Henry henry, p.6
Henry Henry, page 6
Hal retrieved someone else’s bottle of whisky: it was half full, still a decent 300ml. He hated drinking cheap spirits straight, but he wanted to make Percy suffer. The two garden chairs were occupied, so Hal and Percy sat on the patchy grass and smoked and passed the bottle between them, unnoticed in the shuffle of guests coming out for a smoke, going back in, coming out again. Hal did what Jack did and held court, piecing together a sort of stand-up routine featuring stories about his failures, his total uselessness at the British Policy Institute, his extraordinary alcohol tolerance, the time his drug dealer told him he was spending too much money on drugs. Percy boasted about his achievements by joking about how boring he was in comparison: “Yeah, literally all I do now is read books and write essays,” or “I basically did a whole cleanse while I was in Sri Lanka, I didn’t drink or smoke or do anything else for a month.” Hoping to embarrass Percy, Hal told the story about the gay club that he’d just told Fern and Siobhan. Percy, trying to roll a cigarette in the dark, laughed automatically, but sank then, for the first time that evening, into silence.
“Mate,” said Hal, “just take one of mine. Here. This is why I don’t roll my own. Fucking impossible to do when you’re drunk.”
“The filters are biodegradable,” said Percy, but he took one of Hal’s anyway. After the first drag he said, “So, how is it, being, uh, out?”
“What, out like out? I’ve only actually said it to a precious few people; everybody else knows because of gossip. You know because of gossip.”
“Actually, it’s strange because I don’t think I’d ever guess, if I didn’t know? So it must have surprised people, when they found out. It surprised me when I found out. First thing I heard about you in Freshers Week. And I was like, ‘How do you not know him at all and know everything about who he’s sleeping with, and I’ve known him forever and never known?’”
“That’s the first thing people said when they talked about me? It was 2010, not fucking 1810.”
“Well, yes, but I think there was a curiosity … You know, it was before gay marriage, and I think people wanted to see how it was going to work, with inheritances and everything. It’s one thing for a normal person to come out, it’s another thing for—”
“Ugh, don’t say it! Don’t say it! Don’t say a fucking word about it. You’re not a normal person, your family’s net worth is in the nine digits.”
“Yeah, it’s the oil … Stole it from the Scots … Though the market’s crashing like hell …”
“It wasn’t some grand statement, you know, it wasn’t—it wasn’t flinging open the front door, it was sort of slipping out the side door, except the side door creaks so everyone hears it. I couldn’t care less really. It did upset my father. I suppose that’s why I let it happen.”
“Why are you so awful to your father? I like him. I don’t think my dad likes him, but my dad hates everyone.”
“So does mine, secretly. What does it matter to you?”
“It doesn’t,” said Percy. “But isn’t it a waste of time? And even if you don’t get on with him, I don’t see why you would do things—such enormous, life-altering things, you know—just to upset him. It’s childish. It’s such a waste of time and effort.”
“That’s what he says about me. Waste of time and effort. Like going to a faraway restaurant that turns out to be closed, except you’ve spent twentytwo years getting there, and the restaurant has your exact name and it’s going to get all your stuff when you die.”
“Don’t you want to sort of do something—you know, do something with your life?”
“I don’t know, why, what do you want to do?”
“In twenty years,” said Percy seriously, “I’m going to be prime minister.”
Hal laughed at him, rude and unforgiving. He lay on his back in the cool, moist grass and watched the stars and the tops of the trees and the houses blurring with the inward churn of his own drunkenness. He laughed so hard he coughed. He shut his eyes and felt the earth spinning beneath him, keeping him pinned to its surface by the force of its motion. There seemed not to be anyone else in the garden any longer. In the house, there was still music playing; Hal could hear only the bass.
“I don’t think it’s that ridiculous of me,” said Percy.
“You’re so insufferable. And my father thinks you’re the second coming of Christ.”
“Well, that’s an exaggeration,” said Percy, as if he were clearing up a serious misunderstanding.
