by Paul Murray
‘The fucking door is locked,’ Carl says.
‘Oh sweetheart, I’m so sorry, I forgot…’ She reaches for her bag and starts fishing in it for her keys. She flicks through them till she finds the right one then hands the bunch to Carl. ‘You can hang onto them for tonight, petal. Leave them on the breakfast bar when you come in. I’ve taken a sleeping pill so I won’t be going anywhere.’ Carl grabs the keys with a grunt of disgust. ‘Have a good time, honey,’ she calls after him. Tears are creeping back into her voice. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
Carl unlocks the front door and steps out into the cold rainy porch – and that’s when the idea comes. At first he doesn’t know it’s an idea. It’s just the words reappearing in his brain, KEY and PILL. He doesn’t know why they are there. He stops on the step, frowning to himself, one hand on the doorknob about to pull it closed. KEY PILL KEY PILL, the words stare at him like the eyes of a painting. Carl’s brain is not used to KEY PILL ideas, and in the KEY beginning it refuses to PILL fit them together – then all at once, all by themselves, they fall into place and the idea is there, where a second ago there was nothing. This must be what happens to Barry all the time! With the idea fizzing up his arms, Carl slips back into the house! Inside, he slams the door. He waits a moment to make sure his mom is still in bed. Then he creeps up the stairs and into her bathroom.
In the mirror over the sink he sees himself. The idea is written like a smirk across his face. Carefully, he lifts the keys to the light and prods through them. He picks out a tiny silver wand and puts it into the tiny silver lock in the mirror. The key turns silently. He screws up his eyes and pulls the handle. The door swings open without a sound.
Every inch of the cabinet has been filled. Tubes, jars, boxes, pills of every colour and size and shape, all with white labels with Carl’s mom’s name written on them. If Barry was here he could probably tell you which ones do what. But Carl is only looking for one thing.
They call it the date-rape drug, Barry said. It’s this pill that they invented that if you put it in a girl’s drink it makes her really horny and she’ll do whatever you want. But then the next day she won’t remember anything.
They invented a pill to make girls do that? Carl was surprised.
No, they invented it to be a sleeping pill but then someone else found out it did all this other stuff too when you mixed it with alcohol.
Sleeping pill.
OMG WE R SO SHTFCD.
Then she would do whatever you wanted.
That is Carl’s idea for Lori.
But there is a problem. The labels on the little bottles and boxes do not tell you which one is the sleeping pill. Instead they have names, long strange names that slide out of shape while you are reading them. They sound like kings from history or alien planets. There are hundreds of them. He thinks of ringing Barry to ask him which pill he was talking about. But then he would have to tell Barry his idea, which he doesn’t want to do while Barry is alone with the girl, in case it gives Barry an idea as well. Then he has another idea – put all the bottles and boxes in his bag and bring them to the Hop so that Barry can pick out the right ones! He is just lifting his hand to grab the bottles on the bottom shelf when he hears his mom in the next room. He freezes then runs over to the shower door to hide, but nothing happens. Maybe it was just the TV. From here behind the shower door though he notices something he didn’t see before, a white box on the window sill, beside her Ladyshave, with a pack of pills sticking out like a silver tongue.
The label tells him nothing, just another weird alien name. But inside the box he finds instructions, folded up like a map:
ZENOHYPNOTAN is a hypnotic designed to help you sleep. ZENOHYPNOTAN is a benzodiazepine-like agent, a member of the cyclopyrrolone group of compounds. When experiencing sleeplessness, take one tablet of ZENOHYPNOTAN one hour before going to bed. DO NOT CONSUME WITH ALCOHOL. Do not operate heavy machinery. NEVER EXCEED THE RECOMMENDED DOSAGE. You may experience some or all of the following side-effects during or after use of ZENOHYPNOTAN: drowsiness, vomiting, sweating, fatigue, dizziness, changes in libido, loss of vision, anterograde amnesia, disorientation, numbed emotions, depression, anxiety, inability to sleep. Other reactions like restlessness, agitation, aggressiveness, delusion, rages, nightmares, psychoses, inappropriate behaviour and other behavioural effects have been known to occur with benzodiazepines and benzodiazepine-like agents. Should this occur, use of the drug should be discontinued. Termination of use may cause headaches, muscle pain, confusion, extreme anxiety, hypersensitivity to light, hallucinations, epileptic seizures, derealization, depersonalization, suicide. In the case of negative side-effects, please consult your doctor.
Here you are Lori, I got you a drink. Oh thank you. Smiling at her the way Barry would smile, in his imagination he is wearing a James Bond tuxedo. Why don’t you drink it? he says.
In a little while, she says.
He smiles. He is not sure what is happening. Why don’t you drink it now? he says.
I’m not thirsty now, she says. Her eyes are like two pills.
Drink it, he says. She backs away. What is going on? He grabs her wrist. Drink it! She won’t, she fights him. He gets angrier and angrier. Her eyes fill with tears as he forces her wrist up to her mouth – and now she drops the cup, and it spills away into the grey fog of his imagination. I will never fuck you! she shouts. Carl begins to roar, not words, just a raggedy animal roar, and he folds his hands into clubs, and raises them against the shrinking girl –
‘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 prove
d 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 –
