Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The academy’s art department was in a sad state even before Howard started school there. Dusty placquards and faded banners hanging in the hallway made him think that might not have always been the case, but these days his footsteps echoed like the beat of a lonely snare as he walked. The hall always smelled like chemicals -- ink and turpentine, with just a hint of mold -- and it made Howard hold a sleeve to his nose as he scanned the little windows into darkened rooms. It wasn’t his kind of scene, no sir. Howard preferred the great outdoors, smokey jazz clubs, and whiskey-haunted libraries to this kind of mess.

At least, that was what he thought he’d prefer. It was all a bit theoretical still, being a teenager and also living in Leeds. There weren’t exactly a huge number of jazz clubs in bicycling distance eager to let him in. But they would. Someday.

Howard stuck his head through the door of the last room at the end of the hall. Through the dim evening light filtering through one dirty window, he could make out the familiar silhouette of his best mate, jagged-cut hair sticking up at all angles and pink tongue peeking out of the corner of his mouth as he hunched over his latest project. Vince’s fingers were coated in vibrant green paint, and his blue uniform blazer was dotted with white and black smudges. Even his beloved hair showed signs of an artist at work. Vince had a tendency to grab at his hair when he was thinking, or nervous, or not thinking at all, and there was nearly as much paint on the strands as there was root boost.

“There you are, little man,” Howard said. Vince didn’t jump, only hummed and swiped his fingers over his canvas again. “It’s well past three, you know.”

“I know, but if I could just--” He touched the painting again, squirming in his chair but unable to leave it alone.

There was nothing else for it when he got like this. Howard picked his way through the cluttered room to Vince’s table and delicately picked up the wet canvas from the edges. “They’ve shut off all the lights. You’ve got to go.”

“I do my best work in the dark,” Vince whined. “You know that!”

“Only because you’re hardly awake in the daylight.” Howard stacked the painting up against the back wall and squinted at it, his tiny eyes shrinking down to specks. It was that creature again, the green man with the giant thumb and one wide, white eye like someone stapled a polo to his face. Of all the subjects Vince painted, this one was Howard’s second least-favorite, right after the pink blob.

It was best not to mention the pink blob.

When he turned back from putting the canvas out to dry, Vince was reclining his chair back against the table, watching Howard with an easy grin. He was almost wearing a proper school uniform this time. The blazer and trousers were standard issue, at least. The neon pink Bowie shirt and star-spattered kerchief around his neck, less so. Howard would never quite understand how Vince got away with it. He got taken to task by the staff if his ankles showed when he crossed his legs. Too distracting for the female students, probably.

“What are you doing skulking about in here after school hours, anyway?” Vince asked.

“Keeping you from getting entombed in the art room all night again. One of these days, you’ll be locked in a whole weekend.”

“That’d be fine. I’d curl up among the canvases. They’d find me in the morning wrapped in a blanket of acrylics with my hair done up in biros like a nana.”

“You’d panic,” Howard said flatly. “If the whole school found you like that, you’d be out of your mind. Ah, my hair’s gone flat! My shirt’s the same as yesterday! This is an outrage!”

Vince giggled and let his chair legs hit the tile again with a loud snap. “Yeah, maybe not. Good thing I’ve got you around to save me.”

“That’s right, sir. Howard Moon, colon, Savior.”

“On second thought, that don’t sound right at all,” Vince gasped between giggles. Colon Savior.

“Alright, alright. Just get your things, yeah? Let’s get out before the teachers leave and we’re both locked in for the night.”

Vince grabbed a few handfuls of biros and brushes before reaching for his bag. Bookbags were one of the few accessories at the academy with no uniform restrictions, but most students fell into one of two camps -- leather satchels, or canvas backpacks. Of course, Vince’s bag had to be an exception. He’d had the same one since grade school, a battered, cross-body canvas mess. Over the years, he’d attacked it with so many coats of paint, patches, sequins, and ribbons that Howard suspected none of the original fabric was even left. It was a husk of a bag, a clownish ghost of something a normal person might carry.

Given the way Vince abused it, it came as no surprise that when he grabbed the strap, it ripped, half the contents spilling out onto the dirty, paint-spattered art room floor.

“Shit.” Vince went scrambling for the stuff that landed on the table, and Howard stooped to grab the chaos of papers on the floor.

