Invincible Summer (12 page)

A
FTER
P
HIL THE
barman there had been Asif, then Clive, and then Piotr. There had been the sweet guy who had taken weeks to get the message and stop phoning her, and the not-so-sweet one with the whole, ‘Oops, sorry, wrong hole,' routine. There had been the guy who'd panted, ‘Call me daddy, call me daddy,' until she'd had to stop him and explain that while she was for the most part happy to call him whatever he wanted, she had to draw the line at anything that hinted at their being more closely related than, say, very distant cousins well above the age of consent.

A pattern quickly emerged, a cycle of about a week in which Sylvie went out with whoever was up for it, drank far too much and went home with whoever was still standing at the end of the night, then lapsed into a sort of psychotic depression in which she couldn't even face answering the phone. After four or five days it would lift a little, and she would think about all the changes she needed to make to her life and resolve to make them. By Friday or Saturday she would feel up to celebrating her fresh start with two or three drinks. But she would finish drink number three at 9pm, and what was she supposed to do then, go home and sit in her room on her own, half-cut? She needed to find a third way, a middle ground between total excess and having to become a hermit. So a fourth drink could be justified but maybe not a fifth, but then after the fourth drink she found herself feeling like the old devil-may-care Sylvie again, and besides, wasn't it someone else's round?

 And on it went, week after week and month after month, until early one Sunday morning when she got back to her flat-share in Hackney and found herself standing in the bathroom in front of the stained avocado sink and looking at her yellow, baggy-eyed face in the mirror, and was suddenly so filled with self-loathing that the urge to slam her forehead into her reflection was overwhelming. The first impact didn't hurt but it also didn't break the mirror, she couldn't even do that properly, and that thought made the rage surge up even more strongly inside her, so she did it again and then again, harder and harder, until it finally smashed, leaving a constellation of cuts on her forehead that bled down her face and into her eyes. Then she got into bed and stayed there all day.

The next morning the bedding was cold and sodden with urine and her forehead really hurt. When she gingerly pressed her fingertips against it she could feel something hard under the skin. Sylvie waited until she heard her flatmates leave and then got up to examine the damage, but she couldn't see much because only a few shards of the mirror remained stuck to the wall. She put on her biggest, baggiest hoodie and sunglasses and walked to A&E at Homerton Hospital, where a tired-looking young doctor picked out the shards of glass with a pair of tweezers and put in a couple of stitches.

‘Do you want to tell me how this happened?'

‘I slipped. In the bathroom. Wet floor. Went face first into the mirror.'

‘That doesn't explain why you waited so long to come in, though. I can tell you this: he's not worth it, whoever he is. Even if you don't want to file a complaint with the police, I can refer you to support services or give you a number for a women's refuge.'

‘Honestly, it wasn't a guy who did this to me.'

The doctor shrugged. ‘Well, the help's there if you want it, all we can do is offer. Hope I don't see you next time, that's all.' He snipped the end off the final stitch. ‘Wait here and a nurse will be along with some antibiotics and your discharge form.'

Sylvie sat and watched the cubicle curtain flap gently behind him and then fall still. How come you never saw that exact shade of green anywhere other than a hospital? Was it because it had become so deeply associated with hospitals and illness that no one wanted to use it anywhere else? And also, what had happened to her life?

When she got home, she phoned her grandfather in France and when he picked up she found that she couldn't speak, only cry, and so she sat on the floor in the hallway crying until he realised who it was and then they spent half an hour like that, her sobbing and Papi crooning French platitudes that she half-remembered from childhood but didn't really understand anymore, and at the end of the conversation when she could speak again they agreed that she would pack her things and give notice on the flatshare and go and spend the summer in the Languedoc, and then they could decide together what to do.

Once she had made the call Sylvie didn't know why she hadn't done it sooner. She'd been so desperate for a way out and yet it had seemed impossible to risk losing face by asking for help. In the months since their row, she hadn't heard a word from Eva. She hadn't wanted to explain about the men to her brother, and though she'd half-hoped Benedict would call he hadn't for ages and anyway, the problems she had now weren't the sort of thing he'd understand. At university things had been different; they'd all seen each other nearly every day, so someone would always notice if you were struggling, and they were all living the same sort of lives so their differences hadn't seemed to matter. It had been the happiest time of her life, she realised now: a stable home, a network of friends around her, a future full of hope and possibility. Now those hopes and possibilities had fallen away one by one, and she was alone and adrift in a city that felt more hostile every day. She should have recognised sooner that it was time to get out. Sylvie could feel the weight lifting from her even as she packed up her stuff and made her way round to Lucien's to tell him she was going.

She hadn't seen him for weeks, since she didn't like to go drinking with him because he tended to scare off any man who tried to talk to her, and anyway, he was busy with his club nights at weekends. He opened the door in his boxer shorts, yawning even though it was three in the afternoon.

‘Come on in. Jeez, sis, what happened to your face? You look like shit.'

Sylvie picked her way over to the sofa across a dense carpet of empty beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays and CD cases encrusted with powdery residue.

‘Accident. Really. I'm not kidding, it was honestly an accident,' she repeated when he looked at her with narrowed eyes. ‘I was drunk, I tripped and went face first into a mirror. Anyway, you don't look so great yourself.'

‘Yeah, well. I had a big night last night. It's my job, remember.' He lowered himself into a chair, rubbing his bloodshot eyes.

‘How are you doing? Really, I mean?' she asked.

‘Fine. What's up? Not that it isn't always a delight to see you, but I'm feeling a bit jaded and you haven't been over for ages.'

‘I know. I haven't been feeling great lately. To tell you the truth, I've been a bit of a wreck. I'm going to spend summer with Papi and Mamie, try to sort myself out a bit.'

