Mira in the Present Tense

by Sita Brahmachari

  “Jidé. What about your surname? Did you find out any-thing more?”

  Jidé shakes his head. Suddenly Jidé the joker looks miserable. It’s like we’ve swapped roles.

  “That’s a shame,” sighs Pat.

  “‘We don’t have that information.’ That’s what Grace said when I asked her if we could ever trace my original surname. I wasn’t always a Jackson.”

  I’ve never heard Jidé talk so quietly.

  “I don’t know what my birth name is. I had a sister, she was about three, they think, older than me anyway…but she wouldn’t speak, not even to tell them her name or mine. Grace said she was too traumatized to talk. Grace and Jai, they gave me the name BabaJidé when they found me. I told you, didn’t I, it means ‘father has returned,’ and even though Jai saw so many children out there, he had a feeling as soon as he saw me that he should be my father. I was about a year old, they’re not sure. I have a made-up birthday. And…my birthparents, who knows? You probably saw them on the news, floating down the river.”

  The words from Jidé’s list echo around my mind.

  A blueberry-colored rash starts to spread up Pat Print’s neck and over her face. I didn’t have her down as a blusher.

  “Rwanda…is that right?”

  Jidé nods.

  “What did Grace and Jai do out there?” she asks gently.

  “Aid workers in one of the refugee camps, the one my sister walked into with me. I suppose I could research what happened to people like my birthparents, but I could never find out my proper name,” explains Jidé. “Anyway, I’m lucky to be alive, aren’t I? Because my sister…she didn’t…” Jidé trails off.

  He suddenly looks exhausted. I don’t think he talks about his past to many people. I haven’t really understood this before, about Jidé, how much he doesn’t say. The layers of his heart are well protected. Even the way he tells us all this is said in a matter-of-fact sort of voice, but he can’t disguise the fact that he’s angry. Now I think I understand why there are all these different edges to him. Jidé the joker, Jidé with attitude, Jidé trying his best to hide how clever he is, although at least in Pat Print’s class he seems to be giving up on that one. Nana thinks I’m lucky because I haven’t had a reason to grow protective layers. Jidé has, and suddenly this all makes me feel like I live in a very cozy little world. A minute ago we were discussing names. Now, suddenly, we’re in Rwanda. I don’t even know where Rwanda is.

  I’ve been trying to work out what’s different about this class. I don’t know what it is about Pat Print, but she’s definitely got this way of letting people say what they want to say. Once she gets us all talking it’s as if she’s almost not here at all; she sort of disappears from the room while the conversation’s flowing and only really steps back in to start it up again, like keeping one of Laila’s spinning tops whirling. Maybe that’s why Jidé Jackson has talked about himself for the first time ever. I don’t think anyone in this room knew that about Jidé, and I’ve been at school with him since primary. By the look on Ben’s face, he didn’t know either.

  Pat Print sighs deeply. That’s the other thing about her. She’s not scared of long silences like some teachers are. It’s weird, but you don’t get embarrassed in the silence in her class and it doesn’t feel like a punishment either. It’s actually a relief to have the time to feel whatever it is you’re feeling, and after what Jidé’s told us I think she’s right…we need a bit of time to let it all sink in.

  “Now, how did you get on with your diaries?” Pat asks, breaking the quiet.

  “Nothing happened to me this week,” booms Ben.

  “Nothing never happens,” replies Pat, smiling.

  “It does to me,” sulks Ben.

  “I did it,” perks up Millie enthusiastically. “But I’d rather not read it out loud.”

  “You’re just trying to get us interested,” jokes Ben.

  “Did it work?” laughs Millie.

  I think Millie and Ben are flirting with each other!

  “Fair enough,” says Pat. “Jidé?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Now you said you’ve got something for me, Mira. Will you read it out to us?”

  I take out my red leather diary. I have already decided which bits I don’t mind them hearing about—obviously there are some things I wouldn’t want any of them to know, not even Millie and especially not Jidé!

