‘Gor…’ he exclaimed to a sunfilled kitchen, ‘I really tied one on last night.’ There was no one to answer. Beverley and Derek had gone and Gary had never returned. Dan found Carol upstairs, watching TV-AM in bed. He cursed, seeing how the hands stood on the little clock in the corner of the screen, but he was interrupted in mid-curse. The lining of his stomach had been saturated like a sponge with alcohol, and then compressed beneath the waistband of his jeans for eight hours. He just made it to the bathroom. Carol blocked out the sound of his retching by humming, and affected not to notice when he came nuzzling back to her and slid his thin head up under the bedcovers. ‘Jeez, I feel awful,’ he said, ‘just awful.’ And then he fell asleep. Carol waited half an hour and then she called his work.So began the era of the sick calls. With monstrous regularity, once, twice and even three times a week, Dan would fail to make it to work. From what snippets of information Carol could glean, Dan was no longer the blue-eyed boy at the design agency.
