Red Ink

by Julie Mayhew

  The boy in the red bodywarmer says, “Anglidha?”

  She English?

  And Haris nods. “Né.”

  Another boy, in a checked shirt, pushes through the crowd to give Haris a high-five. The girl with the dark eyeliner smiles at me, half friendly, half sorry. I shouldn’t be here. But where should I be? Nowhere. I belong nowhere.

  I let Haris sling his arm across my shoulders and move us over to a rectangle of sofas where a boy with a shaved head is flicking a cigarette lighter on and off in time to the dance track. A girl with a matted beehive watches us sit, popping gum against her cherry lips. I am special because I’m with Haris, I see that now. Is this the only way I’ll find my ‘something special’, via the glow of someone else?

  The boy in the checked shirt hands me a tall glass of dark liquid. It looks like Coke but, when I drink, the taste is stinging, as if I’m downing nail varnish remover. I cough, splutter and the girl with the beehive laughs.

  I lean close to Haris’s ear. “You get served?”

  “Served?”

  “They give you alcohol here?”

  “Yes, why not they give me alcohol?”

  “The police . . .”

  “Police suck,” he says and I watch him tip back his head, screw up his eyes, take a long draw on his cigarette.

  How will I love anything more than I love . . .

  Then I watch him yabber, quick and confident, holding the attention of the table. I can barely hear over the bam bam bam of the bassline and even if I could I would not understand. Are they talking about me? I swig more of the drink and wonder what Paul is doing. Calling the police? A car swings past and I turn away. The guy and girl next to me start kissing, their faces suctioned together. I nod my head along to the music. I keep drinking. This is the only way I can join in. And when I empty my glass, the boy in the checked shirt hands me another full one.

  “English,” he says. “You like drink. Too much you like drink.”

  “I’m Greek,” I shoot back.

  But then I think, am I? Am I?

  I drink, faster, faster.

  I watch the girl with the dark eyeliner tell off the boy she’s with. In any language, you know when you’re in trouble. She counts off the things he’s done wrong on her fingers.

  Ena – one – you did this,

  dio – two – you do that and

  tria – three – I will never ever forgive you.

  “We go.”

  Haris has hold of my hand and is pulling me away from the sofas, away from the soothing pulse of the music, towards the bike. When he lets go to swing himself into his seat, the seashore spins. I concentrate hard, really hard, on hitching up my dress and climbing onto the bike without falling over. I take hold of Haris’s waist, rest my face on his T-shirted back.

  “I want to go home,” I think I say.

  “I take you somewhere very pretty,” says Haris and he strikes the pedal. The bike comes to life. Vibrations roar up between my legs.

  We are flying past the bay again with the sheer drop and the car wrecks and the sea and the ships and the lights and then, and then . . .

  I fall asleep. I must have done. There is this gap. We are speeding fast through the night, speeding fast towards death and then I fall asleep.

  I wake as we bump along a dirt track, still close to the coast. We are travelling across grass. Light from the bike’s headlamp bounces off shrubs and piles of rocks. Then I see it – the fortress at the edge of the cliff. Haris kills the engine. We freewheel as if we’re trying to catch the deserted building unawares. When he turns off the bike’s lights, my eyes take an age to adjust to the starlight.

  “Ela. Come on.”

  We go the rest of the way on foot, weaving through the rocks. Haris pulls me tight. It must be late. No, it must be early. I want to go home, but I have no clue where that is so I might as well be here. The fortress looks like something out of the Wild West, a movie set with its insides shot out. Haris walks us round the back wall. Bam – there is this amazing view.

  Somewhere pretty. Somewhere really pretty.

  The future from here, it looks good.

  The moonlight hits the sea. The military base below sulks on the coastline, winking its lights. It is stunning. Insects chirp in the undergrowth. The waves sigh and shush.

  “Yes,” I say. “Really pretty.”

  But Haris is not looking at the sea any more. I can feel it. His breath is near my ear, getting heavy, slowing down. This is when I’m supposed to kiss him but I’ve never . . . I don’t know how you . . . What do you . . .?

