One Minute to Midnight

CHAPTER Nine



28 December 2011

I LEAVE THE Ashton Guest House just after nine and drive back to Dad’s, picking up coffee and muffins from Starbucks on the way. Dad greets me at the door looking brighter, healthier and a good deal more cheerful than he had the previous evening. My mood lightens immediately. I was right to come; Dom must understand that. Okay, as usual I handled things badly, but he knows I’m lacking in emotional intelligence. I think it’s one of the things that attracted him to me in the first place. It makes me vulnerable.

‘Got something to show you, Nicole,’ Dad says as he ushers me into the kitchen. There, on the table, is a notebook. On its face is printed, in my father’s neat hand, ‘NB, work, 2006-’. I flick open the book. On the first page a date is written: 6 March 2002. Below it my father has stuck a small square of newsprint cut from a TV Guide:

BBC Choice, 11.30 p.m.: Twenty-First-Century Slavery: a harrowing look at the illegal sex traffic from eastern Europe and Africa to the UK, including interviews with trafficked women and the men who pay for their services.

It’s the listing for the first film I ever had shown on television. I flick over the next page, and the next – I’m astonished. Here, in this book, through press cuttings and reviews, my father has followed my career. I can’t quite believe it, I don’t know what to think. He knew all about me, he knew what I was doing and he was interested enough – proud enough – to make this scrapbook. He was just never brave enough to pick up the phone and tell me that he was proud.

I leaf through the book until I get to the centre spread: there, in pride of place is an article from Marie Claire which named me ‘one to watch’ in a piece on movers and shakers in the arts who had not yet turned thirty. Those were the days. There was a picture of me, looking solemn and austere in a black trouser suit, surrounded by prettier, sunnier creatures: actresses, composers, music producers.

That was in the summer of 2007. After that, there were just two more entries. Dad watches me flick through a few blank pages before closing the book.

‘You’ve done ever so well, Nicole,’ he says.

‘Well, I started well, certainly,’ I say with an embarrassed little laugh.

We sit down at the table. Dad wolfs down his blueberry muffin. I pick at mine. Apple Bran. Trying to be healthy.

‘What are you working on at the moment?’ he asks. A question I’ve come to dread.

‘It’s … it’s a thing on relationships.’

‘Right, right …’ He obviously expects me to tell him more, but I don’t want to.

‘It’s not a big deal. It’s a thing for Channel Five. Bit trashy really.’ He looks disappointed. I sigh. ‘I don’t do so much of the serious stuff these days.’

‘Why’s that? You were so good at it. That programme about the people traffickers, the thing you did in Albania – that was really good. That was proper, hard-hitting stuff. I remember talking about it to some of the chaps from work.’

I’m simultaneously touched and annoyed. Touched because, after all this time, all our troubles and our silences, I know that he is proud of me, proud enough to go bragging to his colleagues. Annoyed because he even needs to ask why I stopped doing that kind of work.

‘Well, you know. After … what happened, I didn’t want to travel so much any more. I wanted to stay in England. I didn’t want to be travelling to Albania, Ivory Coast, Afghanistan. I wanted to be at home, with Dom.’

‘Right …’ he sounds unconvinced. ‘It’s a pity though, because you were doing so well.’ I notice how quickly we’ve moved from ‘you’ve done ever so well’, to ‘you were doing so well’.

I sip my coffee.

‘I’m going to New York on Thursday,’ I say.

‘Oh right? And is that for work?’

‘No, Dad, it’s a holiday. Dom and I are both going. There’s a party, Karl’s having a party.’

‘Karl?’

‘Julian’s Karl.’

‘Right.’

We finish our coffee in silence. I give him my muffin; I’m no longer feeling hungry. When he’s finished eating, he gets up and replaces the scrapbook on the bookshelf, next to the telephone directory and a small, framed photograph. Dad and Uncle Chris, when they were young, probably in their twenties. I glance around the room. There are no other photographs on display.

I get to my feet. ‘I ought to get going, Dad. Dom’s expecting me back.’

‘All right, then.’ He looks disappointed.

‘I’ll come back and see you as soon as I get back from New York. Okay?’

He shrugs.

‘I will.’ I reach out to put my hand on his shoulder but he turns his back on me, clears the coffee cups from the kitchen table.

Now I feel anguished again, and uncomfortable, the way I had last night, that unpleasant combination of irritation and fear. Dad walks me to the front door.

‘The real reason I wanted you to come here,’ he says, ‘was to ask you a favour.’

‘Of course,’ I reply.

‘I want to see your mother,’ he says, and my heart sinks. ‘I telephoned her a few weeks ago, but that man answered and I didn’t want to talk to him so I hung up. I want you to speak to her. Ask her to come and see me.’

‘Dad …’

‘It’s not much, Nicole. I don’t ask you for much.’

Nor I you, I think, but I don’t say anything. I don’t want to ask Mum to go to see him, because if I do, she’ll feel obliged, and I don’t want her to feel obliged. She doesn’t owe Dad anything. And I’m upset, too. The real reason for asking me here was to get me to persuade Mum to visit? So he didn’t really want to see me at all?

