Invincible summer, p.5
Invincible Summer, page 5
At that moment his eyes happened to alight upon Benedict standing in the far corner of the room, intermittently visible in the strobe light engaged in animated conversation with a man who appeared to have a tattoo of a cobweb covering half his face. Probably shouldn’t have given him that pill, on reflection. It had just been a bit of a laugh, offering a pill to Benedict, who’d always been so straight. Lucien hadn’t thought he’d actually take the bloody thing but apparently there was a contagious recklessness in the air tonight, because when Benedict had seen Eva doing one he’d swallowed audibly and said, ‘Go on then, before I change my mind,’ and grabbed it out of Lucien’s hand, gulping it down with a swig of Evian. They were decent pills tonight too. Lucien was coming up pretty hard and he’d only taken one so far. He was going to make a good bit of wedge on this batch, a lot more than the take on the door by the time he’d paid the DJs and lighting guys and bouncers.
Better go and do the honourable thing, he supposed. In any case, it probably wasn’t a bad idea to get off the decks before he made a total twat of himself. He’d messed up that last mix as the pill kicked in, and for a horrible moment the hands had stopped waving and all sort of lowered to half-mast. He’d managed to pull it back by dropping in Blue Monday fast and hard, relief washing through him as the semiquaver kick-drum reverberated through the crowd and lent renewed vigour to the pumping fists; a good recovery, but still, better to quit while he was ahead.
‘Bill, take over here, would you?’ He motioned to the real DJ who was sullenly awaiting his slot at the end of the mixing desk. ‘Got a bit of business to sort out.’
Lucien clambered down the steps to the dance floor and pushed his way across to the far corner where Benedict was by now having his neck massaged by Spider-Face.
‘A word, mate.’
‘Ah, Lucien. Superb night, thanks for sorting me out with…you know. This here is…this is…’
‘Killer,’ Spider-Face interjected helpfully, his warm smile revealing a mouthful of discoloured and broken teeth.
‘Yes, um, Killer here was just telling me about this biker festival he was at last weekend. There’s another one coming up in a few weeks, great fun, open to all-comers and not at all what most people expect apparently. We should…’
‘We should and we will, mate,’ assured Lucien. ‘Let’s all swap numbers before the end of the night. But right now we need to chip off for a few minutes. Eva wants a word. Don’t mind do you, Killer?’ He steered Benedict away from his beaming companion towards the back of the club.
‘What does Eva want? Where is she?’ asked Benedict, pushing his hair back off his face and peering about.
‘Ah, well, that was a bit of a lie to get you away from your new friend, you see. This being your first pill, I should explain a few things to you. When you’re loved up on Ecstasy everyone seems like your best mate, but of course what really happens is you wake up the next morning with a Hell’s Angel named Killer asleep on your sofa and wonder what the fuck you were thinking. That’s if he hasn’t stabbed you to death in the night and nicked your TV.’
Benedict attempted to raise an eyebrow but succeeded only in generating a series of seemingly random facial twitches. ‘It’s not like you to be so judgemental. You’re condemning the man based solely on his appearance and we all know you can’t judge a book by its cover. You’d miss out on some very good books that way, all those Penguin Classics with the orange covers for starters because they all look alike, not to mention…’
Lucien raised a hand to cut him off. ‘Yeah, yeah. Call me a judgmental conformist, but I’m going stick my neck out here and say that having a spider’s web tattooed across your face is not intended to send the message, “I’m a cuddly, peaceable member of society who under no circumstances would stove in your face with a shovel for the change in your pocket.”’
A hint of doubt finally crept into Benedict’s face. ‘Ah. Well. When you put it like that. So, do you know where Eva’s got to?’
Where Eva had got to at that very moment was wedged into a tiny toilet cubicle with Sylvie, who was struggling to break a pill in half between her fingers.
‘Shit, I’ve dropped it. No, there it is.’
‘Oh God, not on the floor. There’s wee all over it. We can’t take that now.’
