Invincible Summer, page 18
But he was already striding away from her down the hill and she had a sudden overpowering sense of déjà vu, remembering a time when five years earlier another man had strode away from her down a hill, and in the same moment realised that it didn’t feel as bad this time, and wondered whether that was because it got easier the more times it happened or whether it was simply because she had wanted Benedict to stay so much more than she wanted Julian to.
She hit the Accept Call button on her phone. ‘Sylvie? What is it? Is the baby coming?’
‘No, it’s not that. It’s Lucien. Eva, he’s in prison.’
Chapter 23
HMP Brixton, July 2006
EVA SPOTTED HIM as soon as she entered the visiting room, slouched on a plastic chair at a melamine table of the sort she remembered from her school canteen. He was wearing his own clothes, jeans and a hoodie, and looked skinnier than he had when she’d last seen him at Sylvie’s wedding a few months earlier. At the table to his left, a weasely looking hard-nut with full-sleeve tattoos was growling at a lank-haired, sobbing woman. To his right, a boy with a crewcut and a shell-shocked expression on his face who couldn’t have been much older than eighteen sat with what must have been his mum, trying not to look as petrified as he obviously felt.
It seemed incredible to her that Lucien could be forcibly held in this place. She hated herself for thinking it, knew that Keith would despise her for voicing such a thing, but most of the other men in that room at least looked like they belonged there. But Lucien? Sure, he was a rogue but he’d always been easy to forgive, because his penchant for mischief and his unreliability were inextricable from his sheer appetite for life, encompassing whatever passed before him: people, sex, drugs, alcohol, adventure, it almost didn’t matter what, so long as it wasn’t boring. Over the years she’d never quite managed to shake off the slight hunger he provoked in her with his reckless smile, full of mingled awareness and disregard for the spark that crackled between them which had never burst into flame since that one time, years ago, but had still prevented them from ever quite settling into the comfort of friendship. But Lucien wasn’t laughing now, and he wasn’t a loveable rogue to the police and the courts; he was just another bloke who’d been caught with a lot of class A drugs. He hadn’t seen her as she entered the room and she watched him for a few moments overwhelmed by a rush something softer yet fiercer than she usually felt for him.
He stood up from his seat as Eva approached and for a moment they hovered, unsure how to greet each other in this unfamiliar setting before settling for a tentative hug. He smelt of stale sweat with a sharp chemical undertone.
‘Are we allowed to do this?’ she mumbled into his ear.
‘What, hug? Yeah. I think so. I’m only on remand so things aren’t all that strict. You get to wear your own clothes, that sort of thing.’
Lucien withdrew awkwardly from Eva’s embrace and they sat down on the plastic chairs on either side of the table and for a moment neither of them knew what to say. He ran his fingers through greasy hair, and then drummed them on the tabletop.
‘So, have you bent over to pick up the soap yet?’ Eva tried a joke, suddenly desperate for reassurance that he would laugh this off like he did everything else.
Instead he glared at her. ‘That’s not as funny as you think it is. You’ve been watching too much Law and Order.’
They sat in silence for another moment or two until Lucien’s frown softened.
‘Listen, thanks for coming. I didn’t want to ask Sylvie, what with the pregnancy and everything,’
‘I doubt she’d have managed it to be honest. I don’t know if you’ve seen her lately but she’s the size of a house. I’m constantly on alert for a phone call saying the baby’s coming. I thought that was what she was calling about actually, when she rang to tell me what had happened with you. It came at a bit of an awkward moment.’
Lucien grimaced. ‘If you were in bed with Mr Pecs I don’t want to hear about it. I’ve got enough to worry about without that image in my head.’
‘Worse, actually. Or better, depending on how you look at it. He’d just asked me to marry him.’
‘Jeez. You’re not going to are you?’
‘Why’d you say it like that? What do you have against Julian?’
‘Well, you don’t love him for starters. And you’re not going to thank me for saying this, but he’s a bit of a plank. You know, no personality.’
