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‘Minnie’s here,’ shouted her dad from above. Minnie looked up to see him leaning out of 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 dishevelled, 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 neighbours. 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 centre, or the busy motorway flyover. 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 eveningsscouring 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 any more. ‘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 shaking 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 somuch, 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 towards 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 programmes.
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 Pick’s 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 amongst the clamour 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?’
