Skippy Dies: A Novel

by Paul Murray

  ‘I just wanted a quick chat,’ he reassures him. ‘You don’t need to look so freaked out.’ As he speaks the words, it strikes Howard that the Automator made a shrewd move, picking him to talk to the youngster; certainly he’s going to be more on his wavelength than some septuagenarian priest. ‘I hear you tossed your cookies in French class yesterday,’ he says.

  ‘I what?’ Juster says.

  ‘You threw up. You got sick.’

  The ends of the boy’s mouth turn down.

  ‘I just wanted to see if you were feeling better.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Yes, you’re feeling better?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You and Father Green have buried the hatchet?’

  Juster nods.

  ‘He can be a tough old buzzard, but I wouldn’t take anything he says to heart,’ Howard says. The boy makes no response. Frankly he does not seem to Howard all that appreciative of his interest – but kids often hide their vulnerability behind this kind of attitude, he reminds himself, you have to give them space, let them come to you. ‘And how are things generally? How are you doing?’

  ‘Fine,’ Juster suddenly looks wary, as if Howard is trying to catch him out somehow.

  ‘Your schoolwork going okay? Not finding it too hard this year?’ The boy shakes his head. ‘Your family’s doing well? Your parents?’ He nods. Howard searches around for another question. ‘How about swimming? I hear that’s going great.’ The boy nods again, pale brows furrowed apprehensively like he’s playing chess with Death for his soul. Howard begins to get exasperated. This is like pulling hen’s teeth. Still, he ought to put in another minute, just in case Greg does ask about it. ‘You know, I was talking to your swimming coach yesterday,’ he says. ‘He told me some really –’

  But the words die away on his lips, as he is caught in a smile as sudden and bright and paralysing as a prison searchlight… Miss McIntyre has appeared beside them; the smile is, evidently, for him. He hears himself speak to her, without knowing what he says. God, those eyes! Just looking into them is like being kissed – or, no, like being magicked off to another world, where it’s just the two of them alone, the rest of the universe mere tinselled scenery, orbiting in a slow waltz around them –

  ‘Uh, sir?’ Howard is returned to reality by a small voice tugging at him. He turns and stares at the owner as though he’s never seen him before in his life.

  ‘Oh – I’m so sorry!’ Miss McIntyre brings a hand to her mouth. ‘I didn’t realize you boys were in the middle of something.’

  ‘No, no, it’s fine,’ he assures her hastily, then returns to address Juster. ‘Daniel, you’d better head off to your next class.’

  ‘It’s lunchtime.’

  ‘Well, to your lunch, then. We can finish this later in the week.’

  ‘Right,’ Juster says dubiously.

  ‘Good man,’ Howard says. ‘Okay, well, off you go so.’ Juster obligingly stumps off down the corridor. ‘We’ll catch up later in the week,’ Howard calls after him. ‘And have a good talk, okay?’ He turns back to bask in the lovely light of Aurelie McIntyre.

  ‘Sorry,’ she repeats gaily. ‘I didn’t see him there, or I wouldn’t have interrupted you.’

  ‘No no, don’t worry, it was nothing,’ Howard assures her. ‘He had a little run-in with Jerome Green yesterday. Greg asked me to have a word with him, make sure he was all right.’

  ‘I think he’s in my Geography class,’ she comments, adding, ‘He’s so small!’

  ‘Usually he’d be sent to the guidance counsellor, but Greg thought he’d prefer to speak to someone younger,’ Howard elaborates. ‘You know, that he could relate to.’

  She absorbs this thoughtfully, or mock-thoughtfully: many of her gestures, he’s noticed, have this disconcerting hint of unseriousness, of artificiality, as though she has lifted them for her own amusement from some antiquated sitcom. How to get to the real Aurelie?

  ‘Oh, here, I meant to say to you –’ he chucks her arm ‘– I took your advice and got that Robert Graves book. I was reading it to my class just now. You were right, they loved it!’

  ‘I told you.’ She smiles.

  ‘It gives the war a whole new dimension, you know, hearing from someone right there in the thick of it. They really connected with it.’

