Still Falling For You

Chapter 1

Rachel

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 with a 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 kept that to 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.’

Ten minutes and nineteen seconds until midnight. Josh and I have come inside the house, where he is leading me into the yawning mouth of a long, dark corridor. The silence ticks, and all the lights are off, because the house is so vast, it’s not immediately obvious where any of the switches are.

‘Josh, this is creepy,’ I say, glancing around the galleried walls as we walk, our footsteps echoing against the flagstones. ‘All the oil paintings are scowling at us. And there are literal suits of armour.’

‘Yeah, but they’re guarding something really good. Wait and see.’

‘The party’s outside.’

‘No, the party is very much . . . in here.’

We pause by a heavy wooden door, at which Josh withdraws an enormous wrought-iron key from his pocket.

I lift an eyebrow. ‘I think you forgot your kerosene lamp.’

He simply smiles and unlocks the door, heaving it open. It groans and creaks in a way that suggests it hasn’t been used since the last time anyone celebrated a millennium.

As I peer past him, a stiff chill ascends. I can see only a flight of steps, swallowed up by a damp-stone darkness, and a banister made of rope. ‘You know, if this was a horror film, I’d be saying we deserve everything that’s about to happen to us.’

He leans over and flicks on a light. It fizzes and sings, as though the bulb’s seconds from blowing. ‘Does this help?’

‘No. Not in the least.’

‘Shall I go first?’

‘Do you even need to ask?’

He starts to descend. Nervously, I follow him, hanging on to the rope, just waiting for that door to slam shut and the light to sputter out.

But when we reach the bottom I make a sharp intake of breath.

We are in a cellar with a domed ceiling, every wall lined with rack upon rack of glinting bottles. A tiny cathedral of hedonism, just for us.

I start laughing. ‘Oh, my God.’

By my side, Josh beams. ‘Ingrid told me where to find the good champagne.’

We nestle down on Josh’s jacket, lean back against the chilled stone of the cellar wall.

‘We can’t take a magnum,’ I protest.

‘The world’s about to end. We can do what we like.’

I suppress a smile. ‘I’m surprised you’re not out there looting shops.’

‘Well, I would be, but . . . I actually had an ulterior motive for bringing you down here,’ he says, tugging the cork from the bottle he’s picked out.

I smile as it pops. ‘Oh, yeah?’

The bulb-light barely stretches to where we are sitting.

Josh’s face is sliced with shadow, his eyes rich and dark as damp earth.

He nods, passes me the champagne. ‘Yeah. If there’s some sort of biblical explosion up there in the next five minutes, we’re essentially in a nuclear bunker, with enough booze to last for another thousand years. ’

The bottle’s so big, I have to hold it with both hands. I take a swig, the bubbles tart on my tongue, then pass it back to him. ‘What about our friends?’

‘Ah, screw them. They’re going down happy.’

It is silent down here, except for a soft stalactital drip somewhere in the cellar’s far corner. Above ground, the music is still pumping.

‘You were really sweet with Blake tonight,’ I say, picturing him with Polly’s son earlier.

He smiles lopsidedly, rubs a hand through his hair. ‘Yeah, although he took it too literally when I told him to hold on tight. Virtually scalped me.’

I smile too, then glance at my watch. ‘Only two minutes to go. Right. Better say our goodbyes.’

‘Can I go first?’ Josh sets down the bottle and shuffles round to face me, drawing me in to the low valley of his gaze. ‘Well, I should probably just say . . . it’s been the privilege of my life to know and love you, Mrs Foster.’

I prod a finger against his ribcage. ‘Hey. I don’t want be the last thing you ever say to me to be a joke.’

‘It’s not,’ he whispers, then leans forward and kisses me as, above our heads, the clock strikes midnight and the world explodes.

Up there, everywhere could be burning. But down here, right now, we would not know, or care.