Half My Life

By Diana Noonan

Katy struggles with anxiety and compulsive behaviour disorders. She self-harms and is seeing a counsellor. When she starts dating it only increases her anxieties. Then her parents hear her Yiayia (grandmother) is ill in Greece and maybe dying. The family decide to visit. Reluctant at first Katy eventually decides to embrace the trip as a way to learn about her Greek family but the visit uncovers some dark family secrets. A novel that explores the fragility of families, and the damage that can be wrought when unresolved issues of one generation shape the lives of the next. Also a story about hope, and the ability of families to survive and heal damaged relationships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: OneTree House Publishers
• Release date: Oct 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780995117112

Book preview

Half_My_Life.jpg

Για τους Φίλους του Λεονιδιο - με ευχαριστίες

For Leonidion friends - with thanks

First published by OneTree House Ltd, New Zealand

Text © Diana Noonan, 2020

978-0-9951171-1-2

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Cover design: dahlDESIGN

Illustration: © Keith Olsen

Chapter 1

"He wants to go back to Greece?" I was so astonished I could barely speak.

My mother nodded. He wants to see her. He says … he says … She struggled for the words.

"But why right now? This is crazy. He’s never written to her; never talked about her. Most people don’t even know I have a Greek grandmother!"

We were in the kitchen. I was making a sandwich for my school lunch while my mother rattled the breakfast dishes in the sink and refused to meet my eyes.

He leaves Greece when he’s seventeen and he never goes back. I flung open the door of the fridge and snatched a jar of mayo from the top shelf. "He doesn’t talk about his family, ever, and now we all have to drop everything and go – just like that! I thumped the jar hard onto the bench. Well, I’m not going, all right!"

Stop bashing things around, Katie!

He won’t even tell me enough about Greece to help with a geography assignment!

It’s just for three weeks. Just for the holidays.

Er – no! It’s the holidays plus five days, and one of those days happens to be Luke’s … look, you know I want to go to Greece. I’ve always wanted to meet Yiayia, but we could go any time.

My mother slumped over the steaming water, her head drooping, her forearms resting heavily on the edge of the chipped enamel sink. Defeated. I hated myself for doing that to her. And I hated it most because he was to blame. My father was always the reason for the arguments in our house.

Mum?

"I know it means missing Luke’s formal, Katie. Do you really think I don’t know that? Have you any idea how hard this is for me?"

But I already have my dress, my hair appointment. Luke has the tickets. Everything.

Some things are more important than … Look, you’re 16. I don’t expect you to understand. I just want you to …

Please, I begged silently, please don’t let her say trust me. Please don’t let’s do the whole intimacy thing or I’ll puke right over my sandwich.

My arms were beginning to tingle. I had the overwhelming desire to reach beneath my beanie and tug strand after strand of hair from my scalp. All that was stopping me was the thought of turning up for my appointment at Hair Raid on the afternoon of the formal and having the stylist ask me why I had a bald patch.

As if sensing my urge, my mother pulled her hands from the water and spun round to stand guard. But this time she couldn’t say: Don’t do that, Katie; think about the formal, because there wasn’t going to be a formal. No hair appointment, no dress, no after-party … just a big fat nothing.

I’ve arranged for urgent passports, she said, detergent bubbles shimmering on her fingers. I’ll meet you outside school this afternoon and we’ll go and get our photos taken.

Tell me this isn’t happening.

Katie …

I’m not saying I won’t go to Greece, I said, trying to sound calm. I will go. I’ve always wanted to go. But not until after the formal.

Outside the window, the twigs of a birch tree scratched against the glass, a fraying bird’s nest rocking in its winter branches. Mum and Dad’s bedroom above our shop was right next to mine. I’d heard them the night before, talking, at times arguing. They were still going at midnight when I must have fallen asleep. There was something Mum wasn’t telling me.

I’ll be waiting for you outside school. At three-fifteen. Sharp. Try not to be late.

What about my wrist corsage? Luke’s ordered it.

Coffee mugs clattered into the water. She was hiding behind the dishes again. The mayo forgotten, I reached for a wrap and bound my sandwich together before the bean sprouts and tomato had a chance to escape.

I have netball until 4:30.

That doesn’t give us enough time. You’ll have to miss the practice.

I can’t! Trials are on Saturday.

"You won’t be here on Saturday!"

I’m sorry, Mum, but I’m not going. Not until after the formal.

Katie!

She may have been desperate but I had to make that netball practice and I was going to the formal.

