by Paul Murray
‘But didn’t you say the strings were in another dimension?’
‘Yeah, Ruprecht, how can they be here if they’re actually in another dimension?’
Ruprecht coughs loudly. ‘They exist in ten dimensions. Because ten is the number required mathematically for the theory to make sense. They vibrate at different frequencies, and according to the frequency they vibrate at, you get different kinds of particle. The same way that if you pluck a violin string you can get different notes, C, D, E –’
‘F,’ contributes Geoff.
‘F, yes –’
‘G –’
‘Similarly, a string vibrating at one frequency will give you a quark, say, and a string vibrating at another frequency will give you a photon. That’s a particle of light. Nature is made of all the musical notes that are played on this superstring, so the universe is like a kind of a symphony.’
‘Wow…’ Geoff looks in wonderment at his own arm, as if half-expecting it, now its cover’s blown, to start chiming and tootling.
‘But didn’t you say there were eleven dimensions?’ Victor Hero remembers.
‘That’s right. The major stumbling block of string theory was the Big Bang. Like all the other theories before it, string theory broke down when it came to the first moments of the universe. What use is a new theory if it can’t solve the old problems?’
Geoff and Victor agree, not much use.
‘When they added the eleventh dimension, though, everything changed. The theory didn’t break down any more. But instead of just giving an account of our universe, scientists found themselves looking at a model of a whole sea of universes.’
‘Holy smoke,’ Geoff says.
‘I wish I was in the eleventh dimension,’ Dennis comments dolefully. ‘With some porn.’
‘Describe her to me again?’ Skippy, meanwhile, is at the telescope with Titch Fitzpatrick. As Ruprecht makes his exposition, Skippy reels off the vast treasure of detail he has garnered from his few brief sightings of Frisbee Girl. Detaching himself from the eyepiece, Titch looks off to the left, one finger on his jaw, frowning and nodding. ‘Hmm…’
When it comes to the ladies, Titch is the undisputed expert. He has got off with more or less every girl worth getting off with in the Seabrook area, his strike rate dwarfing even that of sporting stars like Calvin Fleet and Beauregard ‘The Panzer’ Fanning; it is widely held that at the end of last summer, at a party in Adam O’Brien’s house, he had full actual sex with KellyAnn Doheny, a second-year from St Brigid’s. Non-teenagers might find his appeal difficult to understand, as he isn’t especially handsome, or big, or even funny; his features are striking only in their regularity, the overall effect being one of solidity, steadiness, the quiet self-assurance one might associate with, for instance, a long-established and successful bank. But that, in fact, is the whole point. One look at Titch, in his regulation Dubarrys, Ireland jersey and freshly topped-up salon tan, and you can see his whole future stretched out before him: you can tell that he will, when he leaves this place, go on to get a good job (banking/ insurance/consultancy), marry a nice girl (probably from the Dublin 18 area), settle down in a decent neighbourhood (see above) and about fifteen years from now produce a Titch Version 2.0 who will think his old man is a bit of a knob sometimes but basically all right. The danger of him ever drastically changing – like some day joining a cult, or having a nervous breakdown, or developing out of nowhere a sudden burning need to express himself and taking up some ruinously expensive and embarrassing-to-all-that-know-him discipline, like modern dance, or interpreting the songs of Joni Mitchell in a voice that, after all these years, is revealed to be disquietingly feminine – is negligible. Titch, in short, is so remarkably unremarkable that he has become a kind of embodiment of his socioeconomic class; a friendship/sexual liaison with Titch has therefore come to be seen as a kind of self-endorsement, a badge of Normality, which at this point in life is a highly prized commodity.
‘All right so,’ he says as Skippy finally, breathlessly, wraps up his paean. ‘Black hair, medium height, wide mouth, pale. That could be a few different people – Yolanda Pringle, maybe, or Mirabelle Zaoum. What’re her kegs like?’
‘Her kegs?’
‘Medium small,’ Dennis says from the bed.
‘I would say about a 30B,’ Mario estimates.
‘Um,’ Skippy says.
‘What she does have is an ass,’ Dennis says.
