Half-Full of Hollow

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

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Chapter 4

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Chapter 4

“Weren’t you supposed to be at some weird jazz cult tonight?” asked Vince, words muffled beneath a fuzzy orange towel. He lifted his head, a wide grin on his face, hair all hidden beneath an enormous pretzel of turban.

“You look like some kind of lunatic housewife with your hair all done up like that,” Howard replied, avoiding the insulting question with admirable dignity.

“A psychedelic monk, more like,” said Vince, spinning back to the mirror and giving the orange tower a bit of an encouraging pat. “This is going to be well genius, Howard. Once the basic backcomb structure is back where it belongs, everything’ll be just like it used to.” He glanced back at Howard, hands pausing on the sides of his head. “Well, almost. You thought about getting a haircut recently? Wish you’d let me do it, Howard. I’d love to get my hands on those smoky curls.”

“I don’t need a haircut to define my personality, Vince,” Howard said briskly, shifting his weight as he avoided the hungry blue eyes staring at his head from across the room. “Howard Moon lets his movement speak for him, sir. It’s all about smoothness, agility, the confidence of a man who dares to defy follicular convention.”

“Shifty, that’s what your movement’s crying out, Howard,” said Vince, shaking his head. “You should tell your movement to shut it immediately, and let my scissors run the conversation right to your hairstyle.”

“There are more important things to life than hair, Sonny Jim,” Howard continued, deftly ignoring Vince’s interruption. “Things like jazz, and philosophy, and women, and stationary, and everything else that should matter to a well-rounded gentleman of the modern age.”

“I’ll have to get at you in the middle of the night,” said Vince distractedly, musing away to his turbaned reflection. “You’ll never even notice me snipping away, knees planted on either side of your snoring body. You’ll wake up in the morning to a brand new cut and people will never have to listen to your edgy rapist movements again—”

“—Howard?”

But Howard was off, striding down the corridor with his shaking fists stuffed in his tweed pockets. The perennial hair debate was nothing new, of course (it was, in fact, perennial) but hearing Vince launch into the same old arguments using precisely the same disturbing ideas was too much.

He had almost forgotten the disturbing nature of their current situation. He had almost lost himself in the absolute effervescent happiness of the old friendship, the old Vince, the Old Days themselves relived in a sea of bathtubs and bubbles. Old Vince. Well, Young Vince, in the technical sense. Having Young Vince around made the Young Howard pop out for a breather, and that was the real problem, wasn’t it?

Howard had forgotten the past two years in a single cheeky flash of bright blue and dimpled cheek. It was as simple as that. Black trousers had erased series of endless outrageous cat suits in a single instant. It hadn’t seemed to matter that the reappearance of the old dynamic was the result of a hideous and dangerous magical misdemeanor. Everything had suddenly been all friendly jibes and played up condescension again.

Yes; Howard had once more tasted the sweet taste of condescension, superiority, misplaced pride and blind arrogance. He had slipped back into his former patterns like Vince had slipped back into his favourite black trousers—except Vince had an excuse for his current insanity, didn’t he? Howard’s excuse was nothing more than a subconscious desire to regress into the golden days of Howard-and-Vince, when verbal weaponry was an extended inside joke and not just, well, weaponry.

Nostalgia tasted sweet, and this unexpected sojourn into the past was positively irresistible. After the built-up bitterness of the Nabootique, Howard had clung to the sugary intrusion like a bee high on pollen.

And it was a fatal attraction, in the end; he knew that. Howard knew it, as his hands clenched in sweaty fists, and he marched his way through the limited space of the house in agitated circles. Vince was going to snap out of this momentary delusion in no time. Bitterness would swing back onto the palate in no time at all.

And everything would taste all the more bitter for the sweetness that had briefly brightened the flat.

Howard didn’t know how he would stand it. It was simply tragic that the entirety of six hours spent in Young Vince’s company could affect him so bloody much. It was like his malaise of the past two years had been wiped out instantly. He hadn’t felt so light and frothy and happy since the heady days of the band that had failed to make it to the big time. Even failing at the music scene was a triumph back then. Failing with Vince—with Vince—had been an award in itself. They hadn’t failed together for an awfully long time.

Vince hardly failed at all, these days. And Howard? Well, he did nothing much but fail, to tell the truth of it. And failure was no longer the source of adventure it had once been.

But back in the bathroom, waterlogged and scowling and trying not to inhale the stringent aroma of hair dye, that hadn’t been a failure, had it? No; despite his grumbling, Howard had been warmer and fuzzier than a bunny rabbit burnt at stake. He had positively shivered with happiness.

