by Paul Murray
Ruprecht Van Doren, owner of the telescope and Skippy’s room-mate, is not like the other boys. He arrived at Seabrook in January, like a belated and non-returnable Christmas gift, after both his parents were lost on a kayaking expedition up the Amazon. Prior to their deaths, he had been schooled at home by tutors flown in from Oxford at the behest of his father, Baron Maximilian Van Doren, and consequently he has quite a different attitude to education from his peers. For Ruprecht, the world is a compendium of fascinating facts just waiting to be discovered, and a difficult maths problem is like sinking into a nice warm bath. A cursory glance around the room will give an idea of his current projects and interests. Maps of many kinds cover the walls – maps of the moon, of near and far-off constellations, a map of the world stuck with little pins marking recent UFO sightings – as well as a picture of Einstein and scoresheets commemorating notable Yahtzee victories. The telescope, bearing a sign that reads in big black letters DO NOT TOUCH, points out the window; a French horn gleams pompously from the foot of the bed; on the desk, hidden beneath a sheaf of inscrutable printouts, his computer performs mysterious operations whose full nature is known only to its owner. Impressive as this may be, it represents only a fraction of Ruprecht’s activity, most of which takes place in his ‘lab’, one of the dingy antechambers off the basement. Down here, surrounded by yet more computers and parts of computers, more towers of unfathomable papers and electrical arcana, Ruprecht constructs equations, conducts experiments and continues his pursuit of what he considers the Holy Grail of science: the secret of the origins of the universe.
‘Newsflash, Ruprecht, they know about the origins of the universe. It’s called the Big Bang?’
‘Aha, but what happened before the Bang? What happened during it? What was it that banged?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Well, you see, that’s the whole point. From the moments after the Bang until this moment right now, the universe makes sense – that is to say, it obeys observable laws, laws that can be written down in the language of mathematics. But when you go before that, to the very, very beginning, these laws no longer apply. The equations won’t work out. If we could solve them, though, if we could understand what happened in those first few milliseconds, it would be like a master key, which would unlock all sorts of other doors. Professor Hideo Tamashi believes that the future of humanity could depend on our opening these doors.’
Spend twenty-four hours a day cooped up with Ruprecht and you will hear a lot about this Professor Hideo Tamashi and his groundbreaking attempts to solve the Big Bang using ten-dimensional string theory. You will also hear a lot about Stanford, the university where Professor Tamashi teaches, which from Ruprecht’s descriptions of it sounds like a cross between an amusement arcade and Cloud City in Star Wars, a place where everyone wears jumpsuits and nothing bad ever happens. Ruprecht has had his heart set on studying under Professor Tamashi more or less since he could walk, and whenever he mentions the Prof, or Stanford and its really first-rate lab facilities, his voice takes on a starry, yearning quality, like someone describing a beautiful land glimpsed once in a dream.
‘Why don’t you just go then,’ Dennis says, ‘if everything’s so whoop-de-doo over there?’
‘My dear Dennis,’ Ruprecht chortles, ‘one does not just “go” to somewhere like Stanford.’
Instead, it seems, you need something called an academic résumé, something that shows the Dean of Admissions that you are just that fraction smarter than all the other smart people applying there. Hence Ruprecht’s various investigations, experiments and inventions – even the ones, his detractors, principally Dennis, argue, purportedly undertaken for the Future of Humanity.
‘That tub of guts doesn’t give two hoots about humanity,’ Dennis says. ‘All he wants is to ponce off to America and meet other dweebs who’ll play Yahtzee with him and not make fun of his weight.’
‘I suppose it must be hard for him,’ Skippy says. ‘You know, being a genius and everything, and being stuck here with us.’
‘But he’s not a genius!’ Dennis rails. ‘He’s a total fraud!’
‘Come on, Dennis, what about his equations?’ Skippy says.
‘Yeah, and his inventions?’ adds Geoff.
‘His inventions? The time machine, a tinfoil-lined wardrobe attached to an alarm clock? The X-ray glasses, that are just regular glasses glued onto the inside of a toaster? How could anyone take these for the work of a serious scientist?’
Dennis and Ruprecht don’t get on. It’s not hard to see why: two more different boys would be hard to imagine. Ruprecht is eternally fascinated by the world around him, loves to take part in class and throws himself into extra-curricular activities; Dennis, an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic, hates the world and everything in it, especially Ruprecht, and has never thrown himself into anything, with the exception of a largely successful campaign last summer to efface the first letter from every manifestation of the word ‘canal’ in the Greater Dublin Area, viz. the myriad street signs proclaiming ROYAL ANAL, WARNING! ANAL, GRAND ANAL HOTEL. As far as Dennis is concerned, the entire persona of Ruprecht Van Doren is nothing more than a grandiloquent concoction of foolish Internet theories and fancy talk lifted from the Discovery Channel.
