Skippy Dies: A Novel

by Paul Murray

  ‘And the touching thing,’ he continues, ‘is that a portion of the proceeds have been dedicated to refurbishing the swimming pool, in memory of the unfortunate boy, Daniel Juster.’

  The boy’s mother, who some might call quite an attractive person, coos at this approvingly. Father Foley returns an avuncular smile. ‘It seemed to us to be the most appropriate way of marking the event,’ he says. ‘Here at Seabrook we don’t believe in brushing things under the carpet. It is a way for us, for the boys and the faculty alike, to say, Daniel, you will always have a place in our hearts, in spite of, that is to say, the, ah, circumstances of your passing.’

  Sweeping a loose strand of golden hair back over his brow, he turns to Ruprecht, who is staring back at him with undisguised hatred. Can he really be her son? Perhaps she is a second wife, she does seem considerably younger – but no, only a mother could dote on a repellent being like this. ‘There are two words I should like you to keep in mind during this difficult time, Ruprecht. The first of them is “love”. You are lucky to be loved by many people. By your father and your –’ he can’t resist it ‘– very charming mother’ (a twinkling, effervescent little smile!) ‘by your Acting Principal, by myself and the rest of the faculty, and by your many friends here in Seabrook College. And most of all, by God. God loves you, Ruprecht. God loves all of His Creation, down to the very lowliest, and He never takes His eyes from you, even when you think you are alone in the world. Daniel is, hopefully, with Him in Heaven now, and he is happy there, happy in God’s love. So let us not be selfish. Let us not let our grief interfere with the good, honest work of our peers. Yes, we have suffered a tremendous loss. But let us mourn Daniel’s passing in the correct way, the loving way, such as by participating in the upcoming Christmas concert, and making it a really special occasion he would be proud of.’

  The boy’s mother is rapt – so, indeed, is the father. Father Foley is rather pleased with this little homily himself. ‘The second word, or actually two words,’ he says, ‘is, or are, “team sports”. In the days of the Roman Empire…’

  Afterwards, he waits outside the Automator’s office while his parents have a private interview inside. Darren Boyce and Jason Rycroft come along and stand across the hallway, just staring at him. When his parents come out he walks them down to the van. They would like to stay longer, but Father is terribly busy. In the car park, Mother cups Ruprecht’s face in her hands. ‘Dearest Ruprecht, we love you very much. Promise me you will remember that one thing, that whatever happens, Mama and Papa will always love you.’

  ‘Let’s have no more of this silliness, Ruprecht,’ Father says. He wipes his mouth with a paper tissue.

  Ruprecht returns to his room alone. On his pillow has been laid, neatly, a toilet brush. He removes it and lies down.

  Mother loves Ruprecht. Lori loves Skippy. God loves everybody. To hear people talk, you would think no one ever did anything but love each other. But when you look for it, when you search out this love everyone is always talking about, it is nowhere to be found; and when someone looks for love from you, you find you are not able to give it, you are not able to hold the trust and dreams they want you to hold, any more than you could cradle water in your arms. Proposition: love, if it exists at all, does so primarily as an organizing myth, of a similar nature to God. Or: love is analogous to gravity, as postulated in recent theories, that is to say, what we experience faintly, sporadically, as love is in actuality the distant emanation of another world, the faraway glow of a love-universe that by the time it gets to us has almost no warmth left.

  When he gets up he spends an hour kicking and stamping on his French horn so he will not have to play it again. Music, maths, these are things that no longer make any sense to him. They are too perfect, they do not belong here. He does not know how he ever believed this universe could be a symphony played on super-strings, when it sounds like shit, played on shit.

