Red Ink

by Julie Mayhew

  “Get rid of her . . .” Chick is gone again. She’s red now, hugging a cushion, doing those snorting things because she can’t get the laugh out.

  “Her what?” I go. “Her penis?”

  Chick screams at the word. Penis! She’s shaking her head. No, not penis. We’re both crying a bit now, as well as laughing. We mouth the word ‘penis’ at each other and clutch our spasming tummies.

  “No, her . . .” She just can’t get to the word.

  “Say it, Chick, before I piss myself.”

  Chick sits up straight and tries to fan laughter away from her face. “I was going to say,” she takes a deep breath, “her moustache.”

  We both go under again, laughing with no sound because we can’t get enough breath.

  Then Mrs Lacey walks into the room wanting to know what we both want for tea. Straightaway we can’t remember what was so funny. Just like that.

  Two and a half hours after the meal, the police turn up.

  When it happens it’s like being sucked down the plughole. My skin and clothes are dry but I’m spinning in the middle of the water. There is the colour blue, then bright white, then blue again. There is a sun, really strong, flashing off the water, blinding me. For a minute, I’m lying on the deck of this boat I’ve never seen before. I can see the wooden floorboards and feel the sicky sway of the sea. Then that image is gone. The boat has gone. More falling. All the blood disappears from my head and goes to my feet. More water. This time a river. I’m trying to cross to the other bank on stepping stones that sink when I tread on them. They rise up again once I’ve stepped off. More falling. Then a cracker bang in my head and a train track of spikes up the back of my neck. My hands go to my head and the blood finds its way there too. I’m coming up. I’m desperate for a gobful of air. A final whoosh.

  I can see two pairs of feet and feel carpet on my cheek. For a terrifying moment I have no idea where I am, who I am. Then the jigsaw puzzle starts fitting together in my head. I’m Melon Fouraki. I’m fifteen years old. I’m lying on my side, on the floor in Chick’s hallway. I recognise Chick’s trainers on the shoe rack. My arms and legs are in this weird arrangement. The recovery position. We had a first-aid talk at school once and we had to lay each other out like this on the gym floor. Chin up to keep the airway open, mouth down to let any vomit out.

  My ears echo like they’re full of water, then I hear this woman’s voice from down the bottom of the rabbit-hole.

  “Oh, God, she’ll want to come and live with us.” She becomes clearer by the end of the sentence. I’m tuning her in on an old radio.

  “You’re okay, just stay put for a moment.” This is a different woman’s voice, closer to me, a northern accent that I don’t recognise. Someone who smells of body spray and petrol is crouched over me. Her coat scratches and rustles as she moves. She’s got a firm hand on my shoulder, trying to stop me from floating to the ceiling.

  I lift my head and I get fireworks against a black background.

  “Don’t try and shift just yet, Melon. You fainted, my love. Try and lie still and breathe deeply.” The northern woman’s voice is soft and chocolatey. It instantly makes you want to do what she says.

  I lie still, looking at the black-shoed feet of a uniformed man, next to the hairy toes of Chick’s dad. A walkie-talkie makes a phlegmy cough and the black-shoed man mutters something into his handset. It gives another choking bark.

  I don’t understand how I ended up on the pastel blue carpet of the Laceys’ hallway.

  Then more jigsaw pieces slot together in my head. I remember the policeman and policewoman making me sit down in the middle seat of the sofa in the living room. I was thinking about Wotsit crumbs. How stupid. The television had been switched off – a big honour in the Lacey house. The standard lamp with its shade like an Ascot hat was the only light in the room. Mr and Mrs Lacey – Rowena and Victor, although I’m never allowed to call them that – were stood at the edge of the room, defending the curtains. Chick was hanging onto the door, not sure whether to come into the room, one of her pink-socked feet was working up and down the door’s inner edge.

  Me and Chick had been upstairs, watching TV in Chick’s room for the few hours since dinner. We’d been feeding raisins to Chick’s hamsters. It was so embarrassing to be summoned into the living room. It became Mr and Mrs Lacey’s patch in the evening. It felt like wandering into the staff room at school. Plain wrong. There were two glasses of wine half-finished on the coffee table. I don’t know why, but seeing that felt like getting a glimpse of Mr and Mrs Lacey naked. The room smelt different to when me and Chick kicked around in there after school.

