Shelter In Your Love (Beatles Fan Fiction)

88. Ding Dong Ding Dong

'I have plenty to fuckin' remind me of her already. I don't need this shit--' He stops himself abruptly and softens his voice. 'All this stuff, Han. Her books and clothes and bloody broken table lamps-- It's not Minnie, love. It's not her. It's just what she accumulated while she was here and now it's junk. Don't keep it all to build some sort of shrine.'

I step closer to him and open the lid of another box. This one contains piles of magazines and newspapers. I think I saw them piled up in the kitchen, by the door. Minnie might have put them there to throw away herself. He's right. I am hoarding her rubbish.

'Minnie wanted you to have something,' I confess, in a quiet voice, folding the cardboard flaps down again.

'Love, she wouldn't,' he says, misunderstanding me. 'She wasn't sentimental about this sort of thing, was she? She didn't get attached to belongings--'

'No, this was something special she wanted you to have. It was in her will.'

John raises an eyebrow. 'Minnie had a will?'

I nod. 'It wasn't long. She left most stuff to me, some money to Bobbie for when she's older and... and "a black box and it's contents for Mr. John Winston Lennon". But I can't find it. Do you know what it is?'

I'd hoped he'd would, but I can see from his face he doesn't.

'Uh, no,' John says, gruffly. 'What kind of box?'

'I don't know, that's the problem. All it said was a black vinyl box. No clue to what kind of size or style box it is, or what might be inside. I've looked for it, John, but I couldn't find anything that might even resemble it. You're sure you don't know what it is? I don't understand why Minnie would want you to have it, and then... hide it somewhere.'

John thinks and then smiles wistfully and shakes his head. 'Haven't a clue, Spanner.' He closes the lid to one of the boxes and shrugs. 'Tell you what, when you find it, after you've gone through this mountain of garbage, then you can give it to me. If that's what she wanted me to have, then that's all I want. I don't need anything else.'

'But I can't find it,' I say, despondent. 'And I feel awful about that.'

'It doesn't matter.'

'It does! She wanted you to have it.'

He puts his arm around my shoulder, turning me around, moving me towards the exit. 'If it's here, then it'll turn up, eventually.'

'But--'

John guides me, nearly pushes me, through the door and out into the passageway that runs past these rooms. We haven't got this far yet with renovations and decorating. There's no heating in this part of the house and there's an empty, damp coldness to it. I'm wearing my huge army parka, but I still feel it. I hug my arms around myself, only realising then, that John hasn't followed me out of the room.

He's stopped in the doorway of the drawing room, looking back over all of Minnie's object d'art. The sum of her life. He casts his eyes around it and sighs again before he turns his head to give me a small smile. I return it. I knew looking at all these things couldn't leave him completely unmoved.

'Come on,' John says. 'We've been so long in here, tongues will be wagging. It's how rumours start, y'know.'

He flicks the light switch by the door. There's a pop and instantly all the lights in the corridor and surrounding rooms go off as well. We're plunged into pitch black.

'Well, that's useful,' John says, in the darkness.

'It's the electrics,' I tell him. 'The bulb must have blown when you turned the light out. Every time a bulb goes, it trips a fuse and all the lights go out. We've had electricians look at it but no one seems to be able to fix it. They patch it up, it works for a while and then it starts acting up again.'