Red Ink

by Julie Mayhew

  “It’s kind of like a limb transplant, I suppose,” Paul goes on, enjoying playing the school teacher. “This way the tree is stronger, it has healthy roots and it avoids disease.”

  “Wow,” I say, just to humour him.

  “So you see,” goes Paul, “things can grow happily alongside one another.”

  I nod.

  “That’s a lemon tree,” Paul goes on, pointing to the fruit, “and that’s an orange tree. They are different but they are the same thing.”

  I watch the leaves ruffle in the dying light.

  “You’re not talking about trees, are you?” I say.

  “Yes I am,” he says, not looking me in the eye. “What did you think I was talking about?”

  Fallen fruit are going mouldy at the base of the tree and I wonder why the monks who live here don’t collect them up and use them, why they leave them to rot. I turn to Paul.

  “But you still need a solid root for it to work,” I say. A statement not a question.

  Paul nods. The air is going cool fast, now that the sun has left us.

  “You mean you need the truth?” he asks, turning to face me.

  “I thought we were talking about trees,” I say.

  On the way out of the courtyard, I read a framed sign on the wall by the archway entrance:

  MONASTERY AGIA TRIADA (HOLY TRINITY) OF JAGAROLOU HAS BEEN FOLLOWING A COURSE, WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN DOWN IN HISTORY WITH GOLD LETTERS SINCE 1632.

  This sign has got it right. History is so big, so heavy, that it needs that capital letter. But also this sign is wrong. Because no one cares what is written down. Writing something down, in gold letters or red ink or whatever – it makes no difference to anyone.

  135 DAYS SINCE

  I am officially sixteen. I can do what I want.

  I let Paul talk me into doing some sightseeing before lunch.

  This is all stalling, I understand this. We are squeezing things in and spreading out time, making the inevitable seem further away. As soon as we sit down for my birthday lunch we must finally acknowledge that I am grown-up. Paul will find it impossible to back off. If he doesn’t have someone or something to fret about, he’s not happy.

  I put on the burgundy dress. I packed it especially for today. The sleeves are long and I will cook in this weather but it’s the only thing I could possibly wear. I will be fine. Pregnant women on the island wander around in the heat of the day bundled up in thick jogging suits and they don’t even crack a sweat. It’s the cool Greek blood. I have that blood too.

  As we leave the villa we find a small, lidded cardboard box on the doorstep outside. Written on the top in felt-tip pen, it says:

  HAPI BIRTHSDAYS

  HARIS X

  Paul looks confused. I haven’t mentioned to him that I have spoken to Haris. Paul, on the other hand, has recounted in detail every single conversation he has had with Nikos.

  “How does he know it’s your birthday?” Paul asks.

  I shrug, pick up the box. I’m nervous about opening it. Will I find a dead frog, or worse, a scorpion? Will I scream and have Haris come rescue me?

  I lift the lid. Paul peers over my shoulder.

  Inside is a small, bronze figure of a man with horns and an animal’s face.

  “The Minotaur,” goes Paul. “Half man, half bull.”

  “I do know.” I roll my eyes. “I have been to Crete, like, a million times.”

  I turn it over in my hands. It’s weighty and warm.

  Paul locks up the villa. “Odd gift, though.”

  To me it makes perfect sense. King Minos of Crete refused to sacrifice the white bull in Poseidon’s honour, so Poseidon made Minos’ wife, Pasiphae, fall in love with a bull. She gave birth to a monster – the Minotaur – who was locked away in a labyrinth on the island. Haris did understand what I was saying by the pool yesterday after all. Me and the Minotaur: we are both freaks.

  We drive into Hania along the coast road, past small villages and resorts. We pass car rental offices and restaurants called Zorba, balconies strung up with lines of washing and houses with steel supports worming their way out of the concrete like stray pubic hairs.

  “Be nice when it’s finished,” goes Paul.

  “What will?”

  “Crete.”

  Paul drives even slower than he does at home. A car sits with its nose on our bumper for the bends and passes us as soon as we hit the straight. The driver takes his hands off the wheel and throws them towards the sky.

