Skippy Dies (45 page)

By the looks of it, getting into the girls’ school will be only marginally less difficult than accessing the higher dimensions.
The main gates close at five, leaving only a pedestrian entrance that leads right by the window of the gatekeeper’s lodge,
home to an infamously vigilant janitor named Brody and also to Brody’s small but bloodthirsty dog, Nipper. Anyone eluding
these two will find the front entrance to the school building locked, and the back entrance taking him into the administrative
area, comprising the Dean of Boarders’ office, the Principal’s office, the Secretariat and the Prefects’ Lounge – the lion’s
den, in short.

‘The only realistic point of entry,’ Dennis says, ‘is here, via the fire escape.’ He points to the symbol on the map demarcating
the iron staircase. ‘The window at the top brings you directly into the nuns’ quarters. From there, it’s a matter of getting
from the second storey to the basement on the other side of the school, while avoiding the nuns, booby-traps set to maim trespassers,
hockey-stick-wielding
prefects, and so forth. Then all we have to do is get into the locked room with the burial mound under it, reassemble the
pod inside, run a lead back over the wall to hook us up to the Cosmic Energy Compressor, and open the portal, this time making
sure we get everything on film. Next stop, the Nobel Prize.’

‘No more school for us,’ Mario says. ‘We will become global celebrities.’

‘Well, I will,’ Ruprecht amends.

‘Do you think it’ll work?’ Skippy says.

Ruprecht does: since that night in the basement, he’s become a total convert to the mysterious power of ancient burial mounds.
‘I’ve been reading up on them on the Internet, and scientifically speaking, there are all sorts of strange phenomena attached
to them that have yet to be explained. It’s an unconventional approach, I know. But as Professor Tamashi says, “Science is
the realm of the formerly impossible.” ’

‘But what happens if the nuns catch you?’

‘It’s a chance we have to take,’ Ruprecht says.

‘The Condor flies tomorrow night, Skip,’ Dennis says. ‘There’s still room on our team for one more.’

‘Well, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go tomorrow,’ Skippy says. ‘That’s when I’m going to Lori’s house.’

Another time Skippy might have been jealous of Dennis and his new role at the centre of Ruprecht’s life; tonight, as he lies
in bed, he is thinking only of tomorrow – not Dennis, not Carl, not pills or the swim meet or Operation Condor: tomorrow and
nothing else. He’s so excited he doesn’t know how he’ll ever get to sleep; but he must do because next thing it’s 6 a.m.,
and he’s plunging
pow!
into fresh chlorine.

The lucky boys who made the cut have extra training all this week, a half-hour every morning before the others start; through
the perspex roof the sky is still pitch-dark, it could be midnight. From the side of the pool, Coach claps a rhythm, while
they race up and down, up and down, an endless journey over the same
short distance. Breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly, crawl: Skippy’s arms and legs do the movements by themselves, while he
floats somewhere inside his body like a passenger. In flashes, through foam, Garret Dennehy and Siddartha Niland appear in
the parallel lanes either side, like fragments of reflections, different Skippys in different worlds.

Outside the showers, while the others are washing, the team huddles round, arms folded across slippery cold bodies, listening
to Coach with serious grown-up expressions. There’s only three days left before the meet!!! He gives them the itinerary and
assigns them their buddies for the trip. ‘Daniel, you’ll partner with Antony as before…’ ‘Ha ha, tough shit, Juster!’ ‘Better
bring some ear-plugs!’ Antony ‘Air Raid’ Taylor, the loudest snorer in the whole school, who cannot be woken till morning
once he falls asleep unless you throw a bucket of water over him.

‘Okay, hit the showers. And remember, take
care
of yourselves over the next few days. No horseplay. I don’t want all that good work going to waste because someone’s pulled
a muscle wrestling, or stood on a nail.’

On a nail, on glass, on acid, on burning coals, or you walk under scaffolding and a girder drops on top of you, or you get
burned in a fire, or you’re kidnapped by terrorists? When you think about it there are so many things that could go wrong!
But Skippy’s not thinking about it, his brain is full of lori lori lori lori! He can’t think of anything else, through swimming,
through breakfast, German, Religion, Art, the thought of her making everything beautifully unreal, like the last days of school,
when you’re walking along the edge of June and though class hasn’t ended summer’s creeping into everything like spilled orange
juice through the pages of your copybook, summer that’s stronger than school, Lori that’s like a one-girl summer…

In English they’re doing a poem called ‘The Road Not Taken’, about this guy Robert Frost in a wood, reading which Mr Slattery
becomes unaccountably emotional.

