This Time Next Year(98)
As she was watching the video a second time, her phone began to ring.
‘Hello, Minnie? It’s Lucy Donohue.’
‘Oh, hi Lucy.’
Lucy coughed on the line. Oh god, what if Minnie had given her food poisoning? Did that sound like a food poisoning cough? What if Lucy had just spent the last hour on the toilet, Rupert vomiting next to her or holding her hair back? What if she was calling to say she planned to sue?
‘We loved your pitch, Minnie. We want you to cater for all our London offices if you think you could develop that capacity? And we’d like Lexon employees to help you deliver the pies to the community as part of our “giving back” initiative. We can pick over the finer details later, but I wanted to give you the good news before you pitched the idea to someone else.’
Minnie wanted to squeal down the line, ‘Thank you, oh thank you Lucy! You don’t know what this means to me!’ but she contained herself – pushing away Lucky, who was pawing at her leg and meowing for attention – and she thanked Lucy as professionally as possible. They arranged a follow-up meeting for Monday.
As she hung up the phone, Minnie heard a scratching noise and walked through to see Lucky scrabbling at the front door. Minnie had forgotten to keep the bathroom door ajar so that he could get to his cat litter.
‘Don’t scratch, Lucky! You’ll lose me my deposit again,’ she said, pushing the bathroom door open, and trying to pick up the cat. Lucky sprang forward and Minnie watched in horror as he started peeing all over her doormat. ‘Eugh, Lucky! What are you doing? Bad cat!’ Minnie scolded.
She picked up the mat to rinse it out in the kitchen sink. As she did so, she noticed an envelope on the floor. It must have come through the postbox and slipped beneath the mat. She picked it up – the letter was soaked in cat urine. On the front, the name ‘Minnie’ had been handwritten.
How long had this been here? She opened it quickly, grimacing at the smell. ‘Lucky, what the hell have you been eating?’
Minnie quickly scanned the writing down to the end – it was from Quinn. The ink was starting to run so she read the note as fast as she could.
Dear Minnie,
I tried to call you, but I think you’ve blocked my number. You’ve also blocked me on, well everywhere else, and I don’t blame you. So I’ve reverted to the old-fashioned form of communication. I have behaved … (Minnie couldn’t make out the next word, it was either ‘terribly’ or ‘teriyaki’ – ‘terribly’ probably made more sense.) I’d like to see you, to explain. I know you might not want to see me, but I’ll be at our pond on Sunday at …
And then the rest of the words had dissolved in the acidity of the cat pee and the letter began to disintegrate in her hand.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Minnie cried. She hardly ever swore. ‘Lucky, you’ve peed on the most important part of the letter!’ Then Minnie remembered she might never have found the letter if it hadn’t been for Lucky peeing on it, so she couldn’t be too cross.
She went to wash her hands, scrubbing them with Brillo pads until she was confident they were cat-pee free. Why did Quinn want to see her? It had been months. How long had that letter been there? Maybe weeks; maybe he’d been to the pond and she hadn’t been there? Had there been a date on the letter?
Minnie pulled the letter out of the bin. There was a date, but it was now covered in peanut butter, the remnants of her pre-presentation snack. She tried to scrape it off but the letter was too far gone.
Maybe the rest of the letter just said something like, ‘you’ve still got my favourite T-shirt, so can you meet me at the ponds to return it?’ Maybe it said, ‘I’m still not into you, but I wanted to apologise in person for being a dick about it.’ Maybe it said a lot of things.
Would she go on Sunday? Did she even want to hear what he had to say? After that excruciating phone call at Tara’s house, Minnie had made a pact with herself – no more mooning over Quinn Hamilton; in fact, no more mooning over anyone. She needed to take back control of her life, of her happiness. She resolved to be more Leila, to stop letting other people mess with her self-esteem.
The letter put a cloud over Minnie’s week. She had been in such a jubilant mood after the pitch with Lucy, and now she was spending all her time speculating, weighing up whether she should go to Hampstead Heath on Sunday. She could just unblock his number and text him. ‘Hey Quinn, thanks for the letter, I don’t know when you sent it because it’s now covered in cat piss and peanut butter. I know, it’s disgusting – clearly I live like an animal. Anyway, could you recap the content over text? Ta.’ What would Meg Ryan do?
25 October 2020
She went that Sunday. Of course she did. Her curiosity got the better of her. At seven thirty she was on Hampstead Heath, skulking in the bushes near the entrance to the mixed ponds. It was a cold, crisp morning and this pond was now closed for the winter. No one was around. Eight o’clock came and went. Minnie sat down on a bench nearby and kicked a pile of autumn leaves at her feet. The letter must have been sent over a week ago. She could unblock him, call him, but she didn’t want to. She’d already spent too many hours fixated on this particular cardboard girl.
She strolled up to Parliament Hill, wrapping her scarf tighter around her neck and tucking her hands deep into the pockets of her new woollen coat. She hadn’t been back here since that day in August; she’d taken to swimming at the indoor pool instead. The heath looked so different with its autumnal clothes on. An orange carpet of leaves covered the footpaths and a crisp, low light shone through the tangle of tree boughs above her head. She picked up a perfect red leaf from the ground, examining the intricate pattern of vessels mapping its thin surface. So beautiful, yet only created to last such a short time before its role on this planet was over, and it would decay into mulch. An unremarkable existence, and yet to look at it – how remarkable.