What Milo Saw

by Virginia MacGregor

  ‘We can’t afford to be making a mess, Tahir,’ said Nurse Thornhill.

  Tahir was his proper on-paper name, but everyone back in Syria called him Tripi. It was the name his little sister gave him when she learnt English and found out that the verb ‘to trip’ meant to fall over things. It’s what clumsy people do, she said. People who fall over their big feet. She looked up from her dictionary, her brown eyes sparkling. From now on, I’m calling you Tripi!

  ‘I’m sorry, Nurse Thornhill.’ Tripi took some kitchen paper and mopped up the spilled water.

  ‘I need your address.’ She placed a blue form by the side of the sink and pointed to a column of empty boxes.

  Steam from the colander curled the edges of the paper. Tripi stared at the words with the blanks next to them: street, city, county, country, telephone number. There were other boxes, too, like National Insurance Number, but Nurse Thornhill said not to worry about those.

  His address? The wet grass that made his knees creak as he bowed down to do his prayers. The thick grey sky that swallowed the sun and thundered with planes. He closed his eyes and thought of Damascus. The reds and purples of the souk, the smell of raw coffee steaming in glass tumblers, his little sister sitting on a high stool in the kitchen telling him what she had learnt at school that day.

  ‘Tripi, did you hear what I said?’

  Tripi opened his eyes and nodded quickly. ‘Yes, yes, my address. I will get it to you.’

  He watched the thin white nurse walk to the big swing doors. The first time he saw her he’d been impressed – so neat and tidy and clean, devoting her life to these old people. He’d felt sorry for her too, living here in the nursing home in her small flat, no husband, no family.

  Before she left, Nurse Thornhill turned and looked at him with her pale, washed-out eyes.

  ‘And no more of that foreign singing. Our visitors don’t like it.’

  As Nurse Thornhill pushed out through the kitchen doors, Tripi thought of that small round wrinkly face staring through the window, and then the little boy’s face beside hers. They had smiled at his singing.

  6

  MILO

  A thump.

  Milo’s eyes flew open.

  A crash.

  Hamlet squirmed his way up the bed covers and stood on Milo’s chest, his ears pinned back.

  The floorboards shuddered overhead. A bit of plaster dust came loose from the ceiling and landed on Hamlet’s black ear. Milo blew it away and gave Hamlet’s ear a kiss.

  And then Hamlet and Milo waited to hear what came next.

  It was a game they played with Gran, listening really hard and trying to make out as many sounds as possible. Gran had invented it when Milo came back from the first appointment for his eyes with Dr Nolan.

  We need to sharpen your other senses, Gran had scribbled on her pad.

  Gran’s theory was that if Milo could hear, smell, taste and feel things better than everyone else, and listen to that voice in his gut too, it would make up for the things he missed in his periphery vision.

  Milo screwed shut his eyes and listened harder.

  A thud like someone had dropped a really heavy book.

  The creak of footsteps walking from one end of the attic to the other.

  Something being zipped open and zipped shut again.

  And then a smash.

  And after that a sigh – not so you could hear, Gran didn’t do things out loud, but a big, fat sigh inside her head and her heart, so big that Hamlet and Milo felt it too.

  Milo rubbed his eyes and turned his head towards the window. It was still dark outside. The orange street lamps buzzed.

  ‘Come on.’ Milo scooped Hamlet up into his arms. ‘Gran needs us.’

  Milo crept past his mum’s bedroom and stopped for a second to check that she was asleep. When Dad first left, Milo would hear her creaking down the stairs, moving around in the kitchen, the suck as she opened the freezer and the clunk as she closed it again and then the low buzz of the telly from the lounge. The next day he’d find her asleep on the sofa, a soup spoon and a soggy tub of Cherry Garcia ice cream lying in a sticky mess on the coffee table. She hadn’t done it for a while, but she still had bad days.

  When he thought he could hear Mum’s sleep-breathing, Milo moved on to the stairs in the attic. As the fairy lights blurred in and out of focus through his tired eyes he felt a fluttering in his chest, which meant that Gran must have the flutter too, which would explain why she couldn’t sleep and why she was clomping around and sighing so much.

  Milo hated the thought that this might be the last night he’d come up these stairs to find her, that soon the nurse in her white uniform with her white teeth and her plastic smile would be looking after her.

  He knocked lightly on her door, waited a second and then walked in.

  Moving his head an inch at a time, he scanned the room.

  It was like a bomb had exploded. The floor was scattered with Gran’s things: her bagpipes and her map of Scotland and her painting of the bay where she grew up in Inverary and the picture of Gramps in his military uniform and all her clothes and shoes and books. Bits of Gran’s favourite yellow vase poked up out of the carpet like bits of shrapnel. And in the middle of it all, like one of those suicide bombers they went on about on the news, who’d managed to stay alive despite the blast, stood Gran, her grey hair sticking up in tufts, her eyes wide and glassy.

