Howard gazes at him deadpan. ‘That’s not actually very comforting, Farley.’
‘I know,’ Farley sighs. He takes a last drag on his cigarette and dashes it under his heel. ‘Look, if I tell you something, can we go back inside?’
‘Tell me what?’
‘Seriously, I feel bad about telling you, but I think I’m getting frostbite out here.’
‘Just tell me.’
‘Well –’ Farley makes a play of adjusting his shirt-cuffs ‘– it seems a certain someone has volunteered to supervise this Hallowe’en Hop.’
‘Aurelie?’
‘I heard her talking to Greg yesterday.’
‘Why?’ The Hop, coming as it does on the first night of the mid-term holidays, is always drastically undersubscribed in terms of supervision.
‘Beats me.’ Farley shrugs. ‘Maybe she sees it as a novelty.’ He skates his fingertips in a figure-8 over the railing, then adds nonchalantly, ‘They’re going to need at least one other chaperone…’
‘Huh,’ Howard says, and for a moment they silently watch colluding clouds and evening darken the sky.
Then Farley stretches his back. ‘Okay, I’m going to get a drink,’ he says. ‘Are you coming in?’
‘I’ll be in now,’ Howard says distractedly.
‘You ladies care for anything at the bar?’ he hears Farley say to the building-society girls. ‘They do a mean pint of snakebite here.’
The girls titter; the door swings closed. Howard watches his fingers blueing on the glass neck of the beer bottle. He thinks of Halley, at her computer in their little house, wrapping up work for the week, starting to make the dinner. If he could just be certain that this was the life he wanted, and not just the life he’d ended up with because he was afraid to go after the one he wanted. If he could just be sure he wasn’t going to end up a fubsy old duffer in a jacket from thirty years ago, so hopelessly failed he no longer even realizes what might have been…
When Howard and Farley were in their final year of school, Jim Slattery’s wife left him. The boys weren’t told, of course, but it was obvious almost immediately. The teacher started turning up to school in odd socks, unshaven, his hair awry. The back seat of his car filled up with takeaway boxes. His classes, never what could be called linear, grew more rambling than ever; sometimes he would break off for minutes on end, arrested by some mysterious detail in the window. One afternoon, in the middle of another of these strange hiatuses, Guido LaManche had called out from the back row, ‘Where’s your wife, Jim?’
Slattery’s expression gave him away at once. He was too shocked to feign incomprehension or to cover up; he just stood there, open-mouthed. Gleefully, Steve Reece repeated the question: ‘Where’s your wife, Jim?’ And in a flash it had been taken up by the whole class, who chanted it over and over: ‘Where’s your wife, Jim? Where’s your wife, Jim?’
Slattery tried to ignore it, began to burble something about the poem they had just been reading, but the chanting grew louder, drowning him out, and finally, to jeers, he fled the classroom.
The next day the takeaway-littered car was missing from the car park, and instead of English class, at a special assembly, the sixth-years got a lecture from Father Furlong, typically abstruse, on the subject of compassion. This was followed by a more direct address from the Dean that suspended lunchtime exit privileges for the remainder of the week. Neither mentioned Jim Slattery’s name, nor what had happened in that classroom.
Nobody expected to see the English teacher for some time, but the very next day he returned to work. He made no reference to what had happened, simply picked up where he had left off. There were sniggers, catcalls, double-entendres, but these remained isolated. A few weeks later they heard that his wife was back.
Howard remembers that afternoon as if it were yesterday: the page of the book on his desk, the weather outside, the faces around him, and most of all Slattery’s own face – at first confused, as though they had broken into a patois he didn’t understand, and then, understanding, not so much upset for himself as shocked, shocked at the discovery of how cruel his boys could be. It was the first time Howard had seen a grown-up look like that: frangible, as if he would fall to pieces if you touched him.
The funny thing is, although every other element of that class is etched into his memory, Howard can’t seem to recall whether he had taken up the chant. Try as he might, he cannot lay hold of that one detail; his mind has smeared it over, like the face of an informer in a TV documentary. Had he sat back, arms folded in disgust, refusing to open his mouth? Had he kept his head down, so no one could see if he was chanting or not? Or had he – there in the middle aisle, middle row, hiding out in the mainstream – had he joined in the chant, loud as anyone? Smiling at the others to show what a laugh he thought it was? He has no idea, he can’t even hazard a guess; now isn’t that strange?
These lucky dog is fucking loevly Russan virginShe is drunked and to be fucked by bottelBitches screames as she fucked evry hole by five studsVozhnogy btzhaga child-rape ltazoy drastilnjeThese granny has not forgot how to fucking!
Each picture is a doorway to a little world that in his head Carl sees them float like bubbles somewhere far away in space, attached to his computer by tiny invisible threads. Each bubble has a girl inside, or maybe two girls, and dildos or studs or a dog, and they are waiting for you to call them to click on them and bring them out of space into your computer. You never know exactly what is in each one till you open it. Maybe the girl will only show her tits not her gee or she could even be a shemale. The picture-doorways are like wrappers like fireworks have or sweets and inside the worlds wait like secrets.
‘I’m not talking about love!’ Downstairs Carl’s mom shouts at Carl’s dad. ‘I’m not even talking about that. I’m talking about just simple decent respect for me as a person who is your wife. Your wife!’
‘Why are you saying this like it’s news to me?’ Dad shouts back. ‘Who do you think pays your credit card bills that arrive on my desk every –’
If you get bored with humans there are cartoon characters. There is Ariel from The Little Mermaid licking out Belle from Beauty and the Beast or Pocohontas from Pocohontas getting fucked by the horse from Mulan. There are characters from computer games like Hopeland and Final Fantasy having sex. There are also old-fashioned ones like animals from Jungle Book which is a film or Donald Duck fucking Minnie Mouse or Yogi Bear fucking Boo-Boo which is a smaller bear.
‘– question of buying your way out of it, David, it’s – look at me, David. I am, I am a woman. I deserve to be treated like a –’
‘I know you’re a woman. I know you’re a woman because you’re being totally irrational.’
‘Oh, it’s irrational, when the phone rings at two in the morning and when I answer they hang up? It’s irrational, the phone ringing at two a.m. four nights running?’
Jessica Rabbitt, also the good-looking bird from Scooby-Doo riding Fred or sometimes Scooby. A lot of Smurfs gang-banging Smurfette. The Simpsons, mostly Homer or Bart fucking Lisa, though there’s one Carl saw of Homer going into Maggie’s room to fuck Maggie, his dick is out and his face is all scary the way it never is in the show, like his eyes are slits and his teeth are fangs and his hand is stretched out like a claw into the crib.