Skippy Dies (42 page)

‘The friend says, “Okay, we should definitely go and get someone.” But Niall’s sister has already pushed the door open. Afterwards
she said it was like the music had put her in a trance. There’s a big
cre-e-e-eak
. The two of them huddle together and step inside. And guess what they find there?’

‘What?’ whispers Geoff.

‘Nothing,’ Dennis says.

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing. The room is totally empty.’

‘But…’ Mario utters in a strangulated voice. ‘What about the music?’

‘They can still hear the music, clear as a bell. And there’s also a lovely smell, like a field full of flowers, though it’s
almost winter, and the room has no windows and is covered in dust and cobwebs. But almost immediately the smell and the music
just… fade away. And they’re standing in an empty room.’ Dennis pauses summatively, and then, ‘Ever since, Niall’s sister’s
friend’s been saying that the music must have come from somewhere else. Like maybe one of the boarders was playing it in her
room, and it was carried through an air vent, or down the pipes? But the boarders’ dorms are way over on the other side of
the school. Niall’s sister is certain that
somehow
the music was coming from that room.’

‘Whoa,’ Geoff says.

‘But how is it possible?’ Mario says.

‘Well, they must have built the room on top of the ancient burial mound,’ Geoff replies. ‘It’s the only logical explanation.’

Ruprecht gets up and paces about the room, gnawing his knuckles.

‘We know that St Brigid’s was a convent before they opened it as a school.’ Dennis is all seriousness now. ‘But what was it
before that? This Druid guy says in days of Yore everyone worshipped this goddess called the White Goddess, and these mounds
and things belonged to her. But when the Church came and spread Christianity across the country, it took over all the magical
places for itself. Changed the names, converted the old legends into stories about, you know, God and stuff. Or else covered
them over completely. It makes sense. You’re a bunch of nuns or monks or whatever, you want everybody in the neighbourhood
following orders and doing what you tell them. If there’s some mystical fairy fort in the neighbourhood where weird shit keeps
happening, you wouldn’t want people to know about it. You’d build your convent right on top of it and lock it up so no one
could get anywhere near it.’

Ruprecht halts his peregrinations and rounds rather fiercely on Dennis. ‘Well, even if it is the long-lost Seabrook fairy
fort, even if Niall’s sister did hear music – so what? What does any of it have to do with my experiment?’

Geoff fields this one: ‘Gee, Ruprecht, you said there might have been some hidden factor influencing the outcome last night…’

Ruprecht opens his mouth to reply, but breaks off and turns his back on them, muttering unintelligibly and throwing his hands
about like a derelict in an underpass. ‘Ley lines, fairies – that isn’t science. Who ever heard of an experiment using fairies?’

‘It does sound pretty unorthodox,’ Dennis admits. ‘But didn’t you say yourself that a scientist has to open himself up to
every possibility, no matter how weird?’

‘You did say that, Ruprecht,’ Geoff confirms.

‘And didn’t you say M-theory is weirder than any other theory in the history of science?’ Dennis perseveres. ‘And hasn’t your
Professor Tamashi always said that probably the only way we’ll master hyperspace in time to save Earth is if a superior civilization
comes along and gives us the technology? Well, what if the technology’s already here? What if the aliens have been and gone
three thousand years ago, but they’ve left their gateway behind? What if, all this time, the solution to M-theory has been
literally right under your nose?’

‘Mound does begin with M,’ Mario observes thoughtfully.

‘Holy smoke, Ruprecht – so does music!’

‘All right!’ Ruprecht, as his resistance crumbles, flinches in self-disgust. ‘Say it
is
possible. Why would this mound – why would it suddenly
stop
influencing the experiment?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe…’ Dennis taps at his temple like he’s starting an old watch ‘… maybe its influence fluctuates. Maybe
there was a surge at the exact moment of the first experiment, but normally it doesn’t reach any further than that little
room.’

‘So if there were some way to gain access to that room…’

For the first time since Optimus Prime disappeared, the pregnant sense of last night, the nearness of something overwhelming,
pervades the basement again, filling the corners and slowly building…

That’s when Skippy’s phone beeps with a new message; and each of them realizes, before he even looks at Skippy’s dumb-struck
face, that he knows who it’s from.

