Mira in the Present Tense

by Sita Brahmachari

  Doris opens the curtains and there she is, my Nana Josie, sitting up in bed, with a weak smile on her face.

  Even though I’m not wearing my watch something strange is definitely happening to time. It’s as if we’ve stepped out of it.

  Nana has an oxygen mask over her mouth and she’s leaning back on her pillow. Dr. Clem and Question Mark pull chairs up to Nana’s bed and ask everyone to sit down. Dr. Clem sits next to Nana Josie, leaning into the bed but resting one foot, to steady himself, on the floor. That’s how he sits with patients as if to say, “I’m on your side.”

  “Josie has asked me to speak to you.” Dr. Clem’s warm smile spreads over us again.

  Nana Josie lifts her head up and nods encouragingly to Dr. Clem, as if she has given him her blessing.

  “As you have probably gathered, we tried to move Josie just now, and she became very anxious. She’s in a state of exhaustion, but she has managed to tell us what she wants, or rather, what she doesn’t want.”

  Dr. Clem takes a deep breath, as if he’s gathering the courage to speak.

  “The purpose of the procedure we were planning was to ease Josie’s breathing. It would certainly give her more time, but after a short while the fluid in her lungs would only build up again.”

  Like drowning.

  Dr. Clem speaks very slowly, as if he’s rehearsing what he’s saying in his head before he actually speaks.

  “Josie has decided that, now that she’s here, she doesn’t want to be moved out of the hospice.”

  Dr. Clem pauses, looking around at each member of the family in case we want to ask him anything, but no one says a word. Nana Josie lifts her arm and pats him on the shoulder. Something has changed. Now Nana doesn’t look worried anymore. Even so, for the whole meeting, my dad sits with his head practically on his knees as everyone else listens to Dr. Clem.

  Krish even puts his hand up as if he’s in class and asks Nana straight out. “Do you actually want to die now, Nana?”

  She just looks at him in a kind way and turns to Dr. Clem.

  “She doesn’t want anymore pain, and that’s what we can do for her here in the hospice, make sure she has no more pain,” explains Dr. Clem, taking hold of Krish’s hand.

  Nana nods. She looks like she’s about to cry and so does Dr. Clem, but instead he takes a deep breath and carries on. He tells us that the pain relief will make Nana sleep more and that she might have very strong dreams. He says we can come to the hospice whenever we want. All the time he’s talking, Dr. Clem is trying to get my dad to look at him and after the meeting he takes Dad by the shoulder and leads him out of the ward. They sit in a room at the end of the corridor, talking. By the time Dad comes out he looks better, more settled.

  So here we are, my dad and me, holding Nana’s hands and watching her sleep. Now it’s my turn to cry. Dad strokes my hair as Nana sleeps.

  “I’m not sure I agree with all this,” Crystal pipes up, pointing vaguely in my direction. “Is it really necessary to drag the children through it?”

  I don’t know who Crystal’s talking to. Some adults do that, talk about you as if you aren’t in the room. She doesn’t really talk to Clara. I don’t think they like each other much, so I suppose she must be talking to Dad, but he’s miles away, lost in his own thoughts. To answer, Clara shoots Crystal a stony look and reaches out to me. Something about her thin, veiny arms reminds me of the oak outside the window, stretching its gnarly branches toward us.

  Saturday, 7 May

  No sign of Notsurewho Notsurewhat.

  No call from Jidé Jackson.

  Crystal is still “beautifying” herself, applying her bright blue eyeshadow and pink dolly cheeks.

  “You’ve caught me putting on my mask!” she jokes.

  “When do you ever take it off?” snaps Clara.

  Crystal ignores her as usual, patting the covers on the bed for me to sit down next to her. I think it might be rude not to, so I do. She whispers to me so that Clara can’t hear.

  “I’ve been looking after myself like this since I was about your age. You’ve got good skin too,” she says, touching my cheek.

  It’s a good thing my spot has disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived.

  “I used to have smooth skin like yours…Plenty of young men will want to kiss you.” She squeezes my cheek. I feel myself turning bright red. I hate it when people do that, as if you’re a pet.

