Skippy Dies: A Novel

by Paul Murray

  It’s not the grades that bother me, sport – Dad doesn’t notice – it’s more the thought that you might be feeling like… His clasped hands dip between his knees like the head of a dead bird; then in a new voice, he says, I suppose what I’m thinking is, maybe we made a mistake in our original plan. Maybe we didn’t foresee quite how – how long it would take for things to pan out. Don’t you think it might make more sense if we arranged for some kind of – if I spoke to your Mr Costigan and said to him, Well, here’s our situation, just so you’re aware.

  Dad, what are you doing? What about the Game! Don’t you know what happens when you talk about it? Don’t you remember what happened last time?

  I know you said you didn’t want to do that. And obviously I’m going to respect that decision. I’m just wondering if it’s something you’ve thought about since. Just as something that might take the pressure off you a little bit?

  Skippy keeps his mouth tight shut, slowly shakes his head.

  You’re sure? Dad’s eyebrow raised, pleading.

  Skippy nods, just as slowly.

  Dad drags his hands over his face. I just hate to think of you, off at Seabrook… I mean… we want you to be happy, if you can, Danny, that’s what we want.

  I am happy, Dad.

  Sure. Okay. I know that.

  Hold tight to your chair, wait for it to end. The pills in the drawer in your room.

  Okay. Dad throws his hands up. I guess we’ll just see how it goes, then. He smiles mirthlessly. End of interrogation, he says.

  You get up to go. Inside you feel cold, hollow, like a ruined castle with the wind gusting through it whhhhssssshhhhhhhwhhhhhhhhhhshhhhhhhhhh.

  Hey – I was thinking of going for a swim tomorrow after work, down to the pool, you interested?

  Hmm… no, I’m okay, thanks.

  You don’t need to practise for the race?

  No, Coach said it wasn’t so important.

  Really?

  Yeah, actually he said we should take a break from it. I might take Dogley for a walk. Come on, boy. He swings the collar and lead over him and Dogley reluctantly rises from his bed.

  Nights are the worst. Outside the fireworks explode like cluster bombs; through the walls the cries are like missiles screaming into your heart. But in the secret compartment of memory where Frisbee Girl is waiting, everything’s just like it was. Her hands, her hair, her eyes, her voice, singing her secret song – the moment picks you up and swirls you into it; you lose yourself again in her sideways-8s, and everything real fades away to a dream.

  That week of mid-term is the longest of Howard’s life. The house has never seemed so small, so confining – like an underground bunker, shared with a ricocheting bullet that zings off the walls night and day, hour after hour. His teeth ache from smiling vacantly; his muscles throb from maintaining his meticulously arranged slouch on the sofa; everyday conversation is like juggling fire, Halley’s most basic inquiry – Are we out of milk? – setting off a mental pandemonium, every synapse blazing in the panic to construct a reply before the delay becomes obvious. By the second day, he is fantasizing about throwing himself at her feet, confessing everything, simply to bring an end to this exhausting assault on his nerves.

  Then he discovers an escape route. Thinking he’d better avoid antagonizing the Automator any further, he goes into the school library Monday morning and borrows a couple of books on Seabrook history as research for his piece for the concert programme. Both are written by the same stylistically unblessed priest, and breathtakingly dull – but while he is reading them Halley leaves him alone. He spends two days blissfully submerged in the mind-numbing minutiae of Seabrook’s past; when he is finished he returns to the library and asks the psoriatic brother in charge if he has anything else on the school. The brother does not. For a moment Howard is at sea. Then he has a brainwave. ‘How about the First World War?’ he says.

  There are seventeen books on the First World War. Howard checks out all of them. At home he piles them around him on the living-room table, and reads with an engrossed, not-to-be-disturbed expression; he even keeps a box of candles beside him for when the construction work on the Science Park knocks the power out.

  ‘You’re really getting into that stuff,’ Halley says, regarding the stacks of books, their stern, catastrophic covers.

  ‘Oh you know, it’s for the kids,’ he replies abstractedly, and peers into the page to make an imaginary underlining.