‘Oo, hark at you, princess. Here, I’ll wipe it off. There, all better. That’s your half.’
‘I don’t know whether I should do another one anyway. I need to be compos mentis for work on Monday.’
Sylvie glared at her through eyes lavishly caked in kohl. ‘Eva. It’s forever since we had a proper night out with the whole crew. Even Benedict’s dropped a pill, bless him. For one night, take off your metaphorical power suit and relax. We’ve hardly seen you since we’ve been back, it’s all work, work, work with you. You’ll have the whole of Sunday to recover.’
Eva hesitated. She was being pretty reckless by her prevailing standards, but the markets were dead in August and next week would be a quiet one at work. And Sylvie was right: they hadn’t seen enough of each other since she’d arrived back from travelling. There wasn’t much Eva could do about that; a job like hers came at a price, and that price was putting it before everything else in your life. When you worked fourteen hours a day it didn’t leave much time for anything else, and if you were half-hearted about it, well, there were plenty of people lined up behind you ready to take your place.
Still, at least the hard slog was finally starting to pay off. Many of her cohort were falling by the wayside, culled for underperforming or simply buckling under the pressure, and those left standing were finally being promoted into jobs where they wouldn’t have to fetch anyone’s coffee and would start to get paid the big bucks. Eva was starting to understand that half of being successful was just staying in the game longer than anyone else. The great surprise of the adult world had been that no one really knew what they were doing, and especially not the people who exuded impenetrable confidence. The first year in the job had been soul-crushing; every time she’d asked a question she found that she didn’t understand the answer. At first she assumed that this was because she was failing to grasp things that everyone else just magically understood, but lately she’d begun to realise that the reason her questions were often glossed over was that the people around her didn’t actually know the answers.
Nobody really knows what they’re doing. This was an epiphany that had scared the bejesus out of her but had also expanded her confidence tenfold, because if the big beasts of the markets didn’t have all the answers, then if she could make it her business to be the one who did she would surely be ahead of the game. She’d quietly gone back and examined the fundamentals: there are two sides to every deal, every profit made by one person equates to a loss for someone else, every loan has to be either repaid or defaulted upon at some point in the future, a single dollar is a single dollar and if it’s being counted in two places at once then sooner or later there’ll be a shortfall. Simple truths, often overlooked.
Understanding everything from first principles gave you a certain confidence that other people could just smell on you, she found. And it wasn’t only that; it was also knowing she could pick up the phone to her brokers and get a table at any club or restaurant she wanted in London that night, or tickets to Wimbledon, or pretty much anything else that her heart desired. It might not be finding a cure for cancer, but being greeted by name and given the best table by the maître d’ at Coq d’Argent still had a way of making you feel like somebody.
Even Lucien was looking at her differently tonight, with a sort of hungry air about him. After all the times she’d had to quell the stabbing feeling she got from watching him look at countless other girls that way, she recognised it when it was directed at her and savoured an inward glow of satisfaction. The balance of power was shifting between them; she had a new allure and they both knew it. It felt like the stars were starting to align for her at last.
She took a decision and grinned at Sylvie across the toilet cubicle. ‘Go on then. But not that half you just dropped on the floor. Give us a clean one, I know you’ve got a bag full. I might as well have a whole one anyway.’
Sylvie fished around in her bra for the little bag of pills. ‘Okay, sod it, flush that wet one down the loo. If you’re doing another whole one then so am I.’