  “Here.” Haris puts a small bottle in my hand and I swig from it, feel the blast of it in my throat. I could breath fire. I could . . . I could . . .

  Haris puts a hand to my chin and pulls my face away from the view. I have no choice. He puts his mouth over mine. No. I choose this. My groin aches, my stomach pulls towards him. Haris is breathing fire too. His tongue is hot and tastes of ash. He winds it around my mouth. He clamps his hand over my backside and pushes my hips into his. I tense as his fingers squeeze into my flesh. I hear Lucy Bloss telling me that I am a fat bitch who no one would have sex with. But, oh God, this is it, I’m about to. And I don’t know what to do, I don’t . . .

  You will find it within yourself.

  I feel like I am going to explode. What do I do with all this fire?

  Haris pulls away and for a moment I think that he has noticed his mistake in choosing me, the freak, the fat bitch, but he just says, “More,” and puts the bottle to my lips. I gulp some down. He does the same. He is in a hurry now. He needs to get somewhere fast.

  “This way.” He grabs my hand and pulls me through one of the doorways of the fortress. Its roof is open to the stars. The gravel inside is spiked through with grass.

  “This way.” We head towards a stone stairway. He knows where he’s going. He’s taken girls here before. Who cares, I think, who cares?

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

  The stairs take us to a stone platform with battlements, to a better view of the sea, but we’re not here for that. Haris edges me back against the stone wall, fixes his mouth over mine, grabs at my chest.

  “No!” I react lightning fast, pull away his hand.

  “Is okay,” he murmurs and starts groping again. And I let him. I let him run his hand up the inside of my thigh, push up my dress. He clamps his hand over my pants and I jump like I’ve been given an electric shock.

  Throw away your fear.

  I tell myself to relax. And he sees my body release. He works his hand inside my pants. And I listen to a breathy moan – a sound that is coming from my own mouth.

  “Happy birthsdays,” Haris sighs.

  And I let him push me down onto the floor, ignore the stones digging hard into my back, the smell of cigarette butts. I hear the click of his belt buckle, feel his hand fumbling in between us. He pulls hard at my pants and I feel cold air between my legs. I am wet and I’m worried this is not how I am supposed to be.

  Forget what you know, what you feel . . .

  “You okay?” Haris asks, and I can feel him against my leg, hard, the hot, smooth skin.

  “Yes,” I say, but I’m ready for pain. This is what Lucy Bloss says – it hurts, you bleed and you should close your eyes.

  I keep my eyes wide open, just to spite her, look into Haris’s black pupils that have swelled, large and round, making him look possessed.

  He pushes my thighs apart. My legs are shaking and I can do nothing to stop them.

  “Relax,” he says and oh my God, oh my God . . .

  It’s called making beautiful music.

  A bird cries in the undergrowth and it’s a weird sound, like a cork being pulled from a bottle.

  It hurts. God, it hurts. Why does everything have to hurt so much? It takes all my self-control not to push him off. But I do not move. I listen to Haris make low, horrible sounds, like he is being tortured, as if he doesn’t want to be doi
ng what he’s doing. I suck in my breath, concentrate on the stars.

  Dream of a flower dying, shedding its seeds, allowing another flower to grow.

  Haris pushes, pushes, pushes and kneads at my chest. The sharp pain inside of me turns into an aching roughness. I feel I should do something with my hands, but what? I don’t know. I wrap my arms around the back of his head, feel the spikes of short, oily hair. This is the right thing. He pushes his face closer to my ear. My cheek is sore from the brush of his stubble. His belt buckle clank, clank, clanks against the stone floor. The skin at the base of my back has grazed. It’s burning. Haris’s breath gets tighter, raspier. Something inside my belly wants to break free. I want to climb up a mountain and jump off the other side.

  “Né, né,” Haris groans in my ear and it’s all so scary I just want to laugh. I screw up my eyes and see that picture from biology class – my pelvis cut in half and Haris inside. This is ridiculous and impossible and terrifying and oh God, oh God, oh God.

