‘Exactly,’ said Sylvie. ‘But you’re not, are you? Because no one can live like that. I’ve given up stressing about it. I’m going to do what’s in my power to make each day a good one, and beyond that everything will just have to take care of itself.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Paul, and raised his glass.
29 London, Spring 2009
Lucien shifted uncomfortably and looked out of the window of the bus. The suit he’d been given by the woman at the Dress for Success charity was digging into his crotch and armpits. He hated the thought that he was going to have to put this suit on again tomorrow morning, and the next day, and the next. Still, at least he’d got the job. It wasn’t much of a job but it was a start. Sylvie and his parole officer would be pleased.
He thought back to when the manager had asked at the end of the interview whether he had any questions and, realizing he was expected to come up with something, he’d asked what it was like working there.
The manager had smirked. ‘What do you think? It’s a bloody call centre. No one wants to be here. It’s the seventh circle of hell. Everyone you speak to hates you and it pays tuppence more than the minimum wage. Only people who are desperate do it, people like you. We’ve taken on a few ex-cons under the reintegration scheme, and they actually tend to stick around longer than most because they have the least choice about it. You’re going to hate every second of it, but if you turn up every day for a year, then suddenly HMP Hellhole isn’t the last thing on your CV and you’re back in the game. A rehabilitated member of society, so to speak.’
This probably wasn’t a totally unfair summary of the situation, but the bastard could have at least tried to put a gloss on it, Lucien thought grimly. Still, he could manage anything for a year, right? For a moment he half wished that tomorrow morning he’d be waking up back in Spring Hill. The open prison where he’d spent most of his sentence wasn’t all that bad in many ways, it had lovely grounds and he’d even had a PlayStation. Moving to a jail out in Buckinghamshire had meant fewer visits, but that hadn’t been such a bad thing. The first handful of visits from Eva had left him feeling so low that he’d had to put a stop to them; after a few sessions of listening to her bang on about her high-flying job and her plank of a boyfriend and their latest weekend mini-break in Rome, he’d known he couldn’t tolerate years of the same, so he’d put her off by saying he was using his slots for other mates, even though precious few of the people he used to call his mates had actually ever bothered to visit or write. It had taken a while but she’d got the message eventually, though she’d still been good enough to top up his prison bank account regularly and send frequent care parcels and the occasional picture of Herbert before she found him a new home.
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.