“God, shut up! Prime minister of my fucking balls. Tell me again how great Sri Lanka was. ‘Wow, I’m Harry Percy, I’ve had food poisoning on five different continents. Wah-wah-wah, donate to UNICEF.’”
From somewhere above—Hal looked up and saw a shape in the firstfloor window—a woman who was plainly not a playwright or a textile artist shouted, “Do you know there are people trying to sleep up here? Do you not realize how loud you are?”
Hal laughed. Percy shoved him to shut him up, fumbling to his feet.
“I’m so sorry,” Percy called up. “We were just going. So sorry to bother you, truly.”
Hal, still on the ground, still laughing, told him, “You’re such a little bitch.” He squinted at the open window, but the woman was just a spot of blue against black. There might have been a floral nightgown.
“Do you not know,” she went on, “that there are other people living here who’ve got to get up in the morning?”
Percy shouted, “We’re really so sorry! We had no idea we were being such a bother, no idea, really. We don’t live here, actually, we’re just guests!”
“It’s half three in the morning,” she cried. “Of course you’re being a bloody bother. I don’t care whether you’re guests or not, you should know better than to go on like that in the middle …”
Once they were on the street again Hal said, “Ah fuck, we’re so far from my flat.”
“Where do you live?”
“Um, Fulham … Don’t make fun of me, it’s where my dad decided I should live.”
“Fulham, yeah … It isn’t—kind of boring? I mean, I’m staying at my dad’s place at the moment and it’s basically awful, but it’s not too far from SOAS, and he says if I want a flat I’ve got to pay for it, and I can’t make enough to afford living in Central while I’m still at uni, and if I lived anywhere else the commute would be too long, so … You’re not going home yet, are you?”
Hal would have looked up the nearest kebab shop and walked there. Percy hailed an Uber and brought Hal to a twenty-four-hour place in Shoreditch, garishly decorated, full of City boys in sweat-stained shirts who’d failed to pull and now were stuck with each other. Hal was too drunk to comprehend the menu; Percy ordered him a fry-up and a pint of lager. When their pints arrived, Percy slapped Hal’s outstretched hand, saying, “Not until you’ve eaten something.”
“Are you my mother?” Hal took a vigorous drink of lager, spilling it down his chin, spattering his shirtfront. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“No, but you obviously need one. Oh God!” Percy’s screwed-up, plaintive face came into focus for a second. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”
“No, no, keep going, that’s the funniest thing you’ve said all night. I’m making you grow a sense of humor. Don’t say sorry, say, ‘Thank you, Hal, for the fact that I’m now capable of making jokes, it’s a skill I’m sure will serve me well in future.’”
“I really didn’t mean it, I just said it.”
“You can do an entire tight five about my dead mum,” said Hal, “just as long as I don’t have to hear you moralizing at me.”
“You just don’t believe anyone actually has a conscience. You think everyone is secretly just like you. Either that or they’re too stupid to be just like you, or too common.”
“You don’t even know me,” said Hal. “Our parents know each other, that’s all.”
“All right,” said Percy. “Then we don’t know each other really.”
Talking to Percy was like trying to fence with a wall. He was always himself, earnest, impassable, uncheckable, evading all attempts at—Hal thought penetration, and laughed. Yes, Percy was like St. Sebastian if the arrows bounced off.
“It’s just that it’s on my mind,” said Hal.
“What is?”
“My mother—it’s past midnight already, so today is the day my mother died. I’m not getting drunk to drown my sorrows, I do this most nights.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it was today.”
“And this is the first year I’m not going to the memorial Mass, which is a godsend, honestly. It’s in Monmouth and her family drive me mad. You know the Woodstocks, don’t you?”
“Of course I do, they’re Mum and Dad’s friends. I think they’re sound enough. I mean, I’m not super keen on golfing with Thomas Woodstock, but it’s mostly Dad who does that, I just get enlisted occasionally. I’m terrible at golf, by the way, never ask me.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“So there’s a memorial for your mother—today? In Wales? And you’re out at four in the morning? Are you even going to be alive tomorrow? Sorry, sorry, bad phrasing, I keep doing it, I think it’s actually sort of a psychological thing.”