  ‘Maybe it reminds them of school,’ she suggests. ‘Didn’t someone describe the trenches as ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent terror?’

  ‘I don’t know about boredom. God, the chaos of it, the brutality. And it’s so vivid. I’d definitely be interested in reading his poetry, if only to see how he can go from describing, you know, people getting their guts blown out, to writing about love.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not that much of a leap,’ she says.

  ‘You don’t think?’

  ‘Have you ever actually been in love?’ she says teasingly.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Howard professes, flustered. ‘I just meant, in terms of writing, that stylistically it must be quite a, a jump from one to the other…’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’ She is doing the thing with her tongue, examining her upper lip with the very tip.

  ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘we sort of got off on the wrong foot the other day.’

  ‘Did we?’

  ‘Well, I mean…’ He is dimly conscious of boys streaming by them on either side. ‘You know you told me you weren’t going to, ah, to do a certain thing with me?’

  ‘I told you I wasn’t going to sleep with you.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right…’ feeling himself flushing deeply. ‘Well, I just wanted… I hoped I hadn’t given the impression – I mean, I just wanted to tell you that I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t intending to, ah, do that with you either.’

  She takes a moment to digest this, then says: ‘That’s all you could come up with, after two whole days?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says reluctantly.

  ‘Now I’m definitely not going to sleep with you,’ she says with a laugh, and turns on her heel.

  ‘Look,’ he puts in desperately, ‘when you say that – what is it that you mean?’

  ‘See you later, Howard,’ she calls over her shoulder.

  ‘Wait!’ But the enchantment is over: as he hurries after her, he is aware once more of existing in a world of objects, of obstacles, coming betw–

  ‘I do beg your pardon, Howard, I didn’t see you…’

  Howard, winded, can only gasp.

  ‘Ah, Robert Graves!’ Jim Slattery lifts the book from the floor where it has fallen. ‘Are you reading this to the boys?’

  Hopelessly, Howard stares after her receding form, which even seen from behind seems to mock him.

  ‘Remarkably versatile writer, Graves,’ Slattery continues obliviously. ‘One doesn’t come across his sort too often these days. Poetry, novels, classical mythology… I wonder, have you ever looked at his White Goddess? Barmy sort of a thing, but quite intriguing…’

  Howard knows there is no escape now. For five years he sat in a classroom and listened to these rambles. Once Jim Slattery starts on a topic that interests him, only an act of God can divert him.

  ‘… delves into various pre-Christian societies – Europe, Africa, Asia – and keeps finding this same figure, this White Goddess, with long fair hair, blue eyes and a blood-red mouth. Right back to the Babylonians, it goes. His theory is that poetry as we know it grew out of this goddess-worship. All poetry, or rather all true poetry, tells the same story – a fertility myth, I suppose you’d call it…’

  Blue eyes, a blood-red mouth.

  ‘… battle between the poet, who represents the coming spring, and as it were his supernatural double or negative self, who represents the past, winter, darkness, stasis, so forth, for the love of this White Goddess…’

  Definitely not going to sleep with you.

  ‘Ended up in Mallorca, of all places – Graves, that is. Moved there with a woman, a poet. Deya. Went there ourselves, actually, a couple of years ag
o, my wife and I. Delightful place, once you get away from the resorts. Astonishing scenery. And the seafood! I remember my wife turning to me one night, she was having the shrimp…’

  Howard nods vacantly. In the distance, he imagines he can see her white scarf whisk into the thicket of the Annexe, like the tip of a fox’s tail.

  As soon as Skippy’s out of sight he starts to run. He keeps running until he finds himself in his room, his head full of flying sparks, almost too thick to see through.

  Talk to you? What does he want to talk to you about?

  Oh fuck!

