Mira in the Present Tense (35 page)

Dad smiles his “you know best” smile at me, and we drive, a bit less dangerously than before to the hospice. When we arrive in reception, Headscarf Lady gives Dad and me a huge hug…It feels like we're coming home.

“He's upstairs, with Joe. He ran all the way from the other side of the Heath. Can you believe it?” Headscarf Lady says, buzzing us up.

I can. That's no farther than one of his competition runs.

When we get to the Family Room, Krish is playing table football with Joe. He looks worried when he sees Dad, as if he's going to get told off, but Dad just scoops him up and holds him in his arms as if he's Laila's size. It would look ridiculous now if Dad tried to carry me like that.

“We would have brought you, if you'd asked us, Krish.”

“I wanted to see Joe,” sobs Krish.

“That's all right, mate,” says Joe, patting Krish on the back. “We just had a few things we needed to sort out.”

Dad sits on one side of Krish and Joe on the other, each with an arm around him. He looks tiny sandwiched between them, almost disappearing into the folds of the sofa. As Dad and Joe talk, Krish's eyes grow heavy and he falls fast asleep. I don't think he's slept since the day he gave Nana his painting.

“Looks like he's out for the count,” smiles Joe.

Dad shakes Joe's hand, pats him on the back, hoists Krish up over his shoulder and carries him along the corridor, down in the lift, and out past Headscarf Lady.

“Bless him!” she says. “He must have tired himself out with all that running.”

Dad settles Krish into the backseat, and he stirs for a moment, opens his eyes, and nestles his head into the curve of my shoulder. Normally, this would really irritate me, but not today.

Just as we're about to set off, Dad adjusts the rear-view mirror and, as he does, he catches sight of his own face and stares at himself, smoothing his fingers over the map of lines fanning from the corners of his eyes.

“I've aged more this month than any other month of my life. There are whole years where I've aged less than this, Mira,” sighs Dad.

Me too, I think to myself.

Krish has been bugging me all day. I want to tell him to get out of my room, but after yesterday I can't risk upsetting him.

“Why did you run off like that anyway?” I ask him.

“I didn't think about it. I just ran,” Krish shrugs.

“What did you want to talk to Joe about?”

“Will you two get into bed,” Dad yells up the stairs. “It's a big day tomorrow.”

When Krish finally leaves me in peace, I turn the light off, close my eyes, and try to think of nothing. I am beginning to drift off when I hear the door open and somebody creeping on tiptoe around my room. In the half-light from the hallway I see Krish heading over to the easel. I don't move an inch, but I clearly see him place Nana's charm on the little ridge where the canvas sits.

I whisper his name. “Krish.” He jumps and stumbles, crumpling himself and the easel into a great clattering mess on the floor. It's strange that Krish is such a good runner, because he often falls over; like Laila's spinning top, he's only got his balance when he's moving fast.

“Why did you take it?” I whisper.

“She never actually
gave
me something, like she
gave
things to you,” I hear Krish's tiny hurt voice cutting through the darkness.

The light switch snaps on and I shield my eyes from the blinding brightness.

“What on earth is going on in here?” shouts Dad, staring at Krish as he tries to untangle himself from the easel.

“Nothing.”

I jump in quickly before Krish has a chance to answer. “He just fell.”

“Please go to bed,” Dad pleads, picking up my portrait and having a good look at it.

“Is this you?”

I nod.

“It's good…makes you look older than you are though,” says Dad as he bends down to pick up the easel. Then he drops down onto his knees and starts rummaging around on the floor.

“You'll never guess what I've found…” Dad stands up triumphantly and hands me Nana Josie's charm. “Shall I take it and fix it onto your bracelet so you can wear it tomorrow? It must have been there all the time,” he says as I hand him the bracelet to fix the charm onto.

“It must have been,” I say, looking over to Krish, who's refusing to meet my eye.

Dad kisses me and Krish good night and practically skips down the stairs.

The sound of waves fills every sense in my body, as if the sea is flowing in and out of me. I hear a little girl humming…in and out flow the waves in even patterns…a sweet lullaby…in and out softly sighing shhhhhhhh. The girl floats toward me. She's holding her fingers to her lips. Shhhhhhh sound the waves in and out, somewhere inside me, but still she floats on, the waves appearing and disappearing from my sight, a little girl of about four years old.

“Who are you?” I call to her, but I know who she is. She has Jidé's face, his eyes, his expression.

“Shhhhhh,” answer the waves. She holds her finger to her lips and hums.