His casual dismissal sparked a flare of annoyance in her. ‘Lucien, you’ve met him all of twice. How can you possibly pronounce on his personality? Anyway, you barely even know me these days, let alone who I do or don’t love.’
‘Ok, well, you asked and I told you,’ said Lucien, unruffled. ‘Maybe I’m wrong, but I reckon I know you well enough to tell how you feel about someone. We may not have seen all that much of each other lately, but we’ve got enough history for that.’
‘God, you’re arrogant. You always bloody were.’
‘Well, you tell me. Do you love him? Are you going to marry him?’
Eva sighed and looked away towards the rows of tense or sad conversations playing out all around them.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘How do you even decide something like that? I’ve told him I want some more time to think about it. He’s not exactly delighted, but what can I do? I mean, there are so many reasons to say yes. He’s got a good heart and we have a good life together. But when I think about spending the next thirty or forty of fifty years together I’m not…I suppose I’m just not excited. It feels like settling. Which of course is what people do, isn’t it? They settle. Everything in life’s a compromise and you’re better off just accepting that.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘But the thing is, I can reason around it all I like but when I think about going home and telling him I’ll marry him I feel like there’s an enormous wall in front of me blocking my path. I can’t even imagine saying it let alone actually doing it.’ She stopped. ‘Anyway, why on earth are we talking about my love life? Lucien, I’m so sorry. How are you doing?’
‘Okay. Kind of.’ He looked down at his hands and picked at a fingernail. ‘Actually, not really, to be honest. I’m shitting myself.’
Eva lowered her voice. ‘What happened? Sylvie filled me in but she didn’t seem to know very much. You got caught with a load of coke?’
‘Yeah. Two kilos, to be precise. No chance of claiming possession instead of dealing, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m going to plead guilty and hope I get a short sentence for a first offence, but it’s definitely going to be jail time.’
‘God. What were you doing with two kilos of coke? I thought you were focusing on the promoting thing? I mean, I know you’ve always done a bit of dealing on the side but two kilos? What’s that even worth?’
‘Thirty five grand wholesale, maybe a hundred retail. Yeah, I know,’ he said, catching the horrified look on her face. ‘I don’t need you to tell me I’ve screwed up.’
‘But why would you even take such a big risk? I mean, it’s not like you need the money, is it, what with all the club nights?’
Lucien looked away with an unusually sheepish air about him. ‘Well, obviously I gave that impression. Particularly to you, seeing as you have this stellar career and everything. But the thing is, my promotions company never really took off. I never made what you could actually call a living from it. There’s too much competition, every aging raver calls himself a promoter and the clubs cream off most of the money anyway. Whereas I’ve made a decent wedge selling drugs over the years. Blown most of it too, unfortunately. Anyway, I wouldn’t usually have handled that much coke but I owed someone a favour. It was only supposed to be at my flat for one night. I don’t know how but the police knew exactly what they were looking for, they kicked the door in less than twenty minutes after it had arrived. ‘
‘Do you know what sort of sentence you’re looking at?’
‘Maybe five years, if I’m lucky. I’d do half of it in jail and half on license. So thirty months, minus the time I spend in here on remand. It’s doable. I’ll be somewhere low security, there’ll be a library and a gym so I can spend my time reading and exercising. It won’t be so bad.’ His voice sounded strained and raspy.
‘No, of course it won’t.’ Eva tried to force her own voice to sound upbeat. ‘We’ll visit you all the time, and it’s not even that long till you’ll be out.’
‘To be honest, I’m almost as worried about getting out as I am about being in here. What am I going to do then? Not sell drugs, that’s for sure. You’d have to be a mug to land yourself in here twice, and I’ll have a record for dealing so if I ever got caught again I’d end up doing serious time. And it’s been feeling like the party’s over for quite a while now anyway. I just didn’t know what to do next and it’s going to be even harder when I get out, because well-paid, life-enhancing careers for ex-cons aren’t exactly in abundance, are they?’
