Red Ink

by Julie Mayhew

  I go back to the reflection. There are differences – the way the dress stretches more than it ever had to over Mum’s chest, the way my arms look like party balloons, the way my belly creates a little mound – but still . . .

  Mum’s stomach was the only thing about her body that was flawed. It was chopping-board flat but she had these stretch marks, little silver lines worming their way around her belly button. It looked like a road map – Piccadilly Circus. There was a straight, red line drawn underneath it all, just above her where her skimpy pants stopped. These lines and scar never went brown like the rest of her skin, even after a whole day’s sunbathing in Crete. I pointed them out once when we were on Tersanas beach and she wafted me away like a stupid fly.

  “Oh, I am not caring about those,” she’d said. Then she’d slowly rolled herself over. The local boys on the patch of sand next to us had watched, dribbling, as if my mum was a supermarket rotisserie chicken. They were closer to my age than hers.

  Mum propped herself up on her elbows and added, “Actually, I am liking them, the lines. They remind me that I give birth to you.” She had smiled – pleased with that. She could never be like everyone else and have at least one little hang-up.

  The more I look in the mirror, the more I see our differences and the less I see that first thing – that ghost. It’s gone. I’ve scared it off.

  “Car’s here, Melon,” Paul yells again.

  I heard him the first time. I know he’s twitching by the front door, desperate for nothing to go wrong, as if us being five minutes late would be a bigger disaster than Mum dying in the first place.

  Before I go, I find the bottle of vanilla perfume on Mum’s jumble sale dressing table and give myself a good squirting. I leave my jumper and skirt on the floor. Mum was never one to stress about mess.

  Paul is waiting downstairs in the hallway in a black suit. His mum, Irene, is flapping around him like an overweight butterfly. They’ve been crying. They have matching gluey streaks on powder brown cheeks. Irene fixes Paul’s tie and picks imaginary fluff off his jacket. Her dress is all vibrant reds and golds and purples. It’s in-your-face cheerful. She’s a giant, weeping Red Admiral in a house of gloom. Irene is staying at the house when we go so she can sort out the food for afterwards. It feels totally wrong that everyone will be chewing on Jamaican chicken drumsticks and lumps of fried plantain after a big ‘Greek’ funeral. Paul said it’s what Mum would have wanted. I said it was slapdash. He argued that it would be ‘multicultural’, so I reminded him what he had originally said – that the whole thing had to be Greek. “Make your mind up,” I told him. That got him running back to his reference books. If it had been up to Mum there would be more of an aftershow party – a laser light show, drag queens in G-strings, that kind of thing.

  I’m halfway down the stairs, stepping carefully over Kojak, when I realise Paul is staring at me with this stricken face.

  “What?” I go.

  He is looking me up and down in horror, like I’ve come downstairs smeared in mud rather than dressed all smart.

  “I bought that dress for your mum,” he croaks.

  “Did you?” I go. I give Kojak a rub behind the ears – he must be feeling it even worse today. I do the rest of the stairs and then unhook my coat off the end of the banister. I need to get my bag from the living room. “She still in there?”

  Paul’s Adam’s apple is doing a dance. “They’ve carried her into the car.”

  “Good.”

  I go into the living room. Everything is like it was, except the air seems different. Museum air. The coffin has gone. There is a bowl of apple, quince and pomegranate on the coffee table. Paul has done loads of research on all the right Greek rituals – found some really weird ones, dragged out from the dark ages. He was talking about putting a coin under Mum’s tongue to pay Charon the miser who will ferry her body across the River Styx. Loopy stuff. People who exaggerate their Irish roots are called Plastic Paddies, I heard once. Paul has become a Plastic Zorba. Just like Mum.

  The one thing I know he is doing right is the kollyva. I got his mum Irene to make this massive dish of boiled wheat for the wake. Sounds gross, but it’s what you’re supposed to do. I know this because Mum talked about it in The Story. Paul reckoned I’d got it wrong, that you only make kollyva for the days when you remember the dead, not funerals – but I set him straight on that one. Irene put almonds and icing sugar on top of the wheat. I told her it had to be decorated with a cross too, made out of pomegranate seeds.

