My Name Is Mina

by David Almond

  She said nothing. She watched a flock of pigeons flying fast across the rooftops.

  “We don’t mind if you think we’re not the place for you,” said Malcolm. “Whatever you decide, it’s nice to have you with us, even if it’s just for a short time. It’s nice to have been part of your growing.”

  She looked down at her feet.

  “What’s it called? The novel?”

  “Joe Carter’s Bones. It’s about a boy who collects all kinds of bones that are lying in the streets and fields around him – birds, mice, frogs. And he gets feathers and bits of leather and grass and leaves and petals and sticks, all kinds of stuff that were part of living things. Puts them together in his shed. Shapes them into things that look like they could live. Tries to breathe life into them again. Tries to make new kinds of creatures with them.”

  “Like a magician.”

  “Aye. Like a magician, a sorcerer.” Malcolm laughed. “Sounds barmy, eh?”

  “Does it work?”

  “Does he make a new creature, you mean? Yes, he does, which makes it even barmier. The book’s a bit like that, I suppose. It’s all bits and pieces, fragments put together to try to make a work of art. I put the bits of the book together and breathe on them and try to make them live. Just like Joe Carter does with his bones.” He laughed again. “And the book keeps getting rejected, so maybe it’s too barmy for anybody to publish. Maybe next time I should write a story where everything’s plain and simple and straightforward. Maybe I should write a book where nothing barmy happens at all, eh? Or where nothing of any kind happens at all?”

  She smiled at the idea.

  “Do you think you could?” she said. “Write a story where nothing happens at all?”

  “Dunno, really. But maybe I should try it. Or maybe you should.”

  And then a bell rang, and they walked back across the concrete towards the classroom.

  They did do stories that afternoon. Malcolm kept lifting objects, showing them, making the kids imagine stories from them. He lifted a pen and said it belonged to a girl called Maisie and when she wrote with it, it had magic powers. He asked, What were the magic powers? And the possible magic powers appeared in the kids’ minds. Then he asked about Maisie’s life – the injured pet she had when she was six, her favorite food, why had she fallen out with her best friend, Claire, last week, the scary dream she had last week – and Maisie’s whole life began to appear in their imaginations. He lifted other objects – a key that had saved Billy Winston’s life. How had it done that? And what secret letter did Billy keep in his drawer? And how did Billy Winston break his wrist when he was seven? He showed an ordinary hen’s egg. What if, when it opened, it wasn’t a chicken that appeared at all, but some unknown beast? And on and on. He showed how our brains make stories naturally, that they find it easy. He said that stories weren’t really about words – the words that kids like Wilfred and Steepy found so difficult to control. They were about visions. They were like dreams. Mina loved all this. She scribbled the answers, the fragments of stories. She loved to see all the new characters and their worlds coming to life inside her mind and on her page.

  When Malcolm asked them to begin to write, as Steepy and Wilfred and Alicia murmured their visions to Malcolm and the assistants and watched visions transformed into words, Mina kept wondering: What if there was a story where nothing interesting happened at all?

  So she tried to do that. But of course each time she wrote a word, something started to happen. As soon as she named a character, the character started to come to life and walked around in her head and on the paper. There was no way to write anything and make it into nothing. Maybe writing was a bit like being God. Every word was the start of a new creation. She wrote sentence after sentence, threw away sentence after sentence. Close by her, Steepy told a tale about a dragon called Norman hatching from an egg, Wilfred muttered about the gang of thugs that chased Billy Winston into a dilapidated warehouse, Alicia sighed about Maisie’s cat that had almost been run over when it was just a kitten.

  Mina kept her eyes lowered, and she listened. Everyone around her seemed to fit in here. For a moment she hated herself. She was useless. She was silly, and endlessly contrary. She fitted in nowhere, even in a place designed for misfits. She looked back at the page and realized that the only story in which nothing happened was a story that wasn’t written at all. It was an empty page. Knowing that made her lonely and scared. Sometimes she wished just for this – to be nothing, to be nowhere, to be empty. Sometimes she wanted a life in which nothing at all had happened to her. Sometimes she wished she was like a story that had never even started. Malcolm was right. As well as being wonderful and exciting, growing up could just be hard, so bloody hard.

  The voices murmured and sometimes laughed around her. She tried to shut them out. She looked into the page and visions and memories moved across it. She saw herself at home again, sitting in her tree again. She saw her mum in a cafe, drinking coffee. She thought of her dad deep down below inside the darkness of the earth and of him gazing down from high above in Heaven. And there was the murmuring of Alicia and Wilfred’s rage and Harry’s shyness and the images on Steepy’s chest, and Malcolm’s kindness and his vivid shirt and his silver bracelet glinting at the edge of her vision. And the memory of Palaver and Trench started flooding in, and Scullery and THE HEAD TEACHER, and SATS Day, and God and flesh and emptiness, and stories in which life itself is created from old bones and stories in which nothing at all happens and and and and and and and and … And maybe it was all these things together, all those bits and pieces from the present and the past, that disturbed everything and caused the visionto appear. Whatever it was, she looked up, and looked through the window into the sunlight pouring down onto the concrete courtyard outside, and she saw him.

