Invincible Summer (22 page)

Big Paul looked thoughtful. ‘Well, first off, I'm assuming Plop-Box is a working title, because it sounds like a mobile khazi. Second, the distributors are your biggest challenge. They have to agree to accept a receipt from this thing instead of a signature from a person. Have you spoken to anyone yet? Royal Mail? DHL? The Post Office is pretty monolithic and hardly well adapted to change.'

‘We've had initial talks and they made promising noises, but we need to have a prototype in place to get them to commit, and that's why we need capital now. I really don't think it's going to be that hard a sell once we have proof of concept. Think about it. Every time they fail to deliver a parcel, they have to take it back to a sorting office and then attempt to redeliver it. That adds costs for them. If the householder buys a Plop-Box, they're spending money that will not only save them inconvenience, but will save the distributors money too. Everyone's a winner.'

There was a few seconds' pause and then Big Paul said, ‘Okay. Done.'

‘Done?' asked Eva.

‘Done,' he confirmed. ‘Two hundred.'

Sylvie's face dropped. ‘Oh. Two hundred quid won't go far.'

But Eva was smiling broadly. ‘Not quid, Sylvie. Grand.'

Eva and Big Paul watched in amusement as she processed the information, furrowed brow giving way to widening eyes. ‘As in, thousand pounds? Two hundred thousand pounds?' she squeaked. ‘Just like that?'

‘Yeah, just like that,' said Big Paul. ‘With one caveat. You have to change the name. Now, do you know why I'm doing this? I'm doing it because I know you, Eva. I trust and believe in you, but more than that, I know that you are so anally retentive that you would walk over hot coals before you let this business fail and lose a penny of my money. And just to give you some added motivation, let's be clear that if you prove me wrong, I will hunt you down and destroy all that you love.'

Still smiling, Eva fetched the bottle of champagne she'd bought that day in hope there would be a reason to celebrate and Big Paul, satisfied that it was of a suitable calibre to pass his lips after scrutinising the label, uncorked the bottle and handed the first glass to Sylvie.

She waved it away. ‘I'll stick with juice, thanks.'

‘AA, is it?' He peered at her suspiciously.

Sylvie looked taken aback. ‘Not exactly. I never made it quite that far. But some people are better off not drinking and I'm definitely one of them. We all know what happened the last time you handed me a drink,' she added, gesturing upwards towards Allegra's bedroom. This was the first time that their previous meeting had been alluded to, and an uncomfortable hush descended upon the table.

‘Yeah.' Paul shifted in his chair. ‘I suppose now's a good time to say that I'm sorry about that. We may not have behaved in an entirely gentlemanly fashion on that occasion. I was sorry about the baby and Robert and everything.'

Eva shot him a glare across the table, causing him to backtrack.

‘Shit, I don't mean I'm sorry about the baby. Probably you're really happy about the baby. Actually, I've got no idea how you feel about the baby and I'm just trying to make the right noises but digging a hole so big I'll probably emerge in Azerbaijan-'

‘Relax.' Sylvie stopped him with a smile. ‘I've got a thick skin and I know people don't always know what to say. I'd honestly prefer that they give it a shot, even one as incompetent as that, than ignore Allegra completely. For the record, I'm delighted about my daughter. She's beautiful and I love her. Sometimes it's tough and I worry about the future, but mostly she's a huge source of joy in my life.'

Big Paul leant back in his chair. ‘Good. Great. I was really sorry to hear about what happened, that's all. Really bad luck.'

‘Look,' said Sylvie, ‘in my situation you rethink your ideas about what constitutes bad luck. Spend half an hour in the waiting room at Great Ormond Street and you'll see children with feeding tubes, oxygen canisters, tracheostomies, colostomy bags. We don't have any of that anymore. The kids themselves, they don't sit around measuring themselves against other people or railing against the injustice of their circumstances, so unless their condition is really painful, and Allegra's isn't, most of the bad stuff is to do with worrying about the future. For the first year I did nothing else. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and lie there for hours thinking about what will happen to Allegra when I die. It blunts itself after a while. I mean, say I live to seventy-five, that's more than another thirty-five years from now.'