‘But Dennis, why would he want to make up stuff like that?’
‘Why does anyone do anything in this shithole? To make himself look like he’s better than us. I’m telling you, he’s no more a genius than I am. And if you ask me, this stuff about him being an orphan, that’s a crock too.’
Well, that’s where Dennis and his audience part company. Yes, it’s true that details of Ruprecht’s ex-parents remain vague, apart from an occasional passing reference to his father’s skills as a horseman, ‘famed the length of the Rhine’, or a fleeting mention of his mother, ‘a delicate woman with aesthetic hands’. And it’s true that although Ruprecht’s present line is that they were botanists, drowned while kayaking up the Amazon in search of a rare medicinal plant, Martin Fennessy claims that Ruprecht, shortly after his arrival, told him that they were professional kayakers, drowned while competing in a round-the-world kayaking race. But nobody believes he or anyone else, with the possible exception of Dennis himself, would do something as karmically perilous as lie about the death of his parents.
That’s not to say Ruprecht isn’t annoying, or that he’s not poison to a body’s street-cred. There are definite drawbacks to a public association with Ruprecht. But the bottom line is that for some inexplicable reason Skippy actually likes him, and so the way it’s panned out is that if you’re friends with Skippy you now get Ruprecht into the bargain, like a two-hundred-pound booby prize.
And by now some of the others have become quite fond of him. Maybe Dennis is right, and he is talking non-stop bollocks – it still makes a change from everything else they’re hearing these days. You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone ‘Give me the gun’, etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone’s asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don’t mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg – that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you’d imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of ‘life’. Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors – GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE – keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn’t necessarily need to be closed…
At the onset of this process – looking down the barrel of this grim de-dreamification, which, even more than hyperactive glands and the discovery of girls, seems to be the actual stuff of growing up – to have Ruprecht telling you his crackpot theories comes to be oddly comforting.
‘Imagine it,’ he says, gazing out the window while the rest of you huddle around the Nintendo, ‘everything that is, everything that has ever been – every grain of sand, every drop of water, every star, every planet, space and time themselves – all crammed into one dimensionless point where no rules or laws apply, waiting to fly out and become the future. When you think about it, the Big Bang’s a bit like school, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘Ruprecht, what the hell are you talking about?’
‘Well, I mean to say, one day we’ll all leave here and become scientists and bank clerks and diving instructors and hotel managers – the fabric of society, so to speak. But in the meantime, that fabric, that is to say, us, the future, is crowded into one tiny little point where none of the laws of society applies, viz., this school.’
Uncomprehending silence; and then, ‘I tell you one difference between this school and the Big Bang, and that is in the Big Bang there is no particle quite like Mario. But you can be sure that if there is, he is the great stud particle, and he is boning the lucky lady particles all night long.’
‘Yes,’ Ruprecht responds, a little sadly; and he will fall silent, there at his window, eating a doughnut, contemplating the stars.
Howard the Coward: yes, that’s what they call him. Howard the Coward. Feathers; eggs left on his seat; a yellow streak, executed in chalk, on his teacher’s cape; once a whole frozen chicken there on the desk, trussed, dimpled, humiliated.
‘It’s because it rhymes with Howard, that’s all,’ Halley tells him. ‘Like if your name was Ray, they’d call you Gay Ray. Or if it was Mary, they’d call you Scary Mary. It’s just the way their brains work. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘It means they know.’
‘Oh God, Howard, one little bump, and it was years and years ago. How could they possibly know about that?’
‘They just do.’
‘Well, even if they do. I know you’re not a coward. They’re just kids, they can’t see into your soul.’
But she is wrong. That is exactly what they can do. Old enough to have a decent mechanical understanding of how the world works, but young enough for their judgements to remain unfogged by anything like mercy or compassion or the realization that all this will one day happen to them, the boys – his students – are machines for seeing through the apparatus of worldliness that adulthood, as figured by their teachers, surrounds itself with, to the grinding emptiness at its heart. They find it hilarious. And the names they give the other teachers seem so unerringly right. Malco the Alco? Big Fat Johnson? Lurch?
Howard the Coward. Fuck! Who told her?
The car starts on the third try and putters past slow droves of boys babbling and throwing conkers at each other till it reaches the gate, where it joins a tailback waiting for a space to open up on the road. Years ago, on their very last day of school, Howard and his friends had paused beneath this same gate – SEABROOK COLLEGE arching above them in reversed gold letters – and turned to give what was now their alma mater the finger, before passing through and out into the exhilarating panorama of passion and adventure that would be the setting for their adult lives. Sometimes – often – he wonders if by that small gesture, in a life otherwise bare of gestures or dissent, he had doomed himself to return here, to spend the rest of his days scrubbing away at that solitary mark of rebellion. God loves these broad ironies.
He reaches the top of the line, indicating right. There’s the ragged beginnings of a sunset visible over the city, a lush melange of magentas and crimsons; he sits there as witty responses crash belatedly into his mind, one after another.
