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?’

‘Thinking?’ Howard repeats, as if the word is unfamiliar.

‘Just now. You were away off somewhere.’

‘I was wondering why the DJ is playing all these old songs.’

‘You looked sad,’ she says. She lays a finger on his chest and gazes at it, like an electrician into a nest of wiring. ‘I bet,’ she says slowly, ‘you were thinking of the dances you went to, when you were young, and wondering where all the time went, and what happened to all the dreams you had then, and if this life is anything like the one you wanted.’

Howard laughs. ‘Bingo.’

‘Me too,’ she says ruefully. ‘I suppose it’s inevitable.’ She turns her gaze over the hall, where two-personned silhouettes are swaying almost motionlessly to ‘Wild Horses’ by the Rolling Stones. ‘So how did you do, at your Hop?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Howard, eventually this playing-dumb routine is going to stop seeming charming. Did you score? Did you dance a slow-set? Or were you one of the losers watching from the sidelines?’

Howard considers lying, then comes clean. ‘Loser,’ he says.

‘Same here,’ she nods dolefully. Howard rounds on her in disbelief. ‘You? You’re telling me no one wanted to kiss you?’

‘What can I say? I was your classic ugly duckling.’ She looks away. ‘So do you feel like making up for lost time?’

He starts. ‘What?’

She shrugs, inclines her head towards the crowd. ‘I don’t know. Take home one of those little nymphets. I’m sure they’d love some extra lessons from a handsome teacher. They’re all so gorgeous, aren’t they? And skinny – God, none of them must have eaten for a week.’

‘They’re a little young for me.’

‘Take two. Fourteen plus fourteen is twenty-eight.’

‘I have a girlfriend who might object.’

‘That’s a shame,’ she says ambiguously. She clams up, addresses herself to the music, leaving Howard to wonder just what has passed him by. ‘This is such a great song,’ she remarks, and then, forthrightly, to Howard, ‘Would you like to dance?’

Only by a miracle does Howard manage not to drop his paper cup of punch. ‘Here? Now? With you?’

She arches a gamine eyebrow. Howard’s mind is a sea of flying chicken feathers. ‘We can’t,’ he stammers, then adds hurriedly, ‘It’s not that I don’t want to… but, you know, in front of the kids, and everything?’

‘Then let’s sneak out!’ she whispers.

‘Out?’ he repeats.

‘Somewhere no one will see us. For five minutes.’ Her eyes glitter at him like mirrorballs.

‘But what about the… didn’t Greg say…?’ He gestures weakly at the costumed teenagers.

‘Five minutes, Howard, what’s the worst that can happen? Just till the end of this song, it’s practically over anyway… we’ll just go out into the corridor… ooh, we can make Cosmopolitans!’ She views his expression of agonized vacillation, cringing at her like an animal begging to be put out of its misery, and takes his hand. ‘You owe it to yourself, Howard,’ she says. ‘You have to dance at least one slow-set in your life.’

The lights are low and he doesn’t think anyone sees them leave.

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