Big Paul nodded thoughtfully. ‘True. And who knows what will have happened in thirty-five years' time? What with global warming, probably all that'll be left will be Keith Richards and a bunch of cockroaches sitting around on a rock. Maybe we should
all
be running through the streets screaming.'

‘Exactly,' said Sylvie. ‘ But you're not, are you? Because no one can live like that. I've given up stressing about it. I'm going to do what's in my power to make each day a good one, and beyond that everything will just have to take care of itself.'

‘I'll drink to that,' said Paul, and raised his glass.

L
UCIEN SHIFTED UNCOMFORTABLY
and looked out of the window of the bus. The suit he'd been given by the woman at the Dress for Success charity was digging into his crotch and armpits. He hated the thought that he was going to have to put this suit back on tomorrow morning, and the next day, and the next. Still, at least he'd got the job. It wasn't much of a job but it was a start. Sylvie and his parole officer would be pleased.

He thought back to when the manager had asked at the end of the interview whether he had any questions, and realising he was expected to come up with something, he'd asked what it was like working there.

The manager had smirked. ‘What do you think? It's a bloody call centre. No one wants to be here. It's the seventh circle of hell. Everyone you speak to hates you and it pays tuppence more than the minimum wage. Only people who are desperate do it, people like you. We've taken on a few ex-cons under the reintegration scheme, and they actually tend to stick around longer than most because they have the least choice about it. You're going to hate every second of it, but if you turn up every day for a year, then suddenly HMP Hellhole isn't the last thing on your CV and you're back in the game. A rehabilitated member of society, so to speak.'

This probably wasn't a totally unfair summary of the situation, but the bastard could have at least tried to put a gloss on it, Lucien thought grimly. Still, he could manage anything for a year, right? For a moment he half-wished that tomorrow morning he'd be waking up back in Spring Hill. The open prison where he'd spent most of his sentence wasn't all that bad in many ways, it had lovely grounds and he'd even had a Playstation. Moving to a jail out in Buckinghamshire had meant fewer visits, but that hadn't been such a bad thing. The first handful of visits from Eva had left him feeling so low that he'd had to put a stop to them; after a few sessions of listening to her bang on about her high-flying job and her plank of a boyfriend and their latest weekend minibreak in Rome, he'd known he couldn't tolerate years of the same, so he'd put her off by saying he was using his slots for other mates, even though precious few of the people he used to call his mates had actually ever bothered to visit or write. It had taken a while but she'd got the message eventually, though she'd still been good enough to top up his prison bank account regularly and send frequent care parcels and the occasional picture of Herbert before she found him a new home.

It would have been nice if Sylvie had been able to come more often, but she had more than enough on her plate, what with the baby and everything, so once a month had been okay. The thing about visits was that you got so ravenous for proper human contact that you'd be bouncing off the walls for twenty-four hours beforehand, but then you'd have your visit and it would remind you of everything you were missing and how badly you'd screwed up your own life and the lives of the people around you, and then you spent the next twenty-four hours cycling through anger and shame until you finally just felt numb and deflated. It was worse for the men with partners and kids. They would work themselves up into a welter of misty-eyed sentimentality between visits, and spruce themselves up as much as possible in anticipation of an emotional and affectionate catch up, only to be met by a tired and angry woman who'd had to take three trains to get there and was more worried about how she was going to pay the latest electricity bill than how much her good-for-nothing jailbird boyfriend was missing her cooking.

At least he didn't have that to worry about. But what it also meant was that he didn't have much of a life waiting for him on the outside. He was going to have to start from scratch, and it wasn't going to be easy. Sylvie had said he could stay with her as long as he got a job, but it was funny how hard he found it living under her roof. You'd have thought that living by somebody else's rules and having no privacy would be second nature to him now, but in the three weeks he'd just felt prickly all the time, and very much in the way. It would get easier once Eva had sold her flat, he consoled himself. As soon as she found a place of her own he would get the spare room instead of the sofa, and wouldn't be woken up at 7am every morning by Sylvie bringing Allegra down for breakfast.