  The policewoman sat down next to me on the sofa. She was stocky and when her backside hit the cushions I almost tipped into her lap.

  I’d laughed when she said it, when the policewoman said it. The two officers had probably decided before they walked in the house that news like that sounded better coming from a woman. Or maybe they’d argued in the car over who should do it. It’s your turn. No, I did the last one. Something like that. So, I laughed. Not because it was funny but because it was a bit surreal, sitting in Chick’s living room like that at 9.30 p.m on a Monday night, and because I’d been bracing myself for something bad as I came down the stairs. No one ever calls that late in the evening to say something good, do they? So the laugh was just the pressure to have a reaction, the right reaction, even though I had no clue what that right reaction was. If I was on a soap opera, I would stare wildly at camera and say no, no, it can’t be, it can’t be, then crumple up my face and sob because people think you’re a really good actor if you can cry on the spot and make yourself look ugly. But I just laughed and went blank.

  So the policewoman said, “I’ll make some tea, shall I?”

  And then I had this mad, panicky thought that the thing Mum used to say was turning out to be true, that all the Fourakis family die young. And then I realised I might have to go and identify a body and I knew I wouldn’t be able to do that so I said I had to go to the toilet. I did need to pee, it was no lie. And then . . . I must have fainted before I got to the loo.

  My bladder feels like it’s going to burst. Thank God. If I’d wet myself when I’d fainted, Mrs Lacey would have freaked out about the carpet.

  Mr Lacey’s hairy toes have walked off to the kitchen where Mrs Lacey seems to be in a frenzy, despite having a dry carpet. She’s sobbing out loud. I can hear the grippy bottoms of her big, daft, fur slippers pacing across the tiles. Mrs Lacey didn’t really know my mum. Only vaguely. Only enough to disapprove. They’d met briefly on doorsteps. They’d probably spoken on the phone once or twice, when they didn’t know where me and Chick were. It’s a bit weird that Mrs Lacey is so upset.

  “Oh God, oh God,” Mrs Lacey is repeating, demented.

  “Calm down, Ro.” Mr Lacey must be used to this overreacting.

  “But we’ll be the ones who have to take her in, Victor. Have you thought about that?”

  “Will you be quiet? She can hear you.”

  Mrs Lacey stops pacing. She sighs. “I’m going to be the next one fainting, I tell you.”

  The crouching policewoman swaps a glance with the towering policeman.

  All I’m thinking is, where’s Chick? I want her to burst into the hallway to tell me this is all a stupid dream. Any minute she’ll do it. I know it. Right now, she’s either in the kitchen watching her mum and dad argue, or she’s gone upstairs. No. I hear a game show theme tune. Chick’s in the living room. She’s switched the television back on.

  THE STORY

  2

  Often boundaries solve problems and sometimes they create them. A line drawn in the earth can provide clarity – or start a war.

  In ancient times, locals believed that one fatal eruption at Thíra might cause the Akrotiri peninsula to crack along its boundary line and float away from Crete.

  “Sounds improbable?” Babas said to Maria. He raised one silver eyebrow. “But this shuddering and shattering was e
xactly how God formed our islands long, long ago.”

  “When dinosaurs lived here?” Maria had asked, eight years old and goggle-eyed.

  “Yes, agapoula mou, peristeraki mou, when dinosaurs roamed my melon patch.”

  From this explanation, Maria assumed God and the dinosaurs had divided Babas’s land from the Drakakis farm next door. There were no stone wall partitions, just a deep, natural crevice that ran along the back of Babas’s northern field. However, where the Drakakis plot hugged the Fourakis farm to the east, only tradition held firm whose land was whose. And tradition is always open to interpretation.

  “I keep my borders free of weeds, do I not?” Babas would storm into the kitchen, fiery and sweating mud.

  “Yes,” Mama would reply as she served up stewed cabbage and sausage.

  “I would not let my land grow wild?”

  “No,” Mama would say, taking her seat and clasping her hands ready for Babas to say grace.

