Artichoke Hearts (5 page)

I
climb to the top and look behind me, but the people have all disappeared. There are hundreds of dogs running free all over the Heath, all except for one huge black dog, like a bear,
plodding slowly up the hill – Nana’s old Newfoundland, Claude. Beside him is my Nana Josie, in her cherry-red crocheted hat and long trailing scarf. She smiles at me. Piper starts to bark,
pulling the lead as hard as he can to get to her. She waves to me, and climbs up on to Claude’s back. He breaks into a trot. Now he pounds towards us with his great big bear paws. Just at the
moment when
I
reach for Nana’s hand, Claude’s front paws leave the ground . . . one last kick with his back legs and he is flying. Nana’s hat slips off her head and her
long black hair streams behind her like the tail of a kite. Piper yaps like crazy and leaps off the ground to catch her.

Now
I
am running with Piper, flapping my arms, hard, so
I
can fly after her. I’m hurtling down Parliament Hill, flapping, pushing off with my feet, but no matter how
hard
I
try
I
can’t kick the ground away, and that’s the moment when
I
see him: Jidé Jackson walking closer and closer up the hill, with his arms outstretched
towards me.

‘You were thrashing around a bit,’ Mum explains. She is lying next to me in my bed.

‘I was trying to fly. Me and Piper were trying to catch up with Nana,’ I tell her, still out of breath.

‘Where was Nana?’ Mum asks.

‘Flying away on Claude’s back.’

‘Just a dream,’ Mum says, like in
The Wizard of Oz,
when Dorothy wakes up and the whole story is make-believe, even the nightmare bits. I wish it was – just a dream – except
for the end. I wish I could click my red shiny heels together and make it all go away . . . the blood, the coffin . . . make it all go away . . . except for Jidé Jackson.

11.59 p.m. I wait for the last minute of my twelfth birthday to tick away before I take off my new watch.

Maybe if I don’t wear it time will slow down and things will go back to normal. Since I strapped it to my wrist this morning something strange has happened to time. I can hear it beating,
all day long, under the surface of everything.

‘What’s that?’ asks Nana, pointing to a spot on my cheek that’s mushroomed like magic overnight. It’s just as I thought . . . this oozy red spot is
doing its best to blow my cover.

‘Oh! Darling Mira. Such a shame . . . and you’ve always had such perfectly peachy skin,’ Nana exclaims, poking the head of my painful pustule and making me flinch away from
her.

My mum is shooting Nana a ‘Do you have to?’ look, not that Nana notices.

‘It all starts to change from now on. It’ll be boyfriends and periods next. You know it might not be long, Uma,’ Nana announces, giving me the once-over, before turning to Mum.
‘They’re starting earlier and earlier these days, you know. It’s something to do with their weight. How old were you?’

Great! Now she’s talking about my weight as if I’m not even in the room. I know every detail about periods. There is nothing that my mum hasn’t told me about why you have
periods, how they can make you feel and, yes, I know when Mum started her period -she was twelve, like me, and Nana Josie was fourteen. Aunty Abi was thirteen. And this is probably the moment I
should tell them, right now, except that Nana would probably get dressed up and do some ancient ceremonial dance around the room, or light a candle or something to celebrate me becoming a
woman.
So I don’t tell because that’s what a diary’s for, isn’t it?

‘It’s hard to believe I’ve been buying art materials from Dusty for half a century,’ sighs Nana, as we munch on leftover birthday cake. Even Nana’s tucking in
today.

‘Let’s see how the old boy’s getting on.’

Nana stands up and shakes the crumbs off her lap. She’s determined to make this trip.

Half of a hundred. I can’t even imagine fifty years. Actually, I can’t imagine anything in numbers. I’m rubbish at maths. If someone asks me one of those questions like,
‘If your Nana was born in 1931 and she lived till 2005, how old would she be when she died?’ (which of course they wouldn’t) I’d know how to work it out, but it would take
me so much longer than everyone else. Krish would jump in with an answer way before me. I’d spend ages just staring at the numbers, and when I look at numbers my mind goes blank.

