Chapter 7
7
DAY TWO
Now
‘Nice to meet you, I’m Minnie!’ Minnie said, with an ebullient handshake as she arrived outside what looked like a warehouse that might have once been a bingo hall. If it had, it was now being turned back into a bingo hall on the first Saturday of every month.
‘Good to meet you, I’m Jesse,’ Jesse said, confused but going along with it. It wasn’t that funny, but Minnie delivered her sort-of-joke so wholeheartedly and enthusiastically, he relaxed into her hearty greeting.
‘Are you feeling lucky?’ she asked.
‘Not really.’
‘Great! Let’s do it!’
Minnie and Jesse walked into the venue like the couple at the Oscars who were too cool to dress up. Or like they hadn’t got the memo. Or like friends on a Saturday afternoon, because they definitely weren’t a couple. Minnie was wearing her leather biker jacket over a short floral dress and ankle boots; Jesse wore neat jeans and a bomber jacket with an elasticated neck. All around them, women, men and drag queens were dressed to the nines in confections of gold sparkles, silver sequins and gunmetal lamé. The room was positively bursting with flammable clothing, dotted with people wearing sparkly cowboy hats, feather boas and fake tiaras.
This was not what Jesse was expecting at a Mile End bingo hall at five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, so they scanned their tickets with the bouncer and made a beeline for the bar. They leaned up against it side by side as Minnie picked up a drinks menu on a laminated sheet of A4.
‘How did you hear about this?’ Jesse asked as Minnie studied the cocktail list. ‘And why didn’t you tell me to wear something a little… jazzier?’
Minnie laughed, half in apology, half in excitement.
A man resembling Jay-Z wearing a full tux and sunglasses walked through the room to a small cheer and weaved through the audience, greeting people with slaps on the back and fist bumps, as he headed to a stage at the front of the hall. The place looked more like a community centre than the Kodak Theatre.
‘My sister Rosie came here on a hen do, said it was hilarious,’ Minnie said as she looked from the drinks menu to the room.
‘It is,’ Jesse laughed. ‘I just feel woefully underdressed.’
‘You’re all right,’ she reassured him. ‘Fair dos, we weren’t to know.’
Jesse was one of the few men in the room without make-up, glitter or dripping in jewels and he felt terribly self-conscious.
‘What are you having?’ he asked Minnie urgently.
The bingo hall was buzzing with hen parties and groups of friends arriving to celebrate thirtieth birthdays, fortieths and possibly a seventieth judging from a group of golden girls at the front. A heavily pregnant woman was celebrating her baby shower, and she looked like she might give birth at any moment. All these people had one thing in common, they were coming out for Beyoncé Bingo on an early summer’s evening in a grimy hall. The game where you ‘slay all day’, according to the poster outside – well, from 5p.m. to 10p.m. anyway – and prizes included anything from a Beyoncé mug to a bottle of champagne. And cash of course.
‘What shall I go for? A “Bloody Becky” or a “Long Island Iced Tease”?’ Minnie pondered.
‘I’ll get one of each,’ Jesse declared. ‘See which you like the look of best – I’ll have the other.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And a beer please?’ Jesse added to the barman.
Minnie studied Jesse’s profile as he ordered. His golden stubble lit by cheap lighting. His sincere face and light eyes studious as he flipped the menu over and looked at the back. ‘Oh and a basket of Houston Fried Chicken, right?’ he asked Minnie. ‘Or are you veggie?’
She waved a hand.
‘Bey’s favourite? Count me in.’
The man dressed as Jay-Z stopped at a piano on the stage and lifted the mic.
‘I got ninety-nine problems…’ he teased as he stroked the curves of the ball machine on top of the piano, and looked at the audience over his sunglasses. Pockets of partygoers cheered. ‘Actually I got ninety in my cage.’ He gave the balls a spin.
Minnie laughed as the barman pushed their gaudy looking cocktails, complete with plastic pink flamingo stirrers, towards them. She picked a cocktail up at random; Jesse lifted the other and his bottle of beer.
‘If you take a wooden spoon, someone will bring your food over,’ the barman said.
‘Great, thanks.’
‘Come on, let’s find some seats!’ Minnie said eagerly.
Jesse had a feeling it was going to be a wooden spoon sort of night as Minnie hurried away and he followed in her wake. She was going so fast he had to be careful not to spill any of his cocktail. Minnie turned around and looked at him and he had this strange feeling of being in a ridiculous, hopeless place, with someone who was so open to it, he laughed quietly to himself. Her enthusiasm was infectious.
‘Here!’ she said, grabbing them a spot between two big groups. They sat side by side facing the stage, squeezed in, and looked at the cards and dabbers in front of them.