‘Yes, this is one smoking hot ass,’ Mario says. ‘It is the kind of ass a man will not forget in a hurry.’
‘Hmm,’ Titch muses, and then, relinquishing the telescope, ‘well, I’ll have a think about it. But it doesn’t look like she’s going to show today.’
‘No,’ Skippy says mournfully.
‘Don’t worry about it, T-man,’ Dennis chips in cheerfully from the bed. ‘This girl’s about a trillion miles out of Skippy’s league anyway.’
Titch receives this expressionlessly, then turns back to Skippy. ‘Give me a call next time you see her,’ he says, and wanders out of the room without goodbye, like he’s exiting a lift full of strangers in a department store.
‘The eleventh dimension is infinitely long, but only a very small distance across,’ Ruprecht is telling Geoff and Victor, ‘maybe no more than a trillionth of a millimetre. That means it exists only a trillionth of a millimetre from every point in our three-dimensional world. It’s closer to your body than your own clothes. And on the other side of it – who knows? There could be another universe just one millimetre away, only we can’t see it because it’s in another dimension. There could be an infinite number of them, floating all around us.’ His voice lofts rapturously. ‘Imagine it! An infinite number of universes, whose qualities we can’t even begin to guess at! With totally different laws of physics! Shaped like cylinders or prisms or doughnuts!’
‘Doughnuts?’ The word lights a synapse in Geoff’s brain, which for the last few minutes has been playing a counting game with the clouds ambling by outside.
‘Why not? Or, or shapes that are entirely new –’
‘Or banana-shaped,’ Geoff, who has realized he is feeling a little peckish, suggests.
‘Or shaped like the Formula One track at Silverstone?’ Victor adds.
‘Maybe,’ Ruprecht says. ‘Maybe.’
‘Could there be,’ it suddenly strikes Geoff, ‘a universe that’s full of beer?’
‘Theoretically, I suppose, yes.’
‘And how would you get,’ Geoff says slowly, ‘from this universe, into the one that’s full of beer?’
‘That’s one of the things we’re hoping to find out,’ Ruprecht informs him grandly. ‘Professor Tamashi’s holding an online roundtable on Friday night to discuss that very issue, among others.’
‘Hmm. Uh, Ruprecht, Friday night is the Hop?’
‘The Hop?’ Ruprecht repeats vaguely. ‘Oh yes, that’s right, so it is.’
‘In that case, I have a feeling this online round-table will have to go ahead without Mario,’ Mario says from the bed. ‘I don’t know about you guys, but I am planning to score a lot of bitches at this Hop. Probably I will start with one really hot girl, straight sex, no frills. Then I will have a sixty-nine. Then it will be time for a threesome.’
‘Mario –’ Dennis sits up ‘– what makes you think any girl is going to go anywhere near you? Let alone like fifteen different girls.’
Mario hesitates, then says conspiratorially, ‘I have a secret weapon.’
‘You do?’
‘You bet, mister.’ He flips open his wallet. ‘Read it and weep, boys. It is my lucky condom, which never fails.’
A silence, as Mario smugly returns his wallet to his pocket, and then, clearing his throat, Dennis says, ‘Uh, Mario, in what way exactly is there anything lucky about that condom?’
‘Never fails,’ Mario repeats, a little defensively.
‘But –’ Dennis pinches his fingers to his nose, brow furrowed ‘– I mean, if it was really a lucky cond
om, wouldn’t you have used it by now?’
‘How long have you had it in there, Mario?’ Geoff says.
‘Three years,’ Mario says.
‘Three years?’
‘Without using it?’
‘Doesn’t that sound more like an unlucky condom?’
Mario looks troubled as his unshakeable faith in the luckiness of the lucky condom begins to show cracks.
‘It was definitely pretty unlucky for the condom, to wind up in your wallet!’
‘Yeah, Mario, your wallet is like the Alcatraz of condoms.’
‘It’s like the condom Bermuda Triangle!’
