Red Ink

by Julie Mayhew

  In the early morning, London’s streets look like the aftermath of a disaster. Stop for a moment in one of the city’s rubbish-strewn alleys and you will hear the murmurs of last night’s sorrows, last year’s sorrows, the sorrows of centuries ago. But London is not a place for looking backwards. It moves relentlessly forwards. In this ruthless city, Maria and Yiannis made their new home.

  They began with a bedsit above the Taj Mahal Tandoori House, where the stench from the bins infiltrated the windows and where the arms of the sofa-bed were chewed though by mice.

  The rent did not pay itself so Maria sold Mama’s jewellery and tried to get a job at the Mount Olympus restaurant across the street. But the owner didn’t believe Maria’s story that she was old enough to earn a wage. So they relied on cash from Yiannis’s ironing work, sourced from a contact from the island, a front for making deliveries of a less innocent kind. And the pair would have survived on this income alone had they not been tempted to use more of Yiannis’s stock than he was able to sell. They lost their flat and were forced into a filthy squat.

  Maria missed home. She wrote letters describing her anxiety as they had boarded the aeroplane, the strange, cold air when they landed. She told Mama and Babas of their achievements – Yiannis, the thriving businessman!

  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. You are two bricks, side by side, strong, building the walls of our family. I want to come back to you. I need you. I love you. Your devoted Maria.

  Babas never replied. Babas’s interfering sister Aphrodite did. You should have thought of all this, read Aphrodite’s scribble, before you brought shame upon your family.

  And so Yiannis put an arm around Maria’s shoulder and told her, “I have found an answer to all our sorrows.”

  And Maria stopped, and Maria listened.

  This is the recipe.

  Take a knife edge of powder. Feel that it weighs nothing compared to the load that lays heavy on your heart. Drop it into a torn-off Coke can. Add cold water, let your tears join in. Throw in lemon juice, throw away your fear. Strike up a cigarette lighter, watch the powder boil. See steam rising like your hopes of relief.

  With the remains of your fury, rip the soft fibres from a cigarette butt. Add a message of devotion, a dismissal of your future, your ingratitude to God. Take a needle and draw your mixture through the filter. Tap twice for air, once more for luck. Clench your fist in anger, release. Pierce the skin, see blood rise, let your head drop onto dirty sheets.

  Let the final slivers of your childhood slip away. Know that nothing that has happened before this day has really meant anything. Or rather, everything that has happened before this day has only been leading up to this. Feel a man push himself between your legs, thrusting hard. Say a familiar name although you can’t be sure it belongs to him. Imagine you are in a farmyard, lifting your face to the moonlight. Dream of a flower dying and a weed growing in its place. In the morning – on the day of remembrance – regret what you have done, but do it again and again and again. Become addicted.

  Germination took on a whole new meaning for sixteen-year-old Maria. While the others around her shrank, their cold bones pushing through skin, she rested her hands on a taut, expanding belly, feeling the warmth within, encouraging her baby to go away. She wandered the tablecloth of concrete that spread out around her new home, wondering how this strong seed had survived.

  And that was when she was found – by Auntie Eleni, who had left Crete ten years before and, with her husband, Vassilis, now owned the launderette on the Kentish Town Road.

  “You’re coming with me.”

  Maria took hold of Eleni’s hand, which was surprisingly soft considering she spent all her time dealing with the dampness of other people’s laundry.

  “She came looking for you, your mama,” Eleni explained, leading Maria towards the station. “But she found a lump in her breast. She went home. She died.”

  Maria could not hold herself up. She fell to her knees cradling her heavy belly and began crying with such a force she feared she would never stop.

  “You musn’t be sad,” Eleni told her. “She knew this when she married your father and took his name – all the Fourakis family die young.”

  Eleni extended a warm welcome in her small house near the train station.

  “I can’t believe you found me,” Maria mumbled through mouthfuls of sausage and stewed cabbage.