Crumpled up worksheets with scores marked in thick red and past-due assignments fell like confetti, and Howard had a lecture already prepared on his tongue as he grabbed them. Sure, Vince had never listened to his speeches on proper organization of stationary in the past, but that didn’t mean Howard would stop trying.

As he gathered up a few thick, pink and white envelopes, the chemical smells of the art room receded, and Howard noticed something new. Perfume. It was sweet, floral, feminine. His first thought was that it might be Vince, but then he noticed the envelopes in his hand and the neat, loopy handwriting on them in glitter gel and bright colored inks. He raised the notes to his face and -- carefully -- sniffed.

He nearly dropped the pile. “Vince, are these from girls?” Howard’s voice cracked, squeaking on the last word. He pretended it hadn’t.

“Yeah, guess so,” Vince said, grabbing the papers from Howard’s hands and shoving them into his bag.

Howard stared down at more envelopes still scattered across the floor. “But there must be a dozen of them!”

“More still in the bag,” Vince muttered, snatching up the rest. Howard could hear them crumpling, perhaps even ripping as he stuffed them into his bookbag, then shouldered it. “Ah, don’t look at me like that, Howard.”

“Like what?” Howard sounded like he was being actively strangled by a homicidal goose.

“Like I, I dunno, snapped one of your awful records in half.” Howard drew back at that image, outraged at the very thought, and Vince grinned again. “It’s just because there’s some stupid dance coming up, right?”

Some stupid dance. Howard knew what Vince meant, of course. The academy only held one dance every year -- the sixth form formal graduation dance. As Howard was getting ready to graduate himself in mere weeks, he could choose to go if he wanted. Younger students like Vince (who was a lowly Year 12) could only go if they were asked as a date.

Howard had never been asked.

He snapped out of his thoughts at the gentle brush of Vince’s hand on his elbow. “Don’t touch me,” he said flatly, and Vince giggled and squeezed his bicep. “What?”

“Think I hear the janitor coming. Unless you changed your mind about getting locked in…”

Howard could hear it too now -- the shuffling of the bins and brooms, jingling keys. He nudged Vince toward the door, then caught another little sheaf of pink envelopes that spilled out of Vince’s bag when he spun around.

“I’ll just carry these,” Howard muttered. They smelled like gummies melted on a rose. He rubbed his fingers over the sleek paper folds as they shuffled down the darkened hallway.

The school building was practically empty now. A few afterschool groups -- choir, ski club, and such -- still had meetings. (Howard was meant to be in a jazz band practice himself, but after six years he was still the founder, president, and only member, so technically everywhere he went was a jazz band meeting.)

Those few meeting and practice rooms were illuminated, along with a couple of classrooms, but otherwise the school was quiet, the only noise the muffled tap of Howard’s loafers and Vince’s heels on the ancient wood floors. Being in here when it was so deserted always made the hair on Howard’s neck stand upright. The faded black and white photographs and oil paint portraits on the walls from long-gone classes suddenly screamed for his attention, pressuring Howard to feel the true weight of the centuries on this place. Vince’s hand was still on his elbow, and Howard pressed it into his side.

He paused outside one classroom, its overhead lights still burning. Despite the sun setting fiery orange over the buildings outside, a man sat hunched over a desk inside, scribbling away at a pile of student reports. He had a thick mustache, wire-rimmed gold glasses, and wispy brown hair. If he stood up straight, he might, once, have been as tall as Howard, but no one had seen him do that in at least a decade. The plaque by the door read, Geography - Moon.

Howard stopped, waiting to see if his dad would look up, wave, gesture for him to come in and talk, but Thomas Moon only glared down at his desk with a defeated expression and finger-combed his mustache.

“Come on, Howard,” Vince said gently. “Let’s go home, yeah?”

Home.

If one were to check the academy’s file on Howard Moon, they would have discovered a great many things, including two aliases, several reports of harassment from female classmates, and a long letter from an academic advisor who summed up his opinion of Howard as, “bright, but hopeless.” The file would also list Howard’s address as a house a short distance away from campus. It would note that Howard lived with his father, T. Moon, and that Howard rode his bicycle to school each day.

Aside from the complaints and the advisor’s letter, Howard’s file was full of lies.

Officially, Howard lived at home with his dad, but the truth was more complicated. He didn’t know how to live in that house since his mom left, and as far as he could tell, his dad didn’t either. There was never a choice made for him to move, out, not deliberately.

