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‘OK?’ asked Leila. She sounded surprised that Minnie had agreed.
‘Yes, let’s do it, but none of those names,’ said Minnie, ‘I’ve already thought of the perfect name.’
2 January 2020
The No Hard Fillings kitchen was on an unremarkable side street in Dalston in east London. It was in the part of town that gentrification had not yet reached, sandwiched between a funeral director’s and a derelict old record store. There was a sign out front that said ‘Tandoori Palace’, crossed out with green spray paint. The building used to house an Indian restaurant and Minnie and Leila didn’t yet have the funds to properly change the signage. The girls felt it was somehow fortuitous, coming back from India with the plan and then finding a failing Indian restaurant offering them the chance to take over their lease.
‘I hope you girls have more luck with the place than we did,’ Mrs Mohan had said sombrely as she helped clear out the drawers and cupboards. ‘Better you have it than another KFC or Piri-Piri Chicken.’
Four years later there was still a picture of the Mohan family pinned to the steel fridge door. The girls had found it after the move and they didn’t have the heart to take down the last vestige of the family’s hard work.
On her way to work, Minnie bought fresh coffees for the whole team. She could ill afford it, but she thought everyone might need a morale boost. She’d woken at 2 a.m. feeling groggy and confused, then celebrated the end of her birthday by making an enormous Spanish omelette out of a suspectarray of ingredients she’d found in her fridge. The early hours of the morning had been spent listening to music and cleaning, while Lucky eyed her suspiciously from his warm perch on top of the fridge.
Now it was the second of January – her favourite day of the year; the day furthest from her birthday. So, despite everything that had happened yesterday, she couldn’t help walking into work with a bounce in her step. Greg had tried to call her already this morning. She hadn’t answered; she’d been on the bus and couldn’t bring herself to let an argument ruin her buoyant mood. Greg could be pretty uncommunicative when it suited him. If he was mid-flow with an article, she might not hear from him for days. Perhaps it would be good for him to get a taste of her being less available.
‘I got coffees,’ she called, as she swung through the door and the old-fashioned bell above chimed.
‘Oh, you beauty,’ said Alan, taking one out of her hands.
‘Alan, thank you for hosting us on New Year’s Eve, we both had a lovely time.’
‘Endlessly welcome,’ Alan said with a bow.
Alan was their delivery driver. He was a tall, wiry man in his fifties, with a mouth that constantly twitched. He had pale sallow skin and wide feline eyes with large heavy lids. He made Minnie think of an eighteenth-century poet battling a tortured soul. Alan used to captain boats for a living, but an accident with an anchor had turned him into a self-proclaimed ‘land lubber’. No one knew what the accident had entailed, or what exactly he had injured – he didn’t like to talk about it.
‘Did you get any non-dairy?’ asked Fleur, turning her head sharply.
‘No, sorry, only cow cappuccinos,’ Minnie grimaced.
Fleur sighed, but reached out a hand for one nonetheless. Fleur manned the phone. She was twenty-two and prone to food fads. Today was day two of Veganuary. Fleur had an elegant long neck and white-blonde hair. Like a beautiful, haughty swan, you got the feeling she might hiss at you if you got too close.
Fleur had come to work for them two years ago. It had just been Leila and Minnie back then, and when the business first got busy they needed help taking orders. Fleur had come to the interview with a proposal. She’d explained she was learning to code but couldn’t do it at home because her mother believed the internet gave people asthma – she wouldn’t allow a Wi-Fi router in the house. She said she would work four days a week, but they’d only need to pay her for three, as long as she could do her coding course during the downtime.
They gave her the job as it had sounded like a good deal. In retrospect, Minnie wondered whether any of the stuff about Fleur’s mother or the coding course had been true. Fleur never mentioned her parents, never appeared to go home, and still seemed to be doing this six-month coding course two years later. Leila had a theory that Fleur was actually London’s most glamorous tramp, who simply wanted somewhere warm to sit and scroll through social media.
‘Is Leila here yet?’ Minnie asked.
‘No,’ said Fleur, taking the lid off her cappuccino and peering into it as though hoping to find it might be soy milk after all. ‘Oh, and there’s been a dis-arse-terrrr.’
‘What?’ Minnie spun around to look at her. ‘What disaster?’
‘Beverley burnt the pies.’ Fleur gave a slow, swan-like shrug.
‘She didn’t!’
Minnie rushed past the reception desk into the kitchen beyond. Beverley was standing red-faced in her white chef’s coat, leaning over a countertop full of pies. They were lined up in a colour spectrum ranging from lightly charcoaled through to deeply incinerated. Minnie’s jaw fell as she plonked the cardboard tray of coffees down on the countertop and took in the scene of devastation before her.
‘What happened?’ she asked softly.
‘I think these ones are salvageable,’ said Beverley, pointing at the left-hand side of the counter. Beverley was fifty-nine but looked older, with her ruddy skin and soft, jowly face.
‘How … how did you burn so many?’ Minnie asked, shaking her head in disbelief. At least thirty of the forty pies in front of her were too burnt to sell.
‘I came in early to get a bump on things,’ said Beverley, eyes wide with remorse. Her wiry black hair was escaping in tufts from beneath her hairnet, lending her a mad-professor vibe. ‘Me and the oven have not been getting along.’
‘Are these the pies Leila spent the whole of New Year’s Eve making?’ Minnie asked, pulling the iron bar stool up to the large steel countertop. She picked at one of the burnt crustsand the black pastry crumbled beneath her touch. ‘What happened to the timer we bought you? The pies always take exactly forty-two minutes.’
‘Me and the timer have not been getting along,’ Beverley sighed, brushing some of the errant hair away from her eyes.
