Skippy Dies: A Novel

by Paul Murray

  And the sun don’t shine and the rain don’t rainAnd the dogs don’t bark and the lights don’t changeAnd the night don’t fall and the birds don’t singAnd your door don’t open and my phone don’t ring

  So that as the chorus comes around once more, you can hear young voices emerge from the darkness, singing along:

  I wish you were beside me just so I could let you knowI wish you were beside me I would never let you goIf I had three wishes I would give away two,Cos I only need one, cos I only want you

  – so that for these few moments it actually seems that Ruprecht could be right, that everything, or at least the small corner of everything that is the Seabrook Sports Hall, is resonating to the same chord, the same feeling, the one that over a lifetime you learn a million ways to camouflage but never quite to banish – the feeling of living in a world of apartness, of distances you cannot overcome; it’s almost as if the strange out-of-nowhere voice is the universe itself, some hidden aspect of it that rises momentarily over the motorway-roar of space and time to console you, to remind you that although you can’t overcome the distances, you can still sing the song – out into the darkness, over the separating voids, towards a fleeting moment of harmony…

  And then – just as manly hands throughout the Hall move clandestinely to brush away rogue tears – something happens. At first it’s hard to detect what it is, other than that it’s wrong, very wrong. Heads recoil involuntarily; a spasm of distress flickers across Father Laughton’s cheek, as at some transcendental tooth-ache.

  It’s the song – it appears to have somehow bifurcated; that is to say, it continues on as it was, but also and at the same time in a different key. The result is viscerally, nails-across-a-blackboard ugly, but the musicians do not seem to have noticed, and continue not to notice as the song does it again, so that there are now three versions playing at once, in different keys – and then another, and another, like parallel-universe Canons somehow gathered into the same auditorium, getting louder all the while. Wildly you look to either side of you, wondering if you’re going mad, because this surely is what madness must sound like. Everywhere you see hands pressed to ears, faces shrivelled up like snails retreating into their shells. Now as the layers mount on top of one another, some supra-song begins to loom above them, a song of all possible songs, something not so much heard as felt, like the awful oppressive atmospheric weight preceding a storm or other impending catastrophe. The volume soars; still Ruprecht et al. play on impassively. The engineer at the sound-desk regards his levels in horror; and now the Automator staggers out from the wings and into the waves of ineluctable noise, which has now achieved the status of unthinkable, impossible, no longer remotely discernible as a song; he lurches over the stage, like a man in a hurricane, only to be assailed, just as he reaches Ruprecht, by a peal of sonic energy that is like nothing on Earth –

  *

  Howard had driven to Seabrook at full tilt – his hand, bound clumsily in a huge swollen mitten of linen bandage, screaming every time he had to change gears or apply the brake, making him scream along with it – without knowing quite what he would do when he got there. The vague plan he had in his mind, of unmasking the coach in front of a gasping audience, followed by a Hollywood-style punch-up, Howard and Tom mano a mano, had, he knew, some serious holes (how could he fight with an injured hand? How could he fight a disabled man?); still, for the moment he preferred to leave these to one side, instead racing ahead to the aftermath, in which he arrived at Halley’s door, bruised and bloody from his encounter, but – as she would recognize instantly – inwardly restored. She would quieten his burbled apologies with a finger to the lips; she would smile that smile he had missed so much – so bright and strong, like a kinder, warmer cousin of light – and take him by his good hand inside to her bed.

  All these fantasies had been summarily squashed by the Automator. Ever since, Howard has been in the Ferry, trying to stoke up the remnants of his anger – ‘He hit me! The fucker actually hit me’ – sufficiently that he can… that he can what? Take the coach behind the swimming pool and teach him a lesson, like they were both fourteen years old? And then everything would be peachy, the world restored? Too late: reality has indelibly set in again. So he abandons his plans and just drinks. The pain in his hand provides an excellent excuse. It is excruciating, and has extended itself to colonize his entire body; everything pounds at him, like clumsy fingers on a piano – the laughter and grumbling of the other drinkers, the beauty of the beautiful lounge girl, the hideous carpet, the miasma of body odour… and now a familiar hound’s-tooth jacket.