The night of the break-up Halley slept on the sofa. She wouldn’t take the bed, no matter how he pleaded with her; it was plain
she would have preferred to go, if she’d only been able to summon the energy. Howard was surprised at the way she’d capitulated.
He had expected screaming, punches, excoriation. Instead, she simply sank onto the couch as if he’d sapped her across the
back of the head; she cried longer and harder than all the other times he’d seen her cry put together. And he could not comfort
her; he was transformed into some monstrous creature whose touch brings only pain.

The next morning she left. He has not seen her since. He guesses she is staying with one or other of the motley straggle of
friends she has assembled in her time here – people from work, Americans she’d met on expat forums, other émigrés and cast-aways
who’d found themselves stranded on the margins of Dublin life. She calls to the house when he’s not there to collect her belongings;
every time he comes home from work some new small thing is gone, as if he’s being burgled in instalments.

The house feels different without her. Though she still has clothes in the wardrobe, though her hairdryer still sits atop
the dresser, her razor on the shelf in the shower, the rooms seem bare, denuded; her absence dominates the house – becomes,
oxymoronically, a kind of physical presence, shaped and palpable, as though she moved out and this emptiness moved in to take
up the space she left. There is a new kind of silence that the stereo turned up all the way can only fill one side of; the
air that meets him when he unlocks the door now is clean and clear, smokeless, odourless, breathable.

‘I just wish you hadn’t gone and told her about Aurelie,’ Farley says. ‘You could have done it without telling her that.’

‘It wouldn’t be fair, just giving her half the story.’

‘You’ve burned your bridges now, though. She won’t take you back.’

Howard sighs. ‘What could I do, Farley? If your hand’s in the fire, you know?’

‘How’s that?’

‘Something my dad used to say. If your hand’s in the fire, eventually you have to accept that the only solution is to take
it out. Aurelie was the catalyst, that’s all. It would have happened sooner or later.’

But he’s not sure this is true. If he hadn’t met Aurelie, maybe it would never have happened; maybe he would never have found
the courage to leave Halley; maybe he’d have stayed with her, got married and lived the rest of his life without ever knowing
what real love could feel like – how singular, how incandescent, how complete. Aurelie changed everything, and the truth is
that when he confessed to Halley, he did it in part for
her –
as a kind of prayer to her, a declaration of faith on which to found a different kind of life.

An attempt, as well, to conjure her back from whatever cloud she’d vanished behind. She never came back after mid-term break;
according to the Automator, ‘unforeseen circumstances’ had forced her to extend her holiday. Every day Howard sees her classes
trooping despondently from the Geography Room to the study hall, or carrying votive bundles of cardboard and paper to the
recycling bins, their faces anxious, hopeful, like Indians doing a rain dance. He knows how they feel. Since mid-term he’s
existed in a constant state of tension, braced against every moment as the one that might finally restore her. Even out of
school, even on his own, shopping in the supermarket, sitting at the traffic lights, he finds himself holding his breath.
But the days are a series of ghost pregnancies, delivering nothing.

‘Unforeseen circumstances.’ He can imagine what – who – that means. Seabrook was supposed to be a career break for her, a
transitional phase; she hadn’t intended to get mixed up with
anyone, especially not someone already mixed up with someone else. Now she’s wondering what she’s got herself into, and whether
there’s still time to get herself out. If only he could talk to her! If only he could let her know that this is real to him,
more real than anything that has happened before! Or better yet, magically transport the two of them to the time in the future
when they’ve started out on a life together, the chaos and agony of these interim weeks already faded, the blizzard of flyaway
moments that is the past replaced by something exhilarating, serene, lit from within…

As for Halley, except for Farley he tells no one that she’s gone. Remembering what happened to Jim Slattery all those years
ago, he’s haunted by the thought that somehow the boys will find out. But so far the news appears not to have reached them.
In fact, he finds his classes going unusually well. The second-years in particular: thanks to his mid-term reading on the
First World War, which having nothing better to do he’d continued after Halley left, Howard finds himself able to speak about
his subject from a rare position of authority, and to his surprise, the boys listen. Listen, speak, formulate theories: in
the limbo days after mid-term, while he waits for Aurelie to return and his new life to begin, these classes – which have
so often resembled trench warfare themselves, a huge amount of labour and bloodshed for a dismally small area of terrain –
become something he actually looks forward to.