  “What was his problem?” says Paul. He laughs nervously.

  There are no road markings, no rules. Everyone drives where they like, on the hard shoulder, the middle of the road, in the shade. Paul can’t cope with the anarchy.

  We drive on, past peeling billboards for Winston cigarettes, past kafeneon terraces lined with frowning, grey men. This is my culture, but it feels as foreign to me as it must to Paul. Then the sea starts to creep into view around the corner. A stone jetty with a doll’s house chapel stretches out into the water. The road is now lined with car showrooms filled with shiny new models that look out of place alongside the old bangers on the street. Are they just there as a reminder of what a real car should look like?

  In Hania, we start our tourist marathon at the cathedral – a huge, bright white stone building that is surprisingly tiny inside. A Tardis in reverse. The ceiling strains under the weight of too many chandeliers and above the altar is a painting of a giant Jesus, crossing his fingers and hoping for the best. Hoping that all he said turned out to be true.

  We leave and Paul steers us into a courtyard and up some stone steps to a folklore museum. The shoebox-small rooms are filled with embroidery, photos from the olden days and frozen-faced dummies in traditional dress. Paul lingers longer than he needs to over the reconstruction of a traditional Cretan nuptial bed. I know that he is thinking about Mum. He casts his eyes down, holds his breath, frowns.

  Back out in the courtyard, Paul spies a Catholic church.

  “Wow, look how different this looks to the orthodox places of worship.” He is poring over his guidebook for some facts about this new find. To humour him I agree to go inside. Jesus is crossing his fingers here too, a model of him at the altar this time, not a painting. I light a thin orange candle for Mum. Water surrounds the gold tray of sand and candles. I suppose you wouldn’t want to start a fire with all of this hope and emotion.

  “Can we go shopping now?” I ask.

  No. Paul wants to take a trip in a glass-bottomed boat. Mum would have been appalled to see us behaving like such tourists. We sit up on deck with a bunch of sunburnt English families, some chattering Germans and a loud American group. We wait to leave, swaying and rocking, feeling queasy. That’s when I notice the boat’s name – Aphrodite.

  In the middle of the trip we moor up by an island where a tiny shrine stands over a small smattering of beach. A beautiful white bird rainbows through the air and lands on the sand.

  My little love, my little dove.

  “I think it’s a heron,” goes Paul, all excited.

  “Nah, seagull,” says one of the Americans, butting in.

  We speed back to Hania, kicking up a great whale tail of white water.

  When, at last, we get to browse the shops, Paul buys me my birthday present – a silver string bracelet with a small evil eye. Mum used to wear a leather strap with an evil eye to ward off bad spirits. I don’t know where this bracelet is now. I hope she has it with her, wherever she is.

  Then we walk round the harbour, past a stall selling pottery plaques that clank on their display in the sea breeze, past the restaurants, each with their own ‘pavement bully’ – a waiter who can lure tourists onto their tables in any language. Paul chooses a taverna overlooking the old mosque because it is quieter and we’ll get better service. And because their pavement bully is particularly pushy. This isn’t how Mum would choose a restaurant. Neoplouti, she’d have called this place. New rich. Mum would find the busiest cafe, somewhere full of
locals. And certainly not a restaurant on the harbour. They’re for the gullible. When she was in Crete, Mum suddenly became Greek again. Until she found someone who would listen to her show off about her amazing life in Lonthino.

  I am sweating in the burgundy dress. I take a seat in the shade. Greek music chink-chink-chinks, strum-strum-strums, plink-plink-plinks.

  Paul orders two glasses of champagne and I am stunned. Goody-two-shoes social worker Paul is buying me alcohol. He must have sunstroke.

  “One glass.” Paul waggles a finger near my face. “I know you’ll go and do this anyway. Might as well do it responsibly with me.”

  I nod, trying to keep a serious face.

