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

for a little while, I just watched Margot paint. When she paints, Margot’s face becomes peaceful. It’s the opposite of how my face feels when I’m painting – which is crumpled and angry. But Margot is somewhere else, somewhere different entirely, and I’ll wait patiently for her smile of peace to shift as the picture starts to take shape. When she’s happy with it, she’ll start to talk. And I could wait for Margot’s stories for ever.

‘Let me take you somewhere,’ she said. ‘To a bedsit in London where it’s hot. Unbearably hot. And then your roommate decides to turn on the stove …’

London, August 1965

Margot Macrae is Thirty-Four Years Old

It wasn’t a stove really; it was a small ring burner balanced on top of an old suitcase. But she turned it on nonetheless. It was our entire kitchen. Meena liked to light her cigarettes with it, so she’d turn it on several times a day. Then there’d be no choice but to open the window, which meant running the risk of never getting it closed again because the catch was broken.

This time, I felt compelled to ask her if she was joking, as the ring burner began to fill the room with the stink of burning fake leather as it merrily cooked the suitcase underneath. She didn’t say anything, but lit her cigarette on it. It was already a baking summer day. I lay down flat on my bed and stared up at the ceiling.

‘Back to the meeting,’ Adam said from his position sitting under the window. ‘I think it’s obvious we need a lookout.’

There was a silence.

‘Margot Macrae doesn’t do crime any more,’ Meena said, sucking on her cigarette. ‘So there will be no lookout.’

I felt my insides twist. I stopped calling myself Margot Docherty after the incident in the police station. And I became Margot Macrae again. And perhaps because I was returning to myself, or perhaps because I’d made a promise to a hairy-stomached inspector, I stopped participating in Meena’s activism.

Lawrence pulled a map from his bag and laid it out on the brown carpet. ‘It’ll take about two hours to get there,’ he said, ‘but my van needs petrol, so let’s assume it’ll take longer.’

‘We don’t need a map, I know the way,’ Meena said, tapping the ash from her cigarette into our only saucepan.

The meeting carried on. Even with the window open, it was boiling. I felt a bead of sweat run down my stomach. Adam massaged his temples and sighed. ‘Can we just get on with it?’

‘Right, let’s go.’ Meena stood and rallied the group. They checked their bags for torches, wire cutters, tape, rope. I stayed lying on my bed. I was wearing my thinnest sundress but it was now stuck to me with sweat.

‘If the police come,’ Meena started.

‘I’ll tell them to look for Catherine Amelia Houghton.’

She laughed and blew me a kiss.

I locked the door behind them, and listened as they argued their way down the stairs about just how many animals could fit in the van if somebody volunteered to hitch-hike home.

I felt compelled to open the door and chase after them. But I had said ‘never again’ the day we were arrested and I had meant it.

I turned off the ring burner and picked up the map that Lawrence had left behind. Meena had a thing about maps. The wall above the fireplace was covered in them. Usually maps of places neither of us had ever been to, all stuck up with Sellotape and most of them lovingly stolen. On a whim, I stuck Lawrence’s map up on the wall. It was a map of England and I’m sure it would have been no help for their route that evening. I thought of them all squashed together in the back of Lawrence’s van, and I wondered how long I could continue my one-woman performance of ‘I’m no longer a part of your activist group’. It wasn’t a very popular play.

Now that I was no longer a part of Meena’s escapades, I felt that I was slowly becoming Old Margot. The pale, self-conscious person who had experienced a sudden burst of colour courtesy of the friends she was now forsaking out of fear. I pulled a pin from the noticeboard Meena had ‘borrowed’ from work, closed my eyes and stuck it in the map. It pointed to a field just outside Henley-in-Arden.

When Meena came home to our bedsit that night, she was bleeding.

She forced the door open, tripped on her way in and then turned on the overhead light. She had one of Adam’s T-shirts wrapped around her arm. Dried blood had formed a historical river from just above her elbow all the way down to her hand.

I sat up and stared at her.

‘Little fucker bit me!’ she said.

Tucked under her other arm was a thin and almost entirely featherless chicken. One of the many liberated from a battery farm on the outskirts of Sussex that night.

When I saw that chicken, I knew I wasn’t ready to leave. But the pin stayed in the map, piercing the fields just beyond Henley-in-Arden, where I would go when the time came.

Lenni’s Mother

WE HAVE PRACTISED for death every night. Lying down in the dark and slipping into that place of nothingness between rest and dreams where we have no consciousness, no self, and anything could befall our vulnerable bodies. We have died each night. Or at least, we have lain down to die, and let go of everything in this world, hoping for dreams and morning. Maybe that’s why my mother could never sleep – it’s too much like death and she wasn’t ready. So she was always waking, chasing awareness, clinging to life. Too afraid to let go, and then, years later, unable to do anything else.

Glasgow, September 2012

Lenni Pettersson is Fifteen Years Old

I watched her from my bedroom window as she got out of the