Red Ink by Julie Mayhew Read Free Book Online Page A

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