Red Ink

by Julie Mayhew

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  17 Days Since

  15 Days Since

  The Story

  7 Days Since

  The Day

  The Story

  7 Years Before

  4 Days Since

  16 Days Since

  The Day

  6 Years Before

  The Story

  3 Days Since

  26 Days Since

  6 Years Before

  35 Days Since

  3 Days Since

  The Story

  36 Days Since

  5 Months Before

  52 Days Since

  Part Two

  133 Days Since

  133 Days Since

  134 Days Since

  135 Days Since

  Another Story

  135 Days Since

  136 Days Since

  137 Days Since

  138 Days Since

  Epilogue

  63 Days to Go

  And Another Story

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Will and Ollie

  “History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.”

  Philip Guedalla, 1920

  (repeating Dr Max Beerbohm, repeating Quintilian)

  This is the recipe.

  Take five pounds of hulled whole wheat. Hold it in your arms. Feel that it weighs nothing compared to the load that lays heavy on your heart. Wash the wheat, let your tears join in. Strike a match, strike up faith, light the gas. Watch the wheat bubble and boil. See steam rising like hope. Take the pot from the heat and pour the wheat through a sieve. Lay the grain on a sheet overnight to dry. Rest your head on your own sheets. Dream of a flower dying, shedding its seeds, allowing another flower to grow.

  In the morning, on the day of remembrance, put the wheat in a bowl with walnuts, almonds and parsley. Add a message of devotion, a wish for the future, your gratitude to God. Sprinkle in cinnamon, not guilt. Throw in sesame seeds, throw away your fear. Turn out your mixture and create a mound – a monument to love. Brown some flour and sift. Add a layer of sugar. Press flat. Finally, crush the skin of a pomegranate with the remains of your fury and spread the seeds with love, in the shape of a cross.

  Maria did not dream of a flower dying. The night before her mother’s funeral, she did not sleep at all. She pressed one of Mama’s cardigans close to her face, letting it transport her back to a farm where cistus shrubs turn the air bittersweet. She listened to Melon’s snuffling breaths, envying the way her daughter remained untouched by grief. She thought of the day ahead, the day she would return her mother to the earth. She was not ready to let her go.

  Auntie Eleni had outlined the ceremony and recommended a plot. She had also pressed into Maria’s hands the pamphlet containing the recipe for the traditional kollyva – the boiled wheat.

  “But I can’t cook,” said Maria, scanning the recipe. “I can’t do it.”

  “You will find it within yourself,” Eleni insisted.

  And so she had.

  Part One

  17 DAYS SINCE

  “You okay in there?”

  I locked myself in the bathroom two hours ago.

  “Yeah.” One syllable is all he can have, otherwise he’ll think we’re mates.

  “You’re very quiet.”

  “I’m fine.” Two syllables. He should think himself lucky.

  My name is Melon Fouraki. Let’s get that out of the way, straight off. Some kids get their parents’ jewellery or record collections as hand-me-downs. Mum gave me this name. It is one of her memories – she was brought up on a melon farm in Crete. I’d rather she’d given me her old CDs. She also gave me Paul. Living with him is like wearing clothes made of sandpaper. Every move I make, I’m on edge. He watches so much it hurts.

  The bathroom is the only place to get away. I can hear him fidgeting on the hall landing outside, pretending not to be there. I can hear him bothering the floorboards. He’s listening through the door for the sound of a fifteen-year-old trying to slit her wrists. I am not going to slit my wrists. Paul is a social worker, so he thinks everyone my age runs away from their care home, sleeps on the streets, turns to crime, gets taken back into care and then tries to kill themselves. He can’t get his head around the fact that I am well-balanced. They worked with each other, Paul and my mum, only they ended up shagging. He would say they were partners. ‘Partners’. Idiot. He thinks they were proper boyfriend and girlfriend but he’s deluding himself. Mum only hooked up with him because she thought it would freak out the rest of Social Services if the Greek woman and the black man got it on. It’s not as if they were living together or anything. Now Paul has moved in to look after me. How ironic. How tragic.

