This Time Next Year(53)
‘Quinn.’ She was crying, ‘I need you to come home right now.’
‘Mum I’ll be back in half an hour, I said—’
‘You need to come back now, Quinn, I think there’s someone in the garden, trying to get into the house.’ She sounded breathless, panicked.
Quinn sighed a slow, resigned sigh. He called back the cab; he’d be five minutes, just long enough to get the girl’s name and number. But when he went back inside to the corridor, she had gone.
1 February 2020
Minnie woke up in a panic. She couldn’t breathe. Something was suffocating her. She sat bolt upright, gulping for air, her arms flailing frantically. A grey ball of fur flew across her bed with a screeeeoooow sound. Since moving home last week, Lucky had taken to sleeping on her face. Whether he had separation anxiety, or he simply missed having a warm spot to sleep on at the top of the fridge, Minnie didn’t know, but it was turning into a life-threatening situation.
Looking around the room, Minnie had that momentary feeling of not knowing where she was. The ceiling was too close, the windows weren’t where they should be and there was the ominous sound of ticking, like a hundred bombs about to go off. Then she remembered she was at her parents’ house on a mattress on the floor in her old attic bedroom. There were no bombs, just the combined sound of a hundred clocks.
The small, eight-by-ten-foot space was packed with boxes and old suitcases. Her father’s workbench was set up in the middle of the room, covered with the remaining tools and magnifying lenses he hadn’t got around to moving. The wooden frame of her deconstructed bed leant against one wall, stacked away to make more room for boxes.
The last few weeks felt like an unravelling to Minnie, wool being pulled from her body, stripping her of comfort and leaving her naked. All the ways in which she defined her current life had been removed. Minnie was a chef, she ran a pie company, she lived off the Essex Road, and she dated Greg. Breaking up with Greg felt like stripping off that last piece of identifying clothing.
Handing back the key to her flat had been painful.
‘It’s only temporary,’ Leila had reassured her as she helped move boxes into the hall. ‘You won’t be at your parents’ for ever.’
But Minnie couldn’t see how she was ever going to manage to rent a place on her own again. What with moving house, breaking up with Greg, and the flurry of orders to fill at work, she hadn’t had a chance to plan what she was going to say to Leila about the business. She’d been waiting for inspiration to strike, but it hadn’t struck.
She glanced up at one of the clocks on the wall to see what time it was, but each clock showed a different time. She checked her phone, 11 a.m. She’d been awake half the night, her brain too full; she must have finally dozed off around six. The jostle of thoughts now began again in earnest and she knew she would have no peace until she plucked them out one by one and confined them to a list. She typed a note on her phone.
TO DO:
1) Apologise to Quinn Hamilton for being horrible cow.
2) Tell Leila I want to close the business.
3) Think of excuse – why do I want to close the business?
4) Help Bev, Alan and Fleur find new jobs.
5) Secretly plan Leila’s perfect engagement.
6) Get new job for self.
7) Find somewhere to live.
8) Stop being so shit at life.
9) Buy cat food.
10) Help Bev resolve existential crisis.
11) Build bed/Sort out room.
Then she moved number eleven to the top of the list. It was best to start the day with achievable tasks. She picked up a box which had ‘Minnie’s stuff’ scrawled on the side. Inside was an old karaoke tape player with a broken pink microphone, a half-built Lego Millennium Falcon and an old owl money-box she’d painted herself. She shook it hopefully but it didn’t rattle. At the bottom of the box was a pink photo album decorated in blue glitter glue. In round cursive twirls she had written, ‘Summer Camp 2005’. Minnie flicked reverently through the pages. The book was full of pictures of her with Leila the summer they’d first met. Every year, she’d begged her parents to let her go to that summer camp and every year they’d said they couldn’t afford it. They usually just asked Will to watch her in the holidays, but then Will got a summer job, so Dad relented and she was allowed to go.
On that first day at camp she’d seen Leila walking towards her wearing a pink leotard and green hot pants. She was the coolest person Minnie had ever seen in real life. Minnie had cowered as she’d approached, convinced someone like Leila would only be coming over to say something cruel to her – but she’d just smiled and asked Minnie if she wanted to join them for a water-balloon fight. For Minnie, it had been platonic love at first sight.
It took Minnie most of the day to sort out her bedroom; there was so much nostalgia imbued in each object from her childhood. Eventually, she was satisfied that the room felt habitable. She’d rebuilt the bed, stacked all her dad’s boxes neatly against a wall and categorised all her things into: ‘Old To Keep’, ‘Old To Bin’, and ‘Things For Now’. She didn’t want to unpack the ‘Things For Now’ boxes; it would be conceding that her stay at home was more than temporary.
As a final gesture to brighten the space, she propped the only piece of art she owned against a pile of boxes at the foot of her bed. It was a print of a painting called Automat. Leila had given it to her for her twenty-first birthday and Minnie had treasured it ever since. It depicted a woman in hat and coat sitting alone in an American diner, gazing thoughtfully into a cup of coffee. She looked alone, but not lonely, there was something self-contained and contemplative about the woman. You wanted to know what she was thinking, where she had come from, where she might be going. On the back, Leila had scribbled a note – ‘Be a good companion to yourself and you will never be lonely.’ It was one of Leila’s highest aspirations: self-sufficiency.