Red Ink (20 page)

“What’s in the box?” I go again. My voice has gone reedy, high-pitched.

Paul takes a business-like breath, puts on a business-like face. “I think you can go now, thank you, Susan.” His smile is strained.

“Right, well, I’ll see you next week, Melon,” goes Susan.

“Okay,” I go. My voice is shaking and my hands are joining in. I have no idea why.

“I’ll let myself out,” she says, crabbing sideways out of the room.

“Yes, yes, thank you.” Paul does not go with her to the front door. How can this bag be more important than impressing the social worker?

We hear the front door open, then close. I still have a hand on the bag. We both stand there, not moving at all. The house is so quiet. Just the rumble of cars and lorries passing on the main road.

“What’s in the box?” I ask again. I feel water dripping down off my chin and it takes me a few seconds to realise that it is tears. Tears are streaming down my face.

Paul looks at me, his face in pain. I look back hopefully, willing him to say something, anything other than the answer I know he’s going to give me.

“Your mother, Melon,” he says, blankly, calmly, not letting himself cry. “Your mother’s ashes.”

My chest heaves. This awful sound chugs out of my throat.

“I’d been keeping the box at my mum’s place until I felt you were ready to have it here but . . .” He stops. He can’t talk.

My chest heaves again, as if my body is trying to get rid of something, to bring something up. I look at the box, the carving of the dove.
Agapoula mou, peristeraki mou. My little love, my little dove.

“Oh, God,” I wail.

A strange, dark monster breaks free of its cage in my ribs and comes hurtling out of my throat. I roar. I cry as if I will never stop.

The sky is an unreal blue. Murky. Inky. It clashes with the fat, orange vapour trails from the aeroplanes – jagged lines disappearing downwards behind the curve of the earth. The aeroplanes themselves are insect-small and motionless. They’re just hanging there, ready to be squashed between giant fingers.

“You scared of flying?” Paul doesn’t take his eyes off the road when he talks. He drives slowly, carefully, like a nice, middle-aged lady.

“No. I like it. It’s fun. You?”

“Doesn’t bother me,” he goes.

A car slices in front of us, too close, and disappears down the slip road. Paul doesn’t swear or shout like Mum would have done. He slows down as if he’s been given a warning. I eye the speedo. Fifty-five mph. You can go seventy mph on a motorway, faster if there are no police around – even I know that and I don’t drive.

“Actually, I am scared of flying,” Paul says. His hands are clutching the top of the steering wheel too tight. His arm muscles are tensing with the strain of it. “I’m scared, but in a healthy way.” He pauses to check over his shoulder.

Are we going to dare to break out into the middle lane?

“When I get on a plane, I’m thinking, ‘Oh well, we might crash, that’s that.’ I just accept it.”

No. We stay dribbling down the slow lane.

“That way, when we land and I’m still alive, it’s a bonus. It’s an especially good feeling.” Paul is smiling. “I embrace death!” he goes with a big flourish. He takes one hand off the wheel and waves it about, quickly clamping it back in position when a lorry zooms past, gusting us towards the hard shoulder.

We both laugh. Not real laughing, just the nervous sort. It’s still not okay to laugh properly.

Embrace death.

I haven’t embraced death. These last few months, it’s been embracing me. It’s had its arms tightly around my throat. It pulled me down, under the surface. It could have won, it could have drowned me, but something made me swim upwards for a gasp of air. Maybe it was the promise of this trip. But since when did I ever look forward to going to Crete?

Paul peels his eyes away from the road to look at the dashboard clock. “Shall we stop for a toilet break?”

“Aren’t we nearly there, though?”

“Ah, yes. But we’ve got some time to kill.”

He’s right, we left stupid-early. Everything has been planned to the minute and then an hour or so has been added on in case of a traffic jam, or a flash flood, or the outbreak of the next plague.

“You never know what it’s going to be like at the airport,” he goes, all serious. “Might be queues round the block and then we’d wish we’d stopped for a wee.”

“Okay,” I go. “Fine. Whatever you think.”

He starts slowing down and indicating even though the services are a mile away. We trundle along ticking and flashing. We pull into the Heston services.

