One Minute to Midnight

by Silver, Amy

  ‘Quit smoking?’ I interrupted.

  He laughed. ‘You know me so well. Three: take Karl to Zanzibar for his birthday.’

  ‘That sounds a bit honeymoonish …’

  ‘Oh, don’t you start. He’s really on one with this civil partnership bollocks. Four …’ the line crackled again, more loudly this time, there was some beeping, and then it went dead.

  ‘Julian? Jules?’ I called out, vainly of course. ‘Maybe he’ll ring back,’ I said to Dom, slipping the mobile into my pocket, but he didn’t.

  With Dom at the wheel most of the way, London to the Snowdonia National Park took the best part of the entire day. It was dark by the time we arrived, I was dozing in the passenger seat. Dom gave me a kiss on the cheek to wake me, I opened my eyes and looked out on paradise: a log cabin, blanketed in three to four inches of virgin snow, and not another building in sight, no other lights visible unless you counted the stars.

  The front door flew open and there stood Matt wearing a bright red woolly jumper with a Christmas tree on it, a shot glass in each hand.

  ‘Welcome!’ he called out to us. ‘Schnapps?’

  The others had been there for a good few hours, a fire was roaring in the hearth, the smell of a roasting chicken filled the cabin.

  ‘You see,’ Dom said to me, ‘there are advantages to my refusal to drive at a million miles an hour.’

  ‘I don’t ask you to drive at a million miles an hour, Dom, I just point out that it is generally not thought of as a particularly grievous crime to break the speed limit every now and again.’

  We spent the next couple of days exactly as I’d hoped we would: messing about in the snow, going for long, freezing walks, hanging out in the pub playing pool or sitting in front of the fire playing Scrabble. There was, as we’d predicted, no signal for our mobile phones, there was no TV, no Internet, we were isolated, cut off from the world. It was peaceful in all senses: quiet and harmonious. No one argued, except maybe a little about politics, and even then they were good-natured discussions: whether Gordon Brown’s premiership meant a return to Labour’s roots, Barack Obama’s prospects versus Hillary Clinton, whether or not it was acceptable for adults to read Harry Potter books in an entirely unironic fashion.

  It was a little bubble of middle-class niceness. There were no sexists, no homophobes or racists, no drunk ex-boyfriends, no tear-stained break-ups, no black eyes or bloody lips: it was one of the calmest New Year’s Eves I’d ever spent. Everyone mucked in. No one shirked washing up duties. If I’m honest, everyone was so bloody nice it almost made me want to throw things, but that isn’t a reasonable reaction, is it?

  All six of us, under the direction of Katy who was an amazing cook, helped prepare a four-course feast: a pear and Roquefort salad, followed by a roasted rack of lamb with rosemary and crushed potatoes, possibly the most heavenly panna cotta I have ever tasted, followed by a board of cheeses (all Welsh) which Katy had found at a market in a place called Rhiwbryfdir the previous day.

  At midnight, we sat out on a little terrace at the back of the cabin, wrapped in thick woollen blankets, toasting the New Year with chilled champagne, as a light dusting of snow began to fall over the mountain above.

  ‘Bet you’ve never spent a New Year anywhere quite as beautiful as this, have you?’ Dom asked, and immediately my mind jumped to the beach in Cape Town, but I just said, ‘No. Never.’

  Later, in bed, he asked me to marry him again. It was the third time – it had become our New Year’s ritual. And for the third time, I said no.

  The first time he asked me, back at Alex’s place in Oxfordshire, it had been a total shock. The second time he asked me, I couldn’t claim to be surprised.

  ‘I’m not ready, Dom,’ I told him. ‘I’m twenty-eight. And I think people who marry very young often live to regret it, you know?’

  ‘Twenty-eight is not that young, Nicole.’

  ‘Well, you’re not helping your cause by calling me old.’

  That New Year, when he asked me for the third time, as we lay in the four-poster in the log cabin in Wales, I said no again.

  ‘I can’t settle down now, Dom. There’s too much to do!’

