My Name Is Mina (3 page)

Some of the kids from St. Bede’s passed by the end of the street a few moments back. They saw me, but they’ve stopped laughing and calling by now. These days they just roll their eyes and whisper a few words to each other and head onto the gates of their cage. That’s if they do anything at all. They used to call me a
witch and a weirdo
. They yelled I was a
monkey and a crow
. They had great fun last year. In the summer they threw daisies and yelled,
“Daisies for Miss Crazy!”
In the autumn they threw conkers and yelled,
“Conkers for Miss Bonkers!”
(Which is quite amusing when you think about it, I suppose.)

Now I’m just part of the scenery, like I am for the birds. I am like a lamppost or a tree or a stone. I don’t care. They’re nothing to me. I don’t even look at them. Them! Huh! HUH! Nothing!

This is Falconer Road. It’s a narrow street of terraced houses with little front gardens, each garden with a single tree in it, like this one. The houses are perhaps eighty years old. There are back lanes and garages behind the houses. Beyond the end of the street is Crow Road, where the bigger
older houses are. I own a house there, or I will when I’m grown up. It is a bit dilapidated and has extraordinary creatures living in it. Thank you, Grandpa. I raise my eyes to the sky. Thank you, Grandpa. He left it to me in his will. He’s another one that’s dead. We say he’s in Heaven with Dad.

Heaven. I used to think that the idea of Heaven was silly. I used to think of all the people who keep on dying. Heaven must get ridiculously full, I thought. There wouldn’t be room anywhere in the universe for it.

“How big is Heaven?” I said to Mum one day when I was small. I’d just seen a hearse with a coffin in it heading past the end of the street to the massive cemetery on Jesmond Road, the one where Dad’s buried.

“Oh, very very big, I should think,” she said.

I thought of all the cemeteries in all the world. I thought of all the people lying in them. I thought of all the people who have lived and died in the years and years and years of time. I just couldn’t imagine it.

“It must be ginormous,”
I said.

“Yes, I suppose so,” she said.

Then, a few weeks later, we were reading an encyclopedia. It said that if you counted all the people who had ever lived in all the history of the world until about fifty years ago, there wouldn’t be as many as the people who are alive today.
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That surprised us a great deal.

It was a couple of hours later that I realized what that meant.

“So that means,” I said, “that Heaven only needs to be about as big as the earth.”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose that’s true.”

And we laughed about it, because compared with the size of the universe, earth isn’t very big at all. And even earth isn’t full. There’s room for lots more bodies, just like in Heaven there’s room for lots more souls.

These days, though, I don’t believe any of that. I think that the idea of Heaven is silly for other reasons. When people try to say what Heaven
is like, it just sounds deadly deadly deadly dull. Standing around singing and eating nectar or something and looking at God and praising him and being very very very good. Imagine that!
YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN!
Who’d want to do that for century after century after century after century? Somebody like Mrs. Scullery, maybe, but not me. I bet that even the angels get fed up with it all. I bet they want to eat bananas and marmalade and chocolate, and to look at things like clouds of flies, and to climb trees or to play with cats. I bet they look at us and envy us for being human. I bet that sometimes they even want to be like us. Except they might get put off by the fact that we die.

Anyway, in the end, I don’t really believe in Heaven at all, and I don’t believe in perfect angels. I think that this might be the only Heaven there can possibly be, this world we live in now, but we haven’t quite realized it yet. And I think that the only possible angels might be us.

Is that stupid? No, it’s not! Look at the blackbird, the way the sunlight glistens on it. Look at the way it shimmers, the way its blackness glints with silver, purple, green, and even white beneath the sun. Listen to its song. Look at the way it jumps into the sky. Look how the leaves are coming out from the buds. Feel how strong the tree is and feel the beat of my heart and the sun on my skin and the air on my cheek. Think of things like the human voice, the solar system, the fur of a cat, the sea, bananas, a duck-billed platypus. Look at the things that we’ve made: houses and pavements and walls and steeples and roads and cars and songs and poems, and yes I know that it’s a long long way from being perfect. But perfection would be very dull and perfection isn’t the point.