“What's your name?” I whisper.

“Shhhhhhhh,” echoes the sea.

The girl's lips are sealed.

Then I catch sight of it under the waves, Jidé's bright orange cloth shining through the gray water, floating toward me. I follow it through the wave, grabbing at it until it's safely in my hands. Shhhhhh, sighs the sea. Then the little girl takes her finger from her mouth, smiles at me, and sings.

The first thing I do when I wake up is look for Jidé's piece of orange cloth. It was the kind of dream that follows you from night into the day. Of course when the sleep wears off, I realize it's not real…but I discover something that is.

It
had
to be today of all days. I take the charcoal and draw a pair of moon-shaped earrings on my self-portrait. Something good has got to come out of having periods.

At breakfast Dad takes hold of my hand and attaches the charm bracelet to my wrist. He struggles with the catch for a few moments before he finally closes the clasp. I look up at him and see that his eyes are full of tears.

“Your nana was very proud of you, Mira.”

Krish keeps glancing my way with a worried look on his face. He thinks I'm going to tell. I shake my head to reassure him. I won't tell because I think I understand how he felt.

“Oh, for God's sake,” shouts Dad, dusting off his suit, “there's glitter everywhere.”

I laugh. By the time we've had breakfast we're all covered in glitter…it feels like Nana's joke. She wrote a note in the hospice to say that nobody is allowed to wear black for her funeral so I suppose it is right that I'm wearing my butterfly skirt, all pinks and greens and sequins…Nana's birthday present to me. I'm beginning to think of this as my period skirt. After today, I will never wear it again.

Krish is wearing his new blue linen suit with an Indian collar, the one Aunty Abi and Aunty Mel bought him before he ran away. If my brother wears blue, his eyes sparkle. He keeps fiddling with his tie, like it's strangling him. I think he feels about as comfortable in his suit as I do in my skirt.

Me and Krish have been given “roles” for the funeral. I'm going to read a poem from a book Nana gave me, and Krish is handing out our glittery programs with a biography of Nana's life in it.

Nana's body is being cremated at Golders Hill Crematorium. Dad says it's the same place where Granddad Kit was cremated. Granddad Bimal says he wouldn't mind ending up there too when his time comes, because he would like to follow in the footsteps of the maharajas, whose names line the walls.

“If it's good enough for them, it will be good enough for me!”

Getting cremated means your body gets burned and what's left is just ashes, but you get the ashes back. I remember Nana laughing when she told us that she wanted her ashes sprinkled in her garden in Suffolk because they would “improve the soil.” I think the ashes are just for the living people because it's so hard to think that there is nothing left of the actual person's body, and so people just want something to hold on to…and ashes are better than nothing.

We are all standing outside the chapel. Quite a lot of people I have never seen before are meeting each other and hugging.

Dad can't speak to anyone. He's trying to “hold it together.” He keeps looking at his watch…waiting for the funeral car to arrive.

The car is white. Just an ordinary car, one of those long station wagons. In the back is the coffin, which my dad, a friend of my dad's, Uncle James, and Dunwich Dan are going to carry. Dan volunteered; he said it would be “an honor” to carry Nana's coffin. It slides on wheels out of the trunk, and then they have to lift it up onto their shoulders. I think of Dad and Moses struggling to carry the plain white box out of the rusty blue Volvo. Today, these four men lift it up smoothly, counting one, two, three, and all lifting at exactly the same time. It matters that it's done gracefully.

Even though the coffin is light and Nana was so tiny when she died, it's quite hard for them to lift it up onto their shoulders. A blue silky cloth covers the coffin, but it slides off as it's lifted. I hear a gasp. That's when the painting is unveiled. Everyone stands in a circle, huddled close to get a better look, voices hush to silence and the circle starts to turn as people wheel round the coffin.

I feel so sorry for my dad, because he's carrying his mum's body in a coffin on his shoulders.

A noise comes out of me. It comes up through the earth, into my body, and out through my mouth. It's a very old noise that somehow you recognize, even though you've never heard it before. It's the same noise that came out of my dad, the day Nana died. Then I finally realize what it is, that noise. It's the sound of a heart breaking.

The coffin bearers walk slowly into the chapel and everyone else follows behind. When the coffin is placed on the table, Jay, my nana's friend, the cook and the artist, settles a white dove she has made out of pottery on the top of a nest of wild flowers. Nana's coffin looks like a Matisse painting. On its corner I spot my tiny dog peeing into the sea. It's as if Nana's winking at me.