Red Ink

by Julie Mayhew

  “You never know what it’s going to be like at the airport,” he goes, all serious. “Might be queues round the block and then we’d wish we’d stopped for a wee.”

  “Okay,” I go. “Fine. Whatever you think.”

  He starts slowing down and indicating even though the services are a mile away. We trundle along ticking and flashing. We pull into the Heston services.

  “What shall we do with Mum?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer. He is concentrating on trying to find a parking space.

  “We can’t leave her in the car, can we?” I go on. “Someone might steal her.”

  “No.”

  Paul is reversing slowly, very slowly, into a parking space.

  “So?” I push.

  “How close am I to the car next to you?”

  “You’re fine.”

  “You can get out okay? You can open your door?”

  “Yes!”

  “We’ll put her in the boot.”

  “No,” I go. “That’s not right.”

  I get out of the car and pull the lever that tips my seat forwards, so I can reach Mum. She’s in the wooden dove box, strapped in with a seatbelt, so she doesn’t fall and spill into the footwells. I sling my rucksack over my shoulder, lift up Mum and hold her close to my chest.

  “Let’s go.”

  I slam the car door. Paul locks up.

  Amanda said seeing Mum’s box of ashes for the first time was ‘a catalyst’. I looked it up in the dictionary.

  CATALYST: A SUBSTANCE THAT PRECIPITATES OR SPEEDS UP A CHEMICAL REACTION WITHOUT BEING PERMANENTLY CHANGED IN THE PROCESS.

  I see what she means. Mum is still ash, like she always has been since the funeral, but now I am different.

  A catalyst.

  It makes me think of that chemistry experiment where you mix baking soda and vinegar and it makes the beaker bubble over. When I first saw the dove box, everything inside me came fizzing out. Amanda seemed pleased about this, which meant I was really angry with her for a while. I was still furious with her for being rude about The Story. There was a time when I thought I would never forgive her. But now I can see that all the crying and shouting was a good thing. At least it was honest.

  Inside Heston service station everything is bright and plastic and colourful. The few people ambling about are tired and spongy and grey. You’d think that service stations would be happy places. Everyone there is off on a journey – the promise of something new. But they’re not happy places. They’re shiny on the surface, miserable underneath.

  Me and Paul go our separate ways for the toilet.

  “Meet you in the coffee shop,” goes Paul. He nods over to a counter where a tall, skinny boy in an apron is yawning his face off.

  “Okay.”

  “Whoever gets back first gets the coffee.” He grins over his shoulder. A challenge. Paul has been paying me an allowance out of the money that Mum left, so I have the cash to buy coffee if I have to. I’m bound to take longer though. I’ll make sure I do. The drinks are on Paul.

  He disappears into the gents. I follow the sign for the ladies.

  Paul is really looking forward to this trip to Crete – he’s about-to-burst, can’t-think-about-anything-else excited. He’s made an itinerary of all the things we must achieve while we’re there. Just reading the list is exhausting. Every day in the run-up to us leaving he’s been calling someone to sort something. I came home one day last month and he was on the phone to the airline, talking about taking Mum through airport security.

  “It’s not a box of drugs, or explosives, I don’t want you thinking that . . .”

  He got it sorted, but I told him it’s not customs he needs to be stressing about. If we’re going to scatter Mum’s ashes on the melon farm like she asked, he wants to be worried about getting past Auntie Aphrodite. Paul can’t get hold of Auntie Aphrodite. She hasn’t answered his letters.

  When I get into the toilet cubicle, I’m not sure what to do with Mum. It seems wrong to put her on the floor, so I put her under one arm while I pull down my jeans and pants with the other hand. Then I sit with her on my lap while I pee. Mum wouldn’t have minded, she was never cringey about bodily functions.

  When I wash my hands there’s room to put her box down by the tap. The mirrors over the sinks make me look even more tired than I am. They pick out every vein and blotch. My skin looks yellowy-green, my hair looks lank. I pull my curls back with a band that I have around my wrist. The hair reaches into a tiny ponytail now – just. I’m pleased that it’s growing back fast. It’s something familiar and reassuring from ‘before’. Chick is still off the radar. I have a ponytail but no best friend. No, that’s not true. I have Justine Burrell. We got through the GCSEs together.