  “I have this piece of thread,” Eleni explained. “The piece of thread that connects my heart to yours. When something is tugging at your heart, I know, because I feel it too. The thread, it also binds your heart to Babas, to Mama. You must go home.”

  “I can’t,” said Maria, putting down her spoon.

  “You will find it within yourself.”

  And Eleni pressed into Maria’s hand a pamphlet of soothing words – the recipe for the traditional kollyva – and sent Maria to bed with one of Mama’s cardigans, left behind when she had returned to the island.

  Maria did not sleep at all. She jerked and sweated, her skin crawling, itching, anticipating a dose of something that she could not get. She pressed Mama’s cardigan close to her face, wishing for it to transport her back to a farm where cistus shrubs turn the air bittersweet. She envied her unborn baby untouched by grief and desire. She thought of the trip ahead of her, the day she would return to face Babas. She thought of her love for Yiannis, the bliss that could be found at the end of a needle. She was not ready to let that go.

  Before she left, taking with her Eleni’s jewellery and the earnings from the washateria, Maria took one final look at her sleeping aunt and uncle.

  “Sorry,” she whispered, instead of goodbye.

  The night brought with it a furious storm that Maria couldn’t help but find fitting. She wanted to feel the rain on her skin, have it cleanse her of her sin. She imagined the ancient river Lardanos, the river of holy water, evaporating into the air in Crete and falling on London’s streets. With her hair soaked through, Maria walked back to the squat and told Yiannis they needed a new place to hide.

  And before long, in the fluorescent light of an operating theatre, hair glued to the pallor of her hollowed-out cheeks, Maria had her baby girl cut from inside her. Maria examined the creased and swollen features of the new person squirming in her arms, someone she never expected to see alive, and then she lied to the woman from Social Services about the warm welcome she would find at her Auntie Eleni’s home in Kentish Town. She took the baby back to another grubby squat, back to Yiannis. She got high.

  And despite her state of intoxication, she remembered the hospital’s instructions to register the baby’s birth.

  “What shall we call her?” Maria asked Yiannis, as the registrar sat poised with her fingers over the keyboard. “Something English? Something from home?”

  “Onomase to ‘karpouzi’ tote!” slurred Yiannis. “Call it ‘Watermelon’ then.”

  “Yeah,” said Maria, collapsing into laughter, as the baby screamed its objections, “our daughter will be called ‘Melon’.”

  And that was how Melon got her name.

  But this was momentary joy. Maria could no longer stand the life that London offered her – the bawdy banter of car horns, the tinny basslines of other people’s music, the way her baby stopped breathing a few days after she took her home, the way the hospital explained she had been born an addict and had almost died of withdrawal. The way Maria winced when she told the nurses the baby’s ridiculous name. The way the woman from Social Services said she was very sorry but the baby belonged to them now. The way Maria returned to the squat to find Yiannis lying on the floor. The way Yiannis’s empty eyes were staring at the wall. The way vomit was bleeding around his stone-heavy head. The way Maria called 999 and then ran away to save herself.

  Here it was, her first lesson in how to love and lose.

  A vast flood of grief swamped Ma
ria, pulling her beneath the surface of life. The tears dried and were replaced by the soft, suffocating fog of depression. Maria looked back on her days of rage and sorrow with a twisted sense of fondness. At least then she had felt something.

  She rode red double-decker buses all day, paying no attention to numbers or destinations – she just wanted to be lost among the gothic buildings with their sooty faces. And then one day she heard Greek words being spoken above the fast talk of the English teenagers. This was Anastasios ‘Tassos’ Georgakis from Agios Nikolaos in Crete, a lean older gentleman with slender wrists and inviting eyes. Tassos had come to the UK as a theology student many years ago and had found his calling in London helping addicts like Maria. He said his work consisted solely of helping people find a target and a purpose, their ‘something special’, but Maria suspected there was more to it than that.

