Red Ink

by Julie Mayhew

  In the hallway, Pamela opens the front door for Mum and we both wave her off in a taxi.

  “So,” says Pamela, once the taxi has gone. “Let’s have some fun, shall we?”

  Staying at Pamela’s is great. She cooks lasagne and fish and chips (no eye in the fish) and shepherd’s pie all from ingredients, not from a packet, and she doesn’t complain at all when I watch hours and hours of television. Ernie her Westie decides he really likes me so he sleeps on the end of my bed at night. When we pop back to my house each day to feed Kojak, I feel very guilty for making friends with a dog.

  Pamela tucks me in at night and tells me I mustn’t worry about Mum. Until she talks about not being worried, I had forgotten I should be worried. I guess Mum will find it hard with Auntie Aphrodite being even grumpier than usual, so I think about not worrying about that. But then I remember something I am really worried about – that Granbabas will give his farm to Mum. When Chick’s Gran died, her old house got left to Mrs Lacey. Chick’s mum sold the house, that’s how come Chick got new ice skates, but Mum won’t do that with Granbabas’s farm. She’ll want us to go and live there because she loves Crete so much. When she was growing up, all Mum ever wanted to be was a melon farmer. I would hate it there. I’d have to leave Chick, I wouldn’t understand the TV because I can’t speak Greek, and I don’t think they ever have snow.

  While Mum is away, it snows in London. Not enough to stop us going to school, but enough to build a snowman in Pamela’s back garden. When we’ve used up all of her snow we climb over the fence into our garden and build another snowman.

  “Someone to guard your garden and keep it safe,” says Pamela. I like that. I never want it to melt.

  When Mum gets back she rushes into Pamela’s living room where I am watching TV, picks me up and spins me around until I’m dizzy.

  Pamela follows her in and asks her how it was.

  “Cold,” says Mum, and Pamela nods like this explains everything.

  The ‘cold’ makes me hopeful. “Did you have snow too?” I ask.

  “No, no snow,” says Mum. “Not yet.” The ‘yet’ also makes me hopeful.

  Mum doesn’t mention moving to the farm when we get home. I don’t bring it up in case it’s just something she’s forgotten and I remind her by talking about it. Mum has brought me back a present from Crete – a brown leather satchel with red and green flowers. The bits of the satchel with flowers painted on are sunken into the leather. When you run your fingertips over these dips and grooves, it feels nice. I really like the satchel but when I take it to school a couple of the girls say it’s stupid and cheap and looks like it came from a market. So after that I hang it on the back of my bedroom door and tell Mum I don’t want to take it to school any more in case I spoil it.

  After two weeks of not mentioning the farm, I’m bursting to know what is going on so I cross my fingers behind my back for good luck and ask, “Are we going to have to move to the farm?”

  Mum isn’t looking at me. She is concentrating on stirring beans and putting toast in the toaster at the same time.

  “What farm?”

  “The melon farm. Now that you own it, are we going to have to move there?”

  “I don’t own any farm.” The toast pops up and makes me jump. “Auntie Aphrodite is owning the farm.”

  “Why?”

  “Eggs, fridge, please.”

  I do as I’m told and get two eggs out from the under the flip-up bit in the fridge door. Without thinking I pass them straight to her and she hisses at me to put them on the worktop. With all the questions, I forgot. It’s very, very bad luck to pass eggs straight to someone. Mum waits a few seconds, then picks up the eggs and cracks them into a frying pan.

  “Why?” I try asking again. “Why does Auntie Aphrodite own the farm?”

  “Because Granbabas say it so, that is why.”

  Mum is swearing at the beans for sticking to the pan.

  “Why isn’t it you who gets the farm?”

  “Because it just isn’t, okay, Melon? Now, you are washing hands and sitting up at table.”

  We eat tea without saying much. Mum stabs at the beans like she’s still angry with them for burning. I breathe a sigh of relief. Finding out that the farm belongs to Auntie Aphrodite is the best news. The beans taste good.

  By the end of the meal, Mum has calmed down enough for me to ask another question.

  “Why did you tell Pamela that you got into trouble for not going to Crete for your mum’s funeral when it all happened here?”

