Skippy Dies: A Novel

by Paul Murray

  ‘Why the hell would tonight be any different, you anus?’

  ‘Because of Hallowe’en.’ Geoff turns his festering, Play-Doh visage to Dennis, and in his beyond-the-grave basso expands, ‘The ancient feast of Samhain, when the gates between our world and the Otherworld are opened, and unholy spirits march unchecked through the land. All laws are suspended, and nothing is as it seems…’

  ‘Sure,’ Dennis says, ‘except tonight’s not Hallowe’en, it’s Friday 26 October.’

  With a gasp, Ruprecht checks his watch and then, without a word of explanation, sprints for the side-door out to the corridor. Dennis, Mario and Geoff look at each other incredulously. No one has ever seen Ruprecht sprint before.

  ‘Hmm,’ Dennis says thoughtfully, ‘I see what you mean,’ and they return to observing Skippy with renewed interest.

  So far, things have gone predictably badly. He crashed right into her, spilling half her drink, and now she’s looking at him with a mixture of terror and contempt, the latter gaining the upper hand with every second he stands here twitching and blinking and not saying anything. But it’s impossible to think! Up close she’s even more beautiful, and every time she looks at him he feels like he’s been hit by lightning.

  ‘Uh, sorry,’ he manages to croak at last.

  ‘That’s okay,’ the girl says in a deeply ironic tone. She makes to move past him. Impulsively, he sidesteps into her path.

  ‘Daniel,’ he blurts. ‘Uh, that’s who I am.’

  ‘O-kay,’ the girl responds, and then when he doesn’t get out of the way, with obvious reluctance, she says, ‘Lori.’

  ‘Lori,’ he repeats, then falls back into the twitching, blinking silence. Behind the scenes, his brain, dashing around trying to put out the fires that have sprung up all over the place, shouts at him, Say something else! Say something else! But it does not tell him what, so he opens his mouth with no idea what’s going to come out until he hears himself speak the words, ‘Do you like…Yahtzee?’

  ‘What’s “Yahtzee”?’ pronounced in a tone of pre-emptive disgust that could burn through metal.

  ‘It’s a game of skill and chance,’ Skippy says miserably. ‘Played with dice.’

  The girl looks like if she were any more bored she would actually be dead. ‘Do you have any drugs?’ she says.

  ‘I have an asthma inhaler,’ he replies eagerly.

  The girl just looks at him. ‘Um,’ he says. Inside his whole body groans in agony. He couldn’t help it, it was right there in his hand! Now he stares at his shoes, from which one of the wings is coming off again, wishing the ground would swallow him up – when something else hits him. Scrambling off his quiver, he fishes down past the Arrows of Light – ‘I have these.’ He produces the tube breathlessly.

  ‘What are they,’ she says, without seeming too enthusiastic.

  ‘They’re, um, travel-sickness pills.’

  ‘Travel-sickness pills?’

  Skippy’s head bobs mutely. She gazes at him as if urging him to complete the thought. ‘But you’re not going anywhere,’ she says finally.

  ‘No, but…’ He wants to explain about the pills and how they take you away from where you are even though you’re still there; but it sounds stupid even before he says it, and he tails off, sinking under the weight of his own foolishness. She is right, he isn’t going anywhere. He has ruined everything for ever, there is no way he’ll be able to wipe this from her memory. Now he just wants it to be over. ‘No,’ he says.

  The girl is frowning, as though she’s doing maths in her head. Then she says, ‘What happens if you mix travel pills and asthma inhaler.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Skippy says. Glancing over his shoulder, her eyes suddenly fix and widen. Skippy turns too, and sees that the main doors have been opened. He’s surprised, because when he checks his watch it’s still only 9.45.

  ‘This thing is totally lame,’ the girl decides. ‘I’m getting out of here.’ And before Skippy can say anything, she is walking away, every step she takes a sledgehammer whomping his heart into little tiny pieces. Then she pauses, and over her shoulder, in the careless way you might speak to a stray dog you’d met in the park, she says, ‘Coming?’

  For some reason he starts babbling about how he thinks you have to ask permission before you can leave. But she’s already halfway across the hall.

