My Name Is Mina (skellig) Page 9

  “Personally, I prefer the complexity of words,” she said. She hated herself even as she was saying it. She had read the book in Malcolm’s hands, and she liked it a lot. But she couldn’t stop herself from blathering on and showing off and trying to show she was something special, and nothing like the people here.

  “The complexity of sentences,” she said, “Paragraphs, pages …”

  “Oh, Mina!” said her mum.

  Malcolm closed the book.

  “Maybe you can make recommendations to us, Mina,” he said. “Now, Mrs. McKee, why don’t you leave Mina with us, and …”

  “Yes, I will,” said Mrs. McKee.

  She gave Mina a hug. She told her to have a nice day. She told her she’d be back to pick her up that afternoon.

  As she walked away, Mina wanted to weep like a four-year-old. She wanted to cry, “Take me away, Mummy! Take me away!” But she just stood there, like a stone, silent and bereft.

  And other children started to arrive, and so the day began.

  Among the others, there was Wilfred, who looked so angry, whose brow was furrowed, who clenched his fists, who looked nobody but Malcolm in the eye. His nails had almost been bitten to nothing and two of his front teeth were gone. He smelt of dog.

  There was Alicia, who took a liking to Mina and sat by her all day. Alicia was like a little creature. Her hands trembled, ever so slightly. Her fringe hung down over her eyes. She kept leaning forward so that her hair hung all around her head like a curtain. She spoke in little whispery breaths. “I like you, Mina. Can I sit with you at lunch, Mina?” She stayed silent mostly, but sometimes Mina would hear her humming a low slow tune.

  And there was Steepy, a skinny boy dressed all in green whose hands were covered in cuts and grazes. “Bloody roses, Malcolm,” he said. “Covered in bloody thorns, Malcolm. And bloody brambles. Like bloody knives, Malcolm.” He grinned at Mina. “It’s me bloody garden, Nina.”

  “Mina,” said Malcolm. He winked. “It’s Steepy’s aim to have the most abundant allotment in the land. It’s also his aim to get a swearword into every sentence.”

  “Bloody right, Malcolm,” said Steepy. “Couldn’t write a sentence to save me bloody life, but when it comes to swearing versatility … And when it comes to works of bloody art …”

  He lifted his shirt. There was a whole garden tattooed on his chest: hedge, trees, dozens of flowers, butterflies, birds.

  “That’s just the bloody start. I’ll get a bloody forest on me legs, mountains on me back, bloody sky on me bloody head.”

  Despite herself, and her determinationto stay cool and distant, Mina leaned forward wide-eyed.

  “But you’re just a boy!” she heard herself saying.

  “Aye, and I had it done when I wasn’t even twelve. Me uncle Eric done it. He’s a proper tattoo artist. They wanted to lock him up but they didn’t cos he’s all I’ve got. But he can’t do no more tattoos on me till I’m sixteen. Then I’ll get the rest.” He lowered his shirt again. “We’re messing up the bloody world, Mina. We’re gonna burn it, blow it up, destroy it. We’re killing everything. Every lovely living thing’ll be extinct. But it’ll all be on me, Mina. I’ll be a bloody monument to everything that’s gone.”

  “He’s not as pessimistic as he makes out,” said Malcolm. “Otherwise why bother with all the gardening?”

  “For love,” said Steepy.

  “Bloody love, you mean,” said Malcolm.

  “Aye. For bloody love.” He looked at Mina.

  “What’s your story, then?”

  Mina shrugged.

  “What’s yours?” she said.

  “You’ve had it. What’s the point of school when there’s bloody gardening to be done?”

  “What you doing here, then?”

  “Hanging out with me mates. Like Malcolm. And Wilfie there.”

  Wilfred glared. He bared his teeth. Steepy raised his hand.

  “Down, boy,” he said. “You are me bloody mate, Wilf, whether you want to be or not.”

  Wilf went on glaring, looking nothing like a mate of anyone’s at all.

  Steepy winked at her.

  “He’s OK,” he whispered. “As long as he keeps taking the pills.”

  “The pills?”