  Mum looks at me like she did when we were packing my case – the ‘doing the sums’ face.

  “Because,” she picks toast crumbs off the table with the end of her thumb, “because sometimes it is the kind thing to say a lie rather than to tell the truth.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” says Mum.

  Then she lets me off doing the washing-up.

  THE STORY

  3

  In the early morning, London’s streets are strangely subdued. Chaos has been and gone. Stop for a moment in one of the city’s squares and you will hear murmurs of the night before, of the years before, of centuries ago. But London isn’t a place for looking backwards. History is only a promise that anything could happen in the future. In this place of possibilities, Mama and Maria made their new home.

  They began by lodging with Auntie Eleni, Mama’s sister who had left Crete ten years before with a small suitcase and a big dream. Eleni was a robust woman with a big-hearted spirit, a woman whose hands were surprisingly soft considering she spent all her time dealing with the dampness of other people’s laundry. With her husband Vassilis, she owned the launderette on the Kentish Town Road. Though her welcome was generous, space in Eleni’s house near the train station was not. So Mama understood that as soon as Maria’s baby arrived, they would need to move on.

  Germination took on a whole new meaning for fifteen-year-old Maria as she started this new life away from the gullied melon patch. She rested her hands on her taut, expanding belly, feeling the warmth within, encouraging her baby to grow.

  In the fluorescent light of the delivery room, hair glued to the red of her cheeks, Maria gave birth to a baby girl with frantic limbs – and the final slivers of her childhood slipped away.

  Nothing that had happened before that day had really meant anything. Or rather, everything that had happened before that day had only been leading up to this. From now on, Maria decided, she would be like Babas – she would avoid the bumps in the road. And she would make sure only the strongest memories would survive.

  Maria examined the creased, swollen features of the baby squirming in her arms, a mystery ready to solve, and no other name in the world seemed right. The round hopefulness of the fruits that blossomed back home and the bold-eyed girl before her were the same thing.

  And that was how Melon got her name.

  Mama, Maria and Melon took their few belongings and rented a flat above the Taj Mahal Tandoori House, a few doors down from the Papadakis Washateria. The scent of chilli, cumin, coriander and fenugreek drifted from the kitchen below, infiltrated their bedrooms and seduced their taste-buds.

  Maria took the double room and made Melon’s first crib from the bottom drawer of a cabinet. Mama took the single room, where she did nothing more to make her mark than hang a crucifix above her bed. The living room and kitchen were all one, furnished with a well-loved three-piece suite, the fabric of the arms worn through.

  The rent did not pay itself, so while Maria’s days were spent deciphering a new alphabet at a school for English, her evenings were spent taking orders at the Mount Olympus restaurant across the street. The owner, a Londoner, was so pleased to hire an authentic Greek waitress that he decided to believe Maria’s story that she was twenty-one years old and eligible for a decent wage.

  Mama looked after Melon day and night. God had granted Mama just one opportunity to raise a child, but here was another gift from heaven. While Melon
napped, Mama steamed through ironing work, sourced by her sister, and in the evening she sang Cretan lullabies until her granddaughter’s nasal breaths became slow, slow whispers in the dark.

  But Mama still missed home. She missed the patchwork quilt of flat, dry earth that spread out around their farm. She missed Maria’s Babas, her darling Manolis.

  She wrote letters describing her anxiety as they had boarded the aeroplane at Hania, the strange, cold air when they landed. She told Manolis of Eleni’s achievements – my sister, a thriving businesswoman!

  And she tried to explain.

  At first she could not find the words but, driven by the desperate feelings that possessed her at night, the sentences came. We are two bricks that belong side by side, strong, building the walls of our family. I will come back to you, if you need me like I need you. I love you. Your devoted Chrysoula.

  Babas never replied. But Babas’s interfering sister Aphrodite did. You should have thought of all this, read Aphrodite’s scrawl, before you deserted your husband.

