Minnie and Alan unpacked the pies in the boardroom. It was a large room, partitioned down the middle with a temporary room divider. A white linen tablecloth had been laid out with cutlery and plates at one end. As they unpacked the pies, they could hear people talking on the other side of the partition.
“Do you smell that? Something insanely good,” said a man’s voice.
Alan and Minnie glanced at each other and smiled.
“Top man ordered pies for lunch,” said another voice.
“Nice,” said the first voice, “I’ll work from the office more often.”
“Free pies—probably some perk of the job for shagging that food bird,” said a third voice. “He’s been eating like a king since dating her.”
“Who?”
“Lucy Donohue, that food writer, and you know she’s . . .” The man made a groaning noise and his companions laughed.
Minnie froze. She didn’t want to eavesdrop, but it was impossible not to with a partition that thin. She felt a hard knot form in her stomach as she processed what she’d just heard. This was Quinn’s office, Quinn’s company; he was the one responsible for the huge order that had bailed them out. Alan looked at her with bulging eyes—he’d joined the dots too.
Minnie started unloading the pallet faster. She didn’t want to be here, she didn’t want to listen to this conversation; she just wanted to get the pies unloaded and get out. Why would Quinn do this? Their day together had ended so strangely and he hadn’t been in touch since, beyond that one brief text. Why would he be doing her a favor? This didn’t sit well with Minnie; she didn’t want to be a charity case and she didn’t want to be making pies for arseholes like the men in that room. She was supposed to be making her pies for people who needed them.
She and Alan laid out the last of the food and Minnie scurried back to the front desk to tell the receptionist they were done. Behind them, office workers were gravitating toward the boardroom, drawn from their desks by the aroma of warm pastry.
“Mr. Hamilton would like to see you before you go,” said the receptionist, cocking her head to one side and showing Minnie her enormous teeth. She really did look uncannily like Julia Roberts. “Can I take you up to his office? He’s stuck on a call.”
“We’re in a bit of a rush,” said Minnie weakly.
“You don’t need me; I’ll wait here,” said Alan, taking a seat in the reception area and picking up a yachting magazine. “Ooh, boaty boats.”
The receptionist led Minnie through the open-plan workspace to a glass-paneled office at the far end. Minnie couldn’t believe Quinn ran such a large company; there had to be thirty people working here. Through the glass she could see Quinn, who was wearing a well-tailored blue suit with a white shirt. He was talking on the phone, but when he saw her hovering with the receptionist he smiled and beckoned her to come in.
The receptionist opened the door for her. Minnie picked at her thumbnail. Why did she feel like a schoolgirl being called in to see the headmaster? Quinn mouthed “sorry,” and patted the top of a large brown leather armchair. Minnie gave him an awkward smile and sat down on the sofa opposite. His office was huge. He had a giant glass desk with a large black swivel chair, a meeting room table with four chairs around it, a sofa, an armchair, and a walnut coffee table. His office was bigger than her entire flat. Oh god, maybe this was some kind of Fifty Shades of Grey scenario and the pies had just been a ruse to get her up here and show off his big fancy office and secret sex dungeon.
Minnie looked around the room, wondering where the entrance to a secret sex dungeon might be. There was a bookcase at the far end of the room—maybe you pulled out a book and the whole wall swiveled around. Maybe the sofa had a lever and dropped you down into a hidden vault below. Perhaps that would be more James Bond than Christian Grey. Minnie found her mind wandering—contemplating whether there were architects who specialized in designing secret office sex dungeons.
“Yes, I know,” Quinn said into the phone, “but that’s what my recommendations are. If you don’t want to implement them, that’s your business. You paid me to find the holes in your growth strategy—those are the holes.”
There was a pause while the person on the other end spoke. Quinn rolled his eyes at Minnie, conveying that he was trying to get off the call.
“Listen, Donald, can we pick this up in person tomorrow? I’ve just had someone walk into my office and I . . . Yes, someone more important than you . . . Did you get those pies I sent over today? Well, it’s the chef who made them.”
Quinn sat down in the armchair opposite Minnie. He crossed one leg over the other, leaning back in the chair. Minnie couldn’t help looking at Quinn’s legs, they were so muscular and firm, his trousers cut perfectly around his sculpted thighs.
“Yes, I know they are good . . . Well, yes she is, but that’s irrelevant . . . I will give you her details, I have to go.” Quinn smiled at her as he hung up, the dimple on his left cheek creasing into life. “Sorry about that.”
Minnie clutched her hands together.
“You didn’t need to order all those pies,” she said, shifting her gaze to the floor. “When I mentioned about my business issues, I didn’t mean for you to . . . If anything, I owe you money for the lamp.”
“Please don’t worry about the lamp, Minnie. I should have explained about my mother.” Quinn exhaled slowly, pausing to find the right words. “She has health issues. She finds some things difficult to deal with.”
Minnie looked up at him. His playful tone was gone; the sparkling blue of his eyes clouded over by a film of gray.
“You don’t need to explain, and you didn’t need to bail me out either,” she said.
