‘Is it a boy?’ I asked.
She nodded.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Davey.’
As Pharrell Williams’s ‘Happy’ forced its way into the room, I picked up a paintbrush. That was a key mistake, I learned later – starting to paint before sketching it out in pencil first. But I didn’t care. I’d remembered something happy and I had to get it down.
While I was painting the memory I could see, I told Margot the story.
Örebro, Sweden, 11th January 1998
Lenni Pettersson is One Year Old
It’s a memory I visit a lot.
It’s my first birthday. My mother has plaited my baby hair wisps on top of my head and secured them with a Minnie Mouse clip. I don’t watch it through my own eyes, but from the perspective of the video camera that frames my face in the shot as I point my finger at things and people, and make incomprehensible noises that are not yet words.
I’m sitting on my father’s lap and looking up at him like he’s the moon. He’s talking to whoever’s holding the camera and as he does, he sways me left and right on his knee and my cackle of delight makes him laugh. He turns to me and says something I’ve never been able to hear on the videotape that makes me point at the table and shout, ‘Da!’
Though daylight is still streaming in through the windows, someone turns off the lights and the cake, with its single candle, glows its way from the kitchen into the living room, my mother’s face illuminated. She places the cake on the table in front of me and kisses me on the top of my head. Then she steps back, standing behind me and my father as though she’s not quite sure what to do with herself. I see her mouth ‘Happy birthday, Lenni’ in English to me, which she never spoke unless absolutely necessary. My father takes hold of my hands so I don’t reach out and touch the flame.
The videotape always skips at this point, as together they begin to sing.
Ja, må hon leva!
Ja, må hon leva!
Ja, må hon leva uti hundrade år!
Javisst ska hon leva!
Javisst ska hon leva!
Javisst ska hon leva uti hundrade år!
Which means:
Yes, may she live!
Yes, may she live!
Yes, may she live for a hundred years!
Of course she will live!
Of course she will live!
Of course she will live for a hundred years!
Once I was old enough to understand it, the Swedish birthday song always made me sad. I didn’t know anybody who had lived to one hundred, and I didn’t think I would live to one hundred either. So, every year when my parents and friends sang to me, I felt this sadness that they were all celebrating something that wouldn’t actually happen. They were hoping for the impossible. I would let them down.
In the video, having just blown out my first birthday candle and been fed some icing on a spoon by my father, I have no idea what the song means and I look so happy.
The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot
THE IDEA SLIPPED into my mind like a silverfish.
In the absence of a pen on my bedside table, I had to tell someone before it swam away again.
Her ward was in darkness and mostly silent, except for some spectacularly loud snoring coming from the bed of the woman with the monogrammed dressing gown.
I pulled back the curtain that hung around Margot’s bed. ‘The stories,’ I said, taking in a gasp of air, ‘your stories!’
Margot opened her eyes.
‘We should paint them! One for every year!’
Despite it being somewhere between three and four o’clock in the morning, Margot pulled herself up in bed and squinted at me in the dark.
‘We’re a hundred, remember?’ I said, in case she’d forgotten. ‘Seventeen plus eighty-three. One hundred paintings for one hundred years.’
‘Lenni?’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘I love it.’
After the night nurse, a sturdy man named Piotr with a twinkling earring in his left ear, advised me to return to my bed, I lay in the dark thinking about it.
I still hadn’t been able to find my pen when I returned to the May Ward, so I stared up at the ceiling and hoped that at least one of the three of us – me, Margot or Piotr – would remember the plan when we woke up in the morning.
Somewhere, out in the world, are the people who touched us, or loved us, or ran from us. In that way we will live on. If you go to the places we have been, you might meet someone who passed us once in a corridor but forgot us before we were even gone. We are in the back of hundreds of people’s photographs – moving, talking, blurring into the background of a picture two strangers have framed on their living-room mantelpiece. And in that way, we will live on, too. But it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to have been a particle in the great extant of existence. I want, we want, more. We want for people to know us, to know our story, to know who we are and who we will be. And after we’ve gone, to know who we were.
So, we will paint a picture for every year we have been alive. One hundred paintings for one hundred years. And even if they all end up in the bin, the cleaner who has to put them there will think, Hey, that’s a lot of paintings.
And we will have told our story, scratching out one hundred pictures intended to say:
Lenni and Margot were here.
A Morning in 1940
THE WARD WAS quiet. The morning visiting hours were over and visitors had been begrudgingly forced to leave. Someone had brought in a balloon for one of the May Ward patients and I had spent my morning enjoying the intense commotion