  Maria, meanwhile, embraced all that London offered, good and bad – the bawdy banter of car horns, the tinny basslines of other people’s music, the way rain travelled down a window pane. She rode with Melon on red double-decker buses, paying no attention to numbers or destinations, each journey unveiling a new part of the city, a new crop of gothic buildings with sooty faces, a new green space hidden in the maze of roads. When Maria heard Greek words being spoken onboard the bus, above the fast talk of the English teenagers, she would immediately introduce herself.

  This was how she came to meet Anastasios ‘Tassos’ Georgakis from Agios Nikolaos in Crete. Their lives had begun on the same small island only to converge hundreds of miles away. He was a lean, older gentleman with slender wrists and inviting eyes, who wore an insubstantial tweed jacket whatever the weather. Tassos had come to the UK as a student many years ago and now worked for the Greek embassy. He said his work consisted solely of helping tourists replace lost passports, but Maria suspected there was more to it than that. She invited him to the flat for biskota amigdalou and a pot of English tea – and to meet her mama.

  They were immediate friends – Mama and Tassos. They watched television together in the evenings, with Tassos translating. And when Maria came home from the restaurant at night she would hear their laughter in the living room, the merry click-clack of their Greek tongues.

  Maria turned her attention to Melon who was growing strong and broad, a sign of Babas’s Fourakis blood staking its claim above the genes of Christos Drakakis. Maria did not want her daughter seeking out conversation on the top decks of buses, so she found a playgroup for Melon, somewhere for her to pick up her accentless English.

  But while Maria focused on her thriving daughter, she neglected to see how Tassos had only gone so far in healing Mama’s homesickness. When land is left uncared for, weeds grow. When a sense of longing goes unanswered, an illness takes over.

  “I have found a lump, in my breast.”

  Mama said the fated words one dark afternoon in November and Maria could not speak. How could she have stayed blind to the pain in Mama’s heart? Why hadn’t she stopped? Why hadn’t she listened?

  “You musn’t be sad,” said Mama, who had already resigned herself to her destiny. “I knew this would happen when I married your father and took on his name – all the Fourakis family die young.”

  3 DAYS SINCE

  I have stolen Chick’s credit card. She owes me. My mum is dead. Hers is still alive.

  Although you would think it was the other way around. Chick is the one acting like her arm has been chopped off. Yesterday I cracked a joke, a really funny one, about our maths teacher Miss Boniface and that weird thing she does with her neck and Chick just looked at me like I had murdered her hamsters. I’ve since thought about murdering Chick’s hamsters, but I do want her to speak to me again, not hate me forever.

  That’s all I want. I want her to talk.

  Chick thinks she’s not allowed to smile. She’s terrified that something is going to make her laugh and this will be disrespectful to my mum. Rubbish. Now I’m stuck in the middle of it all, I see that there are no rules about how to behave around death. The Lacey household have made their own rules.

  YOU MUST ACT SOLEMN AT ALL TIMES EVEN THOUGH YOU DIDN’T REALLY KNOW THE PERSON WHO DIED.

  IF YOU WANDER INTO A ROOM WHERE THE DEAD PERSON’S DAUGHTER IS, YOU MUST EXIT, QUICK. YOU WILL HAVE NO CLUE HOW TO ACT OR WHAT TO SAY.

  THIS IS THE LAW.

  Every time she thinks I’m out of earshot, Mrs Lacey says something like, ‘I don’t know what to do with her. Why should I know what to do with her?’ Mr Lacey will tell her, ‘Please keep your voice down, Rowena.’ Never anything constructive, always the same line: ‘Please keep your voice down, Rowena.’ I wish people would speak up. Yell a bit. That would be better than the crushing silence.

  I’m waiting at the tube station. It’s good to be outside. Men in orange overalls are working on the tracks beyond the end of the platform. From this perspective, they look like midgets. Oompa Loompas. Chick played an Oompa Loompa in one of her Christmas ice skating things. She had to wear hideous orange tights and paint her face with this stuff that made her skin break out. Two of the little orange men are carrying what looks like a stretcher with a body on top. Must be sand bags. Must be.

  I’ve heard Mr and Mrs Lacey badmouthing Mum too. Mostly Mrs Lacey. She’ll huff and go, ‘Lord knows how she brought that girl up. Am I expected to right all the wrongs?’ I don’t like that. Only I am allowed to slag off Mum.

