This Time Next Year

by Sophie Cousens

  She shook her head; she could feel a flush creeping up her neck, the telltale sign that she was about to cry.

  “Has something happened? Is there anything I can do?”

  “Well, my business is bust and now I have to go to work on Monday and work out how to close it down, so no, there’s nothing you can do.”

  Minnie dropped her eyes to the floor; she couldn’t look at him. Why had she told him that? She sensed him taking a step toward her; she felt he might be about to hug her. For a moment her body tingled in anticipation, hoping for him to put his arms around her. Then her body tensed, angry with herself for feeling this primal urge to be hugged. Besides, Quinn wasn’t even her boyfriend; if she wanted to sink into anyone’s arms (which she didn’t, there would be no pathetic arm-sinking), it should be Greg’s. Shit, she really needed to call Greg.

  “But your pies are great? People love them, surely there’s a way—” Quinn started to talk but Minnie cut him off.

  “Yeah, but in the real world we have to take loans to start a business, loans with massive interest on them, and if we have a month with fewer orders or we have to buy a new door for the oven, then we don’t have much margin for error,” Minnie said through gritted teeth. “It’s not like in your world, where you just get money from your family to set up whatever business you like and probably never even deal with a bank. I mean, look at this place!”

  Minnie flung out her arm to illustrate the point. In doing so she knocked over one of the china lamp-stands and it flew off the side table, smashing onto the floor. The room was silent. Minnie stared at the broken shards. The lightbulb blinked, made a quiet fizzing sound, and then died.

  “Oh shit,” Minnie said under her breath.

  She looked up to see Quinn’s face had turned ghostly. Tara came running into the room. When she saw the lamp, she started hyperventilating.

  “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.

  January 5, 2020

  Minnie paused at the gray, paint-chipped front door of her parents’ house. She hugged the mustard-yellow woolen cape she was wearing around herself. The cape had been an ill-advised purchase from a thrift 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 was why she’d worn it only 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 savor 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 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 his clothes disheveled, 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 neighbors. 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 center, or the busy motorway overpass. 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 anymore. “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.

  “You’ve cut your hair. I thought you were growing it out?” she said, reaching up to gently tug one of Minnie’s curls.

  “Well, I felt like a change.” Minnie shrugged. “Don’t you like it?”

  “If you want to grow it, it takes time, you have to persevere.” Connie gave an exasperated sigh. “Your generation never stick anything out.”

  “Mum, I don’t think me getting a haircut is symptomatic of my being in the snowflake generation.”

  Minnie took off her cape and hung it on one of the coat pegs in the corridor.

  “It’s like your swimming lessons all over again.”

  “Mum, you can’t still be mad at me for giving up Saturday morning swimming—I’m thirty!”

  Her mother gave a little shake of the head, like a duck shakin
g off rainwater.

  “I spent an arm and a leg on those lessons, and you had such a talent for it, Minnie. Now, did you at least bring a pie?”

  “Was I supposed to?”

  Her mother groaned.

  “Well, it’d be nice not to cook once in a while, when we’ve got a ‘chef’ in the family.” She said chef the way she always said it, in a posh accent with a regal hand flourish. “Your dad’s just got back, been no help to anyone, and I didn’t sit down all shift. We were a nurse short on the ward, and not enough beds as usual.” Minnie followed her mother through to the kitchen and watched her sit down on one of the kitchen chairs with a resigned sigh. “My poor Mr. Cunningham got sent home, and he was in no fit state to go.”

  “I’m sorry you’ve had a hard day, Mum,” said Minnie.

  “I don’t know what the world’s coming to sometimes,” her mother said, closing her eyes. “How can some people have so much, and then our hospital doesn’t even have a bed for a man who just wants to pass on with a little dignity?”

  Minnie reached out to touch her mother’s hand, but her mother didn’t see and moved hers from the table before she could reach it. Minnie picked up a button instead. There was a collection of broken objects in front of her, waiting to be mended: a saucepan without a handle, a small button with hot written on it, and the decapitated head of a ceramic dog.

