by Silver, Amy
We spent the weekend holed up in Aidan’s hotel room, talking incessantly, drinking champagne and having the best sex I’d ever had. Aidan left on Sunday night, and on Monday I broke up with Stewart. Alex was incredulous. So was Julian. He rang me on the Tuesday.
‘Alex just called,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe you dumped Stewart. He was a nice guy.’
‘It’s all your fault,’ I told him. ‘You should never have given Aidan my address. You know I can’t resist him.’
‘He threatened my Fred Perrys, Nic. What else could I do? In any case, what’s going on with you two now? I hope you’re not expecting anything from him. I love the man like a brother, but you know what he’s like. He’s never around, and even when he is, he isn’t exactly reliable.’ He sounded worried.
‘Of course I’m not expecting anything,’ I replied, although of course I was desperately hoping that this might develop into an actual, full-blown relationship. ‘We’re just taking it slowly.’
‘Good.’
‘And we’re going to spend Christmas together. Me and my mum and Aidan and you – since your parents are off jet-setting again this year. And Charles, of course. And Alex, if she doesn’t go home this year. It’ll be brilliant.’
‘Okay,’ Julian said, still sounding less than convinced. ‘I hope you’re right.’
A few days before Christmas, Aidan rang to tell me he wasn’t going to be able to spend it with us.
‘Things are hotting up in Iraq,’ he told me. ‘The disarmament crisis. We’re going out to Kuwait for a few days, going to cover things from there. I’ll ring you when I get back.’
I didn’t see or hear from him again until the following summer. He turned up in Oxford again a month before I wrote my finals. The prospect of having him back in my life spun my head yet again. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, I spent hours in the library composing cool but sassy text messages to him, instead of reading Beowulf. Two nights before my exams started, Aidan rang to tell me he was going away again, to the Congo. He wasn’t sure how long he’d be, or when he’d be able to get back in touch.
I did not get the first-class degree I’d spent three years working for.
I flick open my laptop to rewrite my resolutions.
New Year’s Resolutions, 2011:
1. Get in touch with Aidan re job offer Talk to old BBC contacts about work
2. Lose half a stone
3. Stop taking the pill (or at least admit to Dom that I’m still taking it??)
4. Repaint the kitchen
5. Sort out things with Dad Make an effort to see Dad regularly – monthly dinners?
There’s one new message in my secret Hotmail account.
Alex to Nicole
Nicole? Are you still there? I have to come to London for work at the end of January. I was hoping I could see you. Any chance?
Nicole to Alex
I don’t think so, Alex.
Alex to Nicole
Please?
Nicole to Alex
I’m not trying to hurt you, Alex. I just don’t think I can see you.
Alex to Nicole
Okay. I love you, Nic. I’ll be thinking of you on Friday.
I close my laptop and ring Dom from my mobile, but it goes straight to voicemail. I leave him a message, telling him I’m sorry that I missed dinner, that I bailed on him at the last minute, but it’s a lie. I’m not sorry, I’m pleased that I came. It was the right thing to do.
I rewrite my resolutions one more time.
New Years Resolutions, 2011:
1. Get in touch with Aidan re job offer Talk to old BBC contacts about work
2. Lose half a stone.
3. Stop taking the pill – or at least admit to Dom that I’m still taking it Be honest with Dom. About everything.
4. Repaint the kitchen
5. Sort out things with Dad Make an effort to see Dad regularly – monthly dinners?
Chapter Eight
New Year’s Eve, 1999
London
Resolutions:
1. Get a job! Any job! Preferably one in TV though
2. Lose half a stone
3. Go to Marrakech, take a trip into the Sahara (or the Atlas mountains?)
4. Read The Times and the Guardian every day
5. Go bunjee jumping. Or sky-diving.
‘I JUST DON’T see why we’re all making so much fuss when it isn’t actually the millennium tonight.’
‘Oh will you shut up with that?’ Julian lobbed a pillow at my head.
‘Well, it’s true. The actual start of the third millennium is 1 January 2001, not 1 January 2000. We’re a year early.’
