Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

‘Um. The guy in the wetsuit?’

Big Paul blinked. ‘Yeah.’ He turned back to his bank of screens.

Eva took a couple of steps away and then stopped. ‘Er, Paul? Why is he wearing a wetsuit?’

He didn’t even look up. ‘What do I look like, the Grand Poobah in Charge of Wetsuits? Who knows? Who cares?’

Eva made her way over to Stefan’s desk and cleared her throat. ‘Hi, I’m Eva.’

He swivelled round and half stood to take her outstretched hand but was impeded by his flippers, causing him to abruptly slump backwards into his chair.

‘I’m the new junior on the Interest Rate Derivatives desk,’ she explained. ‘Big Paul said you’d show me the pricing models?’

‘Oh, right. You’re the new me. Best of luck with that fat bastard.’ He raised his voice loud enough for Big Paul to hear him, but although his target raised his head an inch or two, he maintained the air of a grizzled old lion unwilling to make the effort of swatting a fly. ‘Sit down. Are you good with spreadsheets? Can you program VBA?’

‘I’m not bad. I did some Visual Basic on my physics degree,’ she told him, and then unable to resist any longer, ‘Can I just ask, why are you wearing a wetsuit?’

Stefan scowled at her. ‘The Swaps desk traders paid me two grand to come into work like this today. They want to film me on the way home on the Tube. They think it’s funny. So what? They get their laughs, I get two grand. Who’s laughing now?’

‘You came in to work like that on the Tube?’

‘Yeah. You think I’m an idiot?’

Eva grinned. ‘For two grand? I’d have done it for five hundred.’

Stefan’s frown finally reassembled itself into a smile. ‘You, I like. Sit down. I’m going to show you all the tricks. And then, because you’re a physicist, as a special treat I’m going to tell you about my thesis on Black-Scholes and how volatility in markets is predictably random, like the movement of particles.’

Now she had his measure; Stefan was a geek, her favourite type of person and by far the most useful in the building because geeks couldn’t bear to leave a problem unsolved. One of the quants had even once stayed up all night sorting out a particularly thorny pricing issue she’d gone to him with, unable to bear going to sleep without answering her question. She’d come in the following morning to find him at his desk in the same clothes, surrounded by coffee cups and twitchier than ever, but triumphantly wielding the solution. Sometimes it felt as though the cream of a generation was packed into this building, the Oxbridge engineers and rocket scientists. (So who was building the bridges and making the rockets? It didn’t bear thinking about.)

‘A treat indeed,’ smiled Eva, half joking but mostly just relieved to have found a friendly face.

Lucien looked out across the swaying sea of his people and smiled benevolently. The bass thumped, smoke swirled, and several hundred pairs of hands reached for the roof of the warehouse in south London where his weekly club night, Candy, was rapidly becoming a raging success. Technically he was the promoter rather than the DJ, but he’d picked up enough know-how to mix a few records together while he was in Goa and he liked to take a half-hour slot early in the night just to get this feeling. Plus, the visibility helped with picking up girls. If they’d already seen him up here behind the decks it meant he didn’t have to shoehorn being the promoter into every conversation. Not that he really needed the extra boost; success with women came easily to him. He knew he was slightly effeminate-looking, tall and slender with long sooty eyelashes and chiselled cheekbones, but he didn’t care. If anything, it worked in his favour. He was non-threatening in appearance, the antithesis of your common-or-garden meathead, so he tended to get a friendly reception when approaching girls. And Lucien liked girls, liked them a lot, although of course it could be said that he didn’t like them very deeply, or rather, he liked many of them very deeply but only for very short periods of time.

Lucien had a gift: to see straight into the souls of people and know what they needed to hear, right at that very moment. He’d explained this to a girl named Star he met at a beach party in India, and she told him that she could feel him reaching inside her as he looked into her eyes, so he carried on looking into her eyes all through the tantric sex they had when she took him back to her hotel room. At least, he’d done what he imagined tantric sex was supposed to be like, sitting up and facing each other, and it had taken him forever to finish because he’d drunk too much and done too much speed. He’d got an infection afterwards, maybe because it had gone on for so bloody long or maybe because she’d given him something. Either way, it had been a nightmare finding a doctor who spoke enough English to prescribe him antibiotics and it had cost a packet, so he felt a sort of karmic justification for never paying back the two thousand rupees she’d lent him the night before.

He was a free spirit, really, different from the others with their conventional outlooks and tedious career aspirations. They’d been back for six months now and even Sylvie was starting to talk about getting a proper job. Benedict was still a student, avoiding the real world for however many years it would take him to complete a PhD that would apparently land him some boring job that paid bugger all at the end of it, while he, Lucien, was doing better than any of them, because he had an entrepreneurial attitude and also because he was just the type of person who attracted good things by giving off the right vibe. The years they’d spent slogging away in the library, he’d spent selling overpriced drugs to the clueless but affluent students of Bristol and making more money in a weekend than the others could make in a month even now.

Still, it seemed as if Eva was doing quite well for herself these days. Apparently she’d been promoted twice in the two years she’d been in her City job. He didn’t know exactly what she did, something stultifying to do with finance, but by the sound of it she made a decent amount of dosh. She’d changed quite a bit in the time that he and Sylvie had been away travelling, losing the old pudginess and dressing better too, less of the tie-dye and Doc Martens. And apparently she didn’t drink pints anymore; in the bar where they’d all met up before the club she’d ordered a white wine spritzer and he’d almost laughed out loud. The newly constructed Eva seemed faintly absurd to him, but he could see that she had a bit more of an edge to her now, an attractive aloofness. There had always been a kind of connection between the two of them but there was just something offputtingly wide-eyed about her. She was the sort of girl who sucked you in and then started trying to get you to open up about your feelings, always trying to have conversations about the big issues or find out what made you tick . Lucien hadn’t come this far by being the sort of person who dwelt on such things, and he wasn’t about to start now. She’d suckered him into talking about his childhood once, looking at him with wounded eyes as she told him her mother was dead. For some reason it had made him blurt out a bunch of his own private stuff and he’d regretted it ever since, because after that when she looked at him he felt weirdly naked, and not in a good way.

Still, there was definitely something about her. There had been that one drunken fumble years ago in Bristol, but he’d had to avoid her for ages afterwards because it had been obvious she was hoping for something more, which he most certainly wasn’t. She seemed much cooler towards him now, though, and that had always been like catnip to him. Should he, could he, talk her into a rematch tonight? Might be tricky, because she had Benedict staying at hers, but still, Lucien wasn’t one to baulk at a challenge.