Skippy Dies (2 page)

When he goes back inside, Zhang Xielin is kneeling, cradling Skippy’s head on his lap. Doughnuts scatter the ground like little
candied wreaths. In the silence, people peek at Ruprecht with moist, pitying eyes. Ruprecht glares back at them murderously.
He is fizzing, he is quaking, he is incandescent with rage. He feels like stomping back to his room, and leaving Skippy where
he is. He feels like screaming out, ‘What? What? What? What?’ He goes back outside to look into the traffic, he is crying,
and in that moment he feels all the hundreds and thousands of facts in his head turn to sludge.

Through the laurel trees, in an upper corner of Seabrook Tower, you can just make out the window of their dorm, where not
half an hour ago Skippy challenged Ruprecht to the race. Above the lot, the great pink hoop of the Ed’s Doughnut House sign
broadcasts its frigid synthetic light into the night, a neon zero that outshines the moon and all the constellations of infinite
space beyond it. Ruprecht is not looking in that direction. The universe at this moment appears to him as something horrific,
thin and threadbare and empty; it seems to know this, and in shame to turn away.

In winter months, from his seat in the middle desk of the middle row, Howard used to look out the window of the History Room
and watch the whole school go up in flames. The rugby pitches, the basketball court, the car park and the trees beyond – for
one beautiful instant everything would be engulfed; and though the spell was quickly broken – the light deepening and reddening
and flattening out, leaving the school and its environs intact – you would know at least that the day was almost over.

Today he stands at the head of the class: the wrong angle and the wrong time of year to view the sunset. He knows, however,
that fifteen minutes remain on the clock, and so pinching his nose, sighing imperceptibly, he tries again. ‘Come on, now.
The main protagonists. Just the main ones. Anybody?’

The torpid silence remains undisturbed. The radiators are blazing, though it is not particularly cold outside: the heating
system is elderly and erratic, like most things at this end of the school, and over the course of the day the heat builds
to a swampy, malarial fug. Howard complains, of course, like the other teachers, but he is secretly not ungrateful; combined
with the powerful soporific effects of history itself, it means the disorder levels of his later classes rarely extend beyond
a low drone of chatter and the occasional paper aeroplane.

‘Anyone?’ he repeats, looking over the class, deliberately ignoring Ruprecht Van Doren’s upstretched hand, beneath which the
rest of Ruprecht strains breathlessly. The rest of the boys blink back at Howard as if to reproach him for disturbing their
peace. In Howard’s old seat, Daniel ‘Skippy’ Juster stares catatonically into space, for all the world as if he’s been drugged;
in the back-row suntrap, Henry Lafayette has made a little nest
of his arms in which to lay his head. Even the clock sounds like it’s half asleep.

‘We’ve been talking about this for the last two days. Are you telling me no one can name a single one of the countries involved?
Come on, you’re not getting out of here till you’ve shown me that you know this.’

‘Uruguay?’ Bob Shambles incants vaguely, as if summoning the answer from magical vapours.

‘No,’ Howard says, glancing down at the book spread open on his lectern just to make sure. ‘
Known at the time as “the war to end all wars”
,’ the caption reads, below a picture of a vast, waterlogged moonscape from which all signs of life, natural or man-made,
have been comprehensively removed.

‘The Jews?’ Ultan O’Dowd says.

‘The Jews are not a country. Mario?’

‘What?’ Mario Bianchi’s head snaps up from whatever he is attending to, probably his phone, under the desk. ‘Oh, it was… it
was – ow, stop – sir, Dennis is feeling my leg! Stop feeling me, feeler!’

‘Stop feeling his leg, Dennis.’

‘I wasn’t, sir!’ Dennis Hoey, all wounded innocence.

On the blackboard, ‘MAIN’ – Militarism, Alliances, Industrialization, Nationalism – copied out of the textbook at the start
of class, is slowly bleached out by the lowering sun. ‘Yes, Mario?’

‘Uh…’ Mario prevaricates. ‘Well, Italy…’

‘Italy was in charge of the catering,’ Niall Henaghan suggests.

‘Hey,’ Mario warns.

‘Sir, Mario calls his wang
Il Duce
,’ says Dennis.

‘Sir!’

‘Dennis.’