  ‘Hey, wait up!’ He comes to and chases after her, catching up with her as she enters the cloakroom; and side by side they step out into the night.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Dennis says.

  ‘This Hallowe’en is powerful stuff,’ Mario says. He reflects a moment. ‘Perhaps these supernatural forces are also behind the mystery of my failure with the ladies tonight. If a born loser like Skippy can score a hottie-to-the-max like that, you know that some crazy shit is going down.’

  Meanwhile, a long-limbed shadow is pushing through the crowd. Another reversal – this is a shadow for which people get out of the way. It rolls its eyes and gnashes its teeth, it seizes girls as it moves through the hall, pulling off masks and boring into their eyes before casting them aside – and now it catches sight of someone, blundering in tears in the opposite direction, her voluminous dress slipping down her arms so it looks like she’s escaping from an enormous pink-and-white jellyfish. It makes for her, grabs her wrist and pulls her into it. ‘Where’s your friend?’ it demands. ‘Lori, where is she?’

  But the weeping girl just bursts out into fresh wailing. The shadow swears and goes back the way it came, shouldering people left and right in spite of the path that has opened up in front of it.

  Howard and Miss McIntyre do not make it back to the Sports Hall by the end of the song. As soon as they pass through the door, they find themselves bewitched by the strangeness of the school at night. Its inky silence, its somnolence, make the familiar corridors feel like the underground chambers of a mausoleum, untrodden for centuries; Howard has to resist the temptation to yawp! hoot, jump around, shatter the echoey hush. Every step promises to take them deeper into uncharted terrain. Soon the music is only a distant murmur.

  At last they shore up in the Geography Room. Overhead, thunder roars continuously, as though they are in the foundations of some celestial interchange, into which bodiless locomotives come crashing every instant. ‘We’ll have one quick drink and then we’ll go back,’ Miss McIntyre says. She searches through the carrier bags for the ingredients – apparently she was serious about the Cosmopolitans – while Howard, hands in his pockets, looks at the pictures on the walls. The Geography Room is covered from floor to ceiling with photographs, charts and illustrations. One wall is devoted to aerial shots of the earth, wild weaves of colour that reveal themselves, when you read the text below, to be clouds around Everest, a rainbowed view of Patagonian ice-sheets, a hundred thousand flamingos in flight over a lake in Kenya, a blue faro of the Maldives. On another, pictures of happy banana-pickers in South America, happy miners in the Rhine-Ruhr Valley, happy tribes in their rainforests, rub shoulders with graphs depicting the CHIEF EXPORTS OF EUROPE, MINERALS AND THEIR USES, COLTAN – FROM THE CONGO TO YOUR PHONE! The room is like a shrine to the harmonious working of the world: a panoply of facts and processes, natural, scientific, agricultural, economic, all coexisting peacefully on its walls, while the human fallout from these interactions, the corollary of coercion, torture, enslavement that accompanies every dollar earned, every step towards alleged progress, is left for his class: History, the dark twin, the blood-shadow.

  ‘I really like these volcanoes,’ he says, stopping at the pictures by the door. ‘You don’t see enough volcanoes these days.’

  ‘Vodka… cranberry juice… damn, there’s something else…’ Miss McIntyre says to herself. ‘Sorry, what was that?’

  ‘I was just remembering what you said before, about the Earth being forged out of all these grand forces… It’s true, you look at these pictures and you realize we’re walking through the set of this incredible epic they stopped filming a hundred million
years ago…’

  ‘Cointreau!’ she exclaims and returns to the carrier bags. ‘Cointreau, Cointreau… oh, to hell with it.’ She takes a swig from the vodka bottle, and passes it to him. ‘Come on, it’ll warm you up.’

  ‘Cheers, so,’ he says. She makes a fist and playfully punches the base of the bottle. He drinks. The vodka burns all the way down to his stomach. ‘I can’t hear the music at all now,’ he says to distract himself from the discomfort.

  ‘We’ll go back in a minute,’ she says. She hops up on the teacher’s desk and crosses her legs beneath her; from here she regards Howard mockingly, like an imp on a toadstool. ‘So you’re nostalgic for the Palaeozoic now, is that it?’