  He was standing at ease on the concrete close by a couple of parked cars. He was tall and smiling and just like she seemed to remember he was like in life. The air seemed to crackle like fire around him. He turned his head, and looked into Room B12 at the Corinthian Avenue Pupil Referral Unit, and he looked at Mina, who watched him from inside. And he smiled at her, not a sweet and gentle smile but a smile that seemed to go right to a place where all her dreams were. He was in her mind and heart, her body and blood, and she knew that despite everything, everything was OK. Then he was gone, fading into the crackle of fire around him, and there was just concrete and cars and the air and the sun and the emptiness of the Corinthian Avenue afternoon.

  She stared into the emptiness for a while. Then she blinked and looked around her. No one had seen anything. They worked on, bathed in the sunlight that poured in through the windows.

  She put her pen on the empty page and wrote,

  “At Corinthian Avenue I saw my dad and I was glad.”

  Corinthian Avenue wasn’t for me. I enjoyed the day, I learned a lot. It taught me that misfits can fit together in weird ways. It taught me that one day even as a misfit I might fit into this weird world. I liked the people there. I would always remember Steepy and the garden on his chest. But it wasn’t the right time. I needed to be at home with my mum, with my tree. I needed to be homeschooled. After the story-writing, Malcolm read the pieces out to everyone, and we heard about dragons and murders and scared kittens and wonderful imaginary lives. We all laughed and groaned and said how brilliant the stories were. When it was my turn, I put the words about my dad away and held up an empty page. I looked at everyone properly for the first time that day.

  “My story,” I said, “is an empty page. It is a story in which nothing happens at all.”

  They all looked at the page. They all looked at me. They thought about what I’d said, and I smiled when I thought what Mrs. Scullery might say to such a thing.

  “It’s like my back,” said Steepy suddenly.

  “Like your back?” I said.

  “Aye. It’s empty now. But you know that it’ll be filled with something bloody marvelous one day.”

  “Filled with
possibilities, in other words,” said Malcolm.

  “Yes,” said Steepy. “So it isn’t really empty at all.” He laughed at me. “So even a blank page has a kind of story in it.”

  We all agreed that that was so.

  Soon the day ended.

  As I was getting ready to leave, Steepy came to me.

  “You won’t come back, will you?”

  I shrugged, and looked down.

  “You won’t. But mebbe you will one day. We could be good mates, you and me.”

  “Could we?”

  “Aye. We could.”

  Alicia came to me as well. She touched my cheek. She said goodbye. I touched her arm.

  “I almost did what you did,” I said, so softly she could hardly hear. She knew what I was talking about, though.

  “But you seen the sense,” she said. “Just like me.”

  We smiled at each other.

  “Yes,” I said. “Like you.”

  Mum came back. We thanked Malcolm and Mrs. Milligan for our day. Karl came and drove us homewards.

  “So,” he said. “Was there much yak yak yakkity yak?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “And did you attack anybody?”

  “Nobody at all.”

  “Well done.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Pelé.”

  Mum put her arm around me. I was occupied with myself, filled with memories of the day and thoughts of what I’d do tomorrow.

  “Well?” she said. “Did you settle down? You were being very strange when I left this morning.”

  “Just uncomfortable, I suppose.”

  “But you settled down.”

  I sighed.

  “Yes,” I told her. “The people were very nice. I had a good time. I …”

  I hesitated, looked out at the traffic. For some reason, there was no way I could tell her about my vision.

  She smiled.

  “But it’s not for you?”

  I shrugged.

  “No. I’m sorry, Mum.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Really?”

  “Really, Mina. I didn’t really think it would be, somehow. Come on, cuddle in.”

  I cuddled into her. I told her about Steepy and Malcolm and the others. I saw Karl smiling at us through the driver’s mirror. I closed my eyes, and saw Dad again inside me, standing in the crackling sunlight. One day I’d tell her, but not yet. When I look back now, I suspect that Mum had her own secret that afternoon. I recall how happy she felt against me. I remember seeing her smile to herself as we drove back across the river. Was it Colin Pope? Had she taken the chance to be with him that day, freed from her weird daughter? I suspect she had.

  And so I leave the tree, and go back into the house. Mum’s sitting at the table reading a book about the Antarctic.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi.” I take a breath. “I do remember Colin Pope,” I say.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. And I remember he seemed very nice, Mum.”

  She smiles.

  “Good. He is.”

  “And,” I said softly, “I think you’re very brave.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m not,” she said. “But thank you, love.”

  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

  On the next page is the story I created at Corinthian Avenue. It’s an empty page, no words at all. It’s like Steepy’s back, waiting for tattoos. It’s like an empty sky waiting for a bird to cross it. It’s as silent as an egg waiting for the chick to hatch. It’s like the universe before time began. It is like the future waiting to become the present. Look at it closely, and it can be filled with memories, with dramas, with dreams, with visions. It’s filled with possibilities, so it isn’t really blank at all.

