by David Almond
“Don’t you?”
“No. Just as long as they’re …”
“Interesting?”
“Yes! Interesting!”
She smiled again and I suddenly felt really awkward. She reached out and patted my arm.
“I’m sure they will be,” she said.
We walked back home. The blue car drove into the street again and went slowly past the house again.
The blackbird squawked a warning call.
“Do you believe that birds are souls?” I asked.
She pondered.
“No. Not really. It’s a nice thought, though. Do you?”
“No. Birds are quite extraordinary enough without having to be souls as well.”
Mum went back into the house. I climbed back into the tree.
The blackbird watched me. I watched the man and the woman get out of the blue car. They went to Mr. Myers’s window. The woman appeared to be pregnant. They looked very nice.
“Are the eggs here yet?” I whispered to the blackbirds.
Squawk!
Squawk!
Squawk!
We had a lunch of cheese, bananas, iced buns, and pomegranate juice. POMEGRANATE! YUM! WHAT A TASTE! AND WHAT A WORD!
As we ate, Mum talked about birds and souls. She said that some people believe the soul never dies, but it moves from one body to another, even to the bodies of animals. This is called the transmigration of souls. It’s a kind of rebirth, or reincarnation. She talked about Plato and Hinduism and Buddhism. She said that some people believe that if you have not lived well you will be reborn as an insect, or even as a vegetable.
“Or as a fruit?” I said, holding up my banana.
“Yes, some people believe you could be reborn as a banana. Or as a pea, or a Brussels sprout.”
I bit the banana.
“I wouldn’t like to be a sprout. But a banana! Imagine being such a color and having such a taste!”
I bit the banana again. If there was a soul inside it, would you taste it? Or was the soul’s taste the essence of banananess?
“Maybe good souls turn out bright and tasty,” I said. “And bad souls turn out being green and yuck!”
“Maybe. Then raspberries, for instance, must be very good souls. And if you became an insect, what would a good soul be?”
“A dragonfly,” I said. “Imagine being able to do what a dragonfly does and to look like a dragonfly looks.”
“Or a good soul could turn out to be a bee.”
“To be a bee,” I said. “To be a bee!”
“And a bad soul?”
“A cockroach.”
“A bluebottle.”
I pondered.
“I’d quite like to be a bird,” I said.
“I can imagine you as a bird.”
“A skylark, flying so high it can’t be seen. Or a cat, as black as the night.”
We were quiet for a time. We got on with our lunch. I tried to imagine what Dad might like to be, and I came up with a horse, a beast that’s strong and fast and beautiful and proud. I didn’t want to imagine him as another human being. The only human being I wanted him to be was my dad, even if he was just a memory of my dad.
“Another word for transmigration,” said Mum, “is metempsychosis. It’s a word from ancient Greece.”
“Say it again.”
“Met-em-sy-co-sis,” she said, more slowly.
“Me-tem-sy-co-sis!” I said. “What a fantastic word! Metempsychosis! Metempsychosis! Met-em-sy-beautiful-co-sis!”
It is a great word! Look at it! Listen to it!
Then we looked at books about India and Sri Lanka, and read about Hinduism and Buddhism. We looked at photographs of the Himalayas, and I painted a picture of snow-capped mountains while Mum read to me about Tibet, the country beyond India high up in the clouds. In Tibet, people believe that the soul breaks free of the body at night, and has journeys that are remembered as dreams. This is known as astral traveling. Astral traveling! Imagine flying through the night with the bats and the owls, looking down at the house, the street, the city, the world!
They also believe that the whole of the universe hatched from a single egg. This makes total sense to me. Why shouldn’t the universe have hatched from one of the most astonishing weird magical objects in the universe? An egg. A single egg! And if that is somehow true, then the whole universe is like a bird, flying through time. And each time it lays an egg itself, a whole new universe is created. And so there is universe after universe – a flock of universes flying through time.
IF MY SOUL, WHEN I DIE,
IS TAKEN BY THE BODY OF A BEAST,
I PRAY THAT THE BEAST WILL BE A BIRD,
AND THAT MY SOUL WILL BE UPLIFTED
BY THE BODY OF A LARK.
* Extraordinary fact! Dust in houses (and in offices and schools and other places where humans live and work) consists mainly of tiny fragments of human skin. So when we see dust dancing and whirling and sparkling in a shaft of sunlight the thing that is dancing and whirling and sparkling is dead human skin! There’s other stuff in there as well – like pollen and fibers of paper and cloth and flakes of the skin and hair of animals like cats, but the bulk of it is human skin! And lots of people’s skin mingles together and dances in the light, and the skin of the living and the skin of the dead mingle together and dance in the light! And the skin of animals and the skin of humans mingle together and dance in the light! And this mingling is all around us, and is very ordinary and is very extraordinary and very strange!
EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY
Stare at Dust that Dances in the Light
I love afternoons like that, like when we talk about things like metempsychosis, when we learn so much, and wonder so much, and explore so much, and ideas grow and take flight, like the idea about the universe and the egg. I love being homeschooled, when we don’t have to stick to subjects and timetables and rules. We’ve been doing it for nearly a year now, ever since the dreaded SATS Day. It seems much longer – maybe because it feels like we’ve got so much freedom and so much space and time. And we’re very happy with it. Mum says it can’t last forever, though. She says I’ll become too isolated, especially as I’m an only child. She even says that schools aren’t really prisons and cages. Yes, they bloody are! I tell her. She shakes her head and grins. Language! she says.
I love being on my own and with her (and with whisper the cat and with the blackbirds and the owls). She knows that, and she says I’m coping very well, but just the other day she sat me down beside her and said,
“There’ll come a time when you’ll need more than this.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Yes, you will. You’ll need some friends, for instance.”
“Friends?” I whispered.
She stroked my hair. She cuddled me, like I was tiny again.
“Yes, Mina. Friends. You’ll have some lovely friends once you get started. And one day soon, of course, you’ll even start thinking about boys.”
“Thinking about what?”
“About boys.”
I sniffed and looked away, even though I knew it was true.
“No I bloody well won’t!” I said.
She laughed.
“Language! But don’t worry. We’ll take things slowly, step by step.”
Is it true? Will I need to go to school again? I can’t imagine it. Mum says I’m too extreme, but in my view schools are prisons and always have been and always will be. Here’s a poem. I wrote it a couple of years back. I’ll paste it into my journal now.
I love this poem! I love this poem!
I wrote the poem after stupid Mrs. Scullery (or Sculley or whatever her name was) was trying to teach us about tenses, and about the differences between the present and the past and the future.
“Now listen carefully, children,” she said, like we were slow and stupid or really young or something. “If I do something in the present I say I do it. If I say I did it in the past I say I did it. If I say I will do
it in the future I say I will do it. Verbs are doing words*, and they have tenses – past tense, present tense and future tense. I have prepared an exercise for you. You must change the tenses of the verbs as indicated. You understand? Of course you do. It is very plain.”
And she handed some worksheets out. They contained a very boring story about a girl walking through a town and meeting lots of people along the way. Yawn, yawn. We had to change the present tense into the past. We got lots of sheets like that from Mrs. Scullery – sentences with gaps where we had to stick in the missing words, or sentences with the words all mixed up and we had to unmix them to get them to make sense. They were all dead easy and all dead stupid. Usually I’d just put up with it and get on with it, but that day I must have clicked my tongue or something.
“Yes, Mina?” said Mrs. Scullery. “You have something to say?”
Usually I’d just say, No, Miss, but on that day I said, “The thing is, Mrs. Scullery, that it really isn’t very plain at all. The past and the present and the future are much more mysterious than you say they are.”
“Oh, are they? Then please do enlighten us.”
That was so typical of her. SARCASM! I HATE SARCASM! Especially the kind that’s done by teachers.
If I had anything to do with the running of schools, I’d have a big notice put into every single classroom:
Anyway, I did enlighten her.
“Yes, Miss,” I said. “They are much much more mysterious. The past, for instance, was present to the people who lived in it. And the future will quickly become the present and will just as quickly become the past. And in our thoughts, the past and the present and the anticipation of the future exist together.” She stood with her arms folded, waiting for me to go on. So I went on. “Right from the beginning of time, people have attempted to understand time, and they have not managed yet.”
She sighed.
“Finished yet?” she said.
“No. So the mysteries of time cannot be reduced to a worksheet about tenses.”
She sighed more deeply. She stared out of the classroom window into the darkening afternoon. I could see she was thinking that it would have been better for her to be something like a traffic warden or a police constable. Or a sprout, maybe.
“And that’s to say nothing of our dreams,” I said.
“Now you are finished. So please shut up! We are not doing Philosophy, Miss. McKee. This is an English lesson. So do your work!”
I did my work. I seethed inside. What about the dead? I wanted to ask her. They’re supposed to be in the past but what if they’re around us still (even as flakes of dust, for instance, to say nothing of souls)? Are we present when we’re alive and past when we’re dead? And what about the notion that we will rise again? What does that say about the present and the past and the future being different things? The things that the Mrs. Scullerys of the world take for granted and that they think are so plain are not plain.
I scribbled my stupid worksheet. Scullery sat at the desk and dreamed about being a sprout. I grabbed a piece of clean paper and started composing my concrete poem.
That day was near the end of my school days. Not much longer to go till I was at home with Mum. Before that, though, there’d be SATS Day. O my God, SATS Day! That’s another of the tales I’ll have to write. Then there’d be the day at the Corinthian Avenue Pupil Referral Unit. Now that’s a day to write about.
EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY
Write a poem that repeats a word and repeats a word and repeats a word and repeats a word until it almost loses its meaning.
(It can be useful to choose a word that you don’t like, or that scares or disturbs you.)
