I opened my eyes but didn’t lift my head, and I peered at the table where the two upside-down shiny girls were laughing so hard at something the boy had said, and he was stamping green splodges of paint around the knife he had drawn.
‘They have so much time.’
‘So …?’
‘I don’t.’
Pippa couldn’t meet my eye.
‘I’m not saying that to make you feel bad,’ I said, ‘I just want you to understand what I’m feeling. I have an urgency to have fun.’
‘You have an urgency to have fun?’
‘Yes. I have to have fun. It’s urgent.’
‘Okay,’ she said eventually, ‘what can I do to make it better?’
‘You know when I came in here when I wasn’t supposed to?’
‘Yes …’
‘When I met those old people.’
‘The over-eighties group, yes …’
‘I met Margot.’
‘Yes …’
‘I want you to move me into her art group. The over-eighties one.’
‘But Lenni, that is the class for people in their eighties and over,’ Pippa said.
‘Yes. I understand that.’
‘So it wouldn’t really make sense to put you in that group.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re not eighty!’
‘But apart from that?’
‘That’s just the way we’ve decided to do it, so that the classes can be suited to people’s interests and abilities.’
‘Well, I think that’s ageist.’
I waited. She was wavering, I could tell.
‘I promise I’ll be good.’
Pippa smiled. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Seventeen
When Paul the Porter drew back the curtain, the old lady in the purple pyjamas looked up from her Take a Break magazine and asked sharply, ‘Who are you?’ She didn’t seem pleased to be taking a break from her break-taking.
‘That’s not her,’ I whispered to Paul.
‘Sorry!’ Paul said cheerfully while the woman scowled at us. ‘We’re looking for someone.’
The woman mumbled something. Paul drew the curtain back around her bed like he was shrouding an unwanted prize on The Price is Right.
When Paul drew back a different curtain to reveal a different elderly lady in purple pyjamas, she was sleeping, with a faint smile on her lips and a half-eaten slice of fruitcake on a paper plate on her bedside table.
‘That’s her.’
‘You want a chair?’ he asked, and began dragging a plastic visitor’s chair across the ward before I could answer. The sound of the chair dragging across the lino didn’t wake her, but Paul shouting ‘Bye!’ did.
Margot opened her eyes. ‘Lenni?’ She smiled as though she were remembering me from a dream.
She had several hardback books on her bedside table. Tucked between the top two was an opened envelope, and I was sure I could see a letter peeping at me from inside. On the mini whiteboard above her head, her name was written by someone whose writing slanted strongly to the left. Margot Macrae.
Beyond Margot’s curtain, I could hear the low murmur of people talking and some gentle classical music from a staticky radio. Through the gap in the curtain, we watched a tall woman with a tuft of grey hair sticking out from under an Alice band. She had a dark red dressing gown with the initials W. S. stitched in gold on the top pocket. She was making her way out of the ward leaning on a Zimmer frame. Her face was covered in age spots which made her look like a dappled, very slow racehorse.
‘What were you like when you were my age?’ I asked Margot.
‘When I was seventeen?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘Hmm.’ She squinted her eyes, as if somewhere between her open and closed eyelids lived the images from so many years ago, as if she’d be able to see herself, if only she could get the gaps between her lashes just right.
‘Margot?’
‘Yes, dear?’
‘You said you were dying.’
‘I am,’ she said, as though it were a promise she was proud to be keeping.
‘Aren’t you scared?’
She looked at me then, her blue eyes swaying left and right in tiny movements, like she was reading my face. The static of the radio died down and all that was left was the sound of a gentle lullaby.
And then Margot did something amazing. She reached out and she held my hand.
And then she told me a story.
Glasgow, January 1948
Margot Macrae is Seventeen Years Old
On my seventeenth birthday, my least favourite grandmother leant into my face and asked if I was ‘courting’. Her face was so close to mine that I could see the dark purple mark on her bottom lip. I had always thought it was errant lipstick, but up close it was different. A bluish violet that looked like a stone, but bedded in, deep under the skin. I wondered if we could find a doctor who would be willing to scrape it out, just to see what it was.
Disappointed, she sat back in her chair and wiped the icing from the edge of the cake knife with her finger and put it in her mouth. I needed to hurry up, she told me. There were fewer men than women now and ‘the pretty girls will have their pick’.
A week later she announced that she had arranged a date for me with a nice boy from church. I wouldn’t know him, of course, given that my mother and I ‘never visited the house of the Lord’. I was to meet him under the big clock at Glasgow Central Station at exactly twelve noon.
I recounted this interaction to my best (and only) friend Christabel as we hurried along my street towards the train station.
She scrunched up her face and her freckles moved, forming new constellations. ‘But we never talk to boys,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘So, what are you going to say to him?’
This thought hadn’t occurred to me and I stopped. Christabel stopped too, her pink skirt swishing. I don’t know why she was dressed up too, when it was me who had the date. My grandmother had put me in a starchy floral dress and pointed black shoes that were pinching my toes. I felt like I was a child playing at dressing like an
