SECTION I
1.
Rachel
December 1999
Thirty minutes and seven seconds before the world is due to end, I realise my husband is nowhere to be seen.
‘Half an hour left to live, Rach,’ my friend Ingrid says solemnly. ‘Any final words?’
Millennium eve, and we are in the garden of a country house, deep in the wilds, no neighbours for miles. Which is just as well, because the stereo keeps getting turned up, and everyone should be allowed to choose their own exit music.
‘Er, this is a party. Can we do the serious existential shit tomorrow, please?’ says my other friend, Polly.
‘No, not if we’re all dead,’ replies Ingrid, reasonably enough, before swigging from the bottle of whisky she’s holding.
Polly frowns. She works in IT, has had her fill lately of doomsayers prattling on about nuclear meltdowns and freefalling planes and self-combusting stock markets. Anyway. There are, it seems, more pressing issues at stake.
‘Why are you drinking whisky?’ she asks Ingrid.
‘This is all that’s left. We went too early on the champagne.’
‘You mean you did,’ I say with a smile, turning to scan the garden again for Josh. The rain has cleared from the sky now, and we can finally see the stars.
‘Well, it is my last day on earth,’ Ingrid says, then fills our empty glasses with enough hard liquor to finish us all off, if Y2K doesn’t get to us first.
From the edge of the pool, someone lets off a firework. We watch as it shoots skyward, hanging briefly in the blackness witha whistle, like a bird. Sparks erupt, the air glowing purple and fizzing with gunpowder before an iridescent waterfall descends.
Polly looks down at her whisky-filled champagne flute and shakes her head. ‘Oh, this is sad. So very, very sad.’
Ingrid exhales, her breath a spectral twist in the arctic night. ‘Right. It’s been nice knowing you, but I do have—’ she checks her watch ‘—less than thirty minutes now to line up the best snog of my life.’
‘I thought you hated New Year and all its attendant traditions,’ I call out as she departs, at which she turns, blows me a kiss, then carries on walking without missing a beat. She is easily the best dressed of everyone here, in black designer taffeta and vertiginous heels, having refused to die with them still in her wardrobe.
Eventually, I spot him. Down by the fence-line, where the edge of the vast garden rolls into a green glimmer of water meadow, Polly’s five-year-old son is sitting on my husband’s shoulders. Josh is pointing out the stars with a single finger, dancing constellations through the rimy air, showing him the universe. The sight of them together is like a friction burn to my heart.
By my side, Polly nudges me. ‘March is your deadline, you know.’
‘For what?’
‘Having a millennium baby.’ She sips her whisky and smiles. ‘Might be nice.’
From behind us, her husband Darren chips in. ‘Actually, the third millennium doesn’t begin until 2001.’
We turn to face him.
He shrugs. ‘The AD era starts with year 1.’
Neither of us can be arsed to do the counting backwards.
‘Oh, you keptthatto yourself,’ Polly says.
‘What, basic arithmetic?’
She snorts. ‘So, it’s actually this time next year for the apocalypse?’
I watch as Josh begins to walk back towards us, Polly’s son still on his shoulders, gripping fistfuls of his hair for balance. ‘If you ask Josh, that’s probably exactly what he’d say.’
