AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She had ended things with Greg because she wanted more; because she knew she was worth more. So why was she now swimming around like an idiot just to go for a coffee with a guy who wasn’t interested in her? Did she actually want to be friends with him? Was that the consolation prize?
Minnie’s skin was wrinkled and white by the time Quinn finished swimming. They dried off next to each other on the bank; retreated to the changing rooms to get dressed and then met up again outside the iron-gated entrance to the pond. They walked across the heath, down the hill towards Hampstead Heath train station. Quinn said he wanted to go back to the same breakfast van Minnie had taken him to before.
‘So how’s your mum doing after last week?’ Minnie asked, swinging her wet towel as she walked.
‘Talking to your mother a great deal,’ said Quinn.
Yesterday, Minnie’s mother had told her she was popping down to Primrose Hill with a homemade quiche. A quiche?Minnie couldn’t remember the last time her mother had baked a quiche from scratch.
‘I know, it’s strange,’ Minnie said, ruffling her wet hair so that it looked less flat against her head. ‘She’s never really had female friends, my mum. None that I’ve known of in any case. She’s always too busy working to socialise.’
‘Nor mine,’ said Quinn. ‘What do they talk about?’
‘What it’s like to give birth on the first of January in 1990?’ said Minnie with a laugh. ‘That’s literally all I can think of that they have in common.’
‘Maybe they’re both lost souls,’ said Quinn thoughtfully, ‘they see themselves reflected in the other.’
‘That sounded very poetic, Quinn Hamilton. No one would imagine you were a boring management consultant.’ Minnie sucked in her cheeks to stop herself from laughing.
He reached out his rolled-up wet towel and playfully patted her on the bottom with it. ‘Watch your tongue, Cooper.’
‘You call that a towel slap?’ Minnie laughed. ‘Pathetic.’
‘Well, unlike you, I don’t go around beating people with towels until they bleed, I’ve still got a mark where you branded me, you know.’ His voice took on a husky quality.
‘You do not,’ Minnie said, elbowing him in the ribs.
‘And now with the elbowing.’ Quinn clutched his side as though deeply wounded. ‘I’m going to be black and blue being friends with you.’
They got breakfast rolls from the van. Quinn suggested they walk back to the top of Parliament Hill to eat them in the sunshine. They sat in the grass looking out at the Londonskyline, a vast carpet of buildings rolling out in front of them, dotted with cranes and skyscrapers.
‘Feels incongruous having this giant heath here, doesn’t it?’ said Quinn.
‘I love it. It’s like the last spot of wilderness in London, where nature has yet to be pressed flat beneath the concrete.’
‘Now who’s sounding poetic?’ Quinn said, looking sideways at her.
‘Oh shut up.’
‘The heath has inspired many poets: Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, now Cooper,’ Quinn said in a lofty, English-teacher voice.
‘I’m certainly not a poet,’ Minnie said with a sniff, biting into her bacon bap. She knew he was only joking but, when Quinn said things like that, it made her acutely aware that he had gone to university and she had not.
‘“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense”,’ he said.
Minnie turned to look at him with startled eyes. She stopped chewing mid-mouthful.
‘Keats. “Ode to a Nightingale”. Written here, I think. I can’t remember any more of it.’ He blushed, perhaps realising she hadn’t registered he was quoting from a poem. ‘He died at twenty-five, what a waste.’
‘Is this how you usually try to impress girls, quoting poetry and Wikipedia at them?’ Minnie asked, turning her focus back to her coffee.
‘No,’ Quinn leant back in the grass, resting his weight on his elbows. ‘Why, are you impressed?’
‘I’m not supposed to be being impressed, this is just a friendly post-swim blap chap – bap chat.’ Minnie stumbled over the words. ‘That’s hard to say – Post. Swim. Bap. Chat.’
Quinn turned on his side, resting his head on one hand as he looked up at her. ‘You think that’s my modus operandi, do you? Dropping in poetry where I can?’
‘You just dropped in Latin. What do you want from me, Quinn, a B plus?’
