Artichoke Hearts

‘I’m in the bathroom. Mira, can you pick it up or they’ll ring off,’ yells Mum.

I don’t know why they even bother. It’s always me who answers the phone anyway. Krish won’t, because it makes him nervous.

‘Hi! Millie . . . Poor you! Does it really hurt? . . . OK, I’ll tell her . . . Yep, I’ll call you later.’

‘Who was that?’ asks Mum, carrying Laila, all cosied up in a towel, down the stairs.

‘Millie. Her teeth are hurting. It’s her new brace giving her headaches. She’s having the day off. Can I go and see her after school?’

‘If you like, but be back by five and take your mobile,’ Mum says, trying to be relaxed about everything, but then she blows it. ‘Do you want me to walk you in to your writing group, if Millie’s not coming?’

Pat Print walks ahead of me through the great metal gates. When she spots me, she stops and waits.

‘Nana. We saw you walking him. We could see you from her room in the hospice. She thinks Piper and Moses know each other.’

‘Now I think of it, I’ve heard Tilly talk about a “Piper”. Tilly walks Moses on weekdays, mostly. I just don’t have the time. Strange I’ve never bumped into your nana on one of my Suffolk jaunts though . . . So she’s in the Marie Curie. That’s just behind my flat. She’ll be well looked after there,’ she says, touching me on the shoulder in her awkward, trying-to-be-comforting way.

‘Millie can’t come today. She’s got a new brace and her teeth are aching,’ I explain, changing the subject.

‘Ouch! Poor Millie, but I don’t see why everyone’s got to have such perfect teeth these days. It’s all part of this gruesome path we’re all supposed to follow to physical perfection.’

‘Well, you’ll have to fill her in. And then there were . . . three,’ Pat counts, walking into the classroom where Jidé and Ben are sprawled out over their desks as if they would rather be in bed. Ben’s wearing his baseball cap today.

‘Great cap,’ says Pat Print, pulling the brim down over Ben’s eyes and making him squirm.

She takes off her coat. It’s one of those green wax things Nana wears in Suffolk – you hardly ever see anyone wearing one in London.

‘I got the impression dogs aren’t allowed in school. So I’ve left him at home today.’

Before I can think of what’s happening I hear Nana’s words escape from my mouth, ‘With love comes cack.’

Now Pat Print, Jidé and Ben are all rolling around in hysterics. Pat finally calms down enough to ask, Who says that?’

Pat Print can see that I’ve blushed up bright red, so she tries to change the subject. ‘Now . . . what have you got for me, Jidé?’

I want to talk to Jidé, I want to ask him so many questions about Rwanda, but if I ever did he would know I’d been spying on him and what would he think of me, for wanting to know?

‘Is that all?’ laughs Pat, rubbing her hands together. ‘Let’s have it then.’

He could imagine the heat and the red-brown soil, but he could not remember it. When he looked in the mirror he could imagine what his mother and his father looked like. He often wondered whose eyes he had, whose nose, whose mouth, whose skin, whose voice his sounded like, but he knew that there was no way he was ever going to find out. He didn’t want people to feel sorry for him, because he was one of the lucky ones. You hadn’t watched his body on the nine o’clock news floating down the river of corpses. If you had known them, you might have caught sight of his parents though. But would you have recognized them as human beings, or just a mass of disconnected limbs? If your past is hell – where only by an act of good luck . . . God . . . whatever you believe in . . . only you’d survived – why would you look back? You can have too much history when you’re only twelve years old.

That’s why he always looked tough, joked about, or played the fool, because although he didn’t know the ‘derivation’ of his name, at least he was alive.

Pat Print takes off her glasses and wipes her eyes. She’s not a crier like my mum, but when Jidé has finished she stays quiet, looking straight at him and nodding her head as if to say ‘that’s right’. Her silence is full of respect. You don’t often get that feeling between teachers and students.

My eyes are also brimming over with tears. I stare at the ground so that nobody notices, but I feel Jidé glance my way and I want him to know that I care, so I force myself to look up into his eyes. We hold each other there for what seems like forever until he nods, releasing me from the spell of his gaze.

‘Jidé, it wouldn’t surprise me if I were to read that opening in a prize-winning novel. You should write on,’ she says, smiling at him.

‘I would like you both to pick a line or an idea from Jidé’s writing that stood out for you . . . Ben?’

‘I like the last line, where he explains why he’s a joker. Before today I didn’t think there was much behind that.’

‘There’s always something behind a character. Reasons people behave the way they do,’ says Pat. ‘How about you, Mira?’

‘The line about “You can have too much history when you’re only twelve years old” . . . because it made me think . . . it made me feel . . . that you don’t really know anything about anyone. I thought Jidé was born here, I didn’t know anything about Rwanda, or about him, until this writing group. You think you know the people in your class, where they come from, but you just don’t. It’s the same with Nana; I thought I knew her, but I only know a tiny bit of her.’

‘Maybe you’re not supposed to know,’ says Jidé, with his eyes fixed on me.

‘If you don’t know, how do you ever really get to understand another person?’ asks Pat.

‘Maybe you only see the sides of them they want you to see,’ answers Ben, patting Jidé on the back.

‘That’s an astute observation. Have you written anything for me this week, Ben?’ asks Pat.

‘Not much,’ Ben mumbles. ‘Nothing serious, like Jidé’s, just something about skateboarding. It’s more of a poem really . . . or song lyrics.’

