My Name Is Mina (2 page)

“They do not match!” she said in her screechy voice.

“I don’t know what you mean, Miss,” I said.

She leaned down towards me.

“The story,” she said, in a slow stupid voice like she was talking to somebody slow and stupid, “does not fit the plan!”

“But it didn’t want to, Miss,” I answered.

“Didn’t want to? What on earth do you mean, it didn’t want to?”

“I mean it wanted to do other things, Miss.”

She put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “It is a story,” she said. “It is your story. It will do what you tell it to.”

“But it won’t,” I said. She kept on glaring at me.

“And Miss,” I said, like I was pleading with her to understand. “I don’t want it to, Miss.”

I should have saved my breath. She flung the papers onto my table.

“This is typical of you,” she said. “Absolutely typical!”

And she turned to a girl called Samantha and asked her to read her tale, which was something about a girl with curly hair and her cuddly cat, a perfectly planned idiotic thing in which nothing interesting happened at all! And of course all the other kids were giggling through it all, and it led to one of the nicknames I had back then. Typical. Absolutely Typical McKee.

Huh! Huh! Typical!

My stories were like me. They couldn’t be controlled and they couldn’t fit in. Trying to be a good girl sometimes made me very sad. The end of it all was
the day I became nonsensical. Fantastically nonsensical. I’ll tell the story of that day when the time seems right, when the words seem right. And I suppose I’ll tell the other tales that matter, like the tale of my day at Corinthian Avenue and my vision, or the story of my journey to the Underworld in Heston Park, or the story of my grandfather’s house and the owls. And I’ll put in poems and scribblings and nonsense. Sometimes writing nonsense can make a lot of sense! That sounds nonsensical itself, of course, but it isn’t.
NON-SENS-I-CAL! WHAT A GREAT WORD! WOW!

Now I’ve started, it’s lovely to see the empty pages that stretch before me. Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into an undiscovered land.

Look at the way the words move across the page and fill the empty spaces. Did God feel like this when he started to fill the emptiness? Is there a God? Was there ever emptiness? I don’t know, but it doesn’t stop me wondering and wondering.
^*

My motto’s written on paper and pinned above my bed:

It’s by William Blake. Blake the Misfit, Blake the Outsider. Just like me. He was a painter and a poet and some people said he was mad – just like they say about me. Maybe he was out too much in the moon. Sometimes he wore no clothes. Sometimes he saw angels in his garden. He saw spirits all around him. I think he was very sane. So does my mum, so did my dad. I will write with William Blake in mind. I will write about the sad things, of course, because there is no way not to write about the sad things. And there are sad things in my life. Well,
ONE BIG SAD AND HORRIBLE THING
. Weirdly enough, the sad things in my life make the happy things seem more intense. I wonder if other people feel like that, if they feel that sadness, in a weird way, can help to make you more intensely
happy. That’s what’s known as a paradox, I suppose.

What a word! It sounds good, looks good, and the meaning’s good! And if something is a paradox, it is PARADOXICAL. Which is an even better word!

That’s the kind of nickname I’d like to have. Not Typical McKee, but Paradoxical McKee!

Or Nonsensical McKee, of course.

Anyway, I’ll try to make my words break out of the cages of sadness, and make them sing for joy.

Suddenly, thinking about the
ONE BIG SAD AND HORRIBLE THING
, I know that I’m writing all this for Dad. I imagine him watching me and reading my words as I write. He’ll be everywhere in this journal, of course, in my mind and in my words and moving among the spaces between the words and behind the words. Sometimes
I tell people that he died before I was born, but that isn’t true, and I do have some memories of him. I’ll write of those. I think of him watching from somewhere far away beyond the moon. Hello, Dad. Yes, I think I’m happy now. Yes, I think Mum is, too. Good night.

I slip back into bed. The maddening moon shines down on me. I’ve started the journal at last. Tomorrow I’ll write some more. Now I’ll try to dream of bats and cats and owls.

Had breakfast with Mum. Bananas and yogurt and toast with marmalade. DELICIOUS! I told her I’d started my journal. Excellent, she said. I said I might show her some of the pages when I’m ready. Excellent, she said. She said maybe we could make some clay models today. Excellent, I said. Then I came out of the house and climbed into my tree, and here I am.

I love my tree. I’ve been climbing it for a couple of years. I shin up the trunk to a branch that’s just a bit higher than my head. I sit here astride the branch with my back against the trunk. Sometimes I let my legs dangle. Sometimes I sit with my knees raised so that I can rest a book on them. It’s very comfortable, like it was made for me. I’ve been known to sit here for hours at a time, drawing or reading, or just thinking and looking and listening and wondering.

It’s early spring. A pair of blackbirds are building a nest, not too far away from me. The nest’s almost done. I know that because I sometimes climb higher and look down into it. One day soon I’ll look down and see eggs in there. Then
I’ll see chicks. Then I’ll see fledglings leaving the nest. Then I’ll see the fledglings become birds that fly into the blue blue yonder. How amazing is that? The blackbirds squawk alarm calls when I climb higher, like they’re yelling, ‘Behave yourself! Squawk! Get back down, girl! Squawk!’ But I don’t think they’re really too troubled by me, not like they would be by a cat, for instance, or by a stranger. Maybe they think I’m some kind of weird bird myself, or some kind of peculiar branch. Maybe if I sat very still for a very long time, they’d build a nest in me: in my lap, or in my hair, or in my hands if I raised them up and cupped them. There is a story about this called St. Kevin and the Blackbird.

LONG AGO, THERE WAS A SAINT CALLED KEVIN WHO LIVED IN IRELAND. ONE DAY, HE WAS PRAYING WITH HIS HANDS STRETCHED TOWARDS HEAVEN (OR WHAT HE THOUGHT WAS HEAVEN), WHEN A BLACKBIRD FLEW DOWN AND LAID AN EGG IN HIS HANDS. ST. KEVIN WAS A GOOD MAN, AND HE DIDN’T WANT TO BREAK THE EGG OR PREVENT IT FROM HATCHING – AND BEING A SAINT, HE ALSO PROBABLY THOUGHT THAT THE EGG WAS A GIFT FROM GOD. SO HE STAYED IN EXACTLY THE SAME POSITION FOR DAY AFTER DAY AND NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, WITH HIS HANDS STRETCHED TOWARDS HEAVEN (OR WHAT HE THOUGHT WAS HEAVEN), UNTIL THE EGG HATCHED RIGHT THERE IN HIS HANDS. IMAGINE THAT, A TINY CHICK MAKING ITS FIRST MOVEMENTS IN YOUR HANDS. IMAGINE THE CLAWS, THE WET WINGS, THE CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP. IMAGINE IT GROWING AS YOU CARED FOR IT. AND IMAGINE IT FLYING AWAY!