AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And yet, in the dimly lit periphery of his subconscious, Quinn was aware of a darkness lurking. If he ever shone his attention towards it, it would skulk back into the shadows, ungraspable. And yet. Only yesterday he had stared down that shadow for the first time. He had seen it for what it was and he had formulated it into words. Ever since Polly, he had been subconsciously attracted to women with unappealing qualities. It didn’t make sense, he didn’t understand it, but once he’d thought it, he couldn’t help looking back at his relationship history through this strange, murky lens. Jaya had been a narcissist, Eddie a compulsive liar, Anna hated dogs and Lucy was a snob who was rude to waiting staff. All these traits had been immediately visible to him and yet, strangely, were part of the attraction.
Why? When he tried to peer into this rabbit hole he started to feel anxious. What kind of psychopath would actively choose to go out with women who possessed traits he disliked? The anxiety made him feel as if he was his mother, that it was in his DNA, that he was not in control.
Back to the question in hand: why hadn’t he ended things with Lucy? The idea he might love her appealed to him. If this was love, this was manageable; this was not an earthquake waiting to destroy his foundation. If something went wrong in the future with Lucy, he would be sad, but he couldn’t imagine locking himself away for the rest of his life.
There might be another explanation for this stay of execution; that he had started to see value in the sessionswith Carol. Growing up, Quinn came to think of therapy as akin to fixing bomb damage with wallpaper – it was something to take your mind off the fact that the walls of your house had been blown to bits. In the sessions with Carol, he’d found himself talking about his mother and father’s break-up, about his mother’s condition, his father’s disappearance. What had made him unload like that, heaping emotional coal into the filthy engine of therapy? Carol just listened, nodding in comprehension; she did not try to wallpaper anything.
At their fourth session, Carol said, ‘Now I know you have booked this as couple’s therapy, but if I’m honest, I feel Quinn could benefit most from some one-to-one sessions. You should only embark on one course of therapy at a time, so you’d have to do one or the other.’
Lucy looked disappointed. She liked being involved; she liked nodding sympathetically, as though if only he could unload all these words about his past, then at the bottom of the pile of words would be the three she was looking for.
‘Well,’ Lucy frowned, looking back and forth between Carol and Quinn. ‘We’ll have to discuss it. I felt we were making progress?’
Lucy leant forward in her chair, her usually taut face creasing into frown lines. She clasped her hands together and nodded both forefingers in Carol’s direction. Carol responded with one of her neutral, dental-advert smiles.
‘I think you were right to want to talk this through,’ she said to Lucy, ‘but what is becoming clear to me is that Quinn needs a lot more time to work through some issuesindependently.’ Then Carol gave Lucy one of her encouraging nods, the nod that made you feel you’d given all the right answers and were winning the therapy game show. ‘You’re doing a fantastic job being a supportive partner, Lucy.’
‘Well, I have a very secure attachment style,’ said Lucy, keen to out-therapy the therapist.
That had been over a week ago. They had said they would discuss it. Now Lucy was bringing it up at the party.
‘So what do you think we should do?’ Lucy asked, reaching out to hold Quinn’s hands. ‘I think you should ask to be referred to someone else. Carol’s supposed to be the best when it comes to relationships, so I’d rather we saved her for us, don’t you agree?’
‘It’s freezing out here. Let’s go back in and enjoy the party. We can talk about it tomorrow,’ Quinn said, pulling Lucy towards him and kissing her on the forehead.
Lucy forced a smile and then turned to open the sliding door back to the party.
‘Fine, but we need to decide. Now, make sure you mingle, you should talk to everyone here for at least three minutes, then everyone feels that they’ve seen you.’
Quinn looked around the room. Who did he want to talk to? Over by the bar were the few school friends he still kept up with: Matt, Jonesy, Deepak. On the dance floor, his work colleagues and a handful of faces from UCL and Cambridge days. Mike was busy chatting up Lucy’s friend, Flaky Amy. Three minutes. Could anyone really see him in three minutes? Would anyone see him in three hundred minutes? In a room full of his friends, Quinn didn’t think he’d ever felt so lonely.
Quinn watched Lucy strutting over to reprimand a waiter for standing idle. The man looked terrified and launched into action, knocking straight into a girl walking towards him. The girl had brown curly hair and was dressed in a strangely casual tank top. The plainness of her clothes only made it more apparent how striking she was. The waiter dropped his tray and the canapés flew into the air. Quinn watched the girl with the curly hair stop to help the waiter pick them up, apologising as though it was her fault. She got down on her hands and knees and helped brush off the goat’s cheese stuck to the waiter’s tie. Then she cleaned his glasses on her top. Quinn smiled to himself as he watched the scene. He didn’t know anyone here who would help a waiter like that.
The girl stood up and brushed herself down, then picked a piece of goat’s cheese from her hair. The waiter scurried away and she stood there, alone, watching the party as though she wasn’t a part of it. Something about this girl didn’t fit here; she stood out like a swan in a pond full of geese.
Quinn turned his head to see Lucy letting out one of her overblown, mirthless laughs, and he knew then – whether it was to do with his past, their present, or something else entirely – he did not love Lucy. He was going to choose Carol. He wanted to get out of this rabbit hole.
13 September 2020
Minnie was in the garden helping her parents knock down her father’s shed. Now he’d turned the loft into a fully functioning, damp-proof repair studio, he didn’t have any need for the shed, which was taking up valuable space that could be used for her mum’s vegetable project. Minnie’s mother had caught the vegetable growing bug from Tara.
‘Global warming means we should all be growing our own,’ she said by way of explanation.
‘What’s global warming got to do with it, except things grow quicker?’ asked her dad.
‘Well, when tomatoes go up to ten pound a punnet because there’s no land to grow food on, you’ll be glad we got some in our back yard won’t you?’ said her mum, wiping strands of sweaty hair from her eyes with her free hand.
‘If we’re all gonna to be living underwater, you’d be better off learning how to build submarines or growing gills,’ said her dad.
‘It’s strange taking the shed down, the house looks so different without it,’ said Minnie, taking a step back to survey the scene. She was wearing blue dungarees and had a shoebox-sized mallet in her hand. ‘I never realised how much light it was blocking. Look how much sun you’ve got going into the kitchen now.’
‘Perfect for growing things,’ said her mum, eyes wide with delight.
‘I’m going to miss that shed. You know how many clocks I fixed up in there?’
‘You’re just as happy in the loft,’ her mum said quickly.
‘There’s not as much light in the loft though,’ her dad grumbled.