  Blake Productions, the TV company I’d set up, had until this point been making worthwhile but very minor films which aired in the middle of the night on unwatched cable channels, but had just been commissioned to make its first really major documentary, due to air in a prime time slot on BBC One.

  And then there was the road trip, mark two. That April, Alex, Jules and I had taken three weeks off to drive the length of the Atlantic coast of Europe: starting out in Cherbourg, we drove south along the French coast, across the border to the Basque country, around the coast of Portugal and back into Spain, up the Costa le la Luz, finishing up in Tarifa. And since Jules had mentioned a second road trip to me on the phone a couple of days previously, I’d been thinking about it. We could aim bigger this time.

  ‘We could combine work and holiday,’ I told Dom. ‘I’d love to work with Jules. We could film it, or do a blog or something: but it would need to be a big trip, something amazing, like Cape Town to Cairo.’

  ‘You can’t do Cape Town to Cairo, Nicole, because that would entail driving through Sudan, which is much too dangerous.’

  ‘Says who?’ I asked him, and he hugged me closer.

  ‘Says me. In any case, all this is beside the point. You’re making excuses.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Why do you think that you can’t be married and have a successful career or go on holidays with your friends? What do you think is going to happen? That the moment we walk down the aisle you’ll find yourself chained to the sink, barefoot and pregnant? Marriage doesn’t have to change who we are, Nic.’

  ‘So why do it then? What’s the point?’

  ‘If I have to explain that to you, then you really aren’t ready.’ He rubbed the small of my back and kissed my neck. ‘It’s okay. One day you will be ready. And I’ll be here.’

  At 4 a.m. I woke with a start from a bad dream I couldn’t properly recall. Dad was in it, and so was Alex and so was Julian. Something in my heart felt heavy and I wanted to talk to someone, to Mum, to make sure everything was okay. I got up and stumbled through the house in the darkness searching for my handbag. Eventually I found it, I turned the phone on, but there wasn’t any signal. I knew there wasn’t any signal. Still, I spent ages wandering around the house, holding the phone above my head, bashing into furniture, I even pulled on a pair of wellies and went outside into the snow, but not a single bar appeared on the display. Eventually I went back inside and slept fitfully until dawn.

  We had to leave first thing in the morning. Dom was in the middle of an important case and they wanted him in the office that afternoon. In fact, they’d wanted him in the office that morning and the day before and the day before that, but he refused.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said pointedly, ‘you just have to let work come second. Otherwise it takes over everything.’

  ‘It’s not the same for you,’ I replied. ‘You don’t run your own business. It’s different when you’re self-employed.’

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It’s just about priorities.’

  We hit the A5 at about nine in the morning, and almost the second we did, my phone started beeping. And beeping. And beeping. I had twenty-two missed calls: almost all of them from Alex, plus one from my mum and a couple from Karl. There were text messages from Alex, too, I read a couple of them.

  Nic, are you in Wales? Need to talk to you.

  It’s urgent, pls call.

  My heart sank.

  ‘Oh god,’ I groaned. ‘I’m not sure I can face this just yet.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Dom asked.

  ‘It’s Alex. She’s been calling and calling. So either she’s been hitting the booze pretty heavily or she’s having more problems with Mike or – most likely – some hideous combination of the two.’

  Dom squeezed my leg in sympathy. ‘Y
ou don’t have to call her back right away. It’s only just after nine – there’s no way she’ll be up yet,’ he said.

  ‘No, you’re right,’ I replied, ‘I’ll ring her when I get back to London.’

  I wasn’t being entirely straight with him: the last missed call had been an hour before, so I knew she was awake. I turned the phone down to silent and slipped it back into my bag. Just a few more hours of peace, I told myself. Then I’ll deal with it.

  By the time we got onto the M6 we’d got thoroughly bored with the Kings of Leon album we’d been listening to all weekend, so Dom turned it off and tuned into Radio Four instead. It was almost bang on ten o’clock, the news headlines. Eight people were reported dead in fighting between the Fatah and Hamas factions in the Gaza Strip. More than one hundred people were thought to have been killed during rioting following the disputed presidential election in Kenya. And then:

  ‘The British photojournalist killed in Afghanistan on Sunday has been identified as Julian Symonds of London. Mr Symonds, who was thirty-one, and an American journalist, Brian Hicks, were killed when the US military vehicle in which they were travelling was hit …’

  I turned off the radio and covered my eyes with my hands, listening to my breathing, quick and shallow.

  ‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ Dom was saying, ‘oh my god, Nicole …’

  I looked at him. His knuckles were white on the wheel. This wasn’t real. I looked at the radio dial. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true.

  ‘Nicole? Nic?’ Dom had his hand on my leg, squeezing hard. Then he reached for the radio dial again and before I could stop him he turned it back on.

  ‘… Symonds and Hicks were travelling in military convoy from Kabul to the Pakistan border when their vehicle was hit by an IED. Four US service personnel, who have not yet been named, were also killed in the attack.’

  It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true.

  ‘Stop the car, Dominic. Stop the car stop the car stop the car.’

  ‘Nic, I can’t, there’s no hard shoulder, I can’t stop here.’ He was holding the steering wheel with one hand, reaching for my arm with the other.

  ‘Jesus Christ, stop the car, I have to get out Dom …’ I was sobbing now, I undid my seatbelt and started to open the door.

  ‘Jesus, what the hell, Nicole?’ Dom yelled. He swerved onto the edge of the motorway, drove right off the road and onto the grass verge. I got out of the car and threw up. I sat down on the grass and put my hands over my ears and tried to drown out the noise of the traffic.

  On Sunday. They said he was killed on Sunday. He’d been gone for two days and I didn’t know about it. What was I doing? Messing around in the snow or helping make dinner or having some polite fucking conversation about Labour party politics? Is that what I was doing when he was dying, thousands of miles away from his family, from Karl, from me?

  The police came. I don’t know if they just happened upon us or whether someone called them because we had stopped illegally, but they weren’t particularly sympathetic. Dom tried to explain, that I was distraught, I’d been ill, but they just issued us a ticket and told us to get moving.

  I lay down in the back seat of the car. I covered my head with my coat and closed my eyes. I couldn’t stop trembling, my teeth were chattering in my head, but I wasn’t cold.

  ‘Do you want to call Alex now?’ Dom asked me. ‘Nicole?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe you should.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to her. I don’t want to talk to anyone. Not now.’

  I stayed like that, covered up on the back seat, all the way back to London.

  Chapter Seventeen

  30 December 2011

  I’M WALKING THE streets of Manhattan, alone. Dom is in the hotel, working. He was asleep when I got back last night, so he doesn’t know about Alex. I will tell him, I just didn’t want to do it this morning. He was in a good mood (sex followed by breakfast in bed always does the trick) and I didn’t want to spoil it.

  I’m walking up Madison, on my way to Barney’s. The weather’s changed overnight, the sky no longer bright and crisp, it’s dirty grey and ominous. You can smell the snow in the air. The thought of a snowstorm puts an inch or two of extra spring in my step. Dom and I have made plans to meet up later: he’s going to work until mid-afternoon, then we’re going to meet up at the Met for culture followed by cocktails. Maybe after that we can go ice skating at the Rockefeller Center, or take a walk in Central Park. I’ll tell him about Alex then.

  I can’t afford anything in Barney’s. Well, maybe a scarf or a pair of sunglasses, but even that would be pushing it and I can’t really turn up to Karl’s party in sunglasses and a scarf.

  Plus, everyone in Barney’s is scarily attractive – it’s as though a pack of models has been let loose on those cool white marble floors. Even in my skinniest jeans and my rocking Jimmy Choo biker boots, I feel dowdy and out of place. I scuttle out and continue along Madison Avenue, past Calvin Klein, Cartier, Chanel and Chloé. I am too afraid to enter any of these places, but the sight of the cerulean crêpe de Chine dress in the window of Giorgio Armani is too much for me to resist. I overcome my fear (I’ve been to Iraq, for Christ’s sake, how can I be intimidated by shop assistants?), suck in my stomach, straighten my back and in I go.

