Red Ink (6 page)

I’d quite like to take the small trays home with me. The air hostesses probably just throw them out. You never see air hostesses washing-up. Some of the trays are blue and some are yellow and their edges are smooth and shiny. I’m not sure what I’d use mine for, but I’d find something. They’re just nice to have really. I ask Mum if I can keep the little trays and she just says, “You are not eating your mashed potato, no? Melon?”

The hot stuff is too much food for me and too little for Mum. So when I’m halfway done we take my big, blue tray with the foil and swap it with Mum’s. That way it looks like I’ve been good and eaten all mine, and Mum gets seconds. You shouldn’t have seconds if you’re fat but Mum is skinny so it’s okay.

“If she turn to the side, she disappear,” is what Auntie Aphrodite says. She says it really grumpily, so it must be a bad thing to disappear. Auntie Aphrodite has boobies that finish where her belt starts and arms like marshmallows. She is named after the goddess of love and the most beautiful woman ever. Mum says this is
very
funny.

“Flowers they are growing wherever she is walking, birds they are flocking wherever she is flying!” Mum says before doing a harrumph noise and laughing a lot. I have never seen Auntie Aphrodite’s flowers or her birds, but I would like to.

When we get to Crete, Auntie Aphrodite will make all the food and Mum won’t eat much of it, probably because she’s so full from all that aeroplane dinner.

We’ll have Toblerone for afters on the plane too. One of those big triangle ones in the boxes off the air hostess’s trolley. I always say how nice the pilot bears are on the top of the trolley but teddy bears are just daylight robbery if you buy them on a plane. So I get a pen with a jumbo jet lid instead, which is less money. I shouldn’t expect it to last long though, Mum says, and the air hostess hears her and gives her a moody look. Air hostesses are always cross so you can’t blame yourself for upsetting them. It’s a really glamorous job but Mum says the altitude gets to them.

Anyway, we have Toblerone, which is a special treat. If you think about it, after the yogurt and the jam sponge, it’s kind of like having a third afters. Auntie Aphrodite always makes an afters that sounds a bit like balaclava but it isn’t that word, because that’s one of them woolly hats with holes in. Balaclava, or whatever it is, is a bit like a greasy sausage roll without any sausage in. Mum feeds mine to the stray cats that come round the table legs and we pretend I ate it all up. Lying like that is okay because it’s so I don’t hurt Auntie Aphrodite’s feelings.

Auntie Aphrodite is my Granbabas’s sister, so really she’s my Great Auntie Aphrodite, except I don’t call her that. Although she’s the oldest, Granbabas still gets to boss her around because he’s in charge of the family. Mum loves Granbabas (except she just calls him Babas) but they don’t cuddle or hold hands, like I do with Mum, because they’re different. Mum and Granbabas say things in Greek to each other and I don’t know what any of it means, because they say it too fast and the words are all different. So probably they say lots of nice things instead of holding hands.

Mum says to Granbabas, “Speak English in front of Melon.”

Granbabas can speak English but with bits missing – like Mum, but worse.

“If she grown up here, she know what I say.”

Granbabas is kind of right but if I had lived in Crete all the time then I wouldn’t speak any English, except a little bit to tourists, which would be just as bad as not knowing how to do Greek. Svetlana in my class has a dad that’s from the Czech Republic and a mum from Barnet, so she can speak two languages at the same time. Mum could have talked in Greek to me in England but she didn’t. Also I don’t have a dad to do the English bit so that wouldn’t really have worked.

The reason I don’t have a dad is because when my mum came to England she already had me in her tummy, so she didn’t need to marry a man and get a baby. I was born when Mum was sixteen years old, which is a bit too young to be having babies, so we don’t talk about that. We’ll talk about it when I’m older. Auntie Aphrodite says it’s shameful that Mum had me so young and she shakes her head, even though it was eight and three-quarter years ago, which is ages. When Auntie Aphrodite says ‘shameful’ she looks at me. Mum puts her arm round me so I don’t feel shameful on my own. She gives me a squeeze and calls me her ‘
agapoula mou, peristeraki mou
’. This is Mum’s name for me. It means I’m a lovely dove.

