Authors: Paul Murray
‘Carl?’
He freezes. Did he make a noise out loud? Did he imagine the knock at the door?
‘Carl?’ Mom is outside the door. ‘Is that you, honey?’
Fuck shit fuck. He stuffs the box of pills into his back pocket. He opens the door. Mom is there in her robe. She looks at
him not-understanding. ‘I thought you’d gone,’ she says.
‘No,’ Carl says. ‘I forgot something.’
‘Why are you in my bathroom? Why is the medicine cabinet open?’
Her breath smells of alcohol. He imagines the pill dissolving through her blood. She will not remember anything. Slowly he
reaches out his hand to touch her arm. The dressing gown is silky-soft.
‘You’re dreaming,’ he says.
She blinks at him.
‘You’re having a dream,’ he says.
She closes her eyes and puts her hand on her forehead. Then she says, in not much more than a whisper, ‘I remembered… you
weren’t wearing a costume.’
‘A what?’
‘A costume. For the dance? A costume?’
A costume. Fuck! Shit!
The Seabrook RFC clubhouse – a haven for old boys of all ages, where business and drinking can be done without the interference
of yahoos or women – is located, like a frontier outpost, a couple of miles from the school: close enough for the Automator
to be summoned from should anything –
anything
– go awry at the school dance. The Acting Principal made no secret of his unhappiness at leaving the Hop in the hands of
two greenhorns, or one greenhorn and Howard. At first Howard wondered if it was only their lack of experience that concerned
him. Could it be he detected a frisson? Did he suspect the chaperones needed a chaperone?
On the evidence of the night so far, Greg has little cause for worry. Everything is unfolding with all due propriety. After
the vertiginous giddiness of the first half-hour, the students have settled down into a manageable medium-level hysteria.
As for their chaperones, they have barely spoken a word to each other. Seeing that it was just the two of them, Miss McIntyre
said at the outset, the most sensible thing would be to split up, didn’t Howard think? Of course, he’d agreed vigorously,
of course. Since then, they’ve worked opposite sides of the room. From time to time he’ll catch a glimpse of her, sailing
through the three-quarter-scale melee; she will flutter her fingers at him, and he’ll hustle his features into a brief efficient
smile, before she sails on again, the luminescent flagship of some invading army of beauty. Other than that, not so much as
a whisper of frisson.
As he meanders around the room, he asks himself what exactly he’d hoped for from tonight. Up to now, he’d been pretending
that he wasn’t hoping for anything; he’d volunteered for this detail in a kind of deliberate trance, turning as it were a
blind eye to himself, all self-critical faculties switched off. Even tonight, his
grousing to Halley about what a chore and an imposition it was had been on one level quite sincere. It’s only now, when it’s
crystal clear nothing is going to happen, that his hopes become unavoidable, materializing in the form of jags of disappointment
at the same time that they appear, in the cold light of day, preposterous, fantastical, naive. How had he let himself get
so carried away by a couple of flirtatious remarks? Was that all it took for him to be ready to betray Halley? Is that the
kind of man he is? Is that really what he
wants
?
David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ comes on over the sound system; Howard experiences a fresh pang, this one of homesickness
for the house he left less than two hours ago. No, that isn’t what he wants. He’s not going to throw his life away for the
sake of a cheap office affair. Tonight has been both a wake-up call and a reprieve. When he goes home, he can begin to put
right all the things he’s let slide; he can also thank God he didn’t get close enough to Aurelie to embarrass himself further.
First, though, he may devote himself without distraction to his supervisory duties, although aside from judiciously coughing
at couples whose petting is straying towards heaviness, there is not much to do but work his way tortuously from one end of
the room to the other and back again, a supernumary presence swigging aimlessly at his punch, which is exactly as awful as
the punch at his own Mid-term Mixer fourteen years ago. Fourteen years! he thinks. Half his life! As he makes his invisible
way he entertains himself by superimposing onto the crowd faces from his own past, as if he’s walking through it again, a
ghost from the future… There’s Tom Roche as a gladiator, intact, unbroken, ignoring the girls that flutter about him like
hummingbirds to talk rugby with a young Automator, who’s chaperoning with Kipper Slattery and Dopey Dean. There’s Farley,
two heads taller than everyone else, his Mr T costume making him look even skinnier than he already is, and Guido LaManche,
sleeves of his sports coat rolled up à la Crockett from Miami Vice, dealing out lines to softly agape girls like a magician
doing card tricks. And there’s Howard himself, a
cowboy, as generic and uncontroversial an outfit as he could think of, though now he sees within it a telltale pun inserted
by fate (Howard the Cowherd). But then that nickname still awaited him; he was fourteen, half-grown, with no lines of destiny
to thread him to anyone, or at least not that he could see; none of them knew yet what their lives were to be, they thought
the future was a blank page on which you could write what you wanted.