‘Oh, Lucien. You can’t worry about that now. We’ll think of something, you’ve got us on your side.’ Eva felt desperate for him to believe it, but in all honesty she wasn’t sure what life would hold for him at the other end of a prison sentence. For a moment she thought that he might actually be about to cry, but with a visible effort he pulled himself together.
‘Listen, you’re not here to be my agony aunt. There’s a few things I need help with. Sylvie’s not much use right now and I need someone I can trust.’
‘Of course. Tell me what I can do.’
‘Well, first up I’m going to need someone to sort out my flat and put my stuff into storage. It’s rented and the landlord doesn’t know about this yet. But the most immediate issue is Herbert.’
‘Sorry, Herbert?’
‘Yeah. My guinea pig. My next-door neighbour’s got him, the cops let me take him round there after they arrested me. She’s not willing to look after him for long, and anyway, she’s keeping him in a cage and he’s going to hate that. He’s usually free range around the flat, you see.’
‘You have a guinea pig? You’re a drug dealer with a pet guinea pig? Called Herbert?’
‘Yeah, well. I wouldn’t have got him myself, it was Bianca. You know, that girl I was seeing? You met her at Sylvie’s wedding? Anyway, she’s too irresponsible to look after a pet properly. She went away for the weekend without getting anyone to feed him so I sort of confiscated him. I was going to find him a home but no one wanted him and he kept sidling up to me and giving me this really sad look and in the end it got to me and I decided he could stay. So now I need you to take care of him. Sylvie won’t do it, she says she has a phobia of rodents which is ridiculous because Herbert’s a guinea pig and they’re only rodents on a technicality.’
‘I’m not sure my life’s that pet-friendly either, you know.’
Lucien’s features darkened. ‘Eva, I’m asking you to do one thing for me in really desperate circumstances. You don’t have to, but if you don’t then you’ll have to take him to the vet and have him put down, because we can’t leave him to die slowly in a cage with someone who doesn’t want him and won’t look after him. If you can live with that on your conscience, so be it.’
Eva held up her hands in surrender. ‘Okay, okay, I’ll take Herbert. But I live in a flat and he should have a garden to run around in and maybe some guinea pig friends, so I’m going to have to try to find a better home for him when I can. You might not be able to get him back when you get out but I think guinea pigs have a pretty short lifespan so he may well not be around by then anyway.’
Lucien looked away and Eva realised too late how tactless she’d been. She wasn’t sure whether it was the prospect of never being reunited with his guinea pig or the realisation that the world would keep turning as he sat in a cell day after day but she noticed his hand, the smallest two fingers gnarled with old scar tissue, trembling where it rested on the table before he saw her looking and stuffed it into his pocket.
Short of time, the remainder of the visit had been business-like. Lucien had given her the phone numbers of his landlord and his neighbour and a list of things he needed her to do, and then a bell had rung and they’d briefly embraced before being herded towards their respective doors at opposite ends of the visiting room, one leading into the bowels of the prison, the other to light and freedom. Outside the gate she’d found herself gulping the treacly London air into her lungs as though the odour of cheap disinfectant and desperation that hung heavy inside the prison had slowly been suffocating her. She couldn’t imagine breathing that air for another hour, let alone weeks and months and years.
Chapter 24
London, August 2006
AND THEN, A descent into darkness. It began with Sylvie’s voice on the phone, crying and afraid, something’s wrong, please come. Then the rush to the hospital in the middle of the night, Julian’s hands taut on the wheel as they ran red lights. The nervous wait outside the doors of the maternity unit, an hour of agonised not-knowing until they were taken through to a cubicle where Sylvie, face white and pinched, ramblingly told them how the baby had been distressed so they’d done a caesarean, lifting the limp creature from her belly as she watched and immediately rushing her away to the ICU, that Robert had gone with her, and that she’d heard someone say something about oxygen deprivation and oh God, is the baby okay, is the baby okay, won’t someone please tell me that the baby’s going to be okay?