  Back in the hallway, Paul is holding the front door open, taking big breaths. The hand that’s not on the door is trembling. I can’t look at that hand. Something about it makes me feel sick.

  “Let’s go, then.” Paul is pretending to be cheerful and efficient. I don’t want to join in with this jolly chit-chat, so I’m glad when Irene steps between us. She won’t let me escape without giving her a hug. It’s like being wrapped in a duvet.

  “You be brave now.”

  I’m almost disappointed when she lets me go, this woman I hardly know.

  Once we’re in the car, Paul pulls himself together.

  “You’re wearing your mum’s perfume. That’s nice,” he goes.

  He puts his hand on top of mine, gives it a pat. I go rigid. He moves his hand away.

  “Bit pongy though,” I say. “Gets in your throat.”

  I pull up the neck of the dress and give it a sniff. Paul looks away, starts craning his head around the driver’s shoulder to check the car carrying Mum is still there. I don’t know where he thinks it’s going to go – speeding off to do the pick-up for some bank robbers? We crawl along the high street so passersby can have a good nose to see who’s got unlucky. I try not to look at the car ahead. The cheesy wreaths spelling out Mum in pink carnations were Paul’s idea. So was the big, flowery Greek flag. The little dove in white roses was my choice.

  “I wish you’d had a look at her, spent some time with her, Melon.”

  I do a shudder to show him what I think about that. I drive my hands between my knees, look out the car window. It seems a shame it’s not raining. Funerals should be rainy.

  “She looked very peaceful. Very beautiful.”

  “Done her nice, had they?”

  Cara Moran’s mum works in a funeral parlour. Cara is always telling gory stories about how dead people’s insides fall out if you don’t block up all their holes. She says her mum sticks cotton wool in people’s cheeks and makes them look like a chipmunk storing nuts before she gives them a makeover, otherwise their faces sink in. She says you have to use special blusher and lipstick to cover up all the blue skin. I’m pissed off with Paul that he let someone like Cara’s gobby mum loose on Mum and then stuck her in the front room for general display. Paul reckons it’s the Greek way. I said it was twisted.

  In Mum’s will it said she wanted a Greek funeral. I think she meant a funeral in actual Greece, not a theme-park one over here. I’m so relieved Paul didn’t work that one out. We’d be sticking her coffin on easyJet now if he had. She also said she wanted her ashes scattered on the melon farm in Crete, which has caused Paul a massive headache because the Greek Orthodox church won’t let you get cremated. Shows how much Mum knew about it all. She probably just wrote that in her will to sound romantic. Or to play a joke on us.

  So Paul has had to freestyle. The Orthodox churches won’t have us, so we’re using an English one instead and doing all the Greek stuff round the edges. The church he’s chosen is huge, which is a massive waste. There’ll only be me, Paul and a couple of social workers rattling around inside. The Greek lot aren’t coming over to say their goodbyes. Surprise surprise.

  It’s ridiculous that we are doing it in a church at all. Mum was never really into God. She never went to church when she was alive. I was brought up godless, which means no one is looking over me and keeping me safe. I think of the ‘wanted’ ad I’ll have to put in the newspaper when I’m older and need some spiritual guidance:

 
; GOD WANTED

  TO FILL THE HOLE LEFT BY DISINTERESTED MOTHER.

  I wonder where Mum’s gone now. Heaven? Hell? A never-ending boat trip on the River Styx?

  It takes no time to get to the church. The car was a waste too. We could have walked. The chauffeur holds the door open for me. I’m so embarrassed. The church towers over us, ready to swallow us up. Me and Paul walk up the path side by side. I have this horrible premonition of him giving me away at my wedding.

  “Hello, Melon.”

  It’s Mrs Lacey. Mrs Lacey is here. Why is Mrs Lacey here?

  Paul moves off to shake hands with some social worker friend by the church door.

  There is only one reason Mrs Lacey would come – Chick! Chick has pulled herself together! Chick has come to support me!

