My Name Is Mina

  ALSO BY DAVID ALMOND

  Skellig

  Kit’s Wilderness

  Heaven Eyes

  Counting Stars

  Secret Heart

  The Fire-Eaters

  Clay

  Two Plays

  Raven Summer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2010 by David Almond

  Jacket art copyright © 2010 by David McDougall

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Hodder Children’s Books, a division of Hachette Children’s Books, an Hachette UK Company, London, in 2010.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

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  www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Almond, David.

  My name is Mina / David Almond. — Hardcover trade ed.

  p. cm.

  Prequel to: Skellig.

  Summary: Creative, intelligent, nine-year-old Mina keeps a journal in her own disorderly way that reveals how her mind is growing into something extraordinary, especially after she begins homeschooling under the direction of her widowed mother.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98965-0

  [1. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 2. Home schooling—Fiction.

  3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Single-parent families—Fiction. 5. Family life—England—Fiction. 6. England—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.A448Myn 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010040143

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Sara Jane and Freya

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Moonlight, Wonder, Flies & Nonsense

  Bananas, Weirdos, a Beautiful Tree & Boring Heaven

  Dinosaurs, French Toast & a Journey in the Underworld

  Thoughts About the Archaeopteryx

  Ernie Myers, Rubbish, Dust, Metempsychosis & a Blue Car

  Sprouts, Sarcasm & the Mysteries of Time

  Persephone, Daftness & Absolutely Nothing

  Fig Rolls, Pee, Spit, Sweat & all the Words for Joy

  Grandpa, Missing Monkeys & Owls

  Sats Day, Glibbertysnark & Claminosity!

  Eggs, Chicks, a Belly, Babies & Poems

  Spaghetti Pomodoro & a Dream

  The Story of Corinthian Ave.

  Chicks, A Lethal Cat & Limplessness

  Walking, Pizza, Stars & Dust

  A Dream of Horses

  My name is Mina and I love the night. Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. It’s dark and silent in the house, but if I listen close, I hear the beat beat beat of my heart. I hear the creak and crack of the house. I hear my mum breathing gently in her sleep in the room next door.

  I slip out of bed and sit at the table by the window. I tug the curtain open. There’s a full moon in the middle of the sky. It bathes the world in its silvery light. It shines on Falconer Road and on the houses and the streets beyond, and on the city roofs and spires and on the distant mountains and moors. It shines into the room and onto me.

  Some say that you should turn your face from the light of the moon. They say it makes you mad.

  I turn my face towards it and I laugh.

  Make me mad, I whisper. Go on, make Mina mad.

  I laugh again.

  Some people think that she’s already mad, I think.

  I look into the night. I see owls and bats that fly and flicker across the moon. Somewhere out there, Whisper the cat is slipping through the shadows. I close my eyes and it’s like those creatures are moving inside me, almost like I’m a kind of weird creature myself, a girl whose name is Mina but more than just a girl whose name is Mina.

  There’s an empty notebook lying on the table in the moonlight. It’s been there for an age. I keep on saying that I’ll write a journal. So I’ll start right here, right now. I open the book and write the very first words:

  Then what shall I write? I can’t just write that this happened then this happened then this happened to boring infinitum. I’ll let my journal grow just like the mind does, just like a tree or a beast does, just like life does. Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line?

  Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

  Sometimes there should be no words at all.

  Just silence.

  Just clean white space.

  Some pages will be like a sky with a single bird in it. Some will be like a sky with a swirling swarm of starlings in it. My sentences will be a clutch, a collection, a pattern, a swarm, a shoal, a mosaic. They will be a circus, a menagerie, a tree, a nest. Because my mind is not in order. My mind is not straight lines. My mind is a clutter and a mess. It is my mind, but it is also very like other minds. And like all minds, like every mind that there has ever been and every mind that there will ever be, it is a place of wonder.

  When I was at school – at St. Bede’s Middle – I was told by my teacher Mrs. Scullery that I should not write anything until I had planned what I would write. What nonsense!

  Do I plan a sentence before I speak it?

  OF COURSE I DO NOT!

  Does a bird plan its song before it sings?

  OF COURSE IT DOES NOT!

  It opens its beak and it

  SINGS so I will SING!

  I did want to be what they called a good girl, so I did try. There was one fine morning when the sun was shining through the classroom window. There was a cloud of flies shimmering and dancing in the air outside. I heard Mrs. Scullery telling us that she wanted us to write a story. Of course we’d need to write a plan first, she said.

  She asked us whether we understood.

  We told her that we did.

  So I stopped staring at the flies (which I had been enjoying very much!), and I wrote my plan. My story would have such and such a title, and would begin in such and such a way, then such and such would happen in the middle, then such and such would be the outcome at the end. I wrote it all down very neatly.

  I showed my plan to Mrs. Scullery, and she was very pleased. She even smiled at me and said, “Well done, Mina. That is very good, dear. Now you may write the story.”

  But of course when I started to write, the story wouldn’t keep still, wouldn’t obey. The words danced like flies. They flew off in strange and beautiful directions and took my story on a very unexpected course. I was very pleased with it, but when I showed it to Mrs. Scullery, she just got cross. She held the plan in one hand and the story in the other.

