Skippy Dies: A Novel

by Paul Murray

  Skippy turns round. ‘Would you say “Hi” or “Hey”? If you were talking to a girl?’

  ‘I would say, “Put on your crash-helmet, hot stuff, because you are about to have the ride of your life!” ’

  ‘I would say, “Please ignore my friend, his parents dropped him on his head when he was a baby, over and over, because they do not love him.” ’

  Ed’s buzzes with blonde hair and St Brigid’s plaid; but Lori’s not there, and the table where they sat that night is occupied by two others blithely unaware of its history. At the back of the restaurant, however, they find Ruprecht, surrounded by maths books.

  ‘What have you got so far?’ he asks.

  ‘ “H,” ’ Skippy says.

  ‘ “H,” ’ muses Ruprecht. ‘ “H”.’

  ‘A haiku would be nice and sort of different,’ Geoff says, mostly to himself. ‘Lori, your eyes… your big green eyes…’

  ‘How about asking her a riddle?’ Ruprecht says.

  ‘A riddle?’

  ‘Yes, a riddle always grabs the attention. Something about your name, for instance. Instead of “this is Skippy,” you could say, “Who am I? Above a rope, or Down Under. Pass over my name, and you will find it.” Something like that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Ruprecht, have you ever actually met a woman?’

  ‘Lorelei Wakeham,’ Geoff blurts, ‘your sad eyes of emerald are my only stars.’

  Everybody stops dead and stares at Geoff. ‘It’s a haiku,’ he explains.

  Ruprecht repeats the words softly to himself:

  Lorelei WakehamYour sad eyes of emeraldAre my only stars.

  ‘Seventeen syllables,’ he pronounces.

  ‘Holy smoke, Geoff, that’s really beautiful.’

  ‘Oh, it’s just a little something I thought up,’ Geoff demurs.

  ‘You see, this, this is what I have meant by oomph,’ Mario tells Skippy. ‘A haiku like this is the express train to Sexville.’

  ‘Yeah, and Geoff can recite it at your funeral after Carl kills you,’ Dennis scowls; but the heady combination of Japanese poetry and chocolate doughnuts sweeps away any misgivings, and Skippy hurries to key in his message before anyone can change his mind.

  Ever since the Hop, Ruprecht has been acting strangely. According to Mario, who also stayed in school over mid-term, he spent most of the break in his laboratory, and since term resumed he has scarcely been seen. In the morning and at lunch break he skips the Ref and heads directly for the basement, huffing down the corridor with papers spilling from his pockets and a distrait air; meanwhile in class he keeps putting up his hand to ask convoluted questions no one can follow – haranguing Lurch about Riemannian space, pestering Mr Farley about Planck energy, in religion, most startlingly, asking Brother Jonas whether God was God in all universes, or ‘just in this universe’.

  Loss of appetite, sleeplessness, erratic behaviour – if you didn’t know better, you’d almost think Ruprecht, like his room-mate, was in love. You do know better, though, so you conclude it’s far more likely to be something to do with this new theory he’s been going on about.

  Actually, Ruprecht has discovered, the term “M-theory” is something of a misnomer. Theory suggests a hypothesis of some sort, a line of inquiry, a set of principles, at the very least a vague idea of what it is, itself, about. M-theory offers none of these things. It is pure enigma: a nebulous, shadowy, multi-faceted entity infinitely bigger than what it was originally intended to explain. Confronted with it, the best scientists in the world are as schoolboys – less than schoolboys, cavemen, primitives who, foraging with their stone axes in the jungle, stumble upon a spaceship squatting huge and opaque amid the ferns. It swallows entire fields of mathematics like they were nothing at all. The most complicated equations devised by the most brilliant minds operating at the very limit of human capability represent only the most childish gestures at description of its outermost edges, weak flames that reveal the barest inkling of the vastness retiring back into the darkness. For all their labours, the reality of the theory – what it actually means, what it says, what it is a theory of – remains hidden behind the inscrutable M, and while each of them dreams of being the one who will crack it, bring the theory, like King Kong wrapped in chains, into the light, they are prone, late at night, to the chilly thought that rather than illuminating, their efforts are merely feeding it, gorging it with knowledge, which it devours with no sign of satiety.

