Skippy Dies (19 page)

Each picture is a doorway to a little world that in his head Carl sees them float like bubbles somewhere far away in space,
attached to his computer by tiny invisible threads. Each bubble has a girl inside, or maybe two girls, and dildos or studs
or a dog, and they are waiting for you to call them to click on them and bring them out of space into your computer. You never
know exactly what is in each one till you open it. Maybe the girl will only show her tits not her gee or she could even be
a shemale. The picture-doorways are like wrappers like fireworks have or sweets and inside the worlds wait like secrets.

‘I’m not talking about
love
!’ Downstairs Carl’s mom shouts at Carl’s dad. ‘I’m not even talking about that. I’m talking about just simple decent respect
for me as a person who is your
wife
. Your
wife
!’

‘Why are you saying this like it’s news to me?’ Dad shouts back. ‘Who do you think pays your credit card bills that arrive
on my desk every –’

If you get bored with humans there are cartoon characters. There is Ariel from
The Little Mermaid
licking out Belle from
Beauty and the Beast
or Pocohontas from
Pocohontas
getting fucked by the horse from
Mulan
. There are characters from computer games like
Hopeland
and
Final Fantasy
having sex. There are also old-fashioned ones like animals from
Jungle Book
which is a film or
Donald Duck fucking Minnie Mouse or Yogi Bear fucking Boo-Boo which is a smaller bear.

‘– question of
buying
your way out of it, David, it’s – look at me, David. I am, I am a woman. I deserve to be treated like a –’

‘I know you’re a woman. I
know
you’re a woman because you’re being
totally irrational
.’

‘Oh, it’s irrational, when the phone rings at two in the morning and when I answer they hang up? It’s irrational, the phone
ringing at two a.m. four nights running?’

Jessica Rabbitt, also the good-looking bird from
Scooby-Doo
riding Fred or sometimes Scooby. A lot of Smurfs gang-banging Smurfette. The Simpsons, mostly Homer or Bart fucking Lisa,
though there’s one Carl saw of Homer going into Maggie’s room to fuck Maggie, his dick is out and his face is all scary the
way it never is in the show, like his eyes are slits and his teeth are fangs and his hand is stretched out like a claw into
the crib.

‘Eileen saw you, David. So she must be being irrational too.’

‘
Ei
leen – listen, we both know Eileen is a deeply disturbed person, a deeply unwell person with serious personal issues –’

‘She saw you, David, she saw you having dinner with a
teenaged girl
. A teenaged girl! Not much older than
Carl
!’

‘Would you like to know who that was, Lucia? Would you like to stop screaming for five seconds so I can tell you who that
was? That was my fucking
tennis coach
.’

‘Oh, I see, was she helping you with your serve, in the restaurant? Were you having a few rallies together, sitting there
in the fucking Four Seasons, you and your whore?’

In his room Carl turns up the stereo. He looks down at the book on the table. The economic success of the Netherlands was
due in part to the man-made geographical structure called the _________.

Behind the right-hand speaker are he doesn’t know how many fives and tens and twenties. Behind the left-hand speaker are fireworks.
Barry can’t keep them in his house because his mom searches his room. The last few days are like the part of the movie
where the talking stops and over the music you see the money rolling in and the gangsters making deals and buying limos and
doing coke. The kids are mad for fireworks, no matter how many Carl and Barry bring down to the mud-piles, it’s never enough.
Every day there are more kids with their prescriptions, some of them aren’t even from Seabrook. Meanwhile, like in a mirror,
the same thing is happening with the St Brigid’s girls. The first five told other girls, who told other girls, and now there
are so many girls looking for pills that Carl and Barry have to split up.

So they go back and forth from the mud-piles to the girls, turning fireworks into pills and pills into money, so much money.
Barry has already bought a new pair of Nikes (Vendettas) and a digital camera. Now he is talking about a scooter, he thinks
he and Carl should buy matching Vespas, silver ones. He wonders if they should invest in just a little bit of coke, just to
see if it sold. Now that we’ve developed a customer base, he says to Carl, that’s the hardest part of any business.