  “They do not match!” she said in her screechy voice.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Miss,” I said.

  She leaned down towards me.

  “The story,” she said, in a slow stupid voice like she was talking to somebody slow and stupid, “does not fit the plan!”

  “But it didn’t want to, Miss,” I answered.

  “Didn’t want to? What on earth do you mean, it didn’t want to?”

>   “I mean it wanted to do other things, Miss.”

  She put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “It is a story,” she said. “It is your story. It will do what you tell it to.”

  “But it won’t,” I said. She kept on glaring at me.

  “And Miss,” I said, like I was pleading with her to understand. “I don’t want it to, Miss.”

  I should have saved my breath. She flung the papers onto my table.

  “This is typical of you,” she said. “Absolutely typical!”

  And she turned to a girl called Samantha and asked her to read her tale, which was something about a girl with curly hair and her cuddly cat, a perfectly planned idiotic thing in which nothing interesting happened at all! And of course all the other kids were giggling through it all, and it led to one of the nicknames I had back then. Typical. Absolutely Typical McKee.

  Huh! Huh! Typical!

  My stories were like me. They couldn’t be controlled and they couldn’t fit in. Trying to be a good girl sometimes made me very sad. The end of it all was the day I became nonsensical. Fantastically nonsensical. I’ll tell the story of that day when the time seems right, when the words seem right. And I suppose I’ll tell the other tales that matter, like the tale of my day at Corinthian Avenue and my vision, or the story of my journey to the Underworld in Heston Park, or the story of my grandfather’s house and the owls. And I’ll put in poems and scribblings and nonsense. Sometimes writing nonsense can make a lot of sense! That sounds nonsensical itself, of course, but it isn’t. NON-SENS-I-CAL! WHAT A GREAT WORD! WOW!

  Now I’ve started, it’s lovely to see the empty pages that stretch before me. Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into an undiscovered land.

  Look at the way the words move across the page and fill the empty spaces. Did God feel like this when he started to fill the emptiness? Is there a God? Was there ever emptiness? I don’t know, but it doesn’t stop me wondering and wondering.*

  My motto’s written on paper and pinned above my bed:

  It’s by William Blake. Blake the Misfit, Blake the Outsider. Just like me. He was a painter and a poet and some people said he was mad – just like they say about me. Maybe he was out too much in the moon. Sometimes he wore no clothes. Sometimes he saw angels in his garden. He saw spirits all around him. I think he was very sane. So does my mum, so did my dad. I will write with William Blake in mind. I will write about the sad things, of course, because there is no way not to write about the sad things. And there are sad things in my life. Well, ONE BIG SAD AND HORRIBLE THING. Weirdly enough, the sad things in my life make the happy things seem more intense. I wonder if other people feel like that, if they feel that sadness, in a weird way, can help to make you more intensely happy. That’s what’s known as a paradox, I suppose.

  What a word! It sounds good, looks good, and the meaning’s good! And if something is a paradox, it is PARADOXICAL. Which is an even better word!

  That’s the kind of nickname I’d like to have. Not Typical McKee, but Paradoxical McKee!

  Or Nonsensical McKee, of course.

  Anyway, I’ll try to make my words break out of the cages of sadness, and make them sing for joy.

  Suddenly, thinking about the ONE BIG SAD AND HORRIBLE THING, I know that I’m writing all this for Dad. I imagine him watching me and reading my words as I write. He’ll be everywhere in this journal, of course, in my mind and in my words and moving among the spaces between the words and behind the words. Sometimes I tell people that he died before I was born, but that isn’t true, and I do have some memories of him. I’ll write of those. I think of him watching from somewhere far away beyond the moon. Hello, Dad. Yes, I think I’m happy now. Yes, I think Mum is, too. Good night.

  I slip back into bed. The maddening moon shines down on me. I’ve started the journal at last. Tomorrow I’ll write some more. Now I’ll try to dream of bats and cats and owls.

  * * *

  * Wandering and wondering are almost the same word. And wandering through space is very like wondering inside the head. I am a wonderer and a wanderer!

  Had breakfast with Mum. Bananas and yogurt and toast with marmalade. DELICIOUS! I told her I’d started my journal. Excellent, she said. I said I might show her some of the pages when I’m ready. Excellent, she said. She said maybe we could make some clay models today. Excellent, I said. Then I came out of the house and climbed into my tree, and here I am.

  I love my tree. I’ve been climbing it for a couple of years. I shin up the trunk to a branch that’s just a bit higher than my head. I sit here astride the branch with my back against the trunk. Sometimes I let my legs dangle. Sometimes I sit with my knees raised so that I can rest a book on them. It’s very comfortable, like it was made for me. I’ve been known to sit here for hours at a time, drawing or reading, or just thinking and looking and listening and wondering.