  She would arch her back and lift her face to the moonlight.

  I lift my hips off the floor to ease the pain and suddenly Haris’s body shudders, violent, as if he’s having a heart attack. He goes rigid, pushing a strangled sound through his nose. I freeze. Haris opens his mouth, roars, like a dog does when you step on its tail.

  Is this right? Did I do something wrong? Is this it?

  And my sin is ever before me.

  Something hot runs down the inside of my thigh and Haris collapses, silent, a dead weight. I am still thinking about biology class.

  Only the strongest seed will survive.

  “Is okay.” Haris comes back to life, rolls off me, fumbles for a cigarette. “Is okay, I did not do it inside.”

  “Thanks,” I say, which sounds so stupid, too formal and polite. And I start crying because this is all too much, too much, and I want to go home but I don’t know where that is.

  “You cry because this is first time,” Haris says.

  And now I am so embarrassed that he could tell that I was a virgin that I cry even harder. I curl up into a ball, holding my aching belly. I can feel grit on my cheek.

  Let the final slivers of your childhood slip away.

  “Is okay,” Haris says. “You get used to it.”

  And then he wraps his arms around me, covering my dirty face with kisses.

  136 DAYS SINCE

  Morning.

  Haris drops me near the taverna, away from the villa. I spring away from him just as he tries to kiss me. I can’t do it. I feel sick and I doubt Haris’s cigarette breath will taste very good in the morning.

  So this is a hangover. The somersaulting beast has left my stomach and invaded my brain. I wave and walk away, and Haris looks disappointed, maybe because I have taken over his job of being the heartbreaker.

  I walk up the hill, feeling the bruising ache between my legs. I go through the gates to the villas, down the path lined with shrubs towards our terrace. Someone is in the pool doing lazy laps. There is the gentle slip-slop of water. The sky is the bluest blue and the birds are perky, shrill – taunting my throbbing head. Someone has engineered this morning to be too wonderful, too perfect, so that last night feels like the strangest dream.

  I want to go inside and sink my face into a cool, white pillow. We slept on the dusty stone floor of the fortress last night, curled into one another, spoons, sharing Haris’s jacket as a cover. When I woke up I could see that we’d been lying on a bed of dog-ends and sweet wrappers and other people’s used condoms. I want to shower myself clean.

  But I’ll have to get past Paul first.

  The white cat is on our terrace wall. It yowls at me, but I’m feeling too jangled to spend time rubbing its ears. The patio doors are open but I can’t make out any shapes in the shade of indoors. I take a big breath, step inside.

  He is sitting on the sofa in yesterday’s clothes. His smart white shirt with the blue flowers, the khaki shorts. Crumpled now. He has his head in his hands but his neck wrenches up when he hears me come in. I stand there, waiting for him to start crying, lecturing. He takes in the sight of me. He takes in a great big breath of me.

  “Oh, Melon, thank God, thank God.” His head sinks back into his hands. His body relaxes, collapses. “Thank God, thank God,” he mutters.

  He looks odd, exhausted, as if he’s run a marathon and has got no blood or muscle left for anything else.

  I want to go through to the bathroom, strip off, but I stay put. If I move I will trip some sensor that will set Paul off. Already a small earthquake is starting – his hands are shaking as they clasp his head. He lifts his face, his eyes fierce. I look away.

  He can tell.

  I must look different. I must look more ripe, like a piece of peeled fruit. I mustn’t shift. If I do, he’ll definitely be able to tell, just from the way I move.

  “Where have you been?” he asks, low and serious.

  “I ran away.”

  “Where?” There isn’t any niceness in his voice. The ground beneath us is about to crack.

  “Away.”

  “Away where?” His voice is quivering, rising.

  “Just away.”

  “Where, Melon?” he roars at me. He gets to his feet, fingers clawing the air for something. I flinch as he grabs The Rough Guide to Crete from the coffee table and hurls it into the kitchen. The metal fruit bowl goes flying. Oranges bounce across the tiles. The mouth of the bowl spins and spins against the floor, a howling clatter that goes on and on.