  The black beast is on the prowl. Be very wary. Because the black beast really is a black black beast. It’s a pretty purring pet called Whisper but it’s also a wild thing that will kill if we give it the chance. That’s because the eggs have hatched! There are three pretty sticky feathery things inside the pretty nest! And the parent birds are flying back and forwards with fleas and flies inside their mouths, with worms dangling like fat spaghetti from their beaks. I’ve climbed carefully, quietly, just high enough to look down and see the extraordinary pretty things. And the parents squawked at me – Squawk squawk squawk! – and tilted their heads as they looked at me.

  Don’t you dare! they squawked. Keep away! Squawk! You’re danger! Squawk!

  But the real danger’s down below. The black beast’s prowling in the garden. It’s slinking along the pavement. It tries to look casual and unconcerned, but it hesitates and listens. I see it turning its head, turning its ear towards the nest. And it looks up at me with O so pleading eyes.

  Hello, Mina, purrs the black black beast. I’m your special friend, aren’t I? I’m your lovely little pet. Why don’t you let me come up there to keep you company?

  I glare back down, and I point my finger.

  Don’t you dare, you black black beast! Keep away! You’re danger!

  I wave it off and it turns in a huff and prowls haughtily away. It’ll soon be back, making eyes at me, and licking its teeth at the thought of crushing the pretty little things inside its mouth.

  I sit still in the tree. I tell myself I’m the Guardian of the Chicks. But I’m not really. In truth, the chicks are safe inside the nest. They’re out of Whisper’s reach. He couldn’t climb up here. And even if he could, he couldn’t climb out to where the nest is. It’s built on branches far too thin to hold him. So he prowls below, listening, watching, waiting. The real time of danger will come when the chicks are fledged, when they’re out of the nest but not able to fly well, when they’re hiding in the hedges and the shadows and the parent birds are still feeding them.

  It’s safe to close my eyes. I stop being the Guardian of the Chicks and I try again to imagine being inside an egg. I imagine the sticky feathers and wings growing on me. I imagine peck peck pecking at the shell with my little pointy beak. I imagine pecking my way out the blue-green darkness of the egg into the blue-green light of the tree, just like the chicks have done. I imagine testing my tiny chirping voice for the first time. And I make tiny, almost-silent tweets and squeaks, pretending that my throat is a bird’s throat and my mouth is a beak and …

  And then I hear my name spoken.

  “Mina? Mina?”

  I open my eyes. I look down. There’s a girl standing just underneath me. She’s wearing a St. Bede’s sweatshirt.

  “Mina.”

  I can’t speak. I make a rather silly-sounding tweeting noise. I bite my lip.

  “Do you not remember me, Mina?”

  I nod. Of course I do. It’s Sophie Smith, the girl from school, the girl that was my friend for a while.

  “Yes,” I squeak at last.

  “Just thought I’d come and say hello,” she says. She smiles. “Hello.”

  “Hello,” I squawk.

  She smiles again, looks up at me in my tree. Blue eyes, blond hair, pale face. Just like she was, but older. The blackbirds are squawking in alarm at this new visitor.

  “They’ve got chicks,” I cheep.

  Sophie smiles.

  “Just being good parents,” she says. She widens her eyes. “I won’t harm them!” she whispers up towards the birds.

  Squawk! go the birds. Squawk! Squawk!

  “Brave things,” says Sophie. “And soon they’ll be brave enough to let their babies fly away.”

  Then she flaps her arms and jumps and jumps.

  “Look!” she says. “I had my operation!”

  “That’s good.”

  She strides in a confident small circle on the pavement.

  “It’s not totally fixed yet,” she says. “But it is nearly.”

  “That’s fantastic. Did it hurt?”

  “Yes. And still does, a bit.” She strides a circle again. She kicks her feet and sways her hips. “But it was worth it.”

  �
�That’s great, Sophie.”

  My voice sounds so small, really like a little chick’s.

  “Did you have yours?” she says.

  “Pardon?”

  “Your operation. The destrangification operation. Remember?”

  “O. Yes, I remember. No, I haven’t had it yet.”

  “Still strange, then?”

  “I suppose so.”

  She smiles.

  “That’s good. You might still come back, though?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You might come back to school? I often wonder about you.”

  I look at the leaves around me. I suddenly feel so stupid up here. I feel so small and so inarticulate. She wonders about me? I haven’t a clue what to say.

  “I don’t know,” I mutter. “No, I don’t think so. I think that schools are …”

  My voice trails away. I can’t even finish the sentence.

  “Even Mrs. Scullery said it might be nice if you came back again,” says Sophie.

  “Scullery? You’re joking!”

  “No.”

  “Huh!”

  Someone calls Sophie’s name. I look along the street. Three girls are there, at the far end, sitting on a low garden wall.

  “Sophie! Come on!”

  “I have to go,” she says. She laughs. “You’re crackers, aren’t you?”

  Again I hardly know what to say.

  “Am I?” I squeak.

  “Yes. But you’re nice. And I’m crackers as well in my way. So are lots of us.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  I bite my lip again. I stare down at her, then I glance at the girls along the street. Can it be true?

  “Well,” says Sophie. “Maybe we’re not quite as crackers as you are. But crackers anyway.”

  “Sophie!” they call again.