  “Aye. They wanted to put me on them as well. No bloody way! I said. Bloody pills!”

  Despite herself, she wanted to be his mate, too. She did want to tell him her story, and to hear more about his, to talk about his garden and his tattoo, and to ask him how a bird that was born for joy could sit in a cage and sing, and to tell him about charms of goldfinches. She wanted to tell him about playing with words on a page, and about the words she used to write on her own skin. And she wanted to tell him that they’d wanted to put her on pills, as well. But she didn’t. She went back to being distant. She turned away from him to Alicia, who smiled and touched her arm and softly hummed.

  “So,” said Malcolm. “That’s getting to know you time over. Time for Maths. Sorry, Steepy. Bloody Maths.”

  They did worksheets at the tables. A couple of assistants came in, Chloe and Joe. Chloe sat with Mina and guided her through the problems. “7 × 6 is the same as 6 x __.” “123 × 9 is the same as 9 x ___.” They were easy. She heard Wilfred curse out loud and fling his pen across the room. He stood up and stormed to the window waving his fists. She saw Malcolm gently guide him back to his task again. She heard Steepy speaking the answers to Malcolm and saw Malcolm writing them down. Alicia sat beside Mina and whispered how she always found sums so hard. Mina helped her and she saw the tears turn to smiles as the solutions appeared to her. She also saw the thin scars on Alicia’s forearms. She touched one of them gently. Alicia flinched, then whispered very softly, “I used to cut meself, Mina. Not no more, though.” Mina looked through Alicia’s hanging fringe into her eyes. She wanted to tell her about the day when she was in her tree, carving words into the bark with her knife. She had rested the blade on her own skin. She was almost at the point of carving a word into herself. She didn’t tell her, though.

  Alicia smiled sadly.

  “I seen sense,” she said.

  “Me, too,” whispered Mina. “Let’s do more sums.”

  Mina went on helping Alicia with her work. She kept glancing around the room, watching these people she had found herself with. A bunch of misfits in a place that accepted them as misfits. She knew them, she understood them. It was so weird. The kids she was with all had trouble fitting in anywhere, but here in a place of misfits they were accepted and they all kind of fitted in and for a few hours in the day they weren’t misfits anymore. And there were other rooms with other misfits all around them. Troubled, damaged, shy, scared children. Kids with pains and problems and yearnings. She tried to stop herself thinking it, but she couldn’t stop herself. She recognized these kids. In some way, they were just like her. But she kept on trying to stay distant.

  At lunchtime, she ate macaroni cheese and chocolate cake. She walked around the concrete playground in the sunlight with Alicia. She stood at the fence and stared towards the city that she’d come from. She wondered about her mum, where she was, what she was doing. She found herself thinking about what Steepy had said, that one day everything she saw would be destroyed. But could that be true? There couldn’t be total destruction, there couldn’t just be nothing. Yes, maybe one day the human race would be extinct just like the dinosaurs. And our cities would crumble into dust. We’d destroy the Heaven we’d helped to make. But there’d be survivors.

  The birds flew over her, sparrows and finches and crows: light-boned, beautiful creatures. They were fragile-looking things, but maybe they were really the strongest and the bravest of all. Surely they’d outlast us, like they outlasted the dinosaurs. They’d keep on flying, building their nests, singing their songs, laying their eggs, tending their young in the ruins of our cities and in our rampant woods and fields. A new wild world would grow around them. And maybe they’d be the ancestors of marvelous creatures that we could
have no notion of. She imagined a future world, a future heaven, inhabited by marvelous birdlike creatures, and she was glad.

  Malcolm came to her and asked if she was enjoying herself. Yes, she told him. He said they’d be writing stories that afternoon – her kind of thing, he thought. She just shrugged again and said nothing. He told her he had a secret that hardly anybody knew. He’d written a novel and he was trying to get it published. He said how scary it was, like he was exposing himself to the world and it made him feel really stupid and young.

  “Know what I mean?” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But I’ve just got to be brave about it,” he said. “Haven’t I?”

  “Suppose so.”

  He smiled gently at her. She looked away.