  I shrink into my shoulders. I have never seen Paul get angry.

  “Where? For fuck’s sake, Melon, where have you been?”

  I’ve never heard Paul swear.

  “Look at you. Look at the state of you.”

  There are grey smears of dust on the burgundy dress. My feet are filthy. My face feels sticky, oily. I put my hand up to feel the tangled mat of my hair and see that there is a bloody scratch up my right arm. Now that I’ve noticed it, I start to feel the sting of it too.

  “Look at the state of you,” Paul yells.

  He launches himself towards me and I think he might grab my throat, but he stops, strides away towards the kitchen. He kicks the upturned fruit bowl. It clangs against the kitchen cupboards. He turns, paces towards the front door, huffing, panting. He swivels again, pushes his crushed white shirt up his arms, plants his hands on his hips. He keeps his back to me. His shoulders go up and down with the weight of his breath.

  “I’m going to ask you again,” he says, quiet now, a lawyer summing up, “and you’re going to give me an answer.”

  He turns to stare me down.

  “Where have you been?” He bites the whole of his bottom lip, keeping back his fury.

  I open my mouth to speak, but what can I say?

  “Where?” He jabs at me.

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Where?!”

  “The sea,” I say.

  Paul’s eyes drill into me. I need to say more.

  “I saw the sea and then . . .”

  “And then what?”

  “I saw the sea and,” I start to tell a story, “and I know this will sound weird and everything, but it felt like the sea was talking to me, in a way. And I was sort of talking back.”

  I am my mum’s daughter. I can do it, I can tell a good story.

  “And it said, ‘You want to come with me?’ So I went, I went down onto the beach and the sand felt warm and it felt good to just sink into it all and lose myself, kind of. If you know what I mean.”

  The earthquake inside Paul fades to tremors.

  “And it’s not like I really understood what the sea was saying, not words or anything, but I understood, I guess. Then I watched the lights of the ships and the harbour and they were really pretty. Really beautiful.”

  I am my mother.

  “And then I must have fallen asleep. I just curled up where I was and I cried and I fell asleep.”

  That’s how you do it, that’s how you tell a story.
Truth and lies, truth and lies.

  Paul nods. Calmer now.

  “I called the police,” he says. “I need to tell them you’re . . . okay.” His voice breaks at the end of the sentence. There is this choking sound. He looks away.

  Then it comes – the sobbing. Paul is shaking again, this time with tears. He staggers to one of the armchairs. His head falls back into his hands. I still haven’t moved. I am stuck to the floor.

  “I thought . . . I thought you were . . .” he manages. His back heaves with the sobs. His voice is all mangled. “You could have been . . .”

  “Dead?” I offer.

  Paul chugs out more tears.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “No, I’m sorry . . . I’m . . . Anything could have . . . Oh no, I can’t . . .” He can hardly breathe for crying. “I thought . . . I thought that . . .”

  I want to run away again. I have seen Paul cry before, but not like this, not anything like this. This is awful. The earthquake has turned in on itself.

  “It just brought it all back . . . You disappearing and . . . I shouldn’t have . . . I shouldn’t have told you all that and . . . I’m supposed to be looking after you and . . . Oh, I can’t . . . I just can’t . . .” He gets pulled down under the sobs for a moment, then surfaces again. “It just brought it all back . . . Losing Maria . . . Losing your mother.” He gasps and splutters. Snot and tears stream down his face, into his hands.

  Me and my mother, we are the same person. We do the same things to people.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again. I just want him to be okay.

  “No, I’m sorry.” Paul sniffs, snorts. He lifts his face to the ceiling, gasps for air.

  “S’okay,” I say.

  His chest hiccups. He starts to recover his speech. “No, it was too much, too much to tell you, all that, just like that.”

  I shake my head. I look down at my fingers – there is a half moon of dirt under each of my nails. “I knew it all anyway,” I say. “I knew my story wasn’t true.”

  This surprises him. I can tell.