Father Arthur looked a little sad. ‘I actually won’t be needing my vestments after I retire,’ he said.
‘You could take up gardening? Your robes would be great for that – they’d give protection from the sun but you’d still get a nice breeze.’
‘I can’t garden in my vestments!’
‘You can’t?’
‘They’re sacred garments.’
‘Are they?’
‘Yes! I can’t use them for anything other than religious duties.’
‘That’s a shame because I bet they’d make very comfortable nighties.’
‘I tend to prefer pyjamas,’ he said.
Father Arthur got up from the piano and went across the chapel – the purples and pinks of the stained glass window fell across the carpet, and as he stepped into the patch of purple and pink, for a moment he was purple and pink too.
‘So, Lenni,’ he said, as he picked up a wayward Bible someone had left on a pew, ‘tell me about your one hundred years.’
I lifted up the piano cover again and pressed the highest note and the lowest note together. ‘Our tally on the wall of the Rose Room is up to fifteen now,’ I said.
‘That’s splendid,’ he said. ‘And Margot?’
I pressed three keys in a row, from left to right so that the notes stepped up. It sounded quite nice.
‘She’s well,’ I said. ‘She’s very good at painting. If I’d known she was this good, I might not have signed up to have my pictures placed next to hers for everyone to see.’
‘Lenni,’ he said softly, from somewhere behind me.
‘So I’m writing them down, the stories. To make up for my lack of artistic talent.’
I pressed another three of the little black notes.
‘What’s she like?’ Arthur asked.
‘She’s like nobody I’ve met before,’ I told him.
I pressed the notes quickly so they sounded like tinkling bells.
‘I think her baby died.’
The Second Winter
St James Hospital, Glasgow, 3rd December 1953
Margot Docherty is Twenty-Two Years Old
‘We can’t get hold of your husband,’ the nurse said as she stopped at the doorway, out of breath. I didn’t just hear her words, I could see them, shimmering across my eyes in dots of white and black. I could feel her movements too. As she came towards me, the fizzes in my cheek moved with her.
I held my hand over one eye and I nodded.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked, coming closer. She faltered. ‘I mean, your eye, is it okay?’
I nodded, hand still over my eye, and willed her to leave but she came closer. ‘Is there something wrong with your eye?’ she asked again.
I turned away from her, hoping it would make her leave, but it didn’t and I couldn’t remember the words to make her go.
She knelt down in front of me, and I felt the reverberations of her movement all across my face.
‘Look at me,’ she said, and I did. Her mouth and her chin were gone, replaced by a grey nothingness. ‘Blink,’ she said, and I did. Though she was in front of me, she felt very far away.
‘Follow the end of my pen,’ she said, and I tried to but the pen kept disappearing.
‘Doctor?’ she said in an even voice, but I knew there was concern in it.
The shape of a man came and stood beside her. ‘She can’t see,’ the nurse said.
‘I’m fine,’ I tried to say, but it came out very long and slow, I couldn’t get to the M, so I settled for a B. ‘I’b fiy.’ I knew it was wrong, but it wasn’t clear how to fix it. I wanted to say something else, but I didn’t know what it was.
The doctor made an interested sound and repeated the steps made by the nurse. Just like her, parts of his face were missing; there were grey gaps where his forehead and chin should have been. And what little I could see flickered with the flash of a photograph nobody had taken.
He had me open and close my jaw, turn my head. He asked me to tell him my name. I knew it, it was in my mind, but I couldn’t find shapes to match it. I wanted to tell them to leave me, that I was fine, that my time was precious, but I couldn’t.
From somewhere, the hissing snake of the word ‘stroke’ slithered its way to my ear.
‘Stroke’ is a lot like the word ‘snake’， only I’d never noticed before. This I clung to, and I thought it over and over several times. As though I were remembering my telephone number. I felt that I would need it later. Stroke and snake. So similar. Why had I never spotted that?