Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

*

Walking home, Eva was half surprised to find that she was crying. It was indignation as much as hurt, she told herself. What Sylvie had said was just so unfair . Eva had always wanted nothing but the best for Sylvie, but it was impossible to help someone who refused to face up to reality.

She’d been right about one thing, though: Eva was crazy to agonize over the good things in her life. In a world where even her oldest friend could be that spiteful to her, having at least one person she could count on was crucial. What was she waiting for? Why wouldn’t she want her devoted, gorgeous boyfriend to move in with her? There wasn’t going to be a thunderbolt, but what she and Julian had together was pretty damn good. Sylvie can say as many horrible things as she likes about me, thought Eva, but at least I’m not the one going home on my own tonight.

*

As it happened, Sylvie didn’t go home on her own that night. Just as Eva had suggested, she stayed and finished the bottle, and once it was finished she sat at the bar and chatted up the barman, who slipped her a free drink every time the manager wasn’t looking. When his shift was over she went back with him to his flat in Canning Town and when she woke the next morning she had to slide her hand between her legs for the slimy, clotted confirmation that yes, they’d had sex and no, he hadn’t used a condom. She managed to dress and sneak out without waking him, pausing only to vomit as quietly as possible in the kitchen sink on the way to the front door.

After Phil 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 9 p.m., 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 flatshare 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, she wondered. 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 realized 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 one another 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 realized 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 recognized 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.