Alex groaned and laid back on the bed. ‘Will you stop trying to spoil our fun? I don’t care if it’s the real millennium tonight or next year, tonight is when everyone’s celebrating it, so stop being such a downer.’
‘Exactly,’ Jules agreed. ‘Tonight we are, quite literally, going to party like it’s 1999.’
‘It is 1999.’
‘Oh, just drink some champagne and cheer up, will you?’
The three of us were sitting on Alex’s bed, drinking cheap cava and helping Alex choose her outfit for the evening. At that moment she was wearing a red Gucci mini-dress (bought with her entire student loan in the summer sale) and high heels.
‘You’ll freeze to death,’ I told her.
‘Yes, but her corpse will look fucking fabulous,’ Julian said. He took a photograph of her; she posed for the camera, model-esque.
‘Well, I’m wearing jeans,’ I said. ‘And lots of layers. A woolly jumper. And Doc Martens.’
Alex wrinkled her nose at me in disgust. ‘You can’t wear a woolly jumper, Nicole. We’re on the guest list at Fabric.’
‘Well if we’re on the guest list, we should we able to wear whatever the hell we like. In any case, before we get to Fabric we’re going to be standing on the banks of the Thames for hours, freezing our arses off. You’ll be miserable as sin by eleven, I’m warning you.’
Alex kicked off her heels, unzipped her dress and let it fall to the ground. She was wearing bright pink underwear. Julian took some more photographs.
‘You’d better not show anyone those, Jules,’ she said, as she rifled despairingly though another rack of garments.
‘Oh, I was thinking of blowing them up and hanging them in the living room. If you’ve got it, you know, may as well …’
The two of them started giggling, which got on my nerves. I swilled back more cava in an attempt to perk myself up a bit. To be perfectly honest, I was feeling grumpy. I didn’t want to stand for ages on the banks of the Thames looking at fireworks and I didn’t want to go to some uber-trendy club where Alex and Julian would fit in effortlessly and I’d stand around feeling incredibly uncool. If it had been up to me, we’d have just had a party at home, but my flatmates refused. Not entirely unreasonably, it had to be admitted, since you couldn’t fit more than fifteen people into our place at the very most.
Julian, Alex and I had been living in a flat on Heneage Street, just off Brick Lane, since the summer. A tiny three-bed with a galley kitchen and a shower room (no bath), it was poky and cramped, with paint peeling off the walls in the hallway and rising damp in the bathroom. We loved it. A stone’s throw from the Whitechapel Gallery, a short hop to Shoreditch and all the curry you could eat right on your doorstep.
I couldn’t remember being happier: Jules and I had been dreaming about sharing a flat (in New York, or Paris, or Barcelona, or London) since he was seventeen and I was fifteen. Having Alex in the mix just added to the fun. I loved our lazy Sunday brunches at the Cantaloupe, I loved the evenings spent sitting on our tatty sofa drinking cheap Rioja and eating pizza while watching EastEnders; most of all I loved the fact that Jules could crawl into bed with me at three in the morning after a big night out and tell me all about his adventures.
And so what if the flat wasn’t exactly the luxury apartment of our teenage dreams? It wasn’t like we had a lot
of choice: it was all we could afford. Julian was earning peanuts working as an assistant for a freelance photographer, Alex had landed her dream job in a publishing house, but she was starting at the very bottom of the ladder so she was earning peanuts too, and I wasn’t earning anything at all. My three-month graduate trainee-ship at Optimum, a TV production company, had ended without my being taken on permanently. That was five weeks previously, and I was yet to find a new job. Frankly, I was starting to panic.
Which was another reason for my being unseasonably grumpy that New Year.
‘If I don’t find anything in the next month, I’m going to have to move home,’ I moaned to Julian, while simultaneously trying to feign interest in Alex’s sixth wardrobe change.
‘Never going to happen. I won’t let you.’
‘I’m running out of money, Jules. By February I won’t be able to pay the rent.’
‘Then we’ll sub you one month’s rent. You’re not going home.’