Carl is glad Barry is happy and trusts Carl again. But sometimes he gets worried. He keeps thinking of the scene in the movie
where the gangsters get machine-gunned by the other gang.

What other gang? Barry says. Those fucking knackers that deal in the park?

Carl and Barry always buy their gear from these knackers in the park. Near the laneway to the train station there is a bench
where one of them will always be. They wear tracksuits and have tattoos on their hands and one night last year they beat up
Casey Ellington when he went to buy hash just because they didn’t like the look of him, so bad he had to get his jaw wired.
On Thursday the one with the greasy hair said, Youse lads are buyin a fair amount of coke these days.

Carl didn’t say anything. Barry told him it was for mid-term break.

Don’t be a bender, Barry says to Carl now. How would those scumbags even know about us?

He puts his arm around Carl. Look, he says, what we have here
is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. All of these individual events have come together, and we are in the exact perfect place
to take advantage of them. It’s Hallowe’en, the kids want fireworks. There’s a school dance with St Brigid’s and all the girls
are freaking out about fitting into their costumes. It’s like a slot-machine ready to pay out, see? And we’re the guys with
the coin, Carl. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. So we collect the money.

Carl has never been in the right place at the right time before. Maybe that is why it feels weird.

I’m not saying we have to do it for ever, Barry says. But we should keep going until the Hop at least. We’d be crazy to stop
before then. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to lose your favourite little customer, would you?

Lollipop-Lips has bought pills from Carl every night this week. He doesn’t meet her with the others, not since that first
time behind Ed’s. Instead she will text him and say she wants to meet up in an hour and he will head out with the pills. Or
sometimes she doesn’t text him, he just goes out and finds her. There are not that many places to go, if you are not in Ed’s
or one of the malls you are probably in the Leisureplex or LA Nites or hanging around outside Texaco. When she sees him she
will smile secretly, like she has magically brought him there. Then they go somewhere quiet and measure out the pills.

This slut so hungry for cock she must apease her cunt with the fist!

Barry says if she was paying money for all the pills she takes he and Carl would both be millionaires. I don’t know how she
gets through them so quick, he says, it’s not like she was even fat in the first place. He keeps asking Carl if he has fucked
her. She must be fucking you ten times a day for that many pills! Ha ha, Carl laughs. But she won’t fuck him. She will only
give him handjobs and let him feel her tits. Sometimes he tells her, you fuck me or else you pay cash like everyone else.
But she just laughs and takes his hand and slips it under her shirt. In the cold damp leaves behind Ed’s, her body a tiny
pocket of heat, her
breath in his ear, the tips of her black hair tickling his neck, he forgets everything else.

In his room he turns up the stereo, unzips his trousers. Here on the screen is a little world of a black-haired girl on the
stairs in a house. There are about twenty pictures to tell the story, which is, she takes off her top, she lifts her skirt
to show her stockings and black see-through knickers, she unbuttons her shirt and slides the skirt up over her thighs –

Last night in LA Nites he met her with Crinkly-Hair and their friend the fat girl and the two of them went into the alcove
beside the cigarette machine. He had his hand on her tummy with his fingertips just under the waistband of her jeans, he was
slipping them downwards so slowly she didn’t seem to notice, he thought his boner was going to rip right through his trousers
like the Incredible Hulk, down and down, was she going to let him? but then she said, Let’s go for a walk.

Maybe she wanted to go somewhere quieter to have sex he thought so he said okay. They walked along the dual carriageway under
the orange lights. Cars shocked past them or waited behind the traffic lights growling smoke from under their wheels. Show
me where you live, she said. He led her down the dark straight avenue. The ends of rain dripped from the trees. Dad’s Jag
was back pulled up outside his house. Maybe there would be some way to get her inside without his parents seeing her. Or maybe
Dad would just let him bring her in to fuck her. Do you want to go inside? he said. It’s okay, she said. He didn’t know if
she meant yes or no but when he moved for the door and she did not he knew she meant no. Why not? he said. She didn’t say
anything. Then he said, I will give you this whole tube of pills if you fuck me. She just looked at him. It was a week’s supply
at least. Even a blowjob, he said.