  ‘It’s okay, Gran.’ Milo walked over to her, took her hand and guided her back to her bed. She was shivering. ‘Here.’ He placed Hamlet on her knees. ‘He’s better than a hot-water bottle.’

  Milo placed Gran’s fingers over Hamlet’s small, warm body and then stroked the top of her hands. Her skin was as thin as tracing paper, barely covering the spiderweb of purple veins.

  She looked up and her face relaxed a bit.

  ‘Just wait here a minute,’ said Milo. He kissed the top of her head and went to the bathroom.

  He clicked open the bathroom cabinet and fixed his eyes on one bottle at a time. There was the bottle with the small pink pills that Gran took because she had too much sugar in her blood. She was skinny as the boys on the football team at school but she lived off shortbread and sugary tea and liked to suck on sugar cubes, so the doctor said she was at risk. Then there was the bottle of green and white pills that were meant to help Gran sleep. The doctor said the pills were good for calming her down too when she got into one of her muddles. Except on very special occasions, Milo avoided giving Gran those pills because they made her drowsy and out of it and not like Gran at all.

  He shifted his focus to the next bottle. The magic untangling pills for the times when Gran’s brain shot off in a million different directions and made her forget where she was and what she was meant to be doing and even sometimes who Milo was. He reached out for the last bottle, pushed and screwed open the lid and tipped a pill into his palm.

  When he came back, he put the small white pill into Gran’s hand, gave her a glass of water and then went to get her pad, which she kept on the windowsill.

  The sky was getting a little lighter now, an inky grey, and through the sky came a chirruping, like a bird, only sharper and more human.

  Hamlet squirmed off Gran’s lap and onto the bed and he plodded across the mattress to the window. Milo picked him up and they both looked out.

  Under a crescent of moon, thin as an onion ring, Mr Overend stood at his window. Sometimes Milo wondered whether Mr Overend was a ghost and whether only he and Gran ever saw him. Mr Overend pressed his lips together and whistled again. He liked to imitate the birds at dawn.

  ‘He’s at it again,’ said Milo.

  Gran didn’t seem to hear.

  He placed the pad in Gran’s lap and then looked around her room. It was all such a mess, he didn’t know where to start.

  ‘So you’ve been packing, Gran?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You don’t need to bring everything, you know.’

  Gran’s face didn�
�t change and she didn’t write anything on her pad.

  Milo came over and crouched beside her. ‘You’re only going for a while, until I can work out how to get you back. Just bring a few essentials – like… Like you’re going on holiday, Gran. You need to pack light, fit everything in one bag.’

  Gran’s face still looked confused. Sometimes it took a while for the untangling pills to kick in.

  ‘I’m going to make three piles, Gran.’

  Milo took Gran’s pad, wrote Go on one piece of paper, Stay on the next one and Not Sure on a third, ripped them off and handed them to her.

  ‘I’ll point to your things one at a time, Gran, and you can hold up the piece of paper to direct me with the packing.’ Milo grinned. ‘It’ll be like one of our games.’

  Milo had thought Gran would like it being a game but she frowned and her cheeks flushed pink and her eyes misted over. She’d probably worn herself out trying to pack all by herself. Milo had helped her to start packing days ago but she kept changing her mind about what she wanted to take and what she wanted to leave – and now she’d left it to the last minute and was trying to do it all by herself and she was wearing herself out. She’d be better off having a rest, but they had to do this now: Gran was leaving for the nursing home first thing in the morning and if Mum found out that the packing wasn’t done she’d flip and do it herself and Gran wouldn’t get a say in what she got to take with her.

  Milo spotted Hamlet’s back legs and curly tail poking out from under the bed and pulled him out and put him back on Gran’s lap, which made Gran smile and look better.

  ‘So, let’s start with the essentials.’ Milo pointed to Gran’s underwear. The big, baggy knickers and the bras with lots of straps and hooks and the thick caramel-coloured tights.

  Gran held up the Go sign.

  ‘You see, Gran, this is going to be fun.’

  Milo pulled out Gran’s old suitcase that had stiff cardboard-like covers and sharp reinforced corners, snapped it open and carefully started folding Gran’s knickers.

  Hamlet came over and sat on the soft bit of Gran’s bagpipes and Gran got into holding the bits of paper up and Milo got into a really good rhythm of folding and putting away.

  ‘You’ll be back by Christmas, Gran,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’

  He stuffed Gran’s shoes with her caramel tights.

  ‘And while you’re away, you should have fun. There’ll be people your age and stuff.’

  He took a breath and looked around. Gran’s room was starting to look tidier.

  ‘And I’ll come and visit you every day. It won’t be that different from how things are now, will it, Hamlet?’ Milo felt his voice go wobbly and he kissed the top of Hamlet’s head to make the lump at the back of his throat go away. ‘And I’ll sneak Hamlet in too, even if that silly nurse said pets aren’t allowed.’ Milo scanned the carpet through his pinhole, picked up the bits of the vase one at a time and carried them to Gran’s bin.

