Marianne Cronin
THE ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF LENNI AND MARGOT
Contents
PART ONE
Lenin
Lenni and the Priest
Lenni and the Question
Lenni and The Temp
Lenni and the Art Room
Runaway
Lenni and Margot
Lenni Meets Her Peers
Seventeen
Lenni and Margot Get Happy
The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot
A Morning in 1940
Lenni and New Nurse
An Evening in 1941
Lenni and Forgiveness, Part I
Margot and the Night
Lenni and Forgiveness, Part II
The First Kiss of Margot Macrae
Margot’s Getting Married
Father Arthur and the Sandwich
The First Winter
Lenni Moves to Glasgow
May Flowers
The First and Only Kiss of Lenni Pettersson
Margot and the Man on the Beach
Father Arthur and the Motorbike
The Second Winter
Lenni
PART TWO
Lenni
Margot and the Diary
Lenni and the Rose Room
Lenni and the Harvest Festival
Margot and the Bottle
Lenni and Margot and Things You Can’t Say
Lenni and the Car
Margot in Trouble
Twenty-Five Years
Margot and the Map
Lenni’s Mother
Lenni and Margot Go for a Walk
Chickens and Stars
Margot and The Professor
Lenni and the Man at the End
Meena and Margot and Things You Can’t Say
Lenni and Little Surprises
Margot and the Birthday
Lenni and the Mass
Margot and President Ho Chi Minh
An Exchange of Riches
Lenni and the Man Who Used to Be Her Moon
Margot and the Road
PART THREE
Lenni
Margot and the Astronomer
My Friend, My Friend
Margot’s Getting Married
Lenni and the First Goodbye
Sixty
Margot and the Sun
P
Lenni and Margot in Trouble
Verboten
When the Planets Align
Let Us Celebrate the Happy Accident of Your Birth
Silver
I Have Loved the Stars Too Fondly
Morning
Light … Dawn … Day
Margot and the Box
Old Friend
Birthday
Margot
Margot Again
Precious Little
Margot’s Goodnight
Lenni’s Last Page
Acknowledgements
An interview with Marianne Cronin
About the Author
Marianne Cronin was born in 1990. She studied English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, before earning a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham. She now spends most of her time writing, with her newly adopted rescue cat sleeping under her desk. When she’s not writing, Marianne can be found performing improv in the West Midlands, where she lives. Her debut novel The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot is to be published around the world and is being adapted into a feature film by a major Hollywood studio.
PART ONE
Lenni
WHEN PEOPLE SAY ‘terminal’, I think of the airport.
I picture a wide check-in area with a high ceiling and glass walls, the staff in matching uniforms waiting to take my name and flight information, waiting to ask me if I packed my bags myself, if I’m travelling alone.
I imagine the blank faces of passengers checking screens, families hugging one another with promises that this won’t be the last time. And I picture myself among them, my suitcase wheeling behind me so effortlessly on the highly polished floor that I might be floating as I check the screen for my destination.
I have to drag myself out of there and remember that that is not the type of terminal meant for me.
They’ve started to say ‘life-limiting’ instead now. ‘Children and young people with life-limiting conditions …’
The nurse says it gently as she explains that the hospital has started to offer a counselling service for young patients whose conditions are ‘terminal’. She falters, flushing red. ‘Sorry, I meant life-limiting.’ Would I like to sign up? I could have the counsellor come to my bed, or I could go to the special counselling room for teenagers. They have a TV in there now. The options seem endless, but the term is not new to me. I have spent many days at the airport. Years.
And still, I have not flown away.
I pause, watching the upside-down rubber watch pinned to her breast pocket. It swings as she breathes.
‘Would you like me to put your name down? The counsellor, Dawn, she really is lovely.’
‘Thank you, but no. I have my own form of therapy going on right now.’
She frowns and tilts her head to the side. ‘You do?’
Lenni and the Priest
I WENT TO meet God because it’s one of the only things I can do here. People say that when you die, it’s because God is calling you back to him, so I thought I’d get the introduction over and done with ahead of time. Also, I’d heard that the staff are legally obliged to let you go to the hospital chapel if you have religious beliefs, and I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to see a room I’d not yet been in and meet the Almighty in one go.
A nurse I’d never seen before, who had cherry red hair, linked her arm through mine and walked me down the corridors of the dead and the dying. I devoured every new sight, every new smell, every pair of mismatched pyjamas that passed me.
I suppose you could say that my relationship with God is complicated. As far as I understand it, he’s like a cosmic wishing well. I’ve asked for stuff a couple of times, and some of those times he’s come up with the goods. Other times there’s been silence. Or, as I have begun to think lately, maybe all the times I thought God was being silent, he was quietly depositing more nonsense into my body, a kind of secret ‘F-you’ for daring to challenge him, only to be discovered many years later. Buried treasure for me to find.
When we reached the chapel doors, I was unimpressed. I’d expected an elegant Gothic archway, but instead I came up against a pair of heavy wooden doors with square frosted windows. I wondered why God would need his windows frosted. What’s he up to in there?
Into the silence behind the doors the new nurse and I stumbled.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘hello!’
He must have been about sixty, wearing a black shirt and trousers and a white dog collar.