Never say never.
That’s what you think.
Better join the queue.
The car behind honks as a gap opens up. At the last second, Howard switches the indicator and turns left instead.
Halley is on the phone when he gets home; she swivels her chair around to him, rolling her eyes and making a blah blah shape with her hand. The air is dense with a day’s smoke, and the ashtray piled high with crushed butts and frazzled matchsticks. He mouths Hi to her and goes into the bathroom. His own phone starts to ring as he’s washing his hands. ‘Farley?’ he whispers.
‘Howard?’
‘I called you three times, where have you been?’
‘I had to do some work with my third-years for the Science Fair. What’s wrong? Is everything okay? I can’t hear you very well.’
‘Hold on’ – Howard reaches in and turns on the shower. In his natural voice he says, ‘Listen, something very –’
‘Are you in the shower?’
‘No, I’m standing outside it.’
‘Maybe I should call you back.’
‘No – listen, I wanted to – something very strange has just happened. I was talking to the new girl, the substitute, you know, who teaches Geography –’
‘Aurelie?’
‘What?’
‘Aurelie. It’s her name.’
‘How do you know?’
‘What do you mean, how do I know?’
‘I mean’ – he feels his cheeks go crimson – ‘I meant, what kind of name is Aurelie?’
‘It’s French. She’s part-French.’ Farley chuckles lasciviously. ‘I wonder which part. Are you all right, Howard? You sound a bit off.’
‘Well, okay, the point is, I was talking to her in the car park just now – just having a nice, normal conversation about work and how she’s getting on, and then out of the blue she says to me –’ he goes to the door and opens it a sliver. In the next room Halley is still nodding and making mm-hmm noises, the phone cradled between her jawbone and shoulder ‘– she tells me she isn’t going to sleep with me!’ He waits, and when no response is forthcoming, adds, ‘What do you think of that?’
‘That is strange,’ Farley admits.
‘It’s very strange,’ Howard affirms.
‘And what did you say?’
‘I didn’t say anything. I was too surprised.’
‘You hadn’t been rubbing her thigh or anything like that?’
‘That’s just it, it was completely unprompted. We were standing there talking about schoolwork, and then out of nowhere she goes, “You know, I’m not going to sleep with you.” What do you think it could mean?’
‘Well, off hand I’d say it means she isn’t going to sleep with you.’
‘You don’t just say to someone that you’re not going to sleep with them, Farley. You don’t introduce sex into the conversation, out of a clear blue sky, and then just banish it. Unless sex is what you really want to talk about.’
‘Wait – you’re suggesting that when she told you, “I’m not going to sleep with you,” what she actually meant was, “I am going to sleep with you”?’
‘Doesn’t it sound like she’s laying down a challenge? Like she’s saying, “I’m not going to sleep with you now, but I might sleep with you if certain circumstances change.” ’
Farley hums, then says reluctantly, ‘I don’t know, Howard.’
‘Okay, I see, she’s just trying to save me a little time and embarrassment, is that it? She’s just trying to help me out? There couldn’t possibly be any sexual element.’
‘I don’t know what she meant. But isn’t this entirely academic? Don’t you already have a girlfriend? And a mortgage? Howard?’
‘Well obviously,’ Howard says, simmering. ‘I just thought it was a strange thing to say, that’s all.’
‘If I were you I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. She sounds like one of those flirty types. She’s probably that way with everybody.’
‘Right.’ Howard agrees curtly. ‘Here, I’d better go. See you tomorrow.’ He hangs up the phone.
&
nbsp; ‘Were you talking to someone in there?’ Halley asks him when he comes out.
‘Singing,’ Howard mutters.
‘Singing?’ Her eyes narrow. ‘Did you actually have a shower?’
‘Hmm?’ Howard realizes he’s neglected a key element of his cover story. ‘Oh yeah, I just didn’t wash my hair. The water’s cold.’
‘It’s cold? How come? It shouldn’t be cold.’
‘I was cold, I mean. In the shower. So I got out. It’s not important.’
‘Are you coming down with something?’
‘I’m fine.’ He sits down at the breakfast bar. Halley stands over him, examines him carefully. ‘You do look a bit flushed.’
‘I’m fine,’ he repeats, more vehemently.
‘All right, all right…’ She walks away, puts on the kettle. He turns to the window, silently trying out the name Aurelie.
Their house lies several four-lane miles from Seabrook, on the front line of the suburbs’ slow assault on the Dublin mountains. When Howard was growing up, he used to ride his bike around here in the summer with Farley, through fairy-tale woods ticking with grasshoppers and sunshine. Now it looks like a battlefield, mounds of sodden earth surrounding trenches waterlogged with rain. They’re building a Science Park on the other side of the valley: every week the landscape has morphed a little more, the swell of a hill shorn off, a flat gashed open.