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

He clicked and scrolled and then stared for a few moments at the screen, probably trying to summon up the courage to say what he said next. The doctor took a deep breath and said, ‘It’s as we feared.’ And I tried to imagine him at home, tucked up in bed with his wife and a good book and a mug of Bovril – fearing for me, a sixteen-year-old he had met once who must have been one of hundreds of patients he saw each week. I imagined him playing squash and stopping, missing a shot, as he feared for my test results. I imagined him gnawing on his thumbnail as he drove out of the hospital car park every day for the two weeks that we had waited for the test results. Fearing for me.

He seemed unafraid now, as he began explaining terminology and procedures and limitations and time.

While all of that was happening, I was looking out of the window, watching a red car reverse backwards into a parking space. I watched the lights dim as the driver turned off the engine and I watched her get out, holding a heavy bag and something white. I watched her lock the door and walk slowly across the car park and towards the hospital. Then I watched the blue car next to hers reverse carefully and a white car stop in its path to allow the blue car the space to get out.

The doctor turned his monitor around to show some of the scan results to my father, but my father had turned grey. His eyes were fixed on the desk in front of us and he wasn’t breathing.

While the doctor carried on talking about surgeries and stages and bones, the office lights flicked on.

Margot in Trouble

London, July 1964

Margot Docherty is Thirty-Three Years Old

MEENA AND I were back in the police station where we had met five years before. Except this time we were handcuffed, and Meena, for the first time since we’d met, was silent. Though she was seven years my junior, I always looked up to Meena. She was my guide through London and through life. She always knew what to do. But now I realized that she might, in fact, have no idea what she was doing.

We waited, a policeman at either side of us, to sign in for our arrest. I was trying very hard not to meet the eyes of anyone in the waiting room. I tried to catch Meena’s attention, but she was staring down at the floor, biting her lip. One of the policemen escorting us had said ‘Irish’ to his colleague when they heard my accent. I told them I was from Scotland and he muttered, ‘All the same.’

‘Name and address,’ the woman at the desk said.

Meena, speaking for the first time since we were arrested, murmured, ‘Catherine Amelia Houghton.’

My stomach dropped. She’d given them a fake name. I couldn’t believe she’d lied to the police and she’d done it so serenely, giving the name to the woman at the desk without even breaking eye contact. Meena wouldn’t be getting in trouble for what we did, because someone who didn’t exist, Catherine Amelia Houghton, would be in trouble instead.

I realized I was thoroughly out of my depth. It would be my turn to speak any moment. Was I supposed to lie too? What would happen when they found out that we weren’t using our real names? I wanted to be sick.

The woman at the desk turned to me. ‘Name?’ she barked.

I decided then that I’d call myself Harriet – after an old friend of my mother’s – but when I tried to speak, the sound I made was somewhere between my own name and my new alias, a kind of ‘Marghaarrie’.

‘Sorry?’

I tried to swallow, but my mouth was so dry.

Meena gave me a look. A look that said, Have you lost your mind?

‘Her name is Margot,’ Meena told her. She was selling me out. I tried to swallow again but I couldn’t get any moisture into my mouth.

‘What are we being arrested for?’ Meena asked.

The policeman snorted. ‘Lawyer are you, sweetheart?’

Meena didn’t look like a lawyer. I remember so vividly what she was wearing that day – a paisley dress in red with flared sleeves and an old pair of leather sandals that smelled stale whenever she took them off. As we’d been waiting, she’d nervously woven little plaits into her long hair. She’d an obsession with freckles, of which she had none, and so she’d taken to drawing them on with a make-up pencil. She definitely didn’t look like a lawyer.

‘Ideas above your station?’ the other policeman said. He was gazing at Meena like she was naked.

She, to her credit, paid him no attention and repeated her request.

‘Relax,’ the policeman soothed, in a slow tone that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

They put us in individual cells. I tried to make eye contact with Meena as I was led into mine, but she still wouldn’t look at me. The cell smelled of urine and I didn’t want to touch anything, so I paced around the room and tried to piece together what I should say, what the police would already know, and then I tried to cross-check that with what I thought Meena, or Catherine Amelia, would tell them.

If I told the truth completely, it would have sounded like this: at about one o’clock that morning, as I stood on lookout outside the biosciences building, Meena, Adam, Lawrence and a few more of Meena’s friends broke into the medical lab at the university where Meena worked. Well, they didn’t break in. They used a key procured from Meena’s role as typist for The Professor, who was also the head of the medical school at said university. In they went, on a mission to free the hundreds of mice who were living in cells of