  “I think you’re brave,” he said. “I think all of you are brave, coming to places like this, trying to grow up. It’s hard, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “Trying to discover how to be yourself.”

  She nodded.

  “There’s many ways to do it, Mina. A different way for each and every one of us. And you know what? It goes on all your life.”

  She said nothing. She watched a flock of pigeons flying fast across the rooftops.

  “We don’t mind if you think we’re not the place for you,” said Malcolm. “Whatever you decide, it’s nice to have you with us, even if it’s just for a short time. It’s nice to have been part of your growing.”

  She looked down at her feet.

  “What’s it called? The novel?”

  “Joe Carter’s Bones. It’s about a boy who collects all kinds of bones that are lying in the streets and fields around him – birds, mice, frogs. And he gets feathers and bits of leather and grass and leaves and petals and sticks, all kinds of stuff that were part of living things. Puts them together in his shed. Shapes them into things that look like they could live. Tries to breathe life into them again. Tries to make new kinds of creatures with them.”

  “Like a magician.”

  “Aye. Like a magician, a sorcerer.” Malcolm laughed. “Sounds barmy, eh?”

  “Does it work?”

  “Does he make a new creature, you mean? Yes, he does, which makes it even barmier. The book’s a bit like that, I suppose. It’s all bits and pieces, fragments put together to try to make a work of art. I put the bits of the book together and breathe on them and try to make them live. Just like Joe Carter does with his bones.” He laughed again. “And the book keeps getting rejected, so maybe it’s too barmy for anybody to publish. Maybe next time I should write a story where everything’s plain and simple and straightforward. Maybe I should write a book where nothing barmy happens at all, eh? Or where nothing of any kind happens at all?”

  She smiled at the idea.

  “Do you think you could?” she said. “Write a story where nothing happens at all?”

  “Dunno, really. But maybe I should try it. Or maybe you should.”

  And then a bell rang, and they walked back across the concrete towards the classroom.

  They did do stories that afternoon. Malcolm kept lifting objects, showing them, making the kids imagine stories from them. He lifted a pen and said it belonged to a girl called Maisie and when she wrote with it, it had magic powers. He asked, What were the magic powers? And the possible magic powers appeared in the kids’ minds. Then he asked about Maisie’s life – the injured pet she had when she was six, her favorite food, why had she fallen out with her best friend, Claire, last week, the scary dream she had last week – and Maisie’s whole life began to appear in their imaginations. He lifted other objects – a key that had saved Billy Winston’s life. How had it done that? And what secret letter did Billy keep in his drawer? And how did Billy Winston break his wrist when he was seven? He showed an ordinary hen’s egg. What if, when it opened, it wasn’t a chicken that appeared at all, but some unknown beast? And on and on. He showed how our brains make stories naturally, that they find it easy. He said that stories weren’t really about words – the words that kids like Wilfred and Steepy found so difficult to control. They were about visions. They were like dreams. Mina loved all this. She scribbled the answers, the fragments of stories. She loved to see all the new characters and their worlds coming to life inside her mind and on her page.

  When Malcolm asked them to begin to write, as Steepy and Wilfred and Alicia murmured their visions to Malcolm and the assistants and watched visions transformed into words, Mina kept wondering: What if there was a story where nothing interesting happened at all?

  So she tried to do that. But of course each time she wrote a word, something started to happen. As soon as she named a character, the character started to come to life and walked around in her head and on the paper. There was no way to write anything and make it into nothing. Maybe writing was a bit like being God. Every word was the start of a new creation. She wrote sentence after sentence, threw away sentence after sentence. Close by her, Steepy told a tale about a dragon called Norman hatching from an egg, Wilfred muttered about the gang of thugs that chased Billy Winston into a dilapidated warehouse, Alicia sighed about Maisie’s cat that had almost been run over when it was just a kitten.

