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It went without a hitch – well, except for a glitch with the PowerPoint where the screen froze. When she tried to reset it, a picture of her and Leila on a beach in Goa popped up instead. She was holding Fleabag dog with one hand and a cocktail in the other – she looked sunburnt and happy.
‘Sorry, technical difficulties,’ Minnie blustered.
Lucy and her colleague Rupert asked questions and listened politely. They both tasted samples of the pies she had brought and Minnie left them with a bound presentation of her proposal.
‘Well, thank you for coming in, we’ll be in touch,’ said Lucy. ‘Great jumpsuit, by the way.’
Minnie skipped all the way home. She wasn’t sure, but it felt as though the pitch had gone well. If Lexon said no, she would try someone else – she was going to make this happen. On her phone, she had a text from her mother: ‘I hope it went well love. I’ve got my course this afternoon, but call me later and let me know xxx.’
Her mother was retraining to be a midwife. She’d surprised them all at dinner the other week by saying it was something she’d always wanted to do. Tara had researched a course for her online, specifically for nurses wanting to retrain, and she’d signed herself up. She made Dad sell another of his clocks to pay for it. Number thirteen was getting quieter and quieter with all the family’s changing career plans.
Back at her flat in Willesden, Minnie let herself in and flopped on the sofa. She took out her phone. She should reply to Jake, one of the chefs from the catering firm she’d been on a date with last week. Jake was attractive, kind and popular with the waitresses. He’d surfed his way around Mexico in a van last year, and was off base-jumping in Yosemite once he pulled some more cash together. He was the kind of happy-go-lucky adventurer it was impossible not to like. There was no reason not to go on another date with him. Minnie’s owlswere not overly enthusiastic, but the owls had not proved helpful in the past.
Just as she was typing out a reply to Jake, a text came through on the No Hard Fillings WhatsApp group. It was a link from Fleur. Her producer friend who’d filmed the video of Leila’s engagement had finally sent through an edit, and she’d uploaded it to her YouTube channel. Minnie watched the video and laughed out loud; it perfectly captured the joyful madness of the occasion. Minnie watched the close-up of Leila’s delighted face and kissed the screen.
‘We’ve gone viral!’ read Fleur’s message beneath the link. ‘We’ve 60,000 views and counting!’
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’tblame 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
