Invincible Summer

This is uncorrected advance content collected for your reviewing convenience. Please check with publisher or refer to the finished product whenever you are excerpting or quoting in a review.

O
KAY, HERE'S ONE.
If you could know the answer to any question, what would it be?'

Eva was lying on her back and looking up at the sky as she spoke. Summer had finally arrived, late that year, and the feeling of sun on skin combined with the wine and Lucien's shoulder beneath her head was intoxicating. She had sat the last of her first year exams that morning and would be going home for the summer the next day, but in a couple of months she'd be back here in a life that was as far removed from her old world as she'd dared to hope it would be when she'd set off for university the previous autumn.

The four friends were clustered on a blanket close to the top of Brandon Hill. They hadn't bothered to enter the stone tower perched at the hill's brow and climb the spiral staircase to the viewing platform, but in any case their vantage point afforded them an impressive view of the city, out across the treacly river and past the derelict warehouses towards the endless sprawl of streets and houses beyond. In the long grass by their feet were two open wine bottles, the first propped upright in one of a pair of battered lace-up boots, the other lying on the ground spilling its last drops onto the earth.

Sylvie rolled over onto her stomach and brushed a few strands of coppery hair from her eyes. ‘Any question at all?'

‘Yes,' said Eva. ‘Foof.'

 ‘Huh?'

‘That was the sound of the genie disappearing after you wasted your question.'

Sylvie glared at her. ‘That's not fair. I'm having another one. I want to know the meaning of life.'

‘That's not actually a question.' Benedict elbowed her gently in the ribs. ‘Anyway, the answer would probably turn out to be forty-two, and then you'd have wasted your question again.'

Sylvie tugged her index finger and thumb sharply along a stalk of sedge grass, strimming the seeds into her hand and then blowing them into his face. ‘Okay, smarty-pants. What would you ask?'

Benedict blinked. ‘I'd have to think about how to phrase it, but basically I would want to know the grand unifying theory for the universe.' He thought for a moment. ‘Or else what happens when we die.'

‘How about next week's lottery numbers?' asked Eva lazily.

‘You'd have to be insane to waste your question on something so banal,' said Benedict, prompting a scowl from Eva. It was all very well to think there was something trivial about money when you came from a family like Benedict's, but when you'd grown up in a small Sussex town short on glamour and long on stolid conformism the world was a different place. Benedict would never understand what it felt like to get up every weekend and trudge to work in a mindless supermarket job as Eva had for the four long years before she arrived in Bristol, where the same kids who regularly threw her bag over a hedge on the way to school would come in and pull things off the shelves just to get her into trouble. She couldn't win: if she ignored them she ran the risk of getting fired, but if she called security they'd make sure her bag landed in a puddle on Monday.

In a place like that almost anything could make you an outcast: wearing the wrong clothes, doing too well in exams, not being able to talk about the ‘in' TV shows because your father didn't believe in having a TV. The only real glimpse of daylight had come in the form of Marcus, who was briefly her boyfriend because no matter how unpopular you were, there was always a teenage boy whose libido could propel him past that barrier. Marcus was himself quite popular and had taken a surprising interest in Eva, and for a few short months she had been his girlfriend and basked in a grudging acceptance.

The relationship led to the pleasing if rather undignified loss of her virginity in the woods behind the school after half a bottle of cider on a bench, which apparently constituted both date and foreplay. Marcus had eventually grown resentful and dumped her after a much-anticipated afternoon in bed while his parents were away ended prematurely before he'd even removed his trousers, and Eva had ill-advisedly tried to lighten the mood by cracking a few jokes. She'd read in
Cosmopolitan
that it was important for couples to be able to laugh together in bed, but then, the article had also said that slapping the male genitals as if lightly volleying a tennis ball was a good idea and that hadn't gone down particularly well either. At least by that time she'd made it into the relative safety of the sixth form, but while her life had become bearable it was hardly the stuff that dreams were made of. The day before she finally left for university Eva had taken the polyester uniform she'd worn for four long years of Saturdays out onto the patio and set fire to it, making a vow into the smoke that she was never going back.

