Invincible Summer (11 page)

E
VA WAS RUNNING
late, as usual. Sylvie sat scraping the remainder of a layer of chipped blue varnish off one of her fingernails with a broken cocktail stick, then finished her second extortionately-priced glass of wine and ordered another. She didn't know why she bothered sometimes. What she should do is give Eva a taste of her own medicine, stop phoning her until she wised up and realised that she needed to be a bit more considerate and put a bit more effort into the friendship. But if she did that, it would probably be at least a year before Eva even noticed, Sylvie thought bitterly. She was feeling increasingly like a small adjunct to her friend's life, an inconvenient scheduling problem. Everything always had to be on her terms these days: do you mind coming up my way, are you free to get together in this ten-minute slot between my leaving my extremely important job and tumbling into bed with my ridiculously good-looking boyfriend? Okay, so Sylvie herself was between jobs again and had a bit more flexibility, and yes, Eva would probably pick up the tab for the evening, but was it really too much to ask for her best friend to consider the way it all made her feel?

God, you sound like a teenager, she chided herself. No one understands me. But it wasn't really surprising that she sounded like a teenager, seeing as how she was practically living like one despite having turned twenty-nine a few months earlier. Sylvie didn't have much to show for adult life so far. No husband, no kids, no career, no mortgage. Ten years ago that would have sounded like a good thing, a sign that she hadn't been sucked into conforming to society, so why was she beginning to feel as if she had taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line? These thoughts were enough to make Sylvie take another big gulp of her wine and start to wonder whether to order yet another drink, when at last Eva glided in through the glass doors.

‘Finally,' she said as Eva reached the table. ‘You're only fifty minutes late.'

‘Sorry, I got stuck in a meeting. Thanks for waiting.'

‘I didn't have much choice, did I? Seeing as it took an hour and cost six quid to get here on the tube.'

‘Okay, I get it. I'm late. I'm sorry.' Eva threw her jacket over the back of the chair next to her and sat down. ‘How's it going?'

‘Well, I just got fired from a job scraping chewing gum off school desks and I'm thinking of selling a kidney to make the rent. But apart from that, tickety-boo.'

‘That bad, huh? Let me know if you need me to help you out again this month.'

‘Nah. It's all life experience. It will feed my art and give me something talk about in interviews once I'm famous. I'll have a ready supply of anecdotes about clambering over piles of unconscious junkies to get to the front door of the squat I'm going to end up living in.'

In truth Sylvie had long since given up the notion that adversity was the soil in which talent grew. What looked like glamorous squalor from a distance had turned out to be grindingly unpleasant to live day to day, and most of her twenties had been spent in the grey-hued no-man's-land between poverty and the level of financial security needed to stave off anxiety for long enough to flourish. Just having a stable place to live would have helped. She'd been longing for that since she was a child and now here she was, a fully-grown adult, moving from one dodgy flatshare to another. It had become impossible to afford a decent place to live in London and paid work was getting harder to find. For anything more than a shop job she was up against all the people who'd got it right first time around, years younger and with all the optimism and confidence that life had already sucked out of her. Sylvie couldn't compete with that.

Was it London, though, or was it just her? She looked around at the other people in the bar, men and women in their twenties wearing suits and greeting one another with kisses and loud laughter and giving every appearance of thriving. Not everyone was having the same problems that she was. Take Eva. She had landed on her feet with her job and had spent some obscene amount of money on a horrible soulless flat that looked like a hotel room. Sylvie cringed every time she saw her own pictures on the walls of that flat, but at least Eva had a home, money, a job. Look at her now, casually raising a hand to attract the attention of an aproned waiter.

‘Can I get…?' Eva looked over at Sylvie.

‘A bottle of the pinot grigio,'

‘…and a Badoit over here, please?'