  Mrs Lacey takes hold of my elbow with a sympathetic crab claw.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she says, like a robot, like the last week never happened.

  “Thanks,” I say. Then, because she’s caught me by surprise, I go, “You too.”

  Weirdly, she nods.

  “I mean, it’s okay,” I correct myself. “It’s not your fault.”

  She gives me that stare, the one that says she’s locking her explosives away in a fireproof box.

  “Kathleen is very sorry too.”

  “Is she?” I ask. I scan the churchyard over Mrs Lacey’s shoulder. “Where is Chick?”

  “Ice skating practice.” She says this like Chick is doing missionary work in the Congo.

  “Oh. Right. Nice.”

  “She’s very stressed, finding it very difficult. She’s practising for the Autumn Ice Show auditions. She could be a wood nymph.”

  “That’s really . . .” What? I can’t find the words. I can imagine Chick as a wood nymph, those spidery legs.

  “Yes, yes,” nods Mrs Lacey, her mind lost on Chick’s current ordeal.

  “Well, I’d better go in,” I say. “Get a good seat.”

  “Yes, you’d better,” Mrs Lacey says, stern for no reason.

  Paul beckons me over and we walk into the church, into its big, stone insides.

  And it is full.

  Every seat is taken. Every pew is packed, black shoulder to black shoulder.

  The place hums with the sound of people talking under their breath, but when I walk in, it hushes. Apart from Mum, I guess I’m the star attraction. I walk down the aisle and it is like walking into the ribcage of a massive whale. Everyone turns and looks at me as I pass. I stare at all of these unfamiliar faces one by one, and I think, what are you all doing here?

  Afterwards, at the wake, right in the middle of our living room, among all those social workers and neighbours and kids that Mum has helped out over the years, Mum’s friend Poppy, who she used to work with, decided to do this speech.

  “Maria used to tell me this story about when she was growing up in Crete,” she went, “and . . .” Then she broke down in tears and couldn’t carry on.

  It was the funniest thing. Like, funny ha ha and funny weird all at the same time.

  Poppy had started sobbing because she’d spotted a pottery ashtray on our mantelpiece, some skew-whiff yellow and red thing that Mum had made at an evening class. It wasn’t anything important – Mum’s interest in pottery-making had fizzled out ages ago and she was never any good at it. But Poppy went over to the mantelpiece and grabbed this thing like it was one of the Elgin Marbles and started wailing even harder, clutching the hideous thing to her chest. The hairpins and whatnot that Mum had been stashing inside of it fell all over the carpet. I was nearly pissing myself.

  Then Poppy went, “Maria used to talk about this piece of thread,” and suddenly I didn’t feel like laughing any more. “The piece of thread that connects her heart to mine.” Poppy had ditched whatever Crete story Mum had spun for her and had moved onto something else. My story . . .

  “She said that when something happened to me . . .” Poppy started to hold it together now, but I just wished she would stop. “When I felt something tugging at my heart,” Poppy went on, “Maria said she felt it too.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Mum had used the same line on someone else – Poppy – just some woman from work.

  Poppy got full of it then. She was loving the moment. “I know, Maria, babe, I told her, I feel it too.”

  When Mum had last talked to me about the piece of thread I told her that it was a load of rubbish. I told her she never had any kind of clue what I was going through, that she never understood.

  “Oh, don’t you believe it,” she’d gone. This cross little ‘w’ of skin was creased into her forehead. “I know, I feel it. I have this piece of thread.” She’d plucked angrily at the fabric of her T-shirt, at her heart. Her accent went strong. Her face looked in pain. I still didn’t understand what she meant though. I couldn’t feel what she felt. It was only when Poppy did that speech at the wake that I experienced it for the first time – the thread, the tug.

  THE DAY

  People should be fitted with black box recorders. You know, something that survives the crash, the disaster that gets them in the end. Prise open that box and inside you’d find out what they’d been thinking at the exact moment that it happened. Their last thought would probably be how annoyed they were with you, because of that thing you said or did. Or maybe death would make them realise that the bad things you’d done and said didn’t really matter after all.

