Red Ink

by Julie Mayhew

  “So?” Poppy is giving me a hopeful face. “What do you think about living with Paul?”

  All I can think about is what a black man’s cock might look like. I can’t help it.

  “Do you think Paul is the right person to help you through all this?”

  I’m lost. I have no other cocks to compare it with.

  “After all, you’re going through the same thing. You’ve both lost someone you love and . . .”

  Poppy’s voice wobbles. A fat tear spills down her face.

  “Sorry, Melon, not very professional of me, is it? I really shouldn’t have come. Probably get into trouble for this, I do apologise.”

  “S’okay.”

  Poppy is trying to smile but the harder she tries, the more the tears come. She gives up speaking and just sits there sniffing and sighing, little girl sighs, willing herself happy. There is laughter going on in the kitchen. I don’t want to join in with the laughing or the crying.

  “It could go two ways,” I say eventually. “The universe.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Poppy wipes her eyes and tries to rustle up her business face.

  “Either the other galaxies will keep running away from us forever and ever, into eternity. Or . . .”

  Poppy blinks away more tears. “Or?”

  “Or there will come this point when they can’t run away any further and they’ll have to start running back and then everything will contract in on itself.”

  “What happens then?”

  “My book calls it the big crunch.”

  “Sounds painful.”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t it?”

  I wonder if this is enough to get me through an exam question on the creation of the universe. And a question about the end of it all.

  “Have you managed to talk to someone about what’s happened, Melon?”

  “No one is really into talking about it.”

  “No, no. Paul may be good for that, but I think you need somebody independent.”

  I’m trying to remember – did I, at any point, say ‘yes’ to living with Paul?

  “I’m going to organise for you to go and see someone, Melon. Someone you can talk to about your feelings.”

  “Another social worker?”

  “No, a bereavement counsellor.”

  “Oh.”

  “Right, so, I’ll get things moving, shall I?”

  The door to the living room opens a crack and Mr Lacey’s clown head appears. Our talk is over and we got nowhere. We followed a little oval dotted path, back to where we started.

  “We’re going to serve up dinner in a few moments, so . . .”

  So what? I think. Go away, dickhead.

  “So, if you could wind things up.”

  Dinner will be something in a tomato-y garlic sauce, that’s all Mrs Lacey ever cooks. Peel back all the fancy lettuce and nuts that she chucks on top and that’s all there is. Pasta in a tomato-y garlic sauce, chicken in a tomato-y garlic sauce, beef in a tomato-y garlic sauce. The same thing over and over. The smell of garlic is shouting at us from the hallway.

  When Poppy goes home, I will have to sit at the kitchen table and we will all eat in silence. Either that or I’ll listen to Mr and Mrs Lacey do their happy family show, which is so fake it’s suffocating. Chick can’t keep up the pretence of it all, she just ‘yeps’ and ‘nopes’ in roughly the right places. She hardly eats, won’t look me in the eye. I can’t bear it.

  “We’re just deciding whether Melon should return to her home, aren’t we, Melon?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I want to go home.”

  I do. It is my decision. I’m leaving because I want to, not because Mr and Mrs Lacey want me to.

  “I don’t want to be here.” I spit out the word ‘here’ like bad milk. “I’d rather live with Paul.”

  I make it sound as though Paul is a better man than him.

  “That’s great,” says Mr Lacey, not hearing how angry I am. “That’s great that you know what you want.”

  No, listen to me, I think. Listen to me. I’m saying, fuck you. I’m saying, fuck you all.

  Mr Lacey smiles a winner’s smile.

  Except I’m not saying it, am I? I’m not saying fuck you. Not out loud. Not for real. I’m as bad as them.

  I’m trapped on my little, oval, dotted path back to my home.

  MERCURY, VENUS, EARTH, MARS, JUPITER, SATURN,

  URANUS, NEPTUNE . . . PAUL

  Whatever I say, I will end up living with Paul. There is no one else left. I’m like the earth with its magnetic field that repels charged particles. The only charged particles that get through are called social workers. Everyone else is running away from me, as fast as they can.

