One Minute to Midnight

by Silver, Amy

  ‘Happy New Year, Nicole Blake,’ Aidan said.

  ‘Happy New Year,’ I replied.

  He brandished an unopened bottle of champagne at me. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s go and drink this somewhere quiet.’

  ‘What about your friend?’

  He shrugged and laughed. ‘I don’t see her anywhere around, do you? What about your friend?’

  I looked over my shoulder at Alex who was standing there, grinning at us.

  Aidan laughed again. ‘So that’s Alex, is it? Prettier than I’d expected. Less butch.’

  Alex waved me away. ‘I’ll be fine!’ she called out. ‘Go and have fun. I’ll be hanging out around the DJ booth, like a groupie.’

  We walked along the beach, heading away from the party, into the darkness. I felt reckless, as through I were teetering on the brink of something, possibly something dangerous, I wasn’t quite sure what. I felt dizzy, I felt high. It felt amazing. Here I was, on New Year’s Eve, on a beach in South Africa, drinking champagne with a dangerously handsome older man! This was an adventure! This was what I wanted. Also, if he tried anything untoward I could always brain him with the champagne bottle.

  We walked in silence for a while, eventually turning to climb halfway up a sand dune, where we sat down and he opened the champagne. We took turns to drink from the bottle. We had walked far enough from the party so that we could no longer hear the music or the shouts of the crowd. There was no one else on the beach. I felt as though we could be the last two people on earth.

  The moon, a sliver away from a perfect circle, hung low in an endless sky filled with more stars than I’d ever seen in my entire life.

  ‘Don’t get skies like that back home, do you?’ Aidan asked me.

  ‘You certainly don’t.’

  ‘How are things at home, by the way? Your mum all right?’

  ‘She’s fine. She’s good. She’s getting married next year.’

  ‘Nice bloke?’

  ‘He’s lovely.’ I was a bit confused. What were we doing here? Why were we talking about nothing in particular? Surely he didn’t bring me all the way down the beach with a bottle of champagne so that he could ask me about my mother? I was suddenly aware that he hadn’t actually told me what he was doing here in Cape Town. Nor, come to think of it, had he asked me what I was doing here. The weirdness of the whole situation just didn’t seem to bother him at all. It bothered me, though.

  ‘What is it that you’re doing here, Aidan?’ I asked him. ‘I can’t believe that Julian didn’t even tell me that you were in South Africa …’

  ‘He probably doesn’t trust me with you,’ Aidan replied with a grin. ‘His precious Nicole.’ His arm was around my shoulders again. I closed my eyes and leaned into him inhaling his scent. Citrus and cigarettes. Intoxicating, although not quite intoxicating enough to make me forget that he still hadn’t answered my question.

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ I said.

  ‘I’m working,’ he told me. ‘I’m with the BBC now.’

  ‘Reporting?’

  ‘I’m a cameraman. We’re doing a documentary on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. You heard of that?’

  ‘I do read the papers,’ I said, stiffening up again, pulling away from him.

  He smiled at me. ‘You’re so spiky,’ he said. ‘I love how spiky you are. You’re the easiest person in the world to wind up.’

  ‘And how would you know that?’ I asked. ‘You barely know me.’

  ‘Ah, but I’ve heard the stories,’ he said. ‘Plus, I remember the first time I ever saw you. I came to your house to pick up Jules, after he was in that fight, you remember?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘And you got all pissed off and hot under the collar because I asked you if it was past your bedtime.’ He started laughing again.

  I ignored him. ‘So, that sounds interesting. The Truth Commission thing I mean.’

  He chuckled. ‘The Truth Will Out! That’s what they’re calling it. Fucking ridiculous.’

  ‘What do you mean? You don’t think it’s a good thing? I think it’s incredible, so optimistic, you know? To try, in a really constructive way, to deal with the problems of the past.’

  He laughed more loudly this time. ‘You think it’s a good thing to let murderers go free? To say sorry to the victims’ families and simply walk away?’

