Red Ink Page 2

  “We used to talk, you know,” he says. “Your mum and me.”

  15 DAYS SINCE

  I don’t talk about the argument at the session. Why would I? That’s not what the session is about.

  I was expecting an old man, grey, in a suit. Leather furniture. A desk. A couch for me to lie on. I get none of this. I get Amanda. Everything about her is nice. Which is unfair because I really want to hate her. I get a plastic chair in an upstairs room with white walls and a sandy coloured carpet. I suppose it’s all meant to be calming. I just want to scream.

  Amanda sits on the only other piece of furniture in the room, another plastic chair, smoothes down the sides of her hair (a pointless thing to do, she is as frizzy as me), then switches on her very best sympathetic voice.

  “Hello . . . Melon.”

  There is a pause between the greeting and the name. I am used to that pause. Amanda pulls her face into an exclamation mark and double-checks her notes.

  “I think Social Services have misspelt . . .”

  “No, it is Melon.”

  “Oh.” She hides behind her folder.

  “My mum called me Melon.”

  There. I cross my arms as an end to it.

  Mum.

  Amanda stiffens at the word, like an actor who’s been given the wrong line and is forced to jump ahead in the script. I stare at her, working my chewing gum, realising this is what it feels like to be cocky.

  “Melon. Gosh! How lovely!”

  My chewing gum squeaks on my teeth.

  “I’m Amanda.” She thrusts her name badge at me and holds it there, on the end of its neck chain, waiting for me to say something. What can I say about her ‘Amanda-ness’? I nod.

  “And I’ve got here as your surname, Fu . . . Fu . . .”

  “Fouraki.”

  “Is that . . .?”

  “Greek? Yes.”

  “How lovely!”

  I wince.

  “So!”

  Amanda draws in a big, meaningful breath to begin, then stops. Her faces changes, as if she’s just remembered something awful. Has she left the iron on back home, the gas hob blazing? No. It’s tissues. She’s forgotten tissues. She gets up and grabs a box from the windowsill. Then there’s a horrible moment where she can’t decide where to put them because there’s no table and it seems a bit weird to put them on the floor. After faffing around for an age, she decides to plonk the box on my lap. I want to die. If I don’t sob like a baby now, I’ll be for it. So I do this little laugh. Amanda cocks her head at me, switches the concerned face back on.

  “So how are you feeling today?”

  “All right.”

  “Your social worker explained why you’ve come to see me?”

  “Poppy, yeah.”

  “Poppy?”

  “I mean, Barbara.”

  “You called her Poppy.”

  “That’s what she calls herself. Barbara Popplewell. Poppy for short.”

  Amanda looks all sorts of confused. “Oh, I see. Lovely.” But she’s thinking it’s unprofessional, Barbara using another name, I can tell.

  “Because it’s been,” Amanda goes back to her notes, “just over two weeks now.” She doesn’t carry on and add a ‘since’ and finish the sentence. Am I meant to do it for her, like some twisted version of Family Fortunes? We asked 100 people the question, ‘It’s been just over two weeks since what?’ Our survey says the most popular answer iiiiis . . . ‘Your mother got whacked by a bus and was turned into tarmac.’ Round of applause. The set of matching suitcases is yours.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Fifteen days. Not that I’m counting or anything.”

  Amanda tilts her head again, sends me a silent poor you. I ignore it, look out the window behind her. In the distance, two school teams are playing football in fluttering bibs. Small cries and a faint whistle come through the glass.

  “So what feelings have come up for you since then?”

  The correct answer here I presume is sad, lost, suicidal, fetch me a noose. Something along those lines. Our survey says the most popular emotion in the wake of your mother’s death iiiiis . . .

  “I’m a bit pissed off.”

  “Mmm, mmm.” Amanda is nodding like crazy. In TV dramas when the counsellor does this the other person finds they can’t help but carry on talking. Before they know it they’ve confessed everything. I don’t want to spill my guts, not here in this old house that was probably, long ago, someone’s stately home. It seems wrong that a building like this is where the sad and the mad hang out. I am in the wrong place.