  ‘Ah, Howard, wasn’t expecting to find you here…’ Jim Slattery pulls up a stool, motions to the lounge girl. ‘Mind if I…?’

  Howard makes an indifferent gesture with his good hand.

  ‘Didn’t make it to the concert?’

  ‘Sold out.’

  ‘Yes, indeed, even those of us with tickets – that is to say, there was a group of late arrivals from KPMG, Greg asked me if I wouldn’t mind… Didn’t bother me, of course, especially if it gives me the chance of a snifter without herself being any the wiser – cheers.’ The clink of glass causes Howard to wince, and the wince to set off a chain of small agonies. ‘Good lord – what happened to your hand?’

  ‘Caught it in a mousetrap,’ is the tight reply.

  ‘Oh,’ Slattery says equanimously. He sips at his drink, swirls it around his mouth. ‘I heard you’d been in the wars lately. That is to say, not just with the mice.’

  ‘Rodents of one kind or another,’ Howard says; then reflecting, he adds glumly, ‘mostly brought it on myself, though.’

  ‘Oh well. Things will come round, I’m sure.’ Howard merely grunts at this; the older man clears his throat and changes the subject. ‘You know, I came across something the other day that made me think of you. An essay by Robert Graves. “Mammon and the Black Goddess”.’

  ‘Ah, Graves.’ Howard, who feels that the poet has something to answer for in his present situation, smiles sardonically. ‘Whatever happened to old Graves?’

  ‘Well, I daresay you know most of the story – married after the war, moved to Wales, tried to live the domestic life. Didn’t last long, as you can imagine. He got himself mixed up with a poetess, an American named Laura Riding, and took off with her to Mallorca, where they set up shop with her as his muse. She was as mad as a hatter, by all accounts. Ran away with an Irishman, named Phibbs if I recall.’

  ‘Some muse,’ Howard remarks bitterly.

  ‘As a matter of fact that fitted Graves’s conception of things pretty neatly. The muse is an embodiment of the White Goddess, you see. If she settles down with you and starts a home, then she loses her powers. Becomes merely a woman, so to speak. Which means no more poetry, which in Graves’s eyes was almost as bad as death. If she deserts you, on the other hand, then you find another muse to inspire you, and the whole circus starts all over again.’

  ‘Makes you wonder why you’d even bother,’ Howard says.

  ‘There must have been an element of self-punishment to it, I think. Graves had always suffered tremendous guilt over his part in the war, the men he’d killed and seen killed. And then, you see, his son died – his son David was killed in Burma, in the Second World War. Graves had encouraged him to sign up, and helped him to get into the Royal Welch Fusiliers, his old regiment. It was directly after the death of his son that he started writing about the White Goddess, all this business about suffering and sacrifice in the name of poetry. Trying to make sense of it all, in his own barmy way.’

  Howard says nothing, recalls Kipling and Ruprecht Van Doren.

  ‘But that’s what was interesting about this essay,’ Slattery says. ‘Near the end of his life Graves met a Sufi mystic, who told him about another goddess, a Black Goddess. Mother Night, the Greeks called her. This Black Goddess existed beyond the White. Instead of desire and destruction, she represented wisdom and love – not romantic love, but real love, as you might say, reciproc
ating, enduring love. Of those who devoted their lives to the White Goddess, and this endless cycle of ravagement and restoration, a very few, if they managed to survive it, would eventually pass through her to the Black Goddess.’

  ‘Good for them,’ Howard says. ‘And what about everybody else? All the mugs who don’t manage to transcend or whatever?’

  Slattery’s face crumples into a smile. ‘Graves said that the best thing to do was to develop a strong sense of humour.’

  ‘A sense of humour,’ Howard repeats.

  ‘Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humour and you’ll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, it’s our own expectations that crush us.’ He raises his glass, sending ice cubes tumbling about his upper lip, and drains it. ‘I suppose I should be getting along, before my own goddess starts to wonder. Goodbye, Howard. Keep in touch. I hope I’ll see you before too long.’