  ‘Definitely quieter, these days. No new mountains, same old continents and oceans. Occasional earthquake kills a few thousand, that’s as much drama as we get.’

  She receives this with an amused smile, like someone holding a royal flush in a poker game for matchsticks. ‘Dramatic things can still happen,’ she says. ‘All this, for a start.’ She gestures behind her, at the blackboard, on which is written:

  GLOBAL WARMING:

  DEFORESTATION –> DESERTIFICATION

  LOSS OF HABITATS –> DECREASE IN BIODIVERSITY –>

  MASS EXTINCTION

  RISING TEMPERATURES –> DROUGHT –> CROP FAILURE

  POLAR ICE CAPS MELTING –> RISING SEAS –> FLOODING

  DIVERSION OF GULF STREAM –> GLACIATION –> ICE AGE

  ‘An ice age, that would be dramatic enough for most people, no? Or Dublin, London, New York being underwater?’

  ‘That’s true,’ Howard says.

  ‘Some scientists think we’re already past the point of no return. They give the world as we know it another fifteen years. We could be the very last generations of the species.’ She reels this off in a conversational tone, the same mischievous light flickering in her eyes, as if it’s some rambling shaggy-dog joke, not for young ears. ‘The boys take it very seriously. Recycling their Coke cans, using energy-efficient lightbulbs. Yesterday, they were all writing letters to the Chinese ambassador. The Chinese government want to build a dam in a UNESCO Heritage Site, it’s going to destroy the homes of millions of people, including the Naxi – they’re one of the world’s last surviving matriarchies, Howard, did you know that? The boys were so angry! But most people seem to be able to let that stuff just slide over them.’

  ‘They don’t have you to inspire them,’ Howard says.

  ‘I suppose we can’t really conceive of our way of life ever changing,’ she says, ignoring his clunky flattery. ‘Let alone coming to an end. It’s just like the boys here doing stupid things – you know, climbing electricity pylons, jumping their skateboards off ten-foot walls – because they can’t imagine getting hurt. They think they’ll go on for ever. So do we. But nothing goes on for ever. Civilization ends, everything ends, that’s what you teach them in History class, isn’t it?’

  She utters these words softly, like a lullaby. Her stockinged knee is rested against his thigh. The air seems to shoot with sparks.

  ‘History teaches us that history teaches us nothing,’ Howard remembers.

  ‘That doesn’t say much for history teachers, does it,’ she whispers up at him.

  Standing before her at the top of the class, Howard is aware, suddenly, of the empty rows of pupils’ desks behind him, that nobody in the entire world knows where they are. ‘You teach me something, so,’ he goads her gently. ‘Educate me.’

  Her eyes wander ceilingward, as she makes a play of scaring up a thought; then, leaning forward, she confides in a whisper, ‘I don’t think you’re in love with your girlfriend any more.’

  This stings, but he keeps smiling. ‘You can see into my heart now?’

  ‘You’re easy to read,’ she says, tracing a fingertip over his face. ‘It’s all right here.’

  ‘Well, maybe I can see into your heart too,’ he retorts.

  ‘Oh yeah? What do you see there?’

  ‘I can see you want me to kiss you.’

  She laughs coyly, and swings her legs off the desk. ‘That’s not what you see,’ she says. She retreats to the far side of the room, smoothing down her dress. Then, in an amicable, impersonal voice, like a television interviewer putting a fresh question to her guest, she says, ‘Tell me why you left the stock market to become a teacher. Did you suddenly feel the urge to do something meaningful? Had you become disillusioned with the pursuit of wealth?’

  Howard understands that this is a hoop he must jump through; he has erred, and this conversation, artificial as it is, is now the only possible route back to what those lips seemed to promise a few seconds ago. He takes a moment to draw breath, consider his tactics, then, keeping his position by the desk, responds in the same pleasantly neutral tone, ‘It was more that the pursuit of wealth became disillusioned with me.’

  ‘Burnout,’ she says expressionlessly.

  Howard shrugs. He is realizing that this is still too sensitive for him to be ironic and off hand about.

  ‘It happens,’ she says. ‘It’s a stressful job. It’s not for everybody.’

  ‘The people whose money it was weren’t so philosophical.’