‘Are we gonna win big tonight?’ Minnie smiled.
‘No,’ Jesse said.
‘Fair dos. But you gotta have faith that the balls will roll in our favour.’
The lights dimmed, Jesse and Minnie sipped their drinks – Minnie content with the Bloody Becky she had landed – and ‘Gay-Zee’ introduced himself while he rapped something about liberté, égalité and Beyoncé, and explained the rules of Beyoncé Bingo (much the same as regular bingo but with different calls: eighty-eight would be ‘two curvaceous queens’ in this bingo hall). Gay-Zee then called for the lights to be dimmed further, and the raucous cheers to rise, as he introduced his better half, ‘Bingoncé’, who would get the balls rolling.
A stout and stunning woman in a gold fishtail dress sashayed on stage to ‘Crazy in Love’ and rapturous applause, revellers getting up on their feet to the blaring horns and sass. Many of the crowd had clearly been before and knew the drill.
‘How y’all doin’?’ Bingoncé said as she started singing. Kent tones pushed through her Texan accent; her smoulder more Broadstairs than Bel Air. But Bingoncé and Gay-Zee made such a dazzling couple, Minnie and Jesse could not stop smiling in awe. ‘Get up and join me!’
Minnie stood up and started dancing alongside the women next to her, arms in the air.
‘Come on you!’ she said, raising both hands in a motion to tell Jesse to get up. Jesse slowly and self-consciously got out of his seat and joined her, although his movements were more of an awkward sway than Minnie’s gay abandon, dancing as she looked at the performers on the stage. He really needed to drink, and quickly.
‘God this is funny!’ Minnie said, clutching her middle as she turned to Jesse.
He nodded cautiously.
‘I mean, we’re stood here like two idiots on a Saturday afternoon – and I’m not even drunk! When you’ve probably got better things to do!’
They both thought about his daughter, Jesse knowing every freckle on her face; Minnie not even knowing how old she was.
The whole hall was dancing to ‘Crazy in Love’, even the golden girls at the front.
‘Sit down, sit down y’all!’ the queen commanded at the end of the track. ‘Put on your sitting britches, bitches, and have yourselves a drink. I’ll be back to get these balls rolling in just a coupla minutes…’
Bingoncé sashayed off.
Minnie sat down and saw the relief on Jesse’s face as he sat too and slurped his Long Island Iced Tease.
‘I’m sorry, you don’t look like the sort of guy to drink silly cocktails from a plastic glass…’ she said as she flicked the flamingo.
Jesse took a big sip.
‘This is actually quite nice,’ he said, appraising it. ‘Who knew?’
Minnie laughed.
‘I mean, I’m not one for audience participation so she’d better not get me up on stage…’
‘Don’t worry, I don’t think she will.’ Minnie looked around at all the people who would catch Bingoncé’s eye before she would land on Jesse, and then felt a bit guilty. ‘But you know, you gotta be game, roll with the punches… If she calls you up, then you need to get up there and do a kitty-kat crawl or a lick lick lick.’
‘What the fuck is a kitty-kat crawl and a lick lick lick?’
‘Little Beyoncé dance moves. I’d demonstrate them for you, but I need more cocktails.’ Minnie looked around. ‘And I need more space.’
Thank fuck for that , Jesse thought, then he felt a bit guilty.
‘Give way to Bey, Jesse!’ Minnie joked, hitting him on the arm, as if she could read his mind. ‘The risk of being pulled up on stage is part and parcel of being in the presence of that amazing dress I’m afraid. Lighten up! It’s going to be fun.’
‘I guess…’ He shrugged.
‘Anyway what’s the worst that can happen if she does call you up?’
Jesse frowned.
‘Yeah, I don’t like the stage the way I think you like the stage.’
‘You might love it.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘A bad thing can turn into a good thing, I know that.’
Jesse’s brow crinkled. He didn’t really think that was true. Some terrible things had happened to him in the past six months, and he struggled to find a single good outcome in any of them.
‘The night I met JP and had a doomed relationship? Bad. Making a new friend in a cafe because JP landed me in therapy? Good! Tenerife 1977? Definitely bad. Never flying because I’m too scared? Good and freeing in many ways.’
Jesse frowned again, more playfully this time.
‘Beyoncé Bingo, well hopefully it’s going to be good, I have a feeling…’
‘Or maybe it’s going to be so bad it’s good?’ Jesse offered cynically.
‘Yes!’ Minnie clapped her hands together excitedly.
Jesse took another long sip of his Long Island Iced Tease and put it down on the plastic tablecloth.
