Skippy Dies: A Novel

by Paul Murray

  ‘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 do
wn 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??!!!

  ‘– a divorce!’ Carl’s mom screams, clattering up the stairs. Carl stuffs his boner back in his pants, zips himself up, flips the computer screen to FUN FACTS ABOUT THE NETHERLANDS! ‘I’ll get a divorce, mister, and I’ll clean you out!’ She has stopped outside Carl’s door to shriek down, it is like nails going over a blackboard. ‘So I hope your little floozies have… have good career prospects!’

  ‘I’ll get you fucking committed first!’ Dad’s voice bounces up from below. ‘There’s not a judge in the land who’d take your side, you bloody mad bint –’

  The sound of Mom sinking to the floor on the landing: this is usually where she ends up when they are fighting. ‘Why don’t you go,’ she sobs, the words mixed with the snick of the flint as she tries to light a cigarette. ‘Why don’t you just go, and leave my son and me in peace? Why don’t you go once and for all, so we can live our lives with some semblance of dignity?’

  ‘I’ll tell you why, because I’m afraid you’ll burn my fucking house down! Dignity, if you had even the smallest conception of what that meant you’d take one look at yourself and –’

  Carl in his room, his head filling up with hotness, stares at the textbook. The fusion of two cities into a single urbanized mass known as a _______________.

  Mom lets out a scream and there is the sound of something hitting something else, probably she threw her shoe at him. ‘You’re a lunatic!’ Dad shouts. ‘A lunatic!’ Her bedroom door bangs, and at the same moment Carl’s phone jingles with a new message.

  HEY WAT YOU DOIN

  Fuck you, bitch.

  NOTHIG HOMWORK

  Because of a lack of natural resources, the Netherlands must import and from .

  IM SO BORD!!!!

  Downstairs the front door slams, Dad’s Jag starts up. The sound of the bathroom door locking and Mom crying behind it.

  I NED SUM XITMENT…

  The black-haired girl’s eyes roll back in her head, as her hand plunges between her legs right up to the wrist.

  The chief exports of the Netherlands are pull your panties down bitch and if you say another word I will break your skull.

  Carl writes back,

  OK.

  Skippy and the telescope have become almost inseparable. Mornings, lunchtimes, at the end of every schoolday he dashes upstairs and attaches himself to the eyepiece, and for the hours that follow he will either be euphorically happy or speechless with despair, depending on whether or not he has caught a glimpse of Frisbee Girl. In less than a week, Ruprecht has seen him transformed from his usual amiable Ruprecht-helping self to a mooneyed somnambulant who doesn’t want to do anything except look out the window and ask over and over whether Ruprecht, or whoever else happens to be in the room, thinks this girl, whom he has never spoken to, will be at the Hop or not.

  Ruprecht might have found all this quite annoying, but by a strange coincidence, he too has a new fascination. For the last five nights, he has been pulled deeper and deeper into its mysterious involutions; the more he investigates it, the more shadowy it becomes, and the more shadowy, the deeper it draws him in.

  ‘They call it M-theory.’ Monday evening: outside, a damasked sunset is crashing tremulously through a pale blue sky, gilding church steeples and phone masts, the tiled roofs of houses and the scaffolding of new apartments.

  ‘What does the M stand for, Ruprecht?’

  ‘No one knows.’

  ‘No one knows?’

  ‘The theory’s so complicated that they’re only beginning to understand it. So no one can agree what the M is for.’ This, for Ruprecht, is one of its chief attractions. Who could resist a theory so obscure they don’t even understand the name of it? ‘Some people say it’s for Multiverse. Others say it’s for Magic. Matrix. Mystery. Mother.’

  ‘Wow,’ Victor Hero says huskily.

  ‘It’s all at a very early stage, obviously,’ Ruprecht says, ‘but what they think is that everything is made up of membranes. There are different kinds of membrane. Some are tiny particles. Others are huge universes. All of them floating around in eleven dimensions.’

  ‘Eleven?’ Geoff says.

  ‘That’s right,’ says Ruprecht. Geoff does some counting on his fingers and looks confused.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking. Where are these seven extra dimensions? Good question. The answer is, all around us. You see –’ Ruprecht takes off his glasses, getting into his stride now ‘– cosmologists believe that in our universe’s original state, at the moment of creation, it existed as one pure, symmetrical, ten-dimensional structure. All stuff, all forces, were united as one into this structure. However, with the Big Bang, this “higher” universe, as we might call it, broke down. “Our” universe, that is, the dimensions we can see, expanded into spacetime. The higher dimensions, meanwhile, curled up to become very, very tiny. But although we can’t see them, they’re still here. In fact, the extra dimensions exist at every single point in space.’

  Head-scratching from Geoff and Victor.

  ‘It’s a tricky idea to grasp,’ Ruprecht says. ‘By way of illustration, try thinking of a very narrow cylinder.’

  ‘A hair,’ Victor says.

  ‘Mario’s dick,’ Dennis says, from Ruprecht’s bed.

  ‘Hey!’ Mario exclaims.

  ‘Okay –’ Ruprecht determined not to be steer
ed off-course ‘– to us, the very narrow cylinder of Mario’s dick looks like a line, that is to say it looks one-dimensional. But to a very small creature, say an ant, that’s walking along Mario’s dick, he’ll realize that as well as going lengthways he can go in a circular direction too. Even though we might not be able to perceive it, that very small ant is aware that Mario’s dick has two dimensions, i.e. girth as well as length.’

  ‘You’re damn right it has girth!’ Mario shouts. ‘I don’t need an ant to tell me it has girth!’

  ‘According to string theory, which Professor Tamashi and other scientists have been using to try to solve the Big Bang, in addition to the four dimensions of spacetime we know, there are six of these very small, curled-up dimensions, making ten all told. And the strings, which are little strands of energy, wiggle around vibrating in these ten dimensions.’

  ‘Like Dennis’s mother,’ Mario, seeking vengeance for the ant slur, interjects, ‘wiggling around vibrating with her vibrator, because she is a famous slut, and also, she has ten dimensions because she is a fat bitch.’

  ‘That about sums her up,’ Dennis says coolly; gah, Mario’s forgotten that Dennis hates his stepmother and so is immune to insults on that front –

  ‘Wait, what are these strings again?’ Geoff asks.

  Ruprecht’s eyebrow beginning to twitch just a little – ‘Well, if you remember, I told you about it two minutes ago.’

  ‘Oh, right, they’re little bits of energy that everything’s made out of?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘But, uh, Ruprecht, things aren’t made out of strings, they’re made out of atoms. We did that in science class.’

  ‘Yes, but what are atoms made out of?’

  ‘How should I know what they’re made out of?’

  ‘Well, I’m telling you, they’re made out of these little strings.’