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‘Quinn, go home, let’s not do this now, just go and do what you need to do. I’m going to go and meet some friends at a club in Hoxton. Thank you for a lovely meal.’
She kissed him on the cheek, a lingering kiss. Something about it felt more final than simply a goodbye. And as she left, Quinn found the nauseous feeling began to recede and the tightness across his chest finally started to ease.
17 May 2020
Minnie stood on the grass bank, starring down into the murky brown water. Minnie first swam in Hampstead Ponds as a teenager, but the look of the water and the unnerving feeling of swimming when you couldn’t see your hands or feet had put her off. Plus, she’d been conditioned to swim fast in those days, and the ponds weren’t the best place for speed. Swimming was the one thing Minnie had been good at as a child, a sport she could do alone, with no one jeering at her. Or if they were jeering, she couldn’t hear them with her head underwater. She wasn’t sure why she’d given it up in her twenties – life and work had got in the way. Over the last few months, she had found herself drawn back to the water.
Hampstead Ponds were old reservoirs, now open to the public to swim in. They were dotted around the edge of Hampstead Heath – a beautiful, wild parkland which sprawled across nearly eight hundred acres of north London between Hampstead and Highgate. From the highest point you could see most of London, a Legoland of buildings and skyscrapers receding towards the horizon.
Minnie had always loved the heath. It was an idyllic, unspoilt oasis of nature in an otherwise tamed landscape. It served to remind the homogenised city dweller what wild grass and tumbling, tangled tree roots looked and smelt like. It wasn’t just the wild landscape Minnie loved, but thefamiliar characters she saw there. While all of London migrated to the heath in the summer, during the rest of the year you saw the same faces again and again. The regular pond swimmers were a tight-knit community in themselves, with some diehards going in all year round, cracking ice in the winter to get in.
Last autumn, Jean Finney, one of Minnie’s No Hard Fillings clients, had encouraged Minnie to give the ponds another chance. Jean swam regularly there herself, and spoke about the experience of wild swimming with almost religious reverence. Minnie hadn’t got around to it last year. Now, she had time on her hands and a newfound motivation – maybe bracing cold water would toughen her up, body and soul. She’d come for the first time a month ago. Today, the water still looked uninviting, but this time, once she was in, she soon forgot about the murk below, losing herself in the exhilarating sting of the cold and the simple pleasure of wild swimming.
Minnie thought Jean must be doing something right if she at the age of eighty-six was still swimming most days. Jean had a calm demeanour that belied a life well lived. ‘Don’t cry about something you wouldn’t cry about in five years’ time,’ she once told Minnie. ‘And swim – swim when you can.’ Those were her two pieces of life advice.
This morning Jean’s familiar white ruffled head was nowhere to be seen. Launching herself into the water, Minnie felt needles stab into every part of her skin. She struggled to control her breathing as her body fought against the cold. She blocked out the pain and started to swim rapid breaststroke.She counted her breaths; it took twenty for the pain to subside, then her body mellowed, the needles softening to warm tingles, and every part of her felt infused with energy, her brain burning off its early morning fog.
Swimming had become part of Minnie’s new routine. Now she was working for the catering company she had mornings to herself and felt healthier than she had in years. She had time to cook herself good food, do exercise, and she’d even started reading again. She worked six nights a week, and was trying to live frugally. She was saving up a rental deposit to move out of her parents’ house, and in another month or two she’d have enough. Life was simpler, easier, less stressful. Of course she missed the No Hard Fillings kitchen, she missed working with her friends, she missed Leila, but she was trying to be more optimistic, to see the positives.
Since their argument three months ago, she and Leila had patched up a practical peace. They’d had to communicate to wind down the business, but it was a sticking plaster on something that ran much deeper and they both felt it. The administrative hassle of dismantling the company had been easier than either of them imagined. By selling off the kitchen equipment and the delivery van, they’d had just enough to pay remaining salaries and settle the majority of their debt. Everything was made easier by the fact that a chicken-themed fast-food chain wanted to take the lease off their hands and agreed to buy their equipment at a fair price. In a matter of weeks, the deals had been done; it was like watching a giant, painstakingly crafted sandcastle being swept away by one giant wave.
The catering company Minnie now worked for was a production line of salmonen croûteand goat’s cheese tarts with a balsamic glaze. She worked in a rotation of venues, creating meals for weddings, parties, lunches and functions. She didn’t have much to do with the people who ate her food, or even the people who served it. She cooked, cleaned up, got paid and went home. She liked the impersonal nature of it. She didn’t have to think about the business model, about other people’s livelihoods depending on her. She didn’t have to think at all.
She’d stayed in touch with Alan and Bev. Letting them down had been the worst part of the whole thing.
‘We’ll be fine, don’t be thinking about us,’ Bev said, once she’d told them the news.
‘Ah, we’ll find another ship to rig in no time,’ said Alan.
As it turned out they had; the chicken shop had taken them both on, wanting staff who knew the premises. Alan was on deliveries, Bev worked the deep-fat fryer.
Fleur had disappeared, Minnie wasn’t sure where to. Perhaps she was living offline at home in her parents’ Wi-Fi-free zone, or maybe she’d finally set up that horoscope-themed dating app she’d always talked about. Minnie was surprised how much she found herself missing Fleur, of all people.
Giving up the business had been a seismic shift. Like tectonic plates grinding against each other, this small earthquake had released the pressure, preventing more cataclysmic consequences. It had been the right thing to do, she was sure of it. Yet she missed her colleagues, she missedher customers; she missed hearing about Mr Marchbanks’s cats and Mrs Mentis’s bunions. Most of all she missed Leila, and she missed her with a yearning she could only describe as heartache.
They still communicated, sent texts, occasionally exchanged news over the phone. But something had changed between them since their argument. Leila worked days, Minnie worked evenings. They’d met up for Saturday morning coffee a few times, but a polite distance had settled between them. Minnie felt she was catching up with an old acquaintance, exchanging information. She found herself commenting on the coffee, which was never a good sign. Patching together pieces of their friendship in a semblance of repair had not healed the underlying wound.
So Minnie worked and she swam and she saved and she swam, and she kept her head down and she held her breath. Swimming and breathing, living and working, waiting for the next seismic shift to move the ground beneath her feet and right everything again. Or perhaps to suck her under and drown her.
Minnie took four long strokes beneath the dark, cold water, then another, then another. As she ran out of air she felt the fight in her lungs push her to the surface. Survival took over and she broke the surface with a gasp of relief. As she climbed out of the pond onto the jetty, she saw that her towel was not on the bank where she’d left it. She shivered, looking for who might have taken it – a cruel trick at this time of year. A few yards away stood a man, rubbing his face with her blue swimming towel.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, striding over to him, ‘I think that’s my towel.’
The man pulled the towel down from his face. Quinn.
Minnie’s eyes fell unconsciously on to his sculpted torso and she quickly forced her gaze back to his face.
‘Minnie? Hi,’ he grinned. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Freezing,’ she shivered. ‘That’s my towel.’
She pulled it away from him and quickly wrapped it around herself. Quinn looked around and then picked up another blue towel from the bank a few yards away.
‘Not this one?’ he offered.
Minnie looked at the towel. It did look pretty similar to the one she’d just seized. Now she came to think about it, this one was a little fluffier than she remembered hers being.
‘Oh,’ she said with a frown. ‘Here you go,’ she tried to swap back.
