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 schooclass="underline" 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.