Nana is seventy-four years old. That sounds really old to me, but she doesn’t feel like an old lady. My Maths teacher is always nagging me to learn my ‘number facts’. The
problem is I don’t really believe in number facts because Nana is seventy-four years old, but, to me, she’s younger than most of the mums and teachers at school. I don’t mean how
they look, I mean . . . they’re just not as young or as fun as she is: they don’t get excited about things like painting or music or wrapping presents, not like Nana Josie does. Maybe,
if you stop getting excited about things, that’s what makes you old. Then, when I think about it, it’s the exact opposite with Laila, because she’s so new, only ten months old,
but it seems like she’s been in our family forever. So I don’t think how old you are is really a number fact at all. Nana says she has never felt older than sixteen, but time took no
notice of how she felt – it just kept on ticking.

We park right next to Dusty Bird’s art shop. Nana leans on my arm as Mum and I walk her inside. She wants acrylic water-based paints. Nana says it’s very important to choose the
exact colours she has in her mind. I can’t believe how many shades of the same colour you can buy. First we go down the white row. When you really look, most of the paints aren’t white
at all. Nana reads my thoughts.

‘It’s a good lesson in relativity, isn’t it? Something that looks white next to red can look mauve next to another shade of white. Does that make any sense?’ she
asks.

I nod. It sort of does.

‘It’s not all white, innit!’ That’s Nana’s terrible East End accent.

‘Look at this.’ She picks up Opaque Titanium White, which is actually bright white, then she pulls out a paint called Lilac Pearl, that makes Titanium White look lilac.

‘See what I mean?’ Nana lifts the bottle up to the light.

I do.

Next, we walk along the rows of yellows; Nana knows the exact colour she’s looking for.

‘Ah! Yellow Ochre. You’ll get a lot of use out of this one.’

Nana talks to me as if I’m already an artist, like she knows something about me that I don’t really know myself yet. Dad says it’s natural for grandparents to want their
grandchildren to follow in their footsteps. I can understand that, but when Nana Josie talks about art it’s not about what I’m going to be in the future. It’s about what I am now.
Sometimes Nana really embarrasses me when she introduces me to her friends, saying things like . . .

‘This is my granddaughter, Mira, a fellow artist.’

We are walking down a corridor of golden colours. The precious golden paint is on the very highest shelf, but Nana’s so small she can’t reach. Dusty Bird, who is as short as Nana,
comes over with a ladder. As he climbs up, I can hear his knees creak on every rung. Dusty Bird looks older than Nana, or maybe it’s just that I don’t think of her as being old, because
I know her.

‘What kind of gold are you after, Josie?’

‘Nothing yellowy, nothing sharp or brassy, more of a deep burnt gold, Dusty.’

‘You always were a class act.’ Dusty Bird peers under his glasses down the ladder at Nana, and winks.

‘Thanks, Dusty,’ Nana giggles, running her fingers through her spiky silvery hair, as if remembering how long and silky it once was.

I love the way Nana talks about colours, like she thinks each one has a personality. Dusty brings down a few bottles for her to inspect. In the end she chooses Dark Gold.

We are moving through Dusty Bird’s corridors of colours, passing through a rainbow . . . red (just the sight of it brings up that tin-metal taste in my mouth) and yellow and pink and . .
.

‘This is the one: Golden Green Lake.’ Nana reads the label fondly, as if she’s just bumped into an old friend.

Dusty Bird follows us around with his ladder, offering to help as Nana scans her memory for the names of the colours she’s used before. Purple and orange and . . .

‘We’re painting the sea . . . ultramarine, I think, Dusty.’

‘Ultramarine Blue Light?’ he guesses.

‘That’s it, Dusty.’ Nana grins and claps her hands together.

It’s a new game, where Dusty has to match the description to the paint.

‘Turquoise?’ Nana asks, testing him.

There are about ten different shades, but he picks out Deep Turquoise Blue.

‘That’s your usual, Josie.’

Nana nods and drops the bottle into the basketful of paints that Mum’s carrying for her while attempting to distract Laila from pulling every paint pot in her reach off the shelves.