  For the rest of the week he does nothing but read. Textbooks and yarns, elegies and entertainments, eyewitness accounts and fusty donnish histories, he reads them all; and on every page he sees the same thing – Miss McIntyre’s white body stretched out before him, her mouth straining for his, her intoxicated, half-closed eyes.

  He aches to talk to her. Her absence, his powerlessness to reach her, are agonizing. One evening he ends up telling Farley what happened just so he can speak her name: even sketching it minimally down the phone line brings the electricity of that night thrilling through him again, with a strange mixture of shame, pride, shame at his pride. But Farley does not seem to share it. Instead he is sombre, as if Howard had announced some fatal illness.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Howard says.

  ‘What about Halley?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ These are all the questions he has avoided asking himself. Why is Farley asking them? ‘I think I’m in love with Aurelie.’ Howard realizes this only as he says it.

  ‘You’re not, Howard. You barely know her.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  ‘It makes all the difference. You’ve been with Halley for three years. If you mess it up now, I promise you’ll regret it.’

  ‘So what do you suggest I do, pretend it never happened? Just bury my feelings away? Is that it?’

  ‘I’m just telling you what you already know, which is that this thing with Aurelie is a fantasy. It’s a fantasy, you know it. And now you’ve had your fun, you should let it go. You haven’t told Halley anything, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay, well, keep it that way. In my experience, honesty is definitely not the best policy with these things. Just sit tight until things are clearer. If she asks, deny everything.’

  Howard is angry. How many of Farley’s fantasies has he listened to over the years? Chewing Howard’s ear off about the new waitress in the deli, the new assistant in the pharmacy, the girl at the Internet café with the incredible jugs – all of them, conquered or (mostly) otherwise, forgotten completely two weeks later. Who is he to sermonize? Who is he to dictate what is and isn’t real? To say what Howard is or isn’t feeling? Just because he likes having friends who are living the straight life, likes being able to come over to a nice house where he can eat a nice dinner and tell his wild stories, vicariously enjoy the stability and routine for a night without ever having to submit to the slog of it, the endless strictures and limitations –

  Later on, however, when the initial sting has abated, he admits to himself that Farley might have a point. Yes, Miss McIntyre is beautiful; yes, what happened in the Geography Room was exhilarating. But did it actually mean anything?

  He’s back on the couch with his books; on the other side of the room, Halley taps at her computer, cigarette smoke gathered at her shoulder, a spectral familiar.

  People do crazy things, Aurelie said it herself. They do arbitrary things to test the boundaries, to feel free. But those moments don’t have any meaning beyond themselves. They don’t have any real connection with who you are, they aren’t life. Life is when you’re not doing something arbitrary to feel free. This is life, this living room, the furniture and trappings they have picked out and paid for with slow hours of work, the small treats and fancies their budget has allowed them.

  ‘You look deep in thought,’ Halley says from her desk.

  ‘Just straightening something out,’ he says.

  She gets up. ‘I’m going t
o make a smoothie, do you want one?’

  ‘That’d be great, thanks.’

  A life and a place to live it versus a momentary flame of passion. For a grown man, that should hardly be a difficult choice. Confident he’s on the right track now, he sets it out mathematically, constructing an elaborate equation in his head in order to prove it to himself beyond any doubt. On one side he places his relationship with Halley, factoring in as much as he can – the loneliness of his life before he met her, the sacrifices she has made for him, their relative happiness together, as well as more abstract concepts like loyalty, honesty, trust, what it means to be a good person. On the other side –

  On the other side Miss McIntyre’s mouth, her eyes, her nails in his back.

  Halley is asking something from the kitchen. ‘What?’ he calls hoarsely.

  ‘Are you in a blueberry mood, or a pineapple mood?’

  ‘Oh – whatever you think.’ His voice, strained, high, adolescent, melds into the turbulent whine of the blender.

  Leaned up louchely against the Geography Room door, telling him, To be bored, that’s really a crime.

  Howard has been so bored.

  He has been so bored with Howard, and all the accoutrements of being Howard. He does not hold Halley to blame for this; boredom is congenital to cowards, like thin blood is to Russian royalty. But the fact remains that in the Geography Room he had not felt bored. In the Geography Room, lying back in the darkness, he’d felt like he was waking from a long, long sleep.