  With the revelation of his true origins the last vestiges of Ruprecht’s dignity are torn away. Wherever he goes now, a wave of plumbing-related ridicule pursues him; his head is forced so often down the U-bends of Seabrook commodes – ‘It’s a gateway to another dimension, Ruprecht!’ (flush) – that it never fully dries. The worse it gets, the worse it gets, because in school your enemy is anyone you can’t fight off, so the more enemies you have, the more you’ll find queuing up to join the fun. Ruprecht lumbers through it like some elephantine Golem. He does not cry out when someone flicks his ear with a rubber band or slices his arse with a ruler or jabs it with a compass point or mushes wet tissue in his ears or spits on his back or leaves a dump in his shoe. He does not complain when Noddy boards up the door of his laboratory; he does not protest when he is given detention after several of his non-water-resistant possessions are found blocking one of the dorm toilets; he does not show any signs of caring when his room is festooned yet again with toilet roll. Instead he merely withdraws further into himself – into the ever-expanding cellulite fortress he buttresses daily with doughnuts and a new Ed’s milk-shake called SweetDreamz, which contains no milk and more calories, somehow, than pure sugar.

  ‘I’m just concerned that the school’s attitude might come across as somewhat confrontational…’

  ‘Van Doren’s the one who’s being confrontational, Howard. Firm but fair, that’s what we’re being. Am I right, Brother?’ A svelte ebony nod from the sentinel in the corner.

  ‘But the boys – there does seem to be some evidence that the boys may be ganging up on him.’

  ‘The boys know the rules, Howard, and if they’re caught breaking the rules they’ll be punished for it. At the same time, they’ve all put a lot of time and effort into this concert, and if one person is spoiling it for everyone on a whim, then I can understand why they’d be angry. And I can understand that they need to express that anger.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘No one’s bigger than this school, Howard.’ The Automator’s attaché case snaps closed like the jaws of a crocodile. ‘Van Doren’s going to find that out sooner or later. I just hope for his sake that it’s sooner.’

  And so Howard merely looks on, as by the day the glutinous orb of Van Doren’s face grows wider, paler, converging on a dinner-plate blankness, his yearning to take him aside – to comfort him, simply to speak to him – cancelled out by an equally agonizing guilt. For what could Howard possibly say to him that wouldn’t be a barefaced lie? And if he told him the truth, how would that help him?

  So he says nothing, instead goes in the opposite direction, burying himself in his history books just as Van Doren cocoons himself in hydrogenated fats. He delivers his lessons mechanically, not caring whether the boys are listening or not, quietly loathing them for being so predictably what they are, young, self-absorbed, insensate; he waits for the bell just as they do, so that he can dive once more into the trenches of the past, the endless accounts of men sent to their deaths in their tens of thousands, like so many towers of coloured chips pushed by fat hands across the green baize of the casino table – stories that seem, in their regimented wastage, their relentless, pointless destruction, more than ever to make sense, to present an archetype of which the schoolday in its asperity and boredom is the dim, fuddled shadow. Womanless worlds.

  Outside, meanwhile, the winter turns sadistic, cold rain flaying him whenever he steps through the door; he wakes each morning with a mouth full of gravel, like he’s just coming off a three-day bender. He remembers Halley’s magical camera, which can turn anywhere into California. Every night he hopes that she will call, but she does not.

  And then one day a package arrives for him at the school. Inside is a letter, written in a neat, crimped hand. It is from Daniel Juster’s mother.

  My husband tells me that Daniel’s class is studying the Great War and I thought your boys might find this of interest. It belonged to my grandfather, William Henry Molloy. After leaving Seabrook he fought at Gallipoli with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He never spoke about his experiences,
and he kept the uniform hidden in a box at the top of a wardrobe where he thought none of us would find it. Daniel was too young to remember his great-grandfather, nevertheless he was very excited to learn about his participation in the war and would have enjoyed sharing this with his class.

  Inside, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, is a khaki military uniform. Howard holds it up to the light of the staffroom windows. The rough cloth is spotlessly clean, and smells gently musty; he passes it through his hands like bolts of pure time.

  ‘What you got there, Howard?’ Finian Ó Dálaigh asks him.

  ‘Nothing, nothing…’ Howard flashes him a cursory smile, refolds the uniform and stows it rapidly in his locker.

