Excerpt from Henry Henry by Allen Bratton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Are you going to go?"

"Why would I?"

"What if his announcement is that he's dying?"

Hal said, "I know what he does when he thinks he's dying. He rings his solicitor and changes his will for the five hundredth time, then stays up all night and rings me at four in the morning telling me he can't sleep because if he does he'll die and he wants me to tell him whether he should send for a priest or try to wait a little longer. I say, 'Well, if you really think you're dying, I suppose you should send for a priest,' and he says, 'Will you come if I do?' And then I say ... Well, never mind, but the point is that, like, he's going to say he's going to go live in the South of France for the sake of his health or something. And I don't need to go to dinner to hear it when Tom or whoever's going to tell me anyway."

"So, pub?"

"Is your hangover over? It's already the afternoon: come round my flat and we'll start drinking. Bring some cans of G&T, hair of the dog that bit you."

"Yeah, okay, you know what, fine, but obviously yours isn't over, so I'm going to hang up before you make me listen to you puke again."

Lying back on the cool tiles, Hal thought how stupid he was to talk about his father like that. It was the sort of thing you told your therapist, and after the hellish year of priests and psychologists that had followed his mother's death, he had sworn therapy off. He could get benzos from his GP on Harley Street, who was also his father's GP, and had been his grandfather's. Dr. Bradmore had retained the family's loyalty through his protracted investigation for tax fraud: having been fined (not imprisoned) for tax crimes himself, Grandfather John had felt that, if anything, it made him more trustworthy. He chose his questions judiciously and never encouraged Hal to do anything like take him into his confidence. With Poins, Hal always said more than he meant to. He supposed it was because he trusted Poins to be stupid, and to know what was best for him, which was to be stupid.

He wasn't done puking. The nausea became unbearable; he lifted himself up so that his head hung over the toilet bowl and spat and waited for the unconscious, uncontrollable parts of his body to move.

By midnight they were with strangers near King's Cross. Hal met up with one of his dealers to buy a couple of grams, and he and Poins spent the rest of the dark hours at a warehouse club in an otherwise desolate stretch of real warehouses bordering the tracks that led out of, or into, the two stations. They went back and forth between the toilets, the bar, and the smoking section: keeping their heads rushing, bringing themselves up until they were unselfconscious enough to wade into the crush of strangers and flail about under the strobe lights, blinking out of existence in the darkness, flying straight to heaven when the lights blinked on again. They watched the sun rise from the rooftop terrace, lying back in plastic recliners and blowing smoke into the new blue sky. The trains were running again. Hal asked if Poins wanted to crash at his flat. Poins said no, he had to get home, he'd see him that evening at the pub. They walked back to King's Cross together, smoking the last two cigarettes from Hal's packet. Poins took the Northern line and Hal the Piccadilly, and Hal was alone again, coming down, hanging off a yellow pole and looking at the faces of the people around him, thinking:

You don't know who I am. Well, thank God.

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.