  ‘Here you go.’ Halley hands him a tall cold glass, runs her fingers through his hair on the way back to her computer.

  ‘Oh – thanks…’ Well, maybe for now the best thing would be to wait. Until he returns to school and finds the lie of the land, maybe he should take Farley’s advice. Keep his head below the parapet, and Halley – stealthily, unnoticeably, via a careful weave of mishearings and mistimings – at arm’s length; make do for now with secret visits to his memory, replaying his store of Aurelie-moments, imagining their future life together, a smiling haze of uncomplicated rightness. He sips down cold citrusy pulp, picks up his book and sinks into a fantasy in which he walks with her side by side over war-torn earth, through shards of former trees and khaki-shrouded limbs that reach plaintively up out of the ground: he a Tommy covered head-to-toe in mud, she spotless in a cream angora sweater, giving him a pop quiz on his own life he has not studied for, but to which she, fortunately, has all the answers.

  Carl in the dark in the shadows.

  It’s late. He doesn’t know how long he has been there.

  Behind the gates at the end of the grey tongue of drive is a house, it is her house. There are no cars outside and no lights on but this is a trick because Carl saw a shape moving in the dark inside the window.

  Above the gate, a little red dot of light that belongs to the security camera. That’s why Carl is standing here crushed up to the wall. The gates are locked and the walls are high with glass on top. The road is narrow and winding and quiet and dark, nothing is moving. Except inside close up everything is jumping! Everything is speeding and screaming at a million miles a second!

  In his ear the phone buzzes and a voice tells him he has reached Lori’s number. It speaks the number all chopped up like a broken robot, it tells him to leave a message after the tone. The first times that’s what he did, he left messages, like WHY WEREN’T YOU AT THE HOP? WHERE ARE YOU NOW? WHY WON’T YOU ANSWER? But then he got bored and now instead he leaves silences. Hello, you have reached numbernumbernumbernumber, please leave a message after the tone –

  Silence

  until the network cuts him off. Then he hits the button and it all happens again. By now he has stopped expecting her to pick up or not pick up, it’s almost like it’s going on without him, buzz voice silence buzz voice silence. But in his head he can see it, the phone ringing in her bedroom, playing the BETHani song, Lori cross-legged on her bed in her pyjama bottoms, in the house all alone, watching it on her desk flashing,

  <>

  then it stops and the little envelope tumbles onto the screen,

  YOU HAVE A NEW VOICE MESSAGE,

  and she gets up and goes to hear it, and into her ear pours the scary sound of the silent outside going kchhhhhhhhhhhhhshhhhhhhhhhhh, piling up with all the other silences he has sent her, silences floating through the house like cold chunks cut out of the night, she is scared, she is crying, then suddenly she presses the button and this time it is him in her room, staticky, night-shaped, like a bad spirit in a fairy-tale, and with him the night, the cold, the trees, the dark, they’re all transported inside, packed into her bedroom, she is screaming What is happening???!!! then she is running –

  Holding the phone between his chin and his shoulder he takes the tube of pills out of his pocket. He brought them for her but now they are mostly gone. He pours a little pyramid on his fingertip and lifts it up to his nose. It is a message he is sending to himself, he leans his head back and looks up at the cold stars and waits for it to arrive like a bolt of lightning –

  Then there is a noise. A message on his phone! It’s her, she’s been watching him on the CCTV! And now she’s going to open the gates!

  But it’s not from her, it’s from Barry.

  WER R U U HV 2 CUM 2 EDS RIT NOW

  Carl does not want to go to Ed’s. He writes back,

  WOTS DA STORY?

  The reply comes almost as soon as he’s sent it:

  JUST FUKIN GET HEER NOW

  Carl is pissed off, as soon as he goes he knows the gates will open, he sees her creeping on tiptoes over the gravel going, Carl, Carl. Fuck it! Fuck Barry!

  But he gets on his bike and flies back towards Seabrook. The lights of the road swirl and beam extra-bright, he gets there in record time! When he goes behind the doughnut shop though, none of the faces that turn to look at him are Barry. First he thinks it’s a mistake, like he got the wrong message. Then he realizes he knows these faces. He turns to run but someone’s behind him and next thing he knows he’s on the ground.