  Just as the door closes behind Slattery, the lights go out in the pub, and the sudden darkness is filled by a dim but quite unearthly noise – at once eerie and, somehow, mechanical… but it lasts for only a few seconds, and then power is restored, and all returns to normal. The drinkers settle back into their chat; Howard, with no one to talk to, contents himself with nursing his drink and watching the lounge girl as she crosses and recrosses the floor, tray in hand – another muse-in-waiting, another goddess who would transform everything, whose beauty you could surely never get tired of…

  Muses, goddesses, it sounds so preposterous, but wasn’t that how Halley had appeared to him in the beginning? A fragment of pure otherness, a radiance who burned through the stale facts of his life like a flame through an old picture? She told him stories of her home and he heard something transcendental; he looked at her and he saw another world – America! – a magic soil where dreams, like seeds, would alight and instantly take root – far away from this tiny island where you never lost your old nickname, where people couldn’t help sliding into the positions left by their fathers and mothers, the same ones at the top, middle and bottom all the time, the same names in the school yearbook.

  And she, no doubt, had done the same with him. She had looked at him and seen Ireland, or whatever she thought that was; she had seen history, paganism, romantic landscapes, poetry, and not a man who needed help to love. From the beginning, each was for the other first and foremost a flesh-and-blood representative of a different life, a passport into a fresh new future; what had happened since then was nothing more or less cruel than the real person seeping through the illusion – not a gateway to anything, just somebody like you, fumbling their way through the day.

  A sense of humour, he thinks. A sense of humour. If only someone had told him before.

  Two hours after the chaos that closed the Seabrook College 140th Anniversary Concert – when it seemed that nothing could ever be quiet again – and the school is calm once more, although anyone who was present at the Quartet’s performance is still experiencing it as a ringing in his ears, and over the next few days a lot of people will be talking IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Everyone else has gone to bed; Geoff, Dennis and Mario are sitting on the slatted benches of the unlit Rec Room.

  ‘What did he say?’ Mario asks. ‘Are you going to be expelled?’

  ‘Probably,’ Dennis says.

  ‘We have to go and see him first thing on Monday,’ Geoff says. ‘He said he needed time to think before he decided what our punishment should be?’

  ‘Shit-o-rama,’ Mario says. ‘This is a high price to pay for a foolish experiment that did not work.’

  ‘Totally worth it,’ Dennis says. ‘Best thing Von Boner’s done in his whole useless overweight life.’

  In terms of the comprehensive destruction of a night’s entertainment, Ruprecht’s experiment was an unqualified success. The multifrequencied Pachelbel loop, building and building so unendurably, was merely a starter, noise-wise. Just as the Automator took the stage, the Van Doren Wave Oscillator crashed. Instantly, the Sports Hall was filled with a jangle of indescribable static: keening, popping, crackling, hissing, tweeting, belching, roaring, gurgling, a bedlam of utterly alien sounds unleashed at such a volume as to be palpable physical presences, a menagerie of impossible beasts marauding through our reality, disembodied, robotic voices interspersed among them, like a demented mechanical Pentecost…

  Too much for this audience; they fled for the doors. Hats were lost in the jostle, spectacles crushed, women knocked to the ground; they ran until they reached the entrance to the car park, where, a safe distance away, they turned back to view the still-ululating Hall, as though expecting it to implode or lift off into the sky. It did not; instead, after a couple of moments, the noise came to a sudden halt, as the sound-desk shorted out and with it the school power supply, at which point a large minority of them stormed back in again to track down the Automator and ask him what the hell kind of bloody game he was playing at.

  ‘I’m damned if I’m paying you ten thousand a year to turn my son into a terrorist –’

  ‘This never would have happened in Father Furlong’s day!’

  It took nearly an hour of placating, assuaging and mollifying before the Automator could return to his office, where the Quartet had been confined. When he did, he made little effort to disguise his fury. He railed; he roared; he pounded the desk, sending photographs and paperweights flying. There was a new tone in his voice tonight. Before he’d treated them as he treated all the boys – like insects, flimsy and inconsequential. Tonight he spoke to them like enemies.