The dynamic between them felt so different. Doing deliveries together they’d been equals, they’d joked around. Now he was a client and a very generous one at that. Sitting opposite him in this apartment-sized office, she didn’t feel like an equal anymore, she felt like the hired help.
“I know,” said Quinn, a slight frown creasing between his dark brows. Just looking across at him, with his dimpled smile and his strong long legs in those tailor-made trousers, Minnie felt the owls in her stomach waking up, ruffling their wings.
“And I don’t need you pimping me out to your friends,” she said haughtily. “I didn’t set up my business to cook for rich City boys.”
She got to her feet and started pacing back and forth behind the sofa.
“Wow,” said Quinn, putting his hands behind his head and stretching his legs out in front of him. “You know it makes you walk slightly off center?”
“What?”
“The massive chip you carry around on your shoulder.”
Minnie’s mouth dropped open. Ingrained resentments bubbled up inside her, her mother’s voice in her head like a dripping tap she couldn’t turn off.
“I don’t have a chip on my shoulder. I’m just saying this kind of gig isn’t what I set out to do. If I’d wanted to cook for entitled men in suits, I’d have stayed in the restaurant business.”
Quinn laughed, brushing a hand through his sandy-brown hair.
“I can see why your business isn’t thriving if this is the rapport you have with clients.”
“Excuse me?” Minnie said, her fists on her hips. Quinn stood up and walked around behind the back of the sofa toward her.
“Look, your pies are good. You clearly have a market, yet you’re not making money—evidently you’re doing something wrong.”
“Thank you, but I don’t need you to management-consultancy me.”
“Why not?” Quinn spread out his arms in an exaggerated shrug. “I charge five hundred pounds an hour and I’m offering you free advice. It’s sheer petulance not to take it.”
Minnie felt her face grow red, her chin jutting forward.
“Is that the way you speak to all your clients?”
Quinn t
ook a step toward her. Minnie stepped backward toward the wall. She had that strange feeling again, except this time more intensely. Almost as though he was moving in to kiss her. Of course her brain knew he wasn’t, but her body felt as though he was and it sent a heady mixture of indignation and anticipation pumping through her veins.
“You’re not a client,” Quinn said softly, standing a foot away from her. He looked down into her eyes, the hint of a smile still playing at his lips. Minnie narrowed her eyes and looked right back up at him. She wasn’t going to be physically intimidated by him.
“You don’t know enough about my business to have an opinion.”
“Maybe not, but I can see you’re an idealist. You don’t want to compromise your mission statement, even if it means losing your business.” Minnie felt a little rush of pride before realizing he didn’t mean it as a compliment. “Why not deliver to a few corporates if it means staying afloat for your community gigs? Plus, you clearly aren’t employing the right people—the driver who loses the car, the chef who burns the pies. If you want to run a company effectively, you’ve got to pick the right people to work for you.”
Quinn turned and started pacing the office again. The irrational feeling that he was going to kiss her passed, along with any thought he might be about to show her his office sex dungeon with a secret access panel through the bookcase. Quinn picked up a pen from his desk and started clicking the end of it.
“No doubt you would just cull anyone who had a bad day,” Minnie said, folding her arms in front of her chest. “My team are like family. They’ve all had problems in life, that’s why we hired them. We want to give a chance to people who need one.”
“Even if it means destroying your business?”
Minnie narrowed her eyes at him. Between Greg, her mother, and now Quinn, she was sick of people telling her how bad she was at running a business.
“They aren’t the problem. Look, if it’s not going to work how I want it to work, maybe it’s not meant to be.”
“Spoken like a true fatalist. You need to start taking responsibility for your life, Minnie. You lost your coat on New Year’s Eve because you’re careless, not jinxed. Your business is failing because you’re a bad manager who won’t take free advice.” Quinn shook his head and thrust his hands into his pockets. Minnie felt the red prickling back up her neck, flushing her cheeks.
“Well, maybe I don’t need life advice or handouts from some rich-kid mummy’s boy who has no idea what the real world looks like.”
Minnie felt a falling sensation in her stomach as soon as she’d said it. She didn’t know why she’d gone that far; it was too harsh. She felt like a cat being cornered, darting out a sharp claw in a preemptive strike. Quinn’s face changed, the glint in his eye disappeared and his jaw clenched, a muscle pulsing above the sharp line of his chin.
“You don’t know anything about my life, Minnie, and this whole hard-done-by, working-class routine is deeply unattractive.”
“I don’t need you to find me attractive,” said Minnie.
“I think you’d better go,” Quinn told her for the second time in their short acquaintance. “Try not to smash anything on your way out.”
New Year’s Day 2001
Quinn sat on the bottom stair picking at the chipped varnish covering the crack in the banister. In the blue house, the banisters snaked up from the bottom floor four-and-a-half whole turns. If Quinn lay on the floor in the hall and looked up, he couldn’t see where the banister ended; he liked to imagine the curling wood went on and on, winding upward like Jack’s beanstalk to the castle in the clouds, or—in this case—to the attic. When he was little he’d tried climbing to the top without touching the stairs—the carpet was lava and the banisters were safe. He had to get to the top to rescue his sister from the evil tribe who lived in the attic, threatening to throw her into the fearsome volcano.