When we’ve had the balaclava there is coffee, which I don’t have because it’s too much like mud, and then some
tsikoudia
, which is not for children. Granbabas makes
tsikoudia
in the bath and then puts it in lemonade bottles. I’m not sure how he turns the bath water into
tsikoudia
but it smells like petrol so I don’t have any. Mum has three of the little glasses straight after each other and it makes her eyes watery. I ask her if it’s crying and she says, “No, it’s just
tsikoudia
.” So, if you think about it, there’s no actual point to drinking it.

Tsikoudia
makes Auntie Aphrodite giggly and she gets Granbabas and my other auntie, Auntie Despina, and the other Greek ladies whose names I don’t know, to do Greek dancing. You have to stand in a circle and hold hands, but just fingers, and then move one way and then back the other. It doesn’t look that hard, not as difficult as country dancing, but one year Mum tried to join in and Auntie Aphrodite told her to sit down because she wasn’t doing it properly. If it had been me who wasn’t allowed to join in with my friends, Mum would have used her hands-on-hips voice and told the others not to be so mean. She doesn’t do it for herself though.

This time, when Auntie Aphrodite started Greek dancing we just watched, even though Mum practised lots this year in the kitchen in our house with Greek tapes she got from the market. When the ladies dance in a circle, it looks like they’re trying to screw themselves down into the ground. Auntie Aphrodite’s boobies wobble lots. You must not smile when you do Greek dancing because it’s a serious thing. I’m not sure why. It just is.

We only see Auntie Aphrodite and Granbabas for one night because they’re too busy to see us again. Even though Mum is Granbabas’s only daughter and I’m his only granddaughter and we have come all this way just for a week, just for them. Granbabas’s farm takes up all his time. I never knew melons could be so much trouble. Auntie Aphrodite has four children and eleven grandchildren that take up all her time and they live in Crete so that means they’re more important. The rest of the week, me and Mum will do beach things together. Really, that’s more fun than pretending to be happy.

Mum will try to do a big hug thing when we say goodbye and Granbabas will try to get out of it. Maybe he knows we’ll be back next year, so he’s not that upset about us going. Mum kisses Granbabas’s brown and wrinkly cheek and tries not to cry, but he’ll not kiss her back. Granbabas doesn’t ever look like he’ll cry, because that’s more of a girl thing. Auntie Aphrodite will just do a shooing thing with her hand and look embarrassed. I always wave properly.

On the beach I write a postcard to Chick with my new aeroplane pen, because I promised I would send her something and I am missing her like mad. The pen has four sliding buttons down the sides. One for blue ink, one for black, one for green and one for red. I choose red and start writing.

“No!” Mum screams. She snatches the postcard off me in a way that really, really scares me. “This is what you are wishing for? You are wishing that Kathleen is dead?” She is ever so cross.

The frightening moment steals my voice. My eyes are trying to cry but I make them stop because it’s silly to cry about a postcard. Mum is pointing a corner of the card at me. It has pictures of pretty Greek pots on it. They are called urns.

I manage to shake my head. No, I don’t want Chick to die. She is my best friend in the whole universe.

“Then you do not use the red ink,” Mum says. She strokes my hair flat which means, it’s okay now, she’s not angry any more. She gives me back the postcard, which has a little crease on it now.

“You write to someone in the red ink, you wish them dead,” Mum says.

So I click the red sliding button back up, even out the postcard’s crease with my thumb, and choose the blue ink instead.

When Chick’s dad comes upstairs, I get the urge to recite the planets to him.

M
ERCURY,
V
ENUS,
E
ARTH,
M
ARS,
J
UPITER,
S
ATURN,
U
RANUS,
N
EPTUNE

I’ve been up in Chick’s bedroom on my own for the last hour; I need to speak something out loud. I’ve learnt the planet order and don’t need to look at my book any more. I wonder if Mr Lacey would be interested. I’ve got no idea what he’s into. I don’t think he actually has any interests. There are some bowling balls on the shelf in his study downstairs but I’ve never heard Chick mention her dad actually using them. Who owns bowling balls but never goes bowling? Weirdos, that’s who. Mr Lacey revolves around Chick and Mrs Lacey and forgets about being a real person himself. Trying to talk to him about the universe would be pointless.

There is no one I can talk to about the universe.

Mr Lacey is peeping around Chick’s bedroom door. His hair is thin on top with blond candy floss around his ears. At this angle, with his head all separated from his body, he looks like a clown.

“Melon, could you come downstairs for a moment?” This is Mr Lacey’s serious voice. I imagine him with a big, red nose and a flower that squirts water.

