‘We don’t need a map, I know the way,’ Meena said, tapping the ash from her cigarette into our only saucepan.
The meeting carried on. Even with the window open, it was boiling. I felt a bead of sweat run down my stomach. Adam massaged his temples and sighed. ‘Can we just get on with it?’
‘Right, let’s go.’ Meena stood and rallied the group. They checked their bags for torches, wire cutters, tape, rope. I stayed lying on my bed. I was wearing my thinnest sundress but it was now stuck to me with sweat.
‘If the police come,’ Meena started.
‘I’ll tell them to look for Catherine Amelia Houghton.’
She laughed and blew me a kiss.
I locked the door behind them, and listened as they argued their way down the stairs about just how many animals could fit in the van if somebody volunteered to hitch-hike home.
I felt compelled to open the door and chase after them. But I had said ‘never again’ the day we were arrested and I had meant it.
I turned off the ring burner and picked up the map that Lawrence had left behind. Meena had a thing about maps. The wall above the fireplace was covered in them. Usually maps of places neither of us had ever been to, all stuck up with Sellotape and most of them lovingly stolen. On a whim, I stuck Lawrence’s map up on the wall. It was a map of England and I’m sure it would have been no help for their route that evening. I thought of them all squashed together in the back of Lawrence’s van, and I wondered how long I could continue my one-woman performance of ‘I’m no longer a part of your activist group’。 It wasn’t a very popular play.
Now that I was no longer a part of Meena’s escapades, I felt that I was slowly becoming Old Margot. The pale, self-conscious person who had experienced a sudden burst of colour courtesy of the friends she was now forsaking out of fear. I pulled a pin from the noticeboard Meena had ‘borrowed’ from work, closed my eyes and stuck it in the map. It pointed to a field just outside Henley-in-Arden.
When Meena came home to our bedsit that night, she was bleeding.
She forced the door open, tripped on her way in and then turned on the overhead light. She had one of Adam’s T-shirts wrapped around her arm. Dried blood had formed a historical river from just above her elbow all the way down to her hand.
I sat up and stared at her.
‘Little fucker bit me!’ she said.
Tucked under her other arm was a thin and almost entirely featherless chicken. One of the many liberated from a battery farm on the outskirts of Sussex that night.
When I saw that chicken, I knew I wasn’t ready to leave. But the pin stayed in the map, piercing the fields just beyond Henley-in-Arden, where I would go when the time came.
Lenni’s Mother
WE HAVE PRACTISED for death every night. Lying down in the dark and slipping into that place of nothingness between rest and dreams where we have no consciousness, no self, and anything could befall our vulnerable bodies. We have died each night. Or at least, we have lain down to die, and let go of everything in this world, hoping for dreams and morning. Maybe that’s why my mother could never sleep – it’s too much like death and she wasn’t ready. So she was always waking, chasing awareness, clinging to life. Too afraid to let go, and then, years later, unable to do anything else.
Glasgow, September 2012
Lenni Pettersson is Fifteen Years Old
I watched her from my bedroom window as she got out of the car and walked to my father’s front door. She looked older from above – the shadows falling in strange places across her face – and I wondered if that’s how God sees us. We must look so ancient to him.
I didn’t hear the doorbell and I didn’t hear her voice.
‘Lenni?’ my dad called up the stairs. ‘Your mamma’s here to see you.’
She had dropped me off at my father’s new house after several months awake. The long purple shadows under her eyes were back. And she had that look in her eye, as she drove me to my father’s house, that she wasn’t entirely sure who I was. That if we passed each other on the street, she might not recognize me.
A week or so later, she brought everything I’d left behind at her house and dropped it all on the drive, with a letter saying she was moving back to Sweden. And then there she was. Taxi meter running. Ready to say goodbye and to officially tag my father in as a parent and to forever tag herself out.
I sat on the floor and wrapped my arms around my legs. Like I’d seen a child do in an NSPCC advert. Suddenly the size of an acorn, I sat and waited.