Even though I hate school, I sometimes think it’d be very interesting to work in one. Or even to run one. I’d make sure there were some really interesting lessons, though I wouldn’t call them “lessons.” That’s what my “Extraordinary Activities” are – much more exciting and productive than the worksheets put out by the Mrs. Scullerys of this world!
Here is another. I expect I will put in others as I go along.
EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY
(DAYTIME VERSION)
Touch the tip of the index finger to the tip of the thumb, making a ring. Look through the ring into the sky.* See the great emptiness there. Contemplate this emptiness. Wait Don’t move. Perhaps there is a tiny dot in the emptiness, which is a skylark singing so high up that it’s almost out of sight. Perhaps not. Perhaps there really is just emptiness. Sooner or later a bird will appear for a second in your view and will fly away. Something appears in nothing, and then disappears. Keep looking. Sooner or later another bird will appear to take its place. Keep looking. It may be that several birds appear together. Keep looking. Keep looking. Allow the extraordinary sky into your mind. Consider the fact that your head is large enough to contain the sky. That is all, and it is hardly anything at all. No need to write anything down unless you would like to. Just remember. And wonder. And do the activity again when you have a moment. Do not worry about staring into space. It is an excellent thing to do.
EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY
(NIGHTTIME VERSION)
Touch the tip of the index finger to the tip of the thumb, making a ring. Look through the ring into the sky.* See the great abundance there. Contemplate this abundance: the stars and galaxies, the planets, the great great darkness, the stars so far away in time and space they look like scatterings of silver dust. Consider the unimaginable amount of space and time that is circled by the ring you have made. Consider that this unimaginable amount is just a tiny fragment of the universe, of eternity. Keep looking. Keep looking. Things will move across your vision: a flickering bat, a swooping owl; the high-up light of an airplane, the slow slow flashing of a satellite. Keep looking. Keep looking. Allow the abundant night into your mind. Consider the fact that your head is large enough to contain the night. That is all, and it is hardly anything at all. No need to write anything down unless you would like to. Just remember. And wonder. And do the activity again when you have a moment. Do not worry about staring into the dark. It is an excellent thing to do.
* * *
* And incidentally VERBS ARE NOT “DOING WORDS.” “Stop” is a verb. And if I say “I stop,” I have stopped doing anything. I am doing absolutely nothing whatsoever at all! I would have told Mrs. Scullery that, but by this time she was getting totally fed up with me. She would have said, “That is just playing with words,” and I would have answered, “And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!” Which she wouldn’t have understood at all and which would have made her even more and more fed up.
* Do not look into the sun, of course. (Health & Safety Warning!)
* Do not look into the moon, of course. (Health & Sanity Warning!)
Night again. Spring is strange. The year’s supposed to be moving towards summer, but sometimes it seems to be turning right back to winter again. The sky was the color of steel all day. There was frost in the morning and it stayed all day under the trees and on the shady side of the garden wall.
I went out and climbed into the tree but the bark was icy and the breeze was bitter and even with two fleeces on I was freezing cold. The blackbirds didn’t seem to care. They went on flying in and out of the tree, singing and squawking. But what if this year the spring didn’t come at all? What if something dreadful had happened to the seasons for some awful reason?
I jumped down to the ground. Not a soul to be seen. I knelt on the grass and banged the ground with my fist and said,
“Come on, Persephone! Don’t give up, Persephone!”
Persephone, who I thought I might meet during my journey to the Underworld, spends the winter in Hades with Pluto, the King of the Underworld. When it’s time for spring she makes her way back up to the earth again. Spring doesn’t start until she’s back. In ancient Greece, they had music and dancing and singing to call her back, to make sure that spring arrived again.
/> “Come on!” I said, more loudly. I punched the ground again. I imagined her coming up through the earth’s endless complicated tunnels. “Keep going! Don’t get lost! Don’t give up!”
I looked up and there was a woman, staring down at me. I think I recognized her from somewhere nearby. She had a checked green coat on, a woolly scarf, a yellow hat, white hair, and very kind eyes. She had a shopping bag on wheels with her.
“Are you all right, my dear?” she said.
“Yes, thank you.”
“You’ll catch your death down there,” she said.
“I’ll be all right. I’m just calling for Persephone.”
She made a little laughing sound.
“The goddess of the spring!” she said.
“You know about her!”
“Of course I do, dear. Doesn’t everybody?” She cupped a shaky hand around her mouth and whispered, “Come on, Persephone! Come back up to the world again! We’re freezing cold up here!” She giggled. She looked around. “Folk’ll think we’re daft.” She looked at me. “Do you think we’re daft?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. What’s a world without daftness in it?”
“What’s your name?” she said.
“My name’s Mina.”
“Hello, Mina. My name’s Grace.”
“Hello, Grace.”
She smiled and reached across the garden wall and took my hands in hers. Her hands were bony, dry and cold.
She winked at me.
“I’ve seen you in your tree, Mina. You look quite at home up there.”
“I am.”
“I used to love climbing, when I was a girl. I used to dream of climbing trees all day, stepping and swinging from one to the next, never once coming down to ground.”