One Minute to Midnight

CHAPTER Sixteen



New Year’s Eve 2007

Snowdonia, Wales



Resolutions:

1. Look into financing for series on 21st-century warfare



2. Take Alex away for a spa weekend



3. Lose half a stone



4. Go to Ibiza with Jules and Karl this summer



5. Look into buying a flat in Barcelona? Or Berlin?

A COTTAGE HALFWAY up the side of a Welsh mountain in December might not appeal to all comers, but to me it sounded like heaven. I’d spent eight weeks, eight sweltering, feverish, frightening weeks in Kinshasa, and the idea of being somewhere cold and quiet and completely free of gunfire was absolute heaven.

There were six of us going, including Dom and I: the others – Matt and Liz, Peter and Katy – were all solicitors, but even that couldn’t dampen my mood. All I could think about were the long, bracing walks I was going to take over blasted heaths, the nights curled up with Dom and a good glass of red in front of the fire, the snowball fights on the front lawn of the crumbling stone cottage I envisaged in my head.

I had invited Alex to come with us, but she declined.

‘We’re thinking of going to South Africa,’ she told me.

‘We?’

‘Well, maybe just me. I’m not really sure what’s going on at the moment.’

She and Mike were still having problems, and they were getting worse, rather than better, from what I could gather. Not that I’d gathered very much – she and I hadn’t spoken much since we’d gone on holiday together in April. These days, whenever she phoned me I got the feeling that she’d just opened her second bottle of wine. I’d come to dread her calls.

Not so Julian’s, which were rare indeed now that he spent most of his time in warzones. He rang me on the morning of the 28th, just as Dom and I were leaving the M1 and joining the M6 on our way to Wales.

‘Hello!’

‘Jules! I didn’t expect to hear from you today. How’s it going? Are you okay?’

‘I’m on the sat phone. Probably won’t get another chance to call you until I’m in Pakistan.’

‘That’s okay, I’m going to be in deepest, darkest Wales, so I’m probably less likely to have signal than you are. Where are you, anyway?’

‘About a hundred miles from the border, I think.’

‘Is it okay there?’

‘We’re in convoy with the Yanks, so I’m surrounded by marines. I’m feeling pretty safe right now,’ he said. ‘Not to mention a little bit turned on,’ he added, sotto voce.

‘When are you coming home?’

‘Not exactly sure. Once we’re in Pakistan we’ll drive south to Karachi, then I’ll get a flight home from there. I’m hoping to be back within the week. How long are you in Wales?’

‘Just until New Year’s Day.’

‘Excellent. I can’t wait to see you. I was thinking …’ the line crackled and screeched, white noise and static.

‘Jules?’

‘Can you hear me?’

‘I can now.’

‘I was thinking we should do another road trip. Will you have time, maybe in the spring?’

‘Definitely.’

‘What about Alex?’

‘I don’t know. But I think we should persuade her. I think an intervention might be in order.’

‘That bad?’

‘I think so.’

More crackling.

‘So that’s my first resolution,’ Julian was saying. ‘Road trip. Number two …’

‘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. ‘You 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 f*cking 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.