  “Still, my time passed long ago—there’s nothing for it but to make the best of it,” she sighs, puffing white powder on top of her pink blush.

  I can’t think of what to say to Crystal so I smile politely and say nothing, remembering what Mum always says: “If you can’t think of anything kind to say to someone, don’t say anything at all.” I think Crystal wants me to say that she still looks good, but there is no way I could bring myself to say anything like that without blushing bright red and revealing to the whole world that I was lying.

  I think Clara and Nana must have been chatting in the night, because when they sit up in bed they smile at each other like old friends even though it might look from the outside as if they wouldn’t have much in common. For a start, it’s Clara’s clothes—she wears this long, flowery nightgown that stops just above her knee. These are the sort of old ladies’ clothes they sell in Blustons in Kentish Town. Whenever we used to pass that shop, Nana would say how much she loved the name, because it conjures up the image of “blouses on bustling old ladies, squeezing onto buses.” When we walk past Blustons, Krish stares through the shop window at the models with enormous bosoms advertising their bras. Clara is definitely wearing a Blustons nightgown, but it’s about three sizes too big for her. I wonder whether she was once actually quite what Nana calls “Blustony.” Whatever Clara used to look like, now she is thin, like Nana. Clara mutters to herself from time to time, saying things like, “Bloody awful business this…Can you get me out of here?”

  She asks me that when I’m passing her bed, and she makes me feel sorry I can’t help her, but, as Doris keeps trying to explain: “Nobody’s keeping you here, Clara, my dear, it’s just we want to make sure you’re looked after.”

  Clara doesn’t have any visitors.

  “I don’t want to bother them—my boy’s got his own life to get on with,” Clara tells us, then she goes back to chanting, “Bloody awful business this…Can you get me out of here?”

  Sometimes, when we’re all crowded around Nana Josie’s bed, I see this look cross Clara’s face, like she wishes someone would go over and talk to her. She loves Piper, and he loves her. From time to time he jumps onto her bed and she makes “a right old fuss of him.” You can hear her muttering, “Piper, good sort, isn’t he, Josie?”

  Crystal takes this personally, as Clara doesn’t seem to pay any attention at all to Lad. Sometimes, Clara adds under her breath (just to annoy Crystal, I think), “Never been fond of big dogs.”

  The only reason that Crystal, Clara, and Nana Josie are together in this room is because of cancer. I sometimes dream that cancer is like a monster’s shadow and I try to fight it, but it’s not even solid enough to kick or punch. I walk all around it, trying to find a way to scream at it to get out of my nana, but it doesn’t have a face or eyes. I don’t really know how to kill it, so I just shout at it really loudly until I wake myself up. I have this dream quite a lot since Nana got ill.

  There is a therapist lady downstairs in the hospice where you can go to draw pictures of how you feel. She asked me and Krish if we wanted to see her room. Krish didn’t want to. Her room has children’s pictures all over the walls, beanbags on the floor, and paints and crayons everywhere. I drew her my dream of the monster’s shadow in dark smudgy charcoal-y shadows. She said that my dream is my way of facing my fears. I just think that cancer is very, very frightening if you’re asleep or awake, but Nana says that one day, probably in my lifetime, they will find a way to kill it off.

  When I tell Nana about the therapist, she explains to me that the hospice loo
ks after people in all kinds of pain. She says that some people are in pain because their hearts are breaking and they are about to lose the people they love.

  “Like us,” I whisper.

  Nana nods.

  “Can your heart actually break, Nana?”

  “That’s what we call it, Mira, but it doesn’t exactly break. It’s something more complicated than that—it’s more like a sore than a break. When the wound is raw, it feels like it will never heal. I think that’s why they call it a break.”

  “Has that ever happened to you?” I ask Nana.

  “Oh yes.”

  “Can you fix it then, a broken heart?”