Still, it was pointless focussing on the bad stuff. There was plenty of upside in being out of prison, including hot baths, decent food, and not least being in proximity to women again. There were two girls a few rows ahead of him right now on the half-empty bus, sitting facing each other across the aisle and swapping gossip in excited voices. They were like birds, he thought, brightly-coloured chattering birds of paradise, light and skittish and exquisitely free of the sort of baggage that was weighing him down. That was just what he needed to make him feel light again. They were the usual princess/best friend combo, a willowy blonde wearing far too much makeup but pulling it off in the way that only really young, really pretty girls can, and a shorter, stouter friend in a green jumper loose enough to reveal a flesh-coloured bra strap biting into a plump shoulder. He leant forward and rested his arms on the back of the seat in front.

‘Excuse me, ladies.' The stream of chatter halted abruptly and two enquiring faces turned towards him. He grinned and ratcheted an eyebrow up a notch to maximise the impact of his rakish good looks. ‘Do you have the time?'

The best friend looked at him accusingly. ‘You've got a watch on,' she said.

Lucien glanced down at his wrist resting on the seat-back, protruding from the too-short sleeve of his suit jacket. Shit. She was right. He really was out of practice. Lucien felt the eyebrow drop back down a fraction involuntarily.

‘So I have. But that doesn't matter, because what I actually wanted to know was,' and here he turned his best thousand-watt smile on the princess, ‘do you have the time for me to buy you a coffee?'

The princess looked back at him suspiciously. That was okay, with the pretty ones there was always a split second where they sized you up, made you sweat for it. He could feel it all coming back to him, the old magic flowing into his bloodstream. You could get a bit rusty, but the deep memory, the muscle memory,
never left you, and by God he had a muscle with a memory that he'd like to show this girl. Maybe he'd say that to her later on. Or was that too creepy? Okay, maybe too creepy, he decided, and sex puns were never a good idea, but whatever, her glossed lips were parting to speak now. He hadn't watched lips part like that in a long time, and in some ways it was those little details he missed the most; he was a connoisseur, an appreciator of the seemingly minor details, parting lips and parting thighs…

‘But you're…like…' she said, and then stopped.

What? What was he? Like, just so handsome? Maybe not that, since the expression that was now coalescing on her face wasn't that of someone being bowled over by his good looks. Was something going wrong here? Did he have food in his teeth?

She finally found the right word to finish her sentence. ‘…
old
,' she ended. ‘You're properly old.'

The friend's face was creasing up now, and a gale of laughter burst forth. Both girls clutched at each other, pulling themselves to their feet and staggering away towards the front of the bus, which was by now slowing to a stop. As they reached the open door, the princess skipped straight through it still hooting with laughter, but the friend turned back to shout a parting shot over her shoulder for the whole bus to hear.

‘Dirty old man!'

Now a range of faces were turned towards him: the ruddy moonface of the driver, the shocked pale visage of a prim-looking librarian type, the crepey mask of an old dowager, and on the seat beside her, the wrinkled snouts of two pugs. Even the dogs looked appalled.

‘Any more funny business and you're off mate,' shouted the driver, jabbing a thumb towards the door and then finishing off with an audibly muttered, ‘Bloody pervert,' as he turned back to the wheel.

Lucien scuttled off the bus at the next stop, which happened to be on the Finchley Road. He was still a twenty-minute walk away from Sylvie's, but the humiliation was more than he could bear. Old? Lucien? He was thirty-bloody-five. When did mid-thirties become old? Middle age didn't even start till fifty these days, so thirty-five wasn't old by anybody's standards. Well, maybe a teenager would think that was old, but nobody else. He stopped suddenly and stood still on the pavement. They weren't, were they? Sixteen or something? He supposed they could have been. They didn't look it, but you could never really say.

Doing a quick calculation in his head he realised that, yes, he could technically be old enough to be their father. Technically. Was that a bad thing? He'd been thirty-two when he went inside, and he'd never had problems like this back then. True, he'd sometimes knocked a few years off his age for the really young-looking ones at his club nights, just to put him in his twenties. But that was just because being thirty-something didn't seem so cool amongst clubbers, even if you were the promoter, there because your job demanded it. Or had, he thought dolorously. Past tense. As of an hour ago, his job was call centre worker.