The girl on the stairs pushes her tit up and bends her head down to lick her nipple. Carl’s balls are boiling, his cock is
rock-hard, he would almost get up and stick it through the computer screen!

Instead they went to Ed’s. She wanted to go inside but he could
not because he is barred. So he brought her around the back and showed her how to climb from the ledge of the skip up the
drainpipe and onto the roof. The material of the rooftop is rough under your fingers, rippled like frozen waves, in the night
in the pink light of the sign the flat grey rectangle looks like skin. There are empty beer cans, a johnny, a copybook someone
threw up here with homework smeared into nothing by rain. She was looking up at the windows of the Tower. Who lives in there?
she asked. Faggots, he said. Boarders. It looks like it’s from a fairy-tale, she said. Then she said, are you going to the
Hallowe’en Hop?

He just shrugged. He wished he had some beer. He waited for her to lie down but she didn’t. Why are you barred? she said.
He told her about the Gook. The Gook? she said, so he told her as well what Barry told him about the war and the Marines who
died getting ambushed in the jungle by gooks and when they went home to their own country, America, instead of a hero’s welcome
people spat on them. That’s terrible, she said. We should teach this Gook a lesson.

Like what?

Like a reminder of home, she said.

They took the staples out of the old copybook and started folding the pages into aeroplanes. When there were enough planes
they poured lighter fluid over them. Then Carl shinned down the drainpipe and emptied the rest of the lighter into the bin
outside the Doughnut House doors. He lit a piece of paper and threw it in. The bin went
foom!
the heat whacked his eyes, he pegged it back around and hoisted himself up onto the roof, and they both looked down over
the edge as the doors burst open and the Gook charged out with a fire extinguisher in one hand and a blanket in the other
that he flapped at the burning bin. That’s when they lit the first plane and sent it swirling and flaming down on top of him.
The Gook let out a little shriek, covering his head. They lit another one and launched it, he hopped out of the way, but then
there was another, and another and another, until the sky was filled with pieces of falling fire, sailing down around the
Gook, and he just stood there in the middle of it with his mouth open, not moving at all – then he realized what was going
on, and he started to jump up and down, a hoppity Rumpelstiltskin dance of rage, jabbering in Gook and shaking his fist at
the rooftop, where the two of them were holding their hands over their mouths, about to explode from laughing.

But he had to go back inside to call the police, so they could jump down and hide in the park. But when the police had driven
on they came out again and climbed back up there. The sky was dark blue, the doughnut sign was a big wide-open mouth, a mouth
with no face around it or whose face was the whole world. Underneath it half of Lori was pink. The trees almost out of sight
in the dark. Her wide-open mouth, her white bra. The pills in her coat pocket, her mouth swallowing his, she forgot to stop
his fingers unbuttoning her jeans and sliding down into… Then her phone rang, the ringtone was that
BETHani
song, the one where she’s in the changing room and the teacher is watching her through the hole in the wall. She put a hand
on Carl’s wrist.

Hi Dad. No I’m in Janine’s. No watching TV. Just me and Janine.

The outline of his knuckles against the zip of her jeans. Carl did not breathe.

No!
Dad
. No there are no boys. No it’s okay Janine’s mom will drive me home I love you bye.

She fished out his hand and gave it back to him with a fake smile like an air hostess handing you your complimentary meal.
I’d better go home, she said.

Okay, he said.

Loreliar.

The girl on the stairs is naked except for her stockings and she slides shiny wet fingers between her legs and looks out at
Carl. Beside her not-naked Lori appears and disappears like a wave on Morgan Bellamy’s phone. If you knew how you could move
her face from the phone onto the girl on the computer. A nerd would
know how to do it. But Carl does not know how, so he has to switch back and forth from the computer to the phone, like he’s
carrying the face in his mind and imagining it onto the body, so the waves of black hair melt into each other, and Lori’s
lollipop lips turn into the wet shine on the girl on the stairs’ fingers – as Carl stands over her, You better do what I say!!!
No no Carl! Hiding her face with her wet hand. Carl’s fist raised up. Oh so you like fists??!!!