If Hal wasn’t there, he would be in his bedroom at Monmouth. The windows would be open, the curtains tied back, letting the damp, grassy night air pass through. He would be alone, sleepless, halfway between drunk and hungover. With his ears ringing in the quiet, he would suffer the fear that reminded him how much he was like his father. He would go to Henry and beg a pill or two from his supply of pharmaceuticals, and endure Henry’s concern: “Are you sleeping badly? Are you not well? Do you need to see Dr. Bradmore?” Then he would take the pill and pull his duvet up to his neck and sleep for as long as he could before Tom or Humphrey or John came banging in, telling him Dad was saying they’d got to get up or else they’d be late for Mass.
◆
When the bill arrived, Hal snatched it out of the waiter’s hand with a zeal that visibly shook the man. He paid in cash and put down too much for a tip. Then he gave Percy fifty quid and said, “Get me a cab home.”
Percy gave the fifty quid back: he tucked it into the back left pocket of Hal’s trousers, buttoning the pocket so the money wouldn’t fall out. He persisted even after Hal told him to stop touching his arse. He got into the cab with Hal, and when it arrived at Hal’s address, Percy got out too.
Hal said, “What are you doing? Why are you still here? Do you want me to invite you in?”
“No! I’m trying to make sure you get into your flat without passing out.”
“Do what you—ah, fuck.” Thinking the little gate had been open, Hal had walked straight into it, bashing his knee.
Hal lived on the top floor of a very ordinary three-story terraced house. There was a black-and-white-checkered porch, a bay window, a blue door, and a flower box that the woman who lived on the ground floor neglected. Opening the door, one was confronted immediately with a carpeted staircase. Fifty years ago, someone much less grand than him owned this whole house. Now he (his father, that is) owned a quarter of it (there was a basement flat also). As Hal entered his flat, Percy came in after him, saying, “I won’t stay long. Where are the lights in here? Is there a switch? Oh, here it is … No, that’s not it …”
Turning on the light in the bedroom, Percy revealed the duvet that spilled from Hal’s bed to the floorboards, which were covered by dirty clothes and half-empty cups that he stepped carefully to avoid. Hal and Percy stunk of drink and cigarettes and trailed the scent about as they moved, leaving impressions of themselves in the air they had just displaced.
“You should go to the memorial.” Percy was yanking open Hal’s dresser drawers, taking out trousers and shirts. “That’s the sort of thing you regret on your deathbed, you know. Your family will remember it forever, and every time you do something they don’t like they’ll remind you of it.”
“Percy, get out of my flat. Go home.”
Looking up, wobbling a bit, Percy said, “Really?”
“Yes,” said Hal. “There’s a reason we’re not friends.”
“Yeah, ’cause you’re the biggest cunt who’s ever lived, and I try to be a good person.”
“Here it is, the Percy righteousness, the privilege-guilt that demands absolution …”
Percy said, “Would it kill you just to stop?”
“Stop what? If I just stopped, full stop, that would be dying. That’s like saying, ‘Would it kill you to die?’”
“Fuck off! Shut up, shut up. I’m sick of you. Have you got a suitcase? I’m trying to do a good deed and you’re ruining it. You haven’t tricked me, I know you’re stupid underneath the cleverness.” Ferociously, he pitched rolled-up pairs of socks into a duffel bag. “I know about your funny little impressions of me. ‘Ha ha ha, I’m Harry Percy, and I’m actually cognizant of how I affect other people! I’m Hal Lancaster, and I’m sooo funny. Sooo funny! I’m Hal Lancaster and I’m better than everyone else because I was born without feelings. Ha ha! Laugh at my jokes! Ha ha!’”
“You don’t seem to want to leave, though.”
“I do,” said Percy. “I’m leaving right now. Don’t forget to pack underpants.”
