My Name Is Mina

Bananas, Weirdos, a Beautiful Tree & Boring Heaven

Had breakfast with Mum. Bananas and yogurt and toast with marmalade. DELICIOUS! I told her I’d started my journal. Excellent, she said. I said I might show her some of the pages when I’m ready. Excellent, she said. She said maybe we could make some clay models today. Excellent, I said. Then I came out of the house and climbed into my tree, and here I am.

I love my tree. I’ve been climbing it for a couple of years. I shin up the trunk to a branch that’s just a bit higher than my head. I sit here astride the branch with my back against the trunk. Sometimes I let my legs dangle. Sometimes I sit with my knees raised so that I can rest a book on them. It’s very comfortable, like it was made for me. I’ve been known to sit here for hours at a time, drawing or reading, or just thinking and looking and listening and wondering.

It’s early spring. A pair of blackbirds are building a nest, not too far away from me. The nest’s almost done. I know that because I sometimes climb higher and look down into it. One day soon I’ll look down and see eggs in there. Then I’ll see chicks. Then I’ll see fledglings leaving the nest. Then I’ll see the fledglings become birds that fly into the blue blue yonder. How amazing is that? The blackbirds squawk alarm calls when I climb higher, like they’re yelling, ‘Behave yourself! Squawk! Get back down, girl! Squawk!’ But I don’t think they’re really too troubled by me, not like they would be by a cat, for instance, or by a stranger. Maybe they think I’m some kind of weird bird myself, or some kind of peculiar branch. Maybe if I sat very still for a very long time, they’d build a nest in me: in my lap, or in my hair, or in my hands if I raised them up and cupped them. There is a story about this called St. Kevin and the Blackbird.

LONG AGO, THERE WAS A SAINT CALLED KEVIN WHO LIVED IN IRELAND. ONE DAY, HE WAS PRAYING WITH HIS HANDS STRETCHED TOWARDS HEAVEN (OR WHAT HE THOUGHT WAS HEAVEN), WHEN A BLACKBIRD FLEW DOWN AND LAID AN EGG IN HIS HANDS. ST. KEVIN WAS A GOOD MAN, AND HE DIDN’T WANT TO BREAK THE EGG OR PREVENT IT FROM HATCHING – AND BEING A SAINT, HE ALSO PROBABLY THOUGHT THAT THE EGG WAS A GIFT FROM GOD. SO HE STAYED IN EXACTLY THE SAME POSITION FOR DAY AFTER DAY AND NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, WITH HIS HANDS STRETCHED TOWARDS HEAVEN (OR WHAT HE THOUGHT WAS HEAVEN), UNTIL THE EGG HATCHED RIGHT THERE IN HIS HANDS. IMAGINE THAT, A TINY CHICK MAKING ITS FIRST MOVEMENTS IN YOUR HANDS. IMAGINE THE CLAWS, THE WET WINGS, THE CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP. IMAGINE IT GROWING AS YOU CARED FOR IT. AND IMAGINE IT FLYING AWAY!

Some of the kids from St. Bede’s passed by the end of the street a few moments back. They saw me, but they’ve stopped laughing and calling by now. These days they just roll their eyes and whisper a few words to each other and head onto the gates of their cage. That’s if they do anything at all. They used to call me a witch and a weirdo. They yelled I was a monkey and a crow. They had great fun last year. In the summer they threw daisies and yelled, “Daisies for Miss Crazy!” In the autumn they threw conkers and yelled, “Conkers for Miss Bonkers!” (Which is quite amusing when you think about it, I suppose.)

Now I’m just part of the scenery, like I am for the birds. I am like a lamppost or a tree or a stone. I don’t care. They’re nothing to me. I don’t even look at them. Them! Huh! HUH! Nothing!

This is Falconer Road. It’s a narrow street of terraced houses with little front gardens, each garden with a single tree in it, like this one. The houses are perhaps eighty years old. There are back lanes and garages behind the houses. Beyond the end of the street is Crow Road, where the bigger older houses are. I own a house there, or I will when I’m grown up. It is a bit dilapidated and has extraordinary creatures living in it. Thank you, Grandpa. I raise my eyes to the sky. Thank you, Grandpa. He left it to me in his will. He’s another one that’s dead. We say he’s in Heaven with Dad.

Heaven. I used to think that the idea of Heaven was silly. I used to think of all the people who keep on dying. Heaven must get ridiculously full, I thought. There wouldn’t be room anywhere in the universe for it.

“How big is Heaven?” I said to Mum one day when I was small. I’d just seen a hearse with a coffin in it heading past the end of the street to the massive cemetery on Jesmond Road, the one where Dad’s buried.

“Oh, very very big, I should think,” she said.

