One Minute to Midnight Page 4

  ‘No, honestly, it’s good. Who’s this one for again?’

  ‘It’s for the Law Society dinner in January. I’m keynote speaker, remember? I did tell you about this Nic.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I remember.’

  He raises an eyebrow, sceptical. ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘I do.’ I didn’t.

  I’m incredibly proud of Dom. He’s a very successful solicitor, made partner at thirty-two, he’s forever getting asked to give speeches and appear on committees. But sometimes I do space out when he’s talking about his job, and not just because employment law is not the most enthralling of subjects. It’s because I’m jealous. It’s pathetic, I know, but I can’t help myself. Witnessing the steady, hard-won, well-deserved progression of his career from strength to strength only serves to highlight the painful decline of my own. And it’s stupid, I know, because this isn’t a zero-sum game: his doing well doesn’t have anything to do with my doing badly. Still, it hurts.

  Take, for example, my latest project, Betrayal. When I was first asked to produce the programme, the production company informed me that it was going to be a fairly sober three-part series ‘examining the causes and consequences of domestic treachery’. Obviously I knew what the basic subject matter would be: divorces, affairs, Machiavellian goings-on in the workplace, that sort of thing. I also thought it might be quite interesting. The production company promised interviews with psychologists and psychiatrists, in-depth sessions with family counsellors, cultural references and historical comparisons – we’d look at the stories of Judas and Iago, Brutus and Delilah. I thought I might learn something. I thought it might help me deal with my own situation. Ha! I never learn. Turns out it’s just another prurient, cruel trawl through the dirty laundry of people whose lives have just not turned out the way they thought they would.

  Annie Gardner, the woman I have to visit in Oxford tomorrow, is a case in point. Annie is married to Jim. They have two daughters and, as far as Annie was concerned, they were perfectly happy. That was until Annie’s sister, Suzanne, fell pregnant and announced to Annie that Jim was the father. Suzanne has decided to keep the baby and Jim, big-hearted chap that he is, has agreed to support it. Annie has forgiven them both. And into this domestic hell go I.

  Annie is the ideal subject for the programme – and they’re not all that easy to find, despite what a daily diet of Jeremy Kyle and Jerry Springer might suggest – but she’s very nervous about airing her dirty laundry in public. Who wouldn’t be? In any case, she’s having second thoughts about participating and it’s my job to convince her to go ahead. Now all I have to do is prepare a pitch which will not only convince Annie to take part in the programme, but which will also not be a cynical, manipulative lie, the telling of which will keep me awake at night. It is not going to be easy.

  I wrestle with the subject all afternoon, eventually giving up around seven. I come downstairs and discover Dom in the kitchen, staring into an open fridge.

  ‘What do you fancy for dinner?’ he asks. ‘We have turkey, ham, half a dozen mince pies …’

  ‘Chinese,’ I say. ‘I feel like Chinese.’

  We order crispy aromatic duck, black bean stir-fry, butterfly tiger prawns and spring rolls, seaweed and loads of prawn crackers. We eat this feast on the sofa in front of the TV, and afterwards lie there, sated and soporific, Dom’s arms around me, the dogs snoring next to the fire, watching a marathon of Blackadder Goes Forth re-runs on Gold. Perfection. Solid, safe, domestic bliss.

  ‘Nic?’ Dom says sleepily, squeezing me a little harder. ‘You fancy an early night?’

  ‘What?’ I ask, feigning shock ‘Twice in one day?’

  ‘No, I actually mean I want to go to bed. To sleep. I’m knackered.’

  ‘All right, old man,’ I say with a smile. ‘I’ll put the dogs to bed, you make the Horlicks.’

  I wake with a start from a bad dream, the precise details of which I can’t remember. I just know that it was horrible. Dom is sound asleep at my side, I slip my hand into his for comfort. He doesn’t wake. I lie there, motionless, for a minute or two, just listening to his breathing. I feel suddenly and completely awake, my heart beating just a little too quickly.

