The Decadence by Leon Craig

Author:Leon Craig [Craig, Leon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2025-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

The salade niçoise was devoured almost as soon as Jan brought it out and Ursie refilled the jug of Pimm’s several times over the course of lunch. They gradually wandered over to the lake for a quick swim, though Kara refused to get in, saying that dark water made her nervous. She sat in a patch of sunlight on the shore with Nadya, gossiping about people who both of them knew from the vast and frighteningly well-informed London school network that persisted well into their collective adulthood.

Jan swam in a t-shirt to cover the scratches, keeping one ear open for names she recognised. Nadya was always very well up on all the latest news about people who’d been at Oxford, but the extent of Kara’s knowledge surprised her. Ashamed at not having made the cut for Oxbridge, Jan had more or less faded from view – or so she hoped – during her time at university, as nights with her new tribe had replaced most of her standing commitments to see schoolfriends other than Nadya. She would now be remembered solely for the things she’d got up to as a teenager, perpetually drunk, combative and covered in piercings. These days the only updates that reached her were of weddings and disasters.

Luke and Theo started to play some kind of adapted water polo with the ancient football, while Ursie and Nadya packed themselves into a diminutive wooden canoe that lay concealed in the trees and ferried their things over to the lido to smoke in the full sunlight now playing over the water. Kara stayed lying prone on the flowery bank with her hair strewn about her face, as if she were hoping for Millais’ Ophelia comparisons.

Jan swam a little closer to the lido, not turning her head as she heard Nadya complaining that Kara had immediately asked to try on her lipstick when she’d seen Nadya reapplying it and wouldn’t take no for an answer, despite the fact she got cold sores.

‘It’s still so weird seeing her and Luke together again. I forgot how pushy she is when she’s not all depressed without him.’

Ursie said in an undertone, ‘I thought you told her she shouldn’t put up with him any more? Do you remember when Theo came and got her from that awful place she was living in with Luke in third year before she and I moved in together?’

‘She never listens. Anyway, that was before Theo and I were together. He has an open-door policy for his friends, but it’s not always so appropriate. She really took the piss when she was staying with us. She kept borrowing my clothes and I’d come back from the library to find them snuggled up together on the sofa watching Miyazaki films and doing ketamine.’

‘True, true,’ Ursie murmured. ‘I had to keep telling her to stop eating all my cheese and peanut butter and she’d always bring people back for afterparties, even when I told her to keep it down. To be honest, I was kind of relieved when the rent went up and we had to move out of that place.

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