Chapter 5
5
MINNIE
Now
Jesse Lightning… Jesse Lightning.
Minnie was so tempted to google him.
‘No!’ she whispered to her phone as she sat alone at a restaurant table in a lull between services. This was her game, her rules; it would be morally wrong to google him. It would give her an upper hand and Minnie liked to play fair and square and always had done. When Minnie’s brother left his deck of cards on the table to go to the toilet, she wouldn’t look, even if she were tempted. When she sat on her sisters and tickled them until they almost wet themselves: if they shouted stop, she would stop. When Minnie’s best friend’s boyfriend told Minnie in Year 10 that he liked Minnie more than his girlfriend and tried his luck, she told him to back off. ‘If you don’t tell Lotte, I will,’ she had said to Matthew Mroz outside the chemistry lab. Minnie played fair and square. Fair dos was one of her most commonly used expressions.
So why hadn’t Jesse said he had a daughter sooner?
Minnie’s friend Hilde slid into the seat opposite, her chef whites grubby, and glided a plate from her palm into the space under Minnie’s nose.
‘Swiss kohlrabi, lacto fermented with wild blueberries and greens from the garden kitchen. Try it.’
Hilde was the five-foot-zero birdlike kickass chef at Alpine NW1, the restaurant she had opened with her brother Martin two years previously. The restaurant served thoughtful modern Swiss dishes on pretty vintage blue and white plates their ancestors had collected for a century, not knowing that their precious china would be used by AI engineers and UX writers over in London. Hilde was Minnie’s flatmate, except she was rarely at the flat on account of breaking her back to serve the diners of Alpine NW1 their very beautiful, highly ethically sourced food.
‘You’re ridiculous,’ Minnie declared, as she studied wafer-thin rectangles of vegetable, tinged pink at the edges from the pickling process, dotted with tiny trumpet chantarelles, blueberries, pea shoots, and pink and orange flower petals. ‘This is too pretty to eat!’
And too small , Minnie thought, but she didn’t have the heart to say. She didn’t really understand this fine dining malarkey. Her mother regularly served her granny’s recipes of boxty, coddle, barmbrack and hearty stews at their large family dinners in their large homely house at the top of East Heath Road in Hampstead. Minnie’s parents were actors; three of her four siblings were actors, and Minnie had done everything she could to swerve and evade the inevitable. To do her own thing.
Rosie, Minnie’s eldest sister, was a theatre actor. Lillia a stuntwoman. Caleb – the first boy and the middle child – was a data analyst, and Anthony, the next child from Minnie was currently a TV detective. Minnie, the youngest of the five children born into the Bohemian Byrne circus, had fought the calling to join the ‘acting dynasty’ they were often called in the press. She wanted a normal job like Caleb, which was why she’d done teacher training before her first school placement put her back on the path to the family business. Besides, acting was what Minnie was best at.
She’d had the whole auditorium in the palm of her hand as Miranda in The Tempest at school at King Alfred. She had dazzled as Maria in West Side Story , so much so that a Puerto Rican parent in the audience couldn’t believe her accent wasn’t her own; and after three years of study at Mountview in Peckham, with some TV ads and voiceover work in the bag, last summer Minnie had filmed her big-break TV drama, in London, Norway and Tuscany.
Hilde drew Minnie’s phone away from her, so she could give the plate the full attention it deserved, and saw the name ‘Jesse Lightning’ in the Google box at the bottom of the screen. Search as yet incomplete.
‘I thought you weren’t going to—’ Hilde stopped as she watched Minnie take a bite. They sat in silence while Minnie swallowed faster than she meant to and nodded in appreciation.
‘Clever woman. Stunning.’
Hilde smiled.
‘It could do with some?—’
‘Soda bread,’ they both said in unison, Minnie giving an impish smile, Hilde rolling her eyes.
‘Anyway I’m not searching him, I didn’t press it, see? I was just tempted. For a split second.’ Minnie narrowed her thumb and forefinger as if she were carefully forcing fighting magnets together. ‘I just didn’t expect him to have a kid.’
‘Why not? You don’t know the guy. You only met him on Tuesday, Min.’ Hilde looked concerned. She had been worried about Minnie meeting a stranger at the zoo when Minnie explained the whole story to her, late on Tuesday night. Minnie had recently hit rock bottom. At the start of April she had spent an entire week in bed, crying, unwashed, sad. Lying on her side, staring at smudges on the wall, patches of newspaper fingerprints, wondering how they came to be on her bedroom wall. Hilde had come home from the restaurant one night and gone to check on her.
‘What’s the point?’
‘What’s the point of what, sweetie?’ Hilde had asked.
‘What’s the point of trying.’ It wasn’t even a question.
Hilde had made her tea and toast and tried to get Minnie up, but she just lay on her side, staring at the wall. As Hilde ran Minnie a bath, she looked in the bathroom cabinet, and their usual shared stockpile of paracetamol and ibuprofen had disappeared. She found them all in Minnie’s bedside drawer, decanted into a little bowl, like mints.
Minnie didn’t get up and have the bath Hilde had run, she fell back asleep, but Hilde lay next to her all night, just to keep an eye on her. The next morning she called Geraldine and Jeremy, who came round, binned the medication, insisted Minnie take a bath, changed her bedding, opened her curtains and put in a call to Tony, a therapist their friends recommended after their son saw him for OCD.
What if the man from the cafe took advantage of that? What if he turned out to be a psychopath? He had shouted at a kid for no real reason.
So Hilde was especially glad to see Minnie alive now and assumed their London Zoo date that wasn’t a date hadn’t amounted to much, otherwise, why would she be in a closed restaurant at 5p.m. and not having animal-inspired sex back at his flat?
Oh yeah, because he had a kid, apparently.
‘And why wasn’t he taking his kid to the zoo?’ Hilde asked.
Minnie looked blank. She hadn’t got that far. When Jesse had dropped his daughter into the conversation, Minnie had made an even hastier path to the exit.
‘I know,’ Minnie said. ‘And it’s fine . We’re new friends, it wasn’t a date. Why would he need to tell me he had a kid?’
‘But he did tell you he had a kid.’
Hilde was very matter of fact. There was no messing with her. If her sous-chef Keenan hadn’t plucked the pea shoots at the right point, she’d tell him. If a restaurant customer made a complaint on Tripadvisor, she would leave them a one-star review in return and call them out for being rude or awful diners. If Hilde didn’t like Minnie’s outfit choice, or boyfriend, or thinking, she would tell her.
‘I know,’ Minnie conceded. She just hadn’t expected to be so thrown by it.
‘I need to prep the Alpine miso,’ Hilde said, as the not-terribly-Alpine soundtrack of three police cars and their sirens sped up the high street. ‘Wanna help me?’
‘Hmmm, I think I’m going to go home and do some journalling.’
‘Good, you’ll only distract Keenan if you stay. Get outta here.’
Minnie finished her plate and grabbed her biker jacket.
Jesse Lightning.
She shook her head as she left the restaurant, annoyed that she wanted to know everything about him and his bloody daughter.