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

the TV interview. She led the journalists into the art room and helped them set up shots with the poorly children who had been invited to the grand opening. (‘Just broken arms and legs please, nothing too depressing, no cancer patients,’ had been the instruction from The Boss.) The news presenter arranged The Temp with the children, and the camera panned across as she demonstrated how to paint a star, the children copying with thick yellow poster paint on black paper. Then the camera zoomed in on The Boss, who had arrived with a sense of purpose, reeking of fake Gucci perfume and letting everyone know that he was the department lead on the project. He was microphoned ready for his interview, which would air on the evening news at 6 p.m. and 10.30 p.m. The Temp rose slowly from her seat and exited the room.

She held back the tears all the way to the office. Emptying a box of photocopier paper onto the floor, she hurriedly filled it with her possessions: her mug, her photo frame, her box of tissues. She had much less stuff than she had thought, and even her personal papers and paint samples for the art room fitted neatly into the box. She placed her staff card on her boss’s desk and shut the door.

Her head was blurry, stuffed full of emotion. She wanted to get out of the building before the TV crew and the children and the reporters came out into the corridor; she couldn’t bear them seeing her. But without her staff card, she had to use the public door rather than the staff one and she couldn’t remember how to get to it. As she made her way along the maze of hospital corridors, she broke into a run.

She didn’t see the girl in the pink pyjamas until she had crashed into her.

The Temp managed to regain her balance but the girl in the pyjamas didn’t. She tripped over The Temp and fell to the floor. A little heap of bones and pink.

The Temp tried to apologize, but all she managed was a strangled squawk. The nurse who had been walking with the girl crouched down beside her and called to a passing porter to bring over a wheelchair. The Temp didn’t even get a chance to see the girl’s face, but she noticed her thin arms as the nurse fussed her into the wheelchair and wheeled her away. She tried to shout an apology after them.

Those thin arms as the girl was lifted into the wheelchair were all The Temp could see when she tried to sleep, several glasses of Merlot chugging their way through her system but doing nothing to soften her thoughts. She couldn’t go back there. But she had to.

The next day, The Temp telephoned the children’s ward of the hospital to try to track down the girl in the pink pyjamas. All she could tell them was that she estimated the girl was about sixteen or seventeen and she had blonde hair and pink pyjamas. After nearly forty minutes of being on hold and being transferred and being interrogated about her intentions and several lies about how she was related to the girl, the hospital gave The Temp the name of the ward where the girl could be found.

And that was how The Temp came to be standing at the end of my bed, a look of remorse on her face and a posy of yellow silk roses in her hand.

Lenni and the Art Room

THE TEMP IS probably prettier than you imagined her. Taller, too. She was more nervous than she ought to be, though. She seemed surprised that she could sit on the edge of my bed without my bones shattering like glass. We have shared heritage, she believes, her father being Swedish too. Or Swiss. She couldn’t remember. And that mattered, of course. But not as much as what she told me next.

New Nurse said that if I wanted to go to the art room, she would need to ask Jacky’s permission. Jacky said it wasn’t up to her, so New Nurse had to find a doctor who could confirm whether I was allowed in the newly built patient art room and that I wouldn’t be at risk of disease or infection or rabid wolves gnawing at my drip tube.

But New Nurse didn’t come back. While I waited, I read that morning’s out-of-date newspaper. Paul the Porter sometimes leaves them for me on my bedside cabinet. I like the local newspapers best – where the rest of the world doesn’t exist, and all that matters is the local primary school’s new nature garden and an old woman who knitted a quilt for charity. Children are turning one year older, teenagers are graduating and grandparents are being laid to rest. Everything is small and manageable and everybody waits their turn to die.

When I’d finished reading the newspaper, I waited some more. At first I waited patiently, but then I started to think about it properly. A room, a cuboid space to which I had never travelled, existed. There’d be paints, pens, paper and (Vishnu willing) glitter. I might even be able to get my paws on a permanent marker for the graffiti I’ve been planning. Right above my head, on the shelf made out of sockets and switches, is the hospital’s kind reminder of my impermanence. A whiteboard that says ‘Lenni Pettersson’ in red marker with a smudge near the final ‘n’. The thing about whiteboards is that they’re so easily wiped clean. They’re designed to be used again and again and again for the names of the unlucky few who find themselves in the May Ward. One day, in just the briefest stroke of a dry whiteboard eraser, I’ll be gone. A new patient with skinny arms and big eyes will take my place.

I waited some more.

I had a watch when