David Almond - My Name Is Mina

Maybe he wouldn’t be gloomy. Maybe he’d really be glad. Maybe he would want something to do with somebody like me.

I get up. I put the book and the pencil down. I go out of the door. I walk along the street. My heart’s thudding. The air’s dead still. I hear yelling, the kind of yelling Mum must have heard. It comes from the back of the house. A woman’s voice, angry and scared. I don’t turn back. I quickly walk to where the houses end, then turn into the lane that runs along the back of them. I come to the back of Mr. Myers’s house. There’s an ancient derelict garage there. The doors to the lane must have fallen off years ago and there are dozens of massive planks nailed across the entrance. Next to the garage there’s a six-foot-high wall. There’s a waste bin against the wall. I could easily get onto that and then to the top of the wall and look down into the garden and say, “Hello. My name is Mina.”

The woman yells again.

“Keep out! All right?”

I hear the boy muttering something. It just seems to make her angrier.

“Do you not think we’ve got more to worry about than stupid you?” she yells. “So keep out! All right? All right?”

She sounds so scared, at her wits’ end.

“Just keep out!” she yells again, then it’s silent.

I stand in the lane all alone. I tell myself I should go back home, but it feels like an adventure to be standing there, even though I’m so close to home, even though everything’s so still and so silent. My heart beats fast.

Soon I hear the boy kicking the ball. I lean against the garage and feel it trembling as the ball thumps against it. Thump! Whack! Thump! I hear the boy’s grunts of effort and frustration. Who is he? What’ll he be like if I’m brave enough – when I’m brave enough to speak to him?

After a while, there’s his mother’s voice again. Will he come in for lunch? No, he tells her. No! Then I hear their voices close together. She’s calmer now. I imagine her at his side, touching him, tousling his hair, reasoning with him, explaining her anger. It’s the garage she’s scared of. It must be. Please keep out of it, she must be telling him. Then I hear a doorbell, and her feet hurrying away. Now! I tell myself. Now!

But I don’t. Do it! I tell myself, but I don’t. And there’s the creaking of a door, then silence again. No football. And then his dad’s voice, yelling, too.

“Michael! Michael! Didn’t we tell you …”

Michael. That’s his name. But it’s too late.

He’s with his dad now, and his dad thumps a wall and the garage shudders and I hear them heading back towards the house.

Silly Mina! Lost your chance! Chicken!

I wait, but they’ve gone. And I trail back home. And I write again.

Chicken! I’m frightened. Don’t be frightened!

I try not to feel silly and forlorn. I write an extraordinary activity for myself, the most important of all extraordinary activities. I pin it up above my bed.

I read it and read it. I tell myself to be as brave as a chick making its first flight, as brave as Steepy with his tattoos, as brave as Sophie with her operation, as brave as Mum living without Dad, as brave as the baby leaping into the world. I write the words to help me.

Mina was brave and she tried again. She walked along the street and into the back lane. She stepped up onto the waste bin and then up onto the wall and she said, “Hello. My name is Mina. What’s yours?”

And I do it, just like that, the very next day.

I see him go off to school in the morning. I’m in the tree when he comes back in the afternoon. I don’t wait long. I take myself for a walk into the back lane. I hear the boy and his dad talking together. Then his dad goes away. And I wait. And there’s silence, just the creaking of a door, so he must be in there again.

As soon as he comes out! I tell myself.

I wait.

The creaking of the door.

Now! Do it!

I jump up onto the waste bin and look down from the top of the wall.

“Are you the new boy here?” I say.

He turns around, looks up, and at last I tell him in my brightest voice:

“My name is Mina!”

Wandering and wondering are almost the same word. And wandering through space is very like wondering inside the head. I am a wonderer and a wanderer!

Extraordinary Fact! There are as many people alive in the world today as there have been in the whole of human history!

This makes me think about how some people say that “modern” art can’t be much good because it doesn’t much look like anything in the world. But maybe it’s not trying to look like the world. Maybe it’s trying to be like the world. Or maybe trying to do a kind of impossible thing – to look like something that’s in the world but can’t really be seen at all.

Extraordinary fact! Dust in houses (and in offices and schools and other places where humans live and work) consists mainly of tiny fragments of human skin. So when we see dust dancing and whirling and sparkling in a shaft of sunlight the thing that is dancing and whirling and sparkling is dead human skin! There’s other stuff in there as well – like pollen and fibers of paper and cloth and flakes of the skin and hair of animals like cats, but the bulk of it is human skin! And lots of people’s skin mingles together and dances in the light, and the skin of the living and the skin of the dead mingle together and dance in the light! And the skin of animals and the skin of humans mingle together and dance in the light! And this mingling is all around us, and is very ordinary and is very extraordinary and very strange!

EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY

Stare at Dust that Dances in the Light

And incidentally VERBS ARE NOT “DOING WORDS.” “Stop” is a verb. And if I say “I stop,” I have stopped doing anything. I am doing absolutely nothing whatsoever at all! I would have told Mrs. Scullery that, but by this time she was getting totally fed up with me. She would have said, “That is just playing with words,” and I would have answered, “And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!” Which she wouldn’t have understood at all and which would have made her even more and more fed up.

Do not look into the sun, of course. (Health & Safety Warning!)

Do not look into the moon, of course. (Health & Sanity Warning!)

A strange thought. Maybe trying to remember when you are young is very like trying to remember when you are old. When he looked out into the street, Ernie Myers probably felt like I did when I was trying to look back into the past. So the young and the old are in some ways very alike.

Thoughts about swearing. Yes, I know that swearing is very bad, and that swearwords are very very bad bad things. But there are times when nothing else will work – otherwise why have swearwords at all? And I know that you are not supposed to say this, but there are times when swearwords just sound very nice and feel nice on your tongue and are simply very nice to say. (I don’t think Mrs. Scullery would agree with any of this, despite her performance in the Bloody Disgrace scene.)