Red Ink (10 page)

I don’t remember that at all. So I asked, “When? When were we apart that long?”

Mum stopped folding clothes and stared at me for a moment like she was doing a sum in her head. Then she went: “No, you are right, this is first time.”

Pamela is asking Mum what I would especially like for tea and Mum is telling her that I’ll eat anything, which isn’t really true. But Mum has already given me the talk about not being any trouble because it’s very nice of Pamela to offer to look after me. I’m worried I’m going to get fish with the eye still in for tea and I’ll have to pretend to like it just to be no bother. On the TV there is a programme where a woman is explaining to two little boys how bogeys are made. She’s mixing together pastry and green food colouring and putting it in blobs on a baking tray.

In the kitchen, Pamela is telling Mum to get going now and to not worry about me. Mum is sniffing and sighing and saying something about not being sure that she can handle it all. Pamela is telling her she doesn’t have to go if she doesn’t want to and Mum is saying, no, no, she has to go. Then Mum tells Pamela a lie. I’m not listening to the TV at all when she says it. I hear it clearly. Mum says: “I have to go, I did not go home for my mother’s funeral and this is very bad, very bad, I must make up for it.” This isn’t true.

Mum’s mum, my
yia-yia
, who I never knew, she died over here in England when I was a baby, not in Crete. Mum has told me The Story. I know all about the funeral. Mum organised the whole thing. She even cooked this big dish of special wheat that you’re supposed to make – like a birthday cake except it’s for a dead person – and Mum never cooks anything like that unless she has to. The funeral sounded beautiful. I wish I could have been there.

The bogey woman on TV is demonstrating how germs get up your nose by kicking balls into a football goal while the two boys try to stop them. Mum comes into the room now and pretends she hasn’t been crying. She gives me a big squeeze that stops me breathing for a moment and tells me I must be good. She uses her telling-off voice so it feels like I’ve already been bad when I haven’t even had the chance yet.

In the hallway, Pamela opens the front door for Mum and we both wave her off in a taxi.

“So,” says Pamela, once the taxi has gone. “Let’s have some fun, shall we?”

Staying at Pamela’s is great. She cooks lasagne and fish and chips (no eye in the fish) and shepherd’s pie all from ingredients, not from a packet, and she doesn’t complain at all when I watch hours and hours of television. Ernie her Westie decides he really likes me so he sleeps on the end of my bed at night. When we pop back to my house each day to feed Kojak, I feel very guilty for making friends with a dog.

Pamela tucks me in at night and tells me I mustn’t worry about Mum. Until she talks about not being worried, I had forgotten I should be worried. I guess Mum will find it hard with Auntie Aphrodite being even grumpier than usual, so I think about not worrying about that. But then I remember something I am really worried about – that Granbabas will give his farm to Mum. When Chick’s Gran died, her old house got left to Mrs Lacey. Chick’s mum sold the house, that’s how come Chick got new ice skates, but Mum won’t do that with Granbabas’s farm. She’ll want us to go and live there because she loves Crete so much. When she was growing up, all Mum ever wanted to be was a melon farmer. I would hate it there. I’d have to leave Chick, I wouldn’t understand the TV because I can’t speak Greek, and I don’t think they ever have snow.

While Mum is away, it snows in London. Not enough to stop us going to school, but enough to build a snowman in Pamela’s back garden. When we’ve used up all of her snow we climb over the fence into our garden and build another snowman.

“Someone to guard your garden and keep it safe,” says Pamela. I like that. I never want it to melt.

When Mum gets back she rushes into Pamela’s living room where I am watching TV, picks me up and spins me around until I’m dizzy.

Pamela follows her in and asks her how it was.

“Cold,” says Mum, and Pamela nods like this explains everything.

The ‘cold’ makes me hopeful. “Did you have snow too?” I ask.

“No, no snow,” says Mum. “Not yet.” The ‘yet’ also makes me hopeful.