  “I got this diary last week. It starts on my birthday, but I’ll read last Sunday. That’s the day me and Nana went to buy paint,” I explain.

  We park right next to Dusty Bird’s art shop. Nana leans on my arm as Mum and I walk her inside. She wants acrylic water-based paints. Nana says it’s very important to choose the exact colors she has in her mind…

  All the way through reading this, I feel Jidé watching me and properly listening, and all I can feel is guilty, because I’m talking about my nana dying…and in a way she’s had her life, and such a good life and a rich life. I just wish that Jidé’s family were alive. I wish that his little sister hadn’t died so young and that he knew her name. Because I can’t stop thinking about Jidé, I’ve forgotten how much I hate reading aloud. Anyway, reading out your work isn’t so bad because at least you can lean on the words you’ve already written. I don’t manage to get to the end because the bell rings for the start of school. Usually everyone jumps up and starts packing their things away, but today, nobody moves till I get to the end of my sentence.

  When someone is dying, everything you say and do means more than it normally does. When someone is dying, you notice things…everything really. The whole of life is in slow motion.

  There’s that silence again…the one where you can hear people’s thoughts echoing around the room. Jidé nods and smiles at me sadly. Somehow, since he told us what he told us, he seems less tough.

  “Everything OK?” chirps Miss Poplar, peering round the door and spotting Moses. She raises her right eyebrow. That means something’s happening that shouldn’t be happening…Miss Poplar never raises her voice, just her right eyebrow. In this case that right eyebrow is managing to say two things at the same time—“Dogs aren’t allowed in school” and “Why aren’t you wearing your uniforms correctly?”—but she doesn’t say anything to Pat Print, not in front of us anyway.

  “I wish you could have heard what I just heard. Mira read us a diary entry about her grandmother,” Pat Print tells Miss Poplar.

  Sometimes, because I don’t talk very much, some adults might assume I don’t think much either. Maybe Pat Print thought that about me.

  “When I agreed to take this job, I anticipated it would be a nice little bit of research, nothing too stretching, but I feel absolutely wrung out by the talent and the bravery of your students,” Pat says, looking from Miss Poplar to Jidé. “Jidé, could you just stay on for a minute.” It’s Jidé’s turn for a private word.

  I wonder what she could possibly say to him to make it better.

  “Excuse me, I’ve got to go now,” I say, standing up and packing up my diary.

  I feel Jidé’s eyes on my back as I leave the room.

  Millie and Ben follow me out into the corridor.

  “Where is Rwanda anyway?” Ben asks Millie.

  “Africa,” Millie answers without hesitation.

  “How do you get to know so much about everything?” asks Ben.

  “Try reading!” smiles Millie.

  Ben sticks his tongue out at her and wanders off laughing and occasionally glancing back at her.

  “Did you bring your mobile in today?” asks Millie.

  I get my pebble out of my pocket to show her.

  “You’re so lucky. My mum would never let me bring mine into school.”

  “Mine wouldn’t either!”

  “Aren’t you the rebel! What’s your number?”

  I have it stuck to the back of the phone until I remember it, which will probably be never because I’m rubbish at memorizing numbers. Millie repeats it over a few times
out loud.

  “OK, got that. I’ll call you. I wish I could come with you. Remember the last time we went?”

  It was only last summer that Millie and me were together in Suffolk, jumping off the dunes and making a den down on the marsh. I can’t imagine us doing that now. It feels like a whole lifetime away.

  Still, the thought of Millie being the first person to call me on my mobile cheers me up as I walk along the corridor following the faint mud trail of Pat Print’s journey into school.

  As we drive past the school on our way to pick up Nana, Pat Print and Miss Poplar are standing at the end of the walkway to school that leads out onto the road. Miss Poplar waves and says something to Pat, who peers into our car. She glances from Mum to Dad, past my brother and sister till she finally sees me. Then she waves, smiles, and blows me a kiss.

  “Who’s that with Miss Poplar?” asks Mum.

