One Minute to Midnight (2 page)

‘Thursday,’ Dom says. ‘Midday flight. Gets us there late afternoon.’

Maureen sniffs. New York is not a place she’s ever had any desire to visit, and therefore doesn’t see any reason why anyone else should want to.

‘We’re going to the golf club for New Year’s Eve,’ Peter says.

‘That sounds lovely,’ I lie.

‘Oh yes, it’s always quite a good night,’ Peter says, ‘isn’t it love?’

‘It is,’ Maureen agrees enthusiastically, ‘it’s wonderful. The O’Neills will be there, Dom, and the Harris clan, of course. You remember Simon, don’t you? He married such a lovely girl. They’re expecting their third in April.’

‘Always a good night,’ Peter says again, ‘perhaps you two could come along next year?’

‘Definitely,’ Dom agrees, without looking at me. ‘We should definitely do that.’

More silence.

‘Are you not enjoying your eggs, Nicole?’ Maureen asks.

* * *

They’re gone by eleven, heading back up the M1, back to civilisation. Yorkshire. The second the car pulls away from the pavement outside our house, Dom grabs me around the waist, kissing me passionately on the mouth.

‘Three days and not a single stand-up row!’ he says with a grin. ‘That must be a record.’

I smile ruefully, instantly feeling guilty for spending the two weeks before they came openly dreading their arrival.

‘It was good. It was nice to see them. It’s always good to see them.’ He laughs. ‘I mean it, Dom.’ And I do mean it, sort of. Peter’s a lovely man. And I don’t think Maureen means to criticise my every move. She just can’t help herself.

‘I know. I thought you did very well.’ We’re walking back to the front door, arm in arm.

‘I should try harder with her. Next time we should go to a show or something.’

Dom laughs again. ‘A show? Good god, woman, that’s above and beyond the call of duty.’

As I open the front door Dom puts his arm around my waist, pulling my body back against his.

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he whispers into my ear.

‘I had a bet with myself that it wouldn’t take you long to suggest sex,’ I say, laughing. ‘But less than thirty seconds after they leave! Impressive.’ Dom has a weird thing about not having sex when his mother’s in the house (just his mother, for some reason, sex with his dad around is fine).

‘Oh shut up and get your knickers off,’ he replies, slipping his hand into the waistband of my jeans.

We only make it halfway up the stairs. Afterwards, while we lie there comparing carpet burns, Dom asks about New Year’s Eve.

‘Where is this party exactly? At a bar, I take it?’

‘No, no no, darling. It’s at Karl’s new gallery. Much more glamorous.’

‘Ri-i-i-ght.’ Dom sounds dubious.

‘It’ll be fun,’ I say, kissing the point on his temple from which his sandy hair is fast receding.

‘It’ll be full of terrifyingly cool arty types,’ he grumbles. ‘We won’t fit in.’

‘What do you mean we?’ I ask, struggling to my feet. ‘
I
’ll fit in just fine.’

Dom grabs me again, pulls me back down beside him. ‘Oh is that right?’

‘It is. In any case, I’m sure Karl will have invited some other geeky and uncool people to keep you company.’

‘Right, bitch, you asked for it,’ he says, running his fingers lightly down my side, sending me into paroxysms of tickle-induced laughter. He doesn’t stop until I beg for mercy.

‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ he says, eventually, wriggling back into his boxer shorts.

‘Lesson learned,’ I assure him breathlessly. ‘But there’s just one thing I ought to say …’

‘What’s that?’

‘I just wanted to tell you that no matter how much I love you, no matter how good you are to me or how well you treat me I will never,
ever
go to the fucking golf club for New Year’s Eve.’

Chapter Two

New Year’s Eve, 1990

High Wycombe

Resolutions:

1. Start keeping a journal: write every day!

2. Read more!
A Clockwork Orange, The Grapes of Wrath, On the Road
, also some classics

3. Lose half a stone

4. Volunteer for a charity, do forty-eight-hour famine

5. Kiss Julian Symonds

I WAS GOING to my first-ever proper New Year’s Eve party. Okay, it was at my house – for the first time ever I was being allowed to join in my parents’ annual New Year bash – and okay, most thirteen-year-olds would sooner die than attend a party with their parents and their parents’ friends, I’m well aware, but I had an incentive, and his name was Julian Symonds.

