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It was fine, Hal had his phone on silent. He made the sign of the cross, prayed for Richard's soul, and said a very genuine Our Father.
* * *
There were a lot of different ways you could vomit from being drunk. There was the tactical chunder, the unloosing of a stomach's worth of lager to make room for another few pints; the surprise puke, which was not a surprise because it would happen inevitably if you did not make it happen yourself; the takeaway puke, when you scarfed a Styrofoam box full of chips or an extra-spicy kebab and then gagged it back up again like a dog who'd pawed open the rubbish; the nightcap puke, a tidy voiding of the stomach right before you collapsed; the blackout puke, with which you were acquainted only afterward, when you woke up in it; the night-bus puke, which probably could have been kept down if you hadn't been jerked back and forth for half an hour by an idiot sadist of a driver; the hangover breakfast puke, which suggested that baked beans and rashers did little to cure the wounds that had been incurred the night before. Then there was the most miserable of them all, the 0-percent-blood-alcohol empty-stomach heaving up of bile, the body's confused and pathetic attempt to rid itself of poison that had already been pissed away. It was like doing penance when you had already been punishing yourself.
From Hal's phone on the floor beside him came Ed Poins's unconcerned drone, North London inflected with American TV: "I've got a cousin in Australia who played rugby, and he drank so much he got a hole in his esophagus."
Hal said, "I don't want to hear about people getting holes where they shouldn't have them. Can't you tell me something funny?"
He felt the weird internal grip of nausea and bent over the toilet bowl, spitting into the clear, still water. He was lucky he couldn't see his face in it; he could sort of see the silhouette of his head. Another round of puke worked its way up his throat and out his mouth. He had to gag and gasp to get it all free. In the water it looked like a whisked egg.
Poins made a noise. "Are you puking right now?"
Like Hal, Poins had read English at Oxford. He had talked vaguely about doing law or working in the City or whatever else would make him money—"My only inheritance will be my mum's semidetached," he liked to remind Hal—but just after they'd sat their finals he'd landed a decent supporting role in a miniseries adaptation of a First World War memoir: he played a young Tommy who'd been shot in the throat and then had a lot of homoerotic poetry written in his honor. The last time Hal had acted was with Poins, in a student production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Hal had been Worthing; Poins, Algernon. Their physical dissimilarity—Hal fair and unusually tall, Poins dark and unusually short—had made them look amusing onstage together, and they had that almost psychic connection that enabled them to change approaches without planning or practicing beforehand. Poins had asked him, after they finished at Oxford, whether he was going to keep acting, and Hal had said he didn't think so, and Poins had asked him why. He had said he was going to have to be the seventeenth Duke of Lancaster. Poins had said, "But you can be other things too, can't you?" and Hal had said, "No, not really," and began to feel sorry for himself, and Poins had laughed and said, "Spare me."
Hal's phone pinged; he sat back against the wall and opened his texts, having only glimpsed the notification before it disappeared.
"Oh God," he said, "Tom is texting me."
"Is he complaining about your Snap story, or is your dad looking for you?"
"Oh, yeah, well, he's not even trying to pretend he's not playing go- between. He says—here's what he says, he says: 'Dad says he has something important to tell us so asked us to come to dinner at his tomorrow at-symbol seven so if you could show up it would be much appreciated thanks passive- aggressive exclamation mark.'"
Excerpted from Henry Henry by Allen Bratton. Copyright © 2024 by Allen Bratton. Excerpted by permission of The Unnamed Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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