  It’s the knackers from the park, all four of them. One of them is pinning him down, another is crouched a little way away doing the same thing to Barry. From the ground between the arms and legs he stares across at Carl with eyes full of fear. What is going on?

  ‘Two posh cunts from Seabrook College,’ the knacker with the shaved head says in a loud voice, like he’s making a speech. ‘Two little faggots.’ He walks around in a small circle with a can in his hand. The knacker with greasy hair is kneeling on Carl’s chest. ‘Did you think you could just go on like this for ever? Did you fuckin think we’d just let you go on doin this and we wouldn’t mind? You fuckin queers?’

  Is he asking Carl? Carl does not understand, he is still trying to understand when Shaved-Head’s face suddenly changes from a question to a snarling, like he’s taken off a mask and beneath it there’s a fire. Carl only catches a glimpse of this, then everything is spinning and stars. His head rings, he feels something wet running down his face.

  ‘What is it?’ Shaved-Head shouts. ‘Where’d you get it?’ His foot lands with a splat in Carl’s eye. Carl rolls his head, panting. From the dark the smashed lights of a burned car stare back at him like someone burned and lying on the ground in the weeds and garbage.

  Greasy-Hair is searching through Carl’s clothes, into the pockets of his trousers and jacket. ‘We are going to kill you,’ he tells Carl, softly, like the doctor telling you the needle might sting a little bit. He finds Carl’s wallet and throws it to Shaved-Head.

  ‘That’s a fuckin start at least,’ Shaved-Head says.

  ‘Here we go.’ Greasy-Hair has found the tube.

  Shaved-Head takes it and opens it. ‘This is what you’ve been selling? What is it? Speed?’

  Barry tries to say something but his teeth are chattering too much. Shaved-Head opens the tube and pours a mound onto the back of his hand. He lowers his nose into it and then a moment later he folds his arms into hims
elf in little jerks. ‘Whoa, I like that! Ah!’ He throws his shoulders back, twists his head. ‘Fuck, yeah! Where did youse shitheads get hold of this?’

  In a little squeaky stammery voice Barry tells him about the pills. He tells him everything, about Morgan, about the girls on diets, about the little kids in junior school and the fireworks.

  ‘Sellin to all the rich bitches,’ Shaved-Head says. ‘Not a bad little plan. Unfortunately you fucked with the wrong people.’ His voice is bright with the drug, it makes you think you are on TV. ‘Get the rope,’ he says.

  Now a knacker with bad teeth comes out of the trees at the edge of the waste ground. In his hand is a blue rope. When he sees it Barry starts shouting. The spotty guy on top of him slaps him, then when Barry doesn’t stop he grabs an old newspaper lying on the ground and stuffs Barry’s mouth full of it. ‘Better do this one first,’ he says, and pulls Barry to his feet. Through the newspaper, Barry’s still making a noise, a high-pitched gurgling squeal like a drowning pig. Tears are running down his face, and Carl can feel them too, burning in a lump in his throat.

  Greasy-Hair hauls him to his feet as Spots drags Barry over to the burned-out car and pulls him up onto the bonnet. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get your turn,’ he says in his doctor voice. ‘But first you have to watch your boyfriend die.’

  ‘A suicide pact,’ Shaved-Head announces, ‘for two little Seabrook queers who can’t take it any more. I don’t think the cops will be too surprised. They’ll just be glad it’s two less faggots.’

  Spots has made the blue rope into a noose. Now he puts it over Barry’s head. Barry is just staring into space, it’s like he is watching something horrible happening somewhere far away that none of the others can see yet – but then, as Shaved-Head calls, ‘Do it!’ and Spots steps behind him he wakes up again – making the noise, his body shaking so hard it looks like he might shake to pieces, his eyes full of panic and tears flinging themselves at Carl and clutching at him, begging him to do something – but what is Carl supposed to do? When all of this was Barry’s great idea? Barry who knows all the answers, who thinks he is so smart? Who tricked Carl into coming down here so he could die here too? Suddenly Carl’s body floods with anger, and inside although a part of him is going Oh fuck another part is thinking Die –