One Minute to Midnight (15 page)

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.