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 banaclass="underline" 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.