Appearing as a special post on the Billy Blagg Advent Calendar and follows on from the Christmas Eve post.

For one year only; a New Year’s Eve addition to the Calendar.

Six years later. New Year’s Eve 1993 at Xenon Nightclub in Piccadilly. The intervening years have been a vain attempt to right a supposed wrong. He’s tried; she’s tried. In fact, she tried so hard she even married another man and moved to the end of the country, hoping that by putting at least half-a-dozen counties between them, it couldn’t possibly survive. It’s not worked though.

Sometimes through lack of will on the part of one or other of them; sometimes through astonishing examples of coincidence – one so ridiculous that even Richard Curtis filming a lovelorn scene for one of his movies would have rejected it as being simply too preposterous – they find themselves once again together on a night they should both be elsewhere. She’s even wearing a dress he bought for her earlier in the week.

The club is nowhere as busy as it should have been. It’s as if everyone has just had enough of drinking and making merry. Even the DJ seems to lack heart in the venture. He puts on a number of slow songs as one year ticks over to the next. This song comes on; a show tune from an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that neither of them would normally give house room too. Tonight though, it sounds different. As they dance slowly, holding onto each other, the words drip into their consciousness; the close dance becomes something else as they seem to meld together. Eventually, they turn their heads to look directly at one another.

We don’t need a crowded ballroom / Everything we need is here / If you’re with me / Next year will be / The Perfect Year.

Nothing was said but they both knew. It was time to stop denying themselves. By April, they had made it the Perfect Year.