  16 DAYS SINCE

  I have bought a new, hardback notebook. I open it up on the dining room table. Its spine cracks. A big noise in a quiet house. A clean, lined page looks back at me. Usually I love that – the buzz of new stationery. Going back to school after the holidays is the worst thing ever, but having a chunky pad of fresh writing paper in your bag makes it all feel better. My favourite thing is a pristine, untouched school diary. By November it doesn’t feel special any more. The grimness of being at school takes over. But in September, at the beginning, that diary is the nicest thing.

  This blank page is giving off no good vibes though. I check the clock on the wall – a pottery sunshine face with hands coming out of the nose. 5 p.m. I have an hour and a half to get writing before Paul comes home.

  Paul went back to work at the end of last week. When you have a proper job, after two weeks of compassionate leave, you have to just get over yourself. School isn’t being so pushy with me.

  On his first day back, Paul came home looking haggard. I never knew black skin could look pale and pasty. It can.

  “Going back to work was very challenging,” he went to me. He stood there in the kitchen, looking down, nodding for a while. “Yes, very challenging,” he muttered.

  He didn’t move, just stayed put, chewing his bottom lip, waiting, as if I was supposed to do something about it.

  “What do you want?” I went, with a sort-of laugh. “A medal?”

  That made him shift.

  On his first day back, Paul cleaned out Mum’s desk. I imagine that was ‘very challenging’ since Mum was a nightmare hoarder and skanky with it too. Paul brought home a box of junk, but I didn’t take a look inside. All I saw was the framed picture of me on my first day at school sticking out the top.

  It was mean of everyone at Children’s Services to make Paul do the clearing up, what with him being so soft. Did they leave her desk exactly as she’d left it on that Monday evening? Her coffee cups going mouldy, urgent paperwork getting ignored, as if she was away on holiday and would be back any day soon to sort it out. Maybe it was kept as a shrine. You hear of those parents who can’t bear to move a single object in their kid’s bedroom after they’ve died. They leave clothes and magazines scattered everywhere. Maybe Mum’s workmates laid flowers on her desk, like people tie bouquets to lampposts where car accidents have happened. Paul did that. Where the bus hit Mum. Those flowers will have shrivelled up now; their plastic wrapping will have gone a manky yellow colour in the sun. I don’t know this for sure. I mean, why would I actually visit the spot where it happened? I’m not that morbid.

  A blank page.

  You could try writing it all down, Amanda said.

  A blank page.

  That’s my head. Blank.

  I used to visit Mum’s office quite often. Before she died. I know her desk, I can picture it. It was near the wobbly table with the kettle and the teabags and the miniature fridge. If I went to see Mum at work, there’d always be little groups of harsh-faced girls hanging around outside the revolving doors at reception. They’d be wearing too many hair accessories. They’d usually be smoking. If I walked past with Mum, she would say ‘hi’ and pretend not to notice the smell of weed. They were her kids – the ones who had to report to her because they’d been in trouble with
the police. She’d tell them how to sort out their lives, give them a target and a purpose. She’d help them find their groove.

  “Is like when a stylus falls into place on a record,” Mum told me. “Music begins to play.”

  She gave loads of time to those kids. I reckon she thought of them as her other children. She’d only had me and never met anyone else to have more babies, so the troubled kids filled the gap.

  Chick’s an only child too. That’s one of our bonding things – the lack of brothers and sisters and the fact that everyone thinks you’re a spoilt brat who doesn’t know how to share. Or at least it was one of our bonding things. It means nothing now.

  Chick says her mum chose to have just her because you don’t do a proper job as a parent if you have several kids. I reckon Mum would have had more babies though, if she’d met the right person. Someone else after Paul. She was still young enough.