Suddenly he wanted, no, needed, fiercely needed and richly deserved, a very large drink. He had twenty quid in his pocket that Sylvie had given him for emergencies. Could you get really pissed these days on twenty quid? He was going to give it his best shot. Lucien gazed up and down the Finchley Road until he spotted the nearest pub, The North Star, and limped towards it in second-hand grey slip-on shoes that were starting to rub.

Ensconced on the threadbare upholstery of a corner bench with a pint of beer and a whiskey chaser on the sticky table-top in front of him, he reflected on what had just happened. They weren't even proper women anyway, he decided, no experience of life and nothing much to say for themselves beyond shrieking and giggling. Now he thought about it, they'd been shrieking and giggling about some friend's fingernails when he'd first noticed them, and who needed that? He might be down on his luck right now, but he could still do better.

Besides, he admitted to himself ruefully, he
wasn't
as young as he used to be. Did he even have the energy and enthusiasm for the game anymore? It was like anything else in life, you had to be hungry for it to do it properly and succeed. And what he needed was a real woman, not some, some…flibbertigibbet. Christ, he was starting to sound like one of the Victorian novels he'd read in the prison library. He thought about how hard Eva had laughed when she'd found him on the sofa with the copy of
Pride and Prejudice
that he'd smuggled out with him because he was only half way through it when his release date came around.

Now Eva, there was a real woman. Like him, she was down on her luck right now, but she'd always had substance, which was exactly what those stupid girls today didn't have. And she was loyal and faithful and that was what a man needed, he reflected sentimentally over another drink. Not the sort to embarrass a man on a bus, to kick a man when he was down. She'd waited all these years for him, after all. Well, she hadn't exactly been waiting for him, he corrected himself, but she'd always wanted him and they'd both always known it. He'd taken advantage of that somewhat in the past, he'd be the first to admit it, but with the older, wiser head he had on him now he could see she would be good for him.

‘She's always needed me,' he told the new friend he'd got talking to at the next table, an oldish bloke name Derek with glasses and a bibulous nose. ‘Cheers for this mate, much appreciated,' he added, raising another pint to his lips.

‘Bitches, they're all bitches,' muttered Derek. ‘Let me tell you about my ex-wife.' He proceeded to do so at length, but Lucien didn't mind as long as he continued to punctuate his story with rounds of drinks. It was midnight and the pub was closing when the tales of recrimination drew to a close.

‘Back to mine, mate?' asked Derek, but Lucien had formulated a plan that he was raring to put into action. He needed to see Eva, to tell her what he'd decided about their being together, and he needed to do it tonight.

‘Sorry, mate. I've got to go and see this girl. The one I was telling you about.'

‘I wouldn't bother, mate. She's bound to be a bitch.'

But of course Eva wasn't a bitch, whatever Derek said. It was still a good fifteen minute walk, but Lucien didn't feel the cold. The stars swirled above him and he felt as though he was floating. It was an epiphany, that's what he was having. Eva would make him happy, and of course he would make her happy too. She hadn't been doing too well lately according to Sylvie, who'd told him a while back that she seemed so depressed for so long after losing her job and being dumped by The Plank that she'd been quite worried about her.

Eva didn't seem all that depressed to him, though. She was taking herself off to the library every day to work on this big business idea of hers. She seemed quiet and thoughtful, but not about to jump off Beachy Head. She was just like him in many ways. They had both been hit by adverse circumstances, but they were both going to pull themselves back up again. More than that, they could pull each other
back up again. Down the line they could get a place together, once she managed to sell her flat. He didn't know how much equity she had in it, but it was surely quite a bit what with how much she used to earn, and they could both get jobs. Maybe even have a couple of kids, seeing as everyone said it was so great.

Hell, he was getting ahead of himself now, but when you thought about it, it all made perfect sense. He was at the front door now, struggling to get his key into any one of the locks hovering in front of him. The house was dark and quiet. Everyone would be in bed and Sylvie would be angry if he rang the bell. After several abortive stabs into the wood of the doorjamb, he hit gold and slid the key home with a satisfying scrape of metal on metal. He staggered into the hallway and instead of turning left into the sitting room towards his makeshift bed on the sofa Lucien mounted the stairs, weaving unsteadily up to the first floor landing.