The zip that ran along the top of the bag was the same faded orange of the straps. For a moment, The Temp wondered if she was actually capable of opening the bag. If maybe it would be better never to open the bag at all. That way her father’s endowment could be both wonderful and terrible, both meaningful and meaningless. But she had to find out.
The black jumper was the first thing she pulled out. It was the source of much of the smell. It was, The Temp couldn’t ignore, the smell of urine. Nevertheless, she took the jumper out and put it on the windowsill beside her.
Also in the bag was a straggle of blue rope, and several empty cans of corner shop own-brand energy drink. They cost 19p a can. The Temp and her friends used to mix them with vodka on nights out.
As she moved an old newspaper to the side, she saw the first banknote. In trying to pull it from the bottom of the bag, she almost tore it, as it was weighed down and tied with a woman’s hair band to a stack of notes of the same design. They were unfamiliar – a man with a long beard and a floppy hat staring glumly at her. Whatever currency it was, there were a thousand in one note alone. And in the stack she held at least two hundred notes. The second stack was the same size, also held together with a woman’s hair band.
Ett Tusen Kronor was printed at the top of each note.
There was only one person The Temp wanted to speak to in that moment, and fortunately she was already on her way to see her.
And that’s how The Temp came to be standing at the end of my bed holding a duffel bag full of Swedish money.
Margot and the Birthday
London, 11th May 1967
Margot Macrae is Thirty-Six Years Old
DAVEY’S BIRTHDAY IS more of a ghost than he has ever been. It haunts me. Stalking the calendar.
But on what would have been his fourteenth birthday, I opened the door to mine and Meena’s bedsit to find it filled with yellow balloons. Hundreds of them.
When I found Meena in the pub in town later, The Professor was nowhere to be seen, and it made me breathe out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Sometimes, when he wasn’t around, Meena was her own person again. And a little bit mine.
I tried to thank her, but she couldn’t hear me over the music. So instead, I just hugged her tight.
As soon as I introduced Meena to Davey, she loved him.
And it made me love her more.
Lenni and the Mass
THERE WERE ONLY a few weeks left until Father Arthur would be a Father no more. I decided, as I imagine people did in black and white days when an actress announced her retirement, to go and see him as often as I could. I’d attend every one of his last performances before he retired to rest his ankle or wed his true love or move to Los Angeles to try his luck in the movies. Then one day I would wave a battered programme in front of my grandchildren’s eyes and say, ‘I was there way back when,’ before boring them with stories of Arthur in his sequin-encrusted finery wowing the audience in a way that only he knew how.
My resentment for New Nurse, Harbinger of the Wheelchair, hadn’t completely evaporated. The evaporation of resentment had been slowed considerably by the fact that the wheelchair remained. She’d used it to take me to the Rose Room and everywhere else since then. She may as well have carved the first half of my tombstone: Lenni Pettersson, January 1997–Any Day Now.
I asked Suzie to take me to the chapel. She’s a May Ward nurse but I never see her doing nurse things. I knew she wouldn’t bring a wheelchair and I wanted to walk.
‘A Catholic mass, is it?’ she asked.
‘Maybe,’ I said, taking her hand as she helped me up from my bed.
‘You don’t know?’ She gave me a look.
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Huh, a mystery,’ she said. ‘I like a mystery. My dad won’t play Cluedo with me any more because he says I get too aggressive.’ And then she laughed. ‘I read at least one mystery book a week, I can’t get enough of them. My dad says he doesn’t like them, says they give me ideas.’
As we walked together out of the May Ward, a rush of nausea crept up from my toes to my throat. I was hot and I was going to be sick.
‘I love all the Miss Marples too, and my friend got me a Poirot for my birthday. I love how he talks about himself in the third person.’ When I didn’t say anything, she carried on, ‘I want to start doing that, you know, say things like, Suzie has her suspicions about the corporal.’
She led me away from the May Ward and down the corridor, and all I could think of was that we were leaving behind all the places where I could be sick without ruining the floor. As we left, I yearned for the cardboard hospital sick buckets that as a child I mistook for disposable top hats. I will forever want to live in the world of my ten-year-old self, where I believed hospitals were prepared for any temporary black-tie emergency with cardboard top hats for every patient.