Skippy Dies (38 page)

Howard regards her carefully as if she’s speaking in tongues. ‘Well, I will, if you want me to, I will. What’s wrong, did
something…?’

She tells him, in an overheated rush, about the dog, the woman, the little girl.

‘Oh God…’ He musses her hair. ‘I’m sorry, Halley.’ But his sympathy only makes her angrier. Why should he get off scot-free?
Yes, she drove the car, but everything else is his fault! His fault!

‘What’s the use of being sorry? God, Howard, what if it had been the little girl who ran out on the road? What would you say
then? Sorry?’

Bowing his head, Howard mumbles contritely.

‘Why don’t you just
do
what you say you’re going to do? You have to
think
of things, Howard, you have responsibilities, you can’t just float around your own little world, buried in your war books,
dreaming you’re fighting the Nazis –’

‘The Hun,’ Howard says to the floor.

‘What?’

‘The Nazis are the Second World War. I’m doing the First.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake – are you even listening to me? Are you even aware you have a life here? Am I just some phantasm who interrupts
your reading? You have to fucking commit to things, Howard, you have to wake up to the people around you, who are depending
on you! Even though you find it boring, it’s still your life!’

She lets him have it, both barrels, all the frustration that’s been building up for the last few weeks and longer; Howard
listens in silence, shoulders hunched, eyes screwed up as if he’s got a stomach pain, and the more she chastises, the more
his brow creases into this stymied attitude, somewhere between bafflement and agony, and the more he doubles up, until with
a start she wonders if he is actually going to be sick, at which point he sits abruptly on the arm of the armchair and says,
almost to himself, ‘I can’t do this any more.’

‘What?’Halley says.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Howard says in a strangulated voice.

At some preconscious level she must know what’s coming, because she already feels like she’s been punched in the stomach:
there is no air in her lungs, she does not seem able to breathe new air in. Not now, she thinks, not now! But the next thing
he is babbling to her about Robert Graves and Hallowe’en, ‘Wild Horses’ and global warming, a substitute geography teacher
who drinks Cosmopolitans – it descends on Halley in a rain, and before she can unpick the sense of it the blood has drained
from her face, her fingers buzz with lightness…

And a part of her is thinking of feminism! A part of her is thinking of all the women who fought for their rights, and feeling
ashamed for letting them down, because as the story of his infidelity unspools, she feels only an agonizing crumbling, a horrible
literal disintegration, as though she’s turned into slush and cascaded all over the floor; he tells her how he doesn’t know
how he
feels
, he doesn’t know what he
wants
– and all
she
wants is for him to mop her up and gather her together as she was; she wants to plead and beg and cry so that he’ll unsay
what he’s just said, hold her in his arms, tell her that nothing has changed, that everything is all right. But of course
that is not what happens.

By the morning after the incident in Our Lady’s Hall, Skippy’s temple has blossomed into a gruesome purple-red flower. Some
bruises you wear like badges of honour: when you got it playing rugby, or quad racing, or falling off something while drunk,
no opportunity is lost to show off a good contusion. A bruise inflicted by someone else, however, is a whole other story:
it’s like a big flashing arrow marking you out as punchable, and before long there’ll be boys queuing up to add bruises of
their own, as if they’d just been waiting for somebody to show them it could be done. In one morning Skippy’s had a week’s
worth of shit from people – swinging the door shut on him, tripping him up in the corridor, not to mention a punishment essay
from Ms Ni Riain, three pages on the Gaelic origins of the name
Seabrook
, for coming late to class. By lunchtime he’s too dispirited even to eat; while the others go to the Ref, he skulks off on
his own.

‘Poor sucker,’ Niall says. ‘He’s got it bad.’

‘That bang on the head was the best thing that could have happened to him,’ Dennis says, carrying his tray to the table. ‘Maybe
now he’ll realize what a stupid idea all this Frisbee Girl stuff was. And we won’t have to listen to that gay
BETHani
song any more.’

‘That song really reminds me of something,’ Geoff says with a frown.

‘It’s a shame though,’ says Niall. ‘Because he does really like her.’

