Artichoke Hearts (6 page)

For some weird reason, when Nana talks about having battles to fight, I can’t help thinking of Jidé Jackson, but then again it seems like I can’t help thinking about him,
whatever anyone says.

‘I thought you were a hippy?’ I say.

‘We evolved,’ laughs Nana.

It’s impossible to think of Dusty Bird as a beatnik or a hippy, or whatever. He’s bald and quite fat and old. But when he looked at Nana I think he could see her as she was when she
was young, and she could see him too. Sometimes you just think of people as old and you don’t think about who they are, or what they’ve done in their lives.

It’s easier for me to imagine Nana when she was young because I’ve got photos of her, and she was more beautiful than most people I’ve ever seen, even in magazines and films.
She had long, thick black hair with a short fringe, and huge dark brown eyes. She was small and slim . . . as small as me. She looked a lot like that actress in the old films Nana likes to watch -I
think her name is Vivien Leigh.

It’s not just the photos that make it easier to imagine her being young. Nana still wears clothes from the 60s. Aunty Abi calls it vintage gear’, but Nana says it’s just her
original Biba wardrobe that she’s never grown out of. She says she’s been waiting for a new fashion that would make her ditch her old look, but she hasn’t been convinced by
anything else yet, and now, apparently, ‘the wheel of fashion has turned full circle’.

Nana Josie has got to be the most stylish person I know. She always wears beads and jewellery and something – a scarf, a ring, a handbag, anything really – that nobody else has, because you
wouldn’t know where to buy the things she wears. I can see why Dusty Bird wanted to go out with Nana and I can understand why he cried man tears for her and kissed her on the lips, even
though he is bald, and old, and fat, and Nana Josie is seventy-four years old, and dying of cancer.

When we get back to the flat, we walk Nana to her bedroom. She’s trying to slow her breathing. Mum eases Nana’s shoes off and helps her on to the bed. Then she opens a pot of
lavender cream, and starts to massage her feet. Since we were babies Mum has always massaged our feet, so I kind of know how to do it. I take Nana’s other foot and massage the cream into her
hard skin. Nana sighs the air out of her lungs, as if to say, ‘Thank you.’ Her foot is getting heavier and heavier in my hand. You can hardly hear her breathing now and I can tell, by
the weight of her foot, that she’s fallen asleep. We cover her with the duvet, then Piper jumps up on to the bed and lies on top of her feet. I think he likes the smell of lavender. Usually I
like it too, but right now it’s making me feel quite sick.

I try to keep Laila entertained by reading her books, but she can’t keep still for very long; she’s always crawling into trouble. She’s drinking the water out of Piper’s
bowl now, but when I bring her a cup of her own she screeches in that high-pitched way that makes you give her anything she wants.

Mum’s in the kitchen making Nana some soup. After about an hour I can smell it all around the flat. It makes my tummy rumble and I don’t even like lentils. I hear Nana get out of bed
and sniff her way into the living room . . .

‘Something smells good.’

We sit down at Nana’s long table where I always check out what new bit of food, jewellery or art stuff has fallen down the cracks. Probably every person who has ever sat at this table has
a bit of the food they ate stuck down the gaps between the wooden slats. Laila swallows a few mouthfuls, then discovers how to blow soup bubbles, spraying orange-brown mush all over the table so
that it dribbles down the cracks to mulch with all the other spilt food. We try hard to ignore her, but Nana has to turn her face away so Laila doesn’t see her laughing. Now I really do feel
like puking.

As I follow the path of the soup along the wooden grooves, I feel . . . I feel something change. I wander through to Nana’s bathroom, trying to make everything look as normal as possible.
I thought so . . . the brown stain has turned to . . . what would it be called on one of Dusty Bird’s labels? Blood Red.