Instead, it happened like this: one night, Howard went over to Vince’s dorm room to watch a film. They both fell asleep to the soothing sounds of Danish cinema, propped up against the wall on Vince’s single bed, and when Howard woke up, it was to sunlight streaming through the window, a blue screen on the telly, and a puddle of Vince’s drool on his chest.

Howard had grabbed his bike and rushed home in time for breakfast, armed with a multicolored selection of excuses and apologies, including some he’d borrowed from Vince’s repertoire. He crashed through the door, nonsense words about a magpie making off with his bike chain tumbling off his tongue, and found his dad seated at the kitchen table, sedately reading the paper, having made toast and tea for one.

That night, Howard slept at Vince’s again. And every night since.

The dormitory was across the lawn from the main building, and a few boys transformed it into an impromptu football pitch almost every evening. They dashed across the field, half-clothed, and a few called out hellos to Vince or shouted at him to come join them. Vince waved at them, and Howard did too, ignoring their blank stares. It was getting dark out. If the sun were still out, they would have recognized him.

Vince’s room was at the very top of the dorms, converted from an old attic space, with wildly sloping walls and a single, porthole-shaped window that overlooked the city. Even though he’d been sleeping there for years, Howard still thought of it as Vince’s room, because it was. Everything about the room screamed Vince, from the brightly patterned swaths of fabric draped across every surface to the piles of glue, glitter, and sequins gathering in in the corners. The room’s sole desk, intended for hours of diligent study, was occupied instead by an antique sewing machine, and Vince’s wardrobe overflowed from the dresser to colonize the walls and paint-spattered floor.

The room was dimly lit in the evenings by several strings of fairy lights and a single sad lamp on the desk, and it smelled perpetually of that strange incense Vince had purchased from an older boy who sometimes skulked around campus, selling odds and ends he hid in the folds of his robe.

(It also smelled, very much, like a space that was occupied by two teenage boys who owned, among other things, socks, but Howard and Vince, having lived in that soupy air for so long, were immune to noticing this.)

As soon as they got inside, Vince flopped backward onto his bed, bag and all. The jolt sent a cascade of envelopes spilling out across the quilt and onto the hardwood floor again, and Howard sighed, knowing he’d be the one picking them up. He set his own brown leather satchel in the corner with his other things -- a few jazz records, propped against the wall, a wicker basket with stationary items, and a stack of neatly folded uniform trousers and plain white button-downs. A pile of Vince’s old clothes, all either outgrown or out of fashion, lay covered by a spare quilt nearby, forming a sort of second bed for the nights one or the other of them didn’t feel like sharing, but it never saw much use.

Vince lay sprawled diagonal across the single bed, arms and legs splayed out like a starfish. His head dangled over the edge of the mattress, his ragged brown hair so stiff with products that it barely shifted, even when his whole face was upside down. His blue eyes traced Howard’s movements as he stooped to scoop up the mess of pink envelopes and folded notes sealed with heart-shaped stickers.

Howard shuffled through them, looking at the handwriting -- a dozen loopy renditions of Vince’s name, plus a few scratchier ones, the familiar unreadable scrawl of teenage boys. That wasn’t surprising. Even when he didn’t kit himself out in skirts and mascara, Vince always had a few boys looking at him out the corners of their eyes, confused or plain intrigued.

“Where do you want me to put all these?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Vince scooted himself up the bed to punch the pillow before he dropped his head into it. “Rip ‘em up, I guess.”

“Rip them up?” Howard’s tiny eyes strained to widen. “All of them?”

Vince shrugged. “Sure. Answer’s no, anyway. It’s not like I’m going to write each of ‘em a note back to say as much.” He paused, tilting his head as an idea occurred to him. “Unless you think I could use them for something. Cut the words out and make a collage, could be genius. I could put it on my sketchbook.”

“I don’t think the original writers would appreciate that much.”

“Hmm, maybe not, yeah.” Vince wrinkled his nose. “Not everyone wants to be art.”

Howard glanced down at the envelopes in his hands again. They weren’t for him. They were personal, private feelings, deep words from pretty girls fooled by Vince’s style rather than Howard’s obvious substance.

But Vince wasn’t going to be using them. He’d given them to Howard, practically.

