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

had to be a way of saying this that sounded less wretched. ‘I don’t know where he is.’

The fat inspector was intrigued. ‘You mean he’s a missing person?’

‘No. No, he … left me,’ I said.

‘Oh.’ The officer was no longer intrigued. He crossed something out on his paper. ‘You’re released. Thank you.’

He didn’t look thankful.

When I got out of the hot police station into the still-warm day, I squinted and held my hand up to my eyes. What time was it? What had just happened? I felt that the smartly dressed man in the brown suit who passed me knew I’d been arrested. I felt it was stamped on my forehead.

‘You’re out!’ Meena cheered, running towards me with a cigarette lolling from her bottom lip. She embraced me with her thin arms and laughed. ‘It was The Professor! He dropped the charges! What a hero!’

My disorientation at the sun and the smells of the street was nothing compared to my disorientation at Meena. She’d looked so floored when we were arrested. Now she just looked flawed. How could she think this was funny?

‘Never again,’ I said, my voice coming out hoarse and catching in my throat.

‘Breaking rocks in the hot sun!’ she sang.

‘Never. Again.’

I started walking and she loped alongside me. ‘I fought the law and the law won!’

I stayed silent, pushing my excess fury through my heels into the pavement.

‘Never again,’ I repeated. ‘I have a caution. Meena, this isn’t … wait.’ I stopped. She stopped. I stared at her. She threw her cigarette into the hedge behind her.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Your name. Why did you give them a fake name?’

‘Fake name?’

‘Amelia Catherine Houghton?’

‘Catherine Amelia Houghton,’ she corrected.

‘So what is that? A name you use when you’re arrested?’

‘It’s my name.’ She stared at me like I was mad. ‘You thought Meena was my real name?’ She laughed again. ‘You think my Irish Catholic mother named me Meena Star?’

‘So Meena is the fake name?’

‘It’s my new name. I just haven’t got round to changing it. Lucky I saved you from calling yourself Marjorie or whatever – they’d have done you for that.’

She started walking ahead of me and as she turned, I let out a little smile. This was so foolish. I’d lived with the girl for five years and had never known her name. I wasn’t the only person reinventing myself in London. In fact, the person I most wanted to be was an invention herself.

‘What else don’t I know?’ I called after her.

She waited while I caught her up.

‘You’re an idiot,’ she said, laughing.

And she grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me on the lips.

A man passed between us, using his hat to push us out of his way. Under his breath, but loud enough for us to hear, he uttered one single word: ‘Dykes.’

Twenty-Five Years

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF our lives were laid out across the tables in the Rose Room.

A metal bucket on the floor of an air-raid shelter, a table laid for a cold but extravagant breakfast, the haunted eyes of a skeleton witnessing a first kiss, and a baby in a yellow hat. Twenty-five stories that had waited patiently within us, now ready to be hung up, admired, celebrated, destroyed. What happens to the pictures once we are finished doesn’t matter that much to me.

‘It’s amazing,’ Pippa whispered.

‘It’s not finished yet,’ I said, standing in front of my painting of Benni the beanbag pig and judging the artist for her lack of talent. With all of them gathered, it suddenly seemed to me that filling the room, our minds, our thoughts with another seventy-five memories might be impossible. There are years of my own life that are fuzzy and there have to be years that Margot can’t remember. And then there is the awkward looming spectre of our impending deaths.

‘But look at it!’ Pippa said. ‘It already looks like something – you’ve created something.’

‘A quarter of something.’

‘Lenni,’ Margot said gently. I caught her eye, but she looked down at the picture in front of her. It was Margot and the man on the beach, captured from a memory older than my mother. What would people think, I wondered, if they saw it in a gallery? Would they guess some, or any, of the details right?

We walked around the pictures for a little longer. I passed Margot’s wedding, my first day at secondary school, a bomb resting quietly on a floral quilt. Finishing felt impossible, and yet those twenty-five paintings were so deliciously real. Hopeful, even though they commemorated some of the worst moments of our lives.

Margot stroked the edge of the canvas depicting a half-drunk bottle of pear-flavoured liqueur and asked me, ‘So, Lenni, what next?’

Margot and the Map

‘OH, THEY ADORED him,’ Else was telling Margot as I came into the Rose Room.

Walter waved her away. ‘They were just being kind.’

‘What’s this?’ Pippa asked.

‘Oh,’ Walter said. ‘Else was kind enough to introduce me to her sons.’

Pippa smiled knowingly. I wondered what she knew as she made her way to the front of the class and started teaching us about cross-hatching.

I spent a good twenty minutes cross-hatching the sides on the carton of apple juice to try to make it seem three-dimensional but it just made the box look hairy. Once I was finished, I told Margot the story of my tantrum in the art gallery to commemorate my fifth year on earth. I told her how I had lost my tiny mind in the middle of the quiet gallery and my mother had lost her temper with me, and then, when a security guard asked us to leave, she had lost her temper at him. He then lost his temper with his boss via a walkie talkie and his boss failed to appear. I screamed throughout, legend has it, because the straw in my carton of apple juice had split.

Then,