Red Ink

by Julie Mayhew

  “You must be having a laugh.”

  Paul gets up and takes my empty bowl to the sink. There is no dishwasher. Nightmare.

  “There is one thing I’d like to do.” It’s easier to say these things without Paul sat right in front of me.

  “What’s that?” Paul turns, nodding hard, an eager beaver.

  “I know I’ve said this before, probably just to wind you up, but the more I think about it, maybe I should do it, just to see, just to kind of know . . .” I feel silly saying it out loud.

  “What?”

  “I thought I might try to find my dad.” There. “No offence.”

  “No offence taken. You mean, find out about his childhood here.”

  “No, actually find my living, breathing dad.”

  Paul pulls that worried face, just like the last time I mentioned Christos.

  “Your father isn’t here, Melon,” he says firmly. “You won’t find him in Crete.”

  It’s strange the way he says this, so definite.

  “Oh, yeah?” I say. “Well, where is he, then?” I smirk. Paul may be an expert on crumbling monuments but he’s no expert on this piece of history.

  “Ahhhmmm . . .”

  That voice. Like he’s preparing a difficult speech.

  “He . . . He came over to England with your mum and then . . .” He puts his hand up to his forehead and pinches a section of skin. “Your mother really never told you anything about this?”

  “Yeah, I know plenty, thank you very much.”

  My turn to speak. My turn to show off my knowledge.

  “His name is Christos Drakakis and he was the neighbour’s son and he liked to draw and he was skinny and he never left Crete actually and . . .” I’m running out of facts. “And I have a picture of him.”

  Paul looks at me, broken. “Your mother told me a different story.”

  “I bet she did. Keep you sweet.”

  “She . . . No . . .” He closes his eyes, massages his forehead with his thumb now – hard. “She told me a . . . worse story.”

  “Worse?” I snort. “How could that story get any more bloody tragic?”

  Paul puffs himself up with air, rests his chin on his chest, then lets it out . . . “Your father is dead, Melon, I’m afraid. I really think I should be honest with you about this and . . .”

  The floor disappears from under my seat. Suddenly nothing in the room, in the world, is in the right place. How can Paul know this?

  He can’t. That’s how. He just can’t.

  “He died when you were a baby,” Paul goes on, looking me in the eye. He seems utterly convinced. “You wouldn’t have known about it at the time. It was . . .”

  “No.”

  “Yes, Melon.”

  “That’s bollocks.”

  “No.” He flattens down the air with his hands. “It’s not. Don’t you think we would have tried to contact him after . . . After your mum . . . If we knew that he was alive?”

  Poppy asked me for Auntie Aphrodite’s number when she visited. She never asked about my dad.

  “Okay then,” I go. “How? How did he die?”

  He studies me for a few seconds before saying, “A drugs overdose.”

  “What, he killed himself? With paracetamol or something?”

  “No, he didn’t do it on purpose. It was . . .”

  “No,” I say. Enough. I scrape back the chair to put a stop to all this stupid talk.

  “Let me finish, Melon.”

  “No.” I keep my calm. “Because you have got this all wrong. This is not how The Story goes. I should know. I’ve heard it enough times. It’s even written down.” I stride off towards my bedroom. “And I have pictures,” I call back at him again, in case he didn’t hear it the first time.

  In my room, I pop open the catches of my suitcase and pull the black bikini from the zipped compartment inside. My book with The Story is in there too. I flip it open. The photo of Mum with Christos and Yiannis is inside the cover. I examine Christos’s lopsided smile. He’s not dead. I can feel it. I undress and put on my bikini.

  Mum’s dove box is propped up against the pillow on one of the beds, watching me. I glare at it. So speak, will you, settle this for good. It keeps its trap shut.

  I walk back out into the living area with a towel wrapped around me.

  “Are you coming for a swim then, or what?” It is my turn to be the cheerful, determined one.

  Paul is sitting at the kitchen table, sulking.

