Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

He paused, one hand on the back of the chair. ‘Shit, it’s not personal. They get rid of ten per cent of the front office headcount every year, so the chances are this will happen sooner or later in a trader’s career. Why do you think there are no old traders? Sure, the successful ones sometimes bail out once they’ve got enough to retire on, but where do you think the rest of ‘em go? I better get back to the desk now. Wait at least five minutes before you follow me, understand?’

*

Eva sat and finished her coffee, giving Big Paul the five minutes he’d requested before returning to the office. There was no sign of anyone on the desk, so she closed the curves and then picked up her bag and left. As she walked out of the building her mobile started ringing. It was Julian again, but she didn’t answer it. She’d be home in a few minutes and she didn’t want to tell him about this on the phone. Besides, she needed to think things through on the walk back. She was certain that she was freaking out underneath it all, but her thoughts were oozing through her mind like mud. She was being fired. In a matter of weeks she would be out of a job. After all the long hours and late nights, the endless, relentless, grinding sacrifice of everything else in her life, everything she had worked for was about to disappear. Eva turned to look back at the office, the windows glowing orange in the fading light. Why would this happen now, when she had finally got to a point in her career where she had felt if not exactly indispensable, then at least as if she belonged? An insider, almost. She had experience, she knew her job, and she was good at it. How could this be happening?

Outside in the open air, she suddenly found herself struggling to breathe, inhaling and exhaling suddenly an effortful process that her body actually needed to be instructed to perform. She started to walk, one foot in front of the other until she reached a nearby park. The sky felt low and ominous. Was it possible to feel claustrophobic outdoors? In a tree above her, a crow shifted its feet and then dropped off its branch like a stone, startling her before it turned and swooped upwards. She stopped and watched until it was a vanishing speck against the grey clouds, trying to shake off the feeling of the sky closing in on her.

*

As she reached her front door and turned the key in the lock, a spurt of stomach acid rose into her mouth, and she had to swallow hard to force it back down. The door swung open but instead of the empty hallway that she was expecting, Julian was standing there. A strange energy buzzed in the air as they looked at each other, both of them surprised. He had a weird expression on his face, and for a split second she thought that somehow he already knew. For a moment her muscles slackened in relief and she leant forward, about to take a step towards him and fall into his arms, when something at the edge of her vision stopped her. There was a row of suitcases and bags lined up along the wall by his feet. Her mind tried to process the scene but she didn’t seem able to gain purchase on the facts; they darted or slithered out of her grasp as she reached for them. But something old and instinctive, deep within the lizard-brain, stopped her moving forward to embrace him. Eva let her arms drop to her sides and they stood and stared at each other.

‘You haven’t been answering your phone,’ Julian said.

‘No.’

‘I needed to talk to you. I didn’t want you to come home to this.’

‘What have I come home to, Julian? I’m going to need you to explain it to me.’

He paused. ‘It is what it looks like. I’m leaving.’

Eva felt as though she was encased in a bubble. His words bounced off its surface. She opened her mouth, but only a strange bark of laughter emerged.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve met someone else.’

At last. Something she could understand.

‘You’ve been cheating on me?’

‘Not really. Not exactly. Would it even matter to you if I had? You’ve known for a long time that I haven’t been happy and you haven’t cared enough to do anything about it. You didn’t want to marry me. Now I’ve met someone who actively wants a future with me instead of reluctantly defaulting to it.’

‘Let me guess. A personal training client? Tammy? Candida?’

‘So what if it is a client?’ The plea for forgiveness in his eyes flattened into something more defensive. ‘That’s mostly how I meet people. I’m not ashamed of it. It’s how I met you, remember?’

Eva groped around for a reaction, but she couldn’t work out what she felt. Pain? Anger? Relief? All she could think about was how she wanted to sit down on her own in a quiet room with a drink. She just didn’t have the emotional resources to deal with this, on top of everything else. If this was going to happen no matter what she said or did, it was best for it to happen fast.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you get on and move your stuff then. Put your key on the table as you leave. I’ll give you an hour, will that be enough?’

‘That’s it?’ he demanded. ‘That’s all you have to say to me after nearly three years together? My God, you really never gave a shit about me, did you?’

‘You’re lucky I’m making this so easy on you, Julian. And you aren’t really the one in a position to get angry here, so spare me the histrionics.’ The barb flew out, a tiny poisonous dart precisely aimed to exact a sliver of revenge, and she saw that it had reached its intended target.

His expression darkened and closed and when he spoke his voice was flat. ‘You always were cold-blooded, Eva, but this is incredible. It just proves I’m making the right decision. I don’t even know why I was so worried about upsetting you. Have a nice—’

She presumed the last word was ‘life’, but the end of the sentence was lost in the sound of the door that she slammed shut behind her. Eva walked away down the corridor towards the lift.

In the year since she’d lost her job and Julian had left, Eva had barely been back to her own place. She had her own bedroom at Sylvie’s and spent most of her time there helping with Allegra, which was a lifeline for Sylvie but also for Eva since the alternative was aimless, miserable days alone in the empty rooms of the apartment she had once loved but which had long since become a part of a life she could no longer occupy. Allegra was two years old now, and a new kind of normal was establishing itself. The oxygen tank and the feeding tube were gone, but managing her fits and feeding her could still be difficult.

The weeks between Eva’s first HR warning and the final termination of her contract had been agony, filled with hours spent pacing around outside her office on the phone to headhunters and contacts in other banks, trying to scope out the territory without betraying her desperation. Whether word had got around the markets or whether people just weren’t hiring she had no idea, but in any case it had all been to no avail. The wind had already been starting to blow in a different direction and as the days and weeks passed, unprecedented upheavals were taking place in the global economy.

Tectonic plates had begun to shift, slowly at first as the US data had begun to turn bad, with housing numbers and non-farm payrolls sliding, and then more quickly, as Northern Rock experienced the first UK bank run in a century as the extent of its liabilities became apparent. The bad news snowballed into an unstoppable avalanche as Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and governments scrambled to bail out their financial institutions. Eva followed the stories obsessively and impotently, as events that weren’t ever supposed to happen started occurring one after the other with frightening regularity. Mingled with the horror was fascination at watching these economic, political, and maybe even historical, forces ripple through the stratosphere.