  ‘Is that why they call you Howard the Coward?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was it something to do with what happened in Dalkey Quarry?’ Her eyes narrow in on him predatorily. ‘The bungee jump? Where your friend got hurt?’

  He just smiles.

  ‘Were you the one who was supposed to jump, is that it?’ She turns away, and continues, in the same bland TV interviewer voice, ‘Haunted by your reputation, you failed at your job in London and came home, resolving to live a worthy but risk-free life. And so you became a history teacher.’ She leans up against the door, her eyes gleaming at him through the shadows. ‘Where you always know the ending, and nothing’s ever going to jump out at you. Like walking through a set from an incredible epic that finished shooting years and years ago.’

  It flashes through his mind that she might hate him; this doesn’t seem an impediment to what they are about here. ‘Different jobs suit different people,’ he says amiably. ‘You thought about being a teacher once.’

  ‘I thought about being a lot of things,’ she agrees. ‘But I never had any vocation. You have to actively want to be a teacher. You don’t have to actively want to be a consultant, because they pay you so much. They provide the motivation for you. It’s much easier.’

  ‘And yet here you are.’

  She laughs. ‘Yeah, well… I needed a change. Change is stimulating, don’t you agree?’ She has folded her hands behind her back, and angles her chin away from him. He takes a step towards her, as towards a dark precipice; his movements seem automatic, as if he is a character he is reading about in a story. ‘Didn’t someone say once,’ she continues, ‘that being bored is the one unforgivable sin?’

  ‘I think it was being boring.’

  ‘Same difference,’ she says, resting her head back against the door. ‘The world is so huge, so many things to do and see… And for us, in the West, with more money and power and freedom than any other people in history…’ She shakes her head. ‘To be bored is really a crime. It’s an insult to everyone who doesn’t have money and power and freedom.’ She looks at him again. ‘Don’t you think we have a duty to do whatever it takes not to be bored?’

  The last of these words are uttered into, and the rest of her philosophy lost inside, Howard’s mouth. Her body twines around him; he pushes her against the blackboard, her pelvis mashing into his, the words WARMING DESERTIFICATION FLOODING EXTINCTION smeared into illegibility by her back. She bites his lips, her hands glide up his chest to grip his shoulders; she exhales involuntarily, a deep grunt, surprisingly masculine, as the heel of his hand grinds momentarily between her legs, then propels him backwards until he hits the teacher’s desk. He climbs up on it, she climbs onto him. Outside, the storm has finally blossomed: it roars, howls, thrashes against the window like something
out of the Palaeozoic, or an epic movie; and as the demonic machinery of hands, mouths, hips takes over, Howard, perhaps not quite at the level of consciousness, but some substratum just below it, finds himself back again, as he has been on so many days and nights, at the edge of a windswept rockface, in a half-ring of shadowed faces, a hand holding out to him a slip of paper on which is written his own name, like a scales weighing up his soul –

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/goodmorningtomorrow.htm

  We’re very pleased to have PROFESSOR HIDEO TAMASHI of Stanford University with us to answer your questions on parallel universes and the stranger-than-fiction world of M-theory…

  KRYSTAL: You talk a lot about other dimensions that are too small for us to see. That doesn’t make much sense.

  PROF TAMASHI: You’re right, Krystal, it doesn’t. Higher dimensions are counter-intuitive because our brains are biologically hard-wired to perceive the world around us as three dimensions of space plus one of time. However, four dimensions of space-time are not enough to explain the creation and make-up of the universe. We may not be able to see them, but higher dimensions, or hyperspace, allow us to explain phenomena that would otherwise remain a mystery. M-theory describes the movement of membranes through these dimensions, some very small, like particles, some very large, like universes. In this way it presents the possibility of a bridge between the subatomic world and the macro world.

  BUSTA MOVE: Where do these membranes come from?

  PROF TAMASHI: That’s a good question, Busta. M-theory maintains that a multiverse consists of membrane-universes floating like bubbles in Nothing. Each bubble forms for free as a quantum fluctuation in Nothing. Universes may be created all the time in this way.

  STANFORD BOUND: Tamashi-san, it is a great honour to speak to you. My question is this: is it possible for a human being to travel through hyperspace to one of these proximate universes?