  “I’m going to give it a miss actually, Melon. You go ahead. Watch out for the deep end.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I should stay and talk to him, tell him how things really were, but I’m not in the mood. Mum lied to him, but he’ll get over it. After all, it’s just a story.

  134 DAYS SINCE

  When I wake up and wander into the living area, Paul isn’t there. We didn’t mention my dad over dinner last night. We went down the hill to the village and ate at a taverna with a blue-painted terrace and dusty metal chairs. The waiter spoke perfect English but Paul insisted on getting out his phrase book and practising his hopeless Greek. He was parakaló-ing and efharistó-ing all over the place. He was still thinking about the conversation about my dad though, I could tell.

  There is a pot of coffee on the go in the kitchen so I pour a cup and move out of the dark cool of the villa into the blaze of sun on the terrace. The sound of cicadas seesaws in the air. Paul is in the pool, doing lengths. Up and down, swift and expert. Paul is a new person like this, with the water washing away his goofiness.

  A cat jumps over the wall as I watch, and starts slaloming round my ankles. Its white limbs are bone and fur, its face is pinched and meatless. It makes Kojak seem like a monster by comparison. I go inside and pour a saucer of milk and head for the terrace, have second thoughts, go back and tip Special K into the milk for extra calories. It feels mean giving diet cereal to a skinny cat but it’s my least favourite of the Variety Pack. And anyway, when I put it down on the terrace, the cat chomps it down as if it’s prime steak.

  Paul is out of the water now, dripping up the path to our terrace.

  “You’re up,” he calls, cheery.

  “Yeah, just going to get my swimming cossie on.”

  “Oh.” He stops at the terrace edge, brow furrowed. My plan to sunbathe obviously doesn’t fit in with his timetable for the day.

  “What?”

  “I was just going to say, stick on some shorts and come with me. I’m going up the road to see this late Minoan tomb. Nikos has just been telling me all about it.” Paul thumbs in the direction of the pool. Nikos is spraying a hose at the base of a tree that looks like a giant pineapple. There is no sign of Haris.

  “This tomb is relatively intact apparently,” Paul goes on. “And it’s not in my guidebook. Quite a find.”

  “A tomb. Nice.” That’s what this holiday needs. More death.

  “Then we should maybe try to find the farm tomorrow?” Paul adds, tagging it on like I won’t notice.

  “At the end of the holiday, maybe,” I fire back. “Save the worst till last.”

  “Whatever you think.” Paul has gone back to tiptoeing on eggshells with me, just like when he first moved in. We’ve slipped back to that.

  “It’s just that meeting the family isn’t going to be fun, you know that.”

  “Your mother did tell me.”

  “Yeah,” I put my head on one side, give him a grin, “but are you sure she told you the whole truth?”

  Paul ignores this, dries the last of the swimming pool water from his body. He has small coils of black hair on his chest. I have the urge to touch them – not like that, not pervy or anything – I just want to know if they feel as wiry as they look. Paul starts folding his towel.

  “Your mother told me all about the family,” he says.

  He lines up each edge of the towel carefully, exactly.

  “About how they punished her, about how angry they were about everything
that she did. But she also told me that she understood their anger and wanted to put the work in to earn their forgiveness. I know they will be frosty, Melon, but I also think that Maria’s death will have changed them. Like it has me. Like it has you.”

  The towel is a neat square now. He holds it close to his chest.

  “Mum did nothing wrong,” I say, then I walk back into the kitchen to top up my coffee. “Getting pregnant is hardly a crime,” I mutter as I go.

  Paul follows me. “I wasn’t talking about getting pregnant.”

  “What, then?”

  Paul opens his mouth then closes it. He has tumbled through a hole in his story.

  “I don’t know,” he offers, in the end.

  “I’ll get my cossie then.” I take my coffee to the bedroom. “Enjoy your tomb,” I tell him.

  There is no one else by the pool. The other guests must be on a mission to see every dug-up scrap of Greek history, just like Paul.