I stuffed the sandwich into my bag and dashed down- stairs into the shop. Through the back-to-front writing on the window that told Newtown, Wellington, New Zealand we were the Papahadjis Greek Fish and Chip shop, I saw the yellow streak of the downtown bus fly past. The lock on the front door was as jammed as ever but I didn’t panic – there was always a queue at the bus stop. The delay only meant I wouldn’t get a seat.

The lock finally flew open and I was outside, standing in the entranceway, ready to shut the door when Mum appeared at the top of the stairs.

Katie?

The bus is here! I shouted, knowing I had to leave before she said I absolutely had to meet her after school. I have to go.

Katie, wait!

"The bus is here, Mum!"

I left the door open and started running. Only a handful of people were left in the queue.

Katie! Come back!

I glanced behind me. Mum was on the street. She had on the long, blue, striped butcher’s apron she always wore in the shop. In the bright morning light her eyes glistened too much.

I’ll text you at lunch time, I shouted. The bus is going without me.

"Katie, stop! She trotted towards me along the footpath, her blue sheepskin slippers scuffing the asphalt. Katie, it’s Grandma-in-Greece, it’s Yiayia. She’s … dying.

I stopped right where I was in the middle of the footpath with Coke cans and broken glass and cigarette packets lying in the gutter. Mum was staring at me, trying not to cry, and it seemed the whole of Newtown was suddenly frozen like a snatch of film on hold. I couldn’t hear the cars and the buses, the whining motorbikes, the hospital ventilation system that roars day and night across the road from our upstairs flat. I couldn’t hear the engine of the rubbish truck across the road or smell the traffic fumes that clogged the city air. Further up the street, Mrs Euoine from the fruit shop stood like a statue on the pavement, a box of bananas balanced on her hip.

"What?"

Mum’s words echoed in the empty space of my wondering if what I’d heard her say was true. My grandmother in Greece was dying. But that couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be.

I should have run back. If I’d been someone else and Mum had been someone else’s mother, I would have run back and hugged her. Together we would have waited at home for my father to come back from the fish market; made plans, decided when to leave. But that wasn’t the way we were, Mum and Dad and I. Even stringing our names together in the same sentence was enough to make me feel uncomfortable. We were a mess. ‘A dysfunctional family,’ as Mike-the-psych, who I went to see on Thursdays at 4:30, liked to remind me.

So I didn’t run back. I stood there with my mouth open until Sibs Jenson from my netball team started the film rolling by calling to me that the bus was leaving and the driver said he wouldn’t wait.

I ran the few metres to the stop, clambered aboard with my school pass held between my teeth, and worked my way to the back of the bus so I could see Mum out the window. She was gazing into nowhere with both hands on her cheeks like a stunned refugee from a war-blitzed village.

Sibs saw her, too.

What’s wrong with your mum? she asked.

I made my mouth open and shut like a puppet’s, and though I couldn’t hear myself speak, I knew the words came out because Sibs nodded, awkwardly, and pressed her lips together in concern.

I won’t be at practice tonight, I told her. We have to go to Greece. We have to go in a hurry because my grandmother’s dying.

Sitting in geography, first period, I didn’t hear a lot of what was being said. The class was sketching from a map, pencilling in the thin band of mountain ranges that run the length of the South Island.

I was trying to picture Yiayia’s face. In all my 16 years I’ve never seen a photo of her. I thought about the things she said in her letters to Mum and me, and I made her face from words. I drew in my mind an old woman, short and thickset like my father. I thought about Mrs Katsaros and the other old Greek women who were my father’s customers, and I gave to the picture deep creases in the swarthy skin of her face. I gave her dark clothing, too, and a black headscarf, because Grandpa Papahadjis is dead and Mrs Katsaros wears a black scarf because her husband is dead.

Then, holding the picture in my mind like a delicate ornament that might break if it were dropped, I pushed my seat back and went to get the ancient atlas Mr Lyebrow keeps on his desk.

You have the maps you need on your laptop, Kate, he said, but I wanted something solid to touch, a piece of my grandmother I could hold; and perhaps he knew there was something wrong because when I reached for the atlas, he didn’t stop me.

I took the book back to my desk and found Greece near the back. Though I knew it was useless to look for Leonosos because it was too small to be on that sort of map, I ran my finger around the jagged coastline of the Adriatic. My eyes felt hot. They stung. I closed them and said softly to the picture in my mind, Wait, Yiayia. Please don’t die. We’re coming. Please wait for us.

Mr Lyebrow? Mr Lyebrow?

In the desk next to mine, Angie Hutane waved her hand in the air. Mr Lyebrow, there’s something wrong with Katie Papahadjis.