  Panic crackles down his nerves to spark painfully in his fingertips, thoughts crash into each other like bumper cars, and the worst thing about it is he doesn’t know why! He doesn’t know what’s pushing against the door of his brain, he doesn’t know why his heart’s beating so fast, he doesn’t know why it’s so important he doesn’t talk to Howard the Coward – and now he doesn’t know why he’s standing on a chair and hauling his bag from the wardrobe, tugging open drawers and flinging the contents over his shoulder onto the bed, underwear, socks, T-shirts, jumpers, runners –

  And then something flickers past the window.

  A moment later, he hears Edward ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson’s stereo come on full volume through the wall, though he knows Hutch is downstairs in the Ref. Beside the bed, Skippy’s radio alarm clock is flashing 00:00. He puts down his bag, and slowly turns to face the window. The room feels wobbly and floating off at the edges.

  It went by almost too quickly to see; at the same time, somehow, he saw it. As he moves towards the window he hears a sudden clash of TVs, radios, computers babbling from the corridor, voices opening doors and asking each other what’s going on. He steps softly like it’s not him doing it, not daring to believe he saw what he thinks he saw; he pretends in fact this is not what he’s thinking, he pretends as he puts his eye to Ruprecht’s telescope that he is just having a casual look-around…

  But all he sees are clouds and birds. Oh wow, what a surprise. Did he really expect that aliens were going to choose just this exact moment to arrive? Like they’ve come the whole way across space just to rescue – wait, there it is! Out of nowhere it appears in his viewer and is gone again. He scrambles around the sky, chasing after it, his heart pounding like it’s going to come right through his chest. Can this really be happening? Is he hallucinating? But no, now he gets a fix on it at last: a SAUCER-LIKE CRAFT, gliding through the air!

  Ruprecht meanwhile is down in his laboratory, working on his Wave Oscillator. To a mind not quite so brilliant as his, the lab might come across as a little unheimlich. It is a cramped and windowless room deep in the bowels of the basement, lit by a single naked bulb; damp seeps up the walls, drips drip from the ceiling, and husks of previous inventions – the Clone-o-matic, the Weather Machine, the Invisibility Gun, the Protectron 3000 – loom from the shadows, each one aborted and cannibalized for other projects, so that now they resemble casualties from some awful mechanical war. For Ruprecht, though, the laboratory is a refuge, an oasis of order and rational thought. The heat from the computers means that the room is always toasty-warm, and it is sufficiently removed from the rest of the building that one can play one’s French horn at any time, day or night; there is even a television, for when one would rather watch the National Geographic channel without ‘humorous’ commentary about beavers, etc. from other parties.

  The Van Doren Wave Oscillator is a METI instrument of Ruprecht’s own devising. The idea is quite simple: the VDWO takes sounds (for example the main theme of Pachelbel’s Canon, played on French horn) and translates them into the full spectrum of frequencies, including those outside human – but perhaps not extraterrestrial – hearing, and broadcasts them into space.

  ‘Blowjob, what’s the point of playing a load of boring music into space? You want them to think that everyone on Earth is like a hundred years old?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, classical music has much to recommend it as a means of communication. On the one hand, it’s a mathematical system, which any intelligent being will be able to understand; on the other, it gives an insight into the physiological nature of humans, musical features such as drone, repetition, percussion, being based on heartbeats, breathing, and so forth. Professor Tamashi has a very interesting paper on the subject.’

  ‘Oh right, I must have missed that somehow.’

  The Wave Oscillator has had its fair share of teething problems; however, today Ruprecht thinks he might finally have these sorted out. Taking it from the worktop – the VDWO is an innocuous rectangular affair about the size of a mid-range box of chocolates – he plugs it gingerly into the mains and steps back. Nothing explodes or catches fire. Good. He switches it on. A red light comes on and an efficient-sounding hum. Ruprecht seats himself in a chair and takes his French horn from its case. He pauses momentarily before beginning, eyeing the door. He usually likes to have Skippy around when doing test runs, but he disappeared after History class and hasn’t replied to any of Ruprecht’s texts. Well, if he wants to miss out on the scientific event of the century, that’s his lookout.