‘Really liking something is an automatic way of making sure you don’t get it.’ Dennis has just come from Quartet rehearsal
– forty-five minutes of sarcastic remarks (‘Ah, I think you’ll find the piece is in
four-four
time?’) and eye-rolling from Ruprecht – and is in an especially bilious mood. ‘That’s the way it goes in this stupid crappy
world.’

‘I suppose,’ Niall says. ‘Though I don’t see why.’

‘Maybe God made it that way to test us?’ Geoff suggests.

‘Oh sure, Geoff, and then at the end we all get lollipops,’ Dennis scowls.

‘Well, the thing is, of course –’ Ruprecht raises his head from his copybook like a sagacious hamster ‘– that the universe
is asymmetrical.’

‘What? What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I mean, what we’re looking at here is a system that went from a high degree of symmetry in the moments immediately after
the Big Bang – ten dimensions, all matter and energy conjoined – to the quite low degree of symmetry we have now, with some
dimensions curled up, disunited physical forces, what have you. Obviously, it’s still a little bit symmetrical, we have our
laws of physics, relativity, rotational symmetry, and so forth. But when you compare it to some of the other possible topologies
that M-theory allows for, our universe does seem quite unbalanced. And patterns that occur on a quantum level carry all the
way up.’

Dennis puts down his fork. ‘Blowjob, what the hell are you talking about?’

‘Exactly the same thing you are. The fundamental structure of the universe means that things consistently fail to balance
out. Toast lands butter side down. Intelligent students get wedgies, instead of being respected as the future leaders of their
society. You can’t get what you want, but someone else, who doesn’t want it, has it in spades. Asymmetry. It’s everywhere
you look.’ He hefts his pudgy body around on the bench, scanning the room. ‘Over there, for instance. Philip Kilfether.’ He
points to where Philip Kilfether, Seabrook’s Smallest Boy, sits just visible behind his juice carton. ‘All Philip Kilfether
has ever dreamed of, since he was old enough to talk, is becoming a professional basketball player. But because of his underdeveloped
pituitary gland, he’s never going to be more than four feet tall.’

They gaze at the tragic sight of Philip Kilfether, who spends hours on the basketball court every day, dashing from one end
to
the next as the ball whizzes unreachably over his head, and more hours still in his room, decorated wall-to-wall with posters
of Magic, Bird, Michael Jordan and other famously tall men, performing stretching exercises in defiance of the medical prognosis.
Murmurs of comprehension rise from the company at the table.

‘Skippy and this frisbee-playing girl is another obvious example. He likes her. She kisses him. The path of least resistance
would seem to be to continue in that vein. But instead, she vanishes and Carl beats him up. It’s baffling.’

‘Or, how about Caetano,’ Geoff chips in. ‘He was in love with this girl in Brazil and he spent his entire life-savings on
buying her this MP3 player because one day they were watching the Shopping Channel together and she said she’d like an MP3
player and then practically the very next day after he gave it to her she got off with this guy who was fixing her parents’
drains in their summerhouse even though she told Caetano this other time that the guy was an idiot and he had these really
hairy knuckles and smelled of drains and then when Caetano asked her to give him the MP3 player back she wouldn’t?’

‘The asymmetry does seem particularly pronounced when girls are involved,’ Ruprecht observes.

‘Wow, Ruprecht, you really think in another universe girls wouldn’t be so asymmetrical?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ Ruprecht says, adjusting his glasses donnishly. ‘As I say, patterns occuring on a quantum level are
replicated on every scale.’

‘That’s great, Blowjob,’ Dennis rejoins. ‘Now all Skippy has to do is find his way into a parallel universe.’

‘It is theoretically possible,’ Ruprecht says.

‘Well, is it theoretically possible you could come up with something that might actually help him?’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know, like a death ray to shoot Carl with.’

‘Violence never solved anything,’ Ruprecht asserts sanctimoniously.

‘Violence solves everything, you idiot, look at the history of the world. Any situation they have, they dick around with it
for a while, then they bring in violence. That’s the whole reason they have scientists, to make violence more violent.’

‘It sounds to me as if your grasp of history is of a similar standard to your ability on the bassoon,’ Ruprecht snaps.

‘Shove it up your hole, Ruprecht, and your lame theory too.’ Dennis kicks back balefully in his chair. ‘The truth is, Skippy’d
still be a loser in a parallel universe. We’d
all
still be losers, even in a universe of tiny girly ants.’