He’s woken from these thoughts by a noise at the main doors. It sets up just as he is walking by, a din of disconnected blows
too violent and disorderly to be called
knocking
– more like punching, like someone is punching the door. Howard glances about him. No one else seems to have heard: the doors
are on the other side of the cloakroom, and the music drowns out all but the loudest exterior noise. But he hears it, as it
starts up again: an intensifying flurry of hammering and pounding, as if some furious non-human agency were trying to force
its way into the hall.
Howard shut these doors, as per the Automator’s instructions, at half past eight exactly. Another door at the far end of the
hall leads to the toilets, the basement lockers and the Annexe; but all the main entrances are locked, and the only way in
or out of the school is here, through these doors, which cannot be opened from the outside – unless, that is, they are broken
down.
While he is standing there, the hammering stops: in its place, after a few seconds’ prickling silence, comes a single, heavy
thud. A moment’s pause, and then another. This time the boys and girls in the vicinity hear it too, and seek out Howard’s
eye in alarm. His mind spins. Who is out there? All kinds of grisly thoughts flash through his head: gangs of marauders, haters
of the school, come to terrorize them at knifepoint, at gunpoint, a Hallowe’en massacre… The thuds get louder: the doors shake,
the bolt rattles. Although the majority still do not know its source, the disquiet seeps inwards, through the dancefloor;
bodies become still, conversations fall silent. Should he call the Automator? Or the police? There isn’t time. Swallowing,
he enters the shady cloakroom and brings himself close to the door. ‘Who’s there?’ he
barks. He half-expects an axe or a tentacle or a metal claw to come crashing through the wood. But there is nothing. And then,
just at the moment he begins to relax, the wood bulges under another blow. Howard curses, jumping back, then presses down
the safety lock and pushes open the doors.
Awaiting him outside is a stormy, packed darkness, as though all space from the ground up has been usurped by the ominous
thunderclouds. Wrapped within it, tensed for another charge, stands a lone figure. Howard can’t make out who it is; groping
around behind him, he finds the light switch and flicks it on.
‘Carl?’ He squints into the blacked-out face. The boy is wearing his everyday clothes – jeans, shirt, shoes – but has smeared
his features with soot. A pretty impoverished costume; somehow that makes it all the more frightening.
‘Can I come in?’ the boy says. His clothes are wet – it must have been raining. He peers over and under Howard’s arm, stretched
protectively across the portal.
‘The doors closed half an hour ago, Carl. I can’t let anyone else in now.’
Carl doesn’t seem to hear him – he’s craning and ducking, stretching and shrinking his frame, in his effort to spy into the
dance. Then abruptly he turns his attention back to Howard. ‘Please?’
From his lips, the word comes as a shock. For a moment Howard wavers. It’s the start of the holidays, after all, and the Automator
isn’t here to see. But something about the boy unnerves him. ‘Sorry,’ he says.
‘What?’ Carl opens his hands at his sides.
He seems to be getting bigger every second, as if he’s partaken of some Alice-in-Wonderland potion. Involuntarily Howard takes
a step backward. ‘You know the rules,’ he says.
For a long moment, Carl looms over him, eyes staring whitely out of the black mask. Howard looks back at him neutrally through
the fissile air, not breathing, waiting to dodge a flying fist. But it does not come; instead the hulking boy revolves and
slowly descends the steps.
Instantly Howard’s resolve is pierced by guilt. ‘Carl,’ he calls. ‘Take this.’ Howard extends the umbrella Father Green left
under the table. ‘In case it rains again,’ he says. Carl gawps at the hooked black handle under his nose. ‘Don’t worry,’ Howard
adds uselessly. ‘You can return it after the holidays. I’ll explain.’