  ‘That’s not the point, though …’

  ‘I know it isn’t. I know. I’ve just been to enough places with dark pasts to know that this country’s problems aren’t going to go away because someone’s convened a commission.’

  ‘That’s a bit cynical,’ I said, and he smiled at me, that knowing smile. ‘I’m not naïve,’ I started to say, but he shut me up with a kiss.

  Later, I asked him what he meant when he said he’d been to enough places with dark pasts.

  ‘You name it.’

  ‘Well? Where?’

  ‘I’ve travelled all over the place. Spent a long time trying to get into print journalism, but there were a couple of problems. One, I didn’t have a university degree and two, I can’t write for shit. Anyway, eventually I decided to get behind the camera instead. I did some work in South-East Asia – mostly just filming stupid hippies on holiday. That was fucking dull, and I wanted to do something real, so when I read the first reports about the civil war in Liberia, I decided to go there.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yeah, charming place.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. ‘You wouldn’t believe what people were doing to each other.’ He was looking out over the ocean, his eyes fixed on some point in the distance. I touched his arm, and he shook his head, as though shaking off some unbidden memory. ‘I got some great footage there. Liberia. I went to a few places where there weren’t many other hacks hanging around, so some of my stuff got picked up by the BBC, CNN, people like that, and since then I’ve not been short of work. I was in Rwanda in 1994, Croatia in 1995, Chechnya this year. Last year, I suppose it is now …’

  I was in awe. ‘My god, that must be so amazing. So incredible to see all this stuff up close, to be right there, telling the story …’

  He laughed. ‘It is, if your idea of excitement is getting a couple of teeth smashed out with a rifle butt wielded by a crazed Interahamwe militiaman.’ He bared his teeth at me and tapped the front two. ‘Replacements. Or if you like the idea of crawling out of a burning vehicle because some Serb has sprayed your car with bullets and shot off your driver’s head. It’s all very exciting.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not for everyone. But I can’t really imagine myself doing anything else. I don’t think there’s anything else I’d be any good at.’ And when he talked about it, I thought that it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to be good at, too.

  For a while, we sat there, watching as a hint of grey appeared at the horizon, a precursor of dawn. The champagne was finished.

  Aidan turned to me at last and said, ‘I think you should come home with me. To my hotel.’ My heart was thudding so loudly in my chest I felt sure he could hear it. ‘Will you come?’

  I wanted to, I wanted to be with him, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t just run off and leave Alex. I couldn’t just go to a hotel room with some guy I hardly knew. Could I?

  ‘Aidan, I can’t … Alex is waiting for me …’

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said, ruffling my hair. ‘I guess I never thought of you as the type to put out on a first date anyway.’ He got to his feet and pulled me to mine.

  ‘Oh, but you did think about it?’ I asked him with a smile.

  ‘Of course I did.’ He put his arm around my shoulders and we walked down the dune together. ‘After that party, Julian’s eighteenth, when I drove you home and dropped you off … the night you told me I was good-looking for an old guy. God, I thought you were so incredibly cute.’

  ‘Cute?’

  ‘Well, cute, sexy, beautiful in this completely unassuming way …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, k
eep going …’

  ‘Well. I told Jules all this, and he flipped out.’

  ‘He never told me this.’

  ‘Oh yeah, he had a right go at me: you stay the fuck away from her, don’t you go anywhere near her … blah blah.’ I laughed at his fairly accurate Jules imitation. ‘I didn’t know you were only sixteen. I thought you were Julian’s age.’

  ‘Still too young for you.’

  ‘What can I say, I’m a dirty old man.’

  ‘How old are you, actually?’ I asked him, as we walked hand in hand towards the ocean.

  ‘Thirty-five,’ he replied.

  ‘You are not!’ I said, dropping his hand as though it were scalding.

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ he said, laughing and grabbing me round the waist. ‘Jesus, do I look thirty-five? I’m twenty-eight.’

  ‘That’s still pretty ancient.’

  ‘I’ll show you ancient,’ he said, raising me up into the air and over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Ignoring my helpless pleas and flailing limbs, he carried me to the water and dropped me into it, diving in after me, wrapping his arms around me, covering my face and neck in salty kisses.