  The door flew open.

  Hamlet squealed and started to run around in circles.

  Milo felt Gran’s shoulders drop.

  ‘What on earth?’

  From where he was crouching, all Milo could see was the outline of the door and the edge of Mum’s frilly nightie and her bulging pale thighs and her pink slippers and her chipped pink toenails.

  ‘I was only helping Gran…’

  Mum ignored Milo and turned to Gran.

  ‘Lou, it’s five thirty in the morning, Milo should be in bed. He’s got school in a few hours.’

  Gran shrugged.

  ‘It’s not her fault,’ Milo said, feeling the heat from all the packing rising up into his cheeks. ‘If you weren’t making her go, she wouldn’t have to pack.’

  A silence dropped between them. Even Hamlet stopped running around. The only sound came from Mr Overend’s low whistling, not a bird this time, more like a warning siren.

  ‘Go to your room, Milo.’

  Milo picked up Hamlet. ‘We’re staying with Gran.’

  Gran scribbled something on her pad. Milo noticed a tremor in her fingers and when he looked at the letters, he saw that they were all wobbly. He went over and read them out loud:

  Please… don’t… fight.

  ‘We’re not fighting,’ Sandy snapped. ‘I’m just giving Milo an instruction and he’d better do what I say or…’ She chewed the nail of her small finger. ‘Or I won’t let him visit after school.’

  Milo felt the heat rise from his cheeks into his eyeballs. The pinhole narrowed. All he saw was Mum’s stupid lips, puckered and mean. It was bad enough that she was making him go to school, which meant that he couldn’t be with Gran when she moved into her new room at the nursing home, but now she was threatening not to let him visit? If she did that, he’d pack his own suitcase and move out and live with Gran in Forget Me Not. That would teach her.

  Gran held up the piece of paper that said Go and stared at Milo.

  He blinked.

  ‘You want me to go, Gran?’ his voice wobbled.

  She nodded slowly.

  ‘Good, we’re agreed for once,’ Mum said. ‘And make sure you put that pig back in the garage.’

  Milo hugged Hamlet tighter and walked out to the top of the stairs. He was about to slam the door when he changed his mind. Instead he clomped down the stairs to make it sound like he was going back to his room and then crept back up really slowly, kneeled on the carpet and looked through the small crack he’d left in the door.

  ‘He’s got to get used to you not being around,’ Mum said, pushing the suitcase out of the way. ‘It’s got out of hand, Lou, his helping you like this.’

  Milo saw Gran’s eyes go watery and then she scribbled something on the pad but it was too far for him to read.

  He clenched his fists. Gran didn’t ask Milo to help, he did it because he wanted to. And maybe if Mum stopped feeling sorry for herself and thinking about Dad and his Tart for a second and helped look after Gran too, then he wouldn’t have to worry about Gran so much.

  ‘Come on, Lou, it’s time for you to rest.’ Mum’s voice was softer than Milo expected. And then she stroked the top of Gran’s head, which she never did when Milo was looking. She eased the pad out of her fingers, put it on the windowsill and then lifted Gran’s limbs so that they were straight on the bed. Then she pulled up the sheets and the blankets and tucked Gran in, like she used to tuck Milo in, all the way round until he could see the shape of his body. She hadn’t done that in ages.

  Milo rubbed his eyes. Packing up Gran’s things had used up all his vision energy, but he didn’t want to leave, not yet.

  He looked again through the crack in the door.

  Mum sat next to Gran on the bed and held her hand, just like he’d done earlier.

  ‘Forget Me Not’s a nice place, Lou. They’ll look after you properly there.’

  Milo felt a flutter in Mum’s chest like the one he’d felt walking up the stairs looking at the fairy lights.

  Mum let out a sigh. ‘It’s for the best, it’s all for the best.’

  Through the pinhole, Milo saw Gran close her eyes and bob her head up and down.

  Mum stayed there for what felt like ages, stroking Gran’s hand, waiting for her to fall asleep. She stayed for so long that Milo got sleepy too and worried that Mum would find him asleep outside the door with Hamlet nuzzled into his arm, so he got up really slowly and tried not to make a sound as he crept back to his room.

  As he lay in bed, Hamlet nuzzled in beside him, he heard Mum walking around upstairs, finishing Gran’s packing.

  Mum’s words floated behind Milo’s eyes, all wobbly and jumbled up like Gran’s writing:

  Best… Its… All… Best… For… Best…

  Maybe if he looked at the words for long enough, he’d start to believe them.

  7

  MILO

  ‘Milo…’

  Mrs Harris’s voice faded in and out.

  Behind his eyelids, Milo saw Gran sitting in her
armchair, the white walls of the nursing home pressing in on her. He wished Mum had let him have the day off school to settle Gran in.

  ‘Milo Moon, are you with us?’ Mrs Harris’s voice was sharper now.