This weekend is his first as a single man for almost three years. He has neglected to make plans and spends most of it in
his house. It feels, at the start, a lot like the times his parents left him home alone as a teenager. He is free to stay
up as late as he wants, listen to music as loud as he wants, eat what he wants, drink what he wants, download porn, belch,
walk around in his boxer shorts. By seven o’clock he is drunk; by eight, the novelty has worn off and he finds himself slumped
over the kitchen table, watching the microwave defrost a frozen spring roll. Then he hears the key turn in the door and Halley
walks in.

Both of them freeze, she by the light switch, he at the table. It is a moment quite electrifying in its cold, untempered immediacy
– not quite like seeing a ghost, more like discovering, in the face of another, that you have become a ghost yourself.

‘I didn’t think you’d be here,’ Halley says.

‘Yeah,’ is all Howard can think to say. He wishes he was wearing trousers. ‘Can I get you something? Tea?’

He doesn’t know quite what tack he should take with her – chastened? Solicitous? Tender? Stoic? The question is moot: ‘Someone’s
waiting,’ she says, gesturing towards the road where an indistinct figure sits inside a car. She goes to their bedroom and
begins to throw things in a box. He waits in the kitchen for her to finish, which she does in fifteen or twenty minutes –
whisking back through the house and bidding him goodnight with all the warmth of a solicitor’s letter. Then she is gone, and
he is left with the hum of the electricity, to go into the bedroom, if he so desires, and see what she has taken.

He drinks the rest of the beer and goes to bed early, but he can’t sleep. The bereaved dog across the road has taken to howling
into the small hours of the night, long ululations laden with rage and grief for its lost companion. Howard lies there for
an hour or two, listening to the howls and watching the ceiling; then, with a sigh, he throws back the sheets and goes down
to the kitchen to sit at the bar with one of his library books (now overdue, and subject to a fine, the borrowing sheet pasted
to the fly-leaf informs him sternly, of one penny a week).

He’s read so many books about the war at this point that he’s in danger of becoming a buff; he’s even started to develop Ideas.
At some point in his reading, he realized the conflict had coalesced into two separate wars. The first, the war of the generals
and the dons as well as the dull school textbook, proliferates with causes, strategies, notable battles, and is fought in
the moral light of the so-called ‘Big Words’ – Tradition, Honour, Duty, Patriotism. In the other war, however, the one the
soldiers actually experienced, these features are nowhere to be found. In this war, any kind of
overarching meaning, even straight enmity between the two sides, seems to dissolve into nothing, and the only constants are
chaos, destruction and the sense of being lost in a machinery too huge and powerful to be understood. The very battlefields
of this war – so clearly delineated on the arrow-strewn relief maps of the first – are deracinated, volatile, pitching themselves
up without warning into the sky, to make landmarks, place names, measurements meaningless. The two disparate accounts remind
Howard strangely of what Farley said in the Ferry that night about the differing explanations of the universe – the relativistic
and the quantum, or the very large and very small. The generals during and the dons after it wanted more than anything else
for the war to make
sense
, to embody the classical concept of conflict, to look, in short, like a war, just as Einstein tried to fit all of creation
into his one perfect geometric scheme; but in the same way that the subatomic particles defied any attempt at explaining them,
rebelled towards an evermore violent schemelessness and disorder, so the war, the more its leaders insisted on the contrary,
spiralled into incomprehensibility, the more soldiers in their tens and hundreds of thousands were wiped out. From those soldiers’
perspective, meanwhile, the war was one sprawling, senseless confusion, a four-year horror story with no discernible point,
other than to belie not only the generals’ causes and big words but the very idea of a comprehensible and God-sanctioned world
– which seems to Howard nicely quantum, if nothing else.