  My mum is dead. Seventeen days ago it happened. Paul thinks I need sympathy and care and time and asking every five minutes how I am. I don’t. Just because your mum is dead that doesn’t define you or anything. I am my own person.

  Paul is still outside the door. I can’t concentrate on writing in my book with him there.

  “You’ll turn into a prune if you stay in much longer.” He is trying to sound casual and funny, as if me being locked in the bathroom is the most hilarious thing in the world and not a total crisis. He is picturing me collapsed in a bath of pink water, a razor on the edge of the tub, my eyes rolled back in their sockets. I’m not even in the bath. I just ran the water so Paul would hear and not question what I’m doing.

  “Yes. All right,” I yell back. Three syllables. Bugger.

  I double-check the bathroom lock, make sure I fastened it, just in case Paul wigs out and decides to burst in on some kind of rescue mission. Mum fitted that hook-and-eye lock. That’s why it’s wonky and why the screws haven’t been pushed in all the way. If you lean on the door, it opens up a crack, like our front door with the chain on. If Mum was ever outside the bathroom wanting to know what I was doing, she would shoulder the door and stick her nose through the gap. Paul won’t do this, not unless he really gets a real panic on. As far as he’s concerned I’m naked in here, and he’s a middle-aged social worker who’s dead cautious about doing anything that might seem dodgy.

  I was at Chick’s house when the police came knocking. Chick’s real name is Kathleen but everyone calls her Chick because she’s little and scrawny and kind of sweet at the same time. No one calls her Kathleen to her face, except for grown-ups. Kathleen’s a geek’s name. Mum was always moaning that I spent far too much time at Chick’s. She never liked Chick’s mum, Mrs Lacey. She thought she acted all superior just because she has a part-time job making up the names for emulsion paint. You know, Pistachio Dream, Cerise Sunset, Arsehole Brown, that kind of thing. Mum said it was a ‘pointless’ job, but I thought it was kind of cool to be paid to do something so, well, pointless. Anyway, I was at Chick’s house when the police came looking for me and I wonder whether Mum subconsciously did it on purpose, chose to get knocked over that evening just so she could prove her case about me spending too much time around Mrs Lacey. That’s the sort of thing she would do.

  Once when we were in Crete visiting Granbabas, one August when it was so hot you couldn’t breathe without cracking a full-on sweat, she made me sit with her in the cashpoint lobby of a bank in Hania, just because it had amazing air-conditioning. We looked such losers, sat in those deckchairs we’d brought with us, the kind that make your knees touch your chin when you sit down. The locals came and went, swiping into the lobby with their cash cards, getting their money, giving us weird looks, wondering if we were the bank manager’s mad relatives minding the cash for him. Mum sat with her legs stretched out, her head tipped back, like sh
e was sunbathing indoors. She kept doing these big, long, God-it’s-so-hot sighs even though it got quite chilly in there after about half an hour. I would have given anything for a stroppy bank clerk to have moved us on, but it was Sunday. No staff. We stayed there for three hours. Mum fell asleep and, because she’d kept her sunglasses on, I never noticed her eyes were shut.

  Paul still won’t shift from the door. “Well, I wouldn’t mind a bath later, so . . .”

  “So?”

  “So, don’t use up all the hot water, please, Melon.”

  He’s still there, waiting. I get up from the floor, kneel over the bath and swish my arm in the water. I hope the noise will prove that I’m still breathing and all my main arteries are intact. I listen for Paul’s feet on the landing. There is a creak or two, a pause. He’s thinking about saying something else, I can feel it. Nothing. Then the crunch, crunch, crunch of the loose boards under the stair carpet. He’s gone. At last. I sit on the mat with my back up against the bath. The side of the bath is carpeted. Old mauve shag-pile. The bathroom suite is green and there is a limescale stain from the bath taps down to the plughole, like tea running down the side of a mug. Mrs Lacey’s bathroom is beige with a sandstone mosaic.