  “You don’t need to go to any trouble, Mum. I’m honestly happy with beans on toast. I’ve just come to see you both.”

  “Well, that’s what you’ll be getting at this rate. Now, would you help me find this dog’s body, Minnie? It must be in that lounge somewhere.”

  Her mother waved a hand toward the front room and Minnie did as she was asked. In the lounge the tick-tock of the clocks was marginally quieter. Her dad had designed it that way so as not to disrupt his programs.

  Of all the clocks in the house, there was only one that Minnie was genuinely fond of. It hung in pride of place above the TV—Coggie. She’d bought it for Dad from a car-boot sale up at Picks Cottage when she was sixteen. When she found it, it didn’t work; the bell on top had rusted and the seven and the four on the face had been scratched away. It had clearly been uncared for and unloved for many years, yet there remained some understated regal quality in that clock’s face, as if—even though it couldn’t tell you the time—it might tell you something else important, if only it could speak.

  Minnie liked the hole in the face that let you watch the cogs whirring behind. The bell on the top was struck by a small pin every hour, and in among the clamor of clocks, it was the one bell she didn’t mind the sound of. Such a gentle proclamation of another hour gone, not a grandiose gong like some of the more entitled clocks.

  Minnie bent down on her hands and knees and reached beneath the sofa searching for the lost piece of dog her mother was looking for. She heard her father’s footsteps heavy on the stairs.

  “Let’s have no more talk about beans on toast—we’ll just get a takeaway, shall we, love?” Minnie’s dad bellowed in the direction of the kitchen, then he stomped into the lounge. Minnie saw his big workman’s boots stop next to her head. “What you doing down there?”

  “Looking for half a dog,” she said.

  He frowned. “Don’t be putting her to work, Connie. Get the girl a drink and let’s get a Chinese in, hey?”

  He sat down in his worn brown cord armchair. The chair made a slow wheezing sound as though it had been winded. He reached for the remote control on the side table.

  “Notice anything different in here, Minnie Moo?” he asked. Minnie stood up and straightened the blue woolen jumper she was wearing. She looked around for a new clock.

  “Up there,” she said, pointing above the bookcase to the left of the TV. There was a small wooden Vienna regulator wall clock, with a pendulum as large as its face.

  “Finally found that missing piece, didn’t I. Bloke in Hamburg sold it to me for a pretty penny; I’ve been haggling with him for months.”

  “Very impressive, Dad—looks good as new.”

  Her father grinned, his broad ruddy cheeks balled to the size of apples. To look at him you wouldn’t imagine Bill Cooper had the sleight of hand or the patience to repair minute pieces of machinery. He had arms like tree trunks and shoulders like an ox, perfect for hauling heavy loads. Yet his real strength lay in the fine-motor coordination of his fingertips and an unlikely interest in antique clockwork.

  “Anyway, Bake Off time. Have you been watching, Minnie Moo?”

  “What series is this?”

  “It’s a repeat—never gets old. I reckon you’d get a handshake off Paul Hollywood for your pies.” He raised his voice. “Con, it’s pastry week!” Then he turned back to Minnie. “Grab me a beer, love, would you?”

  Minnie stopped searching for the dog and went back through to the kitchen. The sound of the television accompanied by a cacophony of ticking, coupled with her instant reappointment as resident barmaid, made Minnie feel as though she’d never left; life felt exactly as it had nine years ago. Technically, she’d only moved out three years ago—she’d had to move home briefly when they were setting up the business. Then there were those few months back in 2011 when she’d suddenly found herself unemployed. Minnie felt queasy thinking about that period of her life. Was this the pattern she was condemned to: Move out, try and make a go of a new job, fail, move home, and start all over again? The Brent Cross house toying with her as if she were a yo-yo, spitting her out into the real world only to reel her in as soon as she overstretched herself.

