Artichoke Hearts (27 page)

I wake up wanting to tell Jidé about Nana dying . . . In a way I wish it wasn’t half term. For the first time in my life I wish it wasn’t the holidays. Then
I remember my mobile. Even though I want to talk to Jidé most, I call Millie first. The phone goes straight to answer machine. I remember now that she’s away on holiday. It’s not
the sort of message you can leave on someone’s answerphone, is it? ‘My nana’s dead, but you can listen to her on the radio this morning.’

So I just hang up and hover over Jidé’s name before pressing the call button.

‘Yep!’

‘Jidé!’

‘Mira!’

He sounds happy and surprised to hear my voice.

‘It’s about my nana.’

‘She died?’

He says it for me.

‘Yes,’ I whisper.

Monday 30 May

‘Are you all right?’

‘Not really,’ I mumble. ‘She’s on the radio this morning; they recorded her in the hospice . . . I thought you might want to listen.’

I don’t know why I want Jidé and Millie to hear Nana talking, but if I had her number I would call Pat Print too.

‘What time?’

I give him the details and after that I can’t think of anything else to say.

‘I’ll listen,’ he says. ‘When’s the funeral?’

‘Saturday’

‘Do you want to meet? I mean . . .’

‘I don’t think I can . . . with all this going on.’

‘OK, just call me if you need me.’

Before I spoke to him, I felt all right, but now the tears are streaming down my face and my voice is all choked up.

‘I hope it’s . . . well . . . I’ll be thinking of you.’

‘Me too,’ I squeak in my high-pitched teary voice.

Just as I hang up I hear him say my name . . .

‘Mira?’

I wait, to see if he calls me back, but he doesn’t.

If someone is dead and they come on the radio, it’s like they’re not dead at all. It’s just as if they’re really talking to you . . . ghost-talking. If
someone you love dies and you keep hearing their voice on the radio, or see them in films or on the television, you could pretend that they’re still alive by listening to them or watching
them over and over.

I was there when the woman interviewed Nana for the radio. But when I hear her voice, everything sounds different. For a start, they’ve added music, the kind they would play at the
Pope’s funeral. I want to tell Jidé that it’s nothing like my nana would choose. There are other people that I haven’t heard before, talking about what they believe in and
how what they believe in affects the way they feel about dying. I wonder which of the people talking are still alive.

We sit around the radio, like I’ve seen loads of times in old films, when they show that moment when Neville Chamberlain announces that Britain is at war with Germany. We huddle around,
waiting to hear Nana speak to us, and somehow it helps to feel that Jidé is listening in with me. It takes me a while to realize that Nana has already started speaking, because Laila’s
making such a racket talking to baby Su Su, her doll. Mum says, ‘Shhhhh,’ to Laila, who is alive, so that we can listen to Nana Josie, who is dead.

Nana’s voice sounds different, sort of velvety. Dad says the radio technicians can put your voice through a warmer to make it sound richer. I don’t think they should change
people’s voices like that. Even the things she says, which I have heard before, somehow seem different . . . more important. First of all you hear someone talking about the Pope. Then you
hear Jo and Lyn talking about their wedding day and the baby and about how they have ‘faith in each other’. After that there’s a short bit with the supposed-to-be-famous person
who turns out to be
Crystal
! Dad says she’s an actress, but none of us have even heard of her. Then you hear Nana talking. I know why the radio woman made Nana such a big piece of her
story, because out of all of the people talking, my nana is the one who sounds the most alive.

Mum and Dad are on the phone all day, letting people know the news. I can’t believe how much there is to do when someone dies. Dad has to arrange to register Nana’s
death. It’s the same town hall he went to for mine and Krish’s birth certificate. That must feel really strange, to have a piece of paper in your hands that tells you the exact end date
and time of your mother’s life.

Nana’s left loads of instructions about the funeral and who she wants Mum and Dad to contact and who she wants Aunty Abi and Aunty Mel to call. It’s like she’s planned a great
big party and our house has been turned into the planning office, only there’s nothing fun about it.

The letterbox clanks and I run downstairs wishing it could be Millie with an escape plan. I would like more than anything else to get out of this house. If I had the courage, I would call
Jidé back and ask if I could go over to his place. Instead of Millie or Jidé, a tall lady, as solid as a door, wearing square glasses, stands on our step. The way she nods towards me
reminds me a bit of Moses – the coffin man, not the dog.

‘Is this the Levenson household?’ she asks.

I nod, but don’t let her in. There’s something about her I don’t like – maybe it’s her smile, which is dead behind the eyes.

‘Who’s that?’ Dad calls from the kitchen.

‘Tell your father that I’m the celebrant.’

‘She’s the celebrant,’ I call back.

Dad appears in the hallway and shakes hands with the woman, as if she’s someone quite important. I sit and listen to them talking for a while. This woman is going to be the person who
keeps the funeral service together, like a priest but without the God bit. She calls herself a celebrant, because she says we will be celebrating the life of Nana Josie. That’s OK for her,
because she never really knew my nana. How am I supposed to celebrate?

I don’t see why we need her to do it anyway. I can’t understand why Nana chose this woman. She never liked people who spoke too slowly or too quietly. ‘Controlling
behaviour,’ Nana used to call it. Celebrant Lady does both as she sits with Mum and Dad, filling in forms and making notes, planning the schedule for Nana’s funeral.