  Mina kept her eyes lowered, and she listened. Everyone around her seemed to fit in here. For a moment she hated herself. She was useless. She was silly, and endlessly contrary. She fitted in nowhere, even in a place designed for misfits. She looked back at the page and realized that the only story in which nothing happened was a story that wasn’t written at all. It was an empty page. Knowing that made her lonely and scared. Sometimes she wished just for this – to be nothing, to be nowhere, to be empty. Sometimes she wanted a life in which nothing at all had happened to her. Sometimes she wished she was like a story that had never even started. Malcolm was right. As well as being wonderful and exciting, growing up could just be hard, so bloody hard.

  The voices murmured and sometimes laughed around her. She tried to shut them out. She looked into the page and visions and memories moved across it. She saw herself at home again, sitting in her tree again. She saw her mum in a cafe, drinking coffee. She thought of her dad deep down below inside the darkness of the earth and of him gazing down from high above in Heaven. And there was the murmuring of Alicia and Wilfred’s rage and Harry’s shyness and the images on Steepy’s chest, and Malcolm’s kindness and his vivid shirt and his silver bracelet glinting at the edge of her vision. And the memory of Palaver and Trench started flooding in, and Scullery and THE HEAD TEACHER, and SATS Day, and God and flesh and emptiness, and stories in which life itself is created from old bones and stories in which nothing at all happens and and and and and and and and … And maybe it was all these things together, all those bits and pieces from the present and the past, that disturbed everything and caused the visionto appear. Whatever it was, she looked up, and looked through the window into the sunlight pouring down onto the concrete courtyard outside, and she saw him.

  He was standing at ease on the concrete close by a couple of parked cars. He was tall and smiling and just like she seemed to remember he was like in life. The air seemed to crackle like fire around him. He turned his head, and looked into Room B12 at the Corinthian Avenue Pupil Referral Unit, and he looked at Mina, who watched him from inside. And he smiled at her, not a sweet and gentle smile but a smile that seemed to go right to a place where all her dreams were. He was in her mind and heart, her body and blood, and she knew that despite everything, everything was OK. Then he was gone, fading into the crackle of fire around him, and there was just concrete and cars and the air and the sun and the emptiness of the Corinthian Avenue afternoon.

  She stared into the emptiness for a while. Then she blinked and looked around her. No one had seen anything. They worked on, bathed in the sunlight that poured in through the windows.

  She put her pen on the empty page and wrote,

  “At Corinthian Avenue I saw my dad and I was glad.”

&
nbsp; Corinthian Avenue wasn’t for me. I enjoyed the day, I learned a lot. It taught me that misfits can fit together in weird ways. It taught me that one day even as a misfit I might fit into this weird world. I liked the people there. I would always remember Steepy and the garden on his chest. But it wasn’t the right time. I needed to be at home with my mum, with my tree. I needed to be homeschooled. After the story-writing, Malcolm read the pieces out to everyone, and we heard about dragons and murders and scared kittens and wonderful imaginary lives. We all laughed and groaned and said how brilliant the stories were. When it was my turn, I put the words about my dad away and held up an empty page. I looked at everyone properly for the first time that day.

  “My story,” I said, “is an empty page. It is a story in which nothing happens at all.”

  They all looked at the page. They all looked at me. They thought about what I’d said, and I smiled when I thought what Mrs. Scullery might say to such a thing.

  “It’s like my back,” said Steepy suddenly.

  “Like your back?” I said.

  “Aye. It’s empty now. But you know that it’ll be filled with something bloody marvelous one day.”

  “Filled with possibilities, in other words,” said Malcolm.

  “Yes,” said Steepy. “So it isn’t really empty at all.” He laughed at me. “So even a blank page has a kind of story in it.”

  We all agreed that that was so.

  Soon the day ended.

  As I was getting ready to leave, Steepy came to me.

  “You won’t come back, will you?”

  I shrugged, and looked down.

  “You won’t. But mebbe you will one day. We could be good mates, you and me.”

  “Could we?”

  “Aye. We could.”

  Alicia came to me as well. She touched my cheek. She said goodbye. I touched her arm.

  “I almost did what you did,” I said, so softly she could hardly hear. She knew what I was talking about, though.

  “But you seen the sense,” she said. “Just like me.”

  We smiled at each other.