Skippy Dies: A Novel

by Paul Murray

  ‘I don’t know, Howard.’ Farley looks off bleakly at the sea. ‘It’s just, they’re just kids, you know? And the people who’re supposed to be looking after them, and teaching them about maturity and responsibility, we’re worse than they are.’

  Howard pushes him away, grinds his teeth. They walk down to the main road, where after five minutes Howard manages to pluck a taxi from the traffic. He declines Farley’s invitation to come back to his apartment and drink more.

  At home there are no messages on his answering machine. He picks up Graves and numbly turns the pages. We no longer saw the war as one between trade-rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.

  If someone had been looking out for that kid this wouldn’t have happened.

  According to the papers, Howard was the last adult to see Daniel Juster alive. Alive, in the rear-view mirror, merging with the dusk, as if he stood on the threshold right at that moment, a dark door Howard couldn’t perceive. But how was he supposed to know? And even if he had known, what was he supposed to have done? Bring him home with him? Ditch his car and go and play with him, in the freezing cold car park? That would somehow have made everything all right? Throwing around a frisbee like he was fourteen years old? When was the last time he even played frisbee?

  But then thinking about it he realizes he remembers the last time quite clearly; and with a disarming vividness finds himself not so much in the grip of a memory as slipped back to that very time, to the shape and feel of being fourteen – the taste of apple-flavoured bubblegum in his mouth, the humiliation of a spot on his chin, the unending turmoil of that endless struggle to stay afloat in a roiling sea of emotions, and the thousands of hours spent out on the gravel, determined to master an utterly valueless skill – the frisbee, the yoyo, the Hacky Sack, the Boomering – in the unshakeable belief that in this lay his salvation. Half of him battling to become visible, the other half just wanting to disappear. God, how had he ever endured it?

  A knock at the front door. Howard has lost track of time, but knows that it’s late: hoping against hope – Halley! – he springs out of his chair to turn the latch. He ducks just in time to dodge the fist that comes flying out of the darkness.

  And in the village the wind sets the lids of the wheelie bins chomping at nothing, and in the cinema Hulk bounces and swings his fists, and in the video-game shop the Christmas games are in, and in Ed’s there’s a special offer, two boxes of doughnuts for the price of one, someone says it’s because of what happened but someone else says no, actually they’re doing it in all the branches. It doesn’t matter where you go though, nowhere feels big enough to contain you, even if you’re right in the middle of the mall it still somehow seems too shallow, like when you were younger and you tried to make your Transformers visit your Lego town, and they were just out of scale, it didn’t work – it’s like that, or maybe it isn’t, because you also feel really tinily small, you feel like a lump in somebody’s throat, or actually who cares what you feel, and everywhere you go you encounter other grey-clad boys from your year, looming up like hateful reflections – Gary Toolan, John Keating, Maurice Wall, Vincent Bailey and all of the others that are the pinnacle of the evolution that began so many years ago with that one depressed fish that if you met him now you’d tell him to stay in the sea – there they are, pale-faced but smirking, sleeves rolled up, and though it’s sad, it’s sadder than a three-legged dog, it’s also flat, it makes you angry, so when someone says Skippy was a homo you’re almost glad because you can fight them, and they’re glad too, so you fight, until someone gets his jumper ripped or the security guard chases you out of the mall, and you’ve already been kicked out of the other mall, and it’s too cold to go to the park, and you think it must be almost time to go to bed but it’s not, it’s only just time for dinner, which is car-tyre with phlegm sauce and which you leave mostly uneaten, and privately you’re thinking Skippy is a homo too, you’re thinking, Fuck you Skippy, though you’re also thinking, Hey, where’s Skippy? or Skippy, did you borrow my – and then you think, Oh fuck, and everything shakes around the edges again and you have to hold on tight to your lucky condom or your Tupac keyring or your actual live shotgun bullet, or if you don’t have one of those things, wedge your hands deeper in your pockets or throw a stone at a seagull or shout after a knacker in the village how his mother was in excellent form last night and run for it, and dream of being Hulk, or a Transformer in a Lego town going smash! bash! crash! stomping the whole city to the ground, incinerating the little yellow-headed Lego people with your laser eyes till the smiles melt right off their faces.