‘A life, you see – a life, Frost is saying, is something that must
be
chosen
, just like a path through a wood. The tricky thing for us is that we live in an age that seems to present us with a whole
raft of choices, a maze of ready-made paths. But if you look more closely, many of them turn out to be simply different versions
of the same thing, to buy products, for example, or to believe whatever prefabricated narratives we’re offered to believe
in, a religion, a country, a football team, a war. The idea of making one’s own choices, of for example not believing, not
consuming, remain as less travelled as ever…’

‘Hey! Skip!’ Mario hisses, leaning across Geoff to poke Skippy in the arm. ‘Have you got a present to bring to your lady?’

‘I need to bring a present?’

Mario claps his hand to his forehead. ‘
Mamma mia
! It is no wonder you Irish remain virgins until you are forty!’

At lunch break they walk up to the shopping mall to get Lori a present. All the money in his wallet buys Skippy the second-smallest
box of chocolates. On the way back, Dennis, who has been unusually quiet this lunchtime, speaks up. ‘I’ve been thinking about
that Robert Frost poem,’ he says. ‘I don’t think it’s about making choices at all.’

‘What’s it about, so?’ Geoff says.

‘Anal sex,’ Dennis says.

‘Anal sex?’

‘How’d’you figure, Dennis?’

‘Well, once you see it, it’s pretty obvious. Just look at what he says. He’s in a
wood
, right? He sees two
roads
in front of him. He takes the one
less travelled
. What else could it be about?’

‘Uh, woods?’

‘Going for a walk?’

‘Don’t you listen in class? Poetry’s never about what it says it’s about, that’s the whole point of it. Obviously Mrs Frost
or whoever isn’t going to be too happy with him going around telling the world about this time he gave it to her up the bum.
So he cleverly disguises it by putting it in a poem which to the untrained eye is just about a boring walk in some gay wood.’

‘But, Dennis, do you think Mr Slattery’d be teaching it to us if it was really about anal sex?’

‘What does Mr Slattery know?’ Dennis scoffs. ‘You think he’s ever taken his wife up the road less travelled?’

‘Poh, when have
you
ever gone up the road less travelled?’ Mario challenges.

Dennis strokes his chin. ‘Well, there was that magical night with your mother… I tried to stop her!’ – ducking out of the
way as Mario swings at him. ‘But she was insatiable! Insatiable!’

Passing back beneath the tattered sycamores, they see a commotion at the entrance to the basement. Boys are milling around,
wisps of smoke gusting over their heads. As they approach, Mitchell Gogan detaches himself from the group rubbernecking at
the door and arrives breathlessly at their side. ‘Hey, Juster –’ barely able to contain his glee ‘– isn’t your locker number
181?’

Yes, and it’s on fire. Skippy squeezes through the crowd to find flames coursing up the open door, roaring proprietorially
in the interior; sparks shoot up to the ceiling and descend again, trailing soot like downed aeroplanes. Boys watch, grinning,
their faces dyed a hellish orange; and in the midst of them – staring at him with eyes that in the gothic light are like the
windows of an empty house – is Carl. Skippy gapes back in horror, unable to look away. Then from behind him comes a gravelly
voice, and Noddy emerges through the bodies, his lumpy troll face flushed red, the fire extinguisher in his hand. ‘Ah Jaysus!’
he shouts. ‘What de fuck’s dis?’

He aims the extinguisher and the crowd, with a single howl of delight, leaps backward as foam cascades into the flames. In
less than a minute the fire is out; the boys disperse, but Skippy hovers shamefacedly as Noddy pokes through the charred contents,
taking care of any embers. ‘Dis your locker, is it?’ he accosts Skippy. ‘D’you have fireworks in dere or lighter fluid or
something?’

Skippy shakes his head mutely, gazing into its sodden black heart.

‘So how’d dis happen, so?’

Noddy’s rancid breath blasts against his nostrils. Through the miasma of smoke he can see Carl watching him, motionless as
a waxwork. ‘I don’t know.’

