One Minute to Midnight (12 page)

‘Aidan Symonds!’ And then it wasn’t happening. A loud, harsh voice rang out, tearing through my perfect moment.

‘Hey, hello!’ Aidan called out, letting go of me and getting to his feet. He was immediately enveloped in the arms of an incredibly tanned blond girl with beads in her hair and a bright orange kikoi tied around her slender waist. She knew how to dress for a beach party. She was whispering something in Aidan’s ear, he was laughing. I turned away and got to my feet.

‘I really ought to go, Aidan,’ I called out to him. ‘It was nice seeing you.’

‘Yeah, yeah, we should meet up again, you can introduce me to Alex,’ he replied, half-heartedly attempting to disentangle himself from the clutches of the blonde. I just smiled, and waved, and walked away, furious with myself for feeling so disappointed.

Back in the shadow of the sound stage, I found Alex dancing up a storm.

‘Thank god!’ she yelled when she saw me, flinging her arms around me. ‘I thought I’d lost you. It’s almost midnight! Where the hell are our drinks?’

‘Long story!’ I yelled back as she dragged me onto the decking which served as dance floor.

‘Never mind! I’ll have one of the guys get us some champagne!’

By midnight, I’d forgotten all about my sartorial failure, the embarrassing fall on the beach, even Aidan and his annoying blonde. Intoxicated with champagne, dance-induced adrenalin and the simple joy of being with my second-best friend in the whole world, the only thing that could have improved my night would have been if Julian had been there too. At the stroke of midnight itself, Alex and I were jumping up and down, hugging each other tightly, a huddle of boys behind her waiting patiently for their New Year’s kiss. As I let her go, I found myself spun around and, before I could protest, Aidan had planted a kiss on my lips.

For a moment or two, everything slowed down. That’s how it felt, as though the rest of the world went into slow motion, the music was turned down, the noise of the crowd abated and the colours faded to black and white. There was nothing except for me and him, standing together on the beach, his arms around my waist, his lips on my mouth. And then he pulled away and the world came back, bright and loud.

‘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, keep 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.’