Shutting the door to his flat, locking it, Hal had that discomfiting sense of a familiar place being changed just by having temporarily contained a new person. Alone again, Hal took on the outsider’s vision, and everything around him—the cracked ceiling, the Persian rug, the tiny dining table with the mismatched chairs, the bricked-up fireplace with the chipped plaster bust of the Apollo Belvedere in it—took on a slightly different attitude and proportion. He was ashamed to take his clothes off; it felt as though Percy had left his eyes behind.
The sun was rising. With the lights out, Hal saw that the palest blue glow came through the crack in the curtains. He was still drunk enough that the bed seemed to be moving beneath him, as if there were another person on the underside, tossing and turning, trying to fall asleep. He shut his eyes and remained completely awake. Fuck, he thought, fuck. I know, he thought. Fuck, he thought. He got up and packed his underpants as well.
PART
PARACETAMOL
TWO
SEVEN
Hal’s drunk lasted him only through the first hour of his journey. He fell asleep on the train and woke to the kind of root-canal headache that made it impossible to think. Each fleck of rain on the window next to him felt like a slap to the side of his head. In the little train toilet, where he did a truly grievous, painful shit, the mirror was placed just across from him, so that he was faced unavoidably with his reflection. Perched on the tiny toilet, his body looked obtrusive and enormous. His face had the bruised, hopeless look of a gin fiend in a Victorian moral tract. Under the fluorescent lights his skin was the color of spoiled milk. Pale stubble was coming up in patches, not quite committing to fully covering his jaw. His hair was greasy, the curls weighed down; his eyes bloodshot and his eyelids puffy pink. He noticed a crust of dried spit in the corner of his mouth, which he wiped away. The smell of his own shit was so horrific he gagged, keeping himself from vomiting by a feat of willpower so great he doubted it would ever be repeated. He deepened his misery by imagining the relative comfort of his flat, the solitude in which he could descend to the depths of indignity securely. He was happy to live, but why could he not do it as a dog or a slug, something with little intelligence and no sense of shame? As he exited the toilet, the girl waiting for it made a face.
There was no train station at Monmouth; Hal disembarked at Newport and hired a cab. Starting the meter, the driver said, “Late night?”
“Yeah, I never really went to bed.”
“Oh, well, that’s what you’re meant to do when you’re young. Where are you going? I’ll try not to take any sharp turns.”
“To Monmouth—it’s, um, there’s not an address as such …”
“Ah, I’m from Monmouth myself.” The driver, a tall man with a long, rounded nose and the vague accent characteristic of the Marches, looked at Hal in the rearview mirror, appraising him: So what sort of business does this boy have here, in my place? Explain yourself. Or don’t, but I’ll make my own assumptions.
Hal said, “Do you know Monmouth House?”
“Yes, I do. Are you a guest of the family then?”
“Well, I’ve just come for a couple of days …”
“I’ve been driving for eight years, and it’s very rare I take anyone up there. I have a cousin who goes up to help with the cleaning sometimes. She says they don’t have many visitors; the place is closed up most of the year. I think they spend most of their time in London.”
“Yes, I think they do …”
“They own a good deal of the land round the town—about a thousand acres in all, and when I was a boy the estate was larger than that. Those were the days when John Lancaster owned it. John was the one who really took things in hand: paid off the county council, started buying up businesses … Made better use of his wife’s inheritance than others might have done in his position.”
“I suppose,” said Hal, shutting his eyes to keep his stomach from churning, absently picking a spot on his forehead, “that things might change when the son inherits.”
“That may be true,” said the driver.
For about thirty minutes they drove in silence, making their way north through the pastures between the mountains and the mouth of the River Severn. As they broke off onto the road that would lead them to the house, passing the sign that read “PRIVATE PROPERTY: NO RIGHT OF WAY,” Hal said, “Do you know much about him, the oldest son?”
“Who, Henry Junior? Well, he was born here in Monmouth. I think all the children were. I don’t know much about them. Yes, it was a surprise when we found out he was gay. Open about it too, very open, not like the last Duke of Lancaster, who was a bit of a flamboyant character, but never actually came out. Of course, it’s a different time now. I say, well, if this is what he wants, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t. I’ve got a nephew who’s gay, and he gets on well enough. The world’s changing.”