‘But he does – you do, I’ve heard you. “Time to rise, Duce,” you say. “Your people await you, Duce.” ’

‘At least I have a wang, and am not a boy with… Instead of a wang, he has just a blank piece of…’

‘I feel we’re straying off the point here,’ Howard intervenes.
‘Come on, guys. The protagonists of the First World War. I’ll give you a clue. Germany. Germany was involved. Who were Germany’s
allies – yes, Henry?’ as Henry Lafayette, whatever he is dreaming of, emits a loud snort. Hearing his name, he raises his
head and gazes at Howard with dizzy, bewildered eyes.

‘Elves?’ he ventures.

The classroom explodes into hysterics.

‘Well, what was the question?’ Henry asks, somewhat woundedly.

Howard is on the brink of accepting defeat and beginning the class all over again. A glance at the clock, however, absolves
him from any further effort today, so instead he directs them back to the textbook, and has Geoff Sproke read out the poem
reproduced there.

‘ “In Flanders Fields”,’ Geoff obliges. ‘By Lieutenant John McCrae.’

‘John Mc
Gay
,’ glosses John Reidy.

‘That’s enough.’

‘ “
In Flanders Fields
,” ’ Geoff reads, ‘ “
the poppies blow
”:

At this point the bell rings. In a single motion the daydreaming and somnolent snap awake, grab their bags, stow their books
and move as one for the door. ‘For tomorrow, read the end of the chapter,’ Howard calls over the melee. ‘And while you’re
at it, read the stuff you were supposed to read for today.’ But the class has already fizzed away, and Howard is left as he
always is, wondering if anyone has been listening to a single thing he’s said; he can practically see his words crumpled up
on the floor. He packs
away his own book, wipes clean the board and sets off to fight his way through the home-time throng to the staffroom.

In Our Lady’s Hall, hormonal surges have made giants and midgets of the crowd. The tang of adolescence, impervious to deodorant
or opened windows, hangs heavy, and the air tintinnabulates with bleeps, chimes and trebly shards of music as two hundred
mobile phones, banned during the school day, are switched back on with the urgency of divers reconnecting to their oxygen
supply. From her alcove a safe elevation above it, the plaster Madonna with the starred halo and the peaches-and-cream complexion
pouts coquettishly at the rampaging maleness below.

‘Hey, Flubber!’ Dennis Hoey scampers across Howard’s path to waylay William ‘Flubber’ Cooke. ‘Hey, I just wanted to ask you
a question?’

‘What?’ Flubber immediately suspicious.

‘Uh, I was just wondering – are you a bummer tied to a tree?’

Brows creasing, Flubber – fourteen stone and on his third trip through second year – turns this over.

‘It’s not a trick or anything,’ promises Dennis. ‘I just wanted to know, you know, if you’re a bummer tied to a tree.’

‘No,’ Flubber resolves, at which Dennis takes flight, declaring exuberantly, ‘Bummer on the loose! Bummer on the loose!’ Flubber
lets out a roar and prepares to give chase, then stops abruptly and ducks off in the other direction as the crowd parts and
a tall, cadaverous figure comes striding through.

Father Jerome Green: teacher of French, coordinator of Seabrook’s charitable works, and by some stretch the school’s most
terrifying personage. Wherever he goes it is with two or three bodies’ worth of empty space around him, as if he’s accompanied
by an invisible retinue of pitchfork-wielding goblins, ready to jab at anyone who happens to be harbouring an impure thought.
As he passes, Howard musters a weak smile; the priest glares back at him the same way he does at everyone, with a kind of
ready, impersonal disapproval, so adept at looking into man’s soul and seeing sin, desire, ferment that he does it now like
ticking a box.

Sometimes Howard feels dispiritedly as if not one thing has changed here in the ten years since he graduated. The priests
in particular bring this out in him. The hale ones are still hale, the doddery ones still dodder; Father Green still collects
canned food for Africa and terrorizes the boys, Father Laughton still gets teary-eyed when he presents the works of Bach to
his unheeding classes, Father Foley still gives ‘guidance’ to troubled youngsters, invariably in the form of an admonition
to play more rugby. On bad days Howard sees their endurance as a kind of personal rebuke – as if that almost-decade of life
between matriculation and his ignominious return here had, because of his own ineptitude, been rolled back, struck from the
record, deemed merely so much fudge.

