Red Ink (16 page)

Melon had found her English voice and every day Maria marvelled at the clean-edged words that spilled from her mouth. She would be the Londoner Maria could never truly be.

And they would go on to buy their own home in the city, not far from Kentish Town.

And soon Maria would earn enough to afford the regular air fare to visit Crete.

“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 home and to Babas. When something is tugging at Babas’s heart, I know, because I feel it too.”

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, an angle that pleased everyone.

Forget what you know, what you feel about everything that has happened.

This is how Maria would explain.

Come and see things in a new way,
she would say.
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.

“You can take your jacket off, you know.”

“I’m not stopping.” I fold my arms across my chest.

“You’re not stopping?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Amanda looks disappointed. These last few weeks she’s convinced herself we’re getting somewhere. If she was one of those detectives on TV and I was the villain, she’d be talking about ‘breakthroughs’ and about how she’d ‘worn me down’, stuff like that.

“No, I’m not stopping. Sorry.” I’m such a cow.

“But you came.”

“Only to tell you I’m not coming any more.”

“You felt you owed me that.”

“Yes.”

She smiles. I am dumping her and she’s smiling.

“So, why have you decided not to come along any more? What feelings have led you to that decision?”

“I don’t want to do that.”

“What?”

“The feelings stuff.”

“Right.”

The school kids are playing hockey on the field outside the window today. There’s something really satisfying about hitting a really hard ball with a big, wooden stick. Amanda follows my gaze out of the window.

“Do you think that you’re all better now, Melon? All fixed?”

“No, I think . . .” I’ve fallen for it again. I am talking. “I think I’m better off broken.”

Amanda is looking even less dumped. She’s not listening to what I’m really saying.

“Or maybe what I mean is . . .” How does she do this, get me saying things that I don’t want to say? “. . . what I mean is, I’ve written it all down, all the stuff about my mum, like you told me to, and I don’t feel any better.”

“Maybe that suggests you haven’t written it all down yet.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe there’s more to say.”

“Maybe.”

I can see Amanda has photocopied some handouts. She’s worrying at the corners of the stack on her lap. Amanda likes handouts. They’re good for papering over the damage.

“I’ve photocopied this for you.”

She hands me the top sheet. She has a copy for herself too. The title reads,
WHAT IS ACCEPTANCE
? There is a cartoon girl next to the title. She is looking up wonderingly but confusingly at a rainbow.

“What do we mean by acceptance?” asks Amanda. She has switched into teacher mode. I like her better when she’s off script. I stare at the confused cartoon girl. Isn’t acceptance just a matter of saying ‘yes’?

“I found some photos,” I tell her. Who else can I tell?

“Photos of what?”

“Mum.”

“Where are these photos taken?”

“In Crete, when she was little.”

“How did it make you feel finding those?”

I refuse to answer that. Amanda doesn’t know how to talk about anything without bringing feelings into it.

At our second session, I talked about the frumpy social worker they’ve assigned to me. She’s called Susan. Poppy isn’t allowed to do my visits any more because she knows me too well. They think it’s better that a complete stranger invades my house – a complete stranger who wears navy trouser suits that have gone bobbly on the thighs where her legs rub together. Anyway, I was telling Amanda about how funny I think it is that Paul, who is a social worker, is being checked up on by another social worker. He’s getting a taste of his own annoying medicine. Amanda goes to me, “Does that feel like a victory for you, that Paul is feeling uncomfortable?” as if I’m the bad person in all of this. It was only meant to be a joke.

“What’s this acceptance sheet then?” I go.

“You don’t want to talk about the photos of your mum?”

“No.”

Amanda looks down at her own copy of the handout, reading it for a moment as if it’s the first time she’s seen it. She must have hassled tonnes of teenagers with this thing before.

“Okay, so, what do we mean by acceptance?” Amanda fixes me with an eager look.

“Well, it says here . . .”

“No, what does the word mean to you, Melon, in relation to your mum?”

I start reading from the first bullet point on the sheet. “Acceptance does not mean you feel happy and contented about what has happened. Acceptance is . . .”

