‘I’m taking her to the zoo,’ Christabel said, ‘to cheer her up.’
‘And why would you need cheering up?’ he asked me, but Christabel answered, speaking quickly.
‘Margot had a date today, but he didn’t come.’
‘You’re Margot?’ he asked, a slight smile on his lips.
I nodded, my face burning.
‘You were just saying, actually, weren’t you, Margot? That you might never find someone to love?’
His eyes didn’t leave mine as he said quietly, ‘I could love you, if you want.’
He offered his love like a cough drop. As though it were nothing at all.
The nurse was standing beside Margot’s bed, squinting at us. He seemed like he might have been standing there for a while.
Margot lifted up her purple sleeve and held out her arm.
‘Just the anti-sickness,’ he said gently, as he snapped the protective top off the needle and placed it in her arm.
‘Ooh.’ She shut her eyes and breathed in through her teeth.
‘All done,’ he said. He stuck a dot of a plaster on her arm and helped her roll down her sleeve. ‘Visiting hours are nearly up, do you need someone to come and collect you?’ he asked me.
‘Oh, no, I’m fine,’ I smiled.
Once he’d gone, I turned to Margot.
‘What happened next?’ I asked.
‘I’ll have to tell you the rest later,’ she said, and she pointed behind me.
New Nurse was standing at the foot of Margot’s bed. ‘Found you!’ she said, with a look that was somewhere between amusement and annoyance.
As we made our way down the corridor and back towards the May Ward, I asked New Nurse, ‘What were you like when you were seventeen?’
She stopped still, thinking for a moment, then she smiled and said, ‘Drunk.’
That night, when I would usually take to the wild waters for rafting with the handsome instructor, who had recently purchased a pair of tropical shorts, I found myself pulled. Not by the water, but by Margot. I didn’t go to the grassy knoll by the water’s edge or lie in the raft with the sun warming my skin. Instead I took a little walk to a train station in Glasgow and I boarded the 12.36 to Edinburgh. I saw a pretty girl in a floral dress and a skinny man and the beginning of something.
And then, somewhere on the way to Edinburgh, I fell asleep, for the first time in years.
Lenni and Margot Get Happy
MY FIRST DAY as an octogenarian was surprising. My legs didn’t feel any more tired and my hair wasn’t grey. I had yet to develop a passion for the smell of lavender and my sleeves didn’t contain any tissues. I had never had lunch in a Marks & Spencer café or shown pictures of my grandchildren to strangers on the bus. But there I was, among my octogenarian peers in the Rose Room, ready to do some painting.
Pippa had rearranged the tables again, this time into clusters of four. I sat beside Margot, and opposite us sat Walter, a retired gardener whose grey hair and rosy red cheeks made him resemble a garden gnome, and Else, who with her black pashmina draped over her shoulders and her short silver bob looked like she could be the editor of a French fashion magazine.
The table beside us was in my mind our competition, as it was made up of four real octogenarians in various shades of sensible pastel pyjamas, whereas on our table sat a gnome, a magazine editor, a fake octogenarian and a Margot. If there was a competition, which I hoped there would be, I was sure we’d win.
Outside the window, the hospital car park was drenched in grey, with half-hearted rain misting down on people as they ran to the payment machines, bowing their heads and opening umbrellas against the subtle deluge. I tried to remember the last time I’d felt the rain. And I wondered, briefly, if I could convince New Nurse to take me out into the car park next time it rained, or better yet, if I could stand in one of the shower rooms fully dressed and have her simulate the rain with one or two of the showerheads on their softest setting.
‘I’d like it,’ Pippa said, rolling up the sleeves of her floral top, ‘if we could spend today thinking about happiness, and painting or drawing moments from our happy memories. I’ll share mine first.’ She tried to perch on the edge of her desk, but stood up fairly quickly because it was ever so slightly too high. ‘One of my happiest memories is a walk my family took with our old dog. It was sometime around Easter but it was a surprisingly hot day. My grandfather was there too, and we just walked along a country road in the sunshine.’
‘I knew you were a dog person!’ I said before I really intended to.