Mum has spent all morning turning Nana’s front room into an artist’s studio. There are white plastic paint pots, mixing sticks, all sizes of brushes and sponges,
and a palate. Now Mum clears the table and covers it in newspaper and when she’s done I help her lift the coffin on to the table. It’s quite heavy for me, but I just about manage to lug
one corner up on to the tabletop, sliding the rest over by tugging at the cloth beneath. It reminds me of a magician’s trick; if only I could make this coffin disappear.

Mum says she’ll be gone for a couple of hours, but not to worry because, if we need her, she can be with us in five minutes. Our flat, I mean Nana’s, is only one road away from
Hampstead Heath where Krish does his running.

‘In case you need me,’ Mum whispers, handing me her mobile number.

‘I’ve got it saved in my phone book, Mum.’

‘Ah! Yes, the mobile. Have you used it yet?’ chips in Nana. ‘You can always use the landline if you need to call your mum.’

‘But she wouldn’t be able to call
me
if I didn’t have my mobile,’ Mum explains.

‘Which is my point.
You
need the mobile, not Mira.’

Mum winks at me, as if to say ‘don’t worry about it’. Nana’s like that – once she gets hold of an idea, she won’t let go, which can seem a bit mean because the
phone was Mum’s present to me.

For a moment I let myself think of the reasons why I might need to call Mum. If Nana gets breathless, I will help her to lie down. If . . .

I look at Nana and she seems to know what I’m thinking, as she so often does.

‘I’m having a good day today, Mira. I’m on a mission and nothing is going to get in my way, except maybe Laila!’ she jokes, taking hold of my hand.

Mum’s having to wrestle Laila into her pram. She’s arching her body, making her back as stiff as a rod. Mum tries everything to distract her, but in the end she has to press
Laila’s tummy hard until she’s forced to fold, like a rag doll. Quickly, Mum straps her in, before the next wave of protest begins.

Laila’s in a rage and the whole street knows about it. I feel sorry for her, because she doesn’t really have a choice about what she wants to do. I’m helping Nana, and Krish is
already out there doing his warm-up, but Laila just gets dragged about. She thinks she should be able to choose what she’s going to do too. Mum says when I was little she had a lot more time
for me. I think Laila’s decided that she would prefer to help Nana and me with the painting, but there is no way that’s going to happen! I do feel sorry for her, but not
that
sorry.

The flat is filled with Laila’s wailing. You can hear her screaming all the way up the path.

‘An excellent protester,’ jokes Nana, covering her ears with her hands.

We sit at the table staring at the white coffin, listening to Laila’s high-pitched wail fade into the distance.

‘Any ideas for painting?’ asks Nana.

I tell her about my dream – not all of it, not about the drowning. I don’t want to upset her because that’s the thing Nana’s most afraid of . . . drowning. I tell her how the
coffin looked in my dream, about the doves, the silver butterflies, the leaping dolphins and the little dog peeing into the sea. She laughs when I tell her about the dog.

She puts on a CD. It’s Italian and I like the tune, but I can’t understand the words. The woman’s voice sounds like it’s skipping through the music: ‘diddli di
diddli di diddli di, di di, di di di’. Nana mixes paint and dips a sponge into the colours, dabbing shades of blue, white and green all over the coffin. As she paints, she tells me what the
woman’s singing about . . . It’s a house, but the house she’s describing is really the whole world. Nana listens and translates.

‘I can translate the diddli di bit,’ I tell Nana, which makes her laugh.

‘You’ll make sure they play this at my funeral, won’t you, Mira?’

I nod, though I’m not sure it’s going to be up to me to decide. What if no one else agreed with me? I’d be left with Nana’s voice ringing in my ears. This is the sort of
thing that wakes me up at night worrying. Anyway, I don’t want to think about Nana’s funeral, because right now she feels so alive.

