Half-Full of Hollow

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Fed up with his increasing alienation from Howard, Vince decides to forcibly regress into his sunshiney days.

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Chapter 1

Contents

Chapter 1

Vince’s glass was empty.

Before, back in the days of the Zooniverse, when every day had demanded a new and exciting perversion of a boring zookeeper outfit, Vince had never bothered to check if his glass was half-empty or half-full or half-stolen by Naboo for a make-shift hookah. Vince hadn’t needed to check, because his glass was unfailingly full to the brim. It wasn’t just full, either—it was slopping pink lemonade every which way.

Maybe that was the problem. Some lunatic had been slurping down the lemonade for the past couple of years, slurping away down to the cold, hard bottom of the glass, and now there was nothing much left.

It would be easy to blame Howard for this. The way his paunch had flung itself out in front like a flubby floaty ring that ships carried for emergencies—well, a couple of litres of sugary lemonade might have contributed. Not that the paunch wasn’t endearing.

And not that Vince would ever blame sugar. Howard, yeah, Howard might get a couple of handfuls of blame chucked square in the eyes, but sugar was sacred.

Oh yes, Vince’s glass was definitely empty, scrape the bottom empty, and it didn’t seem that any dregs had been left at all.

And Vince knew why, in the end. Beneath the gauzy layers of curtains and wraps that his brain cell had strewn about the place, Vince knew that he had been sinking into something decidedly un-sunshiney for a while now. And yeah, it was mostly to do with Howard, little to do with the adorable pudge and even littler to do with the bloody lemonade.

Well, it was hardly Vince’s fault that his sunshine persona had been stripped back to reveal black streaks! Howard had driven him to it with his years of taunting and bossing and settling back in his role of superiority. Vince had worked hard for Howard at the Zooniverse. He’d worked bloody hard to please Howard. He’d tipped his own glass happily and let pink lemonade slosh out into Howard’s.

And Howard had sampled it too, always with an unreadable smile at the edges of his lips, and had somehow retained the smile while his body froze up at the sheer concentration of sucrose.

Not that Vince knew what sucrose was. All he knew was that Howard had become strictly a tea person, tea without sugar, and he would no longer accept lemonade in his glass—even when the glass was as dry as Naboo’s sense of humour.

Not that Vince offered any more.

And so Vince had been left to the lemonade, which didn’t taste as sweet when he was drinking alone. And he’d added sugar. He’d added plenty of sweeteners. He’d bought any number of clothes, dyed his hair repeatedly, straightened it, fluffed it, slathered it in exorbitantly expensive product, become the King and Queen of Camden, procured a million worshippers, forbidden them to touch his hair, and still a bitter taste remained in his mouth.

So maybe part of that bizarre bitterness was despair, or confusion, or whatever. The thing was that Howard didn’t want to put up with Vince anymore, and maybe that was because the sweetness and the childishness had dropped off the electro poof like the zookeeper jacket. Maybe that was why Howard had been so eager to leave on his filmic art-house adventures with Jurgen Haagen-Dazs. Anything to get away from Vince.

So yeah, Vince missed the old days. He missed the classic times. Nowadays his stomach was always crawling with something that could have been guilt or self-loathing or shame or hunger, especially when he was around Howard, and Vince didn’t even want to try to work it out. Not that he could have.

See, he knew he was stupid now. Back in the Zooniverse, he’d had talent and he’d applied it—and it wasn’t even hair-care talent. It wasn’t even the talent of whoring himself out to the Camden night scene. He had been able to communicate with the animals, and he’d gotten along with everyone and they’d all loved him for who he was, not for the clothing that he wore or the flashy smiles that he painted over his lips.

Here in the Nabootique, anyone could communicate with Bollo. Vince’s greatest talent had run dry in a new scene of normality. And the former Mowgli couldn’t even hold a decent conversation with Howard anymore.

Vince’s glass was empty, so he decided to fill it. He walked all the way to Naboo’s room in his up-to-the-minute knee-high silver wellies and filled his cup with water from the Fountain of Youth (posted to Naboo by Saboo during a recent jaunt to Xooberon).

“Cheers,” he said to the empty room, raising the glass, and sipped.

Howard’s cup was empty, so he went to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

He thought about asking Vince if he wanted a cuppa. He thought long and hard for about two seconds and then snorted dourly. Unlikely that Vince would want anything from Howard. He’d just about made that clear with the last series of jibes scrawled over the shop windows in the style of neon advertising. If those paint-slopped windows didn’t provide clarity, Howard didn’t know what did.

He released a few tasty bars of scat while the kettle gently whined, but there was a tenseness in his jaw that messed with the bebop, so he stopped. He slapped his hand on the counter in a sudden burst of frustration, and winced. Wiping a brown smush of Naboo’s latest brownie batch into a tea towel, Howard sighed and wondered what colourful destruction Vince would create to prevent his Jazzercise class that evening.

“Got yourself out of a jazz trance, all right, Howard!”

Oh, here we go. Wearily, Howard pivoted on his heel and prepared to face the familiar slice of daily denigration. When he’d reached half-circle, he had already begun to gesture defensively with the tea towel. And then he looked at Vince’s face. And then he dropped the tea towel. And then he generally gaped a bit, completely ignoring the persistent screeching of the boiling kettle.

Vince looked slightly worried. And that wasn’t even the start of it.

“You feeling okay, Howard? Only you look like you just saw Fossil practicing for the X-Factor. Oh, and what’s with the flat? Did you drag me to your aunt’s again while I was asleep?”

Vince was smiling now, and his cheeks, somehow fuller than they had been that morning, were pinching in with a youthful dimpling affect. There was nothing coy or held back about the smile. This was the smile that had once filled a special secret hole in Howard’s chest, the smile that he’d almost forgotten in the past year.

Something was wrong here, yes sir. Something had certainly gone wrong, most probably in Vince’s mind tank.

And Vince was smiling at him, just like the old times.

And even as he twitched with fear, Howard felt his own lips curl up slightly at the edges. And he smiled back. Habit. Pure habit.

“Cup of tea?” he squeaked, and almost fell to get out of the way when Vince nodded brightly, heading directly for the kettle.

“Oh, brownies! Can I have one?”