  I sit on the edge and drop my legs into the water. The cold slices though my calves. I pull off my T-shirt, let the sun get a look at my shoulders. Me and Chick always used to see who could get the best tan on our holidays. We never mentioned that it was a competition, but we both knew it was. I always won because Chick was so pale to start with. I don’t think Justine Burrell is into pointless tanning competitions. Better things to be worrying about.

  I have my book with The Story on my lap. I have also brought one of those pens with the sliders – one button for each of the four coloured inks. I might add some drawings in red ink. This might sound like a terrible thing to do, but I see it as a way to destroy the superstition, release me and Mum from its grip.

  I told Amanda about the note – in the end. That was hard to confess. I thought she would be angry, that she’d see how I had caused Mum’s death and then wouldn’t want to help me any more.

  But she just sat there blinking for a minute, and then she went, “You don’t actually believe that, do you?”

  Amanda did some research. She discovered that in Greek tradition red is actually a symbol of love; it’s in Korea that they see writing in red ink as a bad omen.

  “There you go,” I’d said. “That proves there’s some truth to it.”

  “But you’re not Korean, are you?”

  “I’m not Greek either.”

  “You’re more Greek than you are Korean,” she’d said.

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  I’ve also decided that The Story, as I’ve written it down in my book, isn’t good enough. I need to rewrite it, do it justice, make it more special. I have Mrs Castleman, my English teacher’s voice in my head, telling me to set the scene, to work harder on my descriptions. I scan the gardens around me for inspiration. Large red flowers shout out from the beds in between trailing pink vines. There are these orange fans that look like birds’ heads on the end of huge stalks. I’m trying to remember if there are palm trees like these ones near Tersanas Beach. Is ‘palm tree’ even the right name? Don’t you have to go to the Caribbean to see real palm trees? I don’t know.

  Ripples break across the flat surface of the water. The blue mosaic underneath jiggles out of focus. Haris is at the other end of the terrace, dragging a long pole with a net across the tiles on the bottom of the pool. I start writing, try to look busy.

  “What you write?” Haris calls across, squinting into the sun.

  “Nothing.”

  I wish I’d kept my T-shirt on now. I tug at the black lycra of my bikini, make sure it’s covering my boobs as much as possible.

  “Is for school?” he asks.

  “No, I’ve left school.”

  “No!”

  “Yeah, I’m sixteen.”

  “You’re not sixteen!”

  “Well, tomorrow I will be, actually.”

  Haris pulls the net out of the water and flips it inside-out, dropping leaves onto a soggy pile on the poolside. He slides the pole back into the water.

  “Is too noisy for you?”

  I don’t know what he means. The only sound is the sparrows squabbling, the odd sheep bleat. I try to hear what he hears.

  “You mean the cicadas?” They are grinding and squealing at full volume, but I find every time we come to the island, after a day or so, you train yourself to block out the noise.

  “Tzitzikas!” Haris announces. “Is not legs rubbing together, is muscles going in and out. Only men do it, only men tzitzikas. The women, they keep quiet.” He mimes zipping his lips and then laughs.

  I’m not sure whether to smile. I can feel the sun crisping my shoulders already. I put my head down and carry on writing. Haris doesn’t take the hint.

  “Is your boyfriend?”

  “Who?”

  “The man. The black man.”

  “No! He’s my . . .” I can’t think how to put it. “He’s my stepdad.”

  “Your mother, she not here?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Haris stops, lets the submerged end of the pole sink to the bottom. He leans on the raised end. He drags a hand through his quiff.

  “But you are young. Just fourteen, no?”

  “I told you, I’m sixteen, actually. Tomorrow, I’m sixteen.”

  “Your birthday?” He puts too many ‘s’s in it, makes it ‘births-days’.

  “Yes.”

  “I bring you a present.”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “No, I bring it.”

  He pivots the pole against the edge of the pool and pulls the net back up through the water. It’s hard work, his brown arms go tense.

  I glide my feet forwards and backwards through the water, make my own ripples.

  “You on holiday?”

  “No.”

  “Why you here then?”