Of course this is pure paranoia. The priests are not immortal. The Holy Paraclete Fathers are experiencing the same problem
as every other Catholic order: they are dying out. Few of the priests in Seabrook are under sixty, and the newest recruit
to the pastoral programme – one of an ever-dwindling number – is a young seminarian from somewhere outside Kinshasa; when
the school principal, Father Desmond Furlong, fell ill at the beginning of September, it was a layman – economics teacher
Gregory L. Costigan – who took the reins, for the first time in Seabrook’s history.

Leaving behind the wood-panelled halls of the Old Building, Howard passes up the Annexe, climbs the stairs, and opens, with
the usual frisson of weirdness, the door marked ‘Staffroom’. Inside, a half-dozen of his colleagues are kvetching, marking
homework or changing their nicotine patches. Without addressing anyone or otherwise signalling his presence, Howard goes to
his locker and throws a couple of books and a pile of copies into his briefcase; then, moving crab-like to avoid eye contact,
he steals out of the room again. He clatters back down the stairs and the now-deserted corridor, eyes fixed determinedly on
the exit – when he is arrested by the sound of a young female voice.

It appears that, although the bell for the end of the school day rang a good five minutes ago, class in the Geography Room
is still in full swing. Crouching slightly, Howard peers through the narrow window set in the door. The boys inside show no
sign of impatience; in fact, by their expressions, they are quite oblivious to the passage of time.

The reason for this stands at the head of the class. Her name is Miss McIntyre; she is a substitute. Howard has caught glimpses
of her in the staffroom and on the corridor, but he hasn’t yet managed to speak to her. In the cavernous depths of the Geography
Room, she draws the eye like a flame. Her blonde hair has that cascading quality you normally see only in TV ads for shampoo,
complemented by a sophisticated magnolia two-piece more suited to a boardroom than a transition-year class; her voice, while
soft and melodious, has at the same time an ungainsayable quality, an undertone of command. In the crook of her arm she cradles
a globe, which while she speaks she caresses absently as if it were a fat, spoiled housecat; it almost seems to purr as it
revolves langorously under her fingertips.

‘… just beneath the surface of the Earth,’ she is saying, ‘temperatures so high that the rock itself is molten – can anyone
tell me what it’s called, this molten rock?’

‘Magma,’ croak several boys at once.

‘And what do you call it, when it bursts up onto the Earth’s surface from a volcano?’

‘Lava,’ they respond tremulously.

‘Excellent! And millions of years ago, there was an enormous amount of volcanic activity, with magma boiling up over the entire
surface of the Earth non-stop. The landscape around us today’ – she runs a lacquered fingernail down a swelling ridge of mountain
– ‘is mostly the legacy of this era, when the whole planet was experiencing dramatic physical changes. I suppose you could
call it Earth’s teenage years!’

The class blushes to its collective roots and stares down at its
textbook. She laughs again, and spins the globe, snapping it under her fingertips like a musician plucking the strings of
a double bass, then catches sight of her watch. ‘Oh my gosh! Oh, you poor things, I should have let you out ten minutes ago!
Why didn’t someone say something?’

The class mumbles inaudibly, still looking at the book.

‘Well, all right…’ She turns to write their homework on the blackboard, reaching up so that her skirt rises to expose the
back of her knees; moments later the door opens, and the boys troop reluctantly out. Howard, affecting to study the photographs
on the noticeboard of the Hillwalking Club’s recent outing to Djouce Mountain, watches from the corner of his eye until the
flow of grey jumpers has ceased. When she fails to appear, he goes back to investi–

‘Oh!’

‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’ He hunkers down beside her and helps her re-amass the pages that have fluttered all over the gritty
corridor floor. ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you. I was just rushing back to a… a meeting…’

‘That’s all right,’ she says, ‘thanks,’ as he places a sheaf of Ordnance Survey maps on top of the stack she’s gathered back
in her arms. ‘Thank you,’ she repeats, looking directly into his eyes, and continuing to look into them as they rise in unison
to their feet, so that Howard, finding himself unable to look away, feels a brief moment of panic, as if they have somehow
become locked together, like those apocryphal stories you hear about the kids who get their braces stuck together while kissing
and have to get the fire brigade to cut them out.