Artichoke Hearts (10 page)

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 on
to 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’s 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 over-hearing 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 towards 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 snake-head flowers with veiny, plum-coloured leaves . . . delicate as Nana’s hands.

The stone man we bought Nana for her birthday a few years ago – and which she calls ‘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 lead . . . 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 long curly locks, pacing up and down, practising 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.

I think this is a strange thing to say, because it’s Nana who’s really in pain.

Later, at night, I can’t get to sleep. I listen to my family breathing. You can hear Dad’s snoring and tiny noises creaking around the cottage. There are definitely
birds fluttering around in the roof. But mostly I can hear people breathing. Then I feel my own breath, in and out, and the little space between the in breath and the out breath, just like
Nana’s taught me. After a while I start to feel quite sleepy. Then I hear Nana’s sandals padding on the wooden floor and I listen to her trying desperately to catch her breath. She
walks slowly to the sink and fills a glass with cold water so she can swallow her pills. Nana has to take so many pills now.

Her body is silhouetted against my bedroom doorway. I watch her leaning against the sink taking little sips of water. Suddenly, she drops the cup, as if it’s burned her. Now she’s
clutching on to her shoulder like she’s being attacked by a wild animal. For a moment I think she’s going to fall over, but she just leans against the sink, holding herself up and
making this horrible groaning noise.

I hear Dad call out, ‘Mum, what’s the matter? What’s going on?’

Nana looks up in this helpless way as Dad walks towards her. ‘Take the pain away, Sam, just take it away,’ she pleads.

‘We’ll do our best for you, Mum.’

Dad puts his arm round Nana and leads her into the front room. I just lie here, staring at the empty doorway. This is not a nightmare. I am wide awake.

Outside everything is grey, Payne’s Grey There’s not even a cloud to watch, scudding across. This whole sky is one great low fog pressing down on me. Even the air
is a misty damp swamp you don’t feel like breathing in. On days like this there is too much sky in Suffolk. I take Dad’s laptop off to Nana’s little pink bedroom and plug in the
Internet stick. I type in ‘Ruwanda’, and it asks, ‘Do you mean
Rwanda
?’ I click on that, and a whole list of choices comes up for me to read about Rwanda . . .
genocide . . . mass killing . . . photos of hundreds of skulls of children on school desks and altars in churches. I can’t take in the nightmare of what I’m reading. More than a million
people killed . . . with machetes, knives and guns . . . Civil war, tribes fighting each other, neighbours ordered to kill neighbours, or be killed themselves . . . priests preaching killing . . .
How many people exactly? No one counted, but the reason for all the killing? To wipe out a whole tribe of people.

Just like Hitler tried to destroy Jewish people, but in Rwanda no one did anything to stop it. Not the British, not the Americans. What did Jidé say? ‘You probably saw them on the
news.’

Here I am sitting in my Nana’s pink room with roses painted on the wall reading these poisonous words with a red-hot anger starting to burn in my belly, filling my throat and mouth with a
bitter acid taste that I can’t get rid of. Now I think I know why Jidé Jackson doesn’t want to go there, doesn’t want to think about it . . . He said he’d had a
sister who wouldn’t even speak of what she’d been through.

It’s true what Jidé said: with this sort of past, why would you want to look back? And, reading all of this, I still don’t know the story of why his sister died.

Suddenly the marshmallow sweetness of Nana’s pink room makes me want to break out. I run into the grey mist and keep on running down the lane and on to the marsh. I gulp in the damp air,
running and running until I can’t breathe any more. But I know there is nowhere to run to, because, although I’ve seen terrible scenes on the television of people suffering and
starving, it’s never really got to me before, not like today . . . because once you know this stuff happened to your friend’s mum and dad, to his sister and to a million other people,
you can’t un-know it. Can you?

‘It’ll be all right, Mira, with Nana. We’re going to sort it out,’ says Dad when I get back.

He wraps his arms round me. I don’t tell him that my tears are not for Nana but for Jidé Jackson and his mum and dad who he never knew . . . and his sister with no name.

Nana is still lying on her white wicker sofa snuggled in her purple shawl. ‘Accepting visitors, like the queen,’ she says. This sofa can only be used by Nana, Krish, Laila and me,
obviously not all at the same time. It would just snap if a big person sat on it. But it’s perfect for Nana. She looks beautiful with all the patterned cushions around her, like a Matisse
painting. I find my sketchbook and start to draw her. Nana smiles at me. She likes ‘sitting’ for people. Since she was very young, artists have painted Nana, and photographed her for
newspapers and exhibitions. We’ve got a black and white photo in the hallway at home of Nana when she was about twenty years old with her bulldog ‘Toro’. The writing underneath
says: ‘Beauty And The Beast Make An Entrance Among Embankment Artists.’

All through the day different people come to visit Nana Josie. Mum and Dad are worried that it’s making her too tired, but when they suggest she has a rest she waves away their worries,
telling them not to fuss, that this is what she’s here for. Even so, later, when people arrive, she’s sleeping. Some people can understand about dying, and others can’t really
deal with it at all. Some of my nana’s friends are happy to hold her hand for an hour while she sleeps. When she’s awake, Nana just lies there, smiling at everyone with her eyes. She
lets the visitors do the talking, if they want to. Some people find it impossible to stop talking . . . to say goodbye. One friend comes back again and again. After he finally leaves, Nana sighs,
‘It’s bloody hard work dying well.’

That’s what we’re trying to help Nana to do, I think, die well. Just like people try to have a good life . . . we are trying to give Nana a good death. But Jidé
Jackson’s mum and dad and sister did not die well. More than a million people in Rwanda did not die well . . . I can’t get the picture out of my mind of their bodies floating down a
river, with no one to care for them.

When you draw someone, you see things in them that you don’t notice in normal life. It’s like the world slows down and grows silent so you just see the person in front of you, like
peering out at a tiny speck of the world through a holey stone. Even though it’s my nana I’m drawing, and I know what she looks like, it’s as if I’m seeing her for the very
first time . . . like how you can tell, by her mouth and her chin, what a determined person she is. But when I’m drawing her eyes I notice something new. Her expression tells me that
she’s trapped; she can’t wait to get out of her body. These are the things I see when I’m drawing Nana Josie.

Dad’s on the phone talking to someone about Nana’s pain in the night. An hour later the phone rings. It’s the Macmillan nurse. She’s the one who’s been coming to
Nana’s flat to look after her. When Dad’s finished talking, he comes over and sits quietly with Nana, and at that very moment Laila wakes up and starts to cry. Mum picks her up to
comfort her.