“Melon, don’t just read the sheet. What do you think?”

“Why did you give me the sheet then, if I’m not supposed to read it?”

“Well, hand it back and we’ll talk first.”

I thrust the sheet back at her with a huff. Amanda straightens out its creases and puts it face down on the pile on her lap. She looks at me, that hopeful face again, waiting for me to talk about acceptance. She’ll have to wait until dinosaurs walk the earth again.

At our third session, last week, Amanda tried to talk me into joining some of the group activities at the counselling centre. If I wanted to, Amanda said, I could share my feelings with other teenagers who have lost someone. My feelings – everything is always to do with feelings! I said no. Who wants to sit around with a load of sad kids (both meanings of the word ‘sad’) and have some kind of blub-off? We’d all be competing to see who has had it worst. I’m not interested.

“I found pictures of my dad too,” I go.

“What, with the pictures of your mum?”

“Yeah, they knew each other as kids, except . . .”

“Except?”

There is a poster on the wall behind Amanda, a kind of flow diagram of what grief feels like. There are angry arrows of ‘guilt’ and ‘fear’.

“His name is Christos Drakakis. My dad is Christos Drakakis.”
And my name is Melon Drakaki
, I want to say.
How do you do?

“You don’t know him, do you, Melon? You’ve not met him. But have you seen photographs of him before?”

“No.”

“Gosh. Were you pleased to find these pictures?”

“I look nothing like him.”

“No?”

“No.”

I have studied the photo album more closely since I found it in Mum’s underwear drawer. When I can’t sleep, I take it out from under my mattress and flick through the pictures. I stare at Christos Drakakis’s face and try to feel like he really is my dad. I will and wish for that, but it never feels true. I’m just looking at a picture of a boy who is younger than me. The older boy in the picture, the one with the sneery smile, his hard face drills into mine. He laughs when I do this willing and wishing, trying to make Christos fit the jigsaw in my head. The older boy is Yiannis, I have decided. He must be. He is the boy who had sex behind the goat sheds.

“Would you like it if you and your dad looked more alike?”

“I don’t want to look like a boy.”

“No, but do you wish there was a family resemblance?”

“Not bothered really.”

The hockey girls are in a huddle in the centre of the pitch now, their heads down. They could be having a jolly tactics talk, or be getting a telling-off, you can’t tell from up here. There could be someone in the middle of that huddle being quietly kicked to pieces.

“Do you still want to know what I think about acceptance?” I ask Amanda.

“I’d like to know what you think about the photos. Are you pleased that you found them?”

“I don’t know.”

On the flow chart poster on the wall behind Amanda there are also angry arrows of ‘denial’ and ‘confusion’.

Paul wants me to go to Crete with him. He wants us to scatter Mum’s ashes on the melon farm like she requested in her will. Paul asked if Auntie Aphrodite might be happy to let us stay with her. I told him she wouldn’t even let me and Mum stay, so she’s hardly likely to give her spare bedroom to Mum’s black boyfriend. I said it to him exactly like that – I said the word ‘black’. It’s the first time I’ve brought it up. Paul looked a little shocked.

“It doesn’t bother me that you’re black,” I added, just to be clear that I wasn’t the one being a racist. “I’m just saying Auntie Aphrodite wouldn’t like it.”

He nodded at me. No smile.

Since then, Paul’s been bringing home holiday brochures. Piles of the things. Pages and pages of bright white apartments with bright blue pools next to bright green spiky trees. He wants me to join in and help pick out a place to stay. He wants us to have a cracking adventure. A celebration of Mum. There’s nothing to choose between these brochure apartments, they all look the same.

“Where did you and Mum used to stay?” Paul asked me.

“Can’t remember the name of it,” I told him. I don’t want to go back to the same place with him.

Without her.

I told Paul I might look for my dad if we go to Crete. I didn’t really mean it. What would I do if I found him? He’s obviously not interested in me. I just said it to wind Paul up, to make him think he wasn’t doing a good enough job of playing dad himself. But it didn’t ruffle him up like I’d expected. Paul just went quiet. He looked at me like I was a little deranged, as if he was scared of me. Then he gave me another one of his nods.