  ‘So what’s the point of it?’ Dennis takes a dim view both of the theory and of Ruprecht’s obsession, which he suspects to be just another layer of self-mystification.

  ‘Well, I suppose the “point” would be a total explanation of reality,’ Ruprecht harrumphs. ‘I imagine that’s what the basic “point” would be.’

  ‘But it’s just a load of maths. How’s that going to help anybody?’

  ‘There is already too many maths,’ Mario chimes in. ‘More beaver, less maths, that’s what I say.’

  ‘Yes, well, if Newton had said that, we wouldn’t have the law of gravity,’ Ruprecht says. ‘If James Clerk Maxwell had said, “More beaver, less maths,” we wouldn’t have electricity. Maths and the universe go hand in hand. Formulae worked out in a single copybook with a single pencil can transform the entire world. Look at Einstein. E=mc2.’

  ‘So what?’ says Dennis.

  ‘So, if it weren’t for “a load of maths”, we’d all be living in shacks in fields, tending sheep.’

  ‘Good,’ says Dennis.

  ‘Oh, you’d like living in a world without phones or DVDs, would you?’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  ‘You’d like going to hospital and being operated on without an anaesthetic, in candlelight, by doctors who had no clue what was wrong with you because there were no X-ray machines?’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  ‘You would?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, good.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Good.’

  The theory is not without its doubters, to be sure, and not all of them are as ill-informed as Dennis.

  ‘Mathematically, yes, it does have a lot of explanatory potential,’ Mr Farley says, after yet another Science class has been diverted into a discussion of the possible physics of other universes. ‘But that doesn’t actually make it true. A lot of people have very compelling theories about what happened to Atlantis. There’s even a theory that Ireland is the remnant of Atlantis. But unless they could verify it somehow, show you some sort of proof, you wouldn’t believe them, would you?’

  ‘No,’ Ruprecht admits.

  ‘The fact is that it would take a trillion trillion times more power than our most powerful energy source to find any evidence for M-theory. On those grounds alone, many scientists would say that it simply isn’t commensurate with twenty-first-century science. That is, even if it’s true, there’s not a lot we can actually do with it, any more than Galileo could have used, for instance, computer operating code if he’d stumbled across it back in the seventeenth century. So while it’s undoubtedly interesting, we shouldn’t let it obscure the less glamorous but just as important scientific work there is to do here on planet Earth. Does that sound fair?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ruprecht concedes.

  No! The more arguments he hears against it, the deeper his adoration grows for this esoteric, unreadable scripture that the crude unthinking world will not take time to understand – the longer he spends in his basement lost in topologies, mapping out the imaginary surfaces that undulate beneath its hyperspatial penumbra, shunning human company except for other faceless devotees in sleepless Internet chatrooms, reciting back and forth those golden shibboleths, string, multiverse, supersymmetry, gravitino, the theory’s hundred names…

  In fact, maybe it is love after all. Why can’t we fall in love with a theory? Is it a person we fall in love with, or the idea of a person? So yes, Ruprecht has fallen in
love. It was love at first sight, occurring the moment he saw Professor Tamashi present that initial diagram, and it has unfolded exponentially ever since. The question of reason, then, the question of evidence, these are wasted on him. Since when has love ever looked for reasons, or evidence? Why would love bow to the reality of things, when it creates a reality of its own, so much more vivid, wherein everything resonates to the key of the heart?

  Once upon a time there was a beautiful young girl named Lorelei who lived on the banks of the river Rhine. She fell in love with a sailor who was going off to sea. ‘When I come back I will marry you,’ he said, so every day she would go up to the cliffs and watch out for his ship. But it never came. Finally one day she got a letter from him. He said he had married another girl, so Lorelei threw herself off the cliff and into the river. To this day she appears on a rock, singing her song and combing her hair. If you hear the song, you can’t escape it, you will sail onto the rocks and she will pull you underwater. If you see her, she is so beautiful that you go insane.