  I study my face now that my hair isn’t messing up the edges. I am different, more grown-up, more steely, as if my bones are made of stronger stuff. Is this what happens when you become an adult? Have the final slivers of my childhood slipped away?

  Back outside, Paul is already sat down with the drinks. He has bought me a cup of coffee. I never used to like coffee. Paul started making it for me when I was really depressed because he didn’t know what to say and he seemed to need to do something. I drank it to make him feel like he was being useful, then I got a taste for it.

  I sit down and Paul pushes a steaming mug towards me. I put Mum on the table. He stares at the box for a moment, then smiles, all affectionate.

  “I’ve stopped counting the days, you know.” He sips his coffee and gets a milky top lip. I point at my own mouth and nod in his direction.

  “What? Oh.” He wipes his face with the back of his hand. “Thanks.”

  I sip my coffee. I have it black and strong, which Paul says makes me hard as nails.

  “Counting what days?” I go.

  “Since.”

  We both watch an old man in a blue anorak scrape back a chair at the next table and sit down. He moves gradually, in stages, like he’s in pain.

  “Me too,” I say. “I’ve stopped counting.”

  “I used to be able to tell you to the day, to the hour, how long it was since it happened. But now . . .” Paul is smiling, nodding, pleased with this revelation about himself.

  “It doesn’t matter any more.” I nod too.

  “No, it’s not that exactly. It still matters, it’s just I’ve been thinking forwards now. I’ve been counting down the days till we get on that plane.”

  “Yeah?”

  Paul’s excitement makes me anxious. I want the trip to live up to his expectations, I do, but every time I’ve been to Crete it’s just been awkward and painful. I want him to understand this, but I can’t find the words to explain.

  “We’ll finally be able to put her to rest, like she wanted,” Paul says.

  “Suppose.”

  A middle-aged woman comes away from the coffee counter and puts down two mugs on the table in front of the anoraked man.

  “There you go, Dad,” she says.

  She opens up the small handbag that she has strapped across her body and pulls out a packet of biscuits – cheap supermarket ones brought from home. She catches us watching. Paul raises a hand in a half wave, smiles to show that we don’t think bad of her for not buying the coffee shop’s expensive biscotti. The woman looks at Paul, then at me, then back at Paul. Then she shoots me this look of concern. A sort of silent, are you okay? I smile back, confused. Paul repeats his nod and wave, more reassuring this time, and the woman sits down opposite her dad.

  Paul turns back to me, shaking his head a little. He rolls his eyes. I stare at him, thinking for a minute that he knew the woman. Then I see what that woman sees: a tired-looking teenage white girl and a thirty-something black man sitting alone together in a service station at 5 a.m. I go where her mind goes. And then I think, oh God, if we’re getting looks like that here in London, what will it be like in Crete, in the villages, where they’ve never even seen a black man? I look down into my coffee.

  I
should say something, warn Paul what it’s like on the island with the family – the way they used to treat me and Mum, the way they’ll treat him – but it’s hard to tell him things like that. He has this image of how it’s going to be and I feel bad for spoiling it. In a way, Paul is quite delicate. He doesn’t understand that it will seem weird to the family that we’re scattering ashes. To them, Mum doesn’t belong in Crete. To them, she shouldn’t have been cremated in the first place. It’s against their religion. Or maybe they would have approved – burn the witch.

  I want to tell Paul that I feel weird about scattering Mum’s ashes too. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to do it. I think of Mum as more real now, more real than when she was alive, and I’m not sure I’m ready to let that go. I say things to the ashes that I could never have said to her when she was actually here, living and breathing. I tell her that I’m sorry for the red ink, for hating her, for not listening to The Story. I tell her I’m sorry for not being at home when the police came to tell me she was dead. Mum used to say that people’s spirits carry on doing things after their body has gone. She would have gone home after the accident to tell me what had happened and I wasn’t there. I have a lot to make up for.

