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

not to look for her. If I saw a woman with dark hair pass me, I would be searching her face for my mother’s. I would end up looking for her by accident. And I don’t want to do that.’

New Nurse opened her mouth to ask something, but I got there first. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘if I get out of here, there are so many other places that I would visit first.’

‘Where would you go?’

‘Paris, New York, Malaysia, Russia, Finland, Mexico, Australia, Vietnam. In that order. And then I would just keep going. On and on and on until I died.’

‘Why Russia?’

‘Why not?’

‘I could never travel anywhere by myself,’ she said. ‘I’m not brave.’

‘Neither am I!’

She looked at me, staring so searchingly that I looked away.

‘Lenni,’ she said softly, ‘you’re the bravest person I know.’

‘Why?’

‘You just are,’ she said, and the moment fell between us.

‘Dying isn’t brave,’ I said, ‘it’s accidental. I’m not brave, I’m just not dead yet.’

New Nurse stretched her legs out straight, so that my legs and her legs were lying side by side like rungs of a train track. Her socks matched this time; they were pink and had cupcakes printed on them. I tried to imagine what her life was like outside the hospital – her house, her car, her sock drawer.

‘I still think you’re brave,’ she said quietly.

‘If you went travelling, I would think you were brave too,’ I told her.

She pulled a tiny red box of raisins out of the pocket of her dress and peeled the top off, then squeezed a finger in and popped a wrinkled raisin into her mouth.

‘I bet they’ll love you in Russia.’

Sometimes I deal with nurses other than New Nurse; they have names and faces but they come and go in a blur. Their non-red hair screams of conformity, and their practice of giving me as much attention as they give everyone else is grating. They never have raisin snack time on my bed late at night. I haven’t checked, but I bet none of them have cupcake socks. Of course, I don’t blame them – they are the wardens and we are the prisoners, and if they get too close, the lines might become blurred as to who is captive and who is free.

Anyway, after New Nurse left, it was one of the other nurses who brought around a selection of newspapers and magazines that had been donated. I went straight for Christian Today so I would have something to talk to Father Arthur about when I next paid him a visit. The main headline promised to tell me of ‘Christ’s Message at the Harvest Festival’. The front cover showed several small children smiling widely from behind a row of canned foods. It looked a lot like the Nativity, except that the Baby Jesus had been replaced with a tin of kidney beans.

I wondered whether Father Arthur would be stacking up tins of beans on the altar of the hospital chapel. Or perhaps his donations would all be made up of hospital food, and the chapel would be filled with plastic trays of stagnant shepherd’s pie, rice pudding and orange-flavoured Fortisip. Although, if Arthur was going to rely on getting a food donation from every person who visited the chapel, there wouldn’t be any food at all except mine. Once again, I realized, he needed my help. I would pay him a visit and lend a hand to the Harvest Festival; perhaps I could round up a group of children for a photo opportunity with some tuna fish in brine.

Since I spent time with the octopus, some things are harder than they used to be. When I asked at the nurses’ desk if I could visit the chapel, there was talk between two of them. The words ‘infection’ and ‘immune system’ were bandied about. I was sent back to my bed.

I didn’t fight at first. But then, about an hour later, as I sat swinging my feet from the edge of my bed, thinking about my purple octopus and staring at the cover of Christian Today, I realized that I didn’t have time to be quite so yielding. Having hardly any time left generates this itch inside my ribcage.

I walked up to the desk. The nurse, Jacky, whose sour face met mine, said, ‘I don’t want to hear it, Lenni, we are really busy today.’

‘What does she want?’ Sharon asked, as she folded her jacket over her arm.

‘To go to church,’ Jacky said.

‘Tuh.’ Sharon rolled her eyes, picked up her mug and her lunch bag, and made her way out. ‘See you tomorrow, bab!’ she called to Jacky behind her.

Once Sharon had gone, Jacky turned to me. ‘You need to go back to your bed, Lenni.’

‘But I’m dying.’

Jacky met my eyes.

‘I’m dying,’ I said again, but she didn’t even acknowledge that I’d spoken.

It was daytime by then, so there were people buzzing around – porters wheeling cages of wild bed linen towards the laundry room, visitors bustling in wearing far too many layers for the tropical climes of the hospital, old people practising walking in the corridors.

‘I’m dying,’ I said more loudly. Jacky didn’t look at me.

‘I’ve already explained that there’s nobody available to take you to church today. There are fifteen other people on this ward who need care and attention. Now stop embarrassing yourself and go back to your bed.’ Her skin was wrinkled around her mouth with the early ageing of a regular smoker, but I imagined that beneath her skin was nothing but granite – hard stone that no heat could melt and no light could brighten. If you peeled back her skin, you could scratch your name into it.

I could have walked back to my bed. In theory. But in practice my feet were heavy, pulled by a force stronger than myself to stay where they were. It was beyond my control. My body was taking a stand, and I had to stand with it. We’re a team. Sometimes.

‘We can discuss