Everyone was looking at me. I tried to wipe away my tears with the back of my sleeve but it didn’t work. They kept coming, and Mr Lyebrow asked if I wanted to go the counsellor. I shook my head and muttered, Sickbay and for the rest of the morning I lay there by myself, staring at the atlas I’d taken from class while I tugged strands of hair from my scalp and tried to figure out why I felt so angry as well as sad, and what I was going to tell Luke about the formal.

I’ve always known I had two grandmothers. Before she died five years ago, Nana Potter, Mum’s mother, lived not far from Wellington. Her home was a tiny cottage with roses in the front garden and, out the back, silver beet and carrots and two gooseberry bushes growing beside a tin fence. Mum and I would go on the train to visit her. She would let me wind her cuckoo clock and change the slim bronze hands to the hour so that dancing Austrian figures would spin in and out of their tiny wooden chalet and twirl in time to the music. There was a budgie, too, blue and white, with a chipped yellow beak, that could recite its name and address.

Everything at my Nana Potter’s was so comfortable, so familiar, that I would leave her house wrapped in her love for me; in the smell of her makeup and perfume, and believe that my Grandma-in-Greece must love me like that, too, and want to have me close. When I was very little, before I understood that huge oceans divide the world, and that my day had already disappeared when Yiayia’s was just beginning, I would ask my mother when we were going on the train to visit my ‘Grandma-in-Greece’. I never asked my father. Not once. Even then, I knew he didn’t want to talk about her.

He never wrote to her. It was always Mum who did that – and me. I started writing to Yiayia when I was five, and though half the time it was only a scribble and a drawing, she said she loved my letters. She said she kept them in a special box by her bed.

She wrote in Greek of course, in strange letters that looked more like the symbols I used in algebra than anything from an alphabet. I always knew Dad didn’t like translating for us – that Mum was nervous as she handed him the grey sheets of paper. His shoulders would stiffen and the muscles in his face tighten as he held Yiayia’s letters. The tension was like something tangible that filled the room – a dark black cloud that tried to hide her loving words.

When I was little, the tension would sometimes turn to argument. One night, while he was reading a letter, my father flew into a rage. He screwed the grey sheets into a ball and threw the paper onto the floor. It was the first time I had heard my mother shout at him and I ran and hid under the table in the kitchen while they hurled words about the room.

What do you expect? my mother shouted. Of course she wants to see you.

She should have thought of that when I was 17. She wants me when it suits her!

You can’t hold a grudge forever, George. You’re a man now, not a boy!

"Grudge? Grudge? It’s much more than a grudge I hold. Here – these letters aren’t for me. If she wants to write, she writes to you – you read them for yourself!"

There was a lot more arguing and then my father began shouting in another language. I had never heard him speak in Greek before.

But he did read to us again. My father is a very private person and my mother said that if he refused to translate Grandma’s letters, she would give them to old Mr Drakos who comes on Friday nights to eat his fried salt cod and garlic sauce out the back of the shop. She would ask him to translate for us.

All morning in the sickbay, I thought about my father: his remoteness, the bitterness that hung over him – over us all – like an oppressive, grey shadow, and of how my mother ducked and dived and contorted herself like an acrobat as she tried to hide it from me. I wished I knew why he was so angry with my yiayia, and why he would never speak of her or the place where he grew up. I would never have the courage to ask him but my secret hope was that now we were going to Greece, the answer might be there – waiting for me in my grandmother’s village.

Cold rain began falling on the sickbay skylight above my head, and I hugged the atlas close to me as if it was a doll. I wished I could talk about everything with Mike-the-psych but my next appointment wasn’t until Thursday. Instead, I tried to imagine his face which remained, as it always did, frustratingly out of reach.

Chapter 2

It was six months since I’d started having appointments with Mike. Sometimes it felt as if nothing had changed in all that time. I still pulled my hair out. And I still did all the other weird stuff that almost no one knew about. But, very slowly, I had begun to see myself and my family from the outside in. At times it felt as if I was looking at a detailed painting of the three of us, and what I saw, I didn’t like.

Technically, Mike-the-psych wasn’t a psychologist; he was a ‘therapist’. That was what was written on the door of his office, a dark room in a villa surrounded by trees and shadows on the hills above Brooklyn. But I couldn’t find anything that rhymed with ‘therapist’ and my sad brain liked rhyme. Sometimes it liked it so much I was virtually immobilised until I’d found a word to rhyme with the last word I’d just said. So Mike-the-therapist became Mike-the-psych, and I knew he was my last chance. There was no one left who could help me because, by that time, I’d been through every kind of ‘health professional’ (as my mother discreetly called the shrinks she’d taken me to over the previous two years) there was.