  “No, that’s what I mean. It’s not as simple as that…it sort of heals over in time, but it always leaves a scar. Each time you get hurt, you put a little protective layer round the wound, like a bandage, so that the next time you can’t be damaged quite so easily. Remember the artichoke leaves?”

  I nod. “What does it feel like, Nana?”

  “Hard to say. There are so many different kinds of heartbreak.”

  “How many?”

  “Let me think…Ah yes! If you draw the most beautiful picture for someone and you put all your energy and love and imagination into it, and then you give it to the person and later you find it in the trash. It’s called rejection, as if they’ve thrown a little bit of you away.”

  Nana always does that—if she’s describing something complicated, she gives you examples of things she knows you’ll understand, but even since my birthday Nana doesn’t know how much I’ve changed. How can she even start to guess at how much more I know now? She’s thinking about the time when a teacher told me that the poem I wrote about India was all wrong and I had to start again because it wasn’t what she’d asked for. I had researched it in the library the night before and asked Granddad Bimal to describe the place where he was born. So when Miss Fallow threw it in the trash it was a bit like she was throwing a part of me away too. Nana could see how upset I was so she got her famous poet friend to read it, and he wrote me a note to tell me how much he liked it and a note for Miss Fallow too. Then Nana marched into school with Piper by her side and stood outside the classroom till Miss Fallow came out.

  “A poet friend of mine has made a dedication to you. Would you like to read it? It’s very short,” Nana announced without waiting for an answer.

  Then she thrust the poem in front of Miss Fallow who blushed bright red and did not look very happy. The poem said:

  Dear Miss Fallow,

  Feel it in the marrow

  Poems aren’t wrong!

  Miss Fallow just looked at Piper and announced, “Dogs aren’t allowed in school.”

  “Neither are bullies,” Nana shot back, stomping off down the corridor with her nose in the air. My nana doesn’t do rules.

  She says it’s the parents’ and grandparents’ job to protect children’s hearts.

  “What if their parents are dead?” The question is out before I can think about what I’m asking.

  “Your parents aren’t going to die, Mira…not for a long time.”

  Nana thinks I’m worrying about myself. Since I decided to keep my period a secret, it’s easier not to tell other things too. I always used to tell Nana exactly what I was thinking about and she would always have an opinion. But Nana doesn’t know everything about me anymore, and something about the way she’s looking at me, right at this very moment, makes me think she knows that I’m holding a little part of me back from her.

  “Nana, some people at school think I shouldn’t see you so much when you’re dying,” I say to avoid her piercing look.

  “That’s the wrong kind of protection, Mira. This is a necessary heartbreak.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you’ve loved someone and you have to say good-bye, there’s no avoiding it, but about Miss Fallow…tell me, when you do something like that now, a poem or a painting, would you show it to her again?”

  “I would know the kind of person to show it to. I’d let Pat Print see it…I would trust her. It wouldn’t bother me now if Miss Fallow liked it or not.”

  “Aha! You see. You’ve wrapped a little protective layer round your heart, like the leaves of the artichoke charm. Who’s this Pat Print anyway?”

  “A writer, she’s doing these workshops in my school…”

  But Nana’s not listening to me anymore. Looking at her as she drifts off to sleep, I realize that she thinks I’m so much younger than I am. What she doesn’t realize is that Miss Fallow and the poem…that is so in the past. The truth is right now I don’t know if I want to see my nana slowly fading away like this. Is this…a necessary heartbreak?

  Sunday, 8 May

  Still no call from Jidé Jackson.

  I am starting to lose faith in Notsurewho Notsurewhat.

  Just as I arrived at the hospice today, Nana’s eyes were growing heavy. She told me yesterday that when she nods off it feels like she’s stepping off a mountain and falling, but it’s not a horrible feeling; she says it’s a bit like floating. I thought of the reed beds and the swaying golden grasses as her head rocked back onto her pillow. I have been sitting here for nearly an hour just watching Nana sleep.

  She’s wearing my favorite orange gauzy cotton top. It has sequins round the neck and little ties with bells. Her body is the size of a skinny child. Nana’s arms are more like Laila’s when she was a newborn, as if they need stuffing with something to fill the loose skin. I am bigger than my nana now, taller and more solid.

