AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Quinn’s on his way, he’ll be here soon.’ Minnie gently squeezed her arm. Tara took a rapid panting intake of air, juddering like a breathy machine gun. ‘OK, just breathe, Tara.Look at me now.’ Tara uncovered her eyes, blinking at Minnie. She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘Just breathe with me.’
‘I’ve done all this,’ muttered Minnie’s mother.
Minnie exhaled slowly and then inhaled loudly through her nose. Gradually Tara started to focus on Minnie, to replicate her breathing pattern.
‘There you go, perfect, just in and out,’ said Minnie’s mother, then in a different tone of voice, ‘hello.’
Minnie turned to see Quinn standing in the doorway, watching her. He was stock-still, a strange look in his eyes. Minnie smiled up at him – it was a reflex, like a sunflower opening towards the sun. Then she remembered the zoo, the rejection, the fact he hadn’t called her since that day, and she reined it in, turning it into a more perfunctory greeting – a small nod of the head.
Quinn watched her face change and the look in his eyes disappeared. He stepped forward and bent down to his mother, Minnie stood up and shuffled backwards out of the way. Quinn looked her up and down with a quizzical ‘what the hell are you wearing?’ expression, then moved to take her place where she had been crouching next to Tara. He patted his mother’s hand, a precise, rhythmic patting, as though communicating some code. Minnie turned to see Tara’s head relax back on the pillow, her hand folding around Quinn’s.
‘Did she take something?’ Quinn asked, turning between Minnie and her mother.
‘Two of these,’ said Minnie’s mother, stepping forward to hand Quinn a brown pill tube. ‘I wanted to call an ambulance but she was very insistent.’
Minnie’s mother knitted her hands together, twirling her thumbs around each other.
‘It’s OK, you did the right thing,’ said Quinn. ‘Thank you for being here, Connie. I know how much Mum’s enjoyed talking to you these last few months. It will have meant so much to her that you came.’
Minnie looked over at her mother in confusion. Her mother had been talking to Tara for months? Why hadn’t she said anything? Her mother prickled uncomfortably, glancing at Minnie and then rubbing the back of her neck with a hand.
‘I’m going to take Mum upstairs,’ said Quinn.
Minnie nodded. She watched as Quinn gently propped one of Tara’s arms over his shoulder and lifted her from the couch as though she weighed no more than a child. Watching him pick her up sent a spark of memory through Minnie’s mind; that day at the pool – his dripping wet torso. She chastised herself; this wasn’t the time to be mentally undressing the man!
‘Don’t leave. I’ll come back down,’ Quinn said to Minnie as he carried his mother towards the stairs.
When he had gone, Minnie shuffled towards her mother and hissed, ‘So, you have been speaking. Why didn’t you tell me?’
Her mother shrugged and walked off towards a side table full of silver photo frames and ornaments. She picked up a white china dog and examined it. ‘Would you look at that, just like mine.’
Minnie looked at the dog. It couldn’t have been more different to the tacky old ornament her mother was talkingabout. Tara’s was probably an expensive bone-china collectors’ item; her mother’s had come from the Odds ’n’ Ends shop off Kilburn High Road.
‘Well?’ Minnie hissed again, hands firmly planted on her scaly mermaid hips.
‘We’ve just been talking. It’s not your business, Minnie, that’s why I didn’t say.’
‘Not my business? I was the one who gave you her number, I was the one who said you should hear her side of the story!’
Her mother shrugged again. She picked up a framed photo of Tara with a young Quinn on her lap – they were watching a sunrise together, somewhere tropical. She looked back at Minnie, who was watching her wide-eyed, waiting for an answer.
‘I’ve got to do some things in my own way, Minnie. We’ve been talking here and there; she’s had a difficult time of it, she has.’
Minnie couldn’t understand why her mother wouldn’t have told her. Then she paused, tempering her irritation. She was glad they had been in touch. Perhaps some closure on the ‘name-stealing incident’ would smooth at least one of her mother’s jagged edges, redress her cynicism about human nature.
‘Well, what did you say that made her … ’ Minnie paused, not sure what to label Tara’s episode as. ‘ … React like that?’
‘I didn’t say anything,’ her mother said. Then, after a pause, ‘She was telling me how upset she was I didn’t call you Quinn, how bad she feels.’ She shook her head. ‘She got so worked up just thinking about back then. I said it’s only aname, isn’t it – it doesn’t matter. But then she started hyperventilating.’
Minnie laughed in disbelief – ‘only a name’. She looked at her mother as if she’d started speaking some strange Martian dialect.
‘Why you laughing?’ her mother frowned. ‘You don’t know what sets these things off. Poor woman’s traumatised – postnatal anxiety, a terrible miscarriage, husband left her high and dry. No wonder she’s a walking bag of nerves.’
Her mother picked up another frame from the collection of photos on the side table. This one showed a couple in their twenties, standing on the doorstep of the Primrose Hill house holding a baby in their arms. Quinn’s father was making a show of holding up the key for the photographer. It must have been taken when they’d first moved in.
‘You see a big house like this, Minnie, and you think people got it all. Sometimes it’s like too much icing on a cake – it’s covering over a crumby base that’s cracked down the middle.’
Minnie put her face into her palms and inhaled deeply. She couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mother’s mouth; this kind of empathy didn’t sound like her at all. How many times had they spoken? Minnie doubted Tara would have confided all this in a few phone calls. Clearly this dialogue with her mother had been going on a while.