Mum doesn’t mention moving to the farm when we get home. I don’t bring it up in case it’s just something she’s forgotten and I remind her by talking about it. Mum has brought me back a present from Crete – a brown leather satchel with red and green flowers. The bits of the satchel with flowers painted on are sunken into the leather. When you run your fingertips over these dips and grooves, it feels nice. I really like the satchel but when I take it to school a couple of the girls say it’s stupid and cheap and looks like it came from a market. So after that I hang it on the back of my bedroom door and tell Mum I don’t want to take it to school any more in case I spoil it.

After two weeks of not mentioning the farm, I’m bursting to know what is going on so I cross my fingers behind my back for good luck and ask, “Are we going to have to move to the farm?”

Mum isn’t looking at me. She is concentrating on stirring beans and putting toast in the toaster at the same time.

“What farm?”

“The melon farm. Now that you own it, are we going to have to move there?”

“I don’t own any farm.” The toast pops up and makes me jump. “Auntie Aphrodite is owning the farm.”

“Why?”

“Eggs, fridge, please.”

I do as I’m told and get two eggs out from the under the flip-up bit in the fridge door. Without thinking I pass them straight to her and she hisses at me to put them on the worktop. With all the questions, I forgot. It’s very, very bad luck to pass eggs straight to someone. Mum waits a few seconds, then picks up the eggs and cracks them into a frying pan.

“Why?” I try asking again. “Why does Auntie Aphrodite own the farm?”

“Because Granbabas say it so, that is why.”

Mum is swearing at the beans for sticking to the pan.

“Why isn’t it you who gets the farm?”

“Because it just isn’t, okay, Melon? Now, you are washing hands and sitting up at table.”

We eat tea without saying much. Mum stabs at the beans like she’s still angry with them for burning. I breathe a sigh of relief. Finding out that the farm belongs to Auntie Aphrodite is the best news. The beans taste good.

By the end of the meal, Mum has calmed down enough for me to ask another question.

“Why did you tell Pamela that you got into trouble for not going to Crete for your mum’s funeral when it all happened here?”

Mum looks at me like she did when we were packing my case – the ‘doing the sums’ face.

“Because,” she picks toast crumbs off the table with the end of her thumb, “because sometimes it is the kind thing to say a lie rather than to tell the truth.”

“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

“Okay?” says Mum.

Then she lets me off doing the washing-up.

In the early morning, London’s streets are strangely subdued. Chaos has been and gone. Stop for a moment in one of the city’s squares and you will hear murmurs of the night before, of the years before, of centuries ago. But London isn’t a place for looking backwards. History is only a promise that anything could happen in the future. In this place of possibilities, Mama and Maria made their new home.

They began by lodging with Auntie Eleni, Mama’s sister who had left Crete ten years before with a small suitcase and a big dream. Eleni was a robust woman with a big-hearted spirit, a woman whose hands were surprisingly soft considering she spent all her time dealing with the dampness of other people’s laundry. With her husband Vassilis, she owned the launderette on the Kentish Town Road. Though her welcome was generous, space in Eleni’s house near the train station was not. So Mama understood that as soon as Maria’s baby arrived, they would need to move on.

Germination took on a whole new meaning for fifteen-year-old Maria as she started this new life away from the gullied melon patch. She rested her hands on her taut, expanding belly, feeling the warmth within, encouraging her baby to grow.

In the fluorescent light of the delivery room, hair glued to the red of her cheeks, Maria gave birth to a baby girl with frantic limbs – and the final slivers of her childhood slipped away.

Nothing that had happened before that day had really meant anything. Or rather, everything that had happened before that day had only been leading up to this. From now on, Maria decided, she would be like Babas – she would avoid the bumps in the road. And she would make sure only the strongest memories would survive.

Maria examined the creased, swollen features of the baby squirming in her arms, a mystery ready to solve, and no other name in the world seemed right. The round hopefulness of the fruits that blossomed back home and the bold-eyed girl before her were the same thing.

And that was how Melon got her name.

Mama, Maria and Melon took their few belongings and rented a flat above the Taj Mahal Tandoori House, a few doors down from the Papadakis Washateria. The scent of chilli, cumin, coriander and fenugreek drifted from the kitchen below, infiltrated their bedrooms and seduced their taste-buds.