‘Nicole?’

‘She’s away at the moment,’ I say, not meeting his eye.

‘When’s she back then?’

‘I’m not sure.’ That’s a lie, she’s back this evening and I can tell from the expression on his face that he knows I’m lying.

‘It’s not much, Nicole. I just want to see her before …’

‘Before your operation.’

‘Before I go.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I say. I leave him standing on his doorstep.

* * *

By the time I get to the end of his road I have to stop the car because I’m crying so much I can’t see where I’m going. I’m hurt, of course, but it’s more than that. I just feel so angry with him, so pissed off that he missed out on my life, on my growing up, and I missed out on having a dad. And all for what? For nothing. I forgave him, I forgave him for that terrible night, the night he struck my mother, we could have got past that. Only he chose not to. He chose, when Mum threw him out, to let me go too. I still don’t understand that.

It wasn’t like we were never close. I can remember, when I was very small, maybe five or six, how he used to take me fishing with him. On Saturday mornings, we’d go down to Spade Oak and sit there for hours. We never caught anything and it was always freezing cold, but I remember loving it – putting worms on hooks and skimming stones and spotting birds’ nests in the trees or just sitting next to him, holding his huge warm hand, waiting for something to bite. I can remember Mum telling her friends: ‘She’s Daddy’s girl, that one. I don’t stand a chance.’

I can’t remember when we stopped going fishing. I can’t remember when I stopped being Daddy’s girl. It was when I got older, though, once I was old enough to realise how hard he was on Mum, how unreasonable he could be. I switched allegiances. And he never seemed to forgive me.

And now I’m okay, and Mum’s okay, and he’s alone. And the thing that kills me, the thing that hurts me most of all, is his loneliness. His loneliness is unbearable, and if it’s unbearable to me, I cannot imagine what it must be like for him.

On the way back to London I stop at the Chieveley Services where I buy a bacon double cheeseburger and devour it ravenously. Should have had that apple bran muffin. I turn on my phone and listen to my messages.

Message received this morning at 8.52 a.m.

‘It’s me. I missed your call last night. Wasn’t really in the mood to talk to you. I take it you’re coming back today? Or are you planning a longer excursion? Is New York still on, or should I be cancelling the flights?’

His voice sounds whiny and sarcastic, I delete the message.

Message received this morning at 10.33 a.m.

‘Hi Nic it’s me.’

There are only a few people in one’s life who can ring up and say, ‘It’s me.’ Parents, siblings, significant others. I don’t think ex-lovers are supposed to be on that list, but Aidan still does it.

‘Ummm … I just wanted to have a chat. It’s … god, what time is it? Four-thirty here. In the morning. I can’t sleep. I wanted to talk about work, the job I emailed you about … Give me a call, yeah?’

I save the message.

Then, instead of driving back to Wimbledon Village to get my hair done and my nails painted, I head instead for Queenstown Road in Battersea. I park the car opposite Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St Joseph Catholic Church and get out. I lean against the car door, light a cigarette and look up at the second-floor window of the converted Victorian house I am standing next to: that was our bedroom window. Me and Aidan shared that bedroom for seven months in 2002. Not seven particularly happy months, it has to be said. Despite its proximity to Battersea Park, Queenstown Road was a horrible address – still is in fact. Our flat was virtually adjacent to the railway line; the windows rattled whenever a train came past; the kitchen was home to a indefatigable intrusion of cockroaches. But all that wouldn’t have mattered had we been happy.

We weren’t. We moved in together at precisely the wrong moment, just when Aidan’s wanderlust was starting to get the better of him once more. The nightmares that had plagued his sleep when he came back from Congo were gone, he’d weaned himself off the antidepressants, he was strong and healthy again and bored with being deskbound. We’d been talking about living together for ages, but it took us forever to find a place. We moved in just at the time when Aidan was starting to feel his feet itch. Moving in with me may have been the straw to break the camel’s back: Julian always said that Aidan was the most doggedly commitment phobic person he’d ever met. He’d been amazed that our relationship, rekindled the (fake) dawn of the third millennium, lasted past January of 2001.

But it did. And we were incredibly happy most of that time. Aidan surprised me by loving the desk job at Cannon, he surprised me by renting a flat about ten minutes’ walk from our place on Heneage Street (I’d imagined that he’d want to keep some distance between us), he surprised me by becoming an attentive, considerate boyfriend. He bought me flowers for no reason, he threw me a huge surprise party on my twenty-third birthday, he whisked me away on spur-of-the-moment trips to Rome and Copenhagen. We never ran out of things to say to each other.

He hadn’t changed completely: he would still disappear, from time to time, without telling me where he was going and when pressed, would become evasive. He still drank too much on occasion. His eye still wandered – he was physically incapable of not looking at pretty girls who wandered past us in restaurants. But then, Julian was physically incapable of not looking at pretty waiters who wandered past us in restaurants, so maybe it was genetic? Aidan may not have been perfect, but I was never, ever bored with him. There was never a moment when I looked over the fence and saw greener grass. I just knew, it was right.