  I check the time on my phone. One-thirty. Five more hours of sleep. If only. I can’t seem to shut my mind down; I can’t stop thinking about New York. I’ve been looking forward to it for months, ever since Karl invited us over to attend his inaugural ‘New York for New Year’s Eve’ party. I haven’t been over there for years, not since 2005, and I love New York. It’s one of my favourite places on earth. And I can’t wait to see Karl again. But New York isn’t just home to Karl; it was also home to Aidan and to Alex. How was it that some of the most important people in my life have ended up there, in glamorous Manhattan, while here I was stuck in boring old southwest London? This wasn’t the way things were supposed to turn out.

  I slip my hand from Dom’s, flip my pillow over, lay my cheek on the cool cotton and close my eyes. Sleep. I must sleep. I can’t sleep. Instead, I make a mental list.

  * * *

  New Year’s Resolutions, 2011:

  1. Get in touch with Aidan re job offer

  2. Lose half a stone

  3. Stop taking the pill

  4. Repaint the kitchen

  5. Sort out things with Dad

  The sublime, the ridiculous and the incredibly vague: a perfect list of resolutions. I ought to write it down. Carefully, I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and creep out of the room. Padding around in the dark again. It was getting to be a habit. I can’t go upstairs to my study – it’s directly above our bedroom and the floor boards up there creak terribly – so I go downstairs instead. I tiptoe into the kitchen (don’t want to wake the dogs up), and in the darkness search for the bottle of Scotch we’d opened on Christmas Day. I discover it next to the toaster, pour myself a large measure and, with the bottle still in hand, pad into Dom’s study and switch on his computer. I log onto the Internet, open my email account and the message from my father. I click ‘reply’.

  Thanks for your message Dad. I’m very sorry to hear you’re unwell.

  That sounds lame, as though he’d written to me telling me he’d been a bit under the weather. I try again.

  Dear Dad, I am terribly sorry to hear your news. Unfortunately, the timing is awful …

  The timing is awful? What the hell am I talking about? Am I saying it’s a bad time to tell me he has cancer, or simply that it’s a bad time to get cancer? For god’s sake. Just be direct:

  Dad, I’m afraid that I cannot come and see you before your operation.

  And that’s just brutal. Nothing I write sounds in any way close to adequate. I sit and stare at the screen, reading and rereading his message, desperately trying to think of something to say to him, something I actually feel. Trouble is, I don’t really know what I feel, other than horrible. I give up, delete what I’d written and close the message. Then I open another email account, the secret Hotmail one that Dom doesn’t know about. I have three new messages. Two are spam, quickly deleted. The third, which arrived that afternoon, comes from arose@petersen.com. Alex. No subject line. I click on her name to open the message.

  So, it’s confirmed. Aaron’s playing away. Checked his BlackBerry on Christmas morning while he was in the shower. Message from Jessica. And I quote:

  ‘Lying in bed, wearing new La Perla (thank you, thank you!) and no one to play with. Can you get away Boxing Day? Happy Xmas my darling Jx’

  I wasn’t surprised, of course, but you were right, it does feel like someone’s stuck a knife into one’s chest and is twisting it, slowly, slowly, oh so bloody slowly. Haven’t said anything to him yet. I’ve barely got out of bed since I saw the message. Feigning illness. So now he brings me chicken soup in bed and soothes my (allegedly) fevered brow and all I want to do is punch him in the face.

  I guess you must think I got what was coming to me.

  God, I miss you Nic.

  xA


  I take a large gulp of whisky. Some of it drips down off my chin and onto my T-shirt. It’s one of my sleeping shirts, I’ve got a few, all of them ancient relics from another life. This one is my Different Class T-shirt, Julian bought it for me when we went to see Pulp play at the Brixton Academy in the first term of my first year at university. It’s soft, worn thin over my shoulders, holes appearing along the seams. It will disintegrate to rags before I throw it out. I take another swig of my drink, shut down the computer, wipe the tears from my eyes and go back to bed.