I thought of all the cemeteries in all the world. I thought of all the people lying in them. I thought of all the people who have lived and died in the years and years and years of time. I just couldn’t imagine it.

“It must be ginormous,” I said.

“Yes, I suppose so,” she said.

Then, a few weeks later, we were reading an encyclopedia. It said that if you counted all the people who had ever lived in all the history of the world until about fifty years ago, there wouldn’t be as many as the people who are alive today[2].

That surprised us a great deal.

It was a couple of hours later that I realized what that meant.

“So that means,” I said, “that Heaven only needs to be about as big as the earth.”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose that’s true.”

And we laughed about it, because compared with the size of the universe, earth isn’t very big at all. And even earth isn’t full. There’s room for lots more bodies, just like in Heaven there’s room for lots more souls.

These days, though, I don’t believe any of that. I think that the idea of Heaven is silly for other reasons. When people try to say what Heaven is like, it just sounds deadly deadly deadly dull. Standing around singing and eating nectar or something and looking at God and praising him and being very very very good. Imagine that! YAWN YAWN YAWN YAWN! Who’d want to do that for century after century after century after century? Somebody like Mrs. Scullery, maybe, but not me. I bet that even the angels get fed up with it all. I bet they want to eat bananas and marmalade and chocolate, and to look at things like clouds of flies, and to climb trees or to play with cats. I bet they look at us and envy us for being human. I bet that sometimes they even want to be like us. Except they might get put off by the fact that we die.

Anyway, in the end, I don’t really believe in Heaven at all, and I don’t believe in perfect angels. I think that this might be the only Heaven there can possibly be, this world we live in now, but we haven’t quite realized it yet. And I think that the only possible angels might be us.

Is that stupid? No, it’s not! Look at the blackbird, the way the sunlight glistens on it. Look at the way it shimmers, the way its blackness glints with silver, purple, green, and even white beneath the sun. Listen to its song. Look at the way it jumps into the sky. Look how the leaves are coming out from the buds. Feel how strong the tree is and feel the beat of my heart and the sun on my skin and the air on my cheek. Think of things like the human voice, the solar system, the fur of a cat, the sea, bananas, a duck-billed platypus. Look at the things that we’ve made: houses and pavements and walls and steeples and roads and cars and songs and poems, and yes I know that it’s a long long way from being perfect. But perfection would be very dull and perfection isn’t the point.

Look at the world. Smell it, taste it, listen to it, feel it, look at it. Look at it! And I know horrible things happen for no good reason. Why did my dad die? What’s the point of famine and fear and darkness and war? I don’t know! I’m just a kid! How can I know answers to things like that? But this horrible world is so blooming beautiful and so blooming weird that sometimes I think it’ll make me faint!

“Mina!” calls Mum. “Mina!”

“Coming, Mum!”

I don’t move.

There’s a white van at Mr. Myers’s house just along the street. He died. (Another one! It’s about time we had some people born around here!) He was called Ernie and he was very old. He used to stand at his window staring out and even when you smiled and waved at him, you couldn’t be certain if he’d seen you, or if he thought he was dreaming about you. I used to wonder what was going on inside his brain. Did he see the same things as everybody else, or did he see different things? Did he see nothing at all? Did the world, and me and everybody in it, seem like a dream? And come to that, do any of us see what another person sees? Maybe we’re all living in some strange kind of dream. If we are, of course, we don’t know that we are.

I used to see a doctor going into the house sometimes. He was a miserable-looking gray kind of bloke that came in a miserable-looking gray kind of car. He caught sight of me in the tree one day. I started to wave but he just scowled, like he thought that sitting in a tree was the stupidest thing in the whole wide world. It was obviously far too much of a struggle for somebody like him to smile and wave back at somebody like me. Huh. Wouldn’t want him to be my doctor. He’d make you feel like topping yourself just by looking at you. Can’t have been much of a doctor, anyway. Mr. Myers died, and was dead for nearly a week before they found him, lying under the table in the kitchen. Poor soul. He had a daughter, but I don’t think she ever really cared for him. She’s at the house right now, carrying out some of Mr. Myers’s belongings to the van. She’s another streak of misery. She was like that even when Ernie was alive. Maybe she thought he’d have some gold hidden away, rather than old table lamps and worn rugs and tatty chairs that she’s carrying out now. Mum says the place is full of stuff, piled up in the attic and in the dilapidated garage at the back of the house.

Look at her. Misery Guts. You had him until he was old! You had your dad till he was old and you didn’t care!

The streak of misery’s putting Mr. Myers’s house up for sale. Wonder who’ll buy it.

“Mina!”

“Yes, Mum!”

“Mina!”

Listen to how lovely her voice is. Call again, Mum.

“Mina!”

Wow.

“Yes, Mum!”