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

My name is Margot Docherty; I’m looking for a missing person. My husband, Johnny.

How could you misplace your husband? would be the first question, I was sure.

I was wrong. The first question wasn’t a question at all, but an instruction to take a seat and fill in a form.

I sat down. The form immediately expected more from me than I was able to give. What was my name? I knew that, but how about my address? Currently, my address was Holborn Police Station, London. But where did I live? In my recently vacated Glasgow tenement? What was my relationship to the missing person? Were we married? Really, were we still? What if he had married someone else since he left? When had I last seen him? And where? Did ‘some years ago on a beach’ count? Or was that as unhelpful as it felt? What did he look like? Was he still slim? Did he still wear his hair parted in the middle and combed to each side? And why was I searching for him in London?

Only this last question could I answer: because many years ago, he’d lain beside me with his hands on my stomach and said that before the baby came, he wanted to see the city. We never went.

My hands were sweating and the pen slipped out of my grasp. I picked it up and wiped my wet fingers on my skirt. I looked to the receptionist to see if there was anyone free to talk to me, but she shook her head.

I pondered over some more questions, which were obvious facts I should have known but didn’t. Things like his height, his health record, his job. With the sparse information I could tell them about Johnny, he may as well have been a stranger.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked. I’d had no idea anyone was beside me, but there she was. She was younger than me, though not by much. She was wearing a blue and green patterned dress and her blonde hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in days. And she seemed completely comfortable exactly where she was at that moment.

‘Er, I’m …’

‘What’s in the bags? A body?’ She laughed and wiped make-up from under her eyes, where it smeared into two dark lines below her lower lashes.

‘Is it drugs?’

‘No, it’s …’

‘Bombs?!’ she asked, and then, looking around at the people in the waiting room who were staring at us, she leant closer to me and whispered, ‘Bombs?’

‘No!’ I said, and dropped the pen on the floor again.

‘Here.’ She passed it to me. Her many bracelets jangled as she tucked her hair behind her ear. ‘Sorry I scared you.’

‘You haven’t scared me,’ I said, and although she hadn’t scared me, I was suddenly filled with the urge to cry. I was exhausted, recently bereaved, and about to file a missing person’s report for a man I could barely describe. A man who wasn’t really missing, but who I couldn’t find, his mother having passed away and his brother having moved without a forwarding address. A man who had promised me his life. A man who I had missed deeply and yet had not missed in the slightest.

She leant back against her chair, folding her thin arms in on herself. She ran her fingers through the lengths of her blonde hair and twisted a piece around her finger.

I turned my attention back to the form. I knew Johnny’s birthday, at least that was something. Then there was a box – ‘reason for filing report’. Half the form was still blank. I filled in the box with a redundant I don’t know where he is, and then realized that might seem flippant and crossed it out.

‘What are you doing?’ she whispered. She smelled of perfume and alcohol.

‘I’m …’ I couldn’t explain it, so I just showed her the form on the clipboard.

‘Missing Person’s Report,’ she read. Her eyebrows rose. ‘Who’s it for?’ Then, as I went to answer, she asked, ‘It’s not for you, is it? That would be brilliant! File your own missing person’s report and then disappear … God, that’s brilliant. I want to do that one day.’ Her eyes shone.

‘My husband,’ I said, feeling like I was speaking for the first time in days.

‘Oh,’ she said, and for some reason I told her the story. Most of it. With one important little person omitted.

‘Do you miss your husband?’ she asked when I was finished.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s the only person I have left.’

‘But you want to spend a lot of time with him when you find him?’

‘No, I—’

‘You want to live with him?’

‘Well …’

‘You’re happy to be defined by him?’

‘Defined?’

‘Yes, you know, you’ve come all this way just for him. Your current purpose is him. He defines you.’ She seemed angry about this.

‘I just wanted to see a friendly face,’ I told her, realizing as I said it that this was the truth.

‘Put that on the form, then,’ she said. ‘They’ll really hot up the search if they know how urgent it is that he’s found.’

The blank face of the form stared back at me, unreadable.

‘What will you do once it’s filed?’

‘I don’t know,’ I told her.

‘Do you have somewhere to stay?’

‘No.’ I felt the heat rising in my face.

‘That’s brave,’ she said, and I wondered if it was.

‘I don’t know,’ I said again, feeling increasingly like I was about to cry.

‘Do you want to know what I’m doing here?’ she asked. I didn’t answer but she told me three things. Firstly, she was waiting for her friend Adam who had recently been incarcerated for breaking into a university animal laboratory. Secondly, she was waiting to see if she would be arrested for the same crime. And thirdly, she was offering me a bed for the night once numbers one and two were resolved.

Then, she advised me to rip up the missing person’s report and to ‘liberate’ myself. Which at first I thought was slang for something sexual, but was