‘What about you, Lucien?' Benedict nudged Sylvie's brother's leg with his own, his voice breaking through Eva's reverie. ‘What's your question?'

‘Christ, I don't know. A list of everyone who's ever got their jollies thinking about me?'

Eva closed her eyes to avoid involuntarily glancing at him and hoped her cheeks weren't visibly reddening. Nobody knows, she told herself. They can't read your mind to see the
Atlas of Lucien
mapped out there, from the messy dark hair to the freckle on the inside of his surprisingly delicate wrist.

Sylvie let out a long, low moan of disgust and Benedict laughed. ‘I don't think I'd like that,' he mused. ‘It would take all the mystique out of things.'

‘The virginity is strong with this one,' taunted Lucien in his best Yoda voice.

‘Hardly,' muttered Benedict. ‘Anyway, there'd probably be some hideous people on there. Your sports master from school or someone like that.'

‘Okay, women only. Under the age of thirty.' Lucien leant over to retrieve the almost-empty wine bottle from Eva's boot, carelessly dislodging her head from his shoulder as he did so.

Eva sat up, trying to look as if the brush-off didn't bother her. Typical of Lucien, she thought, to pull her down onto his shoulder like that and then push her away. They'd been doing this dance for most of the year since she'd arrived in Bristol and her new friend Sylvie had introduced her to her hard-living older brother. Lucien wasn't a student; he described himself as an entrepreneur, though Eva was hazy on the detail of what that actually involved. Sylvie had chosen to study at Bristol only because Lucien was already living there, presumably doing whatever it was that he did in the little time that he didn't spend loitering around halls with the rest of them.

‘Right,' said Sylvie, levering herself up from the ground and brushing the grass off her jeans. ‘I can't listen to any more of this. I'm off to the library to pull an all-nighter, my last essay's due in tomorrow.'

Sylvie was known for her aversion to writing the essays that she always seemed slightly appalled were required by her Art History course, and claimed to find it impossible to work without a deadline less than forty-eight hours away. The degree was merely intended to buy her some time on her trajectory to being a revered artist, which, it was generally accepted by the group, was inevitable. The ingredients were all there: a prodigious and obsessive talent for drawing and painting, a quirky, original eye, supplemented by striking good looks and a tough, irreverent attitude to life. She had a certain shine, a vividness about her; she was just one of those people who generated their own gravity, causing people to cluster around her and try to please her. It was impossible to imagine her being anything other than a great success.

‘I've got to go too,' said Benedict reluctantly. ‘I'm leaving first thing and I haven't packed yet.'

Eva and Lucien said their goodbyes and lay back on the grass, watching the other two walk away down the hill. A tinge of purple was seeping into the late afternoon light announcing the onset of dusk, and Eva was feeling light-headed from the cheap, acidic wine. Lucien rolled over onto his side so that he was facing her.

‘And then there were two,' he said, reaching into the plastic bag beside him. ‘Looks like it's just you and me left to drink the last bottle, Eva.'

The way Lucien said her name made it sound dark and alluring. It was the most exotic thing about her and she had always liked it. Her socialist father sometimes joked that she was named after Eva Perón, but she knew her mother had chosen it just because she loved it. If it had been left to him she'd probably have been called something drab and unostentatious, like Jane or Susan.

‘Eva,' he said again. ‘It's a pretty name.'

‘My mother chose it,' she told him.

‘She's dead, isn't she?' he asked, directly but not unkindly.

‘Yes. She died of breast cancer when I was five. I don't remember her much.'

Lucien rolled over onto his back and turned his face up to the sky, closing his eyes.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘That can't be great. Still, it can't be much worse than having an alkie for a mother.'

Eva's eyes widened. Sylvie had told her a bit about how tough it had been for them growing up, how their parents had split up and how their mother drank too much and how often they'd had to move, but Lucien had always seemed to have an impenetrable veneer of invulnerability. This was the first time she'd ever heard him mention their childhood.