  We found Alex sitting at one of the bonfires with a large group of people, a haze of smoke surrounding them and – from the smell of it – not just from the bonfire. Alex erupted in fits of giggles when she saw us.

  ‘Hey there, lovebirds,’ she said. ‘Or should I say drowned rats?’ Embarrassed, I dropped Aidan’s hand. He reached for it again. My heartbeat sped up a few dozen beats per minute. ‘What on earth have you been up to?’

  We lay back on the beach as the sun rose, getting gently stoned as we waited for our clothes to dry off. Someone had come prepared, they’d rustled up orange juice and were cooking boerewors, a kind of spicy sausage, for breakfast.

  When the sun was fully up, Aidan propped himself up on one elbow, stretched and said, ‘I guess I ought to get going.’

  ‘Oh, don’t go,’ Alex protested. ‘Come back to the house. We’ll go for a swim, have a braai, something like that. Just chill out.’

  ‘That’s kind, Alex, but I really can’t. I’ve been on the lash since Christmas and I have to work tomorrow. At some point I really ought to get some sleep.’ He leaned forward and kissed me on the neck. ‘You got a number I can ring you on while you’re here?’

  I gave him Alex’s parents’ number and walked with him up to the car park to say goodbye. We had one last, intoxicating kiss before I watched him climb, slightly unsteadily, onto a motorbike and roar off into the distance. Without a helmet.

  When he was gone, I returned to the bonfire on the beach, aware that I was grinning like the Cheshire Cat and unable to stop myself.

  ‘Nice going, Nic,’ she said, as I approached. ‘He is delicious. Lekker like a cracker. Although kind of old, no?’

  ‘Twenty-eight!’ I said.

  ‘No way!’

  ‘But so, so sexy.’

  ‘Definitely’ she agreed. ‘He looks just like Julian.’

  ‘I think,’ I said, sitting down next to her and draping my arm around her shoulders, ‘that this has been the best New Year ever.’

  ‘Not better than the Julian one?’

  ‘Well, that was great and awful. This one was just great. God, this is such an amazing place.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘I think we should come back here. When we’ve finished our degrees. We could travel, teach, do something important, you know?’

  ‘Gets under your skin, doesn’t it?’ Alex asked me with a smile.

  ‘What does?’

  ‘Africa.’

  We sat there until the rising sun became too hot, and it was time to head back. Alex managed somehow to find someone sober enough to drive us home, where we snuck quietly into the house and went to bed. I didn’t fall asleep straight away, though. I just lay there, hugging myself, going over every detail of the previous night, thinking of Aidan’s laugh and his green eyes.

  Chapter Seven

  27 December 2011

  I’M ON THE A40 heading west, listening to the radio and wondering why the fuck I’m doing this. I am seriously annoying my husband, risking all manner of nasty confrontations just two days before our holiday, purely so that I can go and visit a man who has pretty much never done anything but let me down.

  Because he’s my dad. That’s why.

  The last time I spoke to him was when he rang to wish me a happy thirtieth birthday. This was two years ago, the day I turned thirty-one. The last time I actually saw him was the night before my wedding. That was more than three years ago. He turned up for dinner the night before, had a drunken temper tantrum and left that night, so he never actually made it to the event itself.

  Given our history, a surprise visit probably isn’t the greatest idea, but somehow I just can’t face picking up the phone and talking to him. Plus, I’ve turned off my phone because I don’t want to hear Dom’s irate messages, or read his angry texts. By the time I get to Ledbury, I realise that I’m not even sure I’ll be able to find his house, it’s been so long since I visited. And I’m right, I don’t remember the way, so I drive round and round for forty-five minutes, still not wanting to phone, until finally I spot The Castle, the horrible pub that he drinks in, which I know is just round the corner from his place.