  “Mmm, mmm.” Amanda is still a nodding dog.

  What feelings are coming up for you? I can’t think of anything to say. Should I literally do what the question asks, stick two fingers down my throat and vomit up the strange, dark monster that has made its home inside of me? We could interrogate this creature instead.

  Amanda keeps at it. “And what do you think is making you feel, like you say, ‘pissed off’?”

  You, I want to say, and Paul and Chick and Mrs Lacey and everyone else who can’t get over the fact my mum is dead and it’s no big deal. I don’t say this. I raise my eyebrows.

  “Sorry that was a . . . I mean, obviously we know what’s making you ‘pissed off’. Obviously we both know that.” Amanda drops behind her fringe to think up some new questions. “I mean, I just want you to explain a bit more about why it’s that particular feeling for you. Let’s look at where these feelings are coming from within you. How are they making you behave?”

  I go back to watching the school football.

  When I was thirteen, our whole class had individual one-off sessions with a community school nurse in the medical room at the back of the sports centre. Everyone lined up alongside the breeze-block building and waited their turn for what our teachers were calling a ‘Year Nine Health Check’. We’d all expected some routine head-lice examination, but Chinese whispers came down the queue as each person came out. We were going to have to talk about our problems – even the boys, and boys, as everyone knows, don’t have problems, apart from the fact they’re boys, of course. The school nurse had decided she was going to weed out the drinkers, the druggies, the vomiters and the starvers, the arm-slicers and the promiscuous slappers. Each of us girls was questioned to cringing point on all areas of ‘female troubles’. Elaine Wilkie was not chuffed to be told she could get thrush if she kept on wearing those thick tights of hers every day.

  But that session was different to this. The school nurse hadn’t been very good at prodding. She’d tried to get me to talk about something private, I’d squirmed and she’d backed off. I felt embarrassed that I didn’t have anything sleazy to keep hidden. Not like Kayleigh Barnes. She’d been trading blowjobs for weed with her brother’s mates since Year Seven.

  In comparison to the school nurse, Amanda’s heavy-duty compassion is like drowning in jam.

  “That’s it really,” I say. “I just feel pissed off.”

  “Can you explain exactly how that feels for you?”

  “I just feel pissed off.”

  “Why is it that particular feeling that is coming up for you?”

  “Don’t know. Just is.”

  “Okay, well let’s, um, let’s break it down, Melon.”

  Why do adults always use your name when it isn’t necessary? There is no one else in the room. Of course she is talking to me. They do it all the time, adults, name-check each other. They do it to prove they haven’t gone senile yet, to show that they still have enough of their brain left to remind someone what they’re called. It’s pathetic. It just sounds patronising.

  “I’m not really upset enough for you, am I?”

  Amanda looks taken aback and I’m just about to notch up a point for myself when I notice the spark in her eye. I’ve been tricked into saying something she wants to hear, I can sense it.

  “I mean,” I jump in, “I mean, I feel, I feel . . . But I’m just . . . I think people think that . . .”

  Ama
nda’s frantic nodding returns, as if what I’m saying makes absolute grammatical sense.

  “I mean,” I raise my voice, try to stop Amanda’s neck from working loose. “You think I should be more upset?”

  “How do you think you should be behaving?” Amanda shoots back, triumphant.

  Ten points to the counsellor.

  Exasperation is fizzing on my tongue. Amanda reminds me of Mum, that self-satisfied face. I feel like I’m listening to her again, talking about the troubled kids at her job, boasting about her work as if it’s curing cancer or something.

  “Giving them easy ways out? No – this is not my job,” Mum would go, lecturing me, as if I had started the discussion, as if I cared. “No. I find ways for teenagers to make the sensible decisions.”

  “What if I said, fuck it, I’m going to keep selling drugs on the estate, it keeps me in nice trainers,” I’d say back.

  “Well, what I am asking you is this: how else you make this ‘trainer money’? How else you do it and not go to jail?”

  “And what if I said, but this is simple.”

  “I would say, now is the time! Now! Now is the time to rewrite your history. You plan to do this all of your life?”