  Paul is toying with a sachet of sugar, spinning it around on the table top.

  “It’s 133 days,” I go.

  “What is?” asks Paul, not looking at me.

  “Since Mum died.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he says quietly.

  He swigs his coffee again, but this time I don’t tell him about the milk moustache.

  133 DAYS SINCE

  We’re at the villa and I’m starving so I eat the Coco Pops. Paul has brought a Variety Pack with him in his suitcase. He thinks we’ve come to a Third World country where they’ve never heard of a cornflake.

  When Nikos, the villa owner, showed us around, he pointed out a welcome basket of food on the kitchen table.

  “To say ‘hello to Crete’ and to get you starting.”

  I gave Paul a look to say, see, they eat food here too.

  Then Nikos explained that there was a supermarket just down the hill in the village where you can buy Marmite and PG Tips.

  “All these important things,” he went, with a big-eyebrowed smile. Then he laughed, loud, while Paul looked at his feet. Ha ha.

  Nikos also told us not to put paper down the toilet and to move the loo roll when you have a shower because Greeks don’t believe in shower curtains and you’ll only get your loo roll wet. So basically he filled us in on all the important things – eating and shitting.

  Nikos’s son lugged our suitcases from the hire car into the villa. Haris, his name is. Well, that was how Nikos introduced him. When Nikos was ordering him about he called him ‘Haralambos’. Hilarious. Haris is about the same age as me, with shiny, tanned skin and a gelled front quiff that you’re just dying to reach over and squash. Once he’d done our suitcases, Haris stood in our doorway gawping at me while his dad ran through the local tourist attractions. I tried staring Haris down but that just made him smirk. I don’t know why he was acting so pleased with himself. He was wearing the dodgiest T-shirt I’ve ever seen. It had this ridiculous English slogan:

  ITS THE NEW THING!

  LIFE THE DREAM, USA

  At one point when his dad was speaking, Haris piped up with, “The pool, it is very deep at one end.”

  “Yes,” went Nikos. “Is very deep. More than two metres. You share with other guests. You be very careful.”

  Haris grinned at this, like the pool being deep had some kind of double meaning.

  In the welcome pack of food there is a bottle of olive oil, a jar of olives, a bottle of wine and some rock-hard bread, so in a way I’m thankful that Paul has been an idiot and brought half of Tesco with him. I know he has teabags and marmalade in that suitcase of his. He was even talking about bringing bacon.

  Paul is standing on the small terrace that leads off from the kitchen/living room to look out across the swimming pool, hands resting on the back of his head. His hair has been clipped really short for the trip. His silhouette against the bright blue sky is all head and ears. He does a dramatic oh-it’s-all-so-beautiful sigh. “Let’s get in that pool before it gets dark,” he goes.

  It’s five in the afternoon and but the sun is still hot enough to strike you dead.

  “Wanna eat these first,” I go, dribbling chocolate milk down my chin.

  “I’m going to find my trunks.” Paul bustles back through the living area, off to his suitcase in one of the bedrooms. He’s bagsied the double room. I’m stuck with the twin.

  The Coco Pops are hitting the spot. Mum always used to buy Variety Packs.

  “This way,” she used to say, “you are not getting bored every morning.”

  Paul obviously shares this philosophy.

  I stayed overnight at Chick’s once and mentioned to Mrs Lacey at breakfast that we have Variety Packs at home, and Mrs Lacey said they were a really bad thing. I thought she was going to say because of the sugar or the lack of fibre, but no. She said, “Variety Packs don’t teach a child that you have to make choices in life and commit to things.” When she said ‘a child’, she meant me.

  Next breakfast with Mum, I parroted back what Mrs Lacey had said and Mum cackled to herself for about five minutes straight.