“I would like you to throw away the idea of acceptance,” says Amanda.

“Acceptance of what?”

“The idea that you should accept what’s happened.”

“I should fight it? The fact that she’s dead? That doesn’t make much sense.”

“No, what I mean is, no one expects you to suddenly feel happy again.”

“Well, good.”

“Acceptance just means acknowledging that the person has really gone.”

“So I shouldn’t fight it? Make your mind up.”

Amanda sighs and wipes a hand down over her forehead and eyes.

She goes quiet for a moment.

When she looks at me again, she has transformed. This is a new Amanda. “What is it that you think you’re fighting, Melon?” This is tough Amanda. “Why are you fighting against everything?”

“I’m not fighting no one.”

I sit next to Justine Burrell at school now. Chick sits next to Lucy. Justine Burrell is clever and intelligent and a high achiever, which means she has no friends. Obviously. I actually quite like her. I see how it must be for her now, being on the outside looking in. Not that I was ever really an insider. But I definitely wasn’t a proper outcast until now.

Whatever we have in common, we’re not really friends, Justine and me. It’s my fault. I don’t say much in class. My mind wanders. I try to listen to all the revision stuff we’re doing but before I know it, I’m off thinking about The Story. I play around with it in my head, deciding how I should write the next bit in my book. I think of new words, prettier ones, better sentences, because English was never Mum’s strong point. I struggle to remember how Mum told The Story. I can’t bring her voice back any more. My memory of her hasn’t gone mute exactly, I can still hear the chip-chop way she used to speak, it’s just there are no real words coming out of her mouth. Maybe this chattering sound will be the next thing to go. Then the image I have of her will lose all its facial features. She’ll become just an outline. Then – pop! – she’ll disappear.

“So you say you’ve finished writing everything down?”

“Yes.”

“Can I ask you what kind of thing you’ve been writing?”

“The Story.”

“The Story?”

Amanda thought I was working on some weepy essay about how sad I am.

“The Story that Mum told me,” I explain.

Amanda looks confused. “A bedtime story? A fairy tale?”

“No.” A fairy tale? Who does Amanda think I am? A baby? “No, it’s not a fucking fairy tale.”

“Okay, I’m sorry, Melon. I’m really sorry if what I just said upset you.”

“It’s not a fucking fairy tale!”

“No, no, I understand that now. But will you tell me what it is? Please.”

“No, fuck off. I don’t want to talk about it now.”

I get up. My face is prickling. I feel a real fury burning in my belly. It’s come out of nowhere, this red hot rage. I’m not even sure why I’m so offended. All I can think is, how dare she say that? How dare she call my book a fairy tale?

“Melon, sit down. This story is obviously really important to you and I would really like to hear about it.”

“It’s not important to you. It’s nothing to do with you. You know nothing about it.”

There is a thwack and a cheer from the hockey field outside.

“Where are you going, Melon?”

I make for the door.

“Home.”

“Tell me about The Story.”

“It’s just a fucking story, that’s all, okay?” I am outside of my body looking down at myself. It’s like watching some other girl going crazy.

“No, it’s more than that, isn’t it, Melon?”

I’m possessed. I’m doubled over, screaming at Amanda. “It’s just a fucking story! All right! It’s just a fucking fairy tale!”

I stop and feel the silence putting its hand over my mouth.

There is nothing left inside of me.

I walk out of the room and slam the door.

“Hurry up! I need a wee.”

Mum shut herself in the bathroom over an hour ago.

“What is problem? I am not locking door, come in.”

“I don’t want an audience.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Melon. Is only me. If you just need a wee . . . You need a poo?”

“No! God! You’re so . . .”

I push my way into the bathroom, stomp past Mum who is lying in the bath, all boobs and bubbles. Her face is smeared in green gloop. I pull down my jogging bottoms and knickers, make a porcelain crash as I sit. I stare straight ahead while I pee. Mum wants to make eye contact, but she’s not getting it. I wipe, stand, pull up my clothes, flush.