For a moment, I met Margot’s bright blue eyes and I felt that we were perhaps going to be cellmates.
‘If you think about it,’ Pippa said, finally placing the paintbrush down, ‘you’re not dying.’
‘I’m not?’
‘No.’
‘Can I go home then?’ I asked.
‘What I mean is, you’re not dying right now. In fact, right now you’re living.’
Margot and I both watched her try to explain. ‘Your heart is beating and your eyes are seeing and your ears are hearing. You’re sitting in this room completely alive. And so you’re not dying. You’re living.’ She took in Margot. ‘You both are.’
It simultaneously made perfect sense and no sense at all.
So Margot and I, both alive, sat in the quiet of the Rose Room and we painted stars. Each on a small square canvas whose edges I forgot to paint, which would annoy me later when Pippa hung them on the wall. Margot’s star was on a background of inky blue and mine was on black. Hers symmetrical, mine not. And in the quiet, as she carefully outlined her yellow star in gold, I got this feeling I’ve never felt with anyone. That I had all the time in the world. I didn’t have to rush to tell her anything, we could just be.
When I was little, I loved drawing. I had an old baby formula tin full of crayons and a plastic table to work at. And no matter how terrible my picture, I would write my name and age in the corner. We’d been to an art gallery with school and our teacher had pointed out all the names in the bottom corner of the prints. I had this idea that because I was so talented, one day my pictures might be displayed in a gallery. Therefore, they’d need my name and the date. The fact that I was only five years and three months old when I drew a wonky Dalmatian copied off a VHS cover would only add to the art world’s awe at my talent. They’d talk of the famous painters who took until their twenties or thirties to really get to grips with their talent, and then they’d say, ‘But Lenni Pettersson was only five years and three months old when she created this work – how is it even possible she was already that good?’ In honour of my own vanity, at the bottom of my painted star, in yellow and using the thinnest brush I could find, I wrote Lenni, aged 17. Seeing this, Margot did the same. Margot, she wrote, 83. And then we put them side by side, the two stars against the dark.
Numbers don’t mean a lot to me. I don’t care about long division or percentages. I don’t know my height or my weight and I can’t remember my dad’s phone number, though I know I used to know it. I prefer words. Delicious, glorious words.
But there were two numbers in front of me that mattered, and would matter for the rest of my numbered days.
‘Between us,’ I said quietly, ‘we’re a hundred years old.’
Lenni Meets Her Peers
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, a slice of fruitcake appeared on my bedside table.
I’m not usually a fan of fruitcake. The way raisins burst in my mouth is exactly what I think it would be like to eat woodlice. The way they are firm at first but then you pierce them and the sweet liquid spurts out, and then you’re left with the skin-like casing.
But free cake is free cake.
I thought about Margot while I ate.
Between us, we have been alive for one hundred years. I suppose that’s quite an achievement.
I’d noticed during our art class at the exact same moment that New Nurse had blushed her way into the Rose Room, accidentally smashing her hip into one of the desks by the door. New Nurse had whispered that she’d found Father Arthur sitting alone in my cubicle. She said I wasn’t technically supposed to be in the Rose Room, and that technically if I didn’t return immediately, I might get in trouble. Which was sweet. For New Nurse, trouble is being shouted at by Jacky. Trouble isn’t the same thing when you’re wearing nightwear in the middle of the day and you’ve named the tube that burrows your dinner into your vein. That’s real trouble. And I’m already in it.
I followed her, though. Because it’s best to leave people wanting more. The trouble I got in was small. I listened intently to it and I promised Jacky I’d stop wandering around. Or wondering around. Nobody was specific about the spelling.
The curtain around my bed drew back just as I was flicking the last of the fruitcake crumbs from my bed.
‘Morning, Lenni,’ Paul the Porter greeted me with a smile. ‘Seen any more spiders recently?’
When I told him I hadn’t, he gestured at my bedside table. ‘They’re going to replace all of these bedside tables over the next few months because they don’t have enough weight in the base.’
I nodded because it was boring.
‘May I?’ he asked.
He pulled on the handle of the top drawer. He pulled harder and then shook it. The yellow silk roses from The Temp looked like they were doing a jitterbug dance. Finally, with both hands, he managed to open it, and as he did so out fluttered a piece of paper.
‘Love letter?’ he asked.
‘Inevitably,’ I told him. ‘I’ll just put it with the others.’
Paul picked it up and, failing to hide his opinion on his face, held it out to me.
Forgiveness: the Lord’s light was printed in swirling text over the top of a pixelated photo of a dove against a cloudy sky with a sunbeam poking through the clouds. Beneath it, the times of the chaplaincy services were printed, and beneath that, scribbled in blue fountain pen, it said:
Lenni, before you ask, I didn’t print this forgiveness pamphlet out specially for you, it’s just