‘You don’t have any money either, Julian.’
‘I’ll quit smoking. It’s on my list of resolutions.’
‘It’s always on your list of resolutions.’
Alex pirouetted around in front of us in gold hot pants and a sheer black top.
‘No!’ I protested. ‘I am not going anywhere with you looking like that. Seriously. You look like a stripper.’
‘Now there’s a solution to our money problems,’ Julian said with a grin. ‘Let’s send Alex out to work at Spearmint Rhino. Oh my god!’ he said, his eyes wide. ‘You even have the perfect stripper name. “Lexi Rose”!’ he exclaimed, waving an arm from left to right as though presenting the billing.
Alex threw a feather boa at him and downed the rest of her sparkling wine.
‘Well, I think I look good in these.’
‘You look amazing, Lexi Rose, you really do,’ I said. ‘But I’m still not going anywhere with you dressed like that.’
An hour or so later, we were ready to go. Alex was back in the red Gucci dress, Julian was devastatingly gorgeous in jeans and a leather jacket. I was wearing jeans too, though Alex had managed to persuade me out of my woolly jumper and Doc Martens and into a daringly low-backed top and heels. The three of us walked arm in arm along Brick Lane, heading north towards Shoreditch where we were planning to hit a few bars before making for the river. A motorbike roared past on our right-hand side. Alex jumped, almost tripping over the pavement in her haste to get out the road.
‘Wanker!’ she called out after the bike, flicking a ‘V’ sign at his back. To my alarm, the motorcyclist slowed, turned the bike around and headed back towards us.
‘He can’t have heard me, he can’t possibly have …’ Alex said.
‘Might have seen you though …’ Julian replied.
The bike came to a halt just in front of us. ‘Oh crap,’ Alex muttered. My legs had turned to jelly, but not because I was afraid of being beaten up in a road rage incident. I knew who it was even before he took off the helmet.
I hung back while Aidan and Julian embraced. Aidan looked tired and gaunt, there were dark circles beneath those beautiful green eyes.
‘Wanker!’ Alex muttered again. Then she grabbed my arm and pulled me closer. ‘Do not, under any circumstances, sleep with him tonight,’ she hissed in my ear.
I rolled my eyes at her. ‘Of course I’m not going to sleep with him,’ I whispered. ‘I haven’t forgiven him for costing me my first. Or for breaking up me and Stewart. I’m totally over him in any case.’
And then Aidan put his arms around me and buried his face in my neck, murmuring, ‘Hello, beautiful,’ and I felt like I’d come home. We held on to each other for just a little too long, oblivious to the noise and the people around us. Alex broke the spell.
‘Hello, wanker,’ she said. ‘You nearly killed me back there, you know.’
‘Nah, I knew what I was doing. Just giving you a little buzz.’ He looked her up and down. ‘Going to a tarts and vicars party, are we?’ She slapped him, not quite playfully, across the face, then gave him a kiss on the cheek.
‘Wash your mouth out,’ she said. ‘This is Gucci. And we’re going to a party at Fabric later. We’re on the guest list; you are not.’
‘But you’re very welcome to join us for drinks and fireworks,’ Julian said, stepping in between the two of them. ‘Although I’d imagine that an international playboy like your good self would have plans for the biggest New Year’s Eve of all time?’
Aidan shrugged. ‘It’s not even the proper millennium, you know,’ he said, and I wanted to kiss him.
Aidan parked his bike outside our flat and the four of us set off once again: Alex’s mood just a little less chirpy, Julian delighted to see his cousin again, me in the state of emotional turmoil typically associated with Aidan’s proximity. Aidan, as usual, seemed completely oblivious to the impact he was having on everyone else.
Alex, teetering a little in her heels, linked her arm through mine as we followed behind the boys.
‘So,’ she said, giving me a knowing little smile, ‘it’s you, me and the Symonds boys for New Year’s Eve. Who’d have thought it?’