Julian was a couple of years ahead of me at school; he was the son of one of Mum’s nursing friends, he was fifteen years old and he was bloody gorgeous. Tall and skinny with dark hair which was always falling into his huge, brown eyes, he had high cheekbones and long lashes, he wore lots of black and listened to the Velvet Underground, he was into art, he read Rimbaud and the Marquis de Sade, he was languorous, sulky, androgynous, rebellious, dangerous, a smoker. He was
divine
.

Under normal circumstances, I’m sure Julian would have had far better things to do with his New Year’s Eve than come to a party at my parents’ house, but he was being punished. The story, told to me by my mum, who had got it from his mum, was that Julian had snuck out to a rave, stayed out all night and came home in the morning ‘high on drugs’. He was grounded for three months, but since his parents couldn’t trust him to stay home all by himself, and since they wanted to come to the party, he was being forced, very much against his will, to come along.

‘Little bastard better not bring any drugs into this house,’ my father said when he was informed. ‘I’ll break his bloody neck. And you,’ he turned to me with a snarl, ‘don’t get any ideas. I don’t want you anywhere near him. You hear?’

Oh, I had ideas. I had fantasies, daydreams, scenarios, imaginings, entire scripts written in my head. I’d greet him (and his parents) wearing acid wash jeans and my new pink halter neck top from Jigsaw (which was the first overtly sexy piece of clothing I’d ever owned) and he’d be struck dumb, speechless with admiration. I, of course, would play everything really cool, but eventually he’d get up the courage to ask me to dance, and we would, a slow shuffle in the corner of my parents’ living room, the two of us, alone in a crowd. ‘Nothing Compares 2U’ by Sinead O’Connor. I put it on the end of the mixtape I’d made for the occasion (after ‘There She Goes’ by The La’s, The Stone Roses’ ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, ‘Suicide Blonde’ by INXS). Just in case.

This was of course all total bullshit. For one thing, Julian Symonds – gorgeous, smouldering, achingly cool fifteen-year-old Julian Symonds – wouldn’t look twice at me. He wouldn’t even notice me. Why would he? I was average. Undeniably, boringly average. Average height, average weight (in other words,
not
thin), boring brown eyes – the only thing different about me was my hair. Mum (and Mum’s friends) were always banging on about how lucky I was to have such lovely hair. ‘Titian blond,’ Mum called it, but to be honest in some lights it looked worryingly close to ginger.

Julian Symonds would never notice me. He never had before, in any case, we’d passed each other in the corridors at school a hundred times and he had never once glanced in my direction. I was a total nobody. And second, the chances of me slow dancing with anyone while my father was in the same room were remote. Dad wouldn’t like it. And wherever possible, I tried to avoid annoying my father.

Dad worked in middle management at Swan (tobacco papers, filter, matches) and he was always pissed off about something. Interest rates, football results, the travesty that was
Rocky V
, you name it, Dad was angry about it. But mostly he was angry with Mum.

Mum could never do anything right. That’s what she always used to say, anyway. ‘No matter what I do, it’s never right, is it? I never do anything right.’ When I was younger this struck me as odd, because Mum
did
do everything right. She was a brilliant storyteller. When she was reading to me at night she’d have me in stitches, giving Peter Rabbit a broad Glaswegian accent or reading the whole of
The Cat in The Hat
in a Jamaican patois. She was incredibly patient: she was the one who taught me to ride a bike, to swim, to bake brownies, to play pool – Dad didn’t teach me anything, except perhaps how to fish. And how to swear. So why, I wondered, did she think she never did anything right?

There may have been a time when my parents were happily married, but if there was, I don’t remember it. I do remember, when I was much younger, that things were better. Dad and I used to be friends. That was a long time ago, though. For years now, there had been tension in the air whenever Dad was around. Mum and I were quieter when he was in the house; we made ourselves small. We walked on eggshells; we tried not to get in the way. Things had been bad for a while now, and they were getting steadily worse. The screaming matches that had made me cry when I was little were now much more regular. And they weren’t just screaming matches any more either; these days they always seemed to end with something – a chair, a plate, a window, my first, greatly treasured, Sony Discman – getting broken.

