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

so she could gather information on the animal testing at the medical school. But her friend Adam told me at another party that she’d been there long enough to know everything she needed to know. And then he’d raised his eyebrows and sauntered away.

She went to fix the record player while I unscrewed the cap and took a cautious sip of the luminous green alcohol. It tasted as if all the pears in the world had been distilled into that single bottle.

She waited. I took another couple of generous swigs.

Meena climbed onto her bed and patted the quilt cover as though I were a dog she wanted to come and sit beside her. She positioned herself opposite me, both of us cross-legged so that our knees almost touched. ‘Now, close your eyes,’ she said. For a moment, I didn’t. Meena’s blue eyes had this glint in them, which with her elfin ears made her look mischievous. Like she was up to something even when she was just smiling.

She unzipped her Moomin make-up bag and I closed my eyes.

I felt her lean closer to me, so that I could feel her eyelashes on my skin.

She wiped the mascara from under my eyes with a tissue and something that was creamy and smelled of lavender. I felt her put shadow on my eyelids and blush on my cheeks. Her brush was so soft it made me shudder.

Then, she rattled around inside her bag for something else. She began drawing on my face. At first it felt like she was shading in my eyebrows, but then I felt her pencil looping up past my eyebrow and around my eye. Then a circle around my eye and a straight line from the top of my cheek downwards.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Stay still,’ she said. And so I did. I felt a wet brush painting within the shapes she had drawn, but by now I had lost all idea of what she was doing. For a brief moment, she pulled me in closer and I could smell her musky perfume and the pear liqueur on her breath.

‘Done!’ she said. I opened my eyes and felt like I was waking up. ‘What do you think?’

I clambered off the end of her bed and stared at myself in the mirror.

She’d made me a flower. My right eye was the centre in blue and around it were pink petals edged in white. A green stalk curled past my newly pinked cheeks and stopped when it reached my jaw.

‘I—’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll do one for me, too,’ she said. ‘Now shift it and drink some more, we have to go soon.’

We sat at the back of the bus. Both of us with our flower face paint. Meena had brought the bottle of pear liqueur with us, and she drank it as the bus swung around corners in the darkness.

A loud tutting came from an old woman sitting across the aisle. She was carrying bursting bags from the closing down sale of a department store.

‘Is something the matter?’ Meena asked in a voice that was pleasant, but had an edge.

The old woman fluffed up. If she had been a pigeon, her feathers would have ruffled.

‘You look like an imbecile,’ she hissed. ‘Both of you. Have some self-respect.’

My stomach turned. The bus slowed to a stop. We climbed off the back of it and started walking. Meena was ahead of me so I used the privacy to pull down on my skirt, trying to get the hem to cover more of my thighs.

‘Stop that,’ Meena said, without turning.

‘Stop what?’

‘Feeling embarrassed.’

‘I am embarrassed. I shouldn’t be dressed up like this. I’m someone’s—’ I stopped myself from saying the M word. ‘I should know better.’

She stopped then and I caught her up and she looked at me, searchingly, for what felt like just a second too long. ‘You care, don’t you?’ she said.

I didn’t know from the way she said it if it was a good thing or a bad thing.

When I didn’t answer, Meena said, ‘That woman was probably somewhere between sixty and sixty-five years old.’

‘So?’

‘So that means she was born sometime between 1895 and 1900. She was raised by Victorians. Imagine being raised by people who used mangles and couldn’t show their ankles, and ending your life watching television, surrounded by women in miniskirts.’ She paused. ‘Are you having fun?’ she asked. She appraised my face and said with a wry smile, ‘Well, you will.’

Going into one of those house parties was like going underwater. My ears filled with the rush of sound, of the music and talking. And everything seemed to take on a gentle, drifting quality. The pear liqueur had numbed my edges so that I couldn’t quite feel anything as I bumped around the house. I was moving slower than I ought to be and the people that passed, dancing or walking, seemed to be floating too. I could sway along quite happily around the house, looking in on the groups of people talking and dancing, but feeling as though I was looking into another world that I could observe without participating. I could float into the kitchen and watch people investigate the cupboards, opening chests and searching for pearls; I could swim to the living room and watch people dance. I was suspended and yet free.

I met Meena in the corridor. She had her fingers intertwined with those of a man in a terrible hat.

‘Are you having fun?’ she shouted.

‘What?’ I could barely hear her.

She came closer and more or less screamed in my ear, ‘Are you having fun?’

‘Yes!’

Several hours of swimming later and as the tides of people drained out of the front door, the house became a house again. No longer my private ocean. I went looking for Meena and I found her in the back garden, holding a cigarette a few centimetres from her mouth and watching, detached, as a man I recognized as her former flatmate Lawrence gesticulated wildly and said something that