Invincible Summer (6 page)

Benedict stifled a laugh. ‘Seriously? You're crying because someone did something nice for you? I've seen it all now. Come on over here, Snugglepops, you look like you could use that cuddle you were trying to give me this morning.'

Lucien glared but allowed Benedict to envelope him in a bear hug, quickly followed by Eva and Sylvie, who threw their arms around him too. The four of them stood like that for a long time in the square outside the church, huddled together with arms stretched to encompass as many of the others as possible, each of their bodies aching with tiredness and elation and relief and sadness that it was over.

B
ENEDICT RUBBED A
hand across his unshaven chin and cast a gloomy look around what he loosely referred to as his office. It was rather an aggrandising term for a cluttered desk in the corner of the basement of the Physics department. True, the basement was the right place to keep the experiments, what with its being easier to control light and temperature, but spending so much time down there was getting a bit much. Every time he left the building he would emerge squinting into the light, like coming out of a daytime showing at the cinema and with much the same feeling of discombobulation.

In winter it hardly bothered him, but now that another summer had rolled around it was wearing a bit thin. At least he was about to have a break. He was mostly tying up loose ends now, archiving data and annotating his code for when he came back to finish writing up his thesis in autumn. The university would be dead over the summer and in a few weeks' time he'd be off to Corfu for a lengthy holiday, more at the behest of his parents than through any great desire of his own. It would be pleasant enough, he supposed, so long as he manoeuvred himself into a room as far away as possible from his brother and Carla and their noisy new baby, but he was feeling restless and ready for a change.

He'd moved back into the postgrad hall this year to avoid having to find another flatmate now that the old one had decamped to Fermilab to immerse himself in the heady world of high-energy particle physics, while Benedict had been left behind tinkering around in the dungeon and dining nightly on Pot Noodles in the shared kitchen that was barely more hygienic than the one in his undergraduate halls of residence had been.

Doing a PhD forced you into a sort of extended adolescence, he thought ruefully. He was working at the cutting edge of particle physics, and yet there was just something uniquely infantilising about the student lifestyle. The email he had received that morning from Eva—an increasingly rare occurrence—had only served to underline this. The picture she painted was, as ever, very much one of bright lights, big city; big deals, big nights out. She mentioned Sylvie but not Lucien, making Benedict wonder whether she saw much of him these days. The email hadn't really felt as though it was from his old friend. It contained none of the shared jokes they used to shoehorn into their messages to show that nothing had changed, that underneath it all they were still the same old Benedict and Eva. Of course, they had never really been Benedict and Eva, at least not in the way that he would have liked, and perhaps she really had changed. Certainly it sounded as though Eva was more excited by bonuses than bosons these days.

There had been that moment, a few years ago, when he'd thought it might actually happen between them. She'd joined him in Corfu the summer they'd graduated, and over the course of a week she'd grown browner and more relaxed until the last day when they'd come in from the pool together and made to enter the house at the same time. They'd got sort of wedged in the doorway, he in shorts and she in a bathing suit, and though their bodies hadn't actually been touching electricity had seemed to crackle and arc between them.

Benedict shifted uncomfortably in his chair, relieving the pressure from the fly of his jeans. Just thinking about it gave him a combined flush of desire and humiliation even now. He should have just kissed her. This wasn't a new thought; it was the same one he'd been having, oh, four or five times a day in the thousand days since, give or take. He should have kissed her but instead he'd stepped back out of the doorway, almost but not quite brushing her body with his own, and the spell had been broken and he'd mumbled an apology and she'd darted off to her room.

He wondered whether he'd die an old man still cursing himself for not having taken what could easily turn out to have been his best shot at happiness. After three long years of watching Eva pining for Lucien and being roundly ignored himself, he'd finally had his chance and he'd blown it. The savage rage he'd felt at himself for the first year afterwards had largely subsided, but the thought of it was still enough to make him cringe at his own inadequacy.

He glanced up at the clock. 9pm. He might as well head home, picking up a Pot Noodle from the Spar on the way. He'd just write his data back down ready for the morning, and make a start on a reply to Eva's message while he was waiting for the job to finish. Benedict sent the command and listened for the telltale signs from the cupboard in the corner of the room, where Boris the data-management robot would be busying himself. The sheer volume of data for his PhD on the search for first-generation leptoquarks in decay channel collisions was so enormous, petabyte upon petabyte of the stuff, that it couldn't be stored on local computers and was instead written onto cartridges which were lifted in and out of the reader by the robotic arm. Most of what he spent his days doing was writing computer programs to sift through massive datasets looking for signature patterns of his particle, isolating traces in amongst all the other distracting and irrelevant data and allowing him to zero in on these tiny signals and separate them out from the background noise.

He opened the email from Eva and read it again. New York,
blah blah
, client dinner,
blah blah blah
, broker night,
blah-di-blah.
He was losing her, that much was clear. She was jetting around the world attending important meetings, hobnobbing with movers and shakers, while he festered in a basement. She never mentioned men these days but he knew they must be there, coming and going. He probably wouldn't know until one day a wedding invitation would plop through his letterbox, and then it really would be too late.

A thought was coalescing in his mind as he hit Reply. If it would be too late then, didn't that imply that it wasn't too late now? What if some future version of himself in a parallel universe was looking back at him sitting here now and cursing him for a bloody fool, just as he was doing with the version of himself of a few years earlier?

Eva,
he began to type recklessly.

He was distracted by a crunching noise coming from the data cupboard. Benedict glanced up but couldn't see anything amiss, so he turned back to the screen and continued.

The noise from the cupboard was growing worryingly loud now, more of a thudding than a crunching sound. Irritated at being distracted but sufficiently unnerved by the possibility of something being wrong with what was, after all, a cupboard full of very expensive equipment, he pushed his keyboard aside and went to investigate.

