on the streets of the poor part of the city, I
can’t keep up with them when we run, nor heave myself over walls fast
enough. And when we throw stones at tin
cans lined on a gate, I rarely hit one.
Even Andres, a little wisp of a boy with coal-black eyes and skin that
seems to have dirt ingrained into it, younger than me by two months, can run faster
than me, and his aim with a stone is unerring.
Marta laughed kindly and held
my hand all the way home.
“Don’t worry about
Lydia. She’s in love with Juanito, but
he has another girlfriend, a rich girl from school that Lydia knows nothing
about. She’s just jealous of you because
you’re prettier than her and because Juanito is your cousin and you’re sharing
our house at the moment.”
I was happy with that for a
while, but I’m wary of Lydia, and her sly smile and the way she looks at me out
of the corner of her eye when she thinks I’m not looking. Those sidelong glances make me trip over
clumsily when we’re running, or catch my feet on the skipping ropes when we
play.
Lydia loved it when Juanito
suggested the raid on the byre.
“Great idea, and she needs to
bring back enough for all of us to have a drink. And not get caught.”
“That’s ridiculous. We all know El Calvo eats children who mess
about with his cows,” said Marta. I
think she must have felt me shudder with fear as I leaned towards her for
protection.
“He does?” gasped Andres.
“Of course, you silly little
boy,” said Juanito, eyes gleaming, “how many times has he chased us away from
them saying he will eat our livers? You
heard him yesterday, when we showed Isabel the cows.....”
“Because she has never seen
cows before,” sneered Lydia.
I have heard him too, and
that’s why I’m terrified now as El Calvo heads towards me.
El Calvo is a nightmare, a
demon, his bald head reddening with rage, sweat dripping along to the corners
of his moustache and strings of spittle hanging from cracked lips. His eyes are a milky grey and they bulge as
if they will pop out from his skull as he stares at me.
“What are you doing in here?”
I flinch because his voice is
so sharp it feels my ears are being cut open.
I look up one more time for help.
This time I can see Lydia, gloating, waving at me as if we were greeting
each other at the fair. El Calvo looks
up too and Lydia ducks away.
“You have spilt my milk!”
“I didn’t, the cow did.”
The steadiness of my voice surprises me,
but that smile from Lydia, pleased that I have been caught, has fired a flame
of anger in my belly which chases away the fear. El Calvo pauses and raises his eyebrows.
“The cow kicked the bucket
over because she was frightened,” I say in a rush, “I didn’t think I had
frightened her because I was very quiet.”
“Why are you in here anyway?”
El Calvo limps over to the cow and caresses her bony rump.
“Why do you limp?” I ask,
curiosity getting the better of me again.
“Bullet got me in the
war. I need that milk. I sell it and it is all I have to get money
for food. They won’t let me work.”
El Calvo is suddenly old and
sad, and he no longer seems quite so terrible.
“Why not?”
He scratches the top of his
head, doubles up coughing and spits out a large, brown gobbet. I feel slightly sick.
“Ask your uncle. He knows me.
We were on the wrong side in the war and we met in prison. He doesn’t have work either.”
He starts to walk towards me
and I back away, but before he gets to me he sees something on the ground and
picks it up. It is a stone, sharp and
black, like a bullet between his hard fingers.
He goes back to the cow and feels along her side.
“So they are your friends?”
he asks, pointing at the gap in the wall.
I nod.
“No they’re not,” he
continues, “one of them wanted you to get hurt.
This stone hit the cow, and that’s why she kicked. I can see the cut on her skin, here. You were lucky you weren’t badly hurt.”
“Oh.” I thought of Andres, the best shot in the
gang. But no. With that sneaky look and her triumphant
smile, it must have been Lydia.
“Did they dare you to come
in here?”
El Calvo might have had a
daughter my age once. His brown-leather
face suddenly creases to show yellow teeth in a broad smile. He takes out a stool and settles on it by the
cow’s side.
“They told me to get the
bucket of milk. If I don’t, they won’t
let me be their friend.”
“Well, we’ll see what we can
do to sort that out. But, little girl,
choose your friends more carefully, because anyone who puts you in danger on
purpose, is usually an enemy.”
El Calvo beckons to me. The stink of the cow is strong, but her skin
is warm and surprisingly soft. El Calvo
shows me how to balance on the stool, takes the bucket and tucks it between my
knees, and lays the cow’s teats to rest in my fingers. The milk gushes hot into the bucket, ringing
as it fills.
I stride proudly back to my
aunt’s house with a half bucket of milk in my hand, that I have pulled from the
cow’s udders myself. El Calvo has told
me I can go back the next evening to help with the milking, if my mother lets
me and if my uncle joins him for a drink to rekindle their old friendship.
It is the victory that I
need. Juanito stares at me, impressed,
and ignores Lydia to help me into the flat with the milk. Andres runs off to tell his older brothers of
his adventures of the day, and Marta is full of praise for me. Lydia walks home alone, and I am rid of her
bad temper for the rest of the holiday.
Juanito lets me walk at his side every time we go out to play. He calls me his “sergeant”. El Calvo calls him, “El Capitan” and is
teaching us all how to look after the cows.
He has cleaned the byre a little and it does not smell quite so bad now,
and my aunt has fresh milk every evening for free.
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