‘Anyway what happened that was so bad in Tenerife? Apart from my first lads’ holiday…’
Bingoncé returned to the stage and started singing ‘Irreplaceable’, her final number before ‘eyes down’ she had said, and started shimmying towards the ball machine.
‘Tenerife 1977? Did we not talk about that at the zoo?’
‘Well…’
‘Worst ever plane crash.’
‘Twin Towers aside,’ Jesse said, quoting Minnie, who looked briefly impressed. He had been listening.
‘The Tenerife airport disaster of 27 March 1977… Everything conspired that day.’
‘Like what?’
‘Two Boeing 747s collided on the runway. A KLM flight was trying to take off while a Pan Am plane was still taxiing. Everyone died in a fire on the KLM, only sixty-one survivors from the front of the Pan Am made it out alive. Almost six hundred people died – the deadliest incident in aviation history. Until?—’
‘Until the Twin Towers,’ they both said in unison.
‘But you know what the weirdest thing about that day was?’
‘Not just the highly unlikely chance of disaster… which hasn’t happened on a scale like that in nearly fifty years…?’
Minnie smiled as if to say, I know I know, I’m ridiculous , but carried on, her momentum gaining pace.
‘Neither plane was meant to be there!’ She looked as if she’d just delivered an awesome card trick.
Jesse looked blank.
‘A terrorist bomb set off by Canary Island separatists had exploded in Gran Canaria, so all these flights had been diverted to Tenerife.’
‘Well isn’t that even more reason to believe in the safety of aviation? Neither plane suffered jet failure nor malfunction. No broken wing or bird in the engine. It was just pure and simple shitty circumstances, like terrorism, or a depressed co-pilot. The likes of which are so miniscule.’
Minnie’s eyes widened in horror.
‘Does that not make it easier for you to get on a plane?’
Jesse obviously had no clue, Minnie thought.
‘Japan Airlines Flight 123?’
‘What?’
‘That was “structural damage” causing 520 deaths. Second most deadly aviation incident caused by technical failure. And it was crazy circumstance.’
‘Oh God, do I want to know?’
‘You should know, Jesse! Might make you think twice about flying. August 12 1985. The plane was flying from Tokyo to Osaka when the tail broke off and it crashed. But – get this – the crash was later found to be down to an incident seven years earlier, when the tail was damaged coming in to land at Itami Airport, and it wasn’t repaired properly.’
‘So what’s your point? Other than never get on a plane. Or maybe stop reading up on this stuff.’
‘My point is a positive one actually…’ Minnie said it pedantically. ‘Tony says all this is out of our control. A bomb could go off on another island or a tailstrike repair could come unstuck. You have to just roll with it. Good and bad. And try to find the good where you only see bad. Lots of things led me to working that event where I met JP. I might have been filming. Or going to a friend’s birthday party. I had no plans, so I worked a crappy event at The Dorchester where I met a man who managed to unravel me within a matter of months.’
‘So what’s the good in that?’
‘I met you, didn’t I?’ Minnie said it so sweetly, Jesse looked at his lap and smiled. ‘And I am learning from it. I am learning not to ever forget myself. To remember my worth. To find the good in the bad, and to not sweat all the cosmic stuff I have no control of.’
‘Wow, your therapist is goooood.’
Minnie smiled proudly, as if she had just passed a test.
‘So why don’t you do it? Take a holiday further afield. Prove you can. If you have to give in and submit to the universe… book a flight!’
That reminded Jesse. He awoke his phone. The flight he was tracking was halfway to Lahore.
Minnie’s shoulders slumped again.
‘It’s just all so… well it’s so brutal when you’re talking about a disaster in aviation. Or heartbreak.’
‘I guess…’ Jesse said, as he put his phone to sleep again.
‘Why do you look at all those planes anyway?’ Minnie shout-whispered, as Bingoncé hit the vocal gymnastics on the last note, took a bow to huge applause and whistles, before an excited hush fell over the room.
Jesse didn’t answer. Instead he studied his card to familiarise himself with his numbers, and picked up a dabber.
‘Good luck!’ He smiled.
‘Number thirteen, Galentine’s Day…’
‘Seventy-three, Queen Bee…’
‘Two curvaceous queens… eighty-eight!’
‘Sixty-eight, “Amazing Grace”…’
‘Twenty-two, two little twins…’
The pace of Beyoncé Bingo was as fast as the woman herself, and Jesse’s red splodges were landing on the card in an aesthetically pleasing formation.
‘Look!’ he said, nudging into Minnie. ‘One more and I get a line!’ He looked pleased with himself, then glanced at the card of the woman on the other side of him. She didn’t have as many red splodges. This was fun.
