Skippy Dies (5 page)

Their house lies several four-lane miles from Seabrook, on the front line of the suburbs’ slow assault on the Dublin mountains.
When Howard was growing up, he used to ride his bike around
here in the summer with Farley, through fairy-tale woods ticking with grasshoppers and sunshine. Now it looks like a battlefield,
mounds of sodden earth surrounding trenches waterlogged with rain. They’re building a Science Park on the other side of the
valley: every week the landscape has morphed a little more, the swell of a hill shorn off, a flat gashed open.

That’s what they all say
.

‘What have you got there?’ Halley comes back with two cups.

‘Book.’

‘No shit.’ She takes it out of his hands. ‘Robert Graves,
Goodbye to All That
.’

‘Just something I picked up on the way home. First World War. I thought the boys might like it.’

‘Robert Graves, didn’t he write
I, Claudius
? That they made into a TV series?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He did.’ She scans the back of the book. ‘Looks interesting.’

Howard shrugs non-committally. Halley leans back against her chair, watching his eyes buzz restlessly over the counter surface.
‘Why are you acting weird?’

He freezes. ‘Me? I’m not acting weird.’

‘You are.’

Interior pandemonium as he desperately tries to remember how he normally acts with her. ‘It’s just been a long day – oh God
– ’ groaning involuntarily as she pulls a cigarette from her shirt pocket. ‘Are you going to smoke another of those things?’

‘Don’t start…’

‘They’re
bad
for you. You said you were going to quit.’

‘What can I tell you, Howard. I’m an addict. A hopeless, pathetic addict in the thrall of the tobacco companies.’ Her shoulders
slump as the tip glows in ignition. ‘Anyway, it’s not like I’m pregnant.’

Ah, right – this is how he normally acts with her. He remembers now. They seem to be going through a protracted phase in which
they’re able to speak to each other only in criticisms, needles, rebukes. Big things, little things, anything can spark an
argument,
even when neither of them wants to argue, even when he or she is trying to say something nice, or simply to state an innocuous
fact. Their relationship is like a piece of malfunctioning equipment that when switched on will only buzz fractiously, and
shocks you when you’re trying to find out what’s wrong. The simplest solution seems to be not to switch it on, to look instead
for a new one; he is not quite ready to contemplate that eventuality, however.

‘How was work?’ he says conciliatorily.

‘Oh…’ She makes a gesture of insignificance, flicking the dust of the day from her fingers. ‘This morning I wrote a review
of a new laser printer. Then most of the afternoon I spent trying to get hold of someone in Epson to confirm the specs. Usual
rollercoaster ride.’

‘Any new gadgets?’

‘Yeah, actually…’ She fetches a small silver rectangle and presents it to him. Howard frowns and fumbles with it – card-thin
and smaller than the palm of his hand.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a movie camera.’

‘
This
is a camera?’

She takes it from him, slides back a panel and returns it. The camera issues an almost but not quite inaudible purr. He holds
it up and aims it at her; a pristine image of her appears in the tiny screen, with a red light flashing in one corner. ‘That’s
incredible,’ he laughs. ‘What else does it do?’

‘
Make every day like summer!
’ she reads from the press release. ‘The Sony JLS9xr offers several significant improvements on the JLS700 model, as well
as entirely new features, most notably Sony’s new Intelligent Eye system, which gives not only unparalleled picture resolution
but real-time image augmentation – meaning that your movies can be even more vivid than they are in real life.’

‘More vivid than real life?’

‘It corrects the image while you record. Compensates for weak light, boosts the colours, gives things a sheen, you know.’

‘Wow.’ He watches her head dip slightly as she extinguishes her cigarette, then lift again. Miniaturized on the screen she
does indeed seem more lustrous, coherent,
resolved
– a bloom to her cheeks, a glint to her hair. When he glances experimentally away from it, the real-life Halley and the rest
of their home suddenly appear underdefined, washed out. He turns his eye to it again, and zooms in on her own eyes, deep blue
and finely striated with white; like thin ice, he always thinks. They look sad.

‘And how about you?’

‘Me?’

