Mira in the Present Tense (12 page)

“It doesn't need salt!” Nana jokes, holding Dad's hand. “I wish you weren't in so much pain,” she sighs, hugging him to her as if he's still a little boy.

I think this is a strange thing to say because it's Nana who's really in pain.

Later, at night, I can't get to sleep. I listen to my family breathing. You can hear Dad's snoring and tiny noises creaking around the cottage. There are definitely birds fluttering around in the roof. But mostly I can hear people breathing. Then I feel my own breath, in and out, and the little space between the in breath and the out breath, just like Nana's taught me. After a while I start to feel quite sleepy. Then I hear Nana's sandals padding on the wooden floor and I listen to her trying desperately to catch her breath. She walks slowly to the sink and fills a glass with cold water so she can swallow her pills. Nana has to take so many pills now.

Her body is silhouetted against my bedroom doorway. I watch her leaning against the sink taking little sips of water. Suddenly, she drops the cup, as if it's burned her. Now she's clutching onto her shoulder like she's being attacked by a wild animal. For a moment I think she's going to fall over, but she just leans against the sink, holding herself up and making this horrible groaning noise.

I hear Dad call out. “Mum, what's the matter, what's going on?”

Nana looks up in this helpless way as Dad walks toward her. “Take the pain away, Sam, just take it away,” she pleads.

“We'll do our best for you, Mum.”

Dad puts his arm round Nana and leads her into the front room. I just lie here, staring at the empty doorway. This is not a nightmare. I am wide awake.

Outside everything is gray, Payne's Gray. There's not even a cloud to watch, scudding across. This whole sky is one great low fog pressing down on me. Even the air is a misty, damp swamp you don't feel like breathing in. On days like this there is too much sky in Suffolk.

I take Dad's laptop off to Nana's little pink bedroom and plug in the Internet stick. I type in “Ruwanda,” and it asks, “Do you mean Rwanda?” I click on that, and a whole list of choices comes up for me to read about Rwanda…genocide…mass killing…photos of hundreds of skulls of children on school desks and altars in churches. I can't take in the nightmare of what I'm reading. More than a million people killed…with machetes, knives, and guns…Civil war, tribes fighting each other, neighbors ordered to kill neighbors or be killed themselves…priests preaching killing…How many people exactly? No one counted, but the reason for all the killing? To wipe out a whole tribe of people. Just like Hitler tried to destroy Jewish people, but in Rwanda no one did anything to stop it. Not the British, not the Americans. What did Jidé say? “You probably saw them on the news.”

Here I am sitting in my Nana's pink room with roses painted on the wall reading these poisonous words with a red-hot anger starting to burn in my belly, filling my throat and mouth with a bitter acid taste that I can't get rid of. Now I think I know why Jidé Jackson doesn't want to go there, doesn't want to think about it…He said he'd had a sister who wouldn't even speak of what she'd been through.

It's true what Jidé said: with this sort of past, why would you want to look back? And, reading all of this, I still don't know the story of why his sister died.

Suddenly the marshmallow sweetness of Nana's pink room makes me want to break out. I run into the gray mist and keep on running down the lane and onto the marsh. I gulp in the damp air, running and running until I can't breathe anymore. But I know there is nowhere to run to, because, although I've seen terrible scenes on the television of people suffering and starving, it's never really got to me before, not like today…because once you know this stuff happened to your friend's mum and dad, to his sister and to a million other people, you can't unknow it. Can you?

“It'll be all right, Mira, with Nana. We're going to sort it out,” says Dad when I get back.

He wraps his arms round me. I don't tell him that my tears are not for Nana but for Jidé Jackson and his mum and dad who he never knew…and his sister with no name.

Nana is still lying on her white wicker sofa snuggled in her purple shawl. “Accepting visitors, like the queen,” she says. This sofa can only be used by Nana, Krish, Laila, and me—obviously not all at the same time. It would just snap if a big person sat on it. But it's perfect for Nana. She looks beautiful with all the patterned cushions around her, like a Matisse painting. I find my sketchbook and start to draw her. Nana smiles at me. She likes “sitting” for people. Since she was very young, artists have painted Nana and photographed her for newspapers and exhibitions. We've got a black-and-white photo in the hallway at home of Nana when she was about twenty years old with her bulldog Toro. The writing underneath says: “Beauty and the Beast Make an Entrance among Embankment Artists.”

All through the day different people come to visit Nana Josie. Mum and Dad are worried that it's making her too tired, but when they suggest she has a rest she waves away their worries, telling them not to fuss, that this is what she's here for. Even so, later, when people arrive, she's sleeping. Some people can understand about dying and others can't really deal with it at all. Some of my nana's friends are happy to hold her hand for an hour while she sleeps. When she's awake, Nana just lies there, smiling at everyone with her eyes. She lets the visitors do the talking if they want to. Some people find it impossible to stop talking…to say good-bye. One friend comes back again and again. After he finally leaves, Nana sighs, “It's bloody hard work dying well.”