Nana hands me another sponge so I can start on the lid. Next, she takes her brush and dips it into the Lilac Pearl paint, swirling waves on to the sea . . . waves and gentle ripples. I watch how
she works in the colours. Underneath, the paint is wet so the colours run into each other: blues, greens and ochres flowing into the sea. Nana hands me her brush to finish the waves on the other
side of the coffin. Then she takes another brush and starts to paint her first dolphin, leaping out of the waves.

My nana can transform a hardboard coffin with her imagination. She can make it dance . . .
diddli di diddli di diddli di di di, di di di.
Another brush dipped in white paint, this time
Titanium White, makes a dove rise out of the spray. Nana doesn’t stop for a second. She’s in the waves, leaping with the dolphins, flying with the doves. Last of all she paints the
little dog with his leg cocked over the coffin corner. It’s a Piper dog with a wiry brown coat.

‘Here, Mira, dip your brush in the Yellow Ochre -Piper needs a pee!’ she orders, handing me the pot.

I take hold of the thickest brush and get ready to splatter the pee across the sea. The yellow spray hits the coffin sides, splatting back into Nana’s face.

‘You’ve peed in my face,’ she laughs.

Then she dips her brush into the blue paint and, with her thumb, flicks the end of the brush at me! This time the spray covers my face.

‘You look like Shiva,’ she says admiringly.

When we get our breath back from giggling, Nana dips her hand into the blue paint and presses her palm against mine, like a high five. She holds my wrist and presses my right hand, hard and flat
against the side of the coffin. Then she places her left hand next to mine to make her own handprint, as if we were one person with a left and right hand of the same size. Two bright blue
handprints, one left, one right, one mine, one Nana’s. Only when you look at the lines on the palms of our hands, can you tell they belong to different people.

The doorbell rings. I hear Krish’s voice before I open the gate. He pushes past me, practically knocking me over as Mum parks Laila under the porch in her pram.

‘Guess where I came?’ Krish shouts.

‘Shhhh,’ hushes Mum, pointing to sleeping Laila.

‘Nana, Nana, guess where I came?’

‘Now what was it? The under-tens?’

‘Yep!’

‘How far was it?’

‘Five K, and the start was up Parli Hill. That was a killer!’

‘How many runners?’

‘About a hundred.’

‘Considering everything . . . I would say you came . . . in the first twenty.’

Nana plays with Krish, like a cat with a mouse.

‘Nope.’

‘I don’t know, Krish . . . tenth?’

‘Try again.’

‘Fifth? Fourth? Third? Second?’

Nana knows he’s come first, because Krish wouldn’t be making a fuss if he came second or third or anything, in fact, except first.

‘Nope!’

‘First place!’ yells Nana, clapping her hands in excitement and reaching out to give Krish a hug. ‘It takes such stamina to do what you do. I used to try and race when I was
your age, but I just couldn’t keep going.’

Nor me, I think.

We first found out that Krish could run when he was six. We were staying with Nana Kath and Grandad Bimal in the Lake District, and we went to this country fair, where they had
all sorts of sports including fell running, which basically means you have to run up a mountain and down again. Why would anyone want to do that? Mum said the people entering the race would have
trained a lot so it might not be a very good idea, but Krish just walked straight up to the starting tent and signed himself in. Then the man stuck his official race number on his T-shirt. Number
fifty-two. We watched him running up that fell, above Lake Grasmere, scrambling up and up for miles in the pouring rain and finally disappearing into the cloud. I didn’t like that feeling of
not being able to see him; neither did Mum. She paced up and down biting her lip, her eyes scanning backwards and forwards across the fell for a glimpse of Krish’s bright blue shirt. Then I
saw him, my brother, skidding and sliding down towards the bottom of that mountain, smeared in mud from head to foot, so you could just make out his eyes peering through the dirt as if he’d
fallen into a bog. When Krish appeared through the rain-mist, Nana Kath jumped up and down, like she was on springs. She announced to everyone around us that number fifty-two was her grandson and
that her own Grandad Billy, my great-great-grandad, had been a famous fell runner.