  Later, when they have the room to themselves, he shows it to Jim Slattery. The older man studies the coarse fabric intently, as if the story of the campaign were inscribed there in the twill. ‘Seventh Battalion,’ he says. ‘There’s a story. You haven’t come across them before? “D” Company? Gallipoli? Suvla Bay?’

  Howard is vaguely aware of Gallipoli as an infamous disaster in which thousands of Australians were killed, but no more than that. ‘It wasn’t just the ANZACs,’ Slattery tells him. ‘I have some books, if you’re interested.’

  That evening – having been granted a special dispensation from his wife – Slattery meets Howard in the snug of the Ferry, and proceeds to relate the tragic history of ‘D’ Company, from their assembly in Dublin at the outbreak of the war to their near-annihilation on an obscure mountain on the Gallipoli peninsula. Howard, without knowing quite why, has brought Molloy’s uniform in his bag, and as the story unreels he becomes increasingly aware of it as a presence, an olive-drab ghost attending their conversation.

  ‘They were volunteers, among the first, who joined up from rugby clubs around the country. Most were professionals, who’d gone to well-known schools, Seabrook included, and worked now as businessmen, bankers, solicitors, clerks. They actually became quite famous in Ireland, even before they went off to fight, because they could have been officers if they’d wanted, but they preferred to stick with their friends. They were known as the “Dublin Pals”, and the day they set sail for England huge crowds turned out to watch them march through the city.

  ‘Now, they’d joined up expecting to be sent to the Western Front, and it wasn’t until their ship sailed that they discovered they were en route to Turkey instead. Churchill had this plan to force a passage through the Dardanelles, create a new supply route to Russia and draw the Germans away from the Front. The previous attempt to land, at Gallipoli, had been a total catastrophe. They’d tried a Trojan horse trick – packed up a division in an old collier that was to run right up onto the beach and catch the Turks by surprise. But the Turks were waiting, with machine-guns. Supposedly the whole bay turned red with blood. This time round, the commanding officers were so paranoid that they kept their plan completely to themselves – to the point that nobody else knew what they were supposed to be doing. “D” Company and the rest of the Dublins were landed in the wrong place, with no maps and no orders. Temperatures were in the hundreds, the Turks had poisoned the wells, it was raining shrapnel. They waited there on the beach while their general tried to work out what to do…’

  On the dismal story goes. From this distance, the bloody ending seems inevitable, and the Pals’ adventure – voluntarily leaving good jobs, easy lives, wives and children, in pursuit of some tally-ho vision of honour and glory – painfully naive; as if they’d imagined the war to be no more than an extension of their clashes on the rugby pitch, the heightened danger merely guaranteeing the glory there to be won.

  ‘But the worst of it was what happened afterwards,’ Slattery says, turning his glass about on the table. ‘I mean, they came home and were forgotten about. Not just forgotten about, banished from history. After the Rising, the War of Independence, suddenly they found they were traitors. The struggles they endured, the horror, the hardships, all for nothing. That must have been a real knife in the back.’ He looks over at Howard. ‘Hard to believe that something that big could simply be buried away like that, as if it had never happened. But it can, that’s the tragedy of it. There’s a terrible cost, but it can.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Howard says, feeling his cheeks flame.

  ‘Although things do change, I suppose…’ The old man runs his hands over the cloth of the uniform again. ‘Anyway, it’ll be a great story for your boys.’

  Howard makes an indistinct sound. As a matter of fact, he has already decided that he will not tell the boys about the uniform. It would mean nothing to them; there is nothing to be gained from exposing it to their indifference. Slattery is surprised to hear this – even, Howard thinks, a little offended. ‘I thought they’d enjoyed studying the war…?’