  Now that Paul has gone I can write things down. That’s why I’m in here. I don’t want Paul to see what I am doing. He will think that it’s a ‘positive step’. He will think it shows I’m ‘coming to terms with everything’. He will think I am close to embracing him in a big, old, do-gooding hug. Basically, he wants me to cry. I do not want to cry. I don’t need to cry. ‘It hasn’t hit you yet,’ he’ll say. And I’ll make some joke like, ‘No, maybe not, but it’s definitely hit Mum though, hasn’t it?’ Ha ha ha ha. And he’ll pull a face and look like he is trying not to blub. This is mean of me, I know, but I just want to be left alone. If Paul can’t understand that, he’ll have to face the consequences. If only Mum had waited one more year, I’d have been sixteen and allowed to look after myself.

  I can hear the scrape of a saucepan bottom against the hob coming from the kitchen downstairs. Paul is a noisy cook. A show-off. He has been cooking all evening, in between his panic attacks outside the bathroom door. He is always cooking for me. He thinks he’s filling the gap left by Mum, but she never used to cook much. Frozen stuff, pasta sauces, lots of things on toast, that’s what I’m used to. Tonight it is homemade soup. I don’t want to have these meals with Paul. He tricks me into them. He’ll ask, all casual, ‘Do you like soup?’ (or risotto or bolognese or whatever) and I can hardly say no otherwise I’ll never get to eat that particular food in front of him again. So I go, ‘yes,’ and he goes, ‘good, because that’s what we’re having for dinner tonight,’ and that’s it, I’m stuck with it.

  “Ten minutes until dinner, Melon.” He always gives me these countdowns. We did this book in English a while back about what the world would be like after a nuclear war, so I’ve given some thought to what I might do if we got a real ten-minute warning. I wouldn’t eat soup.

  I push my sleeve up and put my arm underwater to pull out the bath plug. The water has gone cold. I ran hot water so that the boiler would make the right chugging noises for a proper bath. I am excellent at pretending. I even put in some of Mum’s bubble bath to make the right smell. It reminded me of her getting ready to go out somewhere. There was this one time, she went to the Social Services Christmas ball with Paul (which did not sound like the biggest night of fun on earth) and we had a massive argument just before she left the house. We didn’t speak for a week. Or rather, I didn’t speak to Mum for a week. She was useless at holding grudges. I am an expert.

  I rake a wet hand through my hair to make it look like I’ve been in the bath. I can’t get used to my hair being short. I grab for the ponytail at the back sometimes and forget that it’s gone. I admit the haircut might have been a mistake. The fuss it caused was brilliant, but the haircut itself is rubbish. The front bits go proper frizzy if I sit in a steamy room and I get this fluffy halo around my face. Mind you, that used to happen even when my hair was long. Nothing stops it. Chick got her hair permed once – she actually chose to have curly hair – which I thought was total madness. I have big Greek curls. I have a big nose, big thighs, a big backside and big boobs. The boobs are an especially great thing to have when your name is Melon. Mum always said she was the real Greek but I was the one with the ‘Greek woman’s body’. This is a polite way of saying I’m a bit fat. I’m not fat, I know that really. I’m not like Freya Nightingale who believes she’s an elephant and always goes to the loos to puke after lunch. I just take up more room in this world. Mum was skinny all over, except in the right places. Real boobs that looked fake. She was a dinky person who looked like she would fit in your pocket. I look like I would split the seams.

  I might look Greek but I don’t feel it. It’s a fancy-dress costume I can’t take off. Mum took me to Crete every year but the threads that joined me to that place have been snipped, or they were never there in the first place. Mum tried to fix her threads loads of times but I don’t think she succeeded. The family didn’t forgive her, not really. She never got that into her head. Now there’s hardly any family left to visit. It’s because of the curse. All the Fourakis family die young.

  My dad still lives there though – Mum said. I’ve never actually met the man. She never delivered a living, breathing dad to me. I have a name, that’s all. According to The Story he is called Christos Drakakis. I say it to myself sometimes, test it out. My dad is Christos Drakakis, and my name is Melon Drakaki. How do you do? Except I hope I wouldn’t have been called Melon if Christos had stuck around. He would have stopped Mum being so stupid and I would have been given a proper name with a saint’s day, just like every other good Greek girl. I would have been called Sophia or Alexandra, something normal like that.