Maria took the double room and made Melon’s first crib from the bottom drawer of a cabinet. Mama took the single room, where she did nothing more to make her mark than hang a crucifix above her bed. The living room and kitchen were all one, furnished with a well-loved three-piece suite, the fabric of the arms worn through.

The rent did not pay itself, so while Maria’s days were spent deciphering a new alphabet at a school for English, her evenings were spent taking orders at the Mount Olympus restaurant across the street. The owner, a Londoner, was so pleased to hire an authentic Greek waitress that he decided to believe Maria’s story that she was twenty-one years old and eligible for a decent wage.

Mama looked after Melon day and night. God had granted Mama just one opportunity to raise a child, but here was another gift from heaven. While Melon napped, Mama steamed through ironing work, sourced by her sister, and in the evening she sang Cretan lullabies until her granddaughter’s nasal breaths became slow, slow whispers in the dark.

But Mama still missed home. She missed the patchwork quilt of flat, dry earth that spread out around their farm. She missed Maria’s Babas, her darling Manolis.

She wrote letters describing her anxiety as they had boarded the aeroplane at Hania, the strange, cold air when they landed. She told Manolis of Eleni’s achievements –
my sister, a thriving businesswoman!

And she tried to explain.

At first she could not find the words but, driven by the desperate feelings that possessed her at night, the sentences came.
We are two bricks that belong side by side, strong, building the walls of our family. I will come back to you, if you need me like I need you. I love you.
Your devoted Chrysoula.

Babas never replied. But Babas’s interfering sister Aphrodite did.
You should have thought of all this
, read Aphrodite’s scrawl,
before you deserted your husband
.

Maria, meanwhile, embraced all that London offered, good and bad – the bawdy banter of car horns, the tinny basslines of other people’s music, the way rain travelled down a window pane. She rode with Melon on red double-decker buses, paying no attention to numbers or destinations, each journey unveiling a new part of the city, a new crop of gothic buildings with sooty faces, a new green space hidden in the maze of roads. When Maria heard Greek words being spoken onboard the bus, above the fast talk of the English teenagers, she would immediately introduce herself.

This was how she came to meet Anastasios ‘Tassos’ Georgakis from Agios Nikolaos in Crete. Their lives had begun on the same small island only to converge hundreds of miles away. He was a lean, older gentleman with slender wrists and inviting eyes, who wore an insubstantial tweed jacket whatever the weather. Tassos had come to the UK as a student many years ago and now worked for the Greek embassy. He said his work consisted solely of helping tourists replace lost passports, but Maria suspected there was more to it than that. She invited him to the flat for
biskota amigdalou
and a pot of English tea – and to meet her mama.

They were immediate friends – Mama and Tassos. They watched television together in the evenings, with Tassos translating. And when Maria came home from the restaurant at night she would hear their laughter in the living room, the merry click-clack of their Greek tongues.

Maria turned her attention to Melon who was growing strong and broad, a sign of Babas’s Fourakis blood staking its claim above the genes of Christos Drakakis. Maria did not want her daughter seeking out conversation on the top decks of buses, so she found a playgroup for Melon, somewhere for her to pick up her accentless English.

But while Maria focused on her thriving daughter, she neglected to see how Tassos had only gone so far in healing Mama’s homesickness. When land is left uncared for, weeds grow. When a sense of longing goes unanswered, an illness takes over.

“I have found a lump, in my breast.”

Mama said the fated words one dark afternoon in November and Maria could not speak. How could she have stayed blind to the pain in Mama’s heart? Why hadn’t she stopped? Why hadn’t she listened?

“You musn’t be sad,” said Mama, who had already resigned herself to her destiny. “I knew this would happen when I married your father and took on his name – all the Fourakis family die young.”

I have stolen Chick’s credit card. She owes me. My mum is dead. Hers is still alive.

Although you would think it was the other way around. Chick is the one acting like her arm has been chopped off. Yesterday I cracked a joke, a really funny one, about our maths teacher Miss Boniface and that weird thing she does with her neck and Chick just looked at me like I had murdered her hamsters. I’ve since thought about murdering Chick’s hamsters, but I do want her to speak to me again, not hate me forever.