Look at the world. Smell it, taste it, listen to it, feel it, look at it. Look at it! And I know horrible things happen for no good reason. Why did my dad die? What’s the point of famine and fear and darkness and war? I don’t know! I’m just a kid! How can I know answers to things like that? But this horrible world is so blooming beautiful and so blooming weird that sometimes I think it’ll make me faint!

“Mina!” calls Mum. “Mina!”

“Coming, Mum!”

I don’t move.

There’s a white van at Mr. Myers’s house just along the street. He died. (Another one! It’s about time we had some people born around here!) He was called Ernie and he was very old. He used to stand at his window staring out and even when you smiled and waved at him, you couldn’t be certain if he’d seen you, or if he thought he was dreaming about you. I used to wonder what was going on inside his brain. Did he see the same things as everybody else, or did he see different things? Did he see nothing at all? Did the world, and me and everybody in it, seem like a dream? And come to that, do any of us see what another person sees? Maybe we’re all living in some strange kind of dream. If we are, of course, we don’t know that we are.

I used to see a doctor going into the house sometimes. He was a miserable-looking gray kind of bloke that came in a miserable-looking gray kind of car. He caught sight of me in the tree one day. I
started to wave but he just scowled, like he thought that sitting in a tree was the stupidest thing in the whole wide world. It was obviously far too much of a struggle for somebody like him to smile and wave back at somebody like me. Huh. Wouldn’t want him to be my doctor. He’d make you feel like topping yourself just by looking at you. Can’t have been much of a doctor, anyway. Mr. Myers died, and was dead for nearly a week before they found him, lying under the table in the kitchen. Poor soul. He had a daughter, but I don’t think she ever really cared for him. She’s at the house right now, carrying out some of Mr. Myers’s belongings to the van. She’s another streak of misery. She was like that even when Ernie was alive. Maybe she thought he’d have some gold hidden away, rather than old table lamps and worn rugs and tatty chairs that she’s carrying out now. Mum says the place is full of stuff, piled up in the attic and in the dilapidated garage at the back of the house.

Look at her. Misery Guts. You had him until he was old! You had your dad till he was old and you didn’t care!

The streak of misery’s putting Mr. Myers’s house up for sale. Wonder who’ll buy it.

“Mina!”

“Yes, Mum!”

“Mina!”

Listen to how lovely her voice is. Call again, Mum.

“Mina!”

Wow.

“Yes, Mum!”

We made animals at the kitchen table for much of the day. I started with a worm then a snake then a rat then a cat then a dog then a cow then a horse then a hippopotamus. I made an imaginary creature with wings and claws. I made a baby and rocked it in my hands and sang a lullaby to it. I squashed the clay together and started again and I made an archaeopteryx.

The archaeopteryx was a dinosaur, a dinosaur with wings and feathers. It could fly. Probably not as well as birds can now. It was a bony thing, and probably just made short sharp clumsy flights. But it didn’t die out. It was the only dinosaur that survived, and it’s the ancestor of all the birds that exist in the world today. The blackbirds building their nest in the tree above my head are its descendants!

There are archaeopteryx fossils in the Natural History Museum in London. Mum has said we’ll go to see them, when she has a bit of time, and a bit of money.

She smiled as she watched me molding the clay.

“Archaeopteryx,” she said. “Isn’t it a lovely word?”

“Yes.”

I love sticking my fingers into the clay, bending it and shaping it, ripping it and thumping it and rolling it and squashing it. I love smoothing it with water. I love the way it dries to a crust on your skin and then the way it cracks when you make a fist, the way it turns to dust. I love the way it dries out in the oven. We can’t afford a proper kiln, so the things we make go in with loaves of bread and casseroles and pizzas and curries, so they never get properly baked or properly glazed. That doesn’t matter to us. We think they’re beautiful. We paint them, and we put them on the shelves around us. Sometimes we make little models of each other. Mum has made a little model of Dad – it looks nothing like him, of course, at least not when I compare it with his photographs, but somehow it seems to be more like him than the photographs do.
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