She fumbled in the pocket of the long wool coat she was wearing, which was my mother’s favourite and had been summoned from my mother’s wardrobe to keep my least favourite grandmother warm while she prayed. She pulled out a pink hankie and a scrunched-up scrap of paper. She handed me the hankie with distaste and threw the paper in the bin.
‘What do you want with a hankie anyway?’ she asked.
‘Ma’s crying.’
She leant in closer, peering into the kitchen to inspect her work.
Satisfied, she left for church.
After she left, I pulled the paper from the bin and un-scrunched it. In my father’s blotchy writing were the lyrics to my mother’s favourite song:
How much do I love you?
I’ll tell you no lie
How deep is the ocean?
How high is the sky?
I flattened it as best I could and took it up to her bedroom and placed it under her pillow.
It was the first one we found.
As it turned out, he’d left love notes for her everywhere. Inside the left shoe of her prettiest pair of high heels, at the back of the pantry weighed down by jars, behind the books on the living-room shelf. Slotted between their favourite records. Some of them had more song lyrics, some had jokes, some had pleas to remember him.
My mother collected them all and put them in a Mason jar on her dressing table. Every time we found a new one, she would smile in a way I hadn’t seen her smile without him. When I discovered one in the bottom drawer of my bedside table, I kept it hidden so I could make her smile when we ran out of new notes to find. Or when the telegram came.
Lenni and New Nurse
‘WHAT DO YOU write in that notebook, Lenni?’
‘This?’ I asked, pulling it from my bedside table and wondering briefly when she had seen me writing in it. New Nurse was sitting on the end of my bed. She’d kicked off her shoes and her odd socks (one pink with red cherries on, one striped with a pug’s face on the toes) were swinging over the side of my bed. I knew she wanted me to let her see the notebook, but I didn’t.
‘I’m writing the story.’
‘Of …?’
‘My life. And Margot’s life.’
‘Your one hundred years?’
‘Exactly. Although I started writing it before I met Margot.’
‘So, it’s like a diary?’ she asked.
I turned it over in my hands. It’s shiny on the outside, all different shades of purple. I have to write on both sides of the paper because I don’t want to run out of space before I get to the last page, so the pages crinkle when I turn them. Sometimes I just turn them back and forth because the crinkling is so satisfying. ‘I suppose,’ I said.
‘I used to have a diary,’ New Nurse said, and she pulled a lollipop from the top pocket of her uniform and unwrapped it. She passed it to me. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a lollipop. It was cola flavoured.
‘You did?’
She unwrapped another lollipop, a pink one, and popped it in her mouth. ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘It was boring stuff, though. This girl said this thing behind my back and so I said this thing behind her back, so she tried to fight me, so I kicked her.’
‘You did?’
New Nurse looked a little proud, but said, as though she were worried I might go on a New Nurse-sanctioned kicking spree, ‘Kicking is wrong.’
‘Did you get in trouble?’
She twisted the lollipop in her mouth. ‘Probably.’
‘I write it when I can’t sleep,’ I told her. ‘Since I’m not very good at painting, I figured I would write down our stories in case people can’t tell what they are.’
‘Am I in it?’ she asked.
‘If you were, would you want to read it?’
‘Of course!’
‘Then no, you’re not in it.’
‘I am in it, really, aren’t I?’
‘Who can say?’ I said.
She got off my bed and slipped her shoes back on. ‘If I’m in it, can you make me taller?’
I just gave her a look.
‘Goodnight, Lenni,’ she said.
And she left me alone with my diary. To write about her.
An Evening in 1941
‘I DID THIS one in the same year.’ Walter was showing Margot and me a picture of a hedge cut into the shape of a swan on his smartphone, which had incredibly big button graphics.
‘What’s the weirdest animal you’ve ever made?’ I asked.
‘A unicorn. For a woman who was selling her home but wanted to leave her mark.’
‘That’s the kind of woman I’d like to be,’ I said.
‘But really, my favourite thing is roses. I managed to get some almost perfect Ophelias and some hedgehog roses, which we don’t often see in our neck of the woods. They still grow at the end of my garden, but I can’t tend to them like I’d want, what with my knee. The white ones, my Madame Zoetmans, always come out the best. They’re fluffy. Like sheep on a stick.’
‘Oh, I love Zoetmans!’ Else said, coming to sit with us in a burst of woody perfume. Walter stared at Else with delight. Like she was a unicorn hedge. So we left them to it.
Margot turned back to her drawing.
‘Where to?’ I asked, while she shaded the dark outer corners of what appeared to be a tin bucket.
‘You’ll like this one,’ she said, as she used her thumb to smudge the dark shadows cast by the bucket onto the floor. ‘We’re going back to the house I grew up in,’ she said, ‘to an evening in 1941.’
Cromdale Street, Glasgow, 1941
Margot Macrae is Ten Years Old
I was in the bath when the air raid siren went off. My mother swore very quietly under her breath and stubbed her cigarette out on the soap dish.
My bathwater was still hot, and we’d filled it up to the line drawn in
