Sixty
NEW NURSE WHEELED me to the Rose Room to celebrate the latest of our landmark numbers. We forgot to celebrate fifty, the half-century, so sixty would have to suffice.
‘I’m having trouble knowing where to store them,’ Pippa said to nobody in particular, as she pulled the bigger pieces down from one of the shelves over the sink and laid them on the table. She placed them carefully around the room, seeming to have some preferred order. The colours were what struck me most. A night sky over a cottage in Henley-in-Arden, a chicken with most of its feathers missing, my terrible rendering of my sparsely attended tenth birthday party.
‘Is this one of yours, Lenni?’ New Nurse said, pointing to Margot’s painting of the green park where she’d sat and waited for The Professor to leave.
‘Well, now you’re just being mean.’
‘What?’
‘Of course it isn’t mine!’
I got up out of the wheelchair and waited for New Nurse to try and stop me. When she didn’t, I wanted to push my luck, to try running, or skipping, or sitting on one of the tables swinging my legs. I stood by my painting of my mother and a waiting taxi, as viewed from a great height.
‘It’s amazing,’ New Nurse said.
‘What is?’
‘All of it,’ New Nurse replied, a serious look clouding her face. ‘You’ve done something amazing here. And Margot too, of course.’
‘It was all Lenni’s idea,’ Margot said.
‘She’s a bright one.’ Pippa smiled.
I realized then that but for sixty pictures, some art supplies and my still-beating heart, they could have been at my funeral, discussing me, talking of my achievements with a sentimental over-exaggeration of my good qualities, nursing stale sandwiches on their plates and wondering what I might have done with my life if only I’d lived.
That was all I could think. Not, Hey, we’ve painted sixty pictures, but, This is it. This mothering, sombre way that they’ll talk about me when I’m … wherever I end up. I wanted there to be more. I wanted there to be so much more. But maybe everyone wants that.
I wanted them to be able to say, Lenni Pettersson? Yes, I remember Lenni. The one who miraculously healed and then joined the circus?
I sat back down in my wheelchair. It’s almost impossible to make a bid for freedom in a manual wheelchair when you have the upper body strength of a mosquito, so I couldn’t escape without all three of them noticing. To their credit, they let me go out of the door without trying to stop me.
Halfway down the corridor, I heard the familiar squeak of white canvas trainers behind me.
‘Len,’ she said, and I was impressed that she didn’t hold the handles of the wheelchair and push me herself, but let me struggle on.
‘I’m just going somewhere.’
‘Oh, are you?’ She sounded concerned.
‘Yep.’
‘Anywhere in particular?’
‘Just away from here.’
‘Father Arthur?’
I wheeled on down the corridor. ‘No, remember. He’s gone.’
‘Well, then where are you going?’
‘I just wanted to get away from it.’
‘From your paintings?’
‘From the little funeral you’re having for me in there.’
She didn’t say anything as I reached the end of the corridor and rounded the corner. I got to a set of double doors. New Nurse held them open for me and let me go.
I wheeled around several corners, trying to lose myself. Because if I got legitimately lost, I could stay away from the May Ward for as long as it took me to be found. Just past the phlebotomy lab, I spotted Walter and Else. Side by side in their dressing gowns, walking along very slowly. He had a walker which I hadn’t seen him use before and I wondered if perhaps he had had his surgery on his knee. He said something that made her laugh. So hard that she put her hand on his arm. She looked different laughing. Like she might not be the composed woman she seemed. That she might not be the chic editor of a French magazine, but something else. A mechanic maybe. Someone messier.
They rounded a corner, Walter taking tiny careful steps, without noticing me.
And I thanked the hospital for letting me see them.
Margot and the Sun
MARGOT WAS WEARING a fuzzy purple jumper, and when I came into the Rose Room she wrapped me up in a big hug. Which was exactly what I’d hoped she’d do. She cleared a space on our table and began to paint. Using the thinnest watercolours, she layered orange and red and yellow on top of each other inside a long-stemmed cocktail glass until they were almost bright enough to drink.