That's what we're trying to help Nana to do, I think, die well. Just like people try to have a good life…we are trying to give Nana a good death. But Jidé Jackson's mum and dad and sister did not die well. More than one million people in Rwanda did not die well…I can't get the picture out of my mind of their bodies floating down a river with no one to care for them.

When you draw someone, you see things in them that you don't notice in normal life. It's like the world slows down and grows silent so you just see the person in front of you, like peering out at a tiny spec of the world through a holey stone. Even though it's my nana I'm drawing and I know what she looks like, it's as if I'm seeing her for the very first time…like how you can tell, by her mouth and her chin, what a determined person she is. But when I'm drawing her eyes I notice something new. Her expression tells me that she's trapped; she can't wait to get out of her body. These are the things I see when I'm drawing Nana Josie.

Dad's on the phone talking to someone about Nana's pain in the night. An hour later the phone rings. It's the nurse. She's the one who's been coming to Nana's flat to look after her. When Dad's finished talking, he comes over and sits quietly with Nana, and at that very moment Laila wakes up and starts to cry. Mum picks her up to comfort her.

“Who wants a walk by the sea?” Mum rallies us, trying her best to sound enthusiastic.

Krish is climbing the walls with excitement. I don't really want to go, but I say yes because it's obvious that Dad and Nana want to be on their own.

Mum straps Laila into the baby carrier and hoists her up onto her back. Laila kicks her legs as if she would like to run to catch up with us. The wind smears my hair onto my face so I can hardly see ahead. From the crabbing bridge, me and Krish race for the dunes like we always do. He wins, like he always does. Once over the dunes the sea stops us short. Great breaking waves roar in my face, and the spray threads a foam necklace all along the beach. If you lean back, the wind almost holds you up, but you know that if it decides to, it can just as easily knock you down flat. I wish we'd brought Nana with us. She could have stood on the beach and the wind would have picked her up and flown her over the sea like a kite set free. I love the way the wind and the sea and the cold blast everything else away, so the only thing you can think about is not being blown away. When she was a little girl, Nana used to dream of flying all the time, just like I do. Now that my period's gone I feel as if I could fly over the dunes again, like I did last summer with Millie.

Krish and Mum are shouting to me, but their voices are swallowed by the sea and the wind.

“Piiiiiiiper!” I call.

But Piper has found another dog to play with. They're splashing around in the foam. A woman with a green headscarf appears through the spray. She's walking up the beach toward me, waving.

“Mooooooses,” she calls over and over.

At first I think she's just calling to the dog, but as she draws closer I realize she's waving to me.

“Hello, Mira! I thought maybe there was a chance we'd bump into each other.”

I don't really know what to say. It just feels so odd seeing Pat Print here on the beach. I look over my shoulder to see where Mum and Krish are, but they've disappeared over the dunes.

“I've got a motor home a bit farther up the beach. I keep it parked up permanently. My secret hideaway,” she whispers, placing a finger over her lips.

I still can't think of anything to say to her. So I stare down at the sand and Pat Print's bare feet. She follows my eyes.

“Since I was a little girl, I could never see the sand without throwing my shoes off—whatever the weather, I've just got to feel the sand between my toes. Call me a free spirit.”

I hardly dare look up at her because the thought crosses my mind that maybe she isn't really here at all, but then Piper and Moses fly at us, shaking the salty water off their coats and soaking us with their spray. Pat Print laughs and clips Moses back onto his leash.

“Who's this?” asks Pat, stroking Piper.

“Piper, Nana's dog.”

“Lovely to see you, Mira. Maybe we'll walk together again one day,” Pat Print says, smiling at me.

Then she turns away and glides off down the beach. Her bare feet, the wind whipping up the beach, and her disappearing into the sea mist, coat ends flapping, makes me wonder if that actually happened.

I trail up and down the bank looking for holey stones. If—I say to Notsurewho Notsurewhat—I find a holey stone, then Pat Print is definitely a ghost, spirit, angel, or whatever. As soon as I've thought it, there it is in front of me, a perfect oval holey stone. This one's for Millie. I squeeze it safely snug inside my jeans pocket. Now Krish is sprinting back up the beach, yelling at me to hurry up as Laila's screech carries on the wind. It's too bitter for her out here.

As soon as you walk over the dunes, the sea is gone. With every step, the roar of the waves and the wind is muffled until the world grows gray again.

“What took you so long?” shouts Krish in a voice as loud as Ben Gbemi's as if I'm miles away instead of standing right next to him. I think about telling them about Pat Print, but he probably wouldn't believe me anyway.

“I was looking for a holey stone for Millie.”