  It’s early spring. A pair of blackbirds are building a nest, not too far away from me. The nest’s almost done. I know that because I sometimes climb higher and look down into it. One day soon I’ll look down and see eggs in there. Then I’ll see chicks. Then I’ll see fledglings leaving the nest. Then I’ll see the fledglings become birds that fly into the blue blue yonder. How amazing is that? The blackbirds squawk alarm calls when I climb higher, like they’re yelling, ‘Behave yourself! Squawk! Get back down, girl! Squawk!’ But I don’t think they’re really too troubled by me, not like they would be by a cat, for instance, or by a stranger. Maybe they think I’m some kind of weird bird myself, or some kind of peculiar branch. Maybe if I sat very still for a very long time, they’d build a nest in me: in my lap, or in my hair, or in my hands if I raised them up and cupped them. There is a story about this called St. Kevin and the Blackbird.

  LONG AGO, THERE WAS A SAINT CALLED KEVIN WHO LIVED IN IRELAND. ONE DAY, HE WAS PRAYING WITH HIS HANDS STRETCHED TOWARDS HEAVEN (OR WHAT HE THOUGHT WAS HEAVEN), WHEN A BLACKBIRD FLEW DOWN AND LAID AN EGG IN HIS HANDS. ST. KEVIN WAS A GOOD MAN, AND HE DIDN’T WANT TO BREAK THE EGG OR PREVENT IT FROM HATCHING – AND BEING A SAINT, HE ALSO PROBABLY THOUGHT THAT THE EGG WAS A GIFT FROM GOD. SO HE STAYED IN EXACTLY THE SAME POSITION FOR DAY AFTER DAY AND NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, WITH HIS HANDS STRETCHED TOWARDS HEAVEN (OR WHAT HE THOUGHT WAS HEAVEN), UNTIL THE EGG HATCHED RIGHT THERE IN HIS HANDS. IMAGINE THAT, A TINY CHICK MAKING ITS FIRST MOVEMENTS IN YOUR HANDS. IMAGINE THE CLAWS, THE WET WINGS, THE CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP. IMAGINE IT GROWING AS YOU CARED FOR IT. AND IMAGINE IT FLYING AWAY!

  Some of the kids from St. Bede’s passed by the end of the street a few moments back. They saw me, but they’ve stopped laughing and calling by now. These days they just roll their eyes and whisper a few words to each other and head onto the gates of their cage. That’s if they do anything at all. They used to call me a witch and a weirdo. They yelled I was a monkey and a crow. They had great fun last year. In the summer they threw daisies and yelled, “Daisies for Miss Crazy!” In the autumn they threw conkers and yelled, “Conkers for Miss Bonkers!” (Which is quite amusing when you think about it, I suppose.)

  Now I’m just part of the scenery, like I am for the birds. I am like a lamppost or a tree or a stone. I don’t care. They’re nothing to me. I don’t even look at them. Them! Huh! HUH! Nothing!

  This is Falconer Road. It’s a narrow street of terraced houses with little front gardens, each garden with a single tree in it, like this one. The houses are perhaps eighty years old. There are back lanes and garages behind the houses. Beyond the end of the street is Crow Road, where the bigger older houses are. I own a house there, or I will when I’m grown up. It is a bit dilapidated and has extraordinary creatures living in it. Thank you, Grandpa. I raise my eyes to the sky. Thank you, Grandpa. He left it to me in his will. He’s another one that’s dead. We say he’s in Heaven with Dad.

  Heaven. I used to think that the idea of Heaven was silly. I used to think of all the people who keep on dying. Heaven must get ridiculously full, I thought. There wouldn’t be room an
ywhere in the universe for it.

  “How big is Heaven?” I said to Mum one day when I was small. I’d just seen a hearse with a coffin in it heading past the end of the street to the massive cemetery on Jesmond Road, the one where Dad’s buried.

  “Oh, very very big, I should think,” she said.

  I thought of all the cemeteries in all the world. I thought of all the people lying in them. I thought of all the people who have lived and died in the years and years and years of time. I just couldn’t imagine it.

  “It must be ginormous,” I said.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” she said.

  Then, a few weeks later, we were reading an encyclopedia. It said that if you counted all the people who had ever lived in all the history of the world until about fifty years ago, there wouldn’t be as many as the people who are alive today.*

  That surprised us a great deal.

  It was a couple of hours later that I realized what that meant.

  “So that means,” I said, “that Heaven only needs to be about as big as the earth.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I suppose that’s true.”

  And we laughed about it, because compared with the size of the universe, earth isn’t very big at all. And even earth isn’t full. There’s room for lots more bodies, just like in Heaven there’s room for lots more souls.

  These days, though, I don’t believe any of that. I think that the idea of Heaven is silly for other reasons. When people try to say what Heaven is like, it just sounds deadly deadly deadly dull. Standing around singing and eating nectar or something and looking at God and praising him and being very very very good. Imagine that! YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN! Who’d want to do that for century after century after century after century? Somebody like Mrs. Scullery, maybe, but not me. I bet that even the angels get fed up with it all. I bet they want to eat bananas and marmalade and chocolate, and to look at things like clouds of flies, and to climb trees or to play with cats. I bet they look at us and envy us for being human. I bet that sometimes they even want to be like us. Except they might get put off by the fact that we die.