How times have changed, thought Sylvie. If you'd told her when they were at university that Eva would be there in her tailored suit waving down waiters and asking for mineral water by brand with practised confidence, she'd have laughed. Sylvie had always been the one who got most of the attention, and it had been all she could do to prise her friend out of her Doc Martens now and again. Did the fact that Eva had changed so much and Sylvie hadn't mean that Eva was inauthentic, a fake, or just that Sylvie was getting left behind, a loser who had failed to move on and carve out any sort of a coherent adult life for herself? Ok, there was the art, but really, what was the point if no one wanted to buy it? You could only get by for so long convincing yourself of your unrecognised talent, telling yourself that the whole world was wrong and you were right.

‘There's something I wanted to talk to you about,' Eva was saying, interrupting her train of thought.

The waiter returned with the bottle of wine and two glasses but Eva held a hand over the top of hers.

Sylvie frowned. ‘You're not drinking? Why did you let me order a bottle?'

‘I figured you'd get through it. I'm sticking to water tonight. I'm a bit jet-lagged and I've got work in the morning.'

This was just another sign of where she sat on Eva's priority list. She couldn't even be arsed to have a drink with her. She would deign to spare her an hour or two, but only if she could be in and out as though it had never happened, with no hint of a hangover to interfere with her precious job afterwards. This was a new low, even for goodie-goodie corporate Eva. Unless…

‘Oh God. You're not pregnant are you? You are, look at you! That's what you want to talk to me about, isn't it?'

Eva looked straight at her friend with a deadpan expression. ‘Yes, Sylvie, I'm pregnant. With a massive food-baby.'

‘Shit, sorry. I didn't mean you looked fat. It would make sense, that's all. What with needing to talk to me about something and not drinking. And you have to admit you've put on a few pounds lately.'

‘I've put on a few pounds because I work fourteen hours a day and the only way to get through it is with junk food and sugar highs. I don't need you to remind me I'm overweight, I get enough of Julian hinting that I should work out more.'

‘Well, you should make the most of having a personal trainer for a boyfriend.'

‘I do, but in other ways.' Eva attempted a half-hearted leer, and then gave up and sighed. ‘I mean, obviously he's
very
hot, and we do have fun together, but he's putting a lot of pressure on me to let him move in properly and I can't put off a decision much longer. That's what I wanted to get your advice on, really. I mean, it makes sense. He's so lovely and he practically lives at my place already. It's just that I sometimes wonder whether there's a spark missing. And…I suppose there's a bit of me that's always felt like I was waiting for Benedict.'

‘Benedict?' Sylvie hitched an eyebrow upwards a couple of notches. ‘Eva, he's married. To Lydia. I thought you put this to bed before the wedding? Didn't you ask him to give things a go before he got married and he chose her? I know you were upset at the time, but I thought you'd got over it long ago.'

‘I did. I had. But the thing is…I suppose in the back of my mind there's always been the thought that maybe he and Lydia wouldn't last, and that when they broke up we would have a chance to be together.'

‘It's a long shot, though, isn't it? I mean, it's been what, four years? And they've got kids.'

‘I know. I wasn't really thinking this stuff consciously, it's just always been lurking there, the knowledge that I've never met anyone else I could be as close to as Benedict, and I took him for granted because I was young and stupid. And now I have to decide whether to commit to Julian, and I want to but it means letting go, properly letting go of the idea that Benedict and I will ever be together. It just feels so final.'

‘Steady on. He only wants to move in with you, right?'

‘Well, yes, for now. I mean, if it was just that I could handle it, but it never stops there, does it? After that comes marriage and kids. Either that or you break up, which is much harder if you live together, and I'm just not sure I want to do any of those things.'

‘Do you even have to worry about that now? Can't you just try living together and see what happens?'

‘There's no point ignoring the inevitable, though. This stuff has consequences.'

‘Christ, I don't know. There's no way of knowing, is there? You just have to decide whether you want to try it and then see how it goes.'

‘Yeah, well, I'd like to have thought it through properly before I “see how it goes”,' Eva laughed. ‘Never mind, I know it's not really your scene.'

‘How do you mean, not my scene?' Sylvie didn't join in the laughter, but Eva didn't seem to notice the edge to her voice.