  Focus, Daniel, focus! Coach calls from the side.

  They are the first to use the pool since the holiday. The surface has been harvested of bluebottles and Band-Aids, it shines like amethyst. In the lanes around Skippy, the machine-like churn of the team, ploughing steadily up and down. But he can’t do it. It’s like the water is conspiring against him, like he can feel the individual molecules pushing him back. Like something is there, trying to take hold of him.

  Come on, Dan, get it together!

  He shakes it off, plunges back into the spell of chlorine, imagines himself surging towards a girl kneeling at the top, combing her hair as she waits for him, humming irresistibly, If I had three wishes I would give away two…

  Dawn is just breaking, pinkening the perspex roof, as they climb out for the showers.

  So where is the race taking place? Coach asks.

  Ballinasloe, Antony ‘Air Raid’ Taylor says.

  And when?

  November 15th, Siddartha Niland says, his golden body rippling and glistening.

  Wrong and wrong, Coach says. The race is going on this very minute, right here. He taps his head. In your mind, he says. That’s where a race is won or lost. If you don’t have the right attitude, it doesn’t matter how strong or how fit you are. From now until November 15, I want that race to be all you think about. Write it in your diaries, on your calendars, on the insides of your eyelids. Everything else comes second. Even girls. Girls will still be there when the race is over. And you’ll do a lot better with them if we win.

  Everybody laughs.

  Now I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again. Not everybody’s going to make the cut. If you made it last time, don’t assume you’ll be selected this time. If you were left out last time, you could be racing this time. A lot can happen between then and now.

  After training Skippy gets sick in the toilets by the Ref.

  Later in his room he puts an X on the Garfield calendar. The swimming goggles look down at him from their hook; he feels his whole arm go cold, as if he’d plunged it into a barrel of ice-water.

  The knackers did not kill Carl. When they saw what he had done to his arm they did not even break it. So now everything is even and they can all be friends.

  Friends?

  We have a good thing going with those pills, dude, Barry says. These guys can help us. Give us protection, access to distributors, good deals on other products. All we have to do is cut them a little slice of our profits.

  They broke your arm, Carl says.

  They had to, Barry said. That’s just the way it works. It’s just business, that’s all.

  So now they see the knackers nearly every day. In the park, behind the shopping mall, in Deano’s flat. Deano is the one with bad teeth. Shaved-Head, he’s the leader, is called Mark. Greasy-Hair = Knoxer, Spots = Ste. Barry laughs and jokes with them like that night never happened, and at school he walks around like he’s ten feet tall. He gives shit to fifth-years twice his size and they back off. How do they know Barry has the knackers on his side? It’s like they just know.

  One night Deano tells them about Mark. See your man? He acts hard but he’s really a posh cunt like youse lads. He went to your school then the priests kicked him out for dealing hash. Now he’s stuck with us bunch of scumbags. But it’s good, see, cos he’s got ambitions. He’s like you, he says to Barry, always thinkin.

  The deal is they hand over a cut of their Ritalin sales to Mark, and once a fortnight they buy other stuff from him for a special price. Their first consignment is a few E’s and some coke but mostly the mental weed. Carl and Barry are supposed to sell it but they end up smoking most of it themselves. It fries your brain, it’s like on a hot day when the tar on the road melts and your feet get stuck in it or like when you have a shower and the bathroom mirror gets all fogged up, like you’ll be talking to someone and then all of a sudden it’ll be like half an hour later and instead of fractions the teacher will be going on about exports and it will be a different teacher and you will be in a different room without knowing how you got there.

  It’s good that they have something new to sell though because there are serious problems with the diet pill market. Some of the junior school parents have got suspicious about how hyperactive their kids have been lately, and started tightening up on the prescriptions. Carl and Barry’s supply has been cut in half, but it doesn’t even matter because the girls aren’t buying anyway. Why not? They never stay interested in anything for more than two weeks, Barry says, that’s the problem with girls as a customer base. He tries ringing a couple of them up offering them coke but this just seems to freak them out. Now a couple of them buy like one E a week and the rest totally ignore Carl and Barry.