  Chapter Four

  New Year’s Eve, 1991

  High Wycombe

  Resolutions:

  1. Enter the Seventeen short story competition

  2. Lose half a stone

  3. Phone Dad at least once a week

  4. Sign up for the photography course at the leisure centre

  5. Forget about Julian Symonds

  CHARLES WAS COMING round for dinner, which really pissed me off. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him; he was actually really nice. It just seemed … insensitive. This, after all, was the anniversary of my parents’ spectacular break-up and there was still part of me that blamed Charles for it. Charles, my mother, myself most of all. Somehow over the course of the past twelve months Dad’s part in the whole thing seemed to have diminished in importance.

  Mum suggested that I invite a couple of friends around to join us for dinner; grumpily, I declined.

  ‘It’s going to be really boring,’ I pointed out. ‘My friends do not want to come round here and watch TV with you and your boyfriend.’

  ‘Okay then, darling, have it your way,’ Mum replied breezily, which infuriated me further. This was not going my way. This is not how I wanted to spend New Year’s Eve. I wanted to be going out to a party, or at least having a party at home. Actually, the thing I wanted most of all was to have last New Year’s Eve back, a chance to do it over, minus the bloody ending. More than anything on earth, I wanted to be sitting in my bedroom with Julian Symonds.

  Julian and I had not spoken since Valentine’s Day. He’d called a couple of times in the summer, but I’d got Mum to say that I was out. I didn’t want to talk to him, ever again. I didn’t want to hear him say that he was sorry, or to tell me that it wasn’t me, it was him. I didn’t want to hear him say that he really hoped we could be friends. It was all just too humiliating, too painful.

  The thing was, I should have been over him by now.

  ‘You only went out for like, five minutes,’ Emma Bradley, my supposed best friend at school pointed out to me the last time I flinched at the mention of Julian’s name. ‘Don’t you think you’re being a bit … melodramatic? It’s not like you were in love or anything. You didn’t even shag him.’

  True, I didn’t shag him, but I was in love with him. And it wasn’t five minutes. It was five weeks. Five torturous, blissful, rollercoaster weeks, the five most intense weeks of my entire existence, the weeks during which I was Julian Symonds’ Girlfriend.

  It was beyond my wildest dreams. After all, I’d returned to school a week after the New Year’s Eve party in a state of panic. I was terrified of seeing Julian again, convinced that he would have told the entire school about the party; about my awful fucked-up family, what a total head case my dad was, and about how desperately uncool I was, with a Gustav Klimt print on the wall and everything. That first morning back, I made my way towards morning assembly with my head down. My entire body tense, I glanced up every now and again to check whether people were staring at me, whispering, pointing, laughing. They were not. No one said anything to me, apart from a couple of classmates saying hello and asking if I’d had a nice Christmas, until I reached the doorway of the assembly hall. Then, just as I was about to enter, I felt a gentle tug at my sleeve, and I turned around and there he was, towering over me, handsome even in the dull grey of his school uniform.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, not quite meeting my eye. ‘How are you?’ He looked nervous, he was shifting his weight from foot to foot, biting his lower lip.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I said, concentrating terribly hard on breathing and not falling over at the same time. ‘How about you?’

  ‘I wanted to ring you,’ he said, ‘to find out if you were okay. You and your mum. But I wasn’t sure if I should … I was worried …’

  ‘Dad moved out,’ I said, ‘so, you could have, you know, if you wanted to, you know, called me.’ Jesus, I sounded retarded.

  ‘God, Nicole, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry about your parents. That’s just awful. I feel really terrible about this.’ He looked genuinely upset.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I said.

  ‘It kind of was …’

  ‘Julian …’

  The second bell went, the signal for everyone to get into the assembly hall immediately unless they wanted a week’s detention.

  ‘Can I come and see you?’ he asked me. ‘After school, some time this week?’

  My heart was hammering so hard in my chest I thought I might pass out.

  ‘Of course,’ I squeaked. ‘That would be … nice. I have piano today and gymnastics on Thursday, but any other day would be fine.’ Christ, now I sounded like a nine-year-old.

  But he didn’t seem to think so, he just smiled and said, ‘Great. I’ll come over tomorrow.’