‘You seem a bit down.’ Somehow it’s easier to talk to her like this, mediated by the camera viewer; he finds the buffer making
him audacious, even though she’s sitting close enough to touch.

She shrugs fatalistically. ‘I don’t know… it’s just these PR people, God, they sound like they’re turning into machines themselves,
you know, ask them anything at all and they feed you the same pre-recorded answer…’ She trails off. The backs of her fingers
move across her forehead, barely touching it; the viewer picks up fine lines there that he has never noticed before. He pictures
her here on her own, frowning at the computer screen in the alcove of the living room she has made her office, surrounded
by magazines and prototypes, only smoke for company. ‘I tried to write something,’ she says thoughtfully.

‘Something?’

‘A story. I don’t know. Something.’ She seems happier too, with this arrangement, liberated by not having to look into his
eyes; she gazes out the window, down at the ashtray, kneads her bracelet against the bones of her wrist. Howard suddenly finds
himself desiring her. Maybe this is the answer to all of their problems! He could wear the camera all the time, mount it onto
his head somehow. ‘I sat down and told myself I wasn’t getting up until I’d written something. So I stayed there for a full
hour and God help me, all I could think of was printers. I’ve spent so long cooped up with this stuff that I’ve forgotten
how actual human beings think and behave.’ She slurps her tea disconsolately. ‘Do you think there’s a
market for that, Howard? Epic novels starring office equipment?
Modem Bovary
.
Less Than Xerox
.’

‘Who knows? Technology’s getting smarter every day. Maybe it’s only a matter of time before computers start reading books.
You could be on to something big.’ He places his free hand on hers, sees it jump in Lilliputian form into the corner of the
screen. ‘I don’t understand why you don’t just quit,’ he says. They have had this conversation so many times now, it is an
effort to keep it from sounding mechanical. But maybe it will turn out differently this time? ‘You’ve got a bit of money saved,
why don’t you take some time off and just write? Give yourself six months, say, see what you come up with. We could afford
it, if we tightened our belts.’

‘It’s not that simple, Howard. You know how hard it is to find someone who’ll give me a work permit. Futurlab’s been good
to me, it’d be stupid to quit there with things as they are.’

He ignores the implied accusation here, pretends that this really is about her writing. ‘You’d find something. You’re good
at what you do. Anyway, why not worry about that when the time comes?’

She pulls a face and mutters something.

‘Seriously, though, why don’t you?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake – I don’t know, Howard. Maybe this is all I’m good for. Maybe office equipment is all there is to write
about.’

He withdraws his hand, exasperated. ‘Well, if you won’t do anything about it, then you’ve got to stop complaining.’

‘I’m not complaining, if you ever actually listened to what I –’

‘I do listen, that’s the problem, I’m listening all the time to you telling me you’re unhappy, but then when I try to encourage
you to do something about it –’

‘Just forget it, I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Fine, but then don’t tell me I’m not listening when the problem is you don’t want to
talk
–’

‘Can we just forget – Jesus, would you put that fucking thing
down?’ She stares at him, alight with wounded fury, until he slides the camera’s panel shut. Right, right, this is how they
act. She grabs another cigarette, lights and tugs at it in a single blur of antipathetic motion.

‘Fine,’ says Howard, picking up his book and getting to his feet. ‘Fine, fine, fine, fine.’

He closets himself in the spare room and turns the pages of the Robert Graves book till he hears her get in the shower.

Halley and he have been together for three years, which, at twenty-eight, constitutes the longest relationship of his life
so far. For a long time it coasted along, joshing and amicable. But now Halley wants to get married. She doesn’t say it, but
he knows. Marriage makes sense for her. As an American citizen, her right to work here currently depends on the benevolence
of her employer, who must renew her permit every year. By marrying Howard, she would become, in the state’s eyes, naturalized,
and so free to go where she pleased. That isn’t the only reason she desires it, of course. But it does bring the matter into
focus rather sharply: suddenly the question becomes, why do they
not
get married right away? And it hangs above them like some hulking alien spacecraft, blocking out the sun.