‘Sylvie told me your mum's a bit of a drinker,' she said cautiously.

‘Yep. And I've got the scars to prove it.'

He opened his left hand, holding it out towards her. The last two fingers and part of the palm were swirled with satiny pink tissue, the scarring so extensive that the little finger on his right hand was noticeably narrower than it ought to have been between the two lowest joints. Eva had asked Sylvie about it not long after they'd met, not wanting to risk offending Lucien, but she'd just shrugged and said something about an accidental burn when he was a kid. At the time Eva had sensed something unsaid but hadn't wanted to push; although Sylvie could sometimes be voluble and entertaining on the subject of their flaky home life, recounting stories about finding her mother asleep in the shrubbery or getting told off at school for taking in a family pack of KitKats for lunch because that was all there was in the house, Eva had quickly learned that it was something she only talked about on her own terms.

Now she reached out and ran her fingers across the taut, glossy flesh. ‘Lucien. I'm so sorry. Your mother did that to you? I had no idea.'

He didn't look at her. ‘Nah, not exactly. She was passed out drunk with one of those old-style bar heaters on in the room when I was little, three or four maybe, and I reached out and grabbed it. She never hurt me on purpose, though that's more than I can say for a couple of her boyfriends. She was just a bit of a shit mother when she was drinking, which was quite a lot of the time.'

‘You and Sylvie are lucky to have had each other at least,' Eva said. ‘No wonder you're so close.'

‘Yeah. We've always looked out for each other.'

His eyes met hers for the first time since he'd held out his hand, and they both realised at the same moment that her fingers were still resting against the damaged tissue. For a fraction of a second she glimpsed something she'd never seen before behind his eyes, something at once more human and more animal than the usual sardonic, bullet-proof version of himself that was all he'd ever shown her. She had a searing feeling of seeing him for the first time, not just what he wanted her to see but the child he'd once been, and the life that had shaped what he'd since become. But even as these thoughts were running through Eva's mind his gaze was changing, retreating and flattening, and he closed the fingers over the scars and tucked the hand away so that they were no longer visible.

Unable to bear their new intimacy being snatched away, Eva did something she'd never have been bold enough to do before: she leant over and took his hand again, lacing her own fingers between his damaged ones. He was half beneath her on the ground now, her face above his, her hair grazing his cheek. When he lifted his eyes to hers something new passed between them, something electric, and this time he didn't take his hand away. Instead, he grinned a wolfish grin and raised his other hand and slid the fingers around the back of her neck, tangling them into her hair and tugging her down towards him.

More wine, more talk, and then a walk home in the fading light, drunkenly swaying towards each other as they walked, arms brushing, little fingers half-entwined, swigging from the cans of beer they'd bought on the way in an attempt to neutralise the strangeness and embarrassment of what they were doing.

Any ambiguity had dissolved the minute they'd got inside her room and closed the door. He'd shoved her up against the wall and kissed her hard and started to unbutton her shirt, and she hadn't had time to think, only to get lost in the urgency of the moment.

In bed though, the urgency had dissolved into comedy. There had been clashing teeth and rumbling stomachs, and her jeans had got wedged around her ankles so that she'd nearly fallen over trying to wriggle out of them. There was the first condom that had pinged across the room, and the second one that had fallen into the ashtray. An eventual five minutes' of panting and thrusting was rapidly followed by Lucien's snoring. When she woke furry-mouthed and queasy beside him, with the morning sunlight trickling in around the edges of her curtains, she'd reached out and taken his hand to try to recapture something of the closeness of the night before but he'd pulled it away, kissing her quickly and passionlessly before rolling out of bed to pull on his jeans.

‘Best be off then,' he said once he'd found his T-shirt. ‘We don't want Sylvie finding out about this, she hates it when I shag her mates.'

He grinned and made a run for the door, leaving Eva to lie back swathed in her clammy, rumpled sheets and a palpable sense of rejection.