Red Ink

by Julie Mayhew

  Eventually the man and the woman on the boat start puttering out to sea. Then the motor comes on full pelt, an angry lawnmower, and the boat moves out of the cove. There is no one to watch us now, just a squat orange house peering over the high rocks on one side of the bay.

  I hold the dove box close to my chest, the wood warming in the sun. There is a light breeze in the air and I worry about Mum going in the wrong direction. But then, what is the right direction? Paul has felt the breeze too. He picks up some driftwood and some sun-crisped leaves and tosses them into the sea. He’s testing the current.

  “We should say something,” he says. “Some words.”

  I look down. Black dust from the rocks sways backwards and forwards in the waves.

  “For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me,” I murmur. I can feel Paul watching me, listening. The words come easy, they are written across my mind. They will never be wiped away, even by time. “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”

  I look up at Paul and he nods at the box.

  “How do we do it?” I ask.

  “With your hands. Take her in your hands.”

  I open the box and the container inside. I drive my fingers into the silvery remains of my mother. The sun slicks heat along my forearm. The ashes feel cool in my hands. I toss a handful into the sea and watch it slowly sink, dissolve. It becomes one with the black rock dust that is already there.

  “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean,” I say. “Wash me and I will be whiter than snow.”

  Paul has tears streaking his cheeks. He reaches across and takes some ashes from the box.

  “I have this piece of thread,” he says to the sea as he scatters.

  I join in. “The piece of thread that connects my heart to yours.”

  We smile at each other for knowing the words.

  “When something is tugging at your heart, I know, because I feel it too.”

  We toss the rest of the ashes into the water, handful by handful.

  “Bye, Mum,” I say.

  And then I rinse my hands clean in the clear, cool waters.

  Epilogue

  63 DAYS TO GO

  I take the bus to Kentish Town. I feel heavy and awkward. And I’m desperate for a wee. I’m always desperate for a wee. The last thing I need is a flight of stairs but I go to the top deck anyway. That feels like the right thing to do. I sit towards the back of the bus, hoping for some company but it’s the middle of the day and it’s quiet. No school kids, no commuters. I ride all the way alone.

  When I get off, I nip into the café across the road first, buy a can of lemonade and ask to use the loo. I fancy a coffee but Paul says I should cut back on the caffeine. He’s such a spoilsport. But he’s right, of course, as always.

  “You didn’t have to buy that just so you can use the facilities,” the woman behind the counter tells me. She has hammy arms and a mouthful of gravestone teeth. “Not in your state.” She drops her head on one side, looks at me like I’m a rescue puppy.

  The thin strip-of-a-man behind the counter who is making the sandwiches turns around to see what the woman is talking about, to see what kind of state I’m in. He gives me a look that says, so what? and turns back to carry on slicing.

  “S’okay, I’m thirsty anyway,” I say, putting the coins for the lemonade on the counter, and I walk down to the back of the shop towards the loos.

  “Poor thing,” I hear the woman say when she thinks I’m out of earshot. This makes me smile. I don’t feel like a poor thing.

  In the toilet, there is a small mirror above the sink. I take my time flattening down my hair just like Mum had that day outside the washateria. I wipe away the mascara that has melted underneath my eyes. My skin is pin-pricked and sore. I am supposed to look ‘glowing’ but I don’t. My ankles have swollen up to the size of Australia.

  Out on the street, I have a quick look for the Taj Mahal Tandoori House with the flat above it and the Mount Olympus restaurant where Mum might have waitressed. Silly, I know, because they don’t exist, well, not on this street anyway. I haven’t been back here, not properly, since that day with Mum when I was nine years old, even though I live just a few miles away. Kentish Town is just a place for passing through on the way to Camden.

  I stand outside the Papadakis Washateria and try to make out the figure at the back of the shop, but the windows are steamed-up. I can tell it’s a woman but I can’t see her face. I go in, pushing hard on the door, feeling the instant warm hug of the tumble-dried air. The washing machines are all busy, tutting and sighing.