Chapter 7
Primrose Hill, August 1999
SEVEN HOURS LATER, a hazy sun was rising above Primrose Hill and a blade of long grass was tickling the side of Eva’s face. She propped herself up on her elbows and looked out across the city towards St Paul’s Cathedral. Eva had meant to go home with Benedict after the club closed but somehow she and Lucien had ended up in the back of a crowded van headed for an after-party in North London, and they’d been halfway across town by the time she’d realised that Sylvie and Benedict weren’t with them. Eva hoped Benedict wasn’t annoyed; he knew where the spare key was and really, it wasn’t her fault they’d got split up. He was bound to be okay. She could make it up to him, take him out for breakfast before he caught his train. Eva was actually feeling quite straight now, not in a paranoid, scratchy way, just warm and mellow. She had been surprised and pleased when Lucien had tugged her out of the party, insisting that since they were in this part of town it would be a crime not to watch the sun rise from the top of Primrose Hill.
‘I wish we had something to drink,’ Eva thought as they lay side by side in the grass, and she must have said it out loud without realising because Lucien peeled himself up off the ground beside her and reached inside his jacket to produce a bottle of brandy.
‘Ask, and ye shall receive.’
‘Oh, you didn’t,’ she exclaimed, knowing it could only have come from the party they’d just left.
‘No I bloody didn’t nick it, if that’s what you mean.’ Lucien sounded aggrieved. ‘He gave it to me, alright. Said I had limpid eyes and that I should help myself to his drinks cabinet.’
‘I think he meant to a drink, not a bottle.’
‘Whatever. He left it open to interpretation. Anyway, a flat around here costs squillions so he’s hardly going to miss a bottle of booze. And he wouldn’t have invited a bunch of randoms back to his place if he was that worried about it.’
‘You’re incorrigible,’ Eva laughed. ‘Limpid eyes?’
Lucien leant across and held his face very close to hers. ‘Yes, limpid. Like a rock pool. Can’t you feel yourself being pulled in by their limpidity?’
‘I don’t actually think that’s a word,’ she said, wriggling out from under him. She’d seen him employ weapons-grade flirtation on at least five other people tonight regardless of age or gender, including the guy whose brandy he’d stolen, so she wasn’t kidding herself that this behaviour meant anything.
‘Did you have a good time tonight?’ Lucien said, casually shifting back onto his side but still facing her. She looked up at the lightening sky where the sun was rapidly burning away the early morning cloud. It was going to be one of those perfect summer days.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I really did. I haven’t had such a good time in ages. It’s great the way your club night’s taking off, seems like it’s really working out for you.’
He stretched, causing his T-shirt to ride up so that a couple of inches of flat white stomach were exposed. ‘I’ve got big plans for it, actually. I’m talking to a couple of other club owners about putting on similar nights for them. They love what I’m doing, bringing back proper old-school house and techno, none of that grungy Britpop shite. I’m hoping to put on a really epic night for the millennium.’
‘If the millennium bug doesn’t bring the world to an end, you mean?’
‘Then it really would be the party to end all parties. Maybe I’ll call it Chaos or something. That’s a good angle, maximise the marketing potential.’
‘Listen to you, Richard Branson. Marketing potential?’
Lucien turned a suddenly serious gaze upon her. ‘I’m not messing about here, Eva, it might look like I’m just having fun but it’s hard work and I’m planning on going places. You’re not the only one making something of yourself. I’ve grown up a lot these last couple of years. I’m not just the same old Lucien you used to know.’
He was staring penetratingly into her eyes as he spoke, and was it her imagination or was he leaning in towards her again? Was he trying to tell her that things had changed, that he wanted her and wouldn’t treat her the same way again? Or was that just the residual effects of the pills making her utterly stupid? Oh God, his face was really close now.
‘We’re not like other people, are we, Eva? What you’re doing with your career, it’s really impressive. And I’m going places too. We’re really on the brink of something. Can you feel it?’
And she could feel it. The world was changing. She was standing on the edge of a cliff. But that sounded like a bad thing, so maybe she was at the foot of a mountain, but no, that made it sound like she had a mountain to climb whereas things were actually going to get easier. So a clifftop it was, but the sort of cliff where falling off was a good thing. She felt Lucien take her hand and slide his fingers between hers and suddenly he was standing next to her at the cliff’s edge and they stepped off together and they were floating in the air as his mouth came down on hers and as he kissed her he shifted his weight so that his body was almost on top of hers and it felt…
‘Get a room, why don’t you!’