Ben fixes up his baseball cap and begins, quietly for him, as though he’s embarrassed by his own writing.

On Saturdays I go up the Palace with my skateboard, meet my mates.

On Saturdays I wear my skate gear, like my mates.

No helmets,

caps turned hack to front.

No knee pads, bloody scabs instead.

We watch the graffiti artist ‘O’ spray his purple tag on the wall where you’re allowed.

And the wall where you’re not,

Then we go flying, zipping, twisting mid air.

On Saturdays I go flying

on my skateboard

with my mates.

Pat Print claps. ‘Excellent, Ben Gbemi with a silent G. You’re a performance poet.’

Ben hides his grin under the low brim of his cap. ‘Now, Mira, what have you got for me?’ ‘Some more of my diary, if you want.’ ‘I most certainly do want.’ Pat Print smiles. I flick through, trying to find something I want to read. I don’t feel like reading about Nana, or the hospice, so I pick out yesterday in the classroom. Just the thought of it makes me feel stronger.

I can feel Jidé’s eyes on me. When I finish reading, I look up at him and smile. He should know it’s because of him that I summoned the courage to face up to Demi, Bo and Orla.

‘School can be a brutal place,’ agrees Pat. ‘I remember from my own school days; I hated it so much I was always playing truant, but you only need one or two true friends to change everything. I was thinking, as you’ve all been brave enough to read out your own work, I should probably read you something of mine. Mira’s already had a sneak preview of this one. I can tell you, it’s certainly no better than your writing.’

Pat Print thinks for a moment. ‘I suppose it’s about loyalty . . . Now, where are my specs?’ She rummages in her satchel for her glasses, which hover halfway down her nose. She leafs through her book with great care, as if she’s looking for a particular moment. Then she peers at me from under her glasses, smiles and begins to read.

There should he a moment when you decide enough is enough, and you can seriously have enough of being smacked on the hack of the legs with a wide metal ruler because you can’t remember what twelve times eight is. Can you remember? Too long. Thwack. That’s how long you got. But there was no single defining moment. It was just one ordinary drizzly day of quiet torture that made me walk through my school gates mid-morning. It was the ordinariness of it all . . . the once-too-often wound that made me lift the latch and walk free, out on to the open moorland. That day I made a promise to myself never again to go back to school. I don’t remember how many hours I walked before I came to the beck. That’s when I saw it . . . a picnic basket washed up on the riverbank. My first thoughts were of bull-rushes and Sunday school but, when I opened the hamper lid, there, lying curled up in a mole-like ball, was the small brown form of my first dog. I called him Moses for obvious reasons.

The bell rings and Pat Print closes her book straight away, as if she can’t wait to stop reading. I think she’s still shy! She rummages in her satchel and pulls out three copies of her book, handing them around.

In mine she writes: To Mira. Schooldays are not the best days of everyone’s life! Love, Pat Print. In Millie’s she writes: To Millie, a loyal friend, with love, Pat Print.

As soon as she writes that I feel a pang of guilt. Millie Lockhart has always been my most loyal friend. Why can’t I just be honest with her about Jidé? It’s not like there’s much to tell anyway. Tonight, I think.

Pat Print peers over her glasses at Jidé and Ben. They are hovering in an awkward place between not wanting to miss out, or look too keen. Eventually, Ben thrusts his book in front of Pat without saying anything at all. She smiles to herself.

Last, it’s Jidé’s turn. Pat’s pen pauses for a moment over the page before she decides what to write . . .To Jidé, a brave and fearsome warrior, with a heart of gold, with love, Pat Print.

No matter how hard he tries to look like he doesn’t care what she’s written, Jidé has a smile curling at the corner of his mouth, a smile that I can’t help but wear too until it’s wiped off my face by the sight of my dad, of all people, coming out of Miss Poplar’s office. He thinks I haven’t seen him as he makes a swift exit out of the side door. A deep well of sadness starts to swirl in the pit of my belly, but I still it with this thought . . . if Nana has died while I’ve been at school today, he would be taking me home right now.

‘Pat, have you got a minute?’ Miss Poplar calls to Pat Print down the corridor. She is not her usual cheery self.

I watch them for a moment. Pat Print looks serious, glancing nervously back to the classroom we’ve just been in. She nods her head at whatever Miss Poplar’s talking about, but when Pat Print starts to talk Miss Poplar keeps interrupting her. Even from this distance you can tell by the way their hands dance around that the conversation is getting quite heated.

I pass Miss Poplar in the corridor before break, and she just smiles at me and walks straight past. I want to ask her why my dad was in her office, but as she hasn’t said anything I think maybe I’m not supposed to know.

At break, I sit on the wall on my own. Nobody bothers me until Jidé walks over to join me.

I nod and we walk over to the bench where Ben’s dealing out three piles of Simpson’s Top Trumps. I can’t believe he’s still playing this, but Jidé and Ben laugh as they exchange ‘Huggability’ scores. In primary school they used to play car Top Trumps so I suppose they have moved on, a bit. Any kind of Top Trumps is, as far as I can see, a completely pointless waste of time, but I am grateful, all the same, to Jidé, for asking me over because nothing makes you more likely to be picked on than being on your own.

‘We read out our writing . . . Ben did something about skateboarding, I wrote about yesterday in class and Jidé talked about his birth-parents in Rwanda.’

‘They ache, badly,’ sighs Millie, covering her mouth and opening Pat Print’s book.

‘To Millie, a loyal friend, with love, Pat Print; she reads, smiling up at me.