  “Did you know that people believe there is still a palace to find underneath Chania?” says Paul, his nose back in his guidebook. “It’s buried over there, they think.” He waves in the general direction of the mosque’s concrete dome. “They found Roman mosaics under the cathedral square, near the market, so they’re pretty sure there’s something near. They’ve also found Linear A and Linear B scripts together here. Two ways of writing. Further proof.”

  “Did you see they’ve got a Starbucks now, too,” I say.

  The wind ruffles the stand of napkins on our table and the salt pot tips over.

  “Quick,” I say, “throw some over your shoulder.”

  “Which shoulder?”

  “Left,” I tell him, repeating what Mum used to say to me. “Spite the devil.” We both pinch up some grains and throw.

  The waiter brings over our champagne and takes our order. Pizza for me and something meaty and Greek for Paul. He knocks the rim of his glass against mine.

  “Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” I say.

  “To being sixteen!”

  “To being an adult.”

  Paul laughs at this. “Well . . .”

  He’s in denial.

  We watch the restaurant’s pavement bully ask a passing couple, in English, where they’re from. Denmark. The bully pauses, rifling through his brain for some Danish words but he’s too late, they get away.

  “So, what are you going to do now you’re sixteen?”

  I feel like a child being asked what I want to be when I grow up. A ballerina? A princess? A mummy?

  “Dunno, do my A-levels.”

  “Then what?” Paul is a fan of life-plans.

  “I don’t know.”

  We watch the glass-bottomed boat called Aphrodite trundle out of the harbour again.

  “What are you going to do now?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you were going to marry Mum, weren’t you?”

  This is the first time we’ve talked about this.

  Paul nods. “Yes, I was.”

  He takes a gulp of champagne, stares at the harbour lighthouse.

  “How come you and Mum were engaged? I mean, you’d only been going out for, like, a few months.”

  “A year.”

  A whole year? I scan back through my mind, trying to work out how this is possible. I gulp some champagne, too. It tastes yeasty, like lemonade gone wrong.

  “Still,” I go, “a year, that’s quick.”

  “Sometimes you just know when someone is the right person.”

  For some weird reason Ian Grainger comes into my head. Idiot.

  “What if the other person doesn’t know?” I go.

  “Know what?”

  “That they’re the right person for you.”

  “I don’t think I follow you, Melon. If you know, they know.”

  “So if the other person doesn’t feel the same, then it’s not meant to be?”

  “You can’t make someone love you.” Paul gives a defiant shake of his head.

  “No?”

  “No, that I’m sure of.”

  Two dark-haired kids in baggy clothes come wide-eyed to our table, offering their palms. “Very poor,” the eldest one goes. “Please you be kind.”

  The pavement bully dives over and shoos them away as if they were nothing but pigeons.

  The Greek music zing-zing-zings and ding-a-ling-lings, getting faster and faster.

  Back at the villa, we sit drinking coffee on the terrace, watching the sun set. It is a relief. I’ve felt too hot in the burgundy dress. It is soggy under my armpits. I’m ready for the cool of the evening.

  “Has it been a good birthday?” Paul asks as the dark starts to come.

  “Yes,” I say.

  It has.

  “You missed your mum?”

  “Yeah, a bit.”

  If I am honest, not really. How can I miss her? She is here. She is everywhere on this island, just like she is in every room back home.

  “Yeah, I missed her too,” nods Paul. The scrawny white cat is balancing along the low wall of our terrace. It stops next to Paul and he rubs it behind the ears.

  But the other reason I didn’t miss Mum was because of how Paul organised the day, structured it, made it reassuring. If we’d spent this day with Mum it would have been unpredictable, chaotic, a little scary.

  “Is there anything else you wanted to do for your birthday?”

  “Yes.”

  And I think I say this because of the champagne and because of the glass of tsikoudia that Paul let me drink when we got back to villa. And I say it because I am a grown-up now and I should be able to handle it. I say it because I am feeling brave, feeling ready.

  I say: “I would like you to tell me your version of The Story.”