  “My family are from here. My mum comes from near Tersanas.”

  “Your mother very beautiful like you?”

  I roll my eyes. Look down. “Prettier,” I mumble. “I’m the freak.”

  “What you say?”

  “My mother was much prettier than me,” I say, loud and clear. “I am the freak.”

  “What is ‘freak’?”

  I shrug it away. Haris stares into the distance as if he is still trying to find the Greek translation for what I’ve said. I’m bracing myself for the next question but when I look back at Haris all his attention is on something he’s found at the bottom of the pool.

  “Ela,” he says. “Look.”

  Haris wrenches the pole up through the water, his brown arms stiffening again. He pads around the edge of the pool towards me. His bare feet make sweaty prints on the tiles. He feeds the pole through his hands so the net is close to him, then he holds it out for me to inspect.

  “Look.”

  He stands close – close enough for me to see how the sun has turned the hair blonde on the lower half of his legs, close enough for me to smell his boy smell, a whiff of cigarettes.

  I lower my head over the net, then pull back. It is a frog.

  “Dead.” Haris announces.

  It is on its back, its pathetic front legs folded over its white, bloated chest, clutching its now-still heart.

  “Last week I catch scorpion,” he tells me. “But it alive.”

  I shield my eyes from the sun to look up at him. He’s beaming. Am I supposed to be impressed?

  “No, you didn’t,” I say.

  “Is true. You find one in your bedroom, you scream, I come rescue you.”

  I snort, look away, down at the white page of my book. Haris flips the frog into the flowerbed behind me.

  “Let cat eat it,” he says.

  I want to get up and go but I don’t know how to do that without Haris getting a full-length view of me in my bikini, the sweaty creases across my belly. Haris scuffs back around to the other side of the swimming pool. He skims the water again.

  “If black man not your father, where your father?” he asks.

  I open my mouth, close it.

  “He not here?” Ha
ris goes.

  Then I say, “He’s dead.”

  I don’t think this before I say it, the words just fall out of my mouth. I look down at the water, watch the sunlight jag across the surface. I imagine my words sinking through the blue beneath my feet. He’s dead. He’s dead. I want Haris to fish my words out of the pool so I can put them back in my mouth, unsay them, make them not true.

  Haris nods for a while. Then he goes, “You are ‘orphan’.” He doesn’t say this gently at all, he’s just pleased with himself for knowing the right word in English.

  “I suppose so,” I say.

  Haris pulls the pole out of the water, shakes the last of the insects and leaves into his pile, then scoops it all up with one hand.

  “Okay, ‘freak’,” he says, loud and perky. “Friday I am bringing you present.”

  Then he wanders away from the pool terrace, dragging his net behind him.

  Just before sunset Paul drives us to a sandy-coloured building set in the olive groves not far from the airport, not far from Auntie Aphrodite, not far from the farm. We climb the front stairs to a stone archway, stop to watch the sun shrink to a spark and drop behind the mountains, and then we continue into the courtyard. The bells in the tower are ringing, harsh and pushy, a sound that doesn’t quite mask a squawking sound, a miaowing. I follow the cries, while Paul takes photographs of the front of the chapel. I find the stray cat that is making the noise. Its fur is as honey-coloured as the buildings that surround us. It is pregnant. A scrawny tomcat with long matted hair is on the pregnant cat’s back. His teeth are sunk into the fur at her neck. The tomcat notices me, fixes me with one eye, but continues to thrust with its hind quarters. I wonder if the pregnant cat is squawking in pleasure or pain. After a moment I feel weird watching and I walk away.

  Paul is stood staring up at a tree, his guidebook hanging from the tips of his fingers.

  “Melon, come here,” he says, looking up into lime-coloured leaves. “See – this is several trees all growing together.”

  There are oranges on the wide green branches. I scan right and see that there are lemons growing there too.

  Paul glances down at his guidebook. “There is one ‘rootstock’, which is one tree, then there is an orange tree and a lemon tree grafted onto it.”

  I can feel him watching me, making sure I understand.