Red Ink Read Free Page B

something.
    “Giving them easy ways out? No – this is not my job,” Mum would go, lecturing me, as if I had started the discussion, as if I cared. “No. I find ways for teenagers to make the sensible decisions.”
    “What if I said, fuck it, I’m going to keep selling drugs on the estate, it keeps me in nice trainers,” I’d say back.
    “Well, what I am asking you is this: how else you make this ‘trainer money’? How else you do it and not go to jail?”
    “And what if I said, but this is simple.”
    “I would say, now is the time! Now! Now is the time to rewrite your history. You plan to do this all of your life?”
    “Yeah, why the fuck not, got a problem with that?”
    “Melon, do not say this f-word.”
    “That’s what it’s like on the streets, Mum.”
    And so it went on.
    Amanda waits for an answer, wearing her last successful piece of strategy like a pony rosette. I go back a couple of moves.
    “You think I should be crying.”
    “There are no ‘shoulds’, Melon, just ‘is’.”
    “Right.”
    “The idea of us getting together is so we can work through the issues that are troubling you at this moment in time.”
    “Right.”
    “So we only have half an hour today for an initial assessment, but I think I should perhaps book you in for some more regular sessions with me.”
    I want to run out the room.
    “Or one of our other therapists here?”
    I can’t look at her.
    “And you could try writing it all down. Your teachers tell me you’re a really bright girl.”
    I wonder if my teachers would have said that if Mum hadn’t died.
    “Putting it down on paper is one way of getting it out.” Amanda has slipped on her best Blue Peter voice. “The tears you talk about are just another way of releasing the grief.”
    I try to torture Amanda with a weighted silence. Then I say: “What would I write?”
    “Whatever you want.”
    There is that spark in Amanda’s eyes again. She is going to ask me what I feel like writing.
    “What do you feel like writing?”
    “Dunno. What would you write?”
    “That’s irrelevant. We all experience grief differently. This is about you and what you feel.”
    I roll my eyes, look at the carpet, grip the edge of my seat. I have an urge to hit Amanda in the face, hard, to stop all this stupid talk, to make her understand. How will writing some kind of school essay get rid of the brick lodged in my ribs? I concentrate on holding onto the chair, reining myself in, stopping it from all coming out. Amanda doesn’t get it. The something inside of me isn’t grief, isn’t loneliness, isn’t anything that Amanda can stick a label onto. I snap.
    “It’s all right for you dishing out the advice.” The voice I’m using doesn’t sound like mine. It’s vicious. “You’re not the one with the dead mum, are you?”
    I wait for Amanda to pounce on my words, but she is still and calm. She closes her eyes, blinking away what I just said. She’s not going to retaliate. She smiles a painful smile.
    “No,” she says, rising above it all. “You’re right.”
    Amanda has a dead mum.
    Amanda has a dead mum.
    She looks beaten, soft at the edges, like another human being all of a sudden. My grip on the chair loosens. I shrink back. I feel something like guilt creeping up inside. I want to say sorry but the word won’t come out.
    “Right,” I say, instead. I start nodding. “I’ll do that. I’ll write it down.”

THE STORY
1
    On an island far, far from here, where the sea is woven from strings of sapphire blue and where the sunshine throbs like a heartbeat, there once was a farm.
    At first glance it was like any other smallholding on the Akrotiri peninsula. There was a tiny, stone cottage, its uneven walls washed white. There was a tidy yard with a wire fence where a goat held court to an army of chickens. And beyond the cistus bushes that oozed their lemon scent into the breezy air were endless slopes of turned, brown earth – soil given over to the growing of