  And Lori ignores them too. She does not return any of Carl’s phone calls, she’s never in the places she used to be. Then her friend Janine tells him Lori left the Hallowe’en Hop with some guy.

  What? Carl says.

  They are in the church car park. Janine still wants to buy pills. It’s dark, the church windows are dark, there are no cars around.

  This guy Daniel, Janine says. She looks up at Carl through eyelashes covered in black shit. Carl searches his head for Daniel but he cannot find anything, his head pounds like it is splitting in two.

  Well, what did you expect? The girl twirls her hair with a bony hand. You stood her up. You don’t do that to a girl like Lori and just expect her to forgive you.

  I was stuck in my house, Carl mumbles.

  I mean, she’s got guys queuing up to go out with her, Janine says.

  Go out with her? Carl’s mind churns like the propeller of a boat caught in weeds, trying to catch all the little pieces of that night and glue them back together, the messages she sent him saying come and meet me, it was right here in the church car park –

  I thought she just wanted to buy pills, he blurts to Janine. She laughs, a film laugh, with her head back, ha-ha-ha. You don’t know much about girls, she says. Then she pulls in closer to him so her tits are just touching his arm and her voice drops. I could teach you, she says, playing with the cord of his hoodie. But Carl is still thinking of what she said about Lori and after a second Janine pulls back, stares at him with eyes like a dog you have kicked. Then, She was with him, she says, stabbing the words like a knife. He’s been texting her. He sends her poems.

  With little shuffling steps, Carl turns away, facing into the dark. The girl dances round in front of him, grabs his hands and cries, Oh Carl, why do you even care what Lori does? She’s a child, she doesn’t understand what men want. But Carl doesn’t move. He is staring at the concrete ground, where the no-faced boy is kissing Lori, going to all the places Carl had been, shoving his hands under her shirt, sticking his fingers into her box, flooding her little white fist with jism… Janine steps back. Her hands are still wrapped around his, he can feel her eyes on him like they’re in the distance. In a cooler voice she says, Do you want to get her back?

 
He raises his head. He is so angry, for a second she is Daniel and his arms pump with the message of grabbing him and tearing him up into little pieces. But then it is gone and his arms are empty and Carl is broken.

  Janine reaches out, she strokes his hair and then she says, You really screwed up at the Hop, Carl. That’s not the only problem, either. Her parents found out she’d been lying to them. All the time she was with you she told them she was with me. Then my mom met her mom at the deli and told her she hadn’t been in my house for weeks. She got into major shit. Her daddy likes to know exactly where his little princess is and who she’s with at all times. I don’t think he’d be too happy about you, daddies don’t like you, do they, Carl? He follows the movement of her head, wagging at him like a sad dog. Anyhow, she’s basically grounded. So even if she did want to see you, it would be pretty hard. She smoothes back his hair with gentle fingers. Don’t be sad. If you want me to, I can talk to her for you. I could at least tell her how sorry you are. Would you like me to do that, Carl?

  Carl nods. She puts her arms around him and gives him a comforting hug. Oh Carl, she sighs, like a teacher with a favourite but always-naughty child. Carl has never been that child, he has always been the one they are afraid of. Janine leans back to gaze at him, then she plants a little cheer-up kiss on his cheek. I’ll talk to her, she promises. Everything will be all right. Then she chucks his chin. Did you bring my dolly mixtures?

  He takes the baggie from his pocket and hands it to her. She unfastens her purse, then says, like they are two people just come out of church standing on the steps talking about the weather, Lori says you and her had an arrangement.

  Carl shifts from foot to foot without saying anything.

  Oh Carl, she says again, squeezing herself against him. Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of you. And bending upwards, she gives him another little kiss, a friendly mom-type kiss on his cheeks, and then one on his nose, then on his chin, his eyes, his neck, until accidentally one lands on his lips, which are open, and then accidentally she does it again, and accidentally they are accidentally locked tight and wet together, his mouth full of hers, there on the steps in the dark, just like in his imagination Lori’s mouth is full of the mouth of the faceless Daniel. But soon Carl will find his face, and then he will be sorry.