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

retched up a bright green liquid into the toilet.

Lenni and Margot and Things You Can’t Say

‘LENNI, YOU CAN’T say that!’ New Nurse whispered. ‘Jacky’ll kill me. She’ll kill us all!’

‘She’ll also kill you for saying that she’ll kill people.’

New Nurse clapped a hand over her mouth.

‘How did you find out about our argument?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I have my ways.’ New Nurse tapped her nose. Then she sat up properly. Her shoulders fell, her smile faded, and she fixed me with a searching smile that she sometimes uses when she’s trying not to cry. ‘Was it really that bad?’

I thought about it. Yes, I cried. Yes, I made a bit of an idiot of myself, but it wasn’t that bad. It was mostly embarrassing.

‘The security guard was very nice,’ I told her.

‘Jacky said you cried.’

‘Yep.’

‘I’ve never seen you cry,’ she said.

‘I got to see Father Arthur in the end anyway.’

‘Did you?’

‘He snuck in later.’

‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ she said.

I smiled.

‘Lenni,’ she said, still searching, perhaps hoping I would open up. Maybe wanting to witness some of my fabled tears that she was yet to see. ‘Was it really bad?’

‘I was just having a down day.’

New Nurse nodded. But she wanted more. People do.

‘Is Jacky going to get fired?’ I asked.

She looked away, out of the gap in the curtains around my bed and into the cold lighting of the corridor.

‘Is she in trouble?’

‘I can’t say.’ She kept her eyes fixed on the nurses’ station, where a porter was making one of the student nurses laugh out loud.

‘Did you shout at her?’

‘I can’t say.’

I had a feeling that she probably did shout at Jacky, because there was just the hint of a smile at the corner of her lips.

‘Have you booked your flights yet?’ I asked.

‘My flights?’

‘To Russia.’

‘Not yet.’

‘Why not?’

She gave me a look that was apparently supposed to tell me everything, and yet it actually told me nothing. And so I pulled the poorly person upper hand and told her I was tired.

Somewhat unhappily, she climbed off my bed and shoved on her white trainers. She laced them up in silence and drew the curtain around me. I wasn’t even slightly tired. Well, no more than usual. I just wanted to make her stew a bit, and to punish her for her secretive ways by forcing her to go and have the rest of her break at the nurses’ station. Then maybe she’d appreciate me a bit more, and realize that annoying people with the teaser trailer to a story is not the way to keep friends.

I lay down to support the facade that I was tired, and opened my eyes to find that it was somehow morning. A morning where Margot had made her way to my ward and was standing nervously by my half-open curtain. ‘Lenni,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s my heart.’

‘What is?’ I whispered, still blurry from sleep.

‘The reason I’m here, it’s my heart.’

I sat up in bed. Out of the context of the Rose Room, she seemed tiny.

‘Oh. I’m sorry. I like your heart. I think you’ve got the nicest heart.’

‘I just thought that since we tell each other everything, I should tell you what’s wrong with me.’

I beckoned for her to come closer, and she crept in and sat on the bed beside me.

‘Can they make it better?’ I asked, relieved to see that she wasn’t crying. In fact, she was calm.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said, ‘but they’re trying, bless them.’ She smiled, and it was like sunlight coming to rest on her face for a moment.

Lenni and the Car

‘WHERE IS YOUR father, Lenni?’

‘Where is your father, Lenni?’

‘Where is your father, Lenni?’

Margot has asked me three times, and three times I haven’t answered. So, I think she was surprised when I started talking, midway through painting a row of cars, small and like dots. Red, silver, blue, white.

‘I think Meena was right,’ I told Margot.

‘About what?’

‘About not giving chase.’

Margot furrowed her brow.

‘What she said to you when you were looking for Johnny, about waving someone off into their new life but not feeling the need to follow. Letting the people who need to leave, leave. Allowing them to be free.’

Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital, November 2013

Lenni Pettersson is Sixteen Years Old

The consultant’s office was very dark, but behind his desk was a wide window. In the top half you could see the grey sky and in the bottom half you could look down on the hospital car park. The cars were shining like berries. It made me feel very far away from the world, and I supposed that the consultant had had to arrange his office so his desk faced away from the window, so he didn’t spend all day mesmerized by the car park.

‘My apologies it’s so dark in here,’ he said. ‘They’ve installed new motion sensor lights in an effort to be more environmentally friendly, but mine don’t seem to be working. I’ve waved my hand in front of the damned sensor at least twenty times, but nothing’s happened.’

The darkness made the window all the more alluring.

My father and I sat on the plastic chairs in front of the doctor’s desk. My father’s new girlfriend Agnieszka was outside in the waiting room, looking terrified. I liked her for my father – she was rational but soft, and she made him laugh which was something he rarely did unsupervised. I liked the idea that they could have a life together.

‘So, Miss Pettersson, is it okay if I call you Linnea?’ the consultant asked.

My father said, ‘She goes by “Lenni”,’ at the exact time that I said, ‘Everyone calls me “Lenni”.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Lenni it is. Well, we have all of your test results back, Lenni.’ He clicked a few times on his computer mouse, and as the screen sprang to life, it emitted a green