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

black. I could feel her movements too. As she came towards me, the fizzes in my cheek moved with her.

I held my hand over one eye and I nodded.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked, coming closer. She faltered. ‘I mean, your eye, is it okay?’

I nodded, hand still over my eye, and willed her to leave but she came closer. ‘Is there something wrong with your eye?’ she asked again.

I turned away from her, hoping it would make her leave, but it didn’t and I couldn’t remember the words to make her go.

She knelt down in front of me, and I felt the reverberations of her movement all across my face.

‘Look at me,’ she said, and I did. Her mouth and her chin were gone, replaced by a grey nothingness. ‘Blink,’ she said, and I did. Though she was in front of me, she felt very far away.

‘Follow the end of my pen,’ she said, and I tried to but the pen kept disappearing.

‘Doctor?’ she said in an even voice, but I knew there was concern in it.

The shape of a man came and stood beside her. ‘She can’t see,’ the nurse said.

‘I’m fine,’ I tried to say, but it came out very long and slow, I couldn’t get to the M, so I settled for a B. ‘I’b fiy.’ I knew it was wrong, but it wasn’t clear how to fix it. I wanted to say something else, but I didn’t know what it was.

The doctor made an interested sound and repeated the steps made by the nurse. Just like her, parts of his face were missing; there were grey gaps where his forehead and chin should have been. And what little I could see flickered with the flash of a photograph nobody had taken.

He had me open and close my jaw, turn my head. He asked me to tell him my name. I knew it, it was in my mind, but I couldn’t find shapes to match it. I wanted to tell them to leave me, that I was fine, that my time was precious, but I couldn’t.

From somewhere, the hissing snake of the word ‘stroke’ slithered its way to my ear.

‘Stroke’ is a lot like the word ‘snake’, only I’d never noticed before. This I clung to, and I thought it over and over several times. As though I were remembering my telephone number. I felt that I would need it later. Stroke and snake. So similar. Why had I never spotted that?

‘Do you feel sick?’ he asked.

I shook my head. I was lying. The sweet taste of stomach acid was already filling my mouth. I would have asked for a glass of water if I could remember how.

Stroke slithered back into my ears with an echo. Stroke snake stroke snake.

‘No,’ the doctor said firmly. ‘It is most likely a migraine.’ The words meant nothing to me – as though I’d heard them in a foreign tongue. I tried to separate them into pieces to find the meaning. My-grain.

‘The child’s prognosis?’ the doctor asked.

‘The consultant said it will be a matter of hours,’ the nurse replied.

‘Madam,’ the doctor said, and I felt the weight of something on my left shoulder, presumably a hand. ‘I believe you are having an ocular migraine. Have you ever experienced these symptoms before?’

I shook my head.

‘They can be brought on by stress. I can give you something for the pain, but it will make you drowsy, you may fall asleep. Given the, um, the present circumstances, do you want me to do that?’

‘No,’ I managed. How similar ‘no’ was on the tongue to ‘know’. They were almost the same. Perhaps they were the same.

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘You may find you need to vomit. If you do, there is a container here. Other symptoms may include an aversion to light, intense head pain and confusion. You need to alert us if your symptoms change or worsen.’

I nodded.

‘I will ask the staff to continue to search for your husband.’

He lifted his hand off my shoulder and spoke quickly to the nurse, but the effort of decoding the sounds into meaning was too great.

‘I’ll be here if you need me,’ the nurse said, and I heard her draw the curtain around the bed. The tips of my fingers were tingling as I leant forward and felt for the edges of the mattress.

In front of me lay a baby. My baby. And it was time to say goodbye.

‘Davey,’ I said, my tongue able to remember him when nothing else sounded right. With what was left of my vision, I could see that his little eyes had opened. He was still pale, his body all wrapped up in his sleepsuit and his blanket. He looked up at me. What a sight I must have been. His mother with her hand covering her left eye. I wondered if he remembered the games of peekaboo we had played, and if that was what he thought we were doing.

I don’t know how to say goodbye to a child. I didn’t then and I don’t now. So instead I talked to him. I told him of the life he would lead, of the school uniform he would wear, of his days in the summer sunshine when I would take him to the park. I told him how he would get a part-time job in a greengrocer’s and eventually buy the place and run it himself. How he would meet a young lady who came in to buy a pineapple and they would fall in love. How they would marry and I would wear a yellow hat at the wedding. I told him of his own noisy three children and how he would grow old with them helping out in the shop, using apples to teach them to count. And his eyes stayed fixed on mine while I told him, softly, of how he’d be so incredibly happy and how he would come to visit me when I was old and grey.

I