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

Her sleepy face as she opened her eyes made me want to keep her.

But I couldn’t.

So I handed her an envelope with the next month’s rent in it. And the photograph from the cèilidh. So she wouldn’t forget me.

And then I picked up my bags and, in the grey morning light, I made my way down the road.

Looking for home.

An Exchange of Riches

‘ABOUT £35,000.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘Nope.’

‘Oh my God. Trust me to miss the one day when something exciting happens. What’s she going to do with it?’ New Nurse had completely forgotten she was meant to be giving me my anti-DVT injection, and was standing with one hand on her hip and the needle absently held aloft in her other hand, like a needle catalogue model (if there are such things).

‘She said she would put some aside to make sure her father had a decent funeral, and then she said she didn’t know, perhaps go back to university or travel or put it towards a house, give some to her mother. She had a lot of ideas.’

‘Wow.’

‘I know. She tried to give me one.’

‘One what?’

‘One of the notes. After she asked me to work out how much was in the bag, she offered me one, so that I would have something Swedish with me in hospital. She said she hadn’t forgotten meeting me in all the time since she left the hospital, and she smiled when she saw that the yellow roses are still on my bedside table.’

‘Did you take it?’

‘No, I couldn’t. She’s the one who came up with the idea for the Rose Room – she’s the reason I met Margot.’

‘Isn’t it amazing to think that her dad carried that money around with him and even though he was homeless, he didn’t spend it. And now she knows – her father had been thinking about her the whole time he was gone.’

‘It was an exchange of riches. She gave the hospital a gift and it gave one back.’

Lenni and the Man Who Used to Be Her Moon

‘OH, I REMEMBER your dad,’ Paul the Porter said. ‘Tall fella? Glasses?’

‘That’s him.’ Paul was walking me to the Rose Room because he had to go that way anyway and, in his words, we hadn’t had a natter for a while. He was walking beside me as I wheeled along. He’d asked me if I wanted a push and when I said no, he let me get on with it and I liked that. I mentally awarded him some Porter Points. He’s beating the other porters by miles.

‘Used to come round a lot?’ Paul said.

‘That’s him,’ I said again, as we reached a flat part of the corridor which I could wheel across like a dream.

‘Quiet guy,’ he said, thinking. I wondered if he was picturing my father correctly, with all the colour drained out of him, which is how he always was when he came to the May Ward. As though he’d had to leave his coat and any fresh flowers and all the colour in his face at the nurses’ station before he could come into the ward.

‘He doesn’t come around so much,’ Paul said, holding open a set of doors for me.

‘Nope,’ I said, sliding through. ‘Margot’s been asking me about him. I don’t know why she’s worried about me. I don’t want him to come back.’

‘Maybe she’s not worried about you,’ Paul said thoughtfully, ‘maybe she’s worried about him.’

If Paul hadn’t just won himself an extra fifteen hundred Porter Points for insight, I might have felt nervous coming into the Rose Room to tell her the rest.

Margot had pinned her hair up into a bun, and for a moment she looked like the brown-haired girl I’d seen on the beach in Glasgow.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘Love it,’ I told her, wheeling up to my seat. ‘If we go back to visit my father,’ I said, ‘can we go somewhere fun after?’

She nodded.

Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital, December 2013

Lenni Pettersson is Sixteen Years Old

The first Big Surgery happened a few weeks after the meeting with the fearful consultant.

The dream I had while I was under the general anaesthetic was so orange I could taste it.

When I left the orange dream, I found my father.

I watched him sitting by my bedside and he looked haggard. His face was grey and his jaw was set into stone.

‘I can’t do this, Len,’ he said, and his voice cracked. ‘I can’t sit here and watch you die.’

‘Then don’t.’

He looked at me then, for a long time. Like he was trying to find something in my face that would tell him what he didn’t already know.

At first he still came, between the visiting hours of three and six, and he continued his slow transition into a gargoyle – all stony and grey. Agnieszka had had to return to Poland for work and I knew that he had stopped laughing.

The visits became shorter, and he would miss a day or two, or a week. He became quieter and greyer, and I would watch the clock until the end of visiting hours and be relieved if he didn’t appear in the doorway, all hunched and mourning.

‘I meant it,’ I told him one afternoon as, through my eyelashes, I watched him watch me pretend to sleep, with the same expression of despair with which he had watched my mother stand in the kitchen staring into the garden wearing only a T-shirt and knickers. He wanted to row out to me, to pull me back to shore. But, like my mother, I was underwater already, where it gets dark.

I knew it was time. ‘Papa,’ I said. I hadn’t called him that in years. I was pulling out all the stops. ‘I want you to do something for me.’

He looked at me.

‘I want you to promise me you won’t come back.’

There was a really