Invincible Summer

1

Bristol, Summer 1995

'Okay, here's one. If you could know the answer to any one single 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 right 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 genitalia 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 elder 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 History of Art 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 goodbye to the others and lay back on the grass, watching them 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, 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 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 Eva 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 realized 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 neutralize 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.

2

Bristol, Summer 1997

'Hard to believe it's finally over, isn't it?' said Sylvie. 'No more lectures, no more exams, no more diabolical vending-machine coffee.'

The friends were back in their spot on Brandon Hill, which over the last few years had been the scene of many a boozy afternoon. The day felt dreamy and momentous all at once. Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something before it was even over? Eva shook her head gently to dislodge the thought that the afternoon, their last all together in Bristol, was slipping away from them minute by minute. She was sharply aware that after today it could be any amount of time before she saw Lucien again. He and Sylvie were leaving to go travelling, and while Sylvie was definitely planning to join her in London afterwards, she knew from bitter experience that Lucien was altogether more unpredictable.

'It's not over for all of us, don't forget,' grumbled Benedict. 'Think of me, won't you, when you're off swanning around the world and I'm right back here after the summer.'

'If you're mad enough to stay on for a PhD you deserve everything you get,' Sylvie said. 'I couldn't be more ready to get out of here.'

He shrugged. 'Well, a change of scene would be nice but at least the work's going to start getting interesting. We barely touched on proper particle physics in the undergrad years, so I'll finally get a chance to get stuck into the really exciting stuff.'

Sylvie raised a sceptical eyebrow. 'Yes, well. I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that travelling in India is going to be quite a lot more exciting than being stuck in a lab in the basement of the physics department.'

'In some ways it's very similar,' Benedict said, and then laughed at her incredulous expression. 'No, really. We're all looking for answers to the big questions in life. Maybe you'll find enlightenment in an ashram and I'll find it in a particle accelerator, but the questions are the same.'

Lucien let out a snort. 'We're not all looking for the meaning of life, mate. I'm not, and nor's Eva for that matter.'

Eva glanced across at the reclining figures of her friends, trying to gauge their reaction to Lucien's comment. Normally she would have been pleased at his allying himself with her, but had she imagined it or had they been a bit sniffy when she recently announced that she'd made it through the fiercely competitive selection process to land a traineeship in derivatives trading at one of the top investment banks? During their undergraduate years she'd constantly struggled to keep pace with Benedict and lived in burning envy of the minimal hours that Sylvie's course seemed to require, but now, exams finally over, she could at least allow herself a certain amount of satisfaction that her hard work was about to translate into something more tangible than another three years of study. Someone like Benedict might go on to discover the secrets of cold fusion but Eva was reasonably confident that the world of physics wasn't going to be shaken to the core by her decision to pursue Mammon instead of elusive particles.

Besides, there was an intoxicating buzz around the City these days. The guys manning the Morton Brothers desk at the recruitment fair had only been a few years older than her but they were so effortlessly confident, smart and worldly that they might as well have been a different species. She'd tried for a moment to imagine them scrabbling about for a school bag in a bush in front of a jeering crowd and when she found she couldn't, had accepted an application form for their graduate programme.

'Oh, yes.' Sylvie's face spread into a smirk. 'Thanks for reminding me that my best friend's selling out to The Man.'

'Are you calling me a sell-out, Comrade?' Eva paused to search for a suitable comeback but eventually gave up. 'Okay, fine, I'm selling out, but at least it's to a high bidder. And do you know what, I have lived the alternative to selling out, and it's towns full of shit buildings with nothing to do, where everyone dresses the same and has the same views on everything and woe betide you if you're different in any way.'

Unmoved, Sylvie twirled an imaginary moustache. 'Capitalist running dog.'

Everyone was smiling now, but each of the smiles contained a glint of steel, the flinty protrusion of a serious undertone which had been the subject of a thousand drink-fuelled arguments over the last few years. Simultaneously aware of the futility of the endeavour yet unable to resist making her case one last time, Eva launched into her spiel.

'All you have to do is open your eyes and look around at the world: capitalism is the system that's produced the greatest wealth and freedom. It may not be terribly equal but then, nothing is more equal, and no equality easier to arrange, than ensuring that everyone is equally fucked. Anyway, it's all right for you,' she nodded towards Sylvie. 'You're one of those people who'll be fine wherever they go. Not all of us can just sail through life on raw talent, you know.'

Sylvie grinned but didn't demur, and not for the first time Eva experienced the treacherous sensation that her sadness at going their separate ways was tinged with a hint of excitement about finally wriggling out from Sylvie's shadow.

'When do you set off on your travels, anyway? Is your mum picking you up?' Benedict asked the others, and Eva glanced over to see Lucien's features assemble themselves into a sort of sneering bravado. It made her think, as she had a thousand times since the night they'd spent together, about how much he hated his vulnerabilities being exposed, and how maybe the reason there had never been a repeat of that night was that he couldn't quite forgive himself for having revealed them, or her for having seen them.

