Red Ink (26 page)

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?

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

“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.

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

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

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.

“Well, no, I didn’t know,” I say. “But, yes. I can see now that I knew it wasn’t true, all along I knew, it’s just . . .”

Paul nods.

“I just thought,” I go on, “that people who were in denial, knew they were in denial. So I couldn’t have been in denial, could I? But I was.”

Paul smiles. “No, people don’t know they’re in denial. That’s the whole point.”

We both fall quiet at that. There is just the sound of Paul’s hiccupy breath.

Then he says: “So, are you going to rewrite your book?”

“What book?” I follow his gaze to the kitchen table.

And there it is. My book. The Story. The one I left in a drawer in my room. He’s read my version of The Story.

I gasp. “That was none of your business.”

I dart for the table, pull the book to my chest. The picture of Mum and Christos and Yiannis slips to the floor. The three of them look up at me. I bend down to pick it up and feel the graze on my back drag against the fabric of the dress. I can’t believe he has read it. My story. The fairy tale.

Just a fucking fairy tale.

“I didn’t know where you were, Melon,” Paul says, offering me his palms. “I thought there might be something in there that might help me find you.”

“No, you didn’t,” I spit back. “You’re just fucking nosy, you’ve been dying to know what I’ve been writing. Couldn’t just let me have my privacy. It’s none of your fucking business. You’re always interfering.”

I am stuck to the floor again, a furious mass, my arms clenched around the book. I want to run, but where can I go? Where? And I am so sick of running.

We fall silent. Paul nods. He is not going to fight back.

“I liked it,” he says eventually.

“What?”

“Your story.”

“Yeah, but it’s not true, is it,” I mutter.

“Some of it is.”

I close my eyes.

“The sea is blue.”

I shake my head.

“The island is magical,” he goes on. “The farm, the melons – she loved them, she did.”

“She hated all that . . .”

“When she was a teenager, maybe. She loved it as a kid, as an adult. She wanted it back. People change.”

And yes, this is it. This is what I don’t understand. How a person can change, even when they’re dead. My mother is a chameleon, a magician’s rabbit. Now you see her, now you don’t.

I have no energy left to be angry with Paul.

“Why did she lie to me?” I say.

“Because she loved you.”

I frown at that. How can lies be love?

“And if you say something enough times, it becomes true.” Paul makes a steeple of his fingers, examines his fingertips. “Your story is beautiful, the rest of us didn’t get anything as lovely.”

“You got the truth. You all knew. Poppy, the kids at Mum’s work, everyone.”

“Take what you’ve been given as a gift,” Paul goes on. “She did it because she wanted you to love her.”

“I did love her,” I say.

“And now? Now that you know the truth.”

“Yeah, still.” I sound unsure, I know I do. “I don’t know. I do, of course, but . . . It’s . . .”

“Complicated.”

“Yes.”

He smiles. I try to smile back but a wave of something horrendous – a feeling of terror – takes over my body.

“Oh, God,” I stammer and I run from the room. I dash for the bathroom, skidding to my knees by the toilet. I puke so violently I feel as though I will turn inside out.

Paul calls after me, so I get up and shut the bathroom door. I’m in a cold sweat but I feel better. I flush the sick away. Then I think – blood, I’m ready to look for the blood. I pull down my pants and there it is. Not a lot, just smears of pink dried into some other stuff. Haris’s stuff, I guess. My thighs ache. I sit down. I pee. I take off the pants and screw them into a ball in my hand. Then I think about how Paul will be waiting outside when I open the door. I don’t fancy trying to get past him with a pair of pants in my hand. I put them back on.

When I open the door, Paul is leaning against the wall.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“So you had quite a bit to drink on the beach last night, then?”

“No.” I try to laugh him away but Paul’s not having that.

“So where were you last night? Really.”

“The beach.”

“The real story, please, Melon.”

He smiles a gentle smile.

I give in. I take a breath. I tell him another story. No lies this time. I tell him about the bike ride and the kids at the bar and the drinking and us sleeping at the fortress. Paul’s been told stories worse than mine, he can handle it. I just miss out one little thing, of course, because I know I would die if he gave me a lecture about all of that.

Paul can do what I’ve got to do now.

He can fill in the gaps.

“This is it,” I say, and Paul puts his foot on the brake. We pull up on the verge.

“You sure?” He doesn’t seem too impressed.

I don’t what he was expecting.

“I’m sure,” I say, although there is this brief moment when I think I’ve got it wrong. Me and Mum didn’t come here often. I have never actually been inside the farmhouse. When the family knew we were in town we usually met at Auntie Despina’s taverna in Horafakia. Neutral territory. This is an invasion.

We sit in the quiet of the car for a moment, squinting into the sunlight. Through a break in the tall, wild canes that surround the farm there is a stretch of chicken wire and behind it fat, beige hens are picking at the ground. A cockerel swaggers up to the fence to blast out a
cock-a-doodle-do!
– a noise bigger than its body. Fighting talk. I wonder if Auntie Aphrodite has had it trained.