  The woman is younger than I was expecting. About thirty, I reckon. She is leafing through a receipt book, licking her thumb as she goes. She watches me walk in, suspicious, because I’m carrying no bags of laundry. She eyes me as if she’s ready for a contest.

  “I’m looking for Eleni Papadaki,” I say to the woman, who has a bundle of curls just like mine underneath her headscarf. She carries on flicking through the receipt book, making me wait.

  “She’s not here. Can I help?”

  The woman pushes the receipt book away and looks me up and down, staying too long on my belly. I pull at the bottom hem of my jumper to make sure it’s meeting my jeans. Sometimes I find I’m showing off a silvery spiderweb of stretchmarks, and who wants to be gawping at that?

  “I’m her niece,” I say. “No, no, I’m not, I’m her great niece. We haven’t seen each other in a while and . . .”

  Suspicion starts to evaporate from the woman’s face. Or rather, it morphs into a pointed nosiness.

  “Then that would make us . . . Cousins? Or second cousins, wouldn’t it? Or once removed or someink?”

  She comes out from behind the counter. She’s wearing baggy jeans with trailing, frayed edges. On her big, flat feet she’s wearing Birkenstocks. For a moment I think she is going to come over and hug me, but she stops. Suspicion clouds her face again.

  “Funny we’ve not met before, then?”

  “I’m Melon, Chrysoula’s granddaughter.”

  With that, the woman’s face sort of explodes. A huge, scandalous smile spreads across her lips.

  “Maria’s daughter!” She shouts it like it’s the tiebreaker answer in a quiz.

  “Yes.”

  “Melon. Oh. My. God.” She stands open-mouthed. “The girl called Melon!” She shakes her head. “The girl called Melon!”

  I can feel red sweeping up my neck and across my cheeks.

  “Sorry, I’m Pitsa,” she goes. She leaps forward to grab my hand. She squeezes it hard, shakes it up and down, up and down. “I’m Eleni’s daughter. I’m sorry. I’m just gobsmacked. I never thought you actually really existed.”

  “Why’s that?” I ask.

  “I just thought you were one of Mum’s stories,” she says.

  Pitsa shuts up the shop leaving a sign saying:

  BACK IN 10

  We walk together down the Kentish Town Road, then turn into a residential street.

  “You know, I do have this vague memory of you,” Pitsa goes. She is swinging the washateria keys around her finger like she’s a pantomime jailer. The soles of her Birkenstocks rasp against the pavement. “Proper hazy though.”

  “We’ve met before?”

  “No, not really. I remember this pregnant girl coming to stay with us when I was like twelve or someink. She took my room. I had to sleep on Mum and Dad’s floor. I think you were the bump.”

  “You’ve met my mum?”

  “Like I say, not properly or anyfink. Not enough to, like, judge.”

  “Judge what?” I ask.

  “You know, about the . . .” Pitsa stops talking, checks my face, puts her fingertips over her mouth.

  “S’okay, I know all about it.” I wave a hand through the air to show that it’s nothing.

  “She’s honest with you, your mum, is she?”

  “Was she,” I say.

  Pitsa stops, grabs my hand and yanks it close
to her chest. “You’re not saying she’s, like . . .”

  “Dead, yeah. Died about a year ago.” Pitsa’s mouth drops open again. She stands there – frozen. “Sorry about that,” I go, gently, trying to unfreeze her.

  “Sorry for me! No, sorry for you. Mum never said. But then, like I say, I hardly knew your mum, so. Oh my God, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “But you’re . . .” Pitsa puts a hand on my stomach. I wonder how this must look to the strangers passing by, us standing there, Pitsa clutching onto me, feeling my tummy.

  “S’okay, you know, really,” I say.

  Pitsa is stroking my belly now like it’s an animal that needs calming.

  “Your mum live near here, then?” I say brightly, trying to get us moving again.

  Pitsa nods, turns, starts walking, although she won’t let go of my hand.

  “I’m so, so, so, sorry,” Pitsa mutters, shaking her head-scarfed head.

  We walk past rows of terraced houses with low front garden walls. I think about Eleni telling Pitsa stories about Mum and me.