He’d made it as far as the second floor, balancing his feet on the thin rail of wood, holding on to the railing above, before he’d slipped and fallen down arm first onto the banister below. He’d broken his arm and taken this chunk out of the wood. It had only been a small chunk, but his father had gone ballistic.
“That banister is irreplaceable! It’s carved from a single piece of oak!”
“What were you thinking? What were you doing?” cried his mother, crouching down to Quinn’s level, blue eyes blinking wildly, her blond hair rolled in curlers and black streaks running down her cheeks. The spiders that lived on her eyelids looked as though they were melting.
“Rescuing my sister from the attic,” Quinn said through breathy sobs.
His mother’s face turned white; she covered her mouth with a hand, pushed him away and fled back upstairs, taking them two at a time.
It was Daddy who had taken him to the hospital. Quinn remembered because it was the first time he’d been allowed to sit in the front seat of his father’s convertible. Daddy couldn’t work out the car-seat straps in Mummy’s Volvo, so they went in his car, which didn’t have a car seat or a roof. “Don’t scuff the leather with your feet,” his father instructed. Quinn didn’t have any shoes on because his father hadn’t known where they were kept and Quinn was crying too much to tell him. That was years ago. Daddy didn’t live with them in the blue house anymore.
Today, Quinn was waiting on the stairs for his mother to come down and give him his birthday presents. He’d been awake for hours, but he could be patient—eleven-year-olds were supposed to be patient. He’d got dressed and made himself breakfast—a bagel with peanut butter. At least it was the Christmas holidays, so he wasn’t in any rush to get to school. Quinn looked up at the clock in the hall, ten to ten. Would she be cross if he went to check whether she was awake? He crept up to the third-floor landing.
Her door stood slightly ajar. The curtains were open and light was streaming in. Maybe she was having a bad morning? Sometimes, when she had a bad morning, Quinn had to get a lift to school with Marcus Greenford from four doors up. Sometimes, when she was having a bad day, he had to stay at Marcus Greenford’s house after school, and he didn’t even like Marcus Greenford.
His mother was lying on the bed in her pink silk dressing gown. It lay open with the cord undone. Quinn blushed to see his mother wasn’t wearing nightclothes underneath, just cream-colored pants. It didn’t look like a sleeping position, her body sprawled like that with her arms up around her head and her face buried between two pillows. Quinn crept backward out of the room—he didn’t want her to know he’d seen her without clothes on.
Maybe this afternoon she would get up. She would get dressed and come downstairs. She would make herself coffee and then he could unwrap his presents and she could pretend this wasn’t one of her bad days, just a bad morning. Maybe she’d even take him to Primrose Hill with his bike, if she worked up to it this afternoon.
Quinn had asked for the Lego Millennium Falcon for his birthday. If she could just give him his present now, he wouldn’t even mind so much about her having a bad day. She didn’t need to take him anywhere; it wasn’t like he expected a party. If he could just start building the Falcon, he would be happy for hours.
Ten minutes later and there was still no sound from her room.
“Mummy?” he said quietly. “Mummy, are you awake?” he tried again.
“Not now, Quinn.” Her voice sounded like a dying bird. “Today’s not a good day.”
Quinn carefully pulled the door to; it didn’t lie straight on its hinges anymore and you had to lift it to make it close. The door had been slammed so many times—maybe the hinges had grown tired, like Mummy.
Quinn looked across the landing at his mother’s bathroom. He didn’t like going in there. The white tiled floor had never been white again; that much blood seeping into the floor had turned the grouting gray. Daddy got them to take out the whole floor. Then he redid the guest bathroom too, so that the new tiles would match.
He remembered thinking the bath must have overflowed, but he didn’t know why the water was red. He remembered thinking he’d never seen his mother look so scared. He remembered waiting outside a hospital room the next day with his father. Daddy kept clicking the strap on his Rolex watch open and shut. He smelled of smoke and dirty washing. Then Daddy went in to see her and Quinn was told to wait outside. Mummy cried and screamed at him for not being at home.
He remembered his father moving Quinn’s old crib back up to the attic, along with all the other boxes that had been brought down and stacked up in the spare room. He remembered walking into that room and seeing his father on the floor with his hands over his eyes, his body moving up and down, making the strangest sound. When his father saw him in the doorway, he took off his shoe and threw it at the door and it slammed in Quinn’s face.
Quinn thought about that night in the bathroom a lot. If it hadn’t happened, would his mother be more like a normal mother? Would it have happened if his father had been home? Would it have happened if he had gone downstairs sooner? Mrs. Jacobs, the counselor at school, said he couldn’t think like that. Mrs. Jacobs said the bathroom incident wasn’t the only reason his mother was like she was. She said some people were just anxious, but things could happen that made them more anxious, that made it harder for them to leave the house. Then Mrs. Jacobs had mentioned him going to live with his father in New York and Quinn had stopped telling her these things about his mother.
This Time Next Year Page 13
