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

I stepped out into the cold garden.

‘You know, the thing that really irritates me …’ Lawrence said.

With narrowed eyes, Meena took a drag from her cigarette.

‘… is that you don’t even care,’ he finished.

‘You’re right. I don’t,’ she said, exhaling smoke at the same time as smiling, so that she looked like a Chinese dragon.

Lawrence threw his hands up in a gesture of frustrated defeat and pushed past me, back inside the house. Meena sucked on her cigarette. She was so calm and still, I felt I should have left her alone.

‘Can you hear that?’ she asked.

I strained my ears. I could hear laughter coming from the living room where the remaining party stragglers had washed ashore.

‘Listen,’ she said.

Then she threw her cigarette into the grass and walked off to the end of the garden. I followed her, and as I reached the bottom of the garden where there was a line of dark trees, I could hear it too. It sounded like a baby crying.

I don’t remember much until we were on the other side of the fence, in the neighbours’ garden. The grass was overgrown and littered with discarded junk – there was an old iron bathtub among the weeds, and a rusted lawnmower. A baby doll without arms was lying in the grass, staring at me with its wide-open eyes.

The sound, like a child whining, had fallen quiet then. We crunched through the long grass towards the line of trees at the back of the garden. And then we saw him, behind the rotting shed, chained by his neck to the trunk of a silver elm. When he saw us, he let out a little cry.

‘Oh my God,’ Meena whispered. Then, to the dog, she said in a quiet, soothing voice, ‘Hey there, fella.’ And she half crouched and crept towards him. The dog let out a high-pitched whine.

Meena got closer while I hung back, watching. ‘What if he bites?’ I asked.

‘He won’t bite, will you, pal?’ She was almost close enough to touch him. He looked up at her with doleful eyes and cried. He had a cut across his nose that was infected. A thick line of pink flesh with dark edges.

When she was close enough, Meena crouched down beside him and held her palm out flat. The dog sniffed it and gazed at her. His leather collar was attached to the chain that bound him to the tree, and all around his neck was a red ring of exposed skin where he’d tried to pull himself free.

‘You’re a good boy, aren’t you?’ she asked, and he let her stroke him on the top of his head. He closed his eyes and leant his head towards her. With each breath in, we could see the ridges of his ribs.

‘Would you like to come with us?’ Meena asked, continuing to stroke his head. His stumpy tail flicked once, twice. ‘Roger?’

‘His name is Roger?’

‘Well, he needs a name,’ she said, ‘Why not Roger?’ Then she flicked something silver in her hand.

‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘Is that a knife?!’

‘You never know when you might need one. I keep it in my boot,’ she said, and then, stroking Roger’s head, she said to him very seriously, ‘Now stay still.’ Roger looked up at her with his big brown eyes.

Carefully, Meena cut the leather collar with a sawing motion. ‘It’s okay, baby,’ she said softly, while he cried at the pressure of the collar on his neck.

When he was loose, he turned to Meena and licked her hands. His gentle thanks.

Once we got him through the gap in the fence, we gave Roger water we poured into an empty Neapolitan ice-cream tub, and some meat from the host’s fridge. Inside, the party was continuing, but now we were a party of three and we didn’t care.

‘We should take him to a vet,’ I said as we walked, the dog alongside us, around the side of the house and to the front garden.

Meena nodded, stuffing her Swiss Army knife back into her left ankle boot.

But when I opened the front garden gate, the dog took off like a shot, his long nails scritch-scratching on the tarmac. He quickly disappeared from sight.

‘Wait! Roger!’ I called after him.

‘Shhh,’ Meena hissed. ‘If his owners are in, we want to give him a head start.’

‘But—’

‘He’ll be okay on his own,’ she said. ‘He needs to be free.’

As we walked home, Meena started dry heaving. Nothing was coming out though, and she stood bent over the grassy patch on the pavement not far from our house.

‘We’re nearly home,’ I told her, stroking her hair.

We clattered up the stairs to the shared bathroom. The less said about the state of that bathroom, the better. The inside of the toilet was permanently stained brown, as though someone had been using the bowl to brew tea.

As soon as we got the door open, Meena ran for the toilet, let out a burp and heaved vomit into the bowl.

I flushed the toilet for her, ran some cold water over my hand and held it to her forehead.

‘Ugh,’ was all she could manage before it began again – her body tensing as she threw up.

I stayed with her, and when she was finished we both sat on the floor, leaning against the bath. It wouldn’t be long before the guys from the bedsit above us would need to get ready for work.

Then she knelt up and leant her head over the loo, holding her own hair at the nape of her neck. Nothing happened and she spat into it.

After a little while, Meena, her head still over the toilet bowl, begged, ‘Tell me something.’

‘What?’

‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

I thought.

‘I’ve never met anyone like you.’

‘I knew that. Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘I think I love you.’

She turned. Her eyes met mine and it made my shins tingle. And we looked at one another for a moment before she heaved again, her whole body convulsing as she