Ba-nanna and Mars Baa by Kayleigh Jayshree

I

I can’t remember the shop’s name. It’s in York, sandwiched between various other shops, on a cobbled street. The sign outside was drawn in lavender chalk, in an elaborate swirl that I’m not sure went with the décor. It’s called ‘Ye Olde Sweet Shoppe’ or something. My brother tried to rub the chalk off and I thought Nan was about to tell him off, but she didn’t.

We first went there as children; townies with thin lips and sunken eyes stared at my Nan’s woodland tattoos, clutching each other as if she were contagious. We saw them as part of her. I used to watch her peel the cling film from her tattoos in a stretched out time, lit by a cherry blossom lamp in the corner of the room.

The second stair into the shop wobbled as we put our foot onto it. Nan made a comment about how when Dennis was alive, and in a wheelchair, nobody helped them down the stairs in a restaurant. She said you could taste the customer’s sweat amongst the smell of tomato and rosemary. There was no elevator.

We’d never met him. The shop was lined to the ceiling with pastel lavender and green shelves, filled with blue labelled jars of humbugs, laxative sherbet lemons, toffees, the arbitrary stick of rock. I couldn’t reach most of it, so Nan got me my favourite toffees from the shelf above my head. All I wanted were toffees. I got a whole bag. My cousin got a stick of rock, and my brother had nearly one of everything. He was running around the shop, knocking things over, and my cousin took the time to read every label. I noticed how the banana sweets matched my Nan’s hair exactly, and said she should be called Ba-nanna. She laughed. I can’t say I’ve thought of it since then, but my cousin brought it up at her 80th in a poem.

We sat in the nearby park, eating our sweets. My cousin was crying because she lost a tooth, or chipped a tooth, I can’t remember. She settled down and started reading her journal, which had a lock and key, which I would later break into and be disappointed by the contents. Nan was watching the trees, and I said she matched them, with her robin tattoo on her forearm. She said ‘tweet tweet’ half-heartedly and as an adult, I now wonder if she was still thinking about the stairs, and how her and Dennis were treated when his illness got worse.                                      

***

Me and Nan went back to the shop as adults, just last year, before everything went crazy. The stairs weren’t as tall as I remembered, but Nan tells the story of Dennis again, saying she couldn’t quite remember what the restaurant smelled like. I supplement, and she gives an embarrassed smile. I get some yellow boiled sweets, Nan says she couldn’t get any because of her teeth. She makes polite conversation with the shopkeeper as I look for remnants of us being there the first time; a broken jar by my brother, secret notes from my cousin, a hair from me. Nothing.

We walk around the park, and Nan chides me about moving from job to job, never going to University, never settling, moving every two years. None of us have heard from my cousin, we think she’s somewhere in Italy doing a PhD. But I am always daydreaming, imagining her as greater than she was. Nan mentions her cracked heel, and how I used to sit beside her and moisturise it, before putting on a plaster that would inevitably slip off. I thought about how servitude was my love language, and whether that was healthy. We agree that the shop isn’t the same, especially since they replaced the lavender and green shelves. She asks what books I’m interested in, recommends me way too heavy ones for my mental state; Dostoevsky, Dickens, drab stuff like that. I tell her I’m reading self-help books. She says she thought I never needed help from anyone. That’s why she kept away. We sit on a graffitied park bench and I pull the grey hairs from her yellow hair, one by one, making a small collection, grip them in my palm.

II

Her grey and black hair swings behind her, tied together with a torn away piece of fabric. I’m on her back, making gibberish noises. My brother is laughing, and don’t tell him I told you, but he wet himself and has to wear a big pair of knickers, bunched together with a blue peg, blue to make him feel more masculine.

When we tire of this, Baa puts on the Scooby Doo movie, because she knows her son likes it, and he’s young (ish) so we might, too. I ask questions every five minutes, at that age unable to follow the plot. My brother sighs, and explains, with little patience. Sometimes Baa goes quiet, but we never hear her scream, or anything. We just think that she’s thinking, or bored of us. Mum looks a lot like her, pale skin, almond eyes, thick curly hair. She tells us about how cruel she was but we don’t believe her. Baa taught us bits of Hindi, sang Bollywood films from the 60s. She flinches when people clap, cried when someone popped a balloon at my birthday party. I didn’t know I’d become crueller than she was ever supposed to be.                                            

***

We were banned from going upstairs, especially the bathroom. When Baa and my brother went to McDonald’s to get a milkshake, I waited until Grandad was asleep, dribbling on their new green throw pillow, and snuck up there to get some bangles to play with. I ran up the stairs, two at a time, smelling something strange but not stopping to breathe it in. As a passing thought, I noticed there are lots of photos of my young uncle but none of my mother; his first steps in a blue dinosaur set, food across his mouth, last day at school. 

Newspaper covered the bedroom window, key words and headlines circled in yellow. There were words like ‘war’, ‘death’, ‘onions’, ‘bomb’, ‘Prime Minister’, ‘Marks and Spencer’. The dressing table is full of gauze, some bloodstained. Screwed up bedding, green, unmade. The room stank, but I’m not sure what the smell was. I ran to the bathroom to be sick, the upstairs bathroom we were never allowed to use, and I saw glass jars, plastic water bottles, buckets, filled with a yellow liquid. I threw up in the sink and ran downstairs. Baa and my brother came back, and my brother explained the cashier had mocked her accent. We started calling her Mars Baa to cheer her up. Until I was seventeen, I called her ‘grandmother’ to my friends. I never told anyone about the upstairs. I didn’t get hindsight with her, an adult meeting, but I have a lot of photographs, so that’s something, I guess.

III

Once, Nan dropped me off in Leicester, where Baa lived, because my mother couldn’t come. Ba-nanna had pink hair, driving her gold Ford. The windows were rolled down, even though it felt like winter, and I knew I’d left something at home. Nan sprayed a cheap perfume and rolled the window down, dropping a piece of chewing gum on the road. What about the woodlands, I asked her. She shrugged. Even though the window was open, I kept coughing, all I could smell was the perfume. I had a pink hockey stick, and I was wearing my uncle’s dungarees. My brother appeared in the back seat, blabbered about a gold Pokémon card. We arrived at Baa’s, and she stood outside with a bunch of lilies in her arms, wearing a necklace I lost. I could smell smoke, and I had a strange fear that something in the house was on fire. She waved, and dropped the lilies. Her sari was green and pink. She came towards the car, and I realised I was dreaming.

***

Before- before it, I made a promise to get the two families together, gather them around Yorkshire puddings and gulab jamun, sit them down together, make them talk. All I have are these disparate memories, and the little fascist in my head forcing them together, trying to make them fit. I hope you can make something of them, my little lost one.

………………..

Kayleigh Jayshree (she/they) is a queer short story writer based in the North of England. She is a member of Young Identity and The Writing Squad. She has headlined open mic nights in Manchester and Liverpool, and performed for Hay Festival and HOME Theatre. She often writes about her dual heritage and bipolar disorder.

Twitter: @kayjayshree