‘Condoms tell each other stories about your wallet, “Oh, he disappeared into Mario Bianchi’s wallet, and he was never seen again.” ’
‘Yeah, I bet right this very second your lucky condom is in there whistling the theme from The Great Escape and digging a tunnel out of your wallet with a plastic coffee stirrer –’
‘What do you know about it?’ Mario rounds on them. ‘Eh, you silly nerds, all you know about is this foolish business of the theory of many dimensions. Well, I tell you about something that is happening in this dimension, and that is this Friday I will be boning countless ladies. And that, which I call Mario-theory, is something that you can see with your own eyes, and not just some equations that only gays can understand! So don’t come crawling to me looking for one of my many bitches in the sex orgy I am having, after you have struck out with every girl at the Hop!’
Autumn deepens. A fresh chaos of yellow leaves covers the lane up to the school each morning, as if it’s been visited overnight by woodland poltergeists; after school, you make the return journey through a strange, season-specific gloaming, a pale darkness, spooked and paradoxical, which makes your classmates up ahead seem to fade in and out of existence. The hobgoblin shadow of Hallowe’en, meanwhile, is everywhere. The shopping malls bristle with pumpkins and skeletons; houses lie swathed in cotton-wool cobwebs; the sky cracks and fizzes with firework-tests of increasing rigour. Even teachers fall under the spell. Classes take odd detours, routines slowly vaporize, until by the late stages of the week, the rigid precepts of everyday termtime seem no more real, or even slightly less real, than the fluorescent ghosts glowing from the windows of Ed’s Doughnuts next door…
It’s crossed Skippy’s mind – though he knows it makes no sense, given that other people have seen her too – that Frisbee Girl herself might not be real: that she too may be a kind of Hallowe’en emanation, a dark mirage of smoke and wishes who exists only in the far end of the telescope and will, if he tries to get any closer to her, vanish entirely. And so, while half of him is dying for it to be Friday, can scarcely comprehend how he can possibly make it till Friday – the other half hopes that Friday will never come.
Time, however, has no such reservations; and now he wakes up in the pitch-darkness of the last morning of term.
For the last quarter of the swimming team’s final training session Coach reels in the laneway markers and brings out the net so they can play water polo. With a whap! the ball sails into the air; white and gold and brown bodies leap and splash, yells and hoots clang and rebound from the yellow roof, steam wafts across the water like poison gas over a gaudy blue battlefield. Skippy’s floating near the back where there’s not much happening. Come over here a minute, Daniel, Coach says.
He crouches down as Skippy swims up to him. It hurts him to bend like this, you can see it in the way his eyes screw up.
You’ve missed a lot of training lately.
Sorry, Coach, I was sick. I have a note.
Notes are all well and good, but you’ll need to make that work up somehow. The meet’s only two weeks after we come back from break, you know. There are going to be some good schools there. And your times lately have not been great.
Yes, Coach.
I really want to include you on the team, Daniel, but I’ll need to see a marked improvement when you come back.
Okay, Coach.
You’re going home for mid-term?
Yes.
There’s a pool up there – where are you again, Rush?
Yeah, there’s a pool and also I swim in the sea too.
I see. That’s good. Well, try and get as much practice as you can over the holiday, all right?
Yes, Coach.
Good. Coach’s mouth tightens. The skin of his face is wrinkly but his eyes are clear blue, like a swimming pool waiting for someone to dive in. Daniel, is everything all right with you? Lately I’ve been getting the impression that there’s something on your mind.
No, Coach, not at all.
You’re sure? This… this illness of yours, you’re over that?
Oh yeah, totally.
Okay. The eyes monitor his unblinkingly. I just want you to know that if there is something bothering you, you can come to me and talk about it. That’s what I’m here for. Everything private and confidential.
Thanks, Coach.
I’m not some old teacher. I’m your coach. I take care of my boys.
I know that, Coach. Everything’s fine though.
That’s good. You’re looking forward to seeing your parents, I bet?
Sure.
How are they doing?
Fine.
Your mum?
She’s fine.
Coach’s hand on his shoulder. You give them my very best, okay? They should be very proud of you. You say that to them from me. He stands up.
Okay I will.
And remember, train hard! I want you on that bus to Galway.
Okay.