  “Five minutes, Melon.”

  There are five minutes until the nuclear holocaust: what do I do? Find the epicentre and run towards it. I don’t want to survive with all the destruction and deformity and radiation sickness.

  The pong of soup hits me when I step out of the bathroom. Cooking smells have a set path through this house – up the stairs, a swirl in one corner of the landing and then on to collect in my bedroom. It must be the way the draughts work in this place. Mum’s room never gets rid of that woody vanilla smell.

  I go downstairs, stepping around Kojak, who has taken to sleeping in the middle of the staircase. He’s not been the same since Mum went; he’s gone mute. Before, he would be miaowing around my ankles and following me into the kitchen. Now he stays put – a big, grey ball with one eye on the front door, as if he’s expecting Mum to walk in any minute.

  I stop on the stairs and lift him up into a hug, but he freaks out. He bends his spine backwards and twists out of my grip. He can’t scarper upstairs fast enough. His claws pop and splutter against the stair carpet. He doesn’t want attention from me. He goes to Mum’s room.

  Kojak’s really old now. Maybe the heartache of it all will finish him off.

  In the kitchen, Paul is listening to Jazz FM and wearing Mum’s apron with the big purple flowers. Paul likes lift music and doesn’t seem to care about looking like a girl.

  “Sweet potato and pea,” he goes, turning from the stove to look me up and down. He’s checking for wrist cuts or signs of an overdose, no doubt. “Sit down.”

  He has set two places at the kitchen table, opposite one another. I sit down at one of the four chairs that doesn’t have a place set. I don’t want to eat with Paul and have to look at his face. Paul comes over with a full bowl of soup. He doesn’t react to my choice of seat, just slides a placemat over to me and sets down the bowl. The smell is strong, spicy. He has put a dollop of something white on top that looks like bird poo. Paul ladles himself a bowl, adds the bird poo and then comes to sit down. There is a basket of bread with dead-fly olives running through the middle.

  “Nice?” he asks. Paul is always fishing for compliments.

  “No
t tried yet.”

  I reach for bread, start tearing strips off and putting them in my mouth one by one, chewing thoughtfully, trying to delay the tasting of the soup. He’ll have to wait for the next ice age before I tell him he’s a great cook.

  “You know, Melon, you don’t have to lock yourself in the bathroom.”

  I look down at the steam rising off my soup, watch the edges of the bird poo spread.

  “You can have your own space.”

  I reach for more bread, tear off a crust.

  “What were you doing in there, anyway?”

  “Mind your own business.”

  He shuts up, starts shovelling soup into his mouth, three big mouthfuls straight after one another like he hasn’t eaten all week. Only after the third mouthful, does he go, “Ooo, hot.” Idiot.

  I put my spoon into the soup. I can’t really put it off any longer. I can feel him watching me while I blow on it, then slurp. My skin aches from all the watching I get. He waits for a comment. I carry on spooning. He nods, smiles. He has taken my carrying on as a compliment, which it is not. I’m so angry I could tip the steaming lot all over his head. But I’m also bloody hungry.

  “How was the session on Tuesday? You still haven’t told me how it went.”

  This is the fifth time he has asked me this. I am counting.

  “Was it helpful?”

  “S’okay.”

  “Did you talk about the argument?”

  This is a new one.

  “What argument?” The lingering smell of the bath bubbles kicks me back to the night of the Christmas Ball again, the argument we had that night.

  “Did you talk about the argument you had with your mum?”

  “Which one?” I keep eating to prove I don’t care what he knows.

  “The one just before she died.”

  Hot soup clags up my throat. I turn cold.

  “I just thought that it may be troubling you and that it would help to talk to someone about it.”

  “How do you know about that?” I say. I don’t look at him. I keep my voice level so he understands that it’s definitely not an issue.