This Time Next Year(94)
‘It’s freezing out here. Let’s go back in and enjoy the party. We can talk about it tomorrow,’ Quinn said, pulling Lucy towards him and kissing her on the forehead.
Lucy forced a smile and then turned to open the sliding door back to the party.
‘Fine, but we need to decide. Now, make sure you mingle, you should talk to everyone here for at least three minutes, then everyone feels that they’ve seen you.’
Quinn looked around the room. Who did he want to talk to? Over by the bar were the few school friends he still kept up with: Matt, Jonesy, Deepak. On the dance floor, his work colleagues and a handful of faces from UCL and Cambridge days. Mike was busy chatting up Lucy’s friend, Flaky Amy. Three minutes. Could anyone really see him in three minutes? Would anyone see him in three hundred minutes? In a room full of his friends, Quinn didn’t think he’d ever felt so lonely.
Quinn watched Lucy strutting over to reprimand a waiter for standing idle. The man looked terrified and launched into action, knocking straight into a girl walking towards him. The girl had brown curly hair and was dressed in a strangely casual tank top. The plainness of her clothes only made it more apparent how striking she was. The waiter dropped his tray and the canapés flew into the air. Quinn watched the girl with the curly hair stop to help the waiter pick them up, apologising as though it was her fault. She got down on her hands and knees and helped brush off the goat’s cheese stuck to the waiter’s tie. Then she cleaned his glasses on her top. Quinn smiled to himself as he watched the scene. He didn’t know anyone here who would help a waiter like that.
The girl stood up and brushed herself down, then picked a piece of goat’s cheese from her hair. The waiter scurried away and she stood there, alone, watching the party as though she wasn’t a part of it. Something about this girl didn’t fit here; she stood out like a swan in a pond full of geese.
Quinn turned his head to see Lucy letting out one of her overblown, mirthless laughs, and he knew then – whether it was to do with his past, their present, or something else entirely – he did not love Lucy. He was going to choose Carol. He wanted to get out of this rabbit hole.
13 September 2020
Minnie was in the garden helping her parents knock down her father’s shed. Now he’d turned the loft into a fully functioning, damp-proof repair studio, he didn’t have any need for the shed, which was taking up valuable space that could be used for her mum’s vegetable project. Minnie’s mother had caught the vegetable growing bug from Tara.
‘Global warming means we should all be growing our own,’ she said by way of explanation.
‘What’s global warming got to do with it, except things grow quicker?’ asked her dad.
‘Well, when tomatoes go up to ten pound a punnet because there’s no land to grow food on, you’ll be glad we got some in our back yard won’t you?’ said her mum, wiping strands of sweaty hair from her eyes with her free hand.
‘If we’re all gonna to be living underwater, you’d be better off learning how to build submarines or growing gills,’ said her dad.
‘It’s strange taking the shed down, the house looks so different without it,’ said Minnie, taking a step back to survey the scene. She was wearing blue dungarees and had a shoebox-sized mallet in her hand. ‘I never realised how much light it was blocking. Look how much sun you’ve got going into the kitchen now.’
‘Perfect for growing things,’ said her mum, eyes wide with delight.
‘I’m going to miss that shed. You know how many clocks I fixed up in there?’
‘You’re just as happy in the loft,’ her mum said quickly.
‘There’s not as much light in the loft though,’ her dad grumbled.
‘Well, you were hogging it all down here, weren’t you?’
Once the shed had been dismantled and the wood piled high in the back of her dad’s van, Minnie went inside to boil the kettle and cut up the fruitcake she’d brought. As she stood waiting for the kettle to boil, her eyes wandered along the shelf, scanning her mum’s cookery books. Stashed between Nigella and Jamie Oliver she noticed her mum’s old grey file of clippings. She pulled it out, absent-mindedly flicking through the contents. She’d never looked through it herself. She’d only been shown the odd article or certificate when her mum brought it out at special occasions.
Minnie flicked through Will’s Spelling Bee certificate and the article he wrote for the local paper about the resurgence of Drum and Bass. Minnie shook her head and smiled. There was the newspaper article about Quinn being the first nineties baby, then the next piece of paper in the file made her freeze – it was the menu from Victor’s, the first one she’d cooked. Behind it was the Christmas Day tasting menu from Le Lieu de Rencontre; Minnie had brought it home to show her parents what she was working on. Then there was the first flyer they’d designed to advertise No Hard Fillings, and some pie recipe ideas she’d brought home to show her parents. Minnie flicked through the rest of the file – everything she had ever worked on was here, her mum had kept it all. Minnie quickly covered her mouth with her hand to stop a sob from escaping. Maybe her mother wasn’t so disappointed in her after all.
‘You bringing us a cuppa or what, love?’ came her mother’s voice from the garden.