But Coach has turned away and is blowing his whistle at Siddartha Niland, who is jumping around waving a pair of swimming togs. In the shallow end Duane Grehan is crying out, My shorts! My shorts!
Steam rolls around the water in swaggering piles. But to your skin it is freezing cold.
Very last class before mid-term. Until recently, the Irish teacher, Ms Ni Riain, in spite of her advanced years, strangely conical breasts, and appearance, thanks to whatever brand of foundation she uses, of being made out of toffee, was widely considered Seabrook’s number one babe, and the object of more than a few fixations – which no doubt says something about the nature of desire and its surprising willingness to work with the materials at hand. Since the arrival of Miss McIntyre, however, that particular illusion has been shattered, and Irish is now just another dull class to be struggled through.
There are ways of easing that struggle, though. In the middle of a boring sequence of interchanges on the Modh Coinníollach, Gaelic’s infamously difficult conditional mood, Casey Ellington raises his hand. ‘Miss?’
‘Yes, Casey?’
‘Someone told me that Hallowe’en actually started in Ireland,’ Casey says with a furrowed brow. ‘That can’t be true… can it?’
The name of the boy who first discovered Ms Ni Riain’s undergraduate degree in Irish folklore is lost to time, but the proud work he began lives on to this day. Angle it in the right way and a single well-placed question can sometimes burn up an entire class.
Hallowe’en, Casey Ellington learns, is a direct descendant of the Celtic rite of Samhain. In days of Yore, Samhain – also known as Feile Moingf hinne, or the Feast of the White Goddess – was one of the most important festivals. Held at the end of October, it marked the end of one pastoral year and the beginning of the next: an enchanted time, when the gates between this world and the Otherworld were opened, and ancient forces were let loose on the land.
‘Otherworld?’ Mitchell Gogan raising his hand this time.
‘Irish folklore is dominated by tales of a mysterious supernatural race called the Sidhe,’ Ms Ni Riain says. ‘The Sidhe inhabited another world which shared the same space as ours but could not be seen by humans. Sidhe is usually translated as fairies’ – any giggling here is vigorously stifled in the interests of keeping the digression in the air – ‘but these fairies didn’t have pretty wings or little pink frocks or hang around flower petals. T
hey were taller than humans, and famous for their cruelty. They’d turn men blind, steal newborn babies, cast spells on whole herds of cattle so that they wouldn’t eat and pined away, just for fun. It was considered bad luck even to speak their name. On the night of Samhain, all fires were extinguished, and the entrances to the burial mounds where they were believed to live left open until cockcrow next morning.’
‘They lived in burial mounds?’ says Neville Nelligan, no longer sure whether he’s time-wasting or actually interested.
‘They lived in earthworks, beside rivers, beneath particular trees, in underwater caves. They also lived in burial mounds that dotted the countryside. Originally, the word sidhe referred to these mounds, which were built by an older civilization, thousands of years before. Later on, people came to think of them as palaces that belonged to the fairies and connected their world to ours. There were folk-tales about men who fell asleep near one of these mounds and woke up with the gift of poetry or storytelling, or who discovered a door in the hillside and found their way into a feast underground – always with lovely harp music, sumptuous food, beautiful maidens – only to wake up next morning on the hillside, with no sign of the doorway, and go into the village to find that hundreds of years had passed and everyone they knew was dead.’
Perhaps it’s the sombre weather, the gaunt wind and skeletal rattling of the fallen leaves outside, or maybe it’s heightened sensibilities from the incipient Hop, but these stories take on a weird palpability – you can feel them, a shivery, mournful fog that weaves its way through the air. ‘So if they lived in burial mounds –’ Geoff barely daring to believe it ‘– does that mean the fairies were… undead?’
‘Gods, fairies, ghosts, these were all mixed together as inhabitants of the Otherworld,’ the teacher says. ‘Initially the fairy legends may have started off as stories of the dead living on, feasting in their chambers. Or as a way of explaining what happened to this previous, pre-Celtic civilization that had now disappeared. But the point is that at Samhain, all of these strange beings, who lived side by side with us but who for the most part we didn’t see, became visible and went roaming the land.’