  Howard had thought so too; but recent events have brought home to him just how greatly he’d misjudged them. Every day he watches them yammer to each other about the revived concert, swarm obliviously around the empty seat in the centre of the room, the events of – what, three weeks ago? long vanished from their memories, and eventually he understands that they simply do not have the capacity to relate to the past, their own or anyone else’s. They live in a continuous sugar-rushed present, in which remembering is a chore left to computers, like tidying your room is a chore left for the Third World maid. If the war briefly caught their imagination, it was only as another arena of violence and gore, no different from their DVDs and video games, the movie clips of car accidents and mutilations that they swap like football stickers. He doesn’t blame them for it, the mistake was his.

  The old man swirls the ice in his drink. ‘I wouldn’t write them off just yet, Howard. In my experience, when you can show them something tangible, bring them out of the classroom so to speak, it can have quite an amazing effect. Even a recalcitrant class, they can really surprise you.’

  ‘They’ve already surprised me,’ Howard says curtly, and then, ‘I just don’t think this is something they care about, Jim. I don’t know what they care about, frankly. Apart from maybe getting on TV.’

  ‘Well, you have to teach them to care, don’t you?’ Slattery says. ‘That’s what it’s all about.’

  Howard does not respond to this, other than to wonder how the old man can have stayed so sentimental for so long. Does he simply not see the boys, is that it? Does he not hear what they say?

  He takes Slattery’s books with him; when he gets home, he checks the photograph of Molloy in the company history against a team picture in one of the old school annuals he’s been going through for his programme notes. There he is, grinning from the centre row, carefully lacquered hair giving him a brawny, equine look, the same man that appears in the portraits of the Pals, as if he had simply hopped from one book to the other, ready to charge the Turkish trenches on Chocolate Hill just as he charged Port Quentin in Lansdowne Road. How could he have known what lay ahead of him? Catastrophic defeat, pointless obliteration, disappearance from history, that’s not the fate you expect for a Seabrook boy –

  Thinking this brings back Juster again, that empty seat in the classroom like a tile missing from a mosaic. He studies the photograph in the book again. Is he imagining it, or can he see a family resemblance there, between Molloy and his great-grandson? Over the generations the set mouth has grown uncertain, reticent, the blue eyes dazed, as if the genes themselves had never recovered from the disintegration of Suvla Bay and its aftermath, as if some infinitesimal but vital part had got lost in the churn of time. And yet it seems that Daniel Juster, or the man he might have become, is there, gazing out of the soldier’s face like a reflection on glass; and gazing back in the candlelit living room, Howard finds the hairs on his arms and neck stand up. The uniform floats on its hanger; alone in the candlelit room Howard is suffused by a curious sense of convergence, as if he’s been appointed as one terminal of a mysterious circuit.

  Maybe Slattery was right, is what he’s thinking. Maybe this is what the boys need to wake them up; maybe this is a way
of bringing Daniel back into the classroom, and forcing them to see him. Two ghosts, briefly rescued from oblivion; a small act of reclamation, a chance to make amends.

  Next morning he goes in early to get to the photocopier; he’s in the staffroom, collating pictures of pre-war rugby teams, when the Automator comes in. Crossing swiftly to the armchair where Tom sits reading the sports section of the Irish Times, ‘Quick word?’ he says.

  Tom looks up blankly. ‘Sure, Greg, do you want to go…?’ He motions at the door.

  ‘Actually, perhaps you won’t mind me sharing this with the others,’ the Automator replies, taking from his jacket an envelope emblazoned with the Paraclete crest. It is from the Congregation’s headquarters in Rome; the letter inside, which the Automator reads aloud, announces that Tom has been selected to teach in Mary Immaculate School, Mauritius. Tom lets out a whoop; the Automator, laughing, claps him on the back.

  It takes a moment for Howard to understand that what he is witnessing is an act, put on for the benefit of the onlookers. He is struck by how convincing they are – Tom flushed and starry-eyed, the Automator with a paternal arm over his shoulder, nothing veiled or calculating detectable in their expressions. It’s as if, for them, their lie has already replaced the truth; and now, while he watches, that lie crystallizes outwards, inscribes itself in reality with the help of his unwitting peers, as they crowd around to pump Tom’s hand.

  ‘So you’re leaving us…’