He looked up, surprised. ‘What's been happening? Why didn't you tell me? I'd have helped you out. I know the job thing's been getting you down for a while but I didn't know things were bad enough for you to exile yourself to rural France with the relics.'

‘I'm sorry. I haven't been talking to anyone really, just drinking myself into oblivion. It's all got pretty bad and I need a break, need to get away. I'll be back after the summer. Or maybe I won't. I need a plan, Lucien, a proper long-term plan for my life.' At that moment she noticed a trickle of blood making its way from his nostril towards his upper lip. ‘Your nose is bleeding, here.' She handed him a tissue from her pocket and he swiped it across his upper lip before discarding it on the floor.

‘Sounds heavy. But whatever you need, sis. You know where I am. You can always come and stay here for a bit when you get back.'

She looked at him closely. ‘Listen, Lucien, why don't you come with me? You've been caning it for quite a while now, and you're not looking great.'

‘I'm doing just fine, thank you.' He sounded tetchy. ‘Bought myself a new car yesterday as a matter of fact, a BMW. There's nothing wrong with me. Besides, that's the last place I'd go if I wanted to clean up. Do you remember how the old bastard thrashed me after I smashed that window in his precious greenhouse when we were kids?'

Sylvie sighed. ‘Yes, and I don't think he should have done that but it was a long time ago. When I look back now, my happiest childhood memories were of the summers we spent with them. Which is weird, because remember how much we used to complain about how boring it was there?'

‘Yeah. Because it
was
boring. And if those are your happiest memories it just means that being bored was marginally better than being miserable.'

‘Well, I'm miserable now, so I guess I'm ready to trade it in for a dose of boredom. I know they weren't perfect, but there aren't that many people in the world who are there to help you out when you're on the ropes. You don't get to choose your family, you just make the best of what you've got.'

‘Don't I know it, sis.' Lucien jumped onto the sofa beside her and pulled her into a headlock, dragging his knuckles across her skull until she screamed and wriggled away laughing. They settled back on either end of the sofa as the laughter subsided and a quiet came over them.

‘You're right,' said Lucien suddenly. ‘I do need to get myself together a bit. Lay off the blow a bit more.'

‘Why don't you come with me then? Seriously.'

‘Look, Sylvie, I know we don't have much in the way of family, but I just don't see it the way you do. For me it's way past the time when I could have done with their help. If they wanted to help me out they could have done it any time in the first fifteen years of my life. Anyway, I honestly don't need it now. I'm doing alright.'

‘So long as you're sure you're really okay.'

‘Haven't I always been here for you? You go and do what you need to do and I'll be right here when you get back.'

He pulled her up off the sofa and engulfed her in a hug, then pushed her towards the door.

I've made a terrible mistake, Sylvie thought to herself a thousand times a day. It was too hot, there were too many insects, the sun was too bright and scorched her skin, her eyes, her soul. Papi and Mamie were gentle but watchful. The first night she drank two bottles of wine and after that there had been no more wine in the house, and though she woke every morning with a clear head, as evening approached she felt restless and stunted and had to go out for long walks just to quell the urge to scream into the still darkness of the house. They were miles from the nearest town, and Papi and Mamie drove there only once a week to do the shopping, so she couldn't have laid her hands on any booze even if she'd wanted to. She wondered how they didn't go mad without anything to drink or any company or even a TV. She herself cycled between being agitated and enervated, pacing and lying limply on the sofa. She'd stay for a few weeks and then leave, she told herself over and over again.

Then, during the third week, at the end of which she had decided it would be possible to go without appearing too rude and ungrateful, something began to change. Life began to get easier, almost imperceptibly at first, and then distinctly and noticeably as the periods in which she felt calm grew longer and longer. The days had an irresistible rhythm to them. Each morning, she woke early and walked down into the valley before the sun had fully risen. Where her surroundings had seemed oppressively still and quiet at first, she now found herself tuning in to more subtle sounds and movements, leaves stroked by the breeze, drifting butterflies, warbling birdsong. Some days Papi walked with her, and though he slowed her down and quickly got tired so that they had to turn back much sooner than she would have done alone, she enjoyed his company. He was quick to point out and name some of the creatures they came across, the Two-Tailed Pasha butterfly, the ocellated lizard, and as a special treat one morning, a Short-Toed eagle overhead.

During the day she helped with the laborious housework that was still carried out with little electronic intervention, sweeping floors and washing clothes by hand. When she wasn't doing chores, she was working her way through the eclectic selection of paperbacks that Mamie picked up for her in the second hand bookshop in town. She read everything from PG Wodehouse to Jilly Cooper, eventually resorting to slowly ploughing through a battered copy of Albert Camus'
L'Ete
with her rusty French when she'd run out of English books. In the last essay in the book,
Retour à Tipasa
, Camus returned to the Algiers of his childhood to wander among the Roman ruins and reflect on his life. One passage in particular kept niggling at her, so she sat down with a pen and translated it properly:

She viscerally understood what he said about the light, the silence, the melting away of wrath and night. Was it ridiculously lofty to compare herself to Camus? He was writing about Europe after two wars whereas she was drying out at her grandparents after a drinking binge, but then again, weren't they both living lives shaped by greater forces than themselves? She lived in a time of great freedom, true, but also a time in which house prices, globalisation, the threat of war and terrorism, pressed down hard on people.  Art and music had mostly been replaced by shallow facsimiles of the real thing, she felt, ruled by markets and commercial imperatives rather than passion or anger or a thirst to reflect the world back at itself in a way that might change it. Wasn't she united with Camus by a longing for beauty, a search for a lost piece of their youth and innocence, just as all humans were? She went back to the essay and read it aloud to herself.