Alice Adams: Invincible Summer

At that moment his eyes happened to alight upon Benedict standing in the far corner of the room, intermittently visible in the strobe light, engaged in animated conversation with a man who appeared to have a tattoo of a cobweb covering half his face. Probably shouldn’t have given him that pill, on reflection. It had just been a bit of a laugh, offering a pill to Benedict, who’d always been so straight. Lucien hadn’t thought he’d actually take the bloody thing but apparently there was a contagious recklessness in the air tonight, because when Benedict had seen Eva doing one he’d swallowed audibly and said, ‘Go on then, before I change my mind,’ and grabbed it out of Lucien’s hand, gulping it down with a swig of Evian. They were decent pills tonight too. Lucien was coming up pretty hard and he’d only taken one so far. He was going to make a good bit of wedge on this batch, a lot more than the take on the door by the time he’d paid the DJs and lighting guys and bouncers.

Better go and do the honourable thing, he supposed. In any case, it probably wasn’t a bad idea to get off the decks before he made a total twat of himself. He’d messed up that last mix as the pill kicked in, and for a horrible moment the hands had stopped waving and sort of lowered to half-mast. He’d managed to pull it back by dropping in ‘Blue Monday’ fast and hard, relief washing through him as the semiquaver kick-drum reverberated through the crowd and lent renewed vigour to the pumping fists; a good recovery, but still, better to quit while he was ahead.

‘Bill, take over here, would you?’ He motioned to the real DJ who was sullenly awaiting his slot at the end of the mixing desk. ‘Got a bit of business to sort out.’

Lucien clambered down the steps to the dance floor and pushed his way across to the far corner where Benedict was by now having his neck massaged by Spider-Face.

‘A word, mate.’

‘Ah, Lucien. Superb night, thanks for sorting me out with. . you know. This here is. . this is. .’

‘Killer,’ Spider-Face interjected helpfully, his warm smile revealing a mouthful of discoloured and broken teeth.

‘Yes, um, Killer here was just telling me about this biker festival he was at last weekend. There’s another one coming up in a few weeks, great fun, open to all-comers and not at all what most people expect apparently. We should—’

‘We should and we will, mate,’ assured Lucien. ‘Let’s all swap numbers before the end of the night. But right now we need to chip off for a few minutes. Eva wants a word. Don’t mind do you, Killer?’ He steered Benedict away from his beaming companion towards the back of the club.

‘What does Eva want? Where is she?’ asked Benedict, pushing his hair back off his face and peering about.

‘Ah, well, that was a bit of a lie to get you away from your new friend, you see. This being your first pill, I should explain a few things to you. When you’re loved up on Ecstasy everyone seems like your best mate, but of course what really happens is you wake up the next morning with a Hell’s Angel named Killer asleep on your sofa and wonder what the fuck you were thinking. That’s if he hasn’t stabbed you to death in the night and nicked your TV.’

Benedict attempted to raise an eyebrow but succeeded only in generating a series of seemingly random facial twitches. ‘It’s not like you to be so judgemental. You’re condemning the man based solely on his appearance and we all know you can’t judge a book by its cover. You’d miss out on some very good books that way, all those Penguin classics with the orange covers for starters because they all look alike, not to mention—’

Lucien raised a hand to cut him off. ‘Yeah, yeah. Call me a judgemental conformist, but I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that having a spider’s web tattooed across your face is not intended to send the message, “I’m a cuddly, peaceable member of society who under no circumstances would stove in your face with a shovel for the change in your pocket.”’

A hint of doubt finally crept onto Benedict’s face. ‘Ah. Well. When you put it like that. So, do you know where Eva’s got to?’

*

Where Eva had got to at that very moment was wedged into a tiny toilet cubicle with Sylvie, who was struggling to break a pill in half between her fingers.

‘Shit, I’ve dropped it. No, there it is.’

‘Oh God, not on the floor. There’s wee all over it. We can’t take that now.’

‘Oo, hark at you, princess. Here, I’ll wipe it off. There, all better. That’s your half.’

‘I don’t know whether I should do another one anyway. I need to be compos mentis for work on Monday.’

Sylvie glared at her through eyes lavishly caked in kohl. ‘Eva. It’s forever since we had a proper night out with the whole crew. Even Benedict’s dropped a pill, bless him. For one night, take off your metaphorical power suit and relax. We’ve hardly seen you since we’ve been back, it’s all work, work, work with you. You’ll have the whole of Sunday to recover.’

Eva hesitated. She was being pretty reckless by her prevailing standards, but the markets were dead in August and next week would be a quiet one at work. And Sylvie was right: they hadn’t seen enough of one another since she’d arrived back from travelling. There wasn’t much Eva could do about that; a job like hers came at a price, and that price was putting it before everything else in your life. When you worked fourteen hours a day it didn’t leave much time for anything else, and if you were half-hearted about it, well, there were plenty of people lined up behind you ready to take your place.

Still, at least the hard slog was finally starting to pay off. Many of her cohort were falling by the wayside, culled for underperforming or simply buckling under the pressure, and those left standing were finally being promoted to jobs where they wouldn’t have to fetch anyone’s coffee and would start to get paid the big bucks. Eva was beginning to understand that half of being successful was just staying in the game longer than anyone else. The great surprise of the adult world had been that no one really knew what they were doing, and especially not the people who exuded impenetrable confidence. The first year in the job had been soul-crushing; every time she’d asked a question she found that she didn’t understand the answer. At first she assumed that this was because she was failing to grasp things that everyone else just magically understood, but lately she’d begun to realize that the reason her questions were often glossed over was that the people around her didn’t actually know the answers.

Nobody really knows what they’re doing . This was an epiphany that had scared the bejesus out of her but had also expanded her confidence tenfold, because if the big beasts of the markets didn’t have all the answers, then if she could make it her business to be the one who did she would surely be ahead of the game. She’d quietly gone back and examined the fundamentals: there are two sides to every deal, every profit made by one person equates to a loss for someone else, every loan has to be either repaid or defaulted upon at some point in the future, a single dollar is a single dollar and if it’s being counted in two places at once then sooner or later there’ll be a shortfall. Simple truths, often overlooked.

Understanding everything from first principles gave you a certain confidence that other people could just smell on you, she found. And it wasn’t only that; it was also knowing she could pick up the phone to her brokers and get a table at any club or restaurant she wanted in London that night, or tickets to Wimbledon, or pretty much anything else that her heart desired. It might not be finding a cure for cancer, but being greeted by name and given the best table by the maître d’ at Coq d’Argent still had a way of making you feel like somebody.