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

‘Birth certificate,’ he said. ‘This young lady’s father had her birth certificate.’

The nurse was uninterested. ‘Haven’t seen one. I’m on my break.’ She picked up a teaspoon and started trying to scoop out the wet bits of biscuit that were now floating on the surface of her tea.

‘Gotcha,’ he said, pulling the pink square from the drawer. Paul read the full name on the certificate. ‘This you?’ he asked.

The Temp nodded.

The missing birth certificate had always been a mystery to The Temp and her mother. It had disappeared from the drawer in the kitchen on the day of the stripy dungarees picture. What purpose could an absent father have with his daughter’s birth certificate? Looking down at it then, The Temp saw that he had managed to keep the certificate in perfect condition, except for the creases that formed a cross in the centre where it had been folded in half and in half once again.

He’d taken care of it.

The Temp had always associated her father’s stealing with negativity. When her mother told stories from their courtship of his thieving, it was always bad. It always ended with embarrassment or police or fighting, or trouble of some kind. But this wasn’t like that. It was an act of love, a keepsake, a sign that she had meant something to him.

‘The girl that translated the Swedish for him,’ Paul told her, ‘she said that he wanted to tell you he was sorry for what he did and that he wanted you to keep what’s in the bag.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘Not a clue, haven’t looked.’

The Temp nodded. ‘Thank you.’ But before she reached the door, she turned and asked, ‘A girl translated for him?’

‘She certainly did.’

And with a smile, The Temp asked, ‘Which way is it from here to the May Ward?’

The Temp didn’t know this part of the hospital well and, having immediately forgotten the porter’s directions from her father’s ward to the May Ward, she wandered directionless for a while, the bag in one hand, her birth certificate in the other. Eventually she stopped.

The corridor was empty and had long windows all along it, the sills of which reached just above the floor and so made a perfect place to sit. The Temp crouched down onto the windowsill. She placed the bag in front of her.

The zip that ran along the top of the bag was the same faded orange of the straps. For a moment, The Temp wondered if she was actually capable of opening the bag. If maybe it would be better never to open the bag at all. That way her father’s endowment could be both wonderful and terrible, both meaningful and meaningless. But she had to find out.

The black jumper was the first thing she pulled out. It was the source of much of the smell. It was, The Temp couldn’t ignore, the smell of urine. Nevertheless, she took the jumper out and put it on the windowsill beside her.

Also in the bag was a straggle of blue rope, and several empty cans of corner shop own-brand energy drink. They cost 19p a can. The Temp and her friends used to mix them with vodka on nights out.

As she moved an old newspaper to the side, she saw the first banknote. In trying to pull it from the bottom of the bag, she almost tore it, as it was weighed down and tied with a woman’s hair band to a stack of notes of the same design. They were unfamiliar – a man with a long beard and a floppy hat staring glumly at her. Whatever currency it was, there were a thousand in one note alone. And in the stack she held at least two hundred notes. The second stack was the same size, also held together with a woman’s hair band.

Ett Tusen Kronor was printed at the top of each note.

There was only one person The Temp wanted to speak to in that moment, and fortunately she was already on her way to see her.

And that’s how The Temp came to be standing at the end of my bed holding a duffel bag full of Swedish money.

Margot and the Birthday

London, 11th May 1967

Margot Macrae is Thirty-Six Years Old

DAVEY’S BIRTHDAY IS more of a ghost than he has ever been. It haunts me. Stalking the calendar.

But on what would have been his fourteenth birthday, I opened the door to mine and Meena’s bedsit to find it filled with yellow balloons. Hundreds of them.

When I found Meena in the pub in town later, The Professor was nowhere to be seen, and it made me breathe out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Sometimes, when he wasn’t around, Meena was her own person again. And a little bit mine.

I tried to thank her, but she couldn’t hear me over the music. So instead, I just hugged her tight.

As soon as I introduced Meena to Davey, she loved him.

And it made me love her more.

Lenni and the Mass

THERE WERE ONLY a few weeks left until Father Arthur would be a Father no more. I decided, as I imagine people did in black and white days when an actress announced her retirement, to go and see him as often as I could. I’d attend every one of his last performances before he retired to rest his ankle or wed his true love or move to Los Angeles to try his luck in the movies. Then one day I would wave a battered programme in front of my grandchildren’s eyes and say, ‘I was there way back when,’ before boring them with stories of Arthur in his sequin-encrusted finery wowing the audience in a way that only he knew how.

My resentment for New Nurse, Harbinger of the Wheelchair, hadn’t completely evaporated. The evaporation of resentment had been slowed considerably