  “That’s Pat Print, the writer woman I told you about.”

  “Why did she blow you a kiss?” asks Krish, pulling his grossed-out face.

  I shrug. “I think she likes my writing.”

  “It’s a bit weird though. It’s not as if she knows you or anything.”

  “Miss Poplar’s probably told her why we’re going to Suffolk. Maybe she feels sorry for us.”

  “Why do you call her by her first name anyway?”

  I can’t be bothered to answer Krish.

  “Guess what her dog’s called?” I say, attempting to change the subject.

  “Shep,” tries Dad. “Or Lassie? Or—”

  “Do you want to know or not?” I say, cutting him off and wishing I’d never asked in the first place.

  “Want to know what?” asks Dad.

  “Her dog’s name,” I sigh, almost giving up completely.

  “Go on then,” encourages Mum.

  “Moses!”

  “Jesus, not him again,” groans Dad.

  “Not Jesus, Moses,” jokes Krish.

  This is how conversations go in our house. What is the point?

  We are making this trip to Suffolk because Nana needs to see the big Suffolk sky just once more. There is a lot of sky in Suffolk—that’s why people from London like it, because of the wide-open sky and sea, with nothing on the horizon.

  Nana has a little wooden cottage, like a doll’s house; everything in it is small and delicate. It’s got a white porch, like a summerhouse, looking onto the garden. There are pots and hanging things on little hooks all over the porch…pottery birds, horseshoes, a rusty green wind chime that’s lost its chime, a Jeremy Fisher frog sitting on a lily pad, a rusty Indian metal heart with bells threaded through it and Nana’s long string of holey stones, stretching from one end of the porch to the other. I learned to count on those holey stones.

  High up on a whitewashed shelf, always in exactly the same place, sits the flycatcher’s pot. Every summer a family of flycatchers make their journey over the Sahara desert from Africa to the same little white pot that sits on Nana Josie’s porch. They’ve been coming here for as long as Nana can remember. Those little birds could have sat on a branch near Jidé’s mum and dad and flown thousands and thousands of kilometers over land and sea, just to be in Nana’s garden. She says she feels privileged to have, what she calls, her “feathered guests,” and that when she’s gone we must be very quiet, at the time of the flycatchers, so they will know they’re still welcome. But we can’t really be quiet enough. Nana used to stand for hours painting at her easel in the garden, hardly moving at all, but Krish is always kicking a football or playing cricket or swing ball, and as for Laila, well, you can’t make her be quiet unless she’s asleep or ill. Even I can’t be as quiet as Nana. Anyway, it’s too early for the flycatchers.

  Nana and Laila have both slept all the way from London. They look so peaceful when they’re asleep, like when they wake up, nothing in the world could bother them. We finally turn off onto the bumpety lane leading to the cottage. We wait in the car while Mum and Dad get out and unlock the flaky blue door that Dad and me painted Duck-Egg Blue. As Krish races out of the car, slamming the door behind him, Nana wakes up. She sits and stares at her cottage as if she’s seeing it for the very first time. Then she turns to sleeping Laila and touches her rosy cheek with the back of her hand. I think she might not even know that I’m still sitting next to her until she slips her hand into mine.

  “Muuuuum, Miiiiiiira, what are you doing?” Dad calls to us from the open doorway of the cottage.

  “Remembering,” Nana whispers.

  “I’ve lit the fire, just to air the place out a bit.” Dad says as he opens the car door and gently eases Nana out of her seat. Then he wraps his arm round Nana’s shoulder and walks her slowly inside.

  We sit together, Nana and me, watching the flames dance while Mum and Dad are busy unpacking and making the beds up for tonight. Laila is still asleep in her car seat, and Krish is out playing swing ball in the back garden.

  The walls of the sitting room are covered in Nana’s paintings. I follow her eyes around the room at all that she has created. There are paintings of me and Krish and one of Laila too.