‘
I don’t know
,’ the janitor mouths, turning back to the devastated locker. ‘Well, de whole ting’s fuckin banjaxed – here, where’re you
goin, gimme your name, you…’

But Skippy’s broken free and reeled away. Next thing he knows he’s in his dorm room. The sky in the window is icy-cold; particles
of soot cling to the ribbons of the microscopic box of chocolates. Without thinking he finds himself reaching for the pills
– then he stops. Dennis, Geoff, Ruprecht and Mario have appeared behind him, arranged in the doorway musicians-of-Bremen-style,
regarding him sombrely.

‘What?’ he says.

‘Are you all right, Skip?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Was there a lot of stuff in there?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘What do you mean?’

There is a pause, an exchange of looks, and then Ruprecht: ‘Skippy, I think what happened to your locker may not have been
an accident.’

‘You can’t go to Lori’s house, Skip!’ Geoff blurts. ‘Carl will kill you.’

‘I’m going to go.’ Skippy is adamant. ‘Carl’s not going to stop me.’

‘But, uh, Skip, what if he
does
stop you?’

‘He can
try
,’ Skippy says defiantly.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Maybe it’s time someone stopped
him
.’ He doesn’t even know it’s what he’s thinking until the words leave his mouth, but as soon as they do, he knows he means
it.

‘What are you talking about? You don’t stand a chance against him!’

‘This way you’re going to lose the girl,
and
get stomped into the ground.’

‘And you’ve got a race in three days!’ Geoff remembers. ‘Skippy, how will you be able to race if you’re stomped into the ground?’

‘Skippy?’

Downstairs, bitter smoke from the cheap wood of the locker still inflects the air, and heads turn and snicker at Skippy as
they drift back to class. He ignores them, sweeping the hallway from left to right, until there, in the doorway of the Mechanical
Drawing Room, he sees him: the only person Skippy knows whose
back
looks angry… Heart beating in his ears like a kettle-drum, with a momentum that seems to come from elsewhere, he moves through
the tunnel of air connecting the two of them, and stretches out his hand to tap Carl on the shoulder.

Around them, the corridor comes to a standstill. In the doorway, Carl slowly turns, and his bloodshot eyes fall emptily on
Skippy. They show no sign of knowing who he is; they show no sign of anything. It is like staring into an abyss, an infinite,
indifferent abyss…

Skippy swallows, then in one quick rush charges, ‘You set fire to my locker!’

Carl’s expression doesn’t alter; when at last he speaks it’s as if every word is a deadweight that must be hauled up with
chains and pulleys from the bottom of his feet. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ he says.

Apologize! Walk away! Thank him for doing such a thorough job! ‘After school,’ Skippy says, praying his voice won’t break.
‘Behind the swimming pool. You and me.’

A low buzz emanates from the encircling crowd. It takes a moment for Carl to react; then slowly his jaw drops and a leaden
series of laughs come out. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! The hollow laugh of a robot that laughs without knowing why things are funny. Gently
he places a hand on Skippy’s shoulder and, leaning in to his ear, whispers, ‘You faggot, I am going to kill you.’

Within minutes the news is all over school: no way out now, even if he wanted it. The general response seems to be simple
mystification.

‘
You’re
going to fight Carl?’

Skippy nods.

‘
You
are?’

Skippy nods again.

‘He’s going to massacre you,’ Titch or Vince Bailey or whoever it is says.

Skippy just about manages a shrug.

‘Well, good luck,’ they say, and wander off.

All through class, faces keep flicking back to Skippy, scrutinizing him like he’s a ten-foot lizard sitting there at the desk;
and the day, which had been going so torturously slowly, begins to hurtle, as if time itself were panting to view the fight.
Skippy tries to grasp on to the teachers’ lessons, if only to slow things down. But it’s as if the words themselves know they
are not intended for him and pass him by. This must be what it’s like being dead, haunting the living, he thinks. Like everything
is made of glass, too slippery to hold on to, so that you feel like you’re falling just standing still.

Two minutes after the final bell, the first boys arrive at the patch of gravel at the back of the Annexe. Enclosed by the
swimming pool on one side, the boiler room and an ever-growing chaos of brambles on the others, it can’t be seen from anywhere
else in the school; whenever there’s a score to be settled, for as long as anyone can remember, this is where it’s been done.
In no time at all the space is packed, and from the chatter it’s clear there is little doubt about the outcome: the crowd’s
been drawn here not by the promise of a close-fought battle, but by the chance to see some actual bodily harm.