“Shove over,” he told Vince, sitting the edge of the bed. Vince wormed around a bit, barely moving, until Howard finally gave up and lay down pressed against his side. He ran his finger down the back of the first envelope and unfolded the letter. Even if they weren’t for him, he could pretend they were for a minute. That wouldn’t hurt anything, would it?

The first one was a poem, an ode to Vince’s hair and lips, and Howard winced. Even if he turned it backwards and upside down, he couldn’t convince himself that was for him. Crumpling it up, he tossed it toward the overflowing bin by the desk.

His second attempt was even worse than the first one. This girl had simply written Vince’s name over and over again, decorated with glitter glue and holographic stickers. Howard had glitter down his front and coating the palms of both hands as soon as he opened it.

The third note made him pause. It was actually a full page of neat, orderly handwriting in plain blue ink. Addressed to Vince, it proposed a list of logical reasons why the author and Vince ought to attend the dance together. Howard’s eyes fell to the signature, and his hands shook.

“Vince,” he whispered. Vince was playing with a bit of string. Howard nudged their shoulders together. “Vince. This one’s from Hannah Jones.”

“Yeah? Brilliant.” Vince didn’t sound like he thought it was brilliant. Vince sounded like he’d just been told that their annual school assembly on the dangers of papercuts had been increased in length from half an hour to an all day event.

Howard was struck by a fierce desire to punch him. Hannah Jones was, no doubt, the prettiest girl in Upper Sixth. She had creamy white skin and long blonde hair, like a waterfall of golden cream. On top of that, she was actually interesting. She played three different instruments in the school’s chamber orchestra and spoke both French and Welsh. In his corner of the room, Howard had an entire leatherbound notebook in which he had written the words “Hannah Moon” on every page in every style he could think of.

Vince wound the bit of string around his index fingers, then tied the end in a knot. Folding his hands together, he spread them out to form a cat’s cradle. His expression was flat.

“What’s wrong with you, little man?” Howard asked, bumping their shoulders together again. “I thought you’d be excited about all this. Music, dark corners, bright colored lights and fancy clothes -- a dance is just your thing, isn’t it? Don’t you want to go?”

“Yeah! Of course.” Vince’s grin was back, just that easy. He squirmed on the bed, knocking his bony hip into Howard’s stomach. “Dances are genius. I’ve got about twenty ideas for outfits, just today. I’ve been looking forward to this since the first day I left the jungle. Bryan was all,” Vince’s voice shifted down a register, going stiff, “Vince, my boy, you have to get a real education, and I said,” his voice ran back up the scale, squeaky, like a cockney ragamuffin in an old novel, “Screw that, Bryan, I want to stay out here and be wild like the monkey men. But then Bryan told me, When you finish school, they hold a ball to celebrate, and that was it. I was hooked. It’s been school for me ever since.”

Howard could feel the corners of his mouth twitching. He loved Vince’s ridiculous stories about the jungle, and he was dying to ask what happened next, but no. He couldn’t be so easily seduced by a bit of tale.

“Then why not pick one of these girls to go with, if they’re asking?” He asked, then added quickly, “Not Hannah, of course, but one of the others.”

“I would like to go,” Vince said quietly. He put his palms back together, then pulled them apart. The string stretched between his fingers formed a lace heart. “The girls are nice enough, but… I guess I’m waiting for someone to ask me. Someone particular, I mean.”

Howard stared. Someone particular? If Howard didn’t know better, he’d think Vince was saying he actually liked someone. Someone at their school? Howard wracked his memories, trying to think of who he’d seen Vince talk to recently, who he’d seen Vince smile at. It was a difficult exercise -- every time Howard saw Vince, he was smiling. Every conversation he had with others, he’d always cut it off abruptly when he saw Howard walking toward him. No matter how Howard prodded the idea, he couldn’t think of anyone Vince treated differently from everyone else.

The idea formed into a twisting, sour knot at the center of Howard’s stomach. He and Vince practically lived in each other’s pockets. They sometimes, mistakenly, wore one another’s uniforms to class. If Vince actually liked someone, Howard couldn’t imagine how he would have missed the signs.

“Who’re you asking, then?”

Vince’s inquiry snapped Howard back into the present with a, “Hm? Oh.” He hadn’t actually thought about it much. He’d had the vague idea that he and Vince might go as mates, if no girl had the courage to ask him, but Vince was right, Howard could take the initiative instead.