  As I walked into assembly, I glanced around again, holding my head high this time, no longer hiding. No longer was I hoping that no one had noticed me, now I was praying that someone had seen. Please, please say someone had just witnessed me, Nicole Blake of Year Eight, talking to Julian Symonds of Year Ten, not just an older boy, but the best-looking boy in school.

  As promised, he visited the next day. The day after that, he sought me out during our lunch break at school, he actually sat next to me, at my table, in full view of other Year Tens. That Friday, he came round to the house again. I was upstairs in my room, sulking, because I’d come home from school to find Mum sitting in the kitchen with Charles, giggling like a teenager. So undignified. After Charles left, Mum and I had a row. She said I’d been rude to Charles.

  ‘Just because I don’t fawn all over him like you do doesn’t mean I’m being rude,’ I said to her.

  ‘Don’t be like that, Nic,’ she said. ‘He’s my friend.’

  ‘Oh, is that what they’re calling it these days?’

  ‘Nicole!’

  ‘Well, maybe Dad was right …’

  ‘Go to your room, Nicole,’ she said, cutting me off. ‘Now.’

  And I went upstairs and lay on my bed, wondering why I felt the need to be such a bitch to her. I knew she hadn’t done anything wrong.

  I was still lying there when I heard the doorbell ring. A few moments later, there was a soft knock at my door.

  ‘What?’ I snapped.

  Mum pushed the door open. ‘There’s someone downstairs to see you,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It’s Julian,’ she said, and I leapt to my feet in a panic, tearing off my school uniform and rushing around the room looking for something to wear. Mum stood in the doorway watching me.

  ‘I really ought to send him home,’ she said.

  ‘No!’ I cried, horrified. ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘You’ve been really unkind to me, Nic. I’m not sure you should be allowed to see friends tonight.’

  ‘Please, Mum,’ I begged her. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’

  She just looked at me, implacable. Then she smiled. ‘The red top, that one we got on Oxford Street last summer. Put that on. You look lovely in that.’ I flung my arms around her neck and squeezed. ‘Yes, all right. You get dressed and I’ll tell Julian you’re on your way down. And Nic?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I would never be rude to your friends. Please do me the same courtesy.’

  I pulled on some jeans, threw on the red top and drew a line of black kohl under my eyes. I glowered at myself in the mirror. I was hideous. But there was nothing to be done about
it now. I took a deep breath, pushed open my bedroom door and made my way downstairs.

  Julian was standing in the hallway. Dressed in black jeans, his biker jacket and Doc Martens, he looked perfect.

  ‘Hey you,’ he said with a smile, ‘hope you don’t mind me just coming by like this.’

  ‘Course not,’ I said. As I got to the bottom of the stairs, he reached for my hand. I thought I was going to die. He pulled me closer, glancing quickly over my shoulder to make sure that we were alone (we were – my wonderful mother had disappeared into the kitchen), then he leant over and kissed me on the lips.

  ‘Even better,’ he said softly.

  ‘Even better than what?’

  ‘Than I’d imagined. And I’ve been imagining that since New Year’s Eve.’

  So it began, and it was even better than I’d dreamt it would be, too. It was perfect. He was so easy to be around, and beneath that whole cool façade, he had a wicked sense of humour. For the five weeks we were together it seemed like we never stopped talking – about everything: my family, his family, our friends, films, music, art … And I was so proud to walk down the halls with him, holding his hand, or with his arm draped around my shoulders – and he was so cool about stuff like that – he wasn’t like those idiots who refuse to show their girlfriends any affection in public, but once they’re alone immediately begin ripping their clothes off. Julian was happy to be seen with me.

  Except, of course, that it wasn’t perfect. Because although he was lovely and affectionate in public, he was nothing more than lovely and affectionate in private, too. Not that I actually wanted to do anything with him (not yet, anyway), but it seemed really weird to me that he didn’t want to. I never ever said anything about it (of course), but privately, I tortured myself. Why didn’t he want me? What was wrong with me? Well, aside from my thighs (flabby), breasts (small), hips (wide) and so on. I tried to reassure myself that he was just being respectful of me, but in my heart I knew this was total crap. I was fundamentally undesirable.