  The least Chick can do is lend me her credit card. I haven’t got near enough to Chick to ask her permission. She’d probably say ‘yes’ if I did, anything to make me go away. No, actually, she wouldn’t, because she knows her mum would go spare. That would be ace. To make Mrs Lacey go spare. A reaction. Something real.

  Four minutes until a train. An age. I want to get out of here. I feel like I’m skiving and I’m going to get busted any minute. It’s Thursday morning. A school day. I’ve never skived off. Ever. Of course, I’m not really skiving now. ‘Compassionate leave.’ That’s what they call it. I’m not sure what’s more compassionate: making me stay at Chick’s home with Mrs Lacey, or sending me to school to get stared at by everyone. Mrs Lacey is taking time off work to look after me. She’s not doing much ‘looking after’. She’s done plenty of cleaning and read enough magazines. The best I get is a stiff, ‘Are you okay?’ She looks terrified of what I might say back so I daren’t ever go, ‘No, actually.’ I just say, ‘Yeah, fine.’ Sometimes Mrs Lacey goes, ‘You must miss her very much,’ or, ‘We must be thankful that she didn’t suffer’. They sound like sentences she found in the middle of a greetings card. She says them under her breath, without looking me in the eye. Mrs Lacey has gone to the doctor this morning, and I took the chance to escape. I’d rather be at school, though it would be bad to carry on like nothing had happened. Plus, no one else at school has had a parent die. I am now officially even more of a freak than I ever was. Brilliant.

  There’s the sound of a Coke can being kicked down the stairs onto the platform, then the scuffle of shoes trying to get at it first. I look up.

  Ian. Ian Grainger. The last thing I need right now.

  I’m doing well holding things together, but if Ian starts on me, I don’t know what will happen. I might cry, wail, faint, explode. Literally. Pieces of me flying everywhere.

  I may not be skiving but Ian definitely is. Eleven thirty. He should be in English now. He’s in uniform, so I’m guessing he did Maths first thing then decided to sack it off for the day. Ian’s with Murray Bulger who is fat yet somehow manages to be worthy of Ian’s friendship. Dylan is with them too. Puny, stupid Dylan.

  Dylan kicks the can onto the gravel of the tube tracks.

  “Fuckhead,” goes Ian. He gives the back of Dylan’s head a proper whacking, then walks off ahead of the others. Limping. It’s funny how the limp isn’t there when he pl
ays football.

  Ian picks a spot by the yellow line at the edge of the platform and dumps down his bag. Dylan and Murray join him, do the same with their bags. All three of them put their hands into their anorak pockets. Ian first, the other two following. Sheep. They stand poking their toes at the line, then scan along the platform for a train. They clock me. Murray swings his head back towards the other two, lowers his voice, says something I can’t hear. They half nod, look at their feet, then pretend to find the massive poster for deodorant across the tracks really, really interesting.

  They know.

  One of two things must have happened. Either there was some cringeworthy speech made by the form tutors at register Tuesday morning about why I wasn’t there, or Chick has been spreading it about. Chick will earn some proper kudos at school for this – the juiciest bit of gossip since Pooja Varma got arrested for shoplifting. Or maybe this story is bigger. Someone actually died. And Chick has got firsthand knowledge – details. When Pooja nicked those clothes, we had to make up most of the story just so we could keep talking about it.

  However they found out, Ian, Murray and Dylan know.

  I brace myself. I’m ready for them to do the thing with my name.

  But, nothing.

  I look back along the tracks: a train is nosing its way into the station. I look back at the boys. Still nothing. Their turtle heads have shrunk down into their anorak shells. They’re pretending I’m not there.

  The tube train clatters into the station, shouting down the silence and whipping my hair across my face. The current of air makes the boys’ fringes do a Mexican wave. They’re rooted to the spot, looking at their feet. The doors stop right in front of me and the doors nearest to the boys will take them onto the same carriage. I expect them to move along to another bit of the train, but that would mean acknowledging that they’ve seen me. Too embarrassing.