Aidan was my inspiration. Since that night on the beach in Cape Town, when he told me all his stories, recounted his adventures, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to do what he did. He was the one who showed me what it could be like, and then, years later, he was the one showing me how to do it. We never worked together, not for the same company, but we always worked side by side. He taught me how to edit, he helped me develop a director’s eye. He taught me more about the way to get to the heart of a story than any boss or any course. I remember how excited I’d been back then, planning trips with him, dreaming up projects we would work on together. And he was excited about it, too. For a while, anyway.

I stub out my cigarette underfoot, take one last look up at my former home and get back in the car. Moving in together had just been a step too far. Almost from the moment we signed the lease on that horrible little flat I could feel him pulling away, backing out of the door before he even came in.

I drive back to Wimbledon, taking a circuitous route (via Harvey Nichols to look, unsuccessfully, for a dress for Karl’s party). I arrive back home a little after two, welcomed with great enthusiasm by my dogs. Not by my husband. I make tea in the kitchen, waiting for him to come through to see me. He doesn’t. I know he’s home because the alarm’s not on, and he always puts it on if we’re both out. Plus, the dogs would have been outside if he’d gone out. Hang on, why are the dogs still here? Matt and Liz were supposed to take them back to Sussex … Oh Christ. My heart sinks. He hasn’t really cancelled the New York trip has he? He can’t have done …

I make some tea and take it through to Dom’s study where I find him typing away furiously. He doesn’t turn around at first, but cocks his head to one side and raises his right hand slightly. This is code for, ‘I’m not ignoring you, but I’m in the middle of a sentence and I want to finish it before I lose my train of thought.’ I put down the tea next to him and kiss him on the top of the head. I put my arms around his neck and hold him until he stops typing.

He looks up at me.

‘You okay?’ His face is inscrutable, I can’t tell if he’s still angry or not.

‘Dad has cancer,’ I say, and he gets to his feet and takes me in his arms.

‘I’m so sorry, Nic, I’m so sorry,’ he keeps repeating that, over and over, and I feel terrible, because there’s a reason I blurted it out so bluntly, just at that moment. I knew he couldn’t be angry with me then, not when I’d just told him my father was dying.

We go upstairs together and lie on the bed, holding hands. I tell him I’m sorry about going away without saying anything.

‘It’s okay, you were freaked out. I shouldn’t have got so pissed off.’

‘Were Matt and Liz okay? What did you tell them?’

‘I told them the truth. My crazy bitch wife has disappeared on me again, who knows when I’ll see her again.’

‘Why didn’t Matt and Liz take the dogs, Dom? You’re not … you’re not thinking of not coming are you?’

‘No, of course not. I just thought you’d want to say goodbye to them.’ I snuggle closer to him, resting my head on his chest. ‘And Matt’s got a meeting in London tomorrow morning so he said he’d come back and pick them up on his way home.’

‘I am a crazy bitch.’

‘You are.’

I feel warm and safe and relieved, I try not to think about Dad, or about the fact that in a couple of hours Mum will be back home, she’ll be ringing to tell me about her holiday, and I’m going to have to make a decision about what to do.

We make love, Dom dozes off, I get up and make more tea. I take my laptop from my bag and sit at the kitchen table working. If I go upstairs to the attic, I’ll wake Dom up. I put on Radio 4; they’re talking about the best books of the year. I’m ashamed that I haven’t read any of them. When did I stop reading? Even when I was at my busiest, even when I was travelling around the world, dodging bullets, filming the aftermaths of earthquakes and tsunamis, I found time to read.

I open my resolutions file and re-draft.

1. Get in touch with Aidan re job offer Talk to old BBC contacts about work Email Aidan to decline job offer – ask that he no longer calls me



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 Read more! Read everything on 2011 Booker shortlist. And 2012 shortlist. When it comes out.

5. Sort out things with Dad Make an effort to see Dad regularly – monthly dinners?

This last one will only be possible, I know, if I grant his request and persuade my mother to go and visit him. I decide that I will tell her, as soon as she phones. She’s a big girl, she can decide for herself. I’ll make it very clear that I don’t mind either way. It’s entirely up to her. In fact, I won’t wait until she calls me, I’ll call her now, while my rationale is clear.

I dial her number but it goes straight to voicemail. She’s probably on the way back from the airport. Feeling slightly deflated, eager to begin the process of sorting my life out, I decide to contact Aidan instead. I open the secret Hotmail account and draft a new message.

‘Dear Aidan,’ I write, ‘it was so lovely to hear your voice again’ and then I stop writing because I realise, without turning around, that Dom is standing behind me. I didn’t hear him coming down the stairs, because the radio was on, but now I can tell, by the way that the dogs are looking past me and wagging their tails, that he’s right behind me, reading over my shoulder.