All this was an exercise in illness, wasn’t it? Insanity, that was the only viable explanation. Why else would Howard have cancelled his Jazzercise class two hours before it was due to start, purely to be able to stay home and mess about with Vince’s precious mop of hair? Howard Moon was not the type of man to sit around and play hairdresser, no sir.

But that’s what he’d been doing all afternoon—playing with Vince’s hair. And he would have done the same for Bitchy Vince; there was another troubling fact. Howard would have joined Vince in a series of madcap hair adventures despite their inability to get along if he had just been asked. Vince hadn’t asked anything of Howard in such a long time.

To tell the truth, Howard had the funny feeling that he might have felt even happier if it had been Non-Magicked Vince to entrust him with his precious hair.

It was a strange thing to feel while applying liberal doses of hair dye on military command, but nonetheless, Howard had felt definite touches of something almost but not entirely unlike unmanly affection. Some might call it love. Howard didn’t really want to put a name on it. The nameless tinge of the old days had flirted back across his vision, glazing everything in saccharine happiness. He hadn’t felt that in a long time (or rather, hadn’t allowed himself to feel it).

Stomping across a trail of blackened banana skins (and hastily retreating out of Bollo’s room) Howard slammed his eyes shut, trying to forget the treacherous tinge. Even their friendship had failed, that was the important thing to remember. Their friendship had failed. Failed, failed, failed. Vince may have succumbed to a magical delusion, but even he wasn’t that deluded. The only tinge in his eyes came from his own silvery reflection.

“Always knew Harold a nutjob,” muttered a deep voice from across the room, and Howard, one eye squinting for a clear path through the furniture, didn’t exactly mince his words in reply.

“What’s up with you, you ballbag?” Naboo asked flatly, padding across to Howard and stopping his frenzied pacing with a single hand to tweed-clad arm. Howard froze up completely, staring down at Naboo’s hand with the wide eyes of a rabbit caught in headlights.

“Er, well, in short, er, Vince seems to have—”

“Naboo, outta the zoo! And Bollo, you’re not dead! Imagine that!”

After a rather violent pause, three pairs of eyes swung around to the kitchen door, through which Vince had recently passed. Howard felt his mouth drop open of its own accord, despite supposedly having known what to expect. From behind him, he heard Bollo’s almost reverent whisper:

“Precious Vince gone wrong in the mind tank.”

“It’s genius, isn’t it?” Vince gushed, ducking his head and allowing the blonde and brown mass to feather about his face. “You wouldn’t believe the hair products I found in the bathroom cabinet! There was this hairspray, right, called Goth Juice, and the label said that it was made from—”

“—the tears of Robert Smith.” Howard completed the sentence with an involuntary shudder at the memory of the horrifying Nanatoo incident. What had he been thinking, dressing up like a goth to impress those girls? They wouldn’t have gone off with Naboo and Bollo if he’d shown them his trumpet socks, oh no. And then he shook his head, trying to regain focus.

“Yeah, Vince went through your stuff again,” he said heavily, pre-empting Naboo’s accusation. “And I wouldn’t bother turning your back on us, either. I personally had nothing to do with the whole incident, and Vince—well, Vince can’t really remember anything he’s done for the past couple of years.”

“Fountain of Youth again?” Naboo said sourly, and he wasn’t looking for an affirmation. “I should have known better than to trust you two alone in the flat for an afternoon. The Shaman Council is going to skin me alive for this. Two separate abuses in two years; it’s gotta be a record.”

“There is a cure, isn’t there, Naboo?” Howard asked quickly. He felt, rather than saw, that Vince had strolled on over to the arena of conversation. Automatically, he flinched from Vince’s questioning touch.

“If there wasn’t, you’d still be messing your pants, wouldn’t you?” Naboo sighed, raising his eyes to the ceiling in disdain. “Give me a week, and then we’ll get Vince back to normal.”

“Ah. Do you have to brew the remedial potion under the light of the full moon?”

“No. Shamansburys is only open on Mondays.”

With a final derisive shake of the head, Naboo and Bollo left the room, the gorilla patting Vince comfortingly on the shoulder as he passed.

“Since when have Naboo and Bollo hung about together?” Vince wondered aloud, peering towards their room with wide eyes. “I thought Naboo was more of a frog person, personally.”

With a sigh, Howard steered Vince back towards the couch, sat him down, and flicked through the channels until his ears were assaulted with the kind of music that Vince revered. He then turned to leave for some more aimless pacing, but his arm was caught by familiar fingers.

“Howard?”

“Yes, little man?”

“Thanks for skipping your jazz cult to help me with my hair and all.”

“My pleasure,” said Howard, patting Vince awkwardly on the back, and pulled away, wishing that the two words weren’t brimming over with truth.