This Time Next Year(31)
‘Don’t touch it, don’t touch it, you’ll cut yourself!’ She started shaking her hands, her eyes bulging in panic. ‘Quinn, there’s broken china everywhere.’
In two swift strides Quinn was at her side, ‘It’s OK, I’m not going to touch it.’ He was talking to her in a strange tone, as though he was talking to a child. Tara was shaking, she covered her head in her hands and let out a strange panicked burst of cries. Quinn turned back to Minnie.
‘I think you’d better go,’ he said.
‘Don’t let her touch it!’ cried Tara. ‘Don’t touch it!’
‘She’s not going to touch it, Mum,’ said Quinn as he led the hunched figure of his mother out of the room. ‘Come on, I’ll take you upstairs.’
Minnie was left alone in the living room, frozen to the spot. What just happened? She’d shouted at Quinn, broken a really expensive-looking lamp and then Tara had totally lost it. Should she stay and clear up the mess? Offer to pay for it? Not that she had any money anyway. Why had she taken her anger out on Quinn like that? They’d been having such a great afternoon and she’d ruined it. She picked up her bag from the floor and quietly let herself out of the enormous front door.
5 January 2020
Minnie paused at the grey, paint-chipped front door of her parents’ house. She hugged the mustard-yellow woollen cape she was wearing around herself. The cape had been an ill-advised purchase from a charity shop last year; something Leila had persuaded her was a ‘must-have’ fashion item. Minnie had quickly concluded the cape made her look like a walking banana, which is why she’d only worn it two times (and one of those was to a fruit-themed fancy-dress party.) Now, since she’d lost her only coat and it was two degrees outside, the cape had, by necessity, been resurrected from the depths of her wardrobe.
She could hear the hum of noise inside the house, the ticking audible even from the doorstep. She took a moment to savour the quiet of the street. Since her brother Will had moved to Australia with his girlfriend, Minnie had tried to come home most Sundays to have a meal with her parents. She knew they missed having Will around, he had a way of being with them that felt easy. She couldn’t fill the hole his absence had created in the family dynamic, but she felt she was doing her bit by showing up every week.
‘Minnie’s here,’ shouted her dad from above. Minnie looked up to see him leaning out of the bedroom window. ‘Just dealing with a blocked toilet up here; your Ma had too much quiche past its “best before” again.’
Her dad was wearing his work T-shirt, covered in paint and sweat stains, his round face looked ruddy and dishevelled, as though he’d been doing jobs all morning and hadn’t got around to taking a shower. He winked at Minnie and she shook her head. Minnie heard her mother shouting up the stairs inside, something about it not being funny to make crude jokes to the whole goddamn street.
‘What you hanging around outside for, Minnie Moo? In you hop,’ said her dad, waving her in.
The house was part of a 1930s terrace. It looked the same as most other houses on this particular suburban street of Brent Cross, north London. Theirs had slightly rotten wood on the downstairs window frames and an unruly front yard swamped by brambles and wild roses, but otherwise, there wasn’t much to distinguish it from the neighbours. From the back garden you could see lots of the other houses on the street had added kitchen extensions, or done loft conversions, but the Coopers’ house looked pretty much as it had nearly a hundred years ago. When Minnie mentioned Brent Cross to people, they thought of the huge out-of-town shopping centre, or the busy motorway flyover. For Minnie, Brent Cross would always mean this house, this street, this tiny spot of London she called home.
Inside, number thirteen looked like a pretty normal house; well, normal if you didn’t look at the walls. Every inch of wall space was covered in clocks, a testament to her father’s interest in horology. He had spent the last thirty years collecting and repairing antique clocks. He had a workshop in the garden full of boxes and tools, and spent his evenings scouring the internet for broken clocks or half-repaired clocks that everyone else had given up on.
Sometimes her Dad spent years on one clock, waiting for the right piece to come online or trying to fashion a missing cog himself. The time and effort that went into each piece meant he never wanted to part with one. So the clock army grew, ticking, tocking, some tick-tick-tocking; it was an overwhelming sound when you first walked through the door. Neither of her parents noticed the sound any more. ‘It’s the heartbeat of the house,’ her dad once explained, ‘you don’t spend all day being annoyed by the sound of your own heartbeat, do you?’
Minnie didn’t think that was a good analogy, but there was no point arguing with Dad about the clocks. The orchestra of ticks and tocks had been the soundtrack to her childhood. She and Will used to play a game where they took turns to blindfold each other, and then they’d take a clock from the wall and try to identify it by sound alone. Will called the game ‘Name That Clock’ – not an especially inventive title. The game had come to an unpleasant conclusion when Will had dropped a clock and broken one of the hands off. Minnie had never seen her dad so mad before or since.
Minnie’s mother met her in the hallway, and her eyes instantly fell to Minnie’s hair.