Benedict opened his eyes and watched as the polystyrene ceiling tiles and strip lighting of the office swam into view. There was something else, too, dark and blurry and closer to his face than the ceiling. He struggled to focus on the inorganic arm protruding from a hole in the cupboard door. Boris. There was a sharp pain in the side of his face, he realised, and lifted his hand to touch it.

‘Don't move,' a woman's voice barked. A female voice was in itself an unusual phenomenon in his office. He tried to turn his head and focus on the face as it hove into view above him.

‘What did I just say? Don't move.' Now the face moved directly into his line of vision and he recognised it as belonging to Lydia, another PhD student from the Solid State team along the corridor.

‘What happened?' His voice came out as an embarrassing croak.

Lydia appeared to stifle a smile. ‘I'm afraid your robot appears to have gone rogue. I'm using my powers of deduction here, Watson, but it looks like it punched through the door and hit you in the face. I was just checking my gallium arsenide cells when I heard a load of banging and then a squeal, and I found you lying on the floor and Boris hanging halfway out the door of his cupboard. I've turned the power to your room off at the fuse box, by the way, hope you didn't have anything unsaved on your computer but Boris was still twitching rather alarmingly.'

Benedict started to peel himself up off the carpet.

‘You stay right there. The ambulance will be here any minute.'

‘Ambulance?' he groaned. ‘That's really not necessary.'

As he clambered to his feet waving away Lydia's restraining hand, two green-clad paramedics appeared in the doorway.

‘The patient's in here,' Lydia called to them. ‘I did tell him not to move. He was knocked out by a robot, you know.'

‘Robot attack, is it?' said the first paramedic, a large grey-haired man of about fifty, in a thick West Country burr. ‘We don't get many of those, I don't mind telling you.'

‘Honestly, it's nothing,' Benedict said. ‘Look, I'm fine now, really, it's just a graze.'

‘We'll be the ones to decide that,' said the second paramedic, a skinny young man with a large nose. ‘Sit yourself in this chair and let me have a look in your eyes. Bright light, try not to blink. Now, this young lady said you were out for the count. How long was he unconscious?' This last addressed to Lydia.

‘Not more than a few minutes, I'd say,' she told him. ‘I heard a loud noise which must have been the robot arm punching through the door, and found him out cold on the floor. I phoned for the ambulance but he opened his eyes almost as soon as I put the phone down.'

‘You've got a bit of a bruise but it doesn't look that bad,' said the older paramedic. ‘Still, can't be too careful with a head injury. We'd better take him in.'

‘No really, I'm absolutely fine,' Benedict protested. ‘I certainly don't need to go to hospital.'

‘Well, we could release you into her care, I suppose. Will you be with him all night, young lady? Take him straight to A&E if there's any vomiting or strange behaviour?'

 Benedict looked pleadingly at Lydia and she sighed. ‘Yes, I can take him home with me tonight. I'll keep a good eye on him.'

This seemed to be enough to placate the paramedics, and they picked up their bags to leave. As they reached the doorway the older man turned back towards them.

‘So that's what you lot get up to down here, is it?' he said disapprovingly. ‘Shenanigans with robots? And then they get a mind of their own and something like this happens? I'll tell you the name of a film you should watch, young man. It's called
2001: A Space Odyssey
and it will teach you a thing or two about just how far you can trust computers. Mark my words, it never pays to go against nature,' he added darkly, before stalking away along the corridor.

Benedict and Lydia looked at each other and covered their mouths with their hands, both waiting until they heard the double doors along the hallway swing shut before exploding into laughter.

‘Do you think Boris has achieved consciousness?' asked Lydia when she'd stopped laughing long enough to catch her breath.

‘What, and set out to cause the downfall of his human masters and take over the world?' Benedict guffawed, and then winced at the pain in his head.

They both looked over at where Boris was hanging limply from the door of the data cupboard, looking not at all like a supreme, humanity-crushing intelligent life form, and cracked up again.

‘Right, that's enough shenanigans with robots for one night, young man,' said Lydia. ‘Come on, get your stuff together and we'll head back to mine. There's nothing we can do about this now. It'll have to be sorted out in office hours.'

‘Oh, you don't actually have to look after me tonight, you know,' Benedict said. ‘I just needed you to say that so they wouldn't insist on taking me in. I'm fine, see, perfectly alright to head home now.'

‘What, and have it on my conscience when they find you dead in the morning from a blood clot on the brain? Not likely. You're coming with me, and that's that.'

When Benedict woke the next morning his head still hurt, but he couldn't have said whether it was due to Boris's punch, Lydia's cheap plonk, or the rather vigorous pounding it had taken on her headboard.

Crikey, he thought, looking over at her naked body, only partly obscured by sheets. Not timid old Benedict after all, eh.

Okay, so she'd done most of the running. Or all of the running if he was honest, but he hadn't put on a bad show. The first time he'd been a bit trigger-happy, but surely the second, third and fourth times would have made up for that? Perhaps there were some advantages in a build-up of sexual frustration.

She'd been surprisingly kinky, way beyond any real-life experience of his own. His cheeks glowed remembering that thing with her finger. God, you'd never have thought it to look at her. Actually, he realised, he barely had looked at her until now. He knew she did something or other to do with solar cells but it wasn't his field and he rarely went into the Solid State office. He looked at her again, taking in the curly brown hair and freckles. The freckles were on her arms and back too, he could see now. They made her sort of friendly-looking, and were more than a little sexy. Why had he never noticed any of this before? Partly because she usually had more clothes on, of course, but also because he was usually too busy thinking about Eva to notice what was right under his nose.