‘Hang on?—’
‘Eighty-two, “Déjà Vu”,’ called Bingoncé.
‘BINGO!’ bellowed Jesse, taking himself by surprise as he punched an arm in the air. Everyone in the hall turned to look in his direction, surprised by such timely success.
‘I’ve got a line!’ he called, and looked around at a room full of blank faces. ‘Do you get something for a line?’ he asked Minnie under his breath, now self-conscious as the atmosphere had gone so steely.
‘Ooh, we have a winner, that was quick!’ Bingoncé cooed. ‘Stand up, honey, let me see you…’
Jesse looked around and stood up gingerly. Minnie looked up at him, ignoring the golden hair on his taut stomach where his jacket and T-shirt had risen up.
‘OK, baby, read out your numbers please and Gay-Zee will check them back…’
The woman’s American accent was waning.
‘Five.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Thirteen.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Thirty-five.’
‘Correct.’
‘Sixty-eight.’
Gay-Zee nodded.
‘Twenty-two…’
‘And…?’
Jesse looked at his card and up again, his cheeks starting to burn.
‘That’s it.’
‘That’s it? Honey, I said we playin’ for a full house.’
Quiet ripples of relief and laughter rolled over the bingo hall.
‘We don’t do lines here, do we, baby?’ Bingoncé said.
‘Nuh-uh.’ Gay-Zee shook his head sanctimoniously. The audience chuckled.
‘Oops,’ Minnie said through gritted teeth. She gently tugged Jesse’s sleeve, beckoning him to sit down.
‘Sit ya handsome ass down, honey, and let’s stop stealing my spotlight, huh?’ Bingoncé said, eyeballing Jesse flirtatiously.
There was a raucous cheer – the game wasn’t over.
‘Sweet dream or beautiful nightmare?’ Bingoncé pointed and winked at Jesse. ‘Take a bow, honey, let’s get on with the show.’
The crowd cheered louder and Jesse took it on the chin, turned to face the majority of the room, and took a humble bow before plonking himself down, his face tomato red. Minnie patted him on the arm.
‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sure it happens all the time!’
Jesse took a hearty swig of his beer and the game continued. A basket of Houston Fried Chicken finally arrived, and when a woman at the back of the hall later shouted ‘BINGO!’ she was a winner.
‘Fair dos, never mind buddy,’ Minnie consoled, as they each stabbed popcorn fried chicken with a wooden fork. ‘Two more cards, two more chances to win.’
Jesse loved Minnie’s optimism.
At the break a drag artist called Queen B came on stage and sang ‘If I Were A Boy’, while Minnie went to get Jesse another beer and herself a gin lemonade, sips of which helped her ask the question that had been hovering at the front of her mind but the back of her throat since they arrived.
‘So what’s your daughter’s name? How old is she?’ Minnie asked, as she straddled the bench and sat back in, placing Jesse’s beer in front of him. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were a dad!’ She internally cursed herself for sounding weird about it, when she absolutely wasn’t weird about it.
‘Should I have done?’ he asked with a smile.
‘We’re mates, I’m intrigued!’
Jesse’s face lit up as if he were pretty intrigued too.
‘Her name is Ida. She’s seven.’
‘Ahhh, Ida. Beautiful name.’
Jesse’s face dropped a little. ‘She lives with her mother, in our flat in Kentish Town.’
‘Oh, Kentish Town, that’s near me!’
‘I have her every other weekend – which is why I can’t easily meet on a Saturday.’
As Minnie had hastily left Jesse at the zoo two weeks previously, and suggested Beyoncé Bingo, they had agreed that meeting fortnightly might suit the rhythm of their diaries. It was only twice a month, Jesse figured. He could commit to twice a month for a few hours while Minnie needed to do what she needed to do for her therapy project.
‘Oh, you’re divorced?’
‘Separated,’ he replied swiftly.
‘How long have you been separated?’
‘A few months. Just a trial thing though, while we work out what we want.’ As Jesse said it, he wondered why he was lying. What difference would it make? ‘I’m staying with my mate in West Hampstead for a bit.’
‘My parents live in Hampstead!’
‘Nice. You grew up around there?’
‘Yeah.’ Minnie nodded, but she didn’t want to make this about her. She wanted Jesse to finally open up. ‘So who’s your mate you’re staying with? Is that the teacher?’
Minnie had noted when Jesse referred to his flatmate as a teacher that she had left the classroom to do private tutoring. Perhaps the flatmate was a new girlfriend.