The boy takes it without a word. Howard watches him pass down the rain-slicked avenue, through the intervals of light cast
by the lamps, a row of white moons against the starless sky. With a sigh he closes the door and slides down the bolt.
Re-entering the hall proper, he finds the party in full swing again. From a corner of it, Miss McIntyre observes him with
folded arms; he smiles wanly, then hastily removes himself from the dancefloor as DJ Wallace Willis puts on a record sufficiently
slow in tempo for the kids, hitherto an amiably bouncing mass, to redistribute themselves into soulfully intertwined couples,
kissing each other with varying degrees of accomplishment and Frenchness.
Taking refuge at the punch stand he rubs his eyes and checks his watch. Two more hours to go. All around him, everyone who
has not been asked or has not the courage to ask someone to dance is vigorously conversing in an effort not to notice the
slow-motion epic of desire unfolding on the dancefloor. The soundtrack is ‘With or Without You’, by U2; as he listens, Howard
is seized by the unshakeable certainty that he sat out this very song at this very punchbowl, fourteen years before. God,
this job! These days he can hardly take a step without falling down a trap-door into his own past.
Five months ago, Howard had attended his Class of ’93 Ten Year Reunion in this same hall. Long dreaded, it had proved an unexpectedly
pleasant affair. A three-course meal, full bar, partners left at home until the Alumni and Spouses Golf Outing the following
day; unflattering nicknames left unspoken, enmities of the past carefully let lie. Everyone was eager to appear socialized,
to present his adult self, successfully emerged from its chrysalis. They pressed business cards into Howard’s palm; they took
photos of babies from wallets; they waggled wedding rings and sighed tragicomically.
Each reintroduction repeated a truth at once shocking and totally banal: people grow up and became orthodontists.
And yet none of them had been quite convincing. Once you’ve seen someone firing peas out of his nostril, or trying and failing,
for a full fifteen minutes, to climb over a gym horse, it’s difficult to take him seriously as a top legislator for the UN
or hedge-fund manager at a private bank, no matter how many years have passed. The hall had seemed to Howard no less full
of burlesques and pastiches than it does tonight. And he was the pastiche poster-boy, for he had actually switched sides from
being one of the students to being one of the teachers, from child, as it were, to grown-up – and it had
just happened
, one event in a long muddled train of events, without any great catharsis or epiphany on his part, without any interior transformation
or evolution whereby he might have known anything worth teaching; instead it was like calling one of the kids from the middle
row of his History class and asking him to take over, and while he was at it pay a mortgage, and fret over whether or not
to get married.
He looks out over the sea of slowly bobbing heads, imagines his boys in twenty years’ time, with thinning hair, beer guts,
photos in their wallets of children of their own. Is everyone in the world at the same game, trying to pass himself off as
something he is not? Could the dark truth be that the system is composed of individual units
none of whom really knows what he is doing
, who emerge from school and slide into the templates offered to them by accident of birth – banker, doctor, hotelier, salesman
– just as tonight they’d separated according to prearranged, invisible symmetries, nerds and jocks, skanks and studs –
‘Penny for ’em,’ a female voice speaks directly into his ear.
He jumps. Miss McIntyre smiles at him. ‘How are you getting on?’
‘Fine,’ he recovers. ‘Bored.’
‘Who was that banging on the door?’
‘Carl Cullen. He wanted to come in.’
‘You didn’t let him?’
‘He was either drunk or on something,’ Howard responds laconically. ‘Anyway, he knew what time the doors closed.’
‘I’m glad it wasn’t me who had to speak to him,’ she says, in a rare tone of respect.
‘Yeah, well…’ he shrugs it off. ‘What have you got there?’
‘I raided the girls’ toilets.’ She holds up two carrier bags crammed with clinking bottles. ‘You should have seen their little
faces.’
‘Did you kick them out?’
‘No… I felt sorry for them. It was bad luck. I’d just gone down to use the loo.’ She sets the bags down on the table and rummages
through them. ‘Look at all this stuff. I feel like Eliot Ness.’ She raises her head again. ‘So what were you thinking about?’