  She went with him to the St Elias Centre where she was given a single room, which contained no decoration except for a crucifix hung above the bed. The door was kept locked in between visits from Tassos and the others who came reciting their words of redemption.

  For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

  Tassos placed a resurrection icon by Maria’s bed and Maria clawed the walls, her forehead beaded with sweat.

  Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.

  Tassos lit a candle for Maria and fitfully she watched the fire burn.

  Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.

  Maria offered up kisses to her old life and told it goodbye.

  Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

  Slowly Maria returned, piece by piece. The green hue to her olive skin began to fade, the pupils of her eyes reconnected with life. The brick lodged within her ribs began to crack and, though the splinters still caused jerks of pain, she found a new feeling growing inside – the fire of ambition. Here was a flower dying, shedding its seeds, allowing another flower to grow. Tassos offered Maria work at the St Elias Centre but though the word of God had brought her back, it had never truly entered her soul.

  “No,” said Maria, the first thing she had said with any real passion since she had arrived in England. “I can’t. My child needs her mother.”

  At first she visited Melon at her foster home, watching her play with a collection of toys on the hearth rug. Melon was growing strong and broad, a sign of Babas’s Fourakis blood staking its claim perhaps, as Maria could not be sure the genes of Yiannis Drakakis had played any part in the child before her. Melon was attending playgroups, places where she was learning accentless English. My daughter, thought Maria proudly, will talk like the teenagers on the top decks of buses.

  Gradually a timetable was agreed for Melon to return to her mother.

  “But in the meantime,” said the woman from Social Services, “what about you?”

  And Maria went back to school.

  It is a joyous moment when a life finds a target and a purpose, when a person realises what makes them special. It is like a stylus falling into place on a record. Music begins to play.

  The sign on the double doors of the office read, ‘Congratulations to Maria Fouraki, who will be joining the Adolescent Resource Team as a trainee social worker.’ Maria pushed through those doors, found her new desk and on it she placed the framed picture of her daughter on her first day at school.

  Maria’s vocation was Mama’s love reborn, Yiannis’s lost future reclaimed, Tassos’s nurture repaid. Maria would help others as she had been helped. She would go on to buy Melon her own home in the city, not far from Kentish Town, so one day Maria could forge a reconciliation with Eleni. And soon Maria would earn enough to afford the air fare to visit Crete so she could apologise to Babas and introduce him to his granddaughter.

  “I have this piece of thread,” Maria explained to little Melon. “The piece of thread that connects my heart to yours. This thread, it also binds my heart to Babas . . .”

  Maria understood that the past could not be forgotten and that history could not be altered, but the truth could be viewed from a new angle.

  Forget what you know, what you feel about everything that has happened. This is how Maria would explain. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. The view from up here, it is rosy. The future from here, it looks good.

  135 DAYS SINCE

  I run.

  Down the gravel track towards the village.

  My hands on my ears to begin with. Then I pump my arms, feel them scuff the dry wall, the prickly shrubs.

  The night is black. Paul gives chase. He bellows my name. Then I hear him yelp in pain. He wasn’t wearing shoes when we were out on the terrace.

  I turn the corner, shy away from the lights and music of the taverna, keep my face in the shadows. I am a freak, a Minotaur, born as a punishment for doing wrong. A car growls past and I run faster now, away from the village, towards the sea, tears stinging my sunburnt cheeks. I hear my own breath. I hear Paul calling my name, his voice getting smaller.

  “Melon! Melon!”

  I reach the main road. The dark looming mass of the sea is in front of me.

  On an island far, far from here, where the sea is woven from strings of sapphire blue . . .

  No. All lies.

  I am the daughter of a liar. The daughter of a junkie. I am nothing but a joke.

  I run, on past the junction. Dust covers my sandaled feet, turning them to stone. The insect buzz of a motorbike sends me onto the verge, backs me up against a tree. The burgundy dress snags on the bark and I lose my footing. I fall, yell out, then clamp a hand to my mouth. I don’t want anyone to hear me, to see me. But the motorbike has stopped, it is turning around. It pulls up close and I draw back from its thundering motor.