“Why?”

“There’s someone here who needs to speak to you.”

“The police?”

That was who it was the last time Mr Lacey did this, poked his head around the door and told me to go downstairs. The police were waiting to tell me about Mum.

“Oh, no, no, Melon, sorry, no, someone else, if you could just . . .” Mr Lacey wants to be hard-faced. He’s not even close.

“Right.” I carry on drawing circle planets with oval, dotted paths that lead nowhere, just back to where they started.

“Now, if you don’t mind.”

I’m expecting the men in white coats. Mrs Lacey will have sent for them.

As I come down the stairs, I can hear Mrs Lacey’s serious news programme on the radio in the kitchen. Long words leak into the hall. Through the banisters I can see Chick sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework while her mum cooks. She must have heard me on the stairs but her head stays down. She’s pretending to be engrossed in her French text book.
Look up
, I think,
look up and see me
. No. She’s deaf, blind and dumb. The air is prickly with garlic.

Before all this, Chick would have done anything to avoid her mum and the serious radio stuff. Now, she can’t be in the same room as me. Even with the TV on, the silence between us is like a big, screaming black hole. It doesn’t feel as though something really awful has happened to me, it feels like I’ve done something terrible to Chick. I’ve made everything scary and miserable. I am a bad friend.

At the living room door, Mr Lacey does this ridiculous, twirly hand gesture to usher me in. He’s not saying who’s in there. I’m ready for the worst. Bring it on. Let it chew me up and turn me to dust.

It’s Poppy. Mum’s best friend from work.

She’s here to tell me that this whole week has been one big joke. Poppy will take me to where Mum is hiding and she’ll jump out and say ‘
boo!
’ We’ll have such a laugh, the three of us, about the fact Mum’s not really dead, about how the Laceys are such idiots. We’ll laugh until we can’t breathe.

When Poppy looks up, I know straightaway that this isn’t going to happen. She is wearing the mask – the sorry mask, the death mask.

Poppy clocks my haircut and her face crumples. “It looks nice, Melon, your hair,” she lies.

That’s the first thing she says. Not ‘hello’.

“You reckon?”

“Yeah, babe.”

Poppy is sitting in the armchair by the TV, peeling off a cagoule. She’s wearing a skirt made from curtains that goes all the way down to the floor. I know Poppy smokes weed because I heard her talking to Mum about it once.

Mum went to her, “I could never. No. Would be very bad for me. And I worry for M-E-L-O-N.” As if I couldn’t spell my own stupid name.

I run my hand up the back of my hair, ruffle it up. I still can’t get used to the way it feels, short tight curls that coil round your fingers.

“So what’s the big deal then?” I go. “About my hair, if it looks okay?”

Mr Lacey does an ‘excuse me’ cough.

“I don’t think it’s just about the hair, babe,” goes Poppy. She seems to know the whole story. How can that be? How come they’re talking to Poppy but not to me?

“No, no, that’s not the point,” Mr Lacey blusters, getting ready to make a speech. He’s shoving at his rolled-up sleeves – one of those baggy, pastel shirts Mrs Lacey buys for him because she thinks they make him look cool.

“Do you want to leave us alone for few minutes, Victor? Would you mind?”

Poppy is excellent at telling people to piss off in a nice way.

Mr Lacey waits for a moment, trying to prove that he’s still in charge and not being told what to do. Finally he shifts. Yeah, piss off, Mr Shitty Shirt.

“I’ll be in the kitchen with the girls,” he says.

What he means is, he’ll be in the kitchen stressing about leaving us alone with the contents of his living room.

Poppy does a flat smile.

“With the ‘girls’, eh?” she says quietly once Mr Lacey’s gone.

“Dickhead,” I say in agreement.

“You liking it here, yeah?”

“They hug a lot.”

“That’s nice, I suppose.”

“Each other, not me.”

“Oh.” Poppy grins, a mean grin that I like. “Probably for the best, eh, babe?”

Poppy doesn’t like her real name. Barbara is a granny name for ladies who pull tartan shopping trolleys and have too many cats. Poppy is older than Mum and is too past-it to have kids. Plus, she’s single. That’s why she pretends she’s still twenty-one, so she doesn’t have to face up to it all. The name Poppy doesn’t suit her either. It’s a little girl’s name, for someone with pigtails and a pinafore dress.