  Now, here she was about to ask her parents if she could move back in again. Minnie’s palms felt cold and clammy at the thought of living here again. She’d considered looking for a flat share, but with all the scratch marks Lucky had made in her current flat, she wasn’t holding out much hope of getting her deposit back. She didn’t have the funds to put down another one, and most people weren’t keen on living with an extra four-legged furry flatmate anyway. She opened the fridge door to get two beers, one for herself and one for her dad.

  “So, what happened to you on your birthday?” asked her mum, hand on hip. “There’s usually a tale to tell.”

  Minnie didn’t want to lend fuel to her mother’s narrative about her birthday bad luck. She shrugged.

  “Not much—went to Alan’s for dinner, then on to a party.” Minnie nipped through to give her father his beer, then came back to the kitchen and opened her own. “Oh, but guess who I met, Mum?” Her mother had started chopping onions. “Well? Who do you think I ran into?” Minnie asked again.

  “If it’s a celebrity, I won’t have heard of them. Unless it’s Paul Hollywood because his is the only voice I hear around here,” she said loudly. “Your father is obsessed with that show. You know he watches them all on repeat?”

  Minnie didn’t know which it was better to reveal first—her meeting with Tara and Quinn or the news about her business failing and needing to move home. Part of her would relish seeing the look on her mum’s face when she mentioned Tara’s name; no part of her would relish admitting that No Hard Fillings was broke. She decided to go with the more relishing option.

  “Have you spoken to Will recently?” asked her mother, veering off on to a new topic.

  “No.” Minnie rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

  “Says he’s put an offer in on a house out there, somewhere in Bondi. So impressive at his age—we didn’t manage to buy till we were past forty.”

  “Well, it’s probably cheaper out there,” Minnie said, feeling her jaw tense.

  “I don’t know how you’re ever going to get on the property ladder, Minnie. We were saving for eighteen years to get our deposit together.”

  “Well, I don’t think my generation are going to be able to buy, are we,” said Minnie, pulling the metal tab from her beer can and squeezing it into her palm.

  “Your brother�
�s buying.”

  “Quinn Hamilton! I met Quinn Hamilton,” said Minnie loudly.

  Connie dropped the knife on the chopping board, and Minnie savored the moment—finally her mother was listening.

  “And I met his mother, Tara. She lives in a mansion in Primrose Hill. She’s ever so elegant, she looks like a film star.” Minnie pinched her lips together.

  “Tara Hamilton? You went to Tara Hamilton’s house?” her mother asked, her voice lacking any of its usual resonance.

  “Yup,” said Minnie, taking another swig of beer and leaning back against the fridge, one foot up against its door.

  Her mother frowned at her, then went back to aggressively chopping onions.

  “Well, I’m sure it’s easy to look like a film star when you’re a millionaire, living the bleeding life of Riley.”

  “I ran into Quinn by chance at a party and I told him what you said about Tara taking my name. It’s not what she meant to do at all, Mum; she meant to call him Quinn as a tribute to you for all the help you gave her. She never imagined you wouldn’t call me Quinn too.”

  “What are you bringing all this up for, Minnie?” her mum said, turning around and frowning at Minnie. “Why are you going around town talking about me to people?”

  “It’s not people, Mum, it’s Tara Hamilton—can you believe it, after all this time?”

  “I don’t need you rewriting history, Minnie. No one wants this all raked up.”

  Her mother turned back to her chopping board. She picked up a saucepan from the counter and briskly swiped the onions into it, turning her back to Minnie as she moved the pan to the stove. They stood in silence. The Bake Off theme tune blared out from the next-door room; a hundred clock hands ticked.

  “You going to find that dog for me or what?” said her mother.

  “Look, I got her number; I said you’d call her. Here, I’m writing it down and putting it on the fridge.”

  Minnie couldn’t see her mother’s face but she saw her back go rigid before she reached up to the cupboard above the stove for a can of tomatoes. This wasn’t the reaction Minnie had expected.