‘Well, it's not your cup of tea, is it, all of this? Cohabitation, commitment and so on. Now, if I wanted to decide whether to have a bunk-up with the barman I'd know who to ask.'

Sylvie could feel the wine sloshing in her stomach like a ball of acid. ‘When did you become so fucking smug?'

Eva's eyes widened. ‘Are you kidding? It was just a joke.'

‘Do I look like I'm kidding? I may actually have to stab myself in the face with this fork if I have to listen to your ridiculous problems a moment longer. “Oh no, my super-hot boyfriend wants to move into my million-pound apartment but I'm worried he might be too nice to me.”‘

‘What on earth brought this on? I'm only saying that casual sex is more your field than committed relationships. It's nothing you haven't said yourself a thousand times before, but suddenly I can't say it? Suddenly you're jealous of my relationship?'

‘Jealous? I'm not jealous.' Sylvie slammed down her glass, spilling a puddle of wine onto the table where it soaked into her sleeve unnoticed. ‘This is exactly what I mean about you being smug. Smug and self-centred. You love it now that you're on top and I'm your charity case instead of you being the gawky sidekick.'

‘What the actual fuck?' Eva stared at her, open-mouthed. ‘Your gawky sidekick? That's how you see me? And now you think I'm getting ideas above my station, is that it?'

‘Well, you were hardly the Fonz, were you, when we first met? I introduced you to people, took you to parties. Back in the day, your idea of a good time was a lager top and a chat about relativity. But it was still better than the money-obsessed corporate clone you've turned into.' Her voice was loud and spiteful, and the couple on the table behind them fell silent and turned to stare.

Eva blinked. ‘Are we even friends any more, Sylvie? I know you're not happy with your life, but it's not my fault and there's no point resenting me for making a success of mine. I've worked hard for what I've got while you swanned about being all bohemian. I don't think you ever really appreciated how tough and lonely it was for me. You always had Lucien, and pretty much any man you wanted for a roll in the hay.

‘So yes, fine, I used to be the gawky sidekick and no one looked at me and I'm not surprised that you don't like the fact that things have changed but that's how it is so get used to it. I've tried with you, I really have. I pay for everything and spend about as much time with you as I do with my own boyfriend, and you're still always miserable.' Eva paused and waited for Sylvie to respond but she was staring pointedly out of the window. ‘What I don't understand is, if you hate everything you think I stand for, the corporate world and material possessions and consumer society, why are you even still friends with me? And if you're so unhappy with your own life, why don't you think about changing it instead of sitting around resenting everyone else?' Eva stood up, reached into her purse and threw a couple of twenties on the table. ‘I'm sure you'll have no trouble finishing that bottle on your own. I've got an actual life that I need to get back to.'

Walking home, Eva was half-surprised to find that she was crying. It was indignation as much as hurt, she told herself. What Sylvie had said was just so
unfair
. Eva had always wanted nothing but the best for Sylvie, but it was impossible to help someone who refused to face up to reality.

She'd been right about one thing, though: Eva was crazy to agonise over the good things in her life. In a world where even her oldest friend could be that spiteful to her, having at least one person she could count on was crucial. What was she waiting for? Why wouldn't she want her devoted, gorgeous boyfriend to move in with her? There wasn't going to be a thunderbolt, but what she and Julian had together was pretty damn good. Sylvie can say as many horrible things as she likes about me, thought Eva, but at least I'm not the one going home on my own tonight.

As it happened, Sylvie didn't go home on her own that night. Just as Eva had suggested, she stayed and finished the bottle, and once it was finished she sat at the bar and chatted up the barman, who slipped her a free drink every time the manager wasn't looking. When his shift was over she went back with him to his flat in Canning Town and when she woke the next morning she had to slide her hand between her legs for the slimy, clotted confirmation that yes, they'd had sex and no, he hadn't used a condom. She managed to dress and sneak out without waking him, pausing only to vomit as quietly as possible in the kitchen sink on the way to the front door.