Before Mike, there had been Lauren. She really was a psychologist. I saw her six times. On each visit she wore a different pair of high heels but always the same bright red lipstick, bits of which stuck to her perfect teeth. I was pretty certain her matching red-rimmed glasses were fake. She liked to take them on and off and hold the tip of one wing between her teeth when she thought we were getting somewhere. Lauren and I were never getting anywhere. We were going nowhere fast, even when she brought out her whiteboard and drew graphs and talked about chemicals in ‘the brain’.

There were only two good things about Lauren: her hipster haircut – a chunky honey-blonde wedge that ballooned at the back and chipped in to hug her slim white neck – and her office which, unlike Mike’s with its tiny coal fire, was warm. Lauren was fond of saying: You’re not listening, Kate. I can tell. But I was listening – most of the time, anyway. If I looked at her blankly it was because I honestly didn’t have a clue what she was on about. In the end, she had to go.

Before Lauren there was our doctor, Doctor Hedgman (I’ve known you since you were a baby, Kate. Why didn’t you come to me sooner?). Yeah, right. Like I was really going to rock up and say: Hey, Doctor Hedgman, I pull my hair out and I just spent the afternoon in my room doing some stuff that is so seriously weird you wouldn’t believe me even if I told you – which I never will. When Mum said she wasn’t having her teenage daughter taking the kind of pills he wanted to prescribe for me, Doctor Hedgman suggested I go to Mrs Lambert, our school counsellor. (She was so out of her depth, I told Mike, months later, I could actually see her drowning.)

Somewhere between Lauren, Doctor Hedgman, Mrs Lambert, and Mike, there was Vihaan Rangupta (Call me Vi) who was the first person I’d ever met who seemed to have some idea of the mental stuff that went on in my head. The only reason I told him about it (and then, only a bit), was that Mum had agreed not to come into the appointment. But Vihaan (I couldn’t make myself call him ‘Vi’) said he couldn’t see me regularly because he was a hospital shrink and not a therapist. He knew someone who could, though, and that was Mike. Mike Rossin. Mike-the-psych.

Mike really was my last chance. I told him that, but not on my first visit. At that first appointment I sat bolt upright on his curvy, cracked leather armchair which badly needed reupholstering, and watched him poke, one painful letter at a time, at the screen of the iPad balanced on his knees. And from then on in, the session had gone more or less like a very tedious play.

Katie. Or is it Kate? he’d asked. Which do you prefer?

Kate.

Poke, poke.

And you’re 15?

Sixteen. (Great start, I thought, he doesn’t even know my age.)

Brothers or sisters?

No, just me. I figure my parents found one mistake enough.

Mike gave the screen a final, agonising poke, and pointed to the couch. That’s where you go. I sit behind you.

He shifted to a second, worn armchair while I stared at his pale-green, velvet sofa which was more like a very long couch with a headrest at one end and no armrest at the other. It was like something from a shrink cartoon and if he hadn’t been my very last chance, I would probably have bolted.

I’d prefer to stay where I am. I said it primly; formally; trying to make it sound as if I’d considered my decision very seriously.

No, you go on the couch, replied Mike. I sit behind you. That’s the way I work.

"That’s the way you work! I wanted to shout. What about me? I’m the patient, here. What about what I want?" I also wanted to add that, as my parents were paying a huge amount of money for me to be in his office, it was up to me to decide where I sat. But I didn’t say any of that because it would have somehow implied that A: my father was involved in the visit and B: my parents and I were in any way connected. Instead, I moved myself to the couch and sat there, stiff as a board.

Even though it was summer, it was freezing cold in Mike’s shadowy office because the sun couldn’t find its way in through the heavy, wine drapes that half covered the one narrow sash window in the room. When I told him I was cold, he suggested I use the rug on the end of the couch. Clearly, others had been cold before me because, as I pulled it over my legs, I noticed it was well worn.

How long am I here for? I asked.

Fifty minutes.

I looked at my watch. Fifteen of them had already disappeared. Which meant Mike had just 35 minutes to fix me. I waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t, I started thinking about Luke who I’d met for the first time the weekend before.

He’d been at the edge of the field all through my baseball match, taking photos nonstop, and when the game was finished and I was stuffing my gear into my bag, he’d come over to me.

Hope you didn’t mind me getting a few shots, he’d said. They’re for an art project I’m working on.

I stole a sideways glance at his camera with its long lens.

You’re okay, I said.

Do you play here every Saturday?

Uh-huh.

"I