  And in the schoolyard the lisp of a last fallen leaf skating around the tarmac is the only sound, everywhere else is totally silent, even when people are talking, it’s like someone’s thrown a switch and reversed the polarity of everything so that being alive now is like being dead, like zombies, grey bodies shuffling loose-limbed through the perpetual gloaming, or like universes, same difference, matter or energy adrift in nothingness, descending, like veils, through the darkness. Classes rebegin but it doesn’t make any difference, there is still that empty seat, and in Maths class, calling the roll, Lurch goes, ‘Daniel Ju– oh no, of course not,’ and scratches his name out, right there in front of you. Farts go unpunished, clear jinx situations unheeded, Pokémon cards unswapped; the Junior Rec Room is deserted, the table-tennis table folded up and tidied into a corner, the pool balls lined up in their perspex womb, the television, unprecedentedly, switched off. You don’t talk about It, and you don’t talk about not talking about It, and soon the not-talking-about-It has become something real and tangible existing among you, a hideous replacement-Skippy like an evil twin, a dark blastula that presses evermore insistently against your lives. The dormitory corridor presents only closed doors, behind which are closed faces, secreted beneath headphones or locked into mute dialogues with illuminated screens. Geoff hasn’t done his zombie voice after the night in the Ref it escaped without thinking, My roast beef needs more GRAVEy, and sounded different from how it had before – louder than he meant it to be, and not funny, and even sort of frightening, like it knew something you didn’t.

  And then one morning you go to your locker and find a note there from Ruprecht, calling you to an urgent meeting in his room, and even though it’s probably bullshit you find yourself climbing the Tower stairs to his dorm.

  The others are there already, scrunched up on Ruprecht’s bed because no one wants to sit on Skippy’s, even though his duvet is gone as well as his other stuff. Ruprecht looks feverish and drawn. Ever since that night, in the middle of all this weird nothingness, he’s been rushing about back and forth from his laboratory, one pen in his mouth and another behind his ear, stacks of paper and star maps and set squares bundled in his arms. He waits for everyone to sit down, and then he unscrolls a chart with a familiar shape drawn on it.

  ‘The Van Doren Portal, Mark Two,’ he says. ‘Let me say at the outset that the science of this is far from being stable. This operation, if it works at all, will be highly dangerous. But by rebuilding the pod, and recalibrating it to a monotemporal matrix, I have calculated that it might just be possible to travel backwards to a nodal point in time, e.g. the Hallowe’en Hop, and bring Skippy, as he was then, forward to the present. If we adjust the figures of the original teleportation for a temporal “drag” of –’

  ‘Aaaaugh!’ cries Dennis.

  Everyone turns to look at him. He is ice-pale, breathing rapidly, and directing at Ruprecht a stare of unaccountable vehemence.

  ‘What?’ Ruprecht says.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Dennis says.

  ‘I know it sounds far-fetched, but there is a small but real chance we could use the pod to rescue Skippy. In effect we’re doing the same thing we did with Optimus Prime, only with minor tweaks in order to –’

  ‘Aaaaugh!’ Dennis goes again.

  Ruprecht looks nonplu
ssed; Dennis, in a single strange and complicated motion, throws his arms over his head as if shielding it from a bomb-blast, or as if it itself is about to explode, and then, springing up, marches out of the room. The others look around in bemusement, but before anyone has a chance to say anything, Dennis has marched back in and thrusts something into Ruprecht’s hands. ‘Here!’ he shouts. ‘Special delivery from the eleventh dimension!’

  ‘Optimus…?’ Ruprecht turns the plastic robot over in wonderment; then his gaze jabs upwards to Dennis. ‘But… how? I mean… where was he?’

  ‘In my laundry basket, underneath some Y-fronts,’ Dennis recites.

  Ruprecht is baffled. ‘Some kind of wormhole…?’

  Dennis slaps a hand to his face, leaving a bright red mark. ‘Oh my god – I put him there, Ruprecht! I put him there!’

  ‘You…’ Ruprecht trails off, his mouth becoming an anxious O, like a baby that has lost its soother.

  ‘Don’t you understand what I’m saying to you? Your pod doesn’t work! It doesn’t work! I took the robot! Your invention didn’t do anything! Your inventions never do anything!’