“What shall we do with Mum?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer. He is concentrating on trying to find a parking space.

“We can’t leave her in the car, can we?” I go on. “Someone might steal her.”

“No.”

Paul is reversing slowly, very slowly, into a parking space.

“So?” I push.

“How close am I to the car next to you?”

“You’re fine.”

“You can get out okay? You can open your door?”

“Yes!”

“We’ll put her in the boot.”

“No,” I go. “That’s not right.”

I get out of the car and pull the lever that tips my seat forwards, so I can reach Mum. She’s in the wooden dove box, strapped in with a seatbelt, so she doesn’t fall and spill into the footwells. I sling my rucksack over my shoulder, lift up Mum and hold her close to my chest.

“Let’s go.”

I slam the car door. Paul locks up.

Amanda said seeing Mum’s box of ashes for the first time was ‘a catalyst’. I looked it up in the dictionary.

C
ATALYST:
A
SUBSTANCE THAT PRECIPITATES OR SPEEDS UP A CHEMICAL REACTION WITHOUT BEING PERMANENTLY CHANGED IN THE PROCESS.

I see what she means. Mum is still ash, like she always has been since the funeral, but now I am different.

A catalyst.

It makes me think of that chemistry experiment where you mix baking soda and vinegar and it makes the beaker bubble over. When I first saw the dove box, everything inside me came fizzing out. Amanda seemed pleased about this, which meant I was really angry with her for a while. I was still furious with her for being rude about The Story. There was a time when I thought I would never forgive her. But now I can see that all the crying and shouting was a good thing. At least it was honest.

Inside Heston service station everything is bright and plastic and colourful. The few people ambling about are tired and spongy and grey. You’d think that service stations would be happy places. Everyone there is off on a journey – the promise of something new. But they’re not happy places. They’re shiny on the surface, miserable underneath.

Me and Paul go our separate ways for the toilet.

“Meet you in the coffee shop,” goes Paul. He nods over to a counter where a tall, skinny boy in an apron is yawning his face off.

“Okay.”

“Whoever gets back first gets the coffee.” He grins over his shoulder. A challenge. Paul has been paying me an allowance out of the money that Mum left, so I have the cash to buy coffee if I have to. I’m bound to take longer though. I’ll make sure I do. The drinks are on Paul.

He disappears into the gents. I follow the sign for the ladies.

Paul is really looking forward to this trip to Crete – he’s about-to-burst, can’t-think-about-anything-else excited. He’s made an itinerary of all the things we must achieve while we’re there. Just reading the list is exhausting. Every day in the run-up to us leaving he’s been calling someone to sort something. I came home one day last month and he was on the phone to the airline, talking about taking Mum through airport security.

“It’s not a box of drugs, or explosives, I don’t want you thinking that . . .”

He got it sorted, but I told him it’s not customs he needs to be stressing about. If we’re going to scatter Mum’s ashes on the melon farm like she asked, he wants to be worried about getting past Auntie Aphrodite. Paul can’t get hold of Auntie Aphrodite. She hasn’t answered his letters.

When I get into the toilet cubicle, I’m not sure what to do with Mum. It seems wrong to put her on the floor, so I put her under one arm while I pull down my jeans and pants with the other hand. Then I sit with her on my lap while I pee. Mum wouldn’t have minded, she was never cringey about bodily functions.

When I wash my hands there’s room to put her box down by the tap. The mirrors over the sinks make me look even more tired than I am. They pick out every vein and blotch. My skin looks yellowy-green, my hair looks lank. I pull my curls back with a band that I have around my wrist. The hair reaches into a tiny ponytail now – just. I’m pleased that it’s growing back fast. It’s something familiar and reassuring from ‘before’. Chick is still off the radar. I have a ponytail but no best friend. No, that’s not true. I have Justine Burrell. We got through the GCSEs together.

I study my face now that my hair isn’t messing up the edges. I am different, more grown-up, more steely, as if my bones are made of stronger stuff. Is this what happens when you become an adult? Have the final slivers of my childhood slipped away?

Back outside, Paul is already sat down with the drinks. He has bought me a cup of coffee. I never used to like coffee. Paul started making it for me when I was really depressed because he didn’t know what to say and he seemed to need to do something. I drank it to make him feel like he was being useful, then I got a taste for it.