  Mum and Krish wander along the corridor to the Family Room to make some tea. I don’t like it in there because you always see someone crying, and when they see you, they pretend they’re making a cup of tea or getting something out of the fridge, which is always empty, except for Nana’s health food. But there is a television in there, which Krish loves, and some toys and books, which Laila loves, so you can sort of use it like your own living room. You can even sleep there if you want. People do.

  I look at Nana and find myself wondering for the first time in my life what I will have to say to her when she wakes up. I suppose I could ask her about Rwanda and she would definitely know and she would definitely have an opinion, and if I told her about him she would want to know everything that I know about Jidé Jackson. I walk over to the window and look out onto the street.

  “What’s going on in the outside world?” asks Nana, jolting me back to her. “Be my eyes, Mira.”

  “Nothing much…There’s a woman walking her dog.”

  As she gets closer, I recognize her. It’s Pat Print and Moses. This is starting to freak me out.

  “What’s so interesting?” asks Nana, propping herself up on her pillow to get a better view of the street.

  “It’s that writer woman I was telling you about from school.”

  As Pat Print walks farther down the street, Nana props herself up to get a closer look.

  “That’s Mo.” Nana points to Moses. “Piper and Mo are great pals.”

  “Do you know her then, Nana?”

  Nana studies Pat Print’s back for a while as she makes her way up the road.

  “I suppose I might have seen her about the place—she looks vaguely familiar—but it’s a young girl with two or three dogs who walks Mo.”

  So, instead of asking Nana about Rwanda I tell her about Pat Print’s writing class and seeing her in Suffolk on the beach…and what Millie found out about her ancestor actually having Robert the Something’s heart locked up in a box…and Millie’s ancestor being the only one with a key.

  “The guardian of the heart…she’s a good friend to have,” smiles Nana as Pat Print disappears round the corner at the end of the road.

  “It’s a bit weird, don’t you think, Nana? That I keep seeing her, the writer woman?”

  “Perhaps she’s your guardian angel. Or, more likely, me and her, we just walk the same paths!” Nana says, winking at me.

  I wake up to the smell of burning toast and t
he screech of the smoke alarm. Feeling more tired than I did when I went to bed, I wander downstairs in my pajamas, checking my phone for…nothing.

  Monday, 9 May

  “Come on, Mira, stop messing around with that now, you’ll be late for school.” Mum hurries me along on her morning conveyor belt of making sandwiches, breakfasts, and attempting to get us all out of the door on time. There is no room in this well-rehearsed schedule for me to arrive downstairs in my pajamas at 8:30 a.m.

  “I don’t feel well, Mum.”

  “Neither do I,” moans Krish.

  “You’re fine, Krish. You’ve just eaten three rounds of toast. Do you want anything to eat, Mira?”

  I hold my belly as if it’s hurting and shake my head, even though my stomach is rumbling loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “Go on then. You’d better go back up to bed. I’ll come and take your temperature when I’ve got Krish off to school.”

  “Why don’t you take it now, then you’ll see she’s faking.”

  I pinch Krish hard on the arm as I pass him on the stairs.

  “Awwwww!” he yelps. “That really hurt.”

  “He’s just faking it, Mum,” I say, sneering at him.

  “Off to bed with you then.” Mum whisks me off, tea towel flapping.

  The letterbox clanks, I hear Mum telling Millie I’m not going in and the door closing behind her. Now I feel guilty. I think about getting dressed and running into school after Millie, but it’s too late.

  I am bored and hungry and all Mum has given me to eat is dry toast, crackers, and water. She says that should settle my stomach. Even though Granddad Bimal’s a doctor, she hates people being ill. Whenever I’m off sick, I always remember, too late, that you don’t get much sympathy when you’re ill with Mum. It’s just not worth it. Some people get to sit in front of the TV all day, being served up drinks and bits and pieces of delicious food. Not with my mum. You have to stay in your room and read or sleep. You’re much better off being ill when Dad’s around.