  “You were never in any of my Mum’s stories,” I tell Pitsa.

  She looks disappointed. “No?”

  “I never even knew Auntie Eleni had children.”

  “Yeah, me and my older brother Giorgos. Funny she didn’t mention us.”

  We stop at a gate and Pitsa clinks open the latch. Then she pauses, as if she’s thinking really hard about something.

  “She might have been too off her face,” Pitsa says.

  “Who?”

  “Your mum. Too off her face to remember me and Giorg.” She pushes the gate open and ushers me up the garden path. “No offence, like,” she calls after me as I make my way to the front door.

  I’m expecting the robust woman from The Story, the fat woman I met six years ago, but when we get into the kitchen a tall, slim woman in a neat trouser suit is putting mugs into a dishwasher. She has one of those blow-dried solid haircuts and on the end of her fingers there are long, plastic nails that make her touch things in a weird way, as if everything is dirty. But the face I recognise. This is definitely Auntie Eleni.

  “Mama, guess who’s come to see us,” bellows Pitsa, flip-flopping into the room. “The girl called Melon!”

  “Melon?” Auntie Eleni’s jaw drops and I realise where Pitsa inherited the mouth-open thing.

  “Melon, no, you’re, you’re . . .” Eleni makes big, tall movements in the air with her fingernails to show how I’ve grown. Then she looks at my belly and makes big, wide movements too.

  “You’re thin,” I go, needing to say something to fill the silence and to stop the arm waving. This immediately snaps Eleni out of her shock. She sticks her hands on her hips and twists her waist this way, then that.

  “They make me Slimmer of the Year, four years ago now.” She grins. “The slimming magazine give me makeover. I don’t look back.”

  Pitsa tuts. “They took away my mother and they delivered this as a replacement.” She is leaning on the kitchen sideboard, eating breakfast cereal out of the box.

  “Panagiota!” Eleni snaps. “Shush.”

  Eleni turns back to me. She looks nervous, as if I am a ticking bomb. Her hands slide down off her hips. Pitsa watches us, chomping, like we’re a movie for her entertainment.

  “How do you do the laundry with those nails?” I go, trying to fill the silence again.

  “Mum doesn’t do laundry any more,” chips in Pitsa. “She’s above all that now.”

  Eleni rolls her eyes. “I manage all our stores – we have five now. And the hotel laundry side of the business, I am managing that too.”

  “No, Mama, I manage the hotels, thank you very much.”

  “Panagiota!” Eleni explodes. Then she turns to Pitsa and attacks the air with a splutter of Greek.

  Pitsa fires back a rat-a-tat of thorny, foreign words, then switches language. “Mama, speak English in front of Melon. Don’t be rude.”

  “Get back to the washateria,” Eleni bites back. “People they will be waiting to get to the machines and where are you?” She waves Pitsa away with her square-ended fingers. “Panagiota thinks standing behind the counter of a launderette is beneath her now. She is forgetting I do it for years.”

  Pitsa tosses the cereal box back on the sideboard with a sigh. “If Mama could find reliable managers who turned up at that Washateria for a day’s work,” Pitsa tells me, spikily, “then I wouldn’t have to keep filling in for them, would I?” She gathers up her keys and scuff-scuff-scuffs out of the room.

  “Adío, Mama,” she drones. “See you later, Melon. You come back and we’ll catch up, yeah?”

  She scuff-scuff-scuffs down the tiled hallway.

  “Bye,” I say quietly to the back of a slammed door.

  “I’m sorry,” Eleni says.

  We’re sitting in her tidy living room – me sinking into cushions on a huge boat of a sofa. I’m clutching a glass of water that Eleni insists I drink. Eleni is perched on the edge of an armchair.

  “I know about your mother and I don’t come find you. I’m sorry,” she says.

  “It’s okay.” I feel bad for making her feel this way.

  “No, it’s not okay. You are family and I held grudge. This is bad. But I was angry. All of what happened, none of it is your fault.”

  “I understand. It’s really okay.”

  “Aphrodite, I was back in touch with her recently and she tell me and I should have come. But I am not like Aphrodite, she is so forgiving. I am hard. I am hard-nosed bitch, I know this.”

