‘So, it’s a secret?’ I asked.
‘Yes. And no,’ she said again.
A Healthcare Assistant carrying a tray full of cereal bowls made her way swiftly past us, and then the corridor was silent.
‘Come on.’ I took Margot’s hand.
‘Where are we going now?’ she asked, but she held on to my hand anyway. And she didn’t let go as we wove around the corridors. When we got to the May Ward, I gave the nurses at the station a wave and then took Margot to my bed.
‘Lenni?’ she asked.
I positioned Margot on my visitor’s chair and drew the curtain around the bed so that nobody on the ward could see.
I lifted up the mattress of my hospital bed and underneath was my secret. I pulled him out. He’s a paler pink than he used to be, and his snout is a little fuzzed because of our way of saying hello to each other by touching noses. He wasn’t like the others – not a bear or a lamb or a rag blanket. But I loved him anyway. I liked that in a room full of dolls and bears, he was a pig.
‘Nobody knows he’s here,’ I said.
I gave him to Margot and she looked like I’d just handed her a priceless jewel. She held him as you’d hold a newborn, his head resting in the crook of her arm. His beanbag body well supported.
‘Well, you must be Benni,’ she said, shaking his beanbag trotter.
She smiled and went to hand him back to me.
‘No,’ I said, ‘keep him. For a while.’
‘Why?’
I just shrugged, but I hoped she’d know that I was giving him to her because he’s the only secret I’ve got. And I trusted her with him completely.
A few days later, Margot appeared in the May Ward. I took a break from my busy schedule of napping to make room for her at the end of my bed. She had Benni in her pocket and she brought him out, gave him a kiss on the head, and then she held on to my secret while she told me hers.
London, July 1966
Margot Macrae is Thirty-Five Years Old
Somewhere down in the bottom of my brain, it lives.
Sometimes, it will flick its shimmering tail above the water and sprinkle glittering water particles across my vision. Other times, I forget it’s down there, and when I’m feeling heavy and sinking down, ready to drown, there’ll be a thud and we’ll collide, my memory and me.
A memory of her.
After eleven happy months as our flatmate, Jeremy the chicken had gone missing. It was a silly sentence and explaining it to the neighbours seemed sillier. One, I remember, opened their door with the safety chain still on.
‘Excuse me, I’m looking for my chicken.’
‘No Irish.’
He started to close the door and I caught the glimpse of a goatee.
‘I’m not Irish.’
I didn’t catch any word except ‘potato’ as the door shut in my face.
I stood in the dark hallway of our building. Inside it was cool, but outside the summer was raging. Meena was already in the street, asking people to stop and look at the Polaroid photograph of our chicken. She was heading in the direction of the park, based on the idea that Jeremy might have remembered the time we took him there for a picnic. He might have had a craving for fresh grass, she said.
I stood in the dark hallway feeling lost.
I studied the back of the front door: the crack in the glass from a failed attempt at a break-in, the cage on the letterbox that only the landlord held the key for – holding all of our letters prisoner until he trundled around on a Sunday to dish them out, and, we suspected, intercept anything that felt like it had money in it.
The latch on the door was so high that I could only reach it by standing on my tiptoes. There was no way a chicken could have got through this door without help.
When Meena first brought Jeremy home, I thought he was a house guest. An unusual one, but a guest all the same. I didn’t know he was a tenant and so when, several days into his stay, Meena bought several sheets of wire to build him a ‘run’ around the bedsit that would keep him away from the electrical sockets, I didn’t understand.
‘Aren’t we going to take him to the RSPCA?’ I asked.
‘You want to take our son to the RSPCA? What kind of mother are you?’ I knew she meant it as a joke, but it stilled my heart. I still had not introduced Meena to Davey.
‘So he’s staying?’
‘As long as we’re staying, he’s staying,’ she said.
I pretended to react to this normally, and then I made an unnecessary trip to the corner shop so that I could cry without her seeing me. I had never had pets as a child. The first living thing I’d been accountable for was Davey. The immense responsibility of caring for a living, breathing creature seemed impossible when I had failed so spectacularly the last time.