‘It’s amazing,’ Pippa whispered.
‘It’s not finished yet,’ I said, standing in front of my painting of Benni the beanbag pig and judging the artist for her lack of talent. With all of them gathered, it suddenly seemed to me that filling the room, our minds, our thoughts with another seventy-five memories might be impossible. There are years of my own life that are fuzzy and there have to be years that Margot can’t remember. And then there is the awkward looming spectre of our impending deaths.
‘But look at it!’ Pippa said. ‘It already looks like something – you’ve created something.’
‘A quarter of something.’
‘Lenni,’ Margot said gently. I caught her eye, but she looked down at the picture in front of her. It was Margot and the man on the beach, captured from a memory older than my mother. What would people think, I wondered, if they saw it in a gallery? Would they guess some, or any, of the details right?
We walked around the pictures for a little longer. I passed Margot’s wedding, my first day at secondary school, a bomb resting quietly on a floral quilt. Finishing felt impossible, and yet those twenty-five paintings were so deliciously real. Hopeful, even though they commemorated some of the worst moments of our lives.
Margot stroked the edge of the canvas depicting a half-drunk bottle of pear-flavoured liqueur and asked me, ‘So, Lenni, what next?’
Margot and the Map
‘OH, THEY ADORED him,’ Else was telling Margot as I came into the Rose Room.
Walter waved her away. ‘They were just being kind.’
‘What’s this?’ Pippa asked.
‘Oh,’ Walter said. ‘Else was kind enough to introduce me to her sons.’
Pippa smiled knowingly. I wondered what she knew as she made her way to the front of the class and started teaching us about cross-hatching.
I spent a good twenty minutes cross-hatching the sides on the carton of apple juice to try to make it seem three-dimensional but it just made the box look hairy. Once I was finished, I told Margot the story of my tantrum in the art gallery to commemorate my fifth year on earth. I told her how I had lost my tiny mind in the middle of the quiet gallery and my mother had lost her temper with me, and then, when a security guard asked us to leave, she had lost her temper at him. He then lost his temper with his boss via a walkie talkie and his boss failed to appear. I screamed throughout, legend has it, because the straw in my carton of apple juice had split.
Then, for a little while, I just watched Margot paint. When she paints, Margot’s face becomes peaceful. It’s the opposite of how my face feels when I’m painting – which is crumpled and angry. But Margot is somewhere else, somewhere different entirely, and I’ll wait patiently for her smile of peace to shift as the picture starts to take shape. When she’s happy with it, she’ll start to talk. And I could wait for Margot’s stories for ever.
‘Let me take you somewhere,’ she said. ‘To a bedsit in London where it’s hot. Unbearably hot. And then your roommate decides to turn on the stove …’
London, August 1965
Margot Macrae is Thirty-Four Years Old
It wasn’t a stove really; it was a small ring burner balanced on top of an old suitcase. But she turned it on nonetheless. It was our entire kitchen. Meena liked to light her cigarettes with it, so she’d turn it on several times a day. Then there’d be no choice but to open the window, which meant running the risk of never getting it closed again because the catch was broken.
This time, I felt compelled to ask her if she was joking, as the ring burner began to fill the room with the stink of burning fake leather as it merrily cooked the suitcase underneath. She didn’t say anything, but lit her cigarette on it. It was already a baking summer day. I lay down flat on my bed and stared up at the ceiling.
‘Back to the meeting,’ Adam said from his position sitting under the window. ‘I think it’s obvious we need a lookout.’
There was a silence.
‘Margot Macrae doesn’t do crime any more,’ Meena said, sucking on her cigarette. ‘So there will be no lookout.’
I felt my insides twist. I stopped calling myself Margot Docherty after the incident in the police station. And I became Margot Macrae again. And perhaps because I was returning to myself, or perhaps because I’d made a promise to a hairy-stomached inspector, I stopped participating in Meena’s activism.
Lawrence pulled a map from his bag and laid it out on the brown carpet. ‘It’ll take about two hours to get there,’ he said, ‘but my van needs petrol, so let’s assume it’ll take longer.’