  It’s just after six when I walk up the concrete pathway to his front door. My hands are shaking. My mouth feels like something died in it – I’ve smoked six cigarettes on the way here and I don’t have any mints. I ring the doorbell. No one comes and relief washes over me. This is the best possible outcome! I’ve tried to see him and I’ve failed – but it’s not my fault. I can go to New York free of guilt. I turn and start off down the path, a spring in my step this time, but just as I’m pushing open the garden gate I hear the door open behind me and my heart sinks into my boots.

  ‘Nicole?’

  I turn around and there he is, gaunt, grey and slightly stooped, a hundred years older than I remembered him.

  ‘You are here,’ I say. ‘I thought no one was in.’

  ‘You should have phoned,’ he says, and turns to go back into the house, calling out to me to follow as he goes. No kiss then, no hug, no tearful reunion. For a moment or two I hesitate at the gate, tempted by the almost irresistible idea of just getting back into my car and driving as fast as my Honda Civic will take me all the way back to London, to have dinner with my husband and friends.

  ‘I’m not bloody made of money you know,’ I can hear him shouting. ‘It’s freezing out and I can’t have the heating turned up high all day and night. Will you hurry up and close that door?’

  As I step over the hearth onto the ugly orange carpet I can hear him muttering to himself. ‘Christ’s sake. With me poorly and everything she leaves the bloody door open for half an hour.’

  He’s standing in front of the electric fire in the living room, rubbing his hands together like a miser over his hoard, his dirty grey tracksuit bottoms hanging from his bony hips.

  ‘You’ve lost weight, Dad,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, well, cancer will do that to you.’ He turns and looks at me. ‘Didn’t know whether you’d come. You could have replied to my email. I don’t have anything in for dinner.’

  ‘We can get a takeaway,’ I say.

  ‘Money to burn, have you?’

  ‘Or I could take you out somewhere.’

  Dad sits down in the chair nearest the fireplace. ‘There’s nowhere decent round here these days,’ he says.

  I take off my coat and sit down on the brown velour-covered sofa. The room is unspeakably hideous, it looks as though it were decorated in 1978 by someone with absolutely no taste. Everything is brown or a dirty shade of orange. There are no books, no pictures on the walls, just an enormous flat-screen TV in one corner.

  ‘How are you feeling, Dad?’

  ‘Pretty bloody awful.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. When did you … when was it diagnosed?’

  �
��About a month ago. But I’ve been feeling rotten for a while.’

  ‘You should have told me.’

  ‘What? That I’ve been feeling unwell? What would you have done about it?’ He picks distractedly at some unseen lint on his tracksuit trousers.

  ‘Shall I make us some tea?’ I ask him, already desperate to put some distance between us, even if it’s just a matter of a few feet.

  ‘All right then.’

  Standing in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, I feel like I want to cry, out of frustration more than anything else. Why is he like this? Why can’t he just make an effort? There’s a feeling like nausea rising up inside me, a feeling I remember from a long time ago, from childhood. Fear and disappointment. Pity, too. God, he must be lonely.

  I take the tea back into the living room. He’s turned on the TV and he’s watching Sky Sports News, the sound up high. He accepts the tea wordlessly, takes a few sips, ignores me completely.

  ‘The operation’s on the second then, is it? Is that in Malvern?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Dad? Could we turn the TV down a bit?’

  He turns it off. ‘I just wanted to see the scores,’ he says, exasperated.

  ‘I didn’t say off, I said down.’

  ‘Done now.’ His mouth is set in a grim line. I want to slap him.

  ‘I was asking about your operation. Are you going to the hospital in Malvern?’

  ‘Gloucester.’

  ‘Do you need someone to take you there? How long will you be in for?’

  ‘Your uncle Chris is driving me. Only supposed to be in a couple of days, but you don’t know with the NHS, do you? I’ll probably get MRSA.’

  Always look on the bright side.

  We sit in silence, sipping our tea. He turns the TV back on, muted this time, and swears softly when he sees the football results.

  ‘Did you have money on it?’ I ask.

  ‘Just a tenner.’ He stares down at his hands, clenches and unclenches his fists. It’s a gesture I remember from childhood, and I’m hit by another wave of nausea.