‘Look who’s here?’ he said, putting William down on the ground. The boy immediately toddled over to the bed saying, ‘Mama’, arms outstretched to Connie.
‘Do you want to meet your sister, William?’ Connie said, patting the bed beside her. William clambered up, so she had a child in each arm. ‘This is baby Quinn.’
She held William’s hand so he could gently pat his new sister.
‘You can’t call her Quinn now,’ said Bill.
‘Why not?’ said Connie, her eyes darting up to look at him.
‘’Cause that’s what that other lady called hers, the one that won the money.’
‘What?’ Connie said, her voice a whisper. She carefully placed the baby back in the crib next to her bed. ‘What you on about, Bill?’
‘It’s all over the radio. That baby what won all the money just for being born a minute before ours, he’s called Quinn. I still say we were first. I reckon those midwives cooked up between them the times they logged, based on who was going to look prettier in the paper,’ he said gruffly, rubbing two large palms over his bald scalp.
‘Quinn? She called her baby Quinn?’ Connie couldn’t believe it.
‘Yeah, so we can’t call ours that too, we’d look daft. Their Quinn’s all over the news, he’s famous, plus everyone thinks it’s a lad’s name now.’ Connie sat quietly, stunned. ‘I’ve always liked Minnie for a girl,’ Bill went on. ‘What do you think, Will? Baby Minnie. She might not be rich, but she sure is beautiful.’ He leant in to kiss his wife on the forehead, stroking the baby’s cheek with his calloused plasterer’s hands.
Connie was too tired to think. She needed to sleep. She needed to feed the baby. And she needed to work out how she was going to take care of a toddler and a newborn at the same time. She could argue with Bill about the name later.
But by the time they got home and Connie had got some sleep, baby Quinn Hamilton, the first nineties baby, was all over the national news. ‘The Luckiest Baby in the Land,’ read one headline. ‘A win for Quinn!’ said the reporter on the breakfast show. The name felt spoilt now for Connie, the newspapers taunting her with the money she might have won. Besides, Bill had already started calling the baby Minnie. Connie sat on the sofa feeding her child, watching Tara being interviewed by the television presenter.
‘Someone told me Quinn was a name for luck and he’s definitely been lucky so far,’ Tara smiled. Her blonde hair looked blow-dried for the occasion, her face dewy and radiant. She didn’t look like someone who’d recently given birth. Connie looked down at her daughter.
‘I can’t believe she stole your name,’ Connie said softly. She felt a hot wall of tears building behind her eyes. Her milk was coming in and it was making her emotional; if she let the tears come they might never stop. She closed her eyes to quell the rising tide and whispered to the baby, ‘Just a minute too late, hey.’
New Year’s Day 2020
‘So hang on,’ Quinn said, holding up a finger to interrupt. ‘You’re called Minnie Cooper?’
Minnie and Quinn were sitting on the floor, the sun now streaming through the window. She leant back on her hands and stretched her neck from side to side.
‘Would you believe neither of my parents even made that connection for a good couple of weeks? I got a lot of “vroom vrooms” the whole way through school.’
‘Well, I’m sorry that you were named after a car,’ Quinn grinned, ‘but I don’t think that’s how my mother would tell the story.’
‘I’m sure she wouldn’t,’ Minnie said. ‘She’s not going to admit stealing someone else’s name.’
Quinn swivelled his body around to face her.
‘Can you believe we were born in the same hospital on the same day, minutes apart?’ said Quinn, his face animated. ‘What are the chances of that? And then meeting like this, on our birthday of all days. Don’t you think that’s weird?’
Minnie looked back at him, returning his gaze. She’d thought about this man a lot over the course of her life. She knew it was strange to resent someone she’d never met, someone she knew nothing about, but she did. The way her mother told the story, this was the boy who’d stolen her name and with it her good fortune. When bad things happened to Minnie, her mother would say, ‘You were born unlucky, girl.’ It was the refrain of Minnie’s childhood. Memories of missteps sprung to mind.
On her seventh birthday Minnie fell down an uncovered manhole in the street and broke her foot.
‘The workman swears he only turned his back for a few seconds,’ the paramedic said, as he tried to pull Minnie out.
‘Born unlucky this one,’ said Connie, leaning into the manhole. ‘This would never happen to a Quinn Cooper!’
The night before her thirteenth birthday, Minnie’s parents let her host a New Year’s Eve party for some friends. Minnie invited twelve people from her class, including the boy she liked – Callum Peterson. Ten of her guests went down with flu that week so the only people who turned up were Callum and Mary Stephens. Minnie spent the whole night watching Callum and Mary make out on her sofa. The kissathon only paused for oxygen when Minnie’s mum came in from the kitchen to offer them baked snacks. As Connie leant over to remove a plate of uneaten vol-au-vents from the coffee table, she whispered to her daughter with a wink, ‘This would never happen to a—’
‘I know, I know,’ Minnie hissed back, ‘to a Quinn Cooper.’
The story of Minnie’s stolen name had become a Cooper family legend. Her mother regaled people with the story of the injustice of it all whenever she had the opportunity.
‘Not that she’s bitter,’ Minnie’s dad would chip in with a smirk.
‘Oh, shut it. That prissy woman wouldn’t have had her baby for hours if it weren’t for me,’ Connie would say.
Bill and William made fun of Connie whenever the topic came up, but Minnie noticed that though her mother pretended to make light of it, her eyes had this pained expression. There was a grey folder full of clippings and childhood mementos, which her mother sometimes pulled out at birthdays or Christmas. It had all the old timetables from Minnie’s swim-meets, Will’s Mathlete certificates, and then there was the clipping from The London News the day she was born, with the headline about Quinn plastered across the front page. Whenever her mother reached that page, her face took on a look of solemn reverence.
Minnie never imagined she would ever meet this man. Sometimes she even wondered if the fable was real. When she was a teenager, she’d looked for him online once. She’d found no Quinn Hamilton the same age as her on social media. And yet here he was, all six-foot-something of him, sitting next to her on the floor, his warm, handsome face smiling at her as though they were old friends.
‘If it makes you feel any better, I don’t know how lucky the name has been for me,’ said Quinn.
‘You look as if you’re doing all right,’ said Minnie. ‘That party last night probably cost more than I earn in a year.’
‘Money isn’t everything,’ Quinn shrugged.