I smiled at her. ‘Well, it’s made Julian’s night,’ I said. Julian and Aidan were walking a few paces ahead of us, chatting animatedly about Aidan’s recent travels in Africa.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ Alex said, smiling at them, ‘how much Julian adores him. They couldn’t really be more different.’
‘Oh, I don’t know …’
‘Oh, come on. Okay, same smouldering looks, I’ll grant you, but Jules is so sensitive and sweet and completely selfless, whereas Aidan …’
‘You don’t know him, Alex. There’s a whole history there that you don’t know about.’
Alex rolled her eyes, her expression pained. She’d never admit it but she hated hearing about that history, she hated the fact that she was excluded from a whole chunk of Julian and my friendship. ‘Seriously, when Julian first came out, Aidan was amazing to him. Jules didn’t have the easiest time of it – with his dad, with people at school, but Aidan was always there for him.’
‘So that’s it, is it?’ Alex asked.
‘That’s what?’
‘The reason you like him so much. Because he loves Julian as much as you do.’
‘Well, not the only reason …’
‘Yeah, I refer you back to the smouldering good looks.’
‘There’s more to him than that, Alex.’
She cast a suspicious sideways glance at me. ‘Oh god, you’re totally going to sleep with him tonight, aren’t you?
‘Of course I’m not!’ I huffed. ‘I told you, I’m over him.’ Perhaps if I said it often enough, I might convince myself.
We arrived at the Bricklayer’s Arms, scene of our first pint. Alex and I grabbed a table in the corner while the boys got the drinks in.
‘We could always ditch them,’ Alex said to me. ‘You and I can go off and do our own thing. Pick up some exciting new boys for the new millennium. And if you say it isn’t the new millennium one more time, I’m going to smack you.’
‘We’re not abandoning Jules on New Year’s Eve, Alex. Plus, you’ve been looking forward to this thing at Fabric for weeks. And you’re risking hypothermia just so you’ll look good on the podium when we get there.’
‘Just so long as it’s Julian you want to be around,’ Alex whispered as Julian and Aidan approached with the drinks. Gin and tonics for Alex and me, a pint for Julian and something that looked suspiciously like orange juice for Aidan.
‘You planning on driving somewhere later?’ Alex asked.
Julian shook his head ever so slightly.
‘Just pacing myself,’ Aidan replied. I shot Julian a quizzical glance, he shook his head again, mouthing, ‘later’ at me.
We drank our drinks, laughing hysterically while Julian regaled us with tales from the photography studio: the woman who’d brought in her seven cats ‘to sit for a portrait’ (‘I spent four hours literally
herding cats. Literally.’); the blond teenagers who came in and promptly whipped their tops off (‘practising for page three, innit?’); the lothario from Lahore who came in with a new bride-to-be every other week – the ladies were to be professionally photographed so that he could send the images to his mother back in Pakistan for approval.
It struck me that it was the first time the four of us had ever sat around a table together and had a drink, and it felt so good, it felt perfect. I wanted to bottle that moment, to keep it forever: me, sitting at a table in East London, young and happy and drink in hand, with my best friends and Aidan. The man I was over. Completely over.
As we left the pub and headed for the next bar, Julian fell back in step with me, while Alex and Aidan walked ahead, trading teasing insults as they went.
‘What was that about?’ I asked Julian. ‘The orange juice?’
‘Oh, he’s just taking it easy,’ Julian replied, without meeting my eye.
‘Julian,’ I said, taking his arm and turning him to face me, ‘come on. Aidan’s taking it easy? Seriously?’
Julian sighed. ‘He’s on antidepressants. The past year’s been a bit harrowing, apparently. Don’t say anything, he doesn’t want to make a big deal about it. Just … I don’t know. Be nice. And tell Alex not to be too hard on him, okay?’
‘I’m always nice,’ I replied, and Julian put his arm around me and squeezed.
‘I know you are, my darling. I know you are.’
We swapped around again, Julian catching up with Aidan while I hung back with Alex, who was struggling to keep pace in her heels.
‘He was asking lots of questions about you …’ Alex told me as she took my arm.
‘Really?’ I asked, much too eager.