The Discman incident had taken place a couple of weeks before Christmas. The Discman itself had no bearing on the row; it had nothing to do with the row. It was an innocent bystander. The row concerned a shirt. An unironed shirt. The thing was, Mum, who was a nurse in A&E, had worked a double shift because one of the other nurses had phoned in reporting ‘a family emergency’ (read: hangover) and they hadn’t been able to find any other cover at the last minute. So my mother, who was the senior nurse on the ward and a highly conscientious person, agreed to work an extra eight hours. Instead of coming home at six-thirty in the evening, she’d arrived back just after two in the morning and had gone straight to bed, without ironing the shirt my father had intended to wear to work the following day. This, it turned out, was a disaster.

In the morning, getting ready for school, I heard him shouting. ‘I have a meeting today, Elizabeth! Jesus Christ! Can you never do anything I ask? Blue shirt, grey suit, I told you this. Why is it so bloody difficult to listen? You just never listen, do you?’ Standing in the hallway, their bedroom door slightly ajar, I watched him shake her awake.

‘Okay, okay,’ I heard her say as she was groping on the bedside table for her glasses, ‘I’ll do it now.’

‘It’s too late, it’s too bloody late now, isn’t it? Or do you want to make me late? Is that it? Do you want me to look a fool at work?’ He pushed past me and crashed down the stairs, taking two at a time, Mum followed at a run, shooting me an apologetic glance as she hurried by. Like she was the one who had to apologise.

I hovered on the landing at the top of the stairs, not wanting to listen to the row continuing downstairs, but unable to walk away.

‘It’s important for me, Elizabeth!’ he was shouting again. ‘This meeting is important. Jesus Christ, if you paid half as much mind to me, to this household, as you did to your patients, everything would be fine.’ I could hear the sound of the ironing board being dragged from its resting place next to the washing machine, the clank of metal as it was brought to stand.

‘I told you! I have to leave now, you’re too late!’ Miscellaneous banging and crashing. ‘But could you please do me one favour? Just one thing?’

‘What is it, Jack?’ her voice was clear and even, the voice she used when she didn’t want to provoke him, but she was prepared to show that she wasn’t afraid, either. She used that voice a lot.

‘Will you tidy this bloody place up?’ Crash. Something smashed. As I discovered later, it was my Discman hitting the kitchen wall. ‘It looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in weeks.’

That had been the last big confrontation. Since then, over Christmas and in the run-up to New Year’s Eve, peace had descended on the Blake household. Dad had been off work, which always put him in a good mood, and – better yet – we’d had my uncle Chris staying with us. Chris, Dad’s older brother, seemed to have a calming effect on Dad, who was an altogether more reasonable person when Chris was around. In the face of considerable provocation – Mum working long hours, the interminable pissing rain, even England’s ‘total bloody capitulation’ in the second Ashes test – Dad didn’t throw a single tantrum.

I spent most of that week preparing for the party. In addition to my outfit, my hair and make-up and the music, I was in charge of preparing snacks – this was the price I had to pay for my admission. I was also required to help clean the house on the day of the party, and to lug tins of beer and bottles of soda water from the back of Dad’s car to the ice-filled bathtub.

Mum and Dad were always entertaining. Maybe it was because we weren’t the happiest of households, they liked having other people around, it eased the tension. They were always having barbecues, fancy dress parties and loud birthday bashes with karaoke machines. The planning of these events followed a regular course: Dad would suggest the party, but as the date drew near he’d decide it was a terrible idea and that they didn’t have time to organise it, he’d work himself into a furious rage about it and eventually wash his hands of the whole thing, Mum would do all the actual preparation, she would organise the drinks and make the food and invite the guests. At the party itself, Dad would inevitably get blind drunk and the following morning he’d say to her the next day, ‘That was good, wasn’t it? Good idea of mine, to have a party, wasn’t it?’ He’d say it with a half smile; I never knew whether it was his way of apologising.