The videotape always skips at this point, as together they begin to sing.
Ja, m? hon leva!
Ja, m? hon leva!
Ja, m? hon leva uti hundrade ?r!
Javisst ska hon leva!
Javisst ska hon leva!
Javisst ska hon leva uti hundrade ?r!
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 it had caused. What resulted, in the end, was an irate uncle, who was angry at both ‘Health and Safety’ and ‘Political Correctness’ having simultaneously ‘gone mad’， storming out of the ward ahead of his family carrying a helium-filled Get Well Soon! sheep balloon. The young patient he had visited took the whole thing with a level of maturity the uncle would probably never attain. But that just made me sad because the May Ward has a way of doing that to children. Making them calm and measured and flat. Old before their time.
And I wondered, as I wandered down the hall towards the Rose Room, whether I am old before my time. The set of seven octogenarian faces that greeted me when I opened the door reminded me that, at the very least, I’m not quite eighty yet.
‘Lenni!’ Pippa rushed over to me. ‘Look!’
In the corner of her whiteboard, she’d stuck a piece of paper on which she’d written in gold ink Lenni and Margot’s big idea, and she had made two tally marks for Margot’s painting of the baby and my terrible sketch of the video camera view of my first birthday.