  The shop assistants are delightful. They are unfailingly polite, they ooh and ah when I put on the dress, they recommend shoes and jewellery to go with it. The dress is gorgeous and it looks fantastic on: it hangs beautifully, it clings in the right places, it’s flattering and elegant. Perfect. And just a shade under a thousand dollars. I don’t give myself time to back out, I just slide my credit card over the counter and bite my lip: Dom is going to bloody kill me. I just won’t tell him what it cost.

  I leave the shop feeling dizzy and guilty and delighted. I love the dress. I’ll wear it a hundred times. That way it only cost ten dollars per wear. Less in fact. A bargain. Hell, at least I didn’t get the heels they were suggesting to go with it which cost $400. It could have been a lot worse.

  I’m walking quickly, not looking in the shop windows – I don’t want to spot something I like even more for half the price, I don’t think I could bear it. I need to get off Madison Avenue. I turn right and walk up a block, cross over Park and onto Lexington Avenue. I’m at the corner of Lexington and East 70th, an address which rings a bell for some reason. I’ve seen it somewhere recently, only I can’t think where. It takes me a few moments to figure it out, and then it comes to me: it was on the letterhead at the top of an email I received. The offices of Zeitgeist Productions are at the corner of Lexington and East 71st – one block up. Aidan works one block away from where I am standing. I can’t help myself, I have to go and just have a look.

  Butterflies fluttering in my stomach, I walk past the glass doors to number 502. I stop for a moment to examine the list of names engraved into a chrome plate on the side of the building: Markowitz & Brown, Parker Prince Publishing, Zeitgeist Productions. They’re on the tenth floor. I step back onto the pavement, craning my neck to get a proper view of the place where, had I the courage or the recklessness, I could work for a while. It’s a far cry from the attic office with a view of Wimbledon Common. A snowflake lands on my eyelid. The snow is coming, it’s time to get inside.

  I walk north for a couple of blocks before ducking into a tiny Italian café, its windows all steamed up, not a table free in the place, just one spot left at the counter next to the window. Elbowing a determined-looking young woman in a power suit and heels out of the way I grab the last seat in the house, signal to the waiter and order myself a glass of red. I eat an enormous bowl of linguine with the most delicious meatballs I have ever tasted while watching the world rush by outside the window. It’s better than theatre.

  I finish lunch around two and start heading back south towards the Met. The sky is gunmetal grey now, it looks as though a storm is coming. I’m just passing the Zeitgeist offices again, on the other side of the road this time
, when I spot him. Aidan, standing just outside the office building, talking to a woman with red hair. They’re laughing about something. The woman gives him a kiss on the cheek and turns to go. I just stand there, transfixed. He’s wearing jeans and a leather jacket with the collar up. He looks tanned and lean. His hair is shorter, but other than that he looks exactly the same. He turns to go into the building, and I feel weak, faint almost. I want to call out to him, but he’ll never hear me at this distance, not over the noise of the traffic. Why does every driver in New York have to lean on their horns all the time? He’s almost gone, and then, all of a sudden he turns back and looks at me, directly at me. He just stands there, stock still, staring at me. I don’t know what to do, so I raise my hand in a half-hearted wave. He waves back.

  It seems to take an age for him to cross the road to where I’m standing. I’m in the middle of the pavement – the sidewalk – blocking the flow of impatient New Yorkers who push past me on their way back to their desks, carrying their salt beef sandwiches, their cups of steaming soup. I can’t move, I’m rooted to the spot, all I can do is watch him walk towards me, that languid movement so familiar; the way he cocks his head to one side when he smiles, it stops my heart. Aidan.

  ‘When I offered you a job I didn’t actually expect you to just turn up on my doorstep,’ he says as he reaches me. ‘I thought you’d at least call first.’

  ‘I was just … in the neighbourhood,’ I say and we both start laughing.

  ‘Right.’ He looks down at the Armani bag in my hand and says: ‘Just doing a bit of shopping, were you?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, it’s certainly a good neighbourhood for that.’ We stand there, smiling stupidly at each other, buffeted by the passers-by, until he says: ‘Do you have time for a coffee?’