  “It is he who should be keeping those tangled vines in check,” Babas would mutter, breaking the skin of a sausage with an angry bite. “I am not the one to blame.”

  “Yes,” was always Mama’s reply, and then she would bow her head and send some quiet words to the heavens herself.

  Babas and Grigoris Drakakis’s arguments were as omnipresent as the sea breeze from Kalathás bay, as dependable as the melon harvest, as sure as a girl grows taller with every passing summer.

  The Fourakis and Drakakis children did not join their parents’ wars.

  Christos, the youngest Drakakis son, was small and wiry – a boy in no way suited to the heave-ho of farmwork. Even the chickens ignored his timid commands. He preferred hiding out with Maria in the dinosaurs’ gully that divided their farms, telling her of his dream to one day run away and become an artist. Where exactly a person ran away to in order to become an artist was still a mystery to Christos, but as soon as he found the answer he would go there. Maria, in return, confessed her desire to stay in Crete and take over the growing of melons.

  When Maria and Christos’s limbs grew too long to hide away in their furrowed den, they took themselves to Tersanas beach. Secluded in the mouth of a cove they did comic impressions of their blustering fathers. Nose to nose, barefoot in the sand, they deepened their voices, blew out their cheeks, speared their fingers in the air. They shouted until they could no longer keep up the act and fell on top of one other, giggling.

  Christos told Maria a secret – he had spied on his older brother Yiannis as he led a girl behind the goat sheds late one night. Yiannis had kissed the girl against a wall and the girl had arched her back and lifted her face to the moonlight. They had both made the most peculiar sounds. The next day Christos had asked Yiannis what he had been doing. He wanted to know why his older brother’s face had knotted up into an expression somewhere between grief and surprise.

  “He says it’s called ‘making beautiful music’,” Christos told Maria.

  The idea that Yiannis’s piggy grunts were in any way beautiful made Maria and Christos fall back in the hot sand with laughter.

  But still, their curiosity was awoken.

  Babas did not realise that while he concentrated his fury on unkempt weeds, he had neglected to see how lush and wild his fifteen-year-old daughter had grown. When you discover that your little girl, your melon prized above all others, is carrying the bastard grandchild of your enemy next door, it changes everything.

  Forever.

  To Babas, a line had been drawn in the earth and Maria had stepped across it. He could not look her in the eye. His words and stories dried up.

  Maria’s Mama, always in the background, stepped forward and became the industrious one. She would not allow shame to be brought upon her family. She would not watch her husband shun his only daughter. She decided they must leave the island to allow painful wounds to heal. So Mama, Maria and Maria’s unborn baby, at the time no bigger than a butter-bean, made their way to London where Mama’s sister had gone to live some years before.

  “They will be more understanding there,” said Mama.

  Babas took one last look at Maria, his little love, his little dove.

  “Pah!” he said, instead of goodbye.

  7 YEARS BEFORE

  I’m eight and three-quarters years old.

  There is a bong sound. Soft and comfy. The ‘no smoking’ light comes on above my head and Mum says, “tut”. Sometimes Mum goes and smokes in the toilets. This always makes the air hostesses cross and gets Mum a big telling-off.

  Mum is click-clacking with her seatbelt, making it complicated. Really, it’s easy. Mine’s fixed. Friendly hands around my waist. I’m already eating Cherry Drops to stop my ears popping. Crack the hard shell and there’s a fizz inside. I’m ready for lift-off.

  The smell of meat and baby-food potatoes is filling up the aeroplane. The meal is the best bit. You get a tray with four other littler trays on top. One has a yogurt in with a swollen-up top. You have to be careful when you open it. It could pop all over you, or over the seat in front, or on a stranger sitting nearby. If that happens, it’s very funny, but you have to say sorry. Another little tray has a bread roll with a packet of butter and margarine. Butter AND margarine, you get to choose. If you can’t decide, you can have butter on one half of your bun and margarine on the other. Mum puts the salt and pepper from the sachets on top to make salt and pepper-flavoured bread. Another tray has the hot stuff in. When you take the foil off, the steam gets you with a sting. The last tray has a warm jam sponge. Well, it’s not always jam sponge but it is always an afters. If you think about it, with the yogurt, that makes two afters really.