So why don’t they? It’s not that Howard doesn’t love her. He does, he would do anything for her, lay down his life if it came
to it – if for example she were a princess menaced by a fire-breathing dragon, and he a knight on horseback, he would charge
in with his lance without a second thought, stare the serpent right in its smouldering igneous eye, even if it meant getting
barbecued there on the spot. But the fact is – the fact is that they live in a world of facts, one of which is that there
are no dragons; there are only the pale torpid days, stringing by one like another, a clouded necklace of imitation pearls,
and a love binding him to a life he never actually chose. Is this all it’s ever going to be? A grey tapestry of okayness?
Frozen in a moment he drifted into?

And so in short everything remains on hold, and everything remains unspoken, and Halley gets more confused about where
they are going and what is wrong, even though technically nothing
is
wrong, and she gets angry with Howard, and Howard as a result feels even less like getting married. Actually, when the plates
start flying, it feels like they’ve already been married for years.

After dinner (microwaved) a détente of sorts is reached, whereby he sits reading in the living room while she watches TV.
When she rises to turn in at ten-thirty, he presents his cheek for her to kiss. The protocol that has emerged of late is that
the first person to the bedroom is given a half-hour’s grace, so he or she can be asleep by the time the second comes in.
It is forty-five days, if you’re asking, since they last had sex. Nothing has been explicitly said; it is something they have
agreed on tacitly, indeed is one of the few things they do not, at present, disagree on. Eavesdropping on the pornographic
conversations of the boys at school, Howard considers how inconceivable the idea of
not wanting
to have sex would have seemed to his younger self – remembers how his every atom hurled itself (mostly fruitlessly) after
physical contact with the unthinking, unstoppable urgency of a wild salmon flapping up a waterfall.
There’s a woman in your bed and you’re not having sex with her?
He can practically hear the disappointment and confusion in that younger self’s voice. He’s not saying that he likes the
present situation. But it is easier, at least in the short to middle term.

Often, as they lie side by side in the darkness, neither letting on to the other that they are still awake, he has long, candid
conversations with her in his imagination, where he fearlessly lays everything out on the table. Sometimes these imaginary
conversations end with the two of them breaking up, others with their realizing that they can’t live apart; either way, it
feels good to make a decision.

Tonight, though, he is not thinking about this. Instead he is sitting in the front row of a classroom, staring with the other
boys at a globe that spins with luxurious, excruciating slowness under slender fingers. And as he stares into it, the globe
changes under the fingers from a map of the world into a crystal
ball… a crystal ball-cum-lucky dip, where any future you want is there for the taking; and under his breath he is murmuring,
‘
We’ll see about that
.
We’ll see
.’

H O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O S S S S S S S S S S S S S S S S H H H H H H H HHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s a lift going up your brain and right through into space! You can feel your eyes bulging like they’re going to explode!
Your head’s full of elephants, cartoon elephants in a line, lifting their hooves and playing their trunks so music comes out!
You’re laughing and laughing, you laugh so much you can hardly stand!

But on the ground Morgan is crying. He is crying because Barry’s kneeling on his arms, pinning him down. Above the skips the
doughnut sign shines in the other direction like it doesn’t want to see.

Behind Ed’s is where things happen and if you know what is good for you you will stay the fuck away.

Almost as soon as they come the happy explosions start to drain away. Carl stops laughing and takes a step forward. Morgan
shrinks back as far as he’s able, his white feet waggling in the dark like little animals. Barry whispers in his ear, ‘Just
do yourself a favour and hand them over.’

‘I don’t have any,’ Morgan pleads. ‘I swear!’

‘Then why did you come?’ Barry’s voice is gentle, like a mother’s voice. ‘Why did you come down here, you faggot?’

‘Because you told me to,’ Morgan says, between sobs.

‘We also told you to bring something.’ When Morgan says nothing, Barry slaps him on the cheek. ‘We fucking told you to bring
something, shithead.’

‘I came to tell you I couldn’t bring them.’ Morgan’s face is lifted up and back to look at Barry behind him, so the tears
trickle backwards towards his ears.