'Do be serious,' he told Benedict. 'She's working off her latest drink-driving ban. And she wouldn't have come anyway, I'm persona non grata with her current bloke, remember?'

'We're catching the train up to London this afternoon and staying the night with a mate in Fulham,' Sylvie said. 'Our flight doesn't leave till tomorrow morning.'

'How about you, Eva? What time does Keith get here?' Benedict had met Eva's father, a lecturer in Gender Studies at what he still insisted on referring to as Brighton Poly, on a number of occasions but was still clearly uncomfortable with calling him by his forename. Keith had always eschewed 'Dad' as a title, imbued as it was with patriarchal associations of authority. He was another one who had received the news of Eva's nascent investment banking career with less than unequivocal joy. He'd been so torn between paternal pride and Marxist disgust when she told him, that she thought he might implode in a puff of cognitive dissonance. But, as she'd explained, there was a third way now, a route between the heartless conservatism of old and the unavoidable impracticalities of socialism; a new world order was coming and Eva intended to be a part of it. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Union had dismantled itself, and while calling it the End of History might be over-egging it a bit, it didn't feel too grand an assertion to say that it was the dawn of a new era, and not just for a freshly minted graduate.

'Well, your mother would have been proud,' he'd allowed eventually, and Eva had swiftly changed the subject, as she always did when that quality of gruffness entered his voice.

'We'd better get going or we'll miss the train,' Sylvie said to Lucien, and Eva looked round at her friends with a sudden sense of something precious sliding away from her.

She didn't have her camera with her – it had already been packed up with the rest of her things – so instead she tried to snatch the scene out of the air and etch it onto memory: Lucien, eyes darkly gleaming, Sylvie, hair flaming like a radioactive halo in the sunlight, and next to them Benedict, silhouetted against clear blue sky, turning towards her now and, catching her looking at him, breaking into his broad, lopsided smile. Hold it right there, she thought. Everything's about to change, but just let me keep this moment.

And now there was no putting it off, it was time to say goodbye to Lucien. Eva urgently wished she could have a minute alone with him but Sylvie and Benedict were watching expectantly, so she just sat there as he leant down and dropped a kiss on her face, not quite on the mouth but not quite on the cheek either.

'See you around, kiddo,' he said with a grin, and it was all she could do to stop herself reaching up and pulling his face down towards hers, but already Sylvie was tugging at him and off down the hill they went, turning back to wave but still heading inexorably away from library days and party nights and mornings-after and endless afternoons spent huddled together laughing and clutching steaming cups of terrible coffee and everything else that had formed the fabric of their old lives together and which had seemed all along as if it would never end but was now, suddenly and irrevocably, over.

3

Corfu, August 1997

'Minuscule, isn't it?' yelled Benedict cheerfully above the roar of a landing plane as he tossed Eva's rucksack into the boot of the battered old Peugeot. 'Best sort of car to have out here, though, you'll soon see why. The air con doesn't work, I'm afraid,' he added as they lowered themselves into their seats.

It had definitely been the right decision to come, she thought, as they swept clear of the garish sprawl of Corfu Town and shot out along the coast, the plastic car seat hot beneath her legs and salty air buffeting her through the open window. When Benedict had suggested she join him for a week at his family's place in Corfu she'd wavered, but it was her only chance of a holiday in an otherwise tedious summer that would be spent living at home and working in a shop before she took up her traineeship in September. A whole holiday for the cost of a cheap flight was too tempting, even if it did mean the slightly intimidating prospect of staying with Benedict's family.

'Wouldn't it be a bit strange, though?' she'd asked as they walked back from Brandon Hill at the end of their final afternoon in Bristol. 'Your parents will probably think we're girlfriend and boyfriend or something.'

'Of course not,' Benedict assured her. 'The whole family takes guests there. More than likely my brother Harry will have a pal with him too.' Then, sounding just a little offended, he added, 'It's a genuine offer from a friend. I'm not going to jump on you if that's what you're worried about. Besides, who knows when we'll have another chance to really hang out together? You'll be off doing your thing and I'll be back in Bristol on my own. Think of it as a last hurrah.'

So she'd accepted, and now they were charging north along the twisting coastal road bounded on one side by the cliff wall and on the other by a sheer drop down to the glittering Ionian Sea below. The journey was spellbinding and hair-raising in equal parts; every time a car zoomed towards them they were forced perilously close to the road's edge, leaving Eva clutching the sides of her seat.

'You see?' bellowed Benedict above the roaring air. 'You wouldn't want to be in a Hummer on these roads.'

'Christ!' she yelped as they rounded a hairpin bend and swerved to avoid an oncoming coach. 'Are those things really allowed on roads like this? Couldn't they erect some bloody crash barriers or something?'

'It's all part of the distinctive Corfiot charm. You get used to the roads and, anyway, it's part and parcel of being in such an undeveloped place. No crash barriers but no McDonald's either, at least not where we're going. Don't worry, staying on the road's a simple matter of friction and momentum.' He grinned, seeing Eva grab the dashboard to avoid being thrown against the door as they rounded another sharp bend. 'Trust me, I'm a physicist.'