‘Yeah Elena’s a teacher. A private tutor now though. I’m staying with her and her husband Andrew. And their twin boys. They’re the same age as Ida. We met through Ida actually, when they were all babies.’
‘Ahh nice.’
Jesse made a face.
‘Not nice?’ she countered.
‘It’s pretty fucking soul destroying actually, living with kids who aren’t yours.’
Minnie’s pale nose crinkled. ‘I bet. So what happened?’
‘Just a rough patch, you know… baby comes along and you don’t have a proper conversation for seven years.’ Jesse said it so vaguely as if it wasn’t really happening to him.
Minnie didn’t know what it was like. There had been five kids in her childhood and her parents always seemed to be talking. It was a happy, vibrant and loving home.
‘What’s she like?’
‘Hannah? Or Ida?’
Minnie couldn’t help but bristle at the name Hannah and she didn’t even know why. Hannah might be the nicest woman in the world and Jesse might be a shit husband or an awful father. He didn’t give off that energy though, despite first impressions.
‘Your daughter.’
‘Ahhh she’s amazing. Coolest kid I know. Gorgeous – of course. Obsessed with marsupials. Can tell you any fact about any Australian animal you could ever want to know.’
‘Ooh does she know about quokkas? Those funny animals people take smiley selfies with? I see them all over Instagram.’
‘She has a quokka calendar on her bedroom wall.’
‘Cool!’
‘Yeah, she wants to go to Australia – now that’s a flight.’
Minnie winced.
‘The twins, Andrew and Elena went to Australia a few months ago, brought Ida back a cuddly wombat. She loves it so much, she takes it everywhere.’
Minnie smiled at the sound of it, at the look on Jesse’s face.
‘It took the edge off her friends going to Australia while she had to stay here and go to school.’
‘Well she sounds intrepid.’
‘She is. She wants to go to Nepal. I don’t think I’d heard of Nepal aged seven.’
‘I definitely hadn’t! She’s a smart cookie.’
‘She wants to be a red panda when she grows up actually, although that’s ambitious.’ Jesse winked at Minnie, and she felt a strange and surprising crackle inside, which she buried, while he continued. ‘My dad said Remy the red panda was inspired by Ida.’
Jesse smiled to himself and smoothed out the next bingo card in front of him.
‘And Hannah? Is she a flight attendant? Or a pilot? Is that why you’re always on that tracker?’
‘Hahaha no!’ Jesse measured his features. ‘She’s an accountant. She had – she has – a proper job. Number crunching with CEOs and CFOs and all that stuff.’
‘Wow.’
Queen B left the stage and a group from a hen party were crowding around Gay-Zee as he started tinkling the notes of ‘Empire State of Mind’.
Minnie studied Jesse. She had a thousand questions a mate would ask a mate, but for some reason, none of them could make their way from her brain to her mouth. For once, Minnie Byrne had clammed up. She stopped talking, stopped wittering, stopped asking questions. All of a sudden it felt like it was a no-go area and too intrusive. So she changed the subject.
‘Ooh, I have cool news!’
‘What’s that?’
‘I have an audition at the end of the month. In Paris. For a movie!’
‘Wait, what? That’s like three really cool pieces of news. Take me through them, one at a time.’
‘Well Devon – my agent – he’s got me an audition after a bit of a lean few months, so it’s great, but I feel out of practice.’
‘You’ll be awesome I’m sure.’
Minnie nodded. ‘It’s exciting. It’s at a hotel in Paris. Wim Fischer is directing.’
‘Wow, Wim Fischer? That’s so cool.’
‘I know right? He’s on the junket juggernaut promoting his new film, so his casting director and he are having meetings for his next movie while he’s in Europe.’
‘That’s incredible Minnie. Congratulations!’ Jesse raised his bottle and Minnie met it with her gin lemonade.
‘And I don’t have to fly, just out and back on the train in a day.’
‘Even better!’
‘I probably won’t get it of course.’
‘Of course,’ Jesse joked.
‘But getting the audition is the first hurdle.’
‘It’s amazing. Well done.’
Minnie looked as if it was no big deal, even though she knew it was.
‘What’s the role?’
‘Her name is Veronica Valla. She’s a cocktail waiter by night and an assassin by… well, also by night. She’s part of this European organisation of spies blah blah blah but she’s kickass and I’d love to play her.’
Jesse suddenly noticed a very kickass sparkle in those green eyes of Minnie’s.
‘Well…’ he said with consideration. ‘I think you’ve already nailed it.’
Bingoncé came back on stage singing ‘Cuff It’ before calling eyes down for a second round and Minnie increasingly felt, with every sip of gin lemonade, like fucking up the night.