In the hallway some of the swimmers are gathered around the noticeboard. ‘Hey, Juster! Have a look at this!’ Antony Taylor
calls out.

Coach has posted up the team for the meet. Your name’s second from the end.

‘I can’t believe he picked you,’ Siddartha Niland says. ‘He might as well throw a fucking brick in the water.’

‘You’d better not blow this for us, Juster,’ Duane Grehan says.

‘Why the fuck would he pick you?’ Siddartha shakes his head. ‘It just doesn’t make any sense.’

Upstairs you call Dad to give him the news. ‘That’s great, buddy!’ Dad’s voice crackles from far away.

‘Do you think you’ll be able to come along?’

‘I hope so, sport, I really hope so.’

‘What does Dr Gulbenkian say?’

‘What does he say?’

‘Wasn’t he coming over?’

‘Oh yeah – oh, you know, just the usual. You know him. Listen, D, it’s crazy here today, I’d better go. But that’s great news,
great news. This’ll really give us a lift.’

You hang up, you go to the window and look through the telescope. From the back of the door, the dead plastic eyes of the
goggles watch you watching.

You don’t know why Coach picked you. You’ve got the worst
times in the whole squad. It’s not just that you’re slow. Whenever you swim now it’s like there’s this secret tide waiting
there just for you; and while all the other boys power ahead in straight lines to the finish, while Coach claps his hands
and shouts them on, it is trying to lead you away, down to some unseen place there under the water, a dark door behind which
lies a room that, as you descend towards it, you find you
almost recognize
… and like in a dream when you realize it’s pivoted into a nightmare, that’s when you start freaking out, flailing and thrashing,
which only helps the dark magnets pulling you down, till it genuinely seems you’re going to drown, there in the shallows of
the school pool – only at the last second something will kick back in and you’ll fight it off, struggle to the surface and
claw for the wall as fast as you can,
Paddy Last again, Daniel
, and behind you it will disappear again, sink back into the innocent blue, waiting for the next time…

She’s not out there. You abandon the telescope, step back into the room. The X of the meet burns red on the calendar. The
pills call to you from the dresser. Deep breaths, Skip. Remember what Coach said. A lot can happen between then and now. A
mer-boy enrols at Seabrook and bumps you off the team. You get stuck in a lift, you break your arm. Something worse.

For now though it’s back to class, turgid deserts of grammar and rules and facts, the faraway life it is all a preparation
for glimpsed through the windows of reading-comprehension texts and business models and vocabulary-boosting role-plays –

‘Good morning, I would like
to buy
a new bicycle.’

‘Certainly, sir. What kind of bicycle are you looking for? Is it for
everyday use?
’

‘I need it to
commute to work
. I am looking for something
durable
,
portable
and
not too expensive
. Can you
show me your range
?’

– seeming only fractionally less desolate than the preparations themselves, and the malign influence of the bruise still working
its evil magic, like an anti-amulet, a bad-luck charm you can’t take off…

‘Oh, Mr Juster…’

Calling you back to the doorway of the now-empty classroom. Hanging there across it like a spider in an invisible web. ‘Deep
in thought, Mr Juster…?’

‘Uh, yes, Father.’ He keeps
talking
to you.

‘Is something troubling you, my son?’

‘No, Father.’ Trying not to wriggle under his incendiary stare.

‘You’ve been in the wars, though.’

‘Uh… I ran into a door.’

‘Mmm.’ The fingers that reach out and touch your pulpy temple are chilly and damp and curiously grainy, like they are on Ash
Wednesday, rubbing wet ashes onto your skin. ‘That wasn’t too clever, was it?’

‘No, Father.’

‘What are we going to do with you, Mr Juster?’

‘I don’t know, Father.’

‘If you can’t negotiate even a simple door.’ The priest pauses. A sigh ripples through his knife-like body. ‘Well, boys will
be boys, I suppose.’ The black eyes sparkle. ‘Won’t they, Mr Juster.’

‘Uh… yes, Father.’

‘They will,’ Father Green exhales, as if to himself, ‘they will…’ And he withdraws, like smoke being sucked out a chimney;
leaving you to scurry away, wiping the spot where the fingers touched you, the bones that seem to push right through your
skin and into your soul…