  Ruprecht got the worst of it. Ruprecht, a deviant who had brought his parents nothing but shame; Ruprecht, whose brilliance covered a deep-rooted degeneracy of which this farrago was merely the latest example. You know what I’m talking about, Van Doren. The Acting Principal stared across the desk at him, like a ravenous animal through the bars of its cage. A lot of things have become clear to me now, he said, a lot of things.

  The others were all crying; but Ruprecht just stood there, head bowed, while words fell on him like axes to the chest.

  I’ll be honest with you, boys, the Automator concluded. For various legal reasons expulsion can be difficult to arrange these days. It’s not impossible you’ll get away with a long suspension. And in a way I hope you do. Because it means I will have the next four and a half years to make your lives hell. I will make them a living hell. You assholes.

  ‘Mamma Mia,’ Mario says now.

  ‘He can say what he wants,’ Dennis retorts. ‘We’re part of Seabrook history now. I mean, people are going to be talking about this for decades.’ The moon has peeped out from behind a cloud, and he is seized with a creeping euphoria. ‘The look on my mum’s face! Oh, Van Boner, you are a genius after all!’ A thought occurs to him. ‘Hey, maybe if I get expelled I could write his biography. What do you think? Bummer on the Loose: The Ruprecht Van Doren Story.’

  ‘Where is Ruprecht, anyway?’ asks Mario. ‘He’s not in his room.’

  ‘He seemed pretty down,’ Geoff remarks cautiously.

  ‘Well, what did he expect?’ Dennis says. ‘Skippy’s going to appear in a big ball of light and give us all high fives?’

  ‘I did not say to Ruprecht before, but if I am in Heaven getting it on with a sexy angel, there is no way I am coming back to attend some gay school concert,’ Mario says, then with a yawn rises from the bench. ‘Anyhow, I have heard enough bollocks for one evening. For the record, I hope you are not expelled. I would miss you guys, though this does not make me a homosexual.’

  ‘’Night, Mario.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever.’ The door wheezes shut behind him. For a time, the remaining two sit in silence, each occupied with his own thoughts; Geoff turned to the window, as if the faint silvering cast by the unveiled moon might reveal everything absent to be right out there in the yard…Then, after taking a moment, perhaps to summon up courage, he says casually to Dennis, ‘You don’t think it worked?’

  �
�What?’

  ‘Ruprecht’s experiment, you don’t think it worked?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Not even a little bit?’

  ‘How could it possibly have worked?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Geoff says, and then, ‘it’s just that when all that noise started… I thought I heard a voice that sounded like Skippy’s.’

  ‘Are you talking about the German truck driver?’

  ‘Didn’t he sound a lot like Skippy?’

  ‘Okay, explain to me why Skippy would be talking in German, about trucks.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Geoff admits.

  ‘Geoff, you should know by now that none of Ruprecht’s ideas ever works. And this one was off the wall even by his standards.’

  ‘Right,’ Geoff says. His face falls a little; then rouses, as he is struck by something. ‘Hey though – if you didn’t ever think it would work, how come you agreed to do it?’

  Dennis considers this, and then at last, ‘I would say malice.’

  ‘Malice?’

  ‘Like the Automator said. Malice, wanting to spoil the concert for everybody, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Oh.’ Geoff allows a polite interval to elapse while he affects to take this on board. In the moonlight he has been seized by a tingle of euphoria – the same sensation Dennis had earlier, reflecting on the concert, only Geoff’s is from a different source. Then, attempting to muffle his delight, he says, ‘I know the real reason you did it.’

  ‘Oh, you do?’ Dennis all caustic surprise. ‘Enlighten me, please.’

  ‘You did it because you wanted all of us to be together again. You knew it wouldn’t work, and you knew we’d get in trouble, but you also knew that what Skippy would want, if he was here, is for us all still to be friends? And this was the only way to do it. And even though it didn’t work, it did sort of work, because when we’re all together, it’s like Skippy’s there too, because each of us has his own little jigsaw piece of him he remembers, and when you fit them all together, and you make the whole picture, then it’s like he comes to life.’