  ‘But –’ Ruprecht increasingly distressed ‘– the Mound? And the music?’

  ‘I made that up, moron! I made it all up! I thought it would be funny! And it was! It was really, really funny!’

  The others wince sympathetically; Ruprecht very slowly doubles over, an expression of intense concentration on his face, as if he’s drunk weedkiller and is making a study of the effects. The sight of this makes Dennis only more ruthless.

  ‘You know what your problem is, Blowjob? You’re sure you’re right. You’re so sure you’re right, you’d believe anything. You remind me of my crazy God-bothering stepmother. All day long she casts her little spells, Jesus this, Virgin that, Sacred whatever, say nine of these, sprinkle some of this on that, hey presto. She’s so busy that she doesn’t even notice that none of the things she prays for ever actually happens. She doesn’t care whether they happen, because all she wants really is something to let her walk around with her head in the clouds. And you’re no different, except with you it’s maths instead of prayers, and gay universes, and oh yes, in case we forget, the aliens who are going to come down and build us a spaceship before the Earth goes pop!’

  On the bed, Ruprecht stares vacantly into space, his body drawn in around him.

  ‘Skippy’s dead, Blowjob! He’s dead, and you can’t bring him back! Not you, not every bent scientist in every laboratory in the world!’ Breathing heavily, Dennis pauses, then turns his dreadful gaze on the others. ‘You bummers need to get it through your heads that this is real. None of the stupid bullshit we do to distract ourselves is going to help any more. Spiderman isn’t going to help. Eminem isn’t going to help. Some fucking gay lame tinfoil time machine isn’t going to help. All that stuff is over, don’t you see? He’s dead! He’s dead, and he’s going to stay dead for ever!’

  ‘Stop saying that!’ Ruprecht gasps.

  ‘Dead,’ chants Dennis, ‘deado, deadsville, deadorama, deadington –’

  ‘I mean it!’

  ‘Dead-dead-dead,’ to the tune of ‘La Marseillaise’, ‘dead-de-de dead-dead-dead, dead-de –’

  Ruprecht rises from the bed and, inflating himself like one of those Japanese pufferfish, to surprisingly alarming effect, hurls himself at Dennis. The latter throws a punch that lams directly into Ruprecht’s midriff, but his fist simply gets lost in the folds of Ruprecht’s flab; a split-second expression of horror crosses his face before he is bowled over and disappears underneath his antagonist, who proceeds to bounce on top of him like a malevolent Buddha.

  ‘Stop, stop!’ Geoff cries. ‘Come on, you’re hurting him!’

  It takes all four of them to haul Ruprecht away. Dragging himself up from the floor, Dennis dusts himself down and, with white cheeks, levels a maledictive finger: ‘Skippy’s dead, Blowjob. Even if your stupid plans ever worked, it’d still be too late. So stop getting everybody’s hopes up for nothing.’ With that he hobbles out of the room.

  As soon as he’s gone, the others cluster around Ruprecht to sympathize and reassure: ‘Don’t listen to him, Ruprecht’, ‘Tell us the rest of your plan, Ruprecht.’

  But Ruprecht won’t say anything, and after a while, one by one, they drift away.

  When they have gone, Ruprecht lies for a long time on his duvet, Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, held loosely in his hands. On the other side of the room, the empty bed, its sheets turned down, crisp and hospital-white, roars at him like a locomotive.

  The sun has set long ago, and the only light in the room now comes from the computer screen, where SETI diligently chomps through the barrage of unintelligible noise that hits the Earth every second, searching for anything that might resemble a pattern. For some minutes Ruprecht watches from his bed as the bars file across the screen and drop off the far side. Then he rises, and shuts the computer down.

  The School Board sits in conclave for almost three hours before Brother Jonas knocks on the door of his fourth-year class and summons Howard to the Acting Principal’s office.

  Tom’s is the only face not to turn his way when he enters. As well as Father Green, the Automator and Father Boland, the school president – one of those sleek, silver-haired, ageless men who manage to connote prestige and power without ever having expressed a single memorable thought – there are two men Howard does not know. One is a priest, small and gaunt, with a foxy, Jesuitical cast of features and a mobile jaw that works constantly, as though chewing some indigestible foodstuff; the other, an innocuous balding man in rimless glasses, perhaps forty. Brother Jonas hovers by the door; Trudy, the only woman in the room, brandishes her pen and minute-pad expectantly.

