The doctor turned his monitor around to show some of the scan results to my father, but my father had turned grey. His eyes were fixed on the desk in front of us and he wasn’t breathing.
While the doctor carried on talking about surgeries and stages and bones, the office lights flicked on.
Margot in Trouble
London, July 1964
Margot Docherty is Thirty-Three Years Old
MEENA AND I were back in the police station where we had met five years before. Except this time we were handcuffed, and Meena, for the first time since we’d met, was silent. Though she was seven years my junior, I always looked up to Meena. She was my guide through London and through life. She always knew what to do. But now I realized that she might, in fact, have no idea what she was doing.
We waited, a policeman at either side of us, to sign in for our arrest. I was trying very hard not to meet the eyes of anyone in the waiting room. I tried to catch Meena’s attention, but she was staring down at the floor, biting her lip. One of the policemen escorting us had said ‘Irish’ to his colleague when they heard my accent. I told them I was from Scotland and he muttered, ‘All the same.’
‘Name and address,’ the woman at the desk said.
Meena, speaking for the first time since we were arrested, murmured, ‘Catherine Amelia Houghton.’
My stomach dropped. She’d given them a fake name. I couldn’t believe she’d lied to the police and she’d done it so serenely, giving the name to the woman at the desk without even breaking eye contact. Meena wouldn’t be getting in trouble for what we did, because someone who didn’t exist, Catherine Amelia Houghton, would be in trouble instead.
I realized I was thoroughly out of my depth. It would be my turn to speak any moment. Was I supposed to lie too? What would happen when they found out that we weren’t using our real names? I wanted to be sick.
The woman at the desk turned to me. ‘Name?’ she barked.
I decided then that I’d call myself Harriet – after an old friend of my mother’s – but when I tried to speak, the sound I made was somewhere between my own name and my new alias, a kind of ‘Marghaarrie’。
‘Sorry?’
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was so dry.
Meena gave me a look. A look that said, Have you lost your mind?
‘Her name is Margot,’ Meena told her. She was selling me out. I tried to swallow again but I couldn’t get any moisture into my mouth.
‘What are we being arrested for?’ Meena asked.
The policeman snorted. ‘Lawyer are you, sweetheart?’
Meena didn’t look like a lawyer. I remember so vividly what she was wearing that day – a paisley dress in red with flared sleeves and an old pair of leather sandals that smelled stale whenever she took them off. As we’d been waiting, she’d nervously woven little plaits into her long hair. She’d an obsession with freckles, of which she had none, and so she’d taken to drawing them on with a make-up pencil. She definitely didn’t look like a lawyer.
‘Ideas above your station?’ the other policeman said. He was gazing at Meena like she was naked.
She, to her credit, paid him no attention and repeated her request.
‘Relax,’ the policeman soothed, in a slow tone that made the hairs on my arms stand up.
They put us in individual cells. I tried to make eye contact with Meena as I was led into mine, but she still wouldn’t look at me. The cell smelled of urine and I didn’t want to touch anything, so I paced around the room and tried to piece together what I should say, what the police would already know, and then I tried to cross-check that with what I thought Meena, or Catherine Amelia, would tell them.
If I told the truth completely, it would have sounded like this: at about one o’clock that morning, as I stood on lookout outside the biosciences building, Meena, Adam, Lawrence and a few more of Meena’s friends broke into the medical lab at the university where Meena worked. Well, they didn’t break in. They used a key procured from Meena’s role as typist for The Professor, who was also the head of the medical school at said university. In they went, on a mission to free the hundreds of mice who were living in cells of their own. Unable to find or free the mice, they scrawled a demand to end the medical testing across the wall of the lab in red paint. They ransacked the office, opened the window so it wouldn’t appear to be an inside job, collected me and returned to the group’s unofficial HQ at Meena’s bedsit, where we toasted the mission with a bottle of warm red wine. It had bits of cork floating in it.