  One of Mum’s troubled kids came up to talk to me at the wake. Siobhan, her name was. I’d always thought that those kids hated Mum for sticking her nose into their lives, but Siobhan was head over heels for her.

  “Your mum was amazing,” she went. “She totally understood what I was going through.”

  The way Siobhan gushed made me feel uncomfortable. It felt like this girl had stolen something from me.

  “She, like, totally got me. Cos she’d been there, yeah?”

  Siobhan was wearing a thick, black polo-neck and because it was really hot in our living room and because she was getting so excited, her cheeks burst into horrible red blotches.

  “Your mum saved my life. It was totally down to her that I got myself off drugs.”

  Siobhan was waving her hands around, slopping wine on the carpet. Mum obviously hadn’t got Siobhan off the booze as well.

  “I totally didn’t know, like, who I was.”

  The way Siobhan talked about my mum was the way crazy people talk about finding God.

  “Until I met your mum, I never knew what was special about me.”

  Siobhan never explained what her special thing was, the thing that Mum helped her to find. I really wanted to know that.

  A blank page.

  I sweep the side of my hand over the notebook, clearing away imaginary dust. Write something. Something special.

  When I was little, I believed there was something special about me. It was my job in life to find out what it was. Mum said she gave me my name to make me special, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t the special thing. It was something else. If I didn’t find out what it was before I was old, before I was twenty-four, say, then I would have failed. That’s what I believed. I still do believe that. My time is running out. I could get knocked over tomorrow, like Mum did, and never know. Although, more and more, I’m starting to think there is no special thing in me. Maybe not everyone gets one.

  I unzip my pencil case – another scary-loud sound in a silent house – and pull out a pen without looking. A red one. My shoulders tense. Someone walks over my grave. The red pen feels hot in my fingers. I go to put it back in the pencil case, find a blue pen instead. Then I think, what does it matter now?

  A blank page.

  Amanda expects me to write about how sad I am. When we need to do an essay, Mrs Castleman, our English teacher, tells us to put the subject in block capitals in the middle of the page – SAD – then brainstorm around it. Spread your thoughts out, she says, and organise them afterwards. I would like to be back at school now doing proper essay plans, getting ready for my GCSEs, but Paul thinks this will be ‘very challenging’. It will not be ‘very challenging’, it will be a relief. I never thought I would wish to be back at school, but this house, empty, with nothing to do except think . . . Kojak is terrible company.

  SAD. I have no thoughts about that to be spreading about.

  I need to write something more important, something that will make things okay. Amanda doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She might have a dead mum, but she doesn’t have my dead mum.

  A blank page.

  What I write in this book will make a difference, because the things I do have huge consequences. That’s what the dark thing is that’s been living inside my ribs since the police came to call – my power. I understand it now. When I was walking home from the stationery shop after buying this notebook, I did something – I used that power. I went to the office shop on the high street, the one I’ve never been to before. It looks too boring, too businessy. I could have gone to one of the nice stationery shops in town, but since the haircut, I don’t feel like going too far any more. And anyway, this notebook that I found is perfect. It’s got a purple cover made of velvet with fancy writing pressed into it, like the opposite of braille. Greek writing.

  On my way home, heading back along Long Lane, there was a stocky man walking two miniature sausage dogs. He was in front of me, on the opposite side of the road. The man was butch-looking – a builder-type – but his dogs made him look so drippy. He’d dressed them in matching navy waistcoats. Double drippy. One of the dogs, the littler one at the back, was struggling to keep up on its tiny, stumpy legs. It kept turning to look at me, which slowed it down even more. The man was yanking the lead, making the little dog skid across the pavement. The dog seemed scared of me, which was stupid because I wasn’t going to do anything. But then I thought, what if I did do something? So I kept staring at the dog, feeling myself getting a hold over it somehow. Then when I thought it was really under my spell, I made this sudden turn to cross the road towards the dog. The thing nearly exploded with fright. It yelped and hopped, got into such a tizzy that it tangled itself in its lead. That was very funny.