  “Yeah, why the fuck not, got a problem with that?”

  “Melon, do not say this f-word.”

  “That’s what it’s like on the streets, Mum.”

  And so it went on.

  Amanda waits for an answer, wearing her last successful piece of strategy like a pony rosette. I go back a couple of moves.

  “You think I should be crying.”

  “There are no ‘shoulds’, Melon, just ‘is’.”

  “Right.”

  “The idea of us getting together is so we can work through the issues that are troubling you at this moment in time.”

  “Right.”

  “So we only have half an hour today for an initial assessment, but I think I should perhaps book you in for some more regular sessions with me.”

  I want to run out the room.

  “Or one of our other therapists here?”

  I can’t look at her.

  “And you could try writing it all down. Your teachers tell me you’re a really bright girl.”

  I wonder if my teachers would have said that if Mum hadn’t died.

  “Putting it down on paper is one way of getting it out.” Amanda has slipped on her best Blue Peter voice. “The tears you talk about are just another way of releasing the grief.”

  I try to torture Amanda with a weighted silence. Then I say: “What would I write?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  There is that spark in Amanda’s eyes again. She is going to ask me what I feel like writing.

  “What do you feel like writing?”

  “Dunno. What would you write?”

  “That’s irrelevant. We all experience grief differently. This is about you and what you feel.”

  I roll my eyes, look at the carpet, grip the edge of my seat. I have an urge to hit Amanda in the face, hard, to stop all this stupid talk, to make her understand. How will writing some kind of school essay get rid of the brick lodged in my ribs? I concentrate on holding onto the chair, reining myself in, stopping it from all coming out. Amanda doesn’t get it. The something inside of me isn’t grief, isn’t loneliness, isn’t anything that Amanda can stick a label onto. I snap.

  “It’s all right for you dishing out the advice.” The voice I’m using doesn’t sound like mine. It’s vicious. “You’re not the one with the dead mum, are you?”

  I wait for Amanda to pounce on my words, but she is still and calm. She closes her eyes, blinking away what I just said. She’s not going to retaliate. She smiles a painful smile.

  “No,” she says, rising above it all. “You’re right.”

  Amanda has a dead mum.

  Amanda has a dead mum.

  She looks beaten, soft at the edges, like another human being all of a sudden. My grip on the chair loosens. I shrink back. I feel something like guilt creeping up inside. I want to say sorry but the word won’t come out.

  “Right,” I say, instead. I start nodding. “I’ll do that. I’ll write it down.”

  THE STORY

  1

  On an island far, far from here, where the sea is woven from strings of sapphire blue and where the sunshine throbs like a heartbeat, there once was a farm.

  At first glance it was like any other smallholding on the Akrotiri peninsula. There was a tiny, stone cottage, its uneven walls washed white. There was a tidy yard with a wire fence where a goat held court to an army of chickens. And beyond the cistus bushes that oozed their lemon scent into the breezy air were endless slopes of turned, brown earth – soil given over to the growing of fruit. But this was no ordinary farm – it was a magical place. Here was where five-year-old Maria Fouraki fell in love for the very first time.

  Maria’s Babas worked hard for his crop. Bow-backed, a crucifix of sweat across his shoulders, he deposited seeds in carefully tilled holes. Babas was a large, round man, and the years of toiling in the relentless sun were written dark on his skin and silver in his hair.

  “Just a week is all it takes,” Babas explained to his daughter, his only child – a precious gift. “Agapoula mou,” he called her, “peristeraki mou.” My little love, my little dove. “Just a week,” Babas told Maria, “and the growing will begin.”

  Maria listened, her brown eyes wide, to Babas’s stories of germination and natural selection. Only the strongest seed will survive. She could not look away from the dark soil at her feet. She wanted the miracle to happen that minute. Babas, meanwhile, tilted his face to the sky, checking for subtle hints of the weather to come.

  “If God be good and the summer fine, we shall soon have a new family of watermelons right here.”

  During the days that followed, Maria thought of nothing but the seeds. Why could she not see them growing?

