The crease that this word caused in Pippa’s forehead made me certain that she needs to go on a few away-day courses about how to deal with the dead and the dying. Because she’s not going to last long working at the hospital if she can’t even bear to hear the word. She crouched down beside the table and picked up one of the brushes.
‘It’s a very big topic,’ she said eventually.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I spent a whole day doing that seven stages of grief thing, and I got over it all in one go.’
Pippa pressed the dry bristles of the brush into the tabletop and they fanned out in a perfect circle.
When I was in primary school in ?rebro, I accidentally tore the corner off a page in a textbook. Me and a boy whose name I can’t remember had been racing to see who could turn every page of the book the fastest. I’d been trying to turn the pages really quickly and one of them just tore straight off at the corner. My class teacher shouted at me and, I think because I didn’t look contrite enough, sent me to the head teacher’s office. It felt like I was being sent to the police. I was already sure that my parents would be told and that I would be in trouble for ever. My palms started sweating. Even walking along the corridor to the head’s office while everyone else was in class felt wrong, like I was somewhere I ought not to be.
The head teacher was a sturdy woman with icy silver hair and a pursed pair of lips that were always dressed in oily lipstick. I pictured her shouting at me and I had to work very hard not to start crying. When I got to her office, she was in a meeting and the receptionist told me to wait on one of the green chairs outside her door. A boy several years older than me named Lucas Nyberg was already sitting on the left-hand chair.
‘Are you in trouble?’ he asked me （although of course he asked it in Swedish not English）。
‘Yes,’ I told him, and I felt my chin start to wobble.
‘I’m in trouble too,’ he said. And he patted the chair beside him. He didn’t seem scared or fazed about being in custody outside the head teacher’s office. If anything, he seemed proud of himself.
As I sat beside him, I was relieved. It was comforting to know that someone else was in trouble too. Lucas and I were sharing a fate and it felt so much better than going it alone.
And that’s exactly how I felt when Margot chose to break the silence by leaning towards me and whispering, ‘I’m dying, too.’
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.