‘Just the grey, I remember,’ groans Nana. ‘Payne’s Grey. Well-named, that one, Dusty, because if pain has a colour it’s definitely grey.’

Dusty Bird peers at Nana with a question in his eyes, but he doesn’t ask her anything. When we finally get to the checkout, Dusty offers Nana a seat.

‘What are you up to these days, Josie?’

‘I’m working on dying at the moment.’ Nana smiles at Dusty as if she hasn’t said anything out of the ordinary. ‘It’s my swansong, this coffin. It’s all
going up in smoke, Dusty – that’s why it can’t be oil based, you see,’ Nana explains, smiling at him.

Dusty Bird smiles back.

‘You’re an original, Josie. Damien Hirst’s got nothing on you.’

Laila starts gurgling and Dusty Bird crosses over to our side of the counter to coo at her.

‘This your latest?’

Nana nods. It sounds funny, as if Laila is Nana Josie’s baby. He doesn’t seem to notice my mum.

‘Pretty little thing, isn’t she?’ Then he looks from me to Laila. ‘Another beauty, just like her nana.’ Dusty Bird winks at Nana again. She pushes him away, as if
to say ‘stop talking such nonsense’, but she’s pleased with the compliment, all the same.

Dusty takes Nana’s hand and walks her to the car. They’re like toddlers supporting each other . . . a delicate grey-haired girl and a tubby bald boy. By the time Nana finally gets
into the car, all the colour has drained from her skin. She can’t seem to catch her breath; it’s as if she’s been running. Dusty scurries back into the shop, returning with a
glass of water. Nana takes tiny sips, but it’s a huge effort for her to swallow.

‘This blasted pain,’ Nana gasps.

She carries on sipping, swallowing deep breaths of air, and eventually her breathing slows. Dusty Bird leans into the car. They look straight into each other’s eyes, for what seems like
ages, but it’s probably just seconds ticking slowly. Then he holds Nana’s face in his hands and kisses her right on the lips . . . the kind of kiss that means something.

When someone is dying, everything you say and do means more than it normally does. When someone is dying, you notice things . . . everything really. The whole of life is in slow motion. Dusty
Bird’s eyes fill up with tears. My nana holds his hand for a moment and then he quickly closes the car door and gives the roof a tap. His rooftop tapping says, ‘Go on, get out of here.
I can’t bear to say goodbye.’

He stands in the doorway of his shop and waves us off. Mum waits for a gap in the traffic. I turn round to look at Dusty Bird as he walks inside. The last thing I see is him ‘man
crying’ (that’s what Mum calls that sort of choked-up cry). His back, round like a tortoiseshell, heaves up to his ears, and then drops down again. He rubs his eyes with his fists in a
rough way, like he’s angry with himself, but his tortoiseshell back carries on heaving up and down, up and down.

At last there is a space in the traffic and we turn out on to the road.

By the time we pass The Forum, where a line of people, all with the same quiffy hairstyle, like Elvis Presley, are queuing up for tickets for a gig, Nana has finally got her
breath back, enough to laugh at the ‘characters’, as she calls them, in the queue. Nana thinks, compared to the 60s, we live in a dull ironed-out world where everyone pretty much looks
the same.

‘Dusty Bird’s always had a bit of a soft spot for me. We used to show paintings together on the Embankment. Dusty would flirt outrageously with me and then he and Kit would start
their usual banter . . . “What’s your secret, old man?” he’d ask Kit, and your grandad would always answer the same way . . . “Charm, Dusty. If you’ve got to
ask, you haven’t got it.” “ Then make sure you don’t lose it,” Dusty would tease . . .’

Nana stares out of the window. I don’t even know if she’s talking to us, or herself. It’s like her memories are kaleidoscoping her back in time.

‘He wasn’t bad-looking in his day. He had this long mane of curly black hair and green eyes, a bit of a gypsy look, a real beatnik.’

‘What’s a beatnik, Nana?’ I ask.

‘Arty types, writers, us lot, in the fifties and sixties . . . rebels, protesters. We couldn’t stand being told what to think or how to behave. We had a lot of battles to
fight,’ she sighs. ‘We were young! You’ll do the same one day, hopefully.’