‘And Mira here, she wants to read a poem, or say something.’ Dad smiles at me, probably trying to make me feel involved.

‘Ah,’ sighs Celebrant Lady, without looking my way. ‘When it comes down to it, it can be very difficult for children to deal with these big emotions. I can always read it out
for you,’ she says, half smiling in my direction. ‘What’s the name of your poem?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ I lie. Just because I feel like being as unhelpful as possible towards her. ‘I know the music Nana wanted though,’ I tell Dad.

‘Do you? That’s great. Tell me later,’ whispers Dad, looking sideways at an impatient-looking Celebrant Lady.

‘Well, let me have the title and author of your poem as soon as you can, and a copy, just in case,’ she says, packing away her sensible black notebook.

I can’t believe that this is actually her job. What she wants to do with her life. Plan other people’s funerals.

When she’s gone, Mum and Dad are back on the phone. It’s as if Krish and me and Laila don’t exist any more. Laila’s been plonked in front of the television in a little
nest of cushions and Krish is sprawled out on the sofa, still in his pyjamas. He hasn’t moved all day.

I wander up to my room to find something to do. But there it is waiting for me . . . Nana’s easel. Every time I look at it, I can’t help but feel as if it’s calling me over.
It’s something about the way it leans.

Today, it’s bending even further to the right than ever. I take out my charcoals. It’s as if I’m walking towards another human being, but I know it’s only an easel, made
of wood and spattered with Nana Josie’s paint. I fix the canvas in place; it’s as if I have no choice . . . As I start to draw, I can feel something of Nana inside her easel. It must be
all those hours she’s spent standing in front of it. I don’t even have to adjust the height. It fits.

It’s not like I’ve really thought about what I’m going to draw. I just pick up my mirror and put it on a shelf behind the easel, so that I can see myself and draw at the same
time. This is my first ever attempt at a self-portrait, and as soon as I start, I realize how difficult it’s going to be. It was much easier to draw Nana than it is to follow every detail of
my own face. I work on it for hours, drawing in lines and smudging them out again. It’s not just the shape of the face that makes you look like you – you have to try and catch what’s
coming to the surface. Like the day I understood that Nana was trapped in her body. No matter how accurate you are with the lines and proportions, if you can’t catch that, you can’t
bring a person to life. Finally a face emerges which has something in it that belongs to me. That’s the best I can do, for now.

I am lying in bed staring at my first attempt at a self-portrait, on Nana’s easel.

Mum knocks on the door. She never used to knock.

‘Everything all right, Mira? You’ve been very quiet today.’

Mum walks over to the easel, looking from me to the canvas.

‘That’s a very sad and sombre you,’ says Mum, wrapping her arms around me.

I nod.

For a while we just lie there together, looking at the girl in the picture, who is me.

‘She looks like I imagine you’ll look, when you’re older . . . maybe sixteen, but this terrible sadness will pass,’ says Mum, moving the mirror back to the dressing
table.

‘I just looked in the mirror, and tried to draw what I saw,’ I tell Mum.

Now that I’ve finished, the easel’s straightened up. It’s not calling me over any more.

When I turn the light off, there is nothing sitting in the corner of the room watching me. It’s just Nana’s easel with my first attempt at a self-portrait sitting on it. It’s
as if it’s peaceful, now that I’ve done what it wanted. Can there be such a thing as a peaceful easel? Pat Print would say there could.

I wake with an acid taste in my mouth and a dull ache in my belly . . . I know what’s coming and I actually want it to come right now. That way, by the time it’s
Nana’s funeral, it will all be over. Today I feel like lying in bed, doing nothing, seeing no one.

‘I’ve got a job for you today,’ says Mum, opening a box full of programmes for Nana’s funeral. There are hundreds of them.

‘Are there that many people coming?’

‘It’s hard to know, Mira, but Josie wanted glitter, so glitter she must have.’

For the cover of the programme Nana chose a photo of her by the sea in Suffolk. She’s throwing a piece of wood into the waves for Claude, her Newfoundland. She wanted us – me, Krish and
Laila – to sprinkle glitter on the waves in the photo. So that’s what we try to do, but it’s impossible with Laila ‘helping’, because she either keeps trying to eat the
glitter or just splodges it on to the cards. Mum says it doesn’t matter, but I think it does. Nana would have liked the idea of Laila joining in, but not if she made a mess of the cards.
After ruining about five of them, Mum finally realizes that it’s just not going to work, so she takes her off to the swings.

Krish sits in silence, carefully sprinkling just the right amount of glitter on to each wave. I have mixed the glitter to be the colour of the Suffolk sea on a warm summer’s evening . . .
silvery-blue.

You know that there’s something wrong when Krish is this still and quiet.

‘I’ve done twenty – how about you, Krish?’

That should wind him up enough to get a reaction. But Krish just counts his pile, without looking up.

‘Fifteen,’ he shrugs, as if he doesn’t care.

‘Are you all right?’

He doesn’t answer, but just carries on gluing and glittering.

Glitter is sprinkled all over this house, but there is nothing here to celebrate.