Yes, that was what he’d meant to do, actually. Howard was a go-getter, a maverick. He wasn’t the sort to mope around Vince’s room weeping over love letters from little girls. He was going to take charge, take what he wanted from the world.

“I haven’t quite decided yet,” he told Vince honestly. “There are so many candidates. Good candidates. I may have to ask a few different girls, you know, so no one’s disappointed.”

Vince let out a little huff of a laugh that soon became a full giggle. “Come off it. You’ve got girls breaking down the door, have you?”

“I have!”

“Where are they? I haven’t seen them.”

“Well, you’ve scared them off.”

“Me?”

“Oh yes, they come up and tell me about it all day. That Vince, with his pointy shoes and his witchy ways. I’m worried he’ll curse me if I confess my love to you.”

Vince was cackling now, kicking those same pointy shoes into Howard’s ankles as he shook the bed, until Howard was smiling too, delighted to see tears of mirth in the corners of Vince’s eyes. Vince swiped the moisture away with black-painted fingernails, but never stopped grinning up at Howard from the pillow.

“So, what, you need me to run off and sleep in the woods a few nights? Give you some space to sort through all your admirers without my witchy face?”

“No, no. If your face is too much for them they’re too weak for me. No, what Howard Moon needs is a real woman.” As Howard said it, he knew it was true. Of course. That was exactly the problem, wasn’t it? “These girls are too gentle, too frail. I need an adventuring partner, someone with a backbone, the kind of person who will have my back when it comes to the crunch.”

Vince tilted his head toward Howard, lips curved in a smile and fringe dusting into his blue eyes. He must have put on makeup today, though Howard hadn’t noticed it before. Otherwise, how would his eyes look so blue, and his lips so pink? “Yeah?” Vince murmured, out of breath from laughing. “Who you going to ask like that, then?”

“Mrs. Gideon.”

Vince’s face fell like an ice sheet in the tundra. Avalanche. “Mrs. Gideon? The biology teacher?”

“The very same, sir.”

“Are you fucking with me right now, Howard?” Vince propped himself up on his elbows and then turned to his side, looming half on top of Howard on the bed, staring down at him as he chewed at his lower lip. “You can’t be serious.” His eyes darted over Howard’s features, and Howard didn’t flinch.

Vince looked even paler that usual, practically glowing white in the dim illumination of the fairy lights. Outside their little window, sunset had faded into deep blue night. “You’ve gone wrong.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Howard snapped. He tried to squirm away, but Vince’s hand was resting on his chest, fingers toying with the collar of his jacket. Vince’s face was alarmingly serious.

“I don’t think teachers go to dances with students, Howard. Bit frowned on, innit?”

“I’m of legal age,” Howard protested. “And I was never in her class, anyway!”

“Don’t think that matters.” Vince’s eyes met his, fingers tugging almost compulsively at Howard’s lapel. His gaze dropped, briefly, toward Howard’s mouth, then flicked away. He collapsed back, rolling onto the pillow again. “She’s still a teacher, and you’re not even graduated yet.”

“But I will be,” Howard countered. “I’m a man now. You wouldn’t understand now, but when you get to be my age--”

“I’m three months younger than you!”

“When you get to be my age, well, things gain new meanings, Vince. New perspectives.” Howard stared up at the slanted wooden beams of the ceiling, considering the dark rings above the bed. He and Vince often saw shapes in them -- a rampaging llama, or a monkey god -- but now they took on new dimensions. That one, it could be a box of sweets. The one beside it was a bouquet of flowers, or a mixtape. Yes, that was it. “I’ll woo her,” he said confidently. “You’ll see, Vince. Howard Moon is a man who knows how to win a lady over.”

“Sure he is,” Vince muttered, rolling over again to face the door.

It was strange to see Vince sulking -- obviously jealous of Howard’s great idea -- but now that Howard had a plan, he was running out of time to execute it. The dance was only a week away. If he was going to organize an entire campaign of pitching woo to Mrs. Gideon, he’d need to start tomorrow.

He leapt from the bed, going to rummage in his corner for a notebook and a couple of biros Vince hadn’t yet nicked or chewed. Couldn’t make a plan without writing it down after all. Howard settled in, cross-legged, on the pile of clothes.

“Flowers,” he murmured to himself, writing the word on the first line of a blank page. Then, “Chocolates.”