I sit down and Paul pushes a steaming mug towards me. I put Mum on the table. He stares at the box for a moment, then smiles, all affectionate.

“I’ve stopped counting the days, you know.” He sips his coffee and gets a milky top lip. I point at my own mouth and nod in his direction.

“What? Oh.” He wipes his face with the back of his hand. “Thanks.”

I sip my coffee. I have it black and strong, which Paul says makes me hard as nails.

“Counting what days?” I go.

“Since.”

We both watch an old man in a blue anorak scrape back a chair at the next table and sit down. He moves gradually, in stages, like he’s in pain.

“Me too,” I say. “I’ve stopped counting.”

“I used to be able to tell you to the day, to the hour, how long it was since it happened. But now . . .” Paul is smiling, nodding, pleased with this revelation about himself.

“It doesn’t matter any more.” I nod too.

“No, it’s not that exactly. It still matters, it’s just I’ve been thinking forwards now. I’ve been counting down the days till we get on that plane.”

“Yeah?”

Paul’s excitement makes me anxious. I want the trip to live up to his expectations, I do, but every time I’ve been to Crete it’s just been awkward and painful. I want him to understand this, but I can’t find the words to explain.

“We’ll finally be able to put her to rest, like she wanted,” Paul says.

“Suppose.”

A middle-aged woman comes away from the coffee counter and puts down two mugs on the table in front of the anoraked man.

“There you go, Dad,” she says.

She opens up the small handbag that she has strapped across her body and pulls out a packet of biscuits – cheap supermarket ones brought from home. She catches us watching. Paul raises a hand in a half wave, smiles to show that we don’t think bad of her for not buying the coffee shop’s expensive biscotti. The woman looks at Paul, then at me, then back at Paul. Then she shoots me this look of concern. A sort of silent,
are you okay?
I smile back, confused. Paul repeats his nod and wave, more reassuring this time, and the woman sits down opposite her dad.

Paul turns back to me, shaking his head a little. He rolls his eyes. I stare at him, thinking for a minute that he knew the woman. Then I see what that woman sees: a tired-looking teenage white girl and a thirty-something black man sitting alone together in a service station at 5 a.m. I go where her mind goes. And then I think, oh God, if we’re getting looks like that here in London, what will it be like in Crete, in the villages, where they’ve never even seen a black man? I look down into my coffee.

I should say something, warn Paul what it’s like on the island with the family – the way they used to treat me and Mum, the way they’ll treat him – but it’s hard to tell him things like that. He has this image of how it’s going to be and I feel bad for spoiling it. In a way, Paul is quite delicate. He doesn’t understand that it will seem weird to the family that we’re scattering ashes. To them, Mum doesn’t belong in Crete. To them, she shouldn’t have been cremated in the first place. It’s against their religion. Or maybe they would have approved – burn the witch.

I want to tell Paul that I feel weird about scattering Mum’s ashes too. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to do it. I think of Mum as more real now, more real than when she was alive, and I’m not sure I’m ready to let that go. I say things to the ashes that I could never have said to her when she was actually here, living and breathing. I tell her that I’m sorry for the red ink, for hating her, for not listening to The Story. I tell her I’m sorry for not being at home when the police came to tell me she was dead. Mum used to say that people’s spirits carry on doing things after their body has gone. She would have gone home after the accident to tell me what had happened and I wasn’t there. I have a lot to make up for.

Paul is toying with a sachet of sugar, spinning it around on the table top.

“It’s 133 days,” I go.

“What is?” asks Paul, not looking at me.

“Since Mum died.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says quietly.

He swigs his coffee again, but this time I don’t tell him about the milk moustache.

We’re at the villa and I’m starving so I eat the Coco Pops. Paul has brought a Variety Pack with him in his suitcase. He thinks we’ve come to a Third World country where they’ve never heard of a cornflake.

When Nikos, the villa owner, showed us around, he pointed out a welcome basket of food on the kitchen table.

“To say ‘hello to Crete’ and to get you starting.”

I gave Paul a look to say,
see, they eat food here too
.