The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, Marianne Cronin [top fiction books of all time txt] 📗

and handed them to her. ‘You could just give them to me at school on Monday,’ she said, but I told her she might as well have them back now because I’d be walking home barefoot anyway. I made my way home alone along the gravelly pavement with nothing between my feet and the concrete. The cold of the ground was nice, actually. Soothing.

I let myself in through the back door.

She was asleep at the kitchen table.

‘Mamma?’

I tucked her hair behind her ear and lifted the end of her curls out of the plate of toast crumbs. Her tea was cold. The milk had formed a little island in the middle of the mug.

I tried to clink about so she would wake up. I poured her cold tea down the sink and dusted her toast crumbs into the bin.

She didn’t stir. She took a long breath in.

I put the butter back in the fridge and screwed the lid on the jam. Then I turned and watched her for a moment. Her shoulders rose gently. She looked peaceful, but the ghosts under her eyes were back. They had started haunting her again after she had asked for a divorce and we moved out of my dad’s house. They were like bruises.

‘I kissed a boy tonight,’ I told her.

She didn’t wake.

‘It was my first kiss.’

She carried on sleeping.

‘It wasn’t what I thought it would be.’

I went to check that I’d locked the kitchen door. I put her plate and her mug in the sink.

‘I thought I’d feel something, you know? But it was just weird. He had very wet lips.’

She breathed deeply again, her dreams making her eyelashes flutter.

‘I thought it would mean something.’ I turned off the kitchen light and picked up my bag. ‘But it didn’t really mean anything.’

She moved a little, adjusting her head on her arms.

‘I just thought you should know,’ I said. ‘I had my first kiss tonight.’

I felt better for having told her.

I closed the kitchen door and went upstairs to bed.

Now my first kiss lives on for ever in an otherwise inexplicable felt-tip-pen rendering of a science classroom lit by moonlight (I embellished the skeleton in the window – he wasn’t really watching … as far as I know). And the following Monday, as my English Literature teacher swung his leg over my desk and asked, ‘How do you know when it’s okay to kiss someone?’ my answer still was, and still is, ‘I don’t know.’

Margot and the Man on the Beach

PAUL THE PORTER began with the snake and then, via some very inaccurately drawn Disney characters and a large Celtic cross, arrived at the ace of spades. ‘Now this one, I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘I was on a stag do, and when we left for the restaurant I didn’t have a single tattoo on my shoulder, but when we got back to the hotel I had the ace of spades.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘No. I’m glad it’s on my shoulder, cos I don’t have to see it unless I’m looking at my back in a mirror.’

‘Which I can imagine is not that often,’ I said.

‘It’s not. Now this next one,’ he said, pulling the sleeve of his polo top back down, ‘is my favourite.’ He turned over his left arm and in the crook was a baby, with brown eyes and only one dimple.

‘This is my girl,’ he said. Underneath the baby in curling cursive script was the name ‘Lola May’.

‘That one looks so real!’ I said.

He grinned and pulled out his wallet, holding up an almost identical photo. ‘I told Sam—’

‘Sam?’

‘He did all the Disney ones.’

‘Yikes.’

Paul laughed. ‘Anyway, I told him, You cannot fuck this one up. I want only your best work!’

‘Well, he nailed it.’

‘He did. Thinks it’s up there with the top ones he’s ever done.’ Paul could not have been prouder.

‘How old is Lola?’

‘She’s three. She was born here, you know,’ he said. ‘Proudest day of my life. She wants me to get a Winnie-the-Pooh tattoo, so I’m doing it for her fourth birthday. Probably on my calf cos I’m running out of room on my arms.’

There was a loud fuzz of static on his walkie talkie, and then someone said something that was muffled but seemed pretty urgent.

‘Oops!’ he said and jumped up. ‘Come on, trouble, let’s get you to the Rose Room.’

Once we were settled together in the Rose Room, Margot rolled up the sleeves of her purple cardigan and fixed her eyes on the car park outside the window. ‘It’s so strange, Lenni, to think that your parents probably hadn’t even been born when I was standing on that beach, let alone you.’

She started sketching. Black charcoal on white.

Troon Beach, Scotland, November 1956

Margot Docherty is Twenty-Five Years Old

He’d suggested we go for a walk on the beach in such a way that I didn’t think to argue with him, even though something somewhere between rain and snow was dancing diagonally outside our window.

The beach was deserted. And beyond the sand, the long grass was fighting against the strong wind. We stood silently for a while, watching the violent waves sweeping sand into the sea.

‘I’m leaving,’ he said.

I thought it was a joke, but then I saw that he was crying.

‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get out.’

The wind roared through me. I searched his face for sunlight. But I couldn’t find it.

We were still living in the tenement and it was cramped and noisy; the neighbours had dogs and arguments. But worse than that, they had a baby. Her screams raged their way through the wall to our bedroom and we would lie in silence, fighting the urge to go and comfort a little life that wasn’t ours.

We walked along the shoreline, not hand in hand but close enough to touch. My boots sunk into the sand. The air was much colder but no less claustrophobic than our tenement; the wind was