  Today’s performance is a personal favourite, the opening movement of Bach’s Concerto for French Horn. As he plays, Ruprecht imagines two elegant beings on the other side of the universe putting down the books they are reading and beaming in delight as the lovely music unspools through their futuristic radio; one makes a shall we? face to the other, then they hop into their spaceship – cut to New York, a podium, on which the polite aliens and the enterprising youngster who brought them here are celebrated by the worl–

  The scream of static is so unbelievably loud it knocks Ruprecht clear off his chair. For a moment he remains there, pinned to the ground by the sheer noise of it – then, with some difficulty, as his fingers are in his ears, he begins to crawl towards the Oscillator, from which a German voice now issues, declaring, at the same insane volume, something about Bockwurst? Until, mercifully, the power cuts out.

  Silence: Ruprecht pants on the floor, curled up like a foetus in the darkness. A moment later, the lights come back on, and with them the TV, the computers and every other appliance in the room – though not the Oscillator, which is now smoking guiltily. Ruprecht bends down to examine it, then drops it with a cry, nursing his burned fingers. A wave of frustration surges through him. What is wrong with it? Why won’t it work? Useless, it’s all useless: or rather he is useless – stupid, useless and dull, so what’s the point of even trying? He kicks the Van Doren Wave Oscillator across the room, where it comes to rest, still smouldering, against the foot-unit of Protectron 3000, then throws himself despairingly into his chair.

  ‘Sometimes the reason we do not see the answer is that we are looking too closely at the question,’ a voice says.

  Ruprecht looks up with a start. On the TV, which has come on by itself, is a familiar face – wrinkled and brown like a nut, possessed of eyes of an extraordinary opalescence, whose irises seem to glitter as though performing some labyrinthine calculation.

  ‘All this time, I realized, the complexities of the problem had distracted me from what lay behind it,’ the face says. ‘The addition of a further dimension makes everything clear once again. It presents us with a reality that is at once simple, and of an almost impossible beauty.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ says Ruprecht.

  An almost impossible beauty. Dancing back and forth, glittering like a runaway star through the dowdy greys of autumn – Skippy can’t tear himself away, even as a series of loudening clumps, thumps and pants, as of someone overweight making his way up a staircase two steps at a time, issue from outside, until finally Ruprecht, burnished with sweat, bursts in and blurts, somewhat opaquely, ‘Multiverse’ – before realizing what Skippy is doing: ‘My telescope!’ he cries.

  ‘Sorry –’

  ‘It’s not supposed to be moved.’ Ruprecht fusses him away, jealously seizing the barrel.

  ‘I thought I saw a UFO,’ Skippy says.

  �
�It’s not even pointed at the sky,’ Ruprecht rebukes. He addresses himself to the eyepiece to make sure; there is nothing to be seen at the far end except a St Brigid’s girl with a frisbee in the yard over the wall. ‘Anyway –’ he retracts himself, remembering why he ran up here all the way from the basement ‘– that’s not important. What’s important is this. It appears that our universe may not be the only universe there is. We may be just one of an infinite number of universes, drifting through the eleventh dimension!’

  ‘Wow,’ says Skippy.

  ‘I know!’ Ruprecht says excitably. ‘Eleven dimensions! When everyone thought there were only ten!’

  He goes on in this vein, circling and recircling between the beds, smacking his forehead and exclaiming things like watershed and stupendous. But Skippy doesn’t hear him. Looking through the telescope, he is watching the frisbee girl again as she runs back and forth over the gravel, jumping and twisting mid-air, upstretching her arm to catch the disc and spinning it off again before her feet even touch the ground, laughing as she scoops strands of dark hair out of her mouth… She seems so much brighter than everything around her, a fragment of summer that’s somehow found its way into October; at the same time, she makes everything around her brighter too – she makes it all fit together somehow, like in a musical where someone bursts into song and everyone else starts singing as well – not just the other girls but the trees, the walls, the gravel of the yard, Ruprecht, even Skippy himself at the telescope –

  A howl from behind shatters his reverie. Dennis and Mario have sneaked in and wedgied Ruprecht; discussion of the eleventh dimension is suspended as its main proponent in the room rolls around the floor scrabbling at his underpants.