  “No, no, you’re not, you’re . . .” I don’t know what to say. Does anyone really think that Aphrodite is forgiving?

  “And here you are,” Eleni throws her arms in the direction of my belly, like a gameshow assistant showing off a set of cutlery, “with no one to look after you.” She drops her head.

  “No, I have Paul, he’s Mum’s fiancé – was Mum’s fiancé, when she was alive, I mean. He looked after me, afterwards. Now he’s renting a house a few doors down so I don’t feel so crowded out and so I don’t feel on my own.”

  “A man?” Eleni jerks her head back, looks worried. “This is not right, though, a man. You need a mother.”

  “Paul’s kind of like a mother. Really like one, actually. Believe me.”

  “And he is father . . .?” Eleni looks aghast.

  I nearly drop my glass of water. “God, no! He’s not the dad. This boy in Crete is the dad.”

  “This is better, I suppose. And what do this boy’s family think?”

  “That I should go back there and marry him.”

  Eleni nods for a while, as if she’s in agreement with Haris’s family, but then the nod changes.

  “But this is not right thing for you?”

  “No, I’m going to do my A-levels after all this. I did really well in my GCSEs. I’ll probably go to university.”

  “All this with a baby? This will be very hard.”

  “Paul said he’ll help, although I’ve told him he’s got to do his own thing now. Get a new girlfriend and stuff.”

  “And you have to come to us for help now. We are here for you.”

  Eleni gets up and sits next to me on the sofa. She puts an arm over my shoulder and squeezes. I sit there for a moment, enjoying the warmth of this half-hug.

  “That’s not really why I came,” I say eventually.

  “Go on,” Eleni urges.

  “I’m writing this story, Mum’s story . . . well, rewriting it, actually. I’m putting my own twist on things and I wanted to hear your side of it.”

  “Something to tell your children?”

  “Exactly,” I say.

  “Okay,” Eleni says. “If you want to know the truth . . .”

  “No, I don’t want that,” I say. “Not the truth. Just the way you saw it. Have you got time to tell me?”

  On the way home I sit on the top deck again, lower my wide backside into a seat halfway down the aisle. I im
agine what would happen if I bumped into Ian Grainger and what his expression would be when he saw me like this.

  Melon? I imagine him saying, all flabbergasted.

  And I’d say something really witty back like, no, no, it’s definitely a baby in there. Ha ha ha.

  And then he’d see me in a totally new, grown-up light and regret never taking me seriously and he’d totally wish it was his baby and then . . . And then what? I have no idea. I don’t really care what he would think. Ian’s just a boy and I’m far too adult for him now.

  I guess I’m most interested in what Chick thinks of all this. We still haven’t spoken. In my head, we have endless conversations. And in these conversations I am eloquent and in charge and ask all the right penetrating questions. Why did you let me down? Why did you act like I’d done something wrong? Why didn’t I deserve your support? Why are you letting go of all our years of friendship? Why? Why? Why? And faced with this barrage of questions Chick can think of no reasonable answers, so she gives in and says that I am right and we must become best mates again. This, I realise, will never happen.

  I’m sure word of my predicament has reached Chick, via her mum. That’s what Mrs Lacey would call it – a predicament. I know that Chick did rubbish in her GCSEs and her mum was going to make her join one of those hothouse summer schools with all the Japanese high achiever kids to try and drum some intelligence into her. Mrs Lacey always reckoned that Chick had it in her to be a lawyer or a doctor. That lawyery-doctory thing inside Chick was always hiding itself pretty well, if you ask me. Anyway, I heard that Chick talked her mum into letting her do a theatre studies course at a college in Barnet. She’s going to learn how to pretend to be someone else.

  Justine Burrell told me all this about Chick. I guess Justine’s my best mate now. She’s coming over later to help me turn Mum’s old room into a nursery. Paul’s cleared out the furniture that I don’t need, then me and Justine will be choosing the colours and stuff.

  Justine was amazing when I broke the news about the baby. She just nodded like it was the most normal thing in the world.