  I’d quite like to take the small trays home with me. The air hostesses probably just throw them out. You never see air hostesses washing-up. Some of the trays are blue and some are yellow and their edges are smooth and shiny. I’m not sure what I’d use mine for, but I’d find something. They’re just nice to have really. I ask Mum if I can keep the little trays and she just says, “You are not eating your mashed potato, no? Melon?”

  The hot stuff is too much food for me and too little for Mum. So when I’m halfway done we take my big, blue tray with the foil and swap it with Mum’s. That way it looks like I’ve been good and eaten all mine, and Mum gets seconds. You shouldn’t have seconds if you’re fat but Mum is skinny so it’s okay.

  “If she turn to the side, she disappear,” is what Auntie Aphrodite says. She says it really grumpily, so it must be a bad thing to disappear. Auntie Aphrodite has boobies that finish where her belt starts and arms like marshmallows. She is named after the goddess of love and the most beautiful woman ever. Mum says this is very funny.

  “Flowers they are growing wherever she is walking, birds they are flocking wherever she is flying!” Mum says before doing a harrumph noise and laughing a lot. I have never seen Auntie Aphrodite’s flowers or her birds, but I would like to.

  When we get to Crete, Auntie Aphrodite will make all the food and Mum won’t eat much of it, probably because she’s so full from all that aeroplane dinner.

  We’ll have Toblerone for afters on the plane too. One of those big triangle ones in the boxes off the air hostess’s trolley. I always say how nice the pilot bears are on the top of the trolley but teddy bears are just daylight robbery if you buy them on a plane. So I get a pen with a jumbo jet lid instead, which is less money. I shouldn’t expect it to last long though, Mum says, and the air hostess hears her and gives her a moody look. Air hostesses are always cross so you can’t blame yourself for upsetting them. It’s a really glamorous job but Mum says the altitude gets to them.

  Anyway, we have Toblerone, which is a special treat. If you think about it, after the yogurt and the jam sponge, it’s kind of like having a third afters. Auntie Aphrodite always makes an afters that sounds a bit like balaclava but it isn’t that word, because that’s one of them woolly hats with holes in. Balaclava, or whatever it is, is a bit like a greasy sausage roll without any sausage in. Mum feeds mine to
the stray cats that come round the table legs and we pretend I ate it all up. Lying like that is okay because it’s so I don’t hurt Auntie Aphrodite’s feelings.

  Auntie Aphrodite is my Granbabas’s sister, so really she’s my Great Auntie Aphrodite, except I don’t call her that. Although she’s the oldest, Granbabas still gets to boss her around because he’s in charge of the family. Mum loves Granbabas (except she just calls him Babas) but they don’t cuddle or hold hands, like I do with Mum, because they’re different. Mum and Granbabas say things in Greek to each other and I don’t know what any of it means, because they say it too fast and the words are all different. So probably they say lots of nice things instead of holding hands.

  Mum says to Granbabas, “Speak English in front of Melon.”

  Granbabas can speak English but with bits missing – like Mum, but worse.

  “If she grown up here, she know what I say.”

  Granbabas is kind of right but if I had lived in Crete all the time then I wouldn’t speak any English, except a little bit to tourists, which would be just as bad as not knowing how to do Greek. Svetlana in my class has a dad that’s from the Czech Republic and a mum from Barnet, so she can speak two languages at the same time. Mum could have talked in Greek to me in England but she didn’t. Also I don’t have a dad to do the English bit so that wouldn’t really have worked.

  The reason I don’t have a dad is because when my mum came to England she already had me in her tummy, so she didn’t need to marry a man and get a baby. I was born when Mum was sixteen years old, which is a bit too young to be having babies, so we don’t talk about that. We’ll talk about it when I’m older. Auntie Aphrodite says it’s shameful that Mum had me so young and she shakes her head, even though it was eight and three-quarter years ago, which is ages. When Auntie Aphrodite says ‘shameful’ she looks at me. Mum puts her arm round me so I don’t feel shameful on my own. She gives me a squeeze and calls me her ‘agapoula mou, peristeraki mou’. This is Mum’s name for me. It means I’m a lovely dove.