  It’s like this between Nana and me—we’ve always been happy just to sit together. We don’t even need to talk. When I was eleven, we used to play her game, A Penny for Them, where we would try to read each other’s thoughts, and Nana was nearly always right about what I was thinking…but not today, because my silence is full of Jidé Jackson who she doesn’t even know exists. I get out my mobile and the manual I haven’t read yet and start to mess around with the functions, finding out all the things it can do. I check for messages, but there are none. I turn to the texting page of the manual to work out how to text. I like the idea that you can send messages without anyone overhearing what you’re saying.

  “That’s what I hate about those things. They stop people from living in the moment. Have you had anyone call you on it yet?” Nana asks, jolting me back to her.

  I shake my head and slip my mobile back in my pocket.

  “It’s far too hot in here. Come on, let’s have a look at the garden,” Nana says, standing up and walking toward the back door and out through the porch.

  Nana’s garden is for birds, butterflies, frogs, dogs, and humans. “In that order,” she jokes. All through the winter she hangs fat balls from the trees for the birds to eat. If she hasn’t been for a while, she’ll make a special trip just to replace them, so the birds don’t go hungry.

  In the middle of the garden there’s a pond, which used to have fish in it, but a heron moved in last year and ate them all. There are grasses at the corner of the pond and a few newts, which Nana calls “the ancients of the garden,” swimming in the murky water. There are always frogs hopping around or bathing just underneath the slimy green leaves at the water’s edge. By the side of the pond is Nana’s spring garden, which is just about still flowering, though Nana says it’s past its best. There are primroses, bluebells, bright pink tulips, and snakehead flowers with veiny, plum-colored leaves…delicate as Nana’s hands.

  The stone man we bought Nana for her birthday a few years ago—she calls him “my man in Suffolk”—stands in the middle of the spring garden in his artist’s smock enjoying the flowers and the birds.

  Behind the stone man you can just see the disused old railway wagon through the thicket of brambles, the wagon that my dad and Aunty Abi used to camp in when they brought their school friends to Suffolk. When Millie was here, we had this big plan that we would renovate it, but we couldn’t even get to it through the thicket of brambles.

  I sit next to Nana on her rusty old bench.

  “What are you looking at, Nana?”

  She places her hand in mine. “The past. Do you want to see?”

  I nod.

  “Over there is your daddy, my little Sam, six years old, taking his white rabbit for a walk on a leash…Pipkin, his name was. Sam’s pulling him away from the pond—he’s worried he might hop in. And there on the porch is my beautiful Abi, with her l
ong curly locks, pacing up and down, practicing her lines for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  As she speaks, Nana points, as if each person from the past is appearing in front of her eyes.

  “Out of sight, is the railway wagon, covered in brambles. There I am with your mum and dad painting sunflowers and butterflies, red admirals and cabbage whites on the railway wagon. They keep disappearing round the back to have a snog. They think I don’t notice.”

  I groan at the thought of Mum and Dad snogging, but Nana doesn’t seem to hear. She takes a deep, deep breath, as if she would like to breathe in all these memories as she holds my hand and we walk around the garden together.

  “And there you are, my darling Mira, standing next to me, under my parasol…just four years old…and little Krish tottering around trying to catch goldfish in the pond with the stick-and-string rod I made him.”

  Nana paints the picture of the past so clearly that it almost feels like part of my own memory. She has a way of drawing you in like that…making you feel like you’re the only one that matters in the world.

  “Lunchtime,” Mum calls, opening the door on to the garden and releasing a delicious smell.

  Jill, one of Nana’s Suffolk friends, left a soup simmering on the stove so that Nana would have something to eat as soon as we arrived. We sit round Nana’s rickety table, slurping. You have to be very careful not to lean too hard on this table or it will collapse.

  Nana keeps looking from one of us to the other, giving us the loveliest of smiles like she’s completely happy now that we’ve brought her here. Then suddenly Dad starts to cry. He’s trying his hardest not to, but his body is shaking with man tears. He leans close to his bowl to cover it up, but he just ends up crying into it.

  “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.