  “Be patient,” said Babas. “It’s all going on under the surface.”

  Maria imagined that the seeds were sleeping. Maria’s Mama would watch from the kitchen window as her daughter went to each of the hills of earth in turn, put her cheek to the soil and whispered, “Wake up, wake up,” in a voice no seed could refuse. When the strongest seedlings eventually burst free of their muddy blankets, Maria believed her soft words had made it happen. The melons would be her babies and she must look after them.

  The vines started creeping, spreading, and Maria helped Babas check each morning for darkling beetles, melon aphids and yellowstriped armyworms. After a rainfall she would prune away overhanging leaves to make sure no mildew set in. She ran down the gullies between the crops, continuing her bright words of encouragement. She placed small hands on the rounding balls of green melon flesh, feeling the warmth that they had soaked up from the insistent Greek sun. She imagined the fruits breathing, in and out, in and out. She tenderly instructed them to grow, to take up more space in this world.

  One morning Maria was helping Mama feed the chickens when she heard a curious noise. She looked up to see Babas working his way along the highest slope, reaching under the melon plants and creating a sound –

  thud thud

  The noise echoed around the yard. Maria felt her heart join in –

  thud thud

  She raced up the hill to where Babas was down on his knees in the soil. “What’s wrong?” she panted.

  “Listen carefully, agapoula mou.” He knocked soundly on the skin of one of the green fruit that rested, bloated, on the soil.

  Maria creased her forehead, the same way Babas did and the way his Babas had done before that. A pinched ‘w’ of skin – the Fourakis look of concern.

  “That sound,” said Babas with a smile. “You hear? That is just right.”

  “Just right?”

  “Ta karpouzia ine etima,” announced Babas, expecting Maria to share in his delight. “The watermelons, they’re ready.”

  “Ready for what?” Maria asked, her tin
y hands clasped together as if in prayer.

  The melons were piled in a perfect pyramid on the back of Babas’s truck with no net or tarpaulin to hold them in place. Babas drove away at a snail’s pace, and would maintain that steady crawl all the way to Hania. Maria trailed the truck to the first junction, her eyes prickling with tears. She whispered more words of encouragement, this time urging one of her green children to topple from the truck. But Babas had done this journey many times before and was wise to the bumps in the road. The melons did not listen to Maria. The impossible structure of fruit stayed strong.

  Maria stood on that dusty path and watched the truck disappear. She felt the ground fall away from her perfect summer. She was only five years old but already, here it was, her first lesson in how to love and lose – a toughening-up for the future. A horrible something took hold of Maria’s heart and gave it a painful twist. Her only thought: how will I love anything more than I loved those melons?

  7 DAYS SINCE

  “Car’s here, Melon,” Paul is yelling from downstairs.

  I go into Mum’s room, close the door behind me and open up her Victorian relic of a wardrobe. Inside, the clothes are jammed together so tightly that none of them can breathe. A few dead cardigans lie on the bottom of the wardrobe strangled by belts and shoelaces.

  I’m looking for the burgundy dress.

  Anything with a zip wouldn’t fit me. The burgundy dress is stretchy. It’ll cling to the wrong bits and my knickers will show, but I don’t need to look sexy. I need to look like the grieving daughter. Everything in my wardrobe makes me look too happy or too sad (both meanings of the word ‘sad’). I just want to wear my denim skirt and a T-shirt. Mum wouldn’t have cared less, but today is all about Paul and what his bloody social worker friends think.

  I take the dress off the hanger. It smells of those green plastic balls that stop the moths eating your jumpers. After a bit of Impulse spray it’ll be fine.

  I pull off my black jumper and drop my skirt to the floor. I put the dress on over my head, wriggle the thing into place. I thought the arms would be too small but they go all the way to my wrists just fine. I tug the seams into the right places, then shut the wardrobe so I can see myself in the mirror on the door. Something squeezes my throat. It’s like seeing a ghost. I look over my shoulder expecting someone else to be there. There’s Mum’s empty bed, the duvet and pillows made neat by Paul.