  But what if you wrenched open that box and inside you heard that person thinking about how much they loved you? What if that was their last, dying thought? What a guilt trip.

  Me and Chick are watching weightlifting on the telly at the exact moment it happens. When the bus hits Mum. 6.09 p.m. I find this out afterwards. Don’t ask me why we’re watching weightlifting. I’m not into it or anything. I’m not that sad. It’s just really funny. All those little midgety women so pumped up they looked like men. We are in fits. At the exact moment it happens, we are in fits.

  I knock for Chick after the argument. Our house is one of loads of little, new buildings squashed together. Chick’s house is big and fat and sits by itself. Chick answers, eyes still on the TV through the living room doorway. She hops from socked foot to socked foot, bursting for an imaginary pee.

  “All right, Chick,” I go.

  Chick twitches for a look-out onto the street behind me, then she’s turning towards the kitchen watching for any movement from her mum, then she’s back eyeing the TV. Chick acts like a rabbit waiting for an HGV. She’s always like that.

  “All right, Mel. Come in.”

  At last I get the Chick smile – barbed-wire teeth in a blonde, dolly head.

  “Mum’s driving me mad,” I say, which will be enough of an excuse for me to stay for tea.

  Chick’s walking back to the TV without closing the door, so I do it. I follow her pink leggings, which have given up trying to get a grip on her chopstick thighs. They’ve surrendered in wrinkles around her ankles.

  “Watching weightlifting,” she sing-songs. “On the sofa.” Chick will watch everything and anything.

  Mrs Lacey’s living room is painted Avarice Green with a sludge-grey carpet and a candy-cream three-piece suit. There’s an empty bag of Wotsits on the coffee table and orange crumbs on the sofa. Chick lives on Wotsits. I find a good spot on the sofa away from the cheese dust. I don’t want Mrs Lacey to blame it on me. I chuck my bag at the armchair.

  On the TV, a woman is grinning like a loony, groaning and shaking under a barbell. She looks like she’s trying to do a poo.

  Chick goes, “You can get these pills that kill fat in your body and stop you getting lardy.”

  It sounds like it has nothing to do with anything, but I can see why it came into Chick’s head. We’re like that. We’ve known each other eleven years, since primary school. The women on telly are squatty, chunky hulks, and Chick’s got this thing about getting fat, even though she’s built like a Twiglet. If she wasn’t my best friend I’d hate her for the
amount of Wotsits she can scoff.

  The dumpy woman with the grin drops the barbell and roars. Both me and Chick yell, “Denied!” at exactly the same time. That means we have to do the jinx thing where you link little fingers and make a wish.

  “Why did she yell like that?” Chick asks. “Did she drop it on her foot?” Chick can be a bit dippy. She doesn’t do as well as me at school.

  “No, it’s just what they do to get rid of all that anger and energy and stuff.”

  “Oh.” Chick is nodding like she knew this all along.

  She sticks her thumb in her mouth and rubs her nose with a finger at the same time. The other hand gets hold of a chunk of hair and dabs her split ends against her cheek. I’m supposed to keep it a secret, the thumb-sucking.

  “Do you think they’re lesbians?” I say. The grinning woman is moody now. She lumbers off stage and gets a towel wrapped over her shoulders by a coach. The coach looks scary tall next to this little, bricky weightlifter.

  “What, all of them? Lesbians?”

  “Dunno.”

  Suddenly Chick pulls her thumb out and she’s smiling. There is orange Wotsit gunk round the brackets of her braces. “Do you reckon them fat pills can make you grow taller than a four-foot dwarf?”

  “Or make you look like a woman again?” I go.

  I’m smiling too now because I know we’re off on one. We’ll keep going and going, saying stupider and stupider things until we can’t breathe properly for laughing and one of us begs for mercy. That is how we work.

  “Or get rid of your . . .” Chick doubles over on the sofa, her words gobbled up by giggles. She laughs like a little kid doing an impression of a machine gun – ak ak ak ak.

  “What?” I squeal, tipping forwards with her. I’m halfway to hysterics. I know the answer is going to be good.