  And then the man kicked the dog. Really hard. A boot into its stomach.

  “Stop it,” he went, really gruff. The dog let out this horrible squeal, a sound that put the taste of metal in the back of my throat. That was my power. I did that. I kicked that dog. Me – who likes animals, who used to nurse poorly garden birds in cardboard boxes as a kid, who stops in the street to sign those petitions against vivisection – I kicked that dog. I didn’t mean to, but that’s not the point. It was my fault. Just like I didn’t mean to do the things I did the day Mum died. But I did them, without thinking, and look what happened. Imagine what I could achieve if I really put some thought into it.

  A blank page.

  Paul will be home soon and I’ve written nothing. If I concentrate hard enough, something will come. I click-clack the pen between my teeth. In English once, Mrs Castleman gave us all a postcard and told us to use it as inspiration. Just write, she said, anything that comes into your head. My postcard was of a polar bear with its head turned over its shoulder. Its mouth was open, panting like a puppy, laughing almost. I’d written a fairy story about an ice palace guarded by friendly polar bears. Kids’ stuff. The thing about polar bears is everyone thinks they’re cute and beautiful but really they’re vicious.

  On the top of the hi-fi in the corner there is a picture of Mum. When Paul moved in, he framed several photos of her and put one in every room. You can’t go anywhere in the house and not be reminded. Except my room and the bathroom. But even there, you can’t forget. She is everywhere. I get up and bring the photo over to the dining room table. It’s sealed in a heavy block of see-through plastic. I like the frame. It’s something I’d never have imagined Paul choosing. I put the picture next to my notebook on the table and sit down.

  In this picture, Mum is laughing. Her hair is falling forwards. One of her bony hands (a market-stall ring on every finger) is pulling back a handful of curls on one side of her face. Her mouth is open, you can see two fillings. Mum’s other hand is pushed into her lap, which makes her look shy. Something she definitely wasn’t. On that hand, her left hand, there is a diamond ring. I don’t remember that ring from when she was alive. The background is leafy. She could be in the depths of a forest somewhere, but more likely she’s in a London park. The overflowing bin and the kids with the crack pipe are probably just out of shot.


  I don’t know where this picture was taken. I don’t know where most of the other pictures around the house were taken either. I don’t like that, Paul knowing this whole other person that I’ve never met.

  I wonder where I was when Paul took this picture. It looks sunny. Maybe I spent that weekend sunbathing in Chick’s back garden. Maybe Mum had told me that she had a daytrip planned with Paul and I paid no attention. Maybe I just left the house before she had the chance to say, writing ‘Gone to Chick’s’ on the noteblock in the kitchen before I went. Maybe she told me about it afterwards, what a good time they’d had, but I didn’t listen. I never listened.

  A blank page.

  I throw the pen across the room. It hits the wall, leaving a red scratch of ink. It drops behind the dusty fern plant on the cabinet. Through the dining room window, I can see a mum trying to get her two kids to go up the path of one of the houses behind ours. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know any of our neighbours. If Mum was here she’d tell you her name straightaway, know where she works, what she eats for breakfast, everything. I used to be close to Pamela, our old next-door neighbour, but she moved to Canada last year.

  The mum-I-don’t-know can’t get the youngest of her kids, a little girl, a toddler, to go into the house. The girl wants to crouch down in the gutter and pull something out of the edges of the drain. The mother goes back and yanks her up by one of her pink-anoraked arms. The girl squeals, and keeps squealing the whole way up the path. The mum opens the front door, they go inside. The door shuts behind them and I can’t hear the girl crying any more.

  I didn’t listen. I never listened.

  A blank page.

  I have a heading.

  Yes. I have a heading.

  A heading isn’t much but it’s something.

  I find a blue biro in my pencil case, pull off the lid with my teeth. I am going to break the curse of the empty page. I write:

  THE STORY

  I get out my ruler and underline it, neatly, twice. Yes, this is what I have to write. I did listen. I know every word.