The maternity unit seemed in chaos. Eva sat with Sylvie while Julian went to find a doctor, eventually returning with an exhausted-looking consultant in scrubs who quietly explained that the baby was being cared for on the neonatal unit, that she was stable and the father was with her, and they would take Sylvie there in a few hours, once she’d had a chance to recover from the operation and could get into a wheelchair. Would the baby be okay? When the consultant had left they still didn’t know.
Sylvie was sinking in and out of consciousness, and eventually Eva sent Julian home and got into bed beside her for the several hours it took Robert to return, pale and shaking. A midwife followed and removed Sylvie’s catheter before loading her into a wheelchair and pushing her through the striplit corridors, Eva beside her, to the neonatal ICU and up to the incubator where a tiny baby lay on her front wearing just a nappy, bent legs tucked up beneath her, body covered in leads and monitor pads and a breathing mask over her face.
There in the early morning light, in the antiseptic- and plastic-scented hospital unit, Sylvie’s world stopped turning and for an incalculable moment, the beeping monitors and whooshing breathing apparatus fell still. The universe shrank to a single point, a bright speck of life within the incubator in front of her, and when the world started up again it was the same and yet completely and irrevocably changed.
Later Sylvie would tell Eva that it had been like looking up and seeing the sky for the first time, something vast and silent that had been there all along, like noticing a truth so huge that it was almost impossible to widen your perspective enough to actually see it.
‘And what was it, this truth?’ asked Eva in frustration, but all Sylvie could say was, ‘Love,’ and though she tried she wasn’t able to explain any better.
A moment of brightness, and then the plummet into night. Sylvie chose a name, Allegra, and sat beside the incubator for all her waking hours, often singing, occasionally crying but as quietly as possible so as not to distress the baby. Sometimes Allegra was well enough to be held, sometimes not.
Would the baby be okay? That depended on what you meant by okay, because being okay was now a much more elastic concept than it had previously been.
The baby in the next incubator died suddenly in the night two weeks after Allegra had arrived. Sylvie and Eva held each other and wept silently as his parents, their previously shining, hopeful faces now collapsing in on themselves like dying stars, had returned to the unit in the morning to collect their son’s belongings: a tiny hat, the paper teddy with his name, Miles, and birthweight that had been stuck to the end of his incubator.
Robert told Eva to take as much time off as she needed; he’d hold the fort. Of course, this meant that he’d be in the office all hours covering her work as well as his own while she was with Sylvie in the hospital, but that was probably best for everyone anyway.
Every evening Julian collected Eva and Sylvie and drove them home, arriving each time with snacks, magazines, bags of baby clothes and nappies. Sylvie had been kicked off the maternity ward after a few days; they needed the bed and couldn’t house every parent with a baby in the hospital. Didn’t she know that London maternity wards were overcrowded and in crisis? She’d been lucky to be allowed to stay as long as she had.
Julian picked up Sylvie’s washing as they dropped her off at home at night and brought it back cleaned and ironed, smilingly waving away her tearful thanks. Eva watched him, touching her ring finger with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. She couldn’t hope to meet a man with a better heart beating in his chest, she thought to herself. Next time he asked, she’d say yes.
Slowly, slowly, over the weeks, Allegra’s monitors were removed until finally, three months after she’d been born, she was ready to go home. It was such a relief to leave the hospital with her, even with a feeding tube and oxygen canister, away from the horror and tragedy and the inhuman need to inure yourself to it just to survive. Yet the future was uncertain and full of its own terrors.
Cerebral palsy, the doctors said, but they were reluctant to make too many predictions. She’d definitely have some cognitive impairment, and some loss of control over one side of her body. Beyond that it was hard to say, though when Sylvie asked straight out whether she’d ever live independently the neonatal doctor said gently that it was unlikely.
