Red Ink (2 page)

“Ten minutes until dinner, Melon.” He always gives me these countdowns. We did this book in English a while back about what the world would be like after a nuclear war, so I’ve given some thought to what I might do if we got a real ten-minute warning. I wouldn’t eat soup.

I push my sleeve up and put my arm underwater to pull out the bath plug. The water has gone cold. I ran hot water so that the boiler would make the right chugging noises for a proper bath. I am excellent at pretending. I even put in some of Mum’s bubble bath to make the right smell. It reminded me of her getting ready to go out somewhere. There was this one time, she went to the Social Services Christmas ball with Paul (which did not sound like the biggest night of fun on earth) and we had a massive argument just before she left the house. We didn’t speak for a week. Or rather, I didn’t speak to Mum for a week. She was useless at holding grudges. I am an expert.

I rake a wet hand through my hair to make it look like I’ve been in the bath. I can’t get used to my hair being short. I grab for the ponytail at the back sometimes and forget that it’s gone. I admit the haircut might have been a mistake. The fuss it caused was brilliant, but the haircut itself is rubbish. The front bits go proper frizzy if I sit in a steamy room and I get this fluffy halo around my face. Mind you, that used to happen even when my hair was long. Nothing stops it. Chick got her hair permed once – she actually chose to have curly hair – which I thought was total madness. I have big Greek curls. I have a big nose, big thighs, a big backside and big boobs. The boobs are an especially great thing to have when your name is Melon. Mum always said she was the real Greek but I was the one with the ‘Greek woman’s body’. This is a polite way of saying I’m a bit fat. I’m not fat, I know that really. I’m not like Freya Nightingale who believes she’s an elephant and always goes to the loos to puke after lunch. I just take up more room in this world. Mum was skinny all over, except in the right places. Real boobs that looked fake. She was a dinky person who looked like she would fit in your pocket. I look like I would split the seams.

I might look Greek but I don’t feel it. It’s a fancy-dress costume I can’t take off. Mum took me to Crete every year but the threads that joined me to that place have been snipped, or they were never there in the first place. Mum tried to fix her threads loads of times but I don’t think she succeeded. The family didn’t forgive her, not really. She never got that into her head. Now there’s hardly any family left to visit. It’s because of the curse. All the Fourakis family die young.

My dad still lives there though – Mum said. I’ve never actually met the man. She never delivered a living, breathing dad to me. I have a name, that’s all. According to The Story he is called Christos Drakakis. I say it to myself sometimes, test it out.
My dad is Christos Drakakis, and my name is Melon Drakaki. How do you do?
Except I hope I wouldn’t have been called Melon if Christos had stuck around. He would have stopped Mum being so stupid and I would have been given a proper name with a saint’s day, just like every other good Greek girl. I would have been called Sophia or Alexandra, something normal like that.

“Five minutes, Melon.”

There are five minutes until the nuclear holocaust: what do I do? Find the epicentre and run towards it. I don’t want to survive with all the destruction and deformity and radiation sickness.

The pong of soup hits me when I step out of the bathroom. Cooking smells have a set path through this house – up the stairs, a swirl in one corner of the landing and then on to collect in my bedroom. It must be the way the draughts work in this place. Mum’s room never gets rid of that woody vanilla smell.

I go downstairs, stepping around Kojak, who has taken to sleeping in the middle of the staircase. He’s not been the same since Mum went; he’s gone mute. Before, he would be miaowing around my ankles and following me into the kitchen. Now he stays put – a big, grey ball with one eye on the front door, as if he’s expecting Mum to walk in any minute.

I stop on the stairs and lift him up into a hug, but he freaks out. He bends his spine backwards and twists out of my grip. He can’t scarper upstairs fast enough. His claws pop and splutter against the stair carpet. He doesn’t want attention from me. He goes to Mum’s room.

Kojak’s really old now. Maybe the heartache of it all will finish him off.

In the kitchen, Paul is listening to Jazz FM and wearing Mum’s apron with the big purple flowers. Paul likes lift music and doesn’t seem to care about looking like a girl.

“Sweet potato and pea,” he goes, turning from the stove to look me up and down. He’s checking for wrist cuts or signs of an overdose, no doubt. “Sit down.”

He has set two places at the kitchen table, opposite one another. I sit down at one of the four chairs that doesn’t have a place set. I don’t want to eat with Paul
and
have to look at his face. Paul comes over with a full bowl of soup. He doesn’t react to my choice of seat, just slides a placemat over to me and sets down the bowl. The smell is strong, spicy. He has put a dollop of something white on top that looks like bird poo. Paul ladles himself a bowl, adds the bird poo and then comes to sit down. There is a basket of bread with dead-fly olives running through the middle.

“Nice?” he asks. Paul is always fishing for compliments.

“Not tried yet.”

I reach for bread, start tearing strips off and putting them in my mouth one by one, chewing thoughtfully, trying to delay the tasting of the soup. He’ll have to wait for the next ice age before I tell him he’s a great cook.

“You know, Melon, you don’t have to lock yourself in the bathroom.”

I look down at the steam rising off my soup, watch the edges of the bird poo spread.

“You can have your own space.”

I reach for more bread, tear off a crust.

“What were you doing in there, anyway?”

“Mind your own business.”

He shuts up, starts shovelling soup into his mouth, three big mouthfuls straight after one another like he hasn’t eaten all week. Only after the third mouthful, does he go, “Ooo, hot.” Idiot.

I put my spoon into the soup. I can’t really put it off any longer. I can feel him watching me while I blow on it, then slurp. My skin aches from all the watching I get. He waits for a comment. I carry on spooning. He nods, smiles. He has taken my carrying on as a compliment, which it is not. I’m so angry I could tip the steaming lot all over his head. But I’m also bloody hungry.

“How was the session on Tuesday? You still haven’t told me how it went.”

This is the fifth time he has asked me this. I am counting.

“Was it helpful?”

“S’okay.”

“Did you talk about the argument?”

This is a new one.

“What argument?” The lingering smell of the bath bubbles kicks me back to the night of the Christmas Ball again, the argument we had that night.

“Did you talk about the argument you had with your mum?”

“Which one?” I keep eating to prove I don’t care what he knows.

“The one just before she died.”

Hot soup clags up my throat. I turn cold.

“I just thought that it may be troubling you and that it would help to talk to someone about it.”

“How do you know about that?” I say. I don’t look at him. I keep my voice level so he understands that it’s definitely not an issue.

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

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.