  ‘Well, before anything else, let’s make sure we’re all reading from the same page here,’ the Automator announces heavily. ‘Howard, do you have anything you want to add, subtract or modify, with regard to the statement you made this morning?’

  Seven pairs of eyes bore into him. ‘No,’ Howard says.

  ‘Because these are very serious allegations you’re making,’ the Automator warns.

  ‘They aren’t allegations, Greg. I passed on to you exactly what Tom… what was said to me by Mr Roche last night.’

  This meets with a cold silence; the silver-haired president permits himself a slight shake of the head. Howard flushes. ‘Are you suggesting I shouldn’t have passed it on? Are you suggesting I should have listened to him confess a crime and then clapped him on the shoulder and sent him home right as rain, is that it?’

  ‘No one’s suggesting anything, Howard,’ the Automator snaps. ‘Let’s all try to keep a professional attitude here.’ Eyes closed, he massages his temples a moment, then says, ‘Okay. Let’s go over this one more time. Trudy?’

  Rising from her chair, Trudy arranges her papers and reads, in a clear, neutral voice, Howard’s account of his adventure of last night: how at some time between eleven and twelve he had opened the door to find Mr Roche there in an agitated state; how Mr Roche told him, after he’d brought him in and made him tea, that the night of the junior swimming team’s meet in Thurles, Daniel Juster had come to his hotel room suffering from pains in his leg; how after Mr Roche had treated him manually for cramps the boy became upset and told him that his mother, who had been supposed to attend the meet, was extremely ill; how Juster had grown more and more distressed until Mr Roche made the decision to give him a sedative in the form of painkillers that he carried to treat his spine injury. Shortly afterwards the boy lost consciousness from the effects of the painkillers, at which point Mr Roche sexually molested him.

  ‘ “Apart from a panic attack on the bus back to Seabrook the following day, for which he gave him another sedative, Mr Roche told me that the boy showed no signs of being aware of what had happened. But then last Wednesday, three days before the junior team’s semi-final meet in Ballinasloe, Juster wrote him a letter telling him he was leaving the swimming team. Mr Roche grew alar
med. He contacted Juster’s father and persuaded him to discourage the boy from quitting. Juster’s mother’s health was precarious and he knew the boy was afraid of doing or saying anything that might upset her. His father called Juster and at that point the boy agreed to go along to the meet. Shortly afterwards, however, he overdosed on painkillers.’” Trudy, as she concludes, cannot resist raising her lowered eyes for a swift left-right sweep, with the satisfaction of a pupil who has performed her lesson well.

  ‘You’re happy with that?’ the Automator puts to Howard.

  ‘I’m not happy with it…’ Howard mutters. The Automator switches to his neighbour. ‘Tom?’

  Tom says nothing; a tear slides like a raindrop down his stony cheek. There is a collective sighing and creak of chairs. The little foxy man takes a fob from his pocket, fogs the glass with his breath and buffs it with his cuff, aspirating, ‘Dear, dear, dear.’

  The Automator folds his brow in his hand. Emerging blinking, he says, ‘Jesus Christ, Tom, were you planning to do it again? Were you bringing him down there to do it again?’

  ‘No!’ Tom blurts. ‘No.’ He does not look up. ‘I wanted to show him that it was all right. That was why I wanted him to go. If this time it was all right… it might be as if… the last time never…’ He dissolves into sobs. ‘I didn’t mean for this to happen,’ he gurgles. ‘I loved that boy. I love all my boys.’

  The Automator considers this impassively, his mouth a tight line. Then, turning to the table at large, he says, ‘Well, look, we need to decide what the hell we’re going to do here.’ There is a general susurrus of papers and trouser legs. ‘I’m not a man of the cloth, I don’t have a direct line to God, so it could be I’m all wrong about this. But what I’m thinking is that there is not much to be gained by taking it to the next level.’

  ‘By the next level, you mean turning it over to the police?’ Father Green clarifies in his arch manner. At the word, Tom lets out a moan and reburies his face in his hands.