Eva jerked her eyes open and found herself looking straight into the contemptuous eyes of an early-morning dog walker. She buried her own burning face into Lucien’s shoulder, which was shaking with laughter, until the man had passed.
‘We could you know,’ he whispered into her ear.
‘Could what?’
‘Get a room. We wouldn’t have any problems with Sylvie or Benedict that way. Just you, me and an enormous bed…’
Could she really do this after spending years swearing to herself she wouldn’t fall for it again? It did feel like she was learning new things about him. He was in some ways much more complex than she’d ever realised. Or was that just the pills?
She sighed. ‘Oh, Lucien. I’m not even sure if this is…real. You know?’
He shifted further on top of her and nudged one of his legs between her thighs. ‘Reality’s overrated. It’s for people who can’t handle their drugs. Go on, there’s a Travelodge just by Regent’s Park. We could check in there.’
Her hands were inside his jacket, separated from his skin only by a T-shirt’s width of cotton. She could feel the contours of his body against her palms. How many times had she imagined this? Not half as many times as she’d had to force herself not to, because what was the point in wanting something you couldn’t have? And now here she was in situation where she could have it. Have him, Lucien. Was she really going to throw it away? Oh, but then there was Benedict, waiting at home for her, and she’d been so looking forward to seeing him. He wouldn’t easily forgive her if she went off with Lucien instead of spending the morning with him, and she didn’t even know if he’d made it back there okay, now she thought about it. He could have been mugged or anything. And he’d done his first pill tonight too. There really ought to be someone with him. She could just about be excused for the mix up over who was in the van, but it would be unforgiveable if she didn’t get home soon.
She reached up and kissed Lucien slowly on the mouth, then pulled away. ‘I can’t. I want to, but I’ve ditched Benedict and I don’t even know whether he’s okay. She kissed him again. ‘You could call me. Next week.’
Even as she said the words she sensed a barely perceptible shift in his features, the strained quality of lust dissipating and being replaced by his usual easy confidence, the affect of a man who knows that what he wants is there for the taking. The world jolted into focus and in that moment, she knew that he wouldn’t call her next week, or the one after. They weren’t Eva and Lucien, kindred spirits floating on a bed of clouds through a celestial skyscape. They were two drugged-up idiots lying on the cold ground in a public park at six o’clock in the morning. She was the biggest idiot, of course. Lucien was a complete bastard, but there was almost no point in even thinking about that because Lucien was just doing what Lucien did, taking his chances and hoping to get laid. It would be like criticising a scorpion for stinging you. Yes, it wasn’t pleasant, but its sting was on display, so if you picked it up and got stung then you were the idiot. She looked at him. Do I look like that, she wondered, staring at his bloodshot eyes with their wildly dilated pupils. There was a crust of greyish scum gathering at the corners of his mouth and his teeth and gums were stained dark from the red wine they’d drunk at the party, or maybe from the lollipops he’d been handing out at the club all evening.
Lucien sat up and brushed the grass from his clothes and Eva followed suit, grimly picking a piece of chewing gum off her sleeve. The new distance between them, in reality only a few inches, might as well have been a mile for the gulf that had opened up in the wake of the evaporated intimacy. What was she doing here when she could have gone home with Benedict and sat on the sofa with a duvet and a bottle of wine and finally caught up? They’d barely had a chance to chat this weekend and he was leaving in a few hours. It wasn’t that there was anything specific they needed to talk about; it was just that there were so many things she’d made mental notes to tell him, nothing of consequence, just anecdotes she’d been saving up because she knew they’d make him laugh. She didn’t really have that in her life anymore, and she missed it, really missed it. Eva looked at Lucien and tried to imagine talking to him about her job, or the book she’d just read, or her hopes and dreams. He looked back at her, grinning and dead-eyed.