  Paul studies me for a moment. I don’t need to say anything more. He knows which story I mean. He’s been bursting to give me the truth. His truth. And that is all it is, I tell myself, to make it easier to bear. It will be just one version of the truth.

  “Okay,” he says.

  And he starts talking, gently at first, watching me to see how each word lands. This is his story, the one Mum gave to him. And it is exactly like mine but everything has been moved around. It is one of those puzzles where you slide squares within a square to build up a picture. Only this picture, this story, is clearer. There is a ‘rootstock’ – the truth – and then there is my story, a foreign branch grafted to the stalk, winding its way around the trunk, making you believe that the tree is full of fruit. But really the fruit doesn’t belong.

  I concentrate on the stars, clear and defined in the sky. I can hear Mum’s chip-chop voice in my head telling me The Story, but as Paul goes on there are no real words coming out of the mouth of my mother. She goes mute. The image I have of her starts to lose all of its facial features, she becomes just an outline, she withers to dust.

  Pop – she disappears.

  I get out of my chair and run.

  I run from the truth.

  ANOTHER STORY

  On an island far, far from here, where the sea frames the coastline like a barbed wire fence and where the sunshine throbs like a time-bomb, there once was a farm. At first glance it was like any other smallholding on the Akrotiri peninsula, but here was where fifteen-year-old Maria Fouraki fell in love for the very first time.

  Maria’s Babas worked hard on his relationship with his daughter, his only child – a precious gift.

  “Just a week is all it takes,” Babas explained as he sowed that season’s melon crop. “Agapoula mou,” he called Maria, “peristeraki mou.” My little love, my little dove. “Just a week and the growing will begin.”

  “I know!” Maria bit back, rolling her brown eyes. “Only the strongest seed will survive. So what!”

  Then she jumped across the line in the earth that divided Babas’s land from the Drakakis farm next door, calling after herself, “Who cares about darkling beetles and melon aphids and yellowstriped armyworms? Certainly not me!”

  And Babas watched her go, his forehead a pinched ‘w’ of concern.

  Maria was off to meet Christos, the small and wiry youngest Drakakis boy, even though an ever-widening gully was forming between them. Maria had told Christos of her dream to one day run away
and become an artist, but he had disappointed her, saying he just wanted to stay in Crete and take over his father’s farm. Maria looked on as the chickens ignored Christos’s timid commands, and found herself drawn to Christos’s older, sturdier brother. Her only thought: how will I love anything more than I love Yiannis Drakakis?

  Maria and Yiannis became inseparable. On Tersanas beach, secluded in the mouth of a cove, they would stand nose to nose, barefoot in the sand, a pill dissolving beneath each of their tongues. At the farm, late at night, Yiannis would lead Maria behind the goat sheds, where she would arch her back and lift her face to the moonlight.

  Christos spied on the pair and asked what they had been doing to produce such peculiar sounds.

  “It’s called making beautiful music,” Maria told Christos, and she and Yiannis walked away, their heads falling backwards with laughter.

  This was when Babas and Maria’s arguments became 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.

  “I keep my borders free of weeds, do I not?” Babas would bellow.

  “Yes,” Maria would answer.

  “I would not let my land grow wild?”

  “No,” Maria would mutter.

  “And so it is with my child as it is with my land,” Babas roared. “Drakakis will keep his pestilent, druggy son away from my baby daughter.”

  But Babas did not realise that while he concentrated his fury on his daughter’s relationship with the oldest Drakakis boy, he’d neglected to notice housekeeping money and jewellery disappearing.

  Maria and Yiannis sneaked away from the Akrotiri peninsula in the enveloping dark, with a small suitcase of spoils and a big dream that London would be more understanding of their love.

  Before she left, Maria took one final look at her sleeping parents.

  “Pah!” she said, instead of goodbye.

  In the morning, Maria’s mama, always in the background, stepped forward and became the industrious one. She established which aeroplane Maria had boarded, and made her way to London too, even though Babas refused to take any part in the search. When your little girl, your melon prized above all others turns thief, it changes everything. Forever.