Meena and Margot and Things You Can’t Say
London, September 1966
Margot Macrae is Thirty-Five Years Old
It was the middle of the night and there was a hand touching my hand.
Had there always been a hand touching my hand? I wondered in my sleep.
When I opened my eyes she was there, in my bed, her cold toes touching mine.
She whispered something, but I couldn’t hear her.
‘What?’
‘Don’t you remember what you said?’ she asked. I didn’t then, but it came to me afterwards. The night of the pear liqueur. Sitting in the bathroom. I had told her I loved her.
She looked at me, staring for so long, unblinking in the dark. And then she blinked and the tears fell.
And I willed her to say it.
And she willed herself to say it.
But she couldn’t. And before I could speak, she was gone.
Lenni and Little Surprises
THE TEMP HAD not had much luck since she was unceremoniously ejected from her position at the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital. She had started out with aspirations – applying only for the jobs that made her feel excited, or inspired. If the responses came at all, they were rejections. So, The Temp set her sights lower – applying for typing, data entry, reception work … and still nothing. The rejections were as impersonal and as unrelenting as the ones from her dream jobs. Only this time it was worse, because she was being rejected for jobs she didn’t even want. While waiting outside the twenty-four-hour supermarket manager’s office with the other candidates for ‘seasonal sales assistant: zero-hour contract’， The Temp learned she was in the company of a qualified mechanic, a PhD student, and three other graduates with degrees in History, Mathematics and English respectively.
To her surprise, the manager phoned her that afternoon and offered her a role on the deli counter. When she was at university, The Temp had imagined herself working as an artist in a gallery after graduation. At no point had she envisaged herself reporting to work in the middle of the night to help insomniacs decide which honey-glazed ham to buy. But she resolved to carry on, and arrived at work the following evening with her hair net on and her pride tucked away.
Several months later, when The Temp came home from the deli, her mother asked her to sit in the living room and fiddled anxiously with the sofa cushions, unable to make eye contact with her. In a small voice, The Temp’s mother told her that the father she had met just once in infancy had been found, and that he was in possession of the birth certificate which had gone missing some twenty-two years earlier. The Temp struggled to identify what emotion, if any, she felt upon hearing this news, and it was perhaps a good thing that she hadn’t identified what she felt, because if it had been happiness, it would have been even harder when her mother went on to say that her father was not in a good way, and that the doctors hadn’t given him long to live.
The Temp and her mother discussed at length that night what The Temp would do; whether she would visit or write, whether she would go alone or with her mother, whether she would ask for the birth certificate that had been replaced long ago, or allow him to keep it. She wondered whether she was angry at his abandonment or pleased at his return, whether she wanted to say goodbye or whether he even deserved a hello. Before their decision was made, however, another call came. The Temp’s father had died. The Temp had cried then. It was equivalent to hearing of the death of a stranger, and hearing of the death of an irretrievable part of herself, all at the same time. A great loss, and yet no loss at all.
The nurse on the phone added in a conciliatory tone that the family might take comfort in knowing that he managed to fulfil a dying wish. The Temp’s mother enquired what he had stolen, knowing his proclivity for taking things that didn’t belong to him. After a long pause, the nurse confirmed that he had stolen a bottle of wine from the hospital chapel. Though, the nurse added hastily, it was not the wine that killed him, and the hospital chaplain had posthumously forgiven his actions.
Though The Temp’s mother tried to end the conversation, the nurse on the line added that there was an item in the deceased man’s possession that he had intended to be passed on to his daughter, should she be found.
The next morning, The Temp drove to the hospital. It was surreal that a father she never knew had been in the very place she had once worked. The nurse had told her mother that he’d been in the area looking for them both when he fell ill. Making her way from the car park, everything she saw became significant – had he been through these doors? Had he come to this wing of the hospital? Had he walked across this floor? It was the closest The Temp had ever felt to her father. In life, they had met once. Her mother kept a battered copy of a photograph of The Temp with her father, she dressed in a stripy dungaree suit and holding herself up on the side of the sofa, having, her mother recalled, just learned to stand. Her father was sitting on the sofa looking down at her, his face half hidden in shadow.