My Name Is Mina

I spat down into the water and flushed again and off went my spit into the world. It’ll change from being spit. Some of it will turn up in somebody else and then in somebody else’s spit and pee. It’ll become a bit of the Pacific Ocean or the Nile. It’ll turn up in whatever kind of beings we become in the future. And on and on and on and onto the very end of time.

EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY

Go to the loo. Flush your pee away.

Consider where it will go to and what it will become.

Swigged some water from the tap to replace the water I have lost through spit and pee and sweat. The human body is 65 percent water. Two-thirds of me is constantly disappearing, and constantly being replaced. So most of me is not me at all!

Gulp!

Caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. Stepped back and had a good look. I am indeed very skinny. This must be an organic thing, given my fondness for fig rolls and Jammy Dodgers and chocolate. And I’m rather small. When I was young Mum used to call me her little bird, which I loved. But however small and light I might be, I can’t be as light as a bird is. They have air cavities within their bones. The correct word for this fact is pneumatization. Pneumatization. What a word! NEW-MA-TIZE-ATION.

I, along with all other human beings, am not pneumatized. Therefore I am earthbound. Or am I? Maybe not. After all —

MY PEE AND MY SWEAT AND MY SPIT RISE INTO THE AIR

AS VAPOR AND FALL TO THE EARTH AS RAIN.

MY SKIN DANCES IN THE AIR AS DUST.

MY BREATH MERGES WITH THE AIR AND WITH THE SKY.

SO I AM EARTHBOUND BUT ALSO AIRBOUND!

I keep on looking. I know that the girl I see in the bathroom mirror will evolve and grow. Mum says I am poised on the threshold of a time of wonder. I look at the little creature in the mirror and it seems impossible. But yes, I do feel poised. And I’m also happy to wait, and to be a baby in those times I need to be a baby, like when Mum wraps her arms around me on the sofa and whispers that she loves me, and sings her songs to me, and whispers that I’m her lovely little chick.

Mooched about some more. Went to my bedroom and mooched through my bookshelves. Pulled out three books, three of the extraordinariest books in the world: Where the Wild Things Are, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and Dogger! Lay on my bed and read them and looked at them just like I did when I was a little girl. And danced the dance of the Wild Things with Max, and tiptoed into the bear’s cave with the family, and felt really sad with Dave about his lost toy, Dogger, and really happy with him when he found it again.

I read them all again, a second time, and got all dreamy, and remembered Dad, the way he was when he used to read these books to me just before I went to sleep. I never really have a strong picture of him in my mind. I sort of half-hear him and half-see him, like he’s somebody in a dream that gets harder to remember the more you try to think of him. When I read the words to myself I can kind of half-hear the sound of his voice as he read them to me.

I half-remembered the smell of his breath and the stubble on his cheek as he kissed me good night, the slight roughness of his skin as he stroked my cheek, his voice as he whispered his Good Night. And I lay with the books around me and the strange half-vague, half-intense memories[8] inside me, and felt very small indeed.

This activity has made me rather sad. I will cheer myself up by writing all the words for joy and loveliness, two whole pages filled with nothing else!

skylark Mum blackbird owl moon tree park

Icarus wing weird cat black shining silver

smooth joy yes egg tree nest light toast

marmalade raspberry yogurt park Mina

Dad bat Orpheus angel night whisper

journal Sendak book abundant story sing

dance Grace starling Mina mess clutter sing

beak God fly typical William joy pollen

nonsense sloth wild painter poet Blake

savage coal fig tender wander Rosen

wonder banana transmigration Hughes

flush unimaginable Dave paint clay dangle

alarm witch Buddhism saint skin weirdo

pebble crow pissing grandpa Oxenbury

Ernie heaven universe Max star Dogger

imagine tinkling alive glisten bud beat

beautiful inside soul tatty hatch chick wet

creature book lullaby Maurice sloosh light

water pizza love paradox alive hoot giggle

Hinduism darling purr lass zimmer

Persephone pee poo soul fig bloke strange

bee imagine Shirley chocolate goggly word

Grace metempsybeautifulchosis bony wallop

Himalaya cloud body hatch universe stupid

bloody archaeopteryx poem word yawn

nothingness mystery click tongue

mysterious sprout thump carrot philosophy

see pomegranate sweat Helen dead concrete

Corinthian stop play index finger biscuit

space saber madness spring Michael cheese

strange world winter frost extraordinary

earth this dream dust silver sleep o sun

When that was done, I looked out into the street. The blue car was back. The pregnant woman and the man got out. There was a boy with them. The woman looked at Mr. Myers’s house with distaste, but the man guided her to the front window. They peered in. The boy stood with his hands in his pockets and stared glumly at the earth. He stared glumly along the street. The man grinned at him and called him forward. The boy didn’t move. Then another car came, and a man in a suit, carrying a plastic folder, got out. He shook the hands of the woman and the man. The boy just looked away. The man in the suit laughed. He seemed to say something, probably something about “kids.” He rubbed his hands and took some keys out of his pocket and opened the front door. They went inside.

I sat at the table. I doodled. Wrote some nonsense. Kept looking from the window. Saw Whisper slinking along by the low garden walls.

The family were inside the house for an age. I imagined them moving from room to room, moving through the molecules of Ernie Myers. I imagined them inspecting the collapsing ceilings, the toilet in the dining room, the