“Are you sure she’s not allergic?”

Vince was grumpy, not worth listening to, but he might be right. Howard crossed out “chocolates,” and wrote “sweets.” “What else do ladies like?” He wondered aloud.

“Privacy,” Vince grumbled. “Restraining orders.” Howard ignored him.

“Music” went on the next line, and then, inspired, Howard added, “musicians.” He continued down the list, adding a few more tweaks along the way, until he had a respectable account. It looked like this:

Flowers
Chocolates
Sweets
Music
Musicians
Pencil cases
The French?

He’d stretched it a little at the end there, but that was okay. He had a decent starting place, at least. From across the room, he heard a sigh, then the sound of paper crumpling, thudding into the bin.

“You know,” Vince said suddenly, “this whole situation reminds me of something that happened in the jungle when I was a boy.”

Howard straightened at those words, notebook slipping down his leg, forgotten. “Oh?” He tried not to sound too eager. He loved Vince’s jungle boy stories, but they were shy things, woven in the darkness. If he flashed too much attention on them, they’d often vanish.

“Yeah, although being a leopard, Jahouli handled courtship a bit differently than you and me.”

“I imagine so.” Howard chuckled and crept toward the bed, leaving his list behind. “Was it messy?”

“So messy.” Vince’s eyes were like lasers as he watched Howard crawl onto the bed beside him once again. He smiled, satisfied, and squirmed closer to Howard. “Would you like to hear it?”

“Yeah,” Howard whispered, and that was all Vince needed to launch into the story.

-

Once, when Jahouli was still a cub himself, he fell in love with another leopard. She was called Karla.

Karla? What sort of name is that for a leopard?

She was a rescue leopard, okay? Wildlife release and all that. Do you want the story or not, Howard?

Right. Go on, then.

Like I was sayin’, Jahouli loved Karla, and they did all the usual leopard courting things. He would bring her warm, fresh kills and let her eat all the tastiest parts first, and they’d play together, or they’d have a lie down in the sun, and things were fine. But Jahouli was still young and all, still learning his way around, so he bought a motorbike, said, “See ya, babes” to Karla, and roared off to Edinburgh to get a bachelor flat for a few months.

He had a wild time out there, but eventually he decided to come home. Jahouli was tired from all the boozing and partying all night, and he started missing Karla -- and Bryan, of course -- so he came back to the jungle.

At first, he was nervous around Karla, because she’d grown up over the summer, too, and she was well fit for a leopard, but all the other animals in the forest really cheered Jahouli on. They were like, “Come on, man! She clearly loves you! You’re basically married already.”

So Jahouli went to Karla, and he told her, “Karla, I love you! Let’s be married tomorrow.”

But Karla said no. While Jahouli was away, Karla’s heart had moved on to another. Jahouli was crushed. He sulked away down to the riverbank to cry and listen to The Smiths.

While he was weeping into a small bush over “How Soon Is Now?,” Jahouli overheard Karla on the other side of the river with a friend of hers, a lady gorilla named Ireme. Karla was telling Ireme how she never really loved Jahouli, the minx, and she was head over heels for old Nyoka, the snake. Their love was very forbidden, of course. I mean, a leopard and a reptile? Imagine that. But Jahouli had inspired Karla and she’d decided to go for it. She loved Nyoka, and she was going to ask him out.

Hearing that, Jahouli stopped crying. This whole time, it was all a lie. She never loved him back at all. So, Jahouli gathered himself, turned off his Walkman, and began to search the forest until he found himself at the door of Nyoka the snake himself.

When Nyoka answered the door, Jahouli murdered him.

What?

Murdered him in warm blood. Slurped him down like a scaley bit of pot noodle. Swallowed him whole.

But what about Karla?

Karla was a bit miffed, for sure, but she got over it. She and Jahouli got married after all, a couple weeks later when Jahouli got over his stomachache from eating so much in one sitting.

So it all ended happy ever after, after all.

Nah, not really. Three months later, Karla served Jahouli with divorce papers. She ran out on him and started hooking up with Ireme instead, left Jahouli to raise two cubs on his own. He had to start a second job at Tescos to cover the cost of the baby formula, least until Bryan came along and appointed Jahouli as my new nanny.

But that’s a story for another night, Howard.

Howard?

Are you asleep?

G’night, Howard.