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

‘Where in Glasgow do you live?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘Anywhere.’

‘The doctor said you’re homeless.’

He nodded.

‘Why don’t you have a home?’

‘I have lived terribly. I deserve nothing more.’

I thought about reaching out and touching his hand, but those purple bruises looked sore.

‘Can I do anything to help?’ I asked.

‘Thank them for me, for trying to save a bad old man. Tell the doctor I came to Glasgow to find my girl and ask them to find her for me, if they can, once I’m dead.’ He gestured to a blue holdall bag sitting on the table beside a bloodstained pair of jeans. Mr Eklund leant forward and said the next part quietly, even though nobody else had a clue what we were saying anyway. ‘I have her birth certificate in my bag. Tell them when they find her, to say that I am sorry for everything I did. I missed her daily. Give her everything else that is in the bag, it is hers. If they can’t find her, give the bag to the first homeless person you can find.’

I nodded and stared briefly at the bag. It had clearly started life a very different colour to the one it was now.

‘They want me to ask you if you’re in pain.’

‘Yes. But I deserve it.’

I wondered what the man had done to deserve all that he had decided he did.

‘Tell them I want to sleep,’ he said.

‘Do you?’

‘No. I want to die.’

‘The operation might make you better,’ I said. ‘You might find your daughter yourself.’

He smiled at me like a grandfather might smile at his granddaughter – warm, caring, but conveying that he had seen much more of the world than me and knew many more of its secrets.

‘I’m ready,’ he said.

‘How do you know?’

He rested a bruised hand on mine. ‘I know,’ he said.

I wanted to save him. In that room I was the only person who could speak to him and he was going to give up.

‘But how do you know?’ I asked again.

‘I can feel it, that’s all.’

‘Aren’t you scared?’

He inhaled a laboured breath and fixed me with another soft smile. ‘Don’t be afraid to die, sweet nose.’

‘But I am,’ I whispered.

‘But you have no reason to be!’ He laughed, and the next part he said in English: ‘It will be like sleeping.’

At his use of English, the doctor looked up.

Mr Eklund switched back into Swedish. ‘You just close your eyes.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Well, it is true that I haven’t died yet, but that is how it will be.’

Another laboured breath rattled through his lungs.

I translated to the doctor that Mr Eklund wasn’t in pain, which felt like a lie.

‘You can trust yourself, you know,’ Mr Eklund said. ‘Trust yourself that you will know. In the same way you know when you have hunger and thirst, you will know when it is time. I hope for you, sweet nose, that it isn’t for a long time yet.’

‘I’ve already been alive for a hundred years,’ I said. He didn’t ask me how.

‘Also, please tell them that when they think I have been asking for water, I have been asking for wine. It’s too late for alcohol to kill me, but it’s not too late for it to make me feel better,’ he said. ‘If I wake up again, I’d like a glass of red – Merlot if they have it, although I’m not fussy, I’ll take a Shiraz or even a Zinfandel.’

I laughed and he did too. ‘I’ll tell them,’ I promised.

‘Thank you, Lenni Pettersson,’ he said. ‘Now tell them I’m going to sleep.’

He closed his eyes, and his eyebrows and lined forehead relaxed into a blank face of peace. But he didn’t look dead. If anything, it looked like he was pretending to be dead.

‘Well?’ the doctor asked.

I reverted back to English. ‘Operate away, find his daughter, and give her his bag and her birth certificate. Let me know when you find her,’ I said, rising and walking carefully to the wheelchair. ‘I’ll tell her the rest.’

I sat in the chair and began to wheel myself away. It was harder than it looks. ‘And he wants red wine when he wakes up. A Merlot, if possible, but he’ll take whatever you’ve got.’

Meena and Margot and Things You Can’t Say

London, September 1966

Margot Macrae is Thirty-Five Years Old

It was the middle of the night and there was a hand touching my hand.

Had there always been a hand touching my hand? I wondered in my sleep.

When I opened my eyes she was there, in my bed, her cold toes touching mine.

She whispered something, but I couldn’t hear her.

‘What?’

‘Don’t you remember what you said?’ she asked. I didn’t then, but it came to me afterwards. The night of the pear liqueur. Sitting in the bathroom. I had told her I loved her.

She looked at me, staring for so long, unblinking in the dark. And then she blinked and the tears fell.

And I willed her to say it.

And she willed herself to say it.

But she couldn’t. And before I could speak, she was gone.

Lenni and Little Surprises

THE TEMP HAD not had much luck since she was unceremoniously ejected from her position at the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital. She had started out with aspirations – applying only for the jobs that made her feel excited, or inspired. If the responses came at all, they were rejections. So, The Temp set her sights lower – applying for typing, data entry, reception work … and still nothing. The rejections were as impersonal and as unrelenting as the ones from her dream jobs. Only this time it was worse, because she was being rejected for jobs she didn’t even want. While waiting outside the twenty-four-hour supermarket manager’s office with the other candidates for ‘seasonal sales assistant: zero-hour contract’, The Temp learned she was in the company of a