  It is Haris. And he looks at me like he knows.

  Did everyone know? Everyone except me?

  I take his hand. I have no choice. It is just like he said it would be – I will scream and he will come rescue me. We stare at each other for a moment, until I feel too ashamed and have to look away. I wipe tears and snot from my face. He pulls me towards the bike.

  “You want come with me?”

  What else do I have? Nothing. Nothing.

  Nothing that has happened before this day has really meant anything.

  I get on the bike behind Haris.

  Or rather, everything that has happened before this day has only been leading up to this.

  I am no one. No past. No truth. Now is all there is.

  I grip Haris’s slim, hard waist, smell the leather of his jacket, the faint edge of cigarettes. The bike belches forwards and my heart jams in my throat. I hold on tight, as if my survival depends on the warmth coming from his body. We take off down the coast road, the air cold against my bare shins. Inside my stomach there’s a somersaulting beast. Trapped. We are going too fast and I am going to die.

  All the Fourakis family die young.

  “Where are we going?” I shout, but my words are stolen by the squeal of the bike. We lean sharp into a bend and I see the roadside fall away, see the car wrecks at the bottom on the scrubby rocks: a warning of what happens if you go too crazy. Then we are upright again, high above the harbour where the lights from the ships give the waves a petrol sheen. We speed, too fast, too fast, until the road becomes built-up again and we have to slow. But still we dash past blank-eyed shops and banks, dry cleaners and hardware stores. Cars line the streets and I tighten my thighs, scared that my knee will hit a wing mirror. Then there are no cars any more. The shopfronts lose their dowdiness. They grow shiny. Local faces are replaced by pink, peeling cheeks. Haris slows down again, the engine phut-phut-phut-ing. He navigates tight corner after tight corner. Tourists scatter like birds from a gun.

  We are at the old harbour. I can see the restaurant where I ate with Paul just hours ago. But that was the old me, not the real me. Not the me who knows the truth. Haris ploughs forwards as if he’s going to dri
ve us straight into the inky waters, end it all.

  All the Fourakis family die young.

  But he turns, swift, and we bounce across stones instead, the fairy illuminations of the harbour lighthouse behind us. We zip past fish restaurants that smell seaweed strong. Are we supposed to drive so close to the restaurant tables? Haris doesn’t care. I don’t care either. After all, what do right and wrong mean any more?

  We swing round a corner, our shoulders dipping low to the road, past a playground with its swings sitting empty, past a fresh stretch of seafront cafes. Busy. Infested. Locals not tourists. We stick close to the sea wall, people skipping out of our path like they knew we were coming all along. The water below us is shallow with fish. They group, they swirl.

  This is our destination – a bar with a terrace of stretched cream canopies. Clustered underneath are low white sofas, sophisticated, upmarket, with kids my age lounging across them. Are they minding the place until the adults show up? Haris lurches into high speed to make an impressive arrival. Faces swarm, sipping on straws. The music throb, throb, throbs. My heart joins in. I wasn’t expecting an audience for my tear-swollen face.

  “Get off the bike.” Haris is enjoying the attention. I’m scared to let go.

  You will find it within yourself.

  The concrete sways beneath my feet after the thrill of the ride. I pull down my hem. A girl with dark eyeliner looks me up and down, gives me a gravelly “yassou”. Haris is still straddling the bike, gabbling to a boy in a red bodywarmer. He is smoothing the heel of his hand along the edge of his gelled fringe. Everyone is in trainers and sweaters and I am too dressed-up in the burgundy dress. I am a Guy Fawkes dummy of my unreliable mother.

  “Give me your coat, Haris, I’m cold,” I lie, shouting it again a little louder to compete with the dumf, dumf, dumf of the music.“Your coat. I’m cold.”

  He climbs off the bike, kicks the prop, hands me his leather jacket.