Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

It would have been nice if Sylvie had been able to come more often, but she had more than enough on her plate, what with the baby and everything, so once a month had been okay. The thing about visits was that you got so ravenous for proper human contact that you’d be bouncing off the walls for twenty-four hours beforehand, but then you’d have your visit and it would remind you of everything you were missing and how badly you’d screwed up your own life and the lives of the people around you, and then you spent the next twenty-four hours cycling through anger and shame until you finally just felt numb and deflated. It was worse for the men with partners and kids. They would work themselves up into a welter of misty-eyed sentimentality between visits, and spruce themselves up as much as possible in anticipation of an emotional and affectionate catch-up, only to be met by a tired and angry woman who’d had to take three trains to get there and was more worried about how she was going to pay the latest electricity bill than how much her good-for-nothing jailbird boyfriend was missing her cooking.

At least he didn’t have that to worry about. But what it also meant was that he didn’t have much of a life waiting for him on the outside. He was going to have to start from scratch, and it wasn’t going to be easy. Sylvie had said he could stay with her as long as he got a job, but it was funny how hard he found it living under her roof. You’d have thought that living by somebody else’s rules and having no privacy would be second nature to him now, but in the three weeks he’d just felt prickly all the time, and very much in the way. It would get easier once Eva had sold her flat, he consoled himself. As soon as she found a place of her own he would get the spare room instead of the sofa, and wouldn’t be woken up at 7 a.m. every morning by Sylvie bringing Allegra down for breakfast.

Still, it was pointless focusing on the bad stuff. There was plenty of upside in being out of prison, including hot baths, decent food, and not least being in proximity to women again. There were two girls a few rows ahead of him right now on the half-empty bus, sitting facing each other across the aisle and swapping gossip in excited voices. They were like birds, he thought, brightly coloured chattering birds of paradise, light and skittish and exquisitely free of the sort of baggage that was weighing him down. That was just what he needed to make him feel light again. They were the usual princess/best friend combo, a willowy blonde wearing far too much make-up but pulling it off in the way that only really young, really pretty girls can, and a shorter, stouter friend in a green jumper loose enough to reveal a flesh-coloured bra strap biting into a plump shoulder. He leant forward and rested his arms on the back of the seat in front.

‘Excuse me, ladies.’ The stream of chatter halted abruptly and two enquiring faces turned towards him. He grinned and ratcheted an eyebrow up a notch to maximize the impact of his rakish good looks. ‘Do you have the time?’

The best friend looked at him accusingly. ‘You’ve got a watch on,’ she said.

Lucien glanced down at his wrist resting on the seat-back, protruding from the too-short sleeve of his suit jacket. Shit. She was right. He really was out of practice. Lucien felt the eyebrow drop back down a fraction involuntarily.

‘So I have. But that doesn’t matter, because what I actually wanted to know was,’ and here he turned his best thousand-watt smile on the princess, ‘do you have the time for me to buy you a coffee?’

The princess looked back at him suspiciously. That was okay, with the pretty ones there was always a split second when they sized you up, made you sweat for it. He could feel it all coming back to him, the old magic flowing into his bloodstream. You could get a bit rusty, but the deep memory, the muscle memory, never left you, and by God he had a muscle with a memory that he’d like to show this girl. Maybe he’d say that to her later on. Or was that too creepy? Okay, maybe too creepy, he decided, and sex puns were never a good idea, but whatever, her glossed lips were parting to speak now. He hadn’t watched lips part like that in a long time, and in some ways it was those little details he missed the most; he was a connoisseur, an appreciator of the seemingly minor details, parting lips and parting thighs. .

‘But you’re. . like. .’ she said, and then stopped.

What? What was he? Like, just so handsome? Maybe not that, since the expression that was now coalescing on her face wasn’t that of someone being bowled over by his good looks. Was something going wrong here? Did he have food in his teeth?

She finally found the right word to finish her sentence. ‘. . old,’ she ended. ‘You’re properly old.’

The friend’s face was creasing up now, and a gale of laughter burst forth. Both girls clutched at each other, pulling themselves to their feet and staggering away towards the front of the bus, which was by now slowing to a stop. As they reached the open door, the princess skipped straight through it still hooting with laughter, but the friend turned back to shout a parting shot over her shoulder for the whole bus to hear.

‘Dirty old man!’

Now a range of faces were turned towards him: the ruddy moonface of the driver, the shocked pale visage of a prim-looking librarian type, the crepey mask of an old dowager, and on the seat beside her, the wrinkled snouts of two pugs. Even the dogs looked appalled.

‘Any more funny business and you’re off, mate,’ shouted the driver, jabbing a thumb towards the door and then finishing off with an audibly muttered, ‘Bloody pervert,’ as he turned back to the wheel.

Lucien scuttled off the bus at the next stop, which happened to be on the Finchley Road. He was still a twenty-minute walk away from Sylvie’s, but the humiliation was more than he could bear. Old? Lucien? He was thirty-bloody-five. When did mid-thirties become old? Middle age didn’t even start till fifty these days, so thirty-five wasn’t old by anybody’s standards. Well, maybe a teenager would think that was old, but nobody else. He stopped suddenly and stood still on the pavement. They weren’t, were they? Sixteen or something? He supposed they could have been. They didn’t look it, but you could never really say.

Doing a quick calculation in his head he realized that, yes, he could technically be old enough to be their father. Technically. Was that a bad thing? He’d been thirty-two when he went inside, and he’d never had problems like this back then. True, he’d sometimes knocked a few years off his age for the really young-looking ones at his club nights, just to put him in his twenties. But that was because being thirty-something didn’t seem so cool amongst clubbers, even if you were the promoter, there because your job demanded it. Or had, he thought dolorously. Past tense. As of an hour ago, his job was call-centre worker.

Suddenly he wanted, no, needed, fiercely needed and richly deserved, a very large drink. He had twenty quid in his pocket that Sylvie had given him for emergencies. Could you get really pissed these days on twenty quid? He was going to give it his best shot. Lucien gazed up and down the Finchley Road until he spotted the nearest pub, the North Star, and limped towards it in second-hand grey slip-on shoes that were starting to rub.

*

Ensconced on the threadbare upholstery of a corner bench with a pint of beer and a whisky chaser on the sticky table-top in front of him, he reflected on what had just happened. They weren’t even proper women anyway, he decided, no experience of life and nothing much to say for themselves beyond shrieking and giggling. Now he thought about it, they’d been shrieking and giggling about some friend’s fingernails when he’d first noticed them, and who needed that? He might be down on his luck right now, but he could still do better.