  I’m shovelling down the Coco Pops double-quick, silently thanking Nikos for leaving us a ‘hello to Crete’ half litre of milk in the fridge too. I’m so hungry. The last thing I ate was in a coffee shop at Gatwick at seven thirty this morning. Paul dragged us up there, away from all the good shops on the ground floor, and told me to get a sandwich as there wouldn’t be any food on the plane.

  “Yeah, there is,” I told him. “There’s a hot meal.”

  “Only if you order it,” he went. “I decided against paying for it. They always taste awful.”

  I couldn’t believe it. The best thing about the flight is the food. Everyone knows this.

  “Have a sandwich,” he goes, “because they’ll only have crisps on the plane.”

  I scanned the glowing fridges. “But I don’t want to eat a chicken and avocado sandwich at seven in the morning.”

  “Have a croissant then.”

  So I had a croissant and I ate it under protest, while Paul hoovered up a crayfish and rocket sarnie like it was the middle of the day or something.

  We didn’t speak. How could he cancel the in-flight meal? I couldn’t look at him. I pretended to be interested in the posters advertising how fresh everything was, and the dead-eyed staff who looked the total opposite of fresh. I wondered if they kept them in the dark, in locked cages in the basement of Gatwick airport, only letting them out to brew up cappuccinos.

  “Ta da!” goes Paul. He slides on bare feet across the tiles of the living area. He’s put on bright blue Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, his shades and a floppy hat. I’m supposed to laugh but I can’t find the energy. The whole journey has left me feeling sad, washed out.

  “Ready to swim!” he announces, clicking his heels and saluting. I still can’t find a laugh.

  Flying just wasn’t the same without Mum. With her it was all about the anticipation. Not about coming to Crete, but about each moment on the journey itself – the take-off, the meal, the Toblerone from the trolley. There was something really thrilling about knowing what to expect. Mum would always get nervous, struggle with her seatbelt, and then try to have a smoke in the loos. Looking back, I see now that she wasn’t actually scared of flying, she was scared of the family at the other end. But now I am scared of flying.

  On the plane with Paul I was terrified. Without Mum there to be the scaredy-cat, I had to take on the role. As we walked down the boarding tunnel all I could think about was how people who’ve had near-death experiences say they go down a tunnel. Flying is exactly like dying – you end up in a different place. I hyperventilated, I nearly fainted. Although, maybe it wasn’t a fear of flying exactly. Maybe it was my fear of what’s
at the other end. In Crete. And at the other end of life too.

  Paul drops the clown act and sits opposite me at the kitchen table. He watches me slurp the dregs of the milk.

  “They good, were they?”

  “Mmm.” I nod.

  “Excellent.”

  “Did you know breakfast cereals really do actually have iron in them?” I say this to avoid the heart-to-heart conversation that I can see hurtling my way. “You know, like actual iron filings, not just injected vitamins.”

  “Yeah?” goes Paul.

  “I saw this thing on the telly where a scientist rubbed a magnet over a clear plastic bag of crushed cornflakes and all these bits of grey came to the surface.”

  “Wow, that’s good knowledge, Melon.”

  Patronising words. He’s softening me up.

  “You’d never have known it was there, would you?” I go, running out of things to say.

  “What do you want to do this holiday?” Paul asks.

  This is it – the serious talk.

  “Nothing much. Get her ashes scattered. Get a tan.”

  “We’ll go out for some shopping and lunch on Friday for your birthday, of course.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Sixteen!” He does jazz hands when he says this.

  “Yes.” I smile. Just a day and a bit left of being a child. Just a sliver.

  “And I have a list of archaeological sights that are supposed to be fantastic,” Paul goes, “and then there’s the cathedral and the museums in Chania. So much for us to do.” He says Hania all wrong, with a hard ‘ch’ at the front.

  “Yeah?” I push the bowl away. “Great.”

  “But what do you want to do while you’re here? We’re here for the ashes, yes, but it’s about you, too.” Paul has flicked on his ‘social worker’ switch. “It’s about tying up any loose ends you might have; it’s about building some bridges.”

  “What, with Aphrodite, you mean?”

  “If that’s what you want?”