by Paul Murray
‘ “Someone”?’ Farley repeats.
‘It just sort of happened,’ the ginger boy says.
‘Oh God,’ Farley sighs, ‘sorry, Halley,’ as he follows them away.
How strange that Howard spends his whole day with these creatures, she thinks. She finds her energy sapped just from being around them a few moments.
Climbing into the car afterwards – an ancient Bluebird, a compendium of idiosyncrasies held together by rust that represents Howard’s only significant investment in life prior to meeting her – she pretends to herself that she doesn’t feel bad about going home. She turns on the radio, hums unlisteningly over the chatter of voices, does not resist as her mind slips back to those grand days of irrational exuberance, when hardly a day went by without a new start-up starting up, or an IPO, or some other such glamorous wing-ding, as her old editor called them, for Halley to dress up for; the great days of the Internet Boom, when all the talk was of the future, imagined as a kind of secular, matte-black Rapture, an epoch of convergence and unending bliss that it was widely believed, there at the end of the twentieth century, was just about to arrive, and Halley spent her nights in a little apartment on Mulberry Street –
The dog bounds out in front of her in a flash of golden fur that disappears immediately out of sight. She jams on the brakes, but the car, with a surprisingly heavy, almost industrial sound, has already hit it. Opening the door she scrambles out onto the street – her street, with her house, and the rest of the day as it should have been, only yards away! – at the same moment that the woman from the house opposite opens hers and runs down the footpath towards her.
‘It just appeared out of nowhere,’ Halley gabbles, ‘it jumped right out in front of the car…’
‘The garden gate was open,’ the woman says, but her attention is on the dog, kneeling to stroke its pink-tinged head. It lies flat on its side, a little distance from the car bumper; its brown eyes smile at Halley as she crouches down beside it. Blood is trickling along the gravel from underneath its head. ‘Oh, Polly…’
A car has pulled up behind Halley’s. Unable to pass, the driver gets out and stands over them. ‘Oh, the poor thing… did you hit her?’
‘She came out of nowhere,’ Halley repeats miserably.
‘Poor old girl.’ The man hunkers down by the two women. The dog, enjoying the attention, looks from one to the other, thumps its tail weakly on the ground. ‘She needs to be taken to the vet,’ the man says. They begin to discuss how she might best be lifted. If a sheet were slid under her, a kind of hammock? – A shrill scream issues from a short distance away. The woman’s little girl is frozen by the garden gate.
‘Alice, go inside,’ the woman commands.
‘Polly!’ the girl cries.
‘Go inside,’ her mother repeats, but the girl is dashing pell-mell down the path and by the time she reaches them is already in floods of tears. ‘Polly! Polly!’ The dog pants and licks its chops, as if to try and calm her.
‘Shh, Alice… Alice…’ The woman half-rises as the little girl begins to wail, her entire head turning mauve, becoming one huge mouth. ‘Shh…’ The woman presses the child’s head into her body; the small hands fling themselves around her skirt. Gently she leads her back towards the house. ‘Come on now… it will be okay…’
Absently, Halley swirls her fingertips over the drab tarmac while the man phones the DSPCA. Before long the woman from the house re-emerges, a white sheet bundled in her arms. She waits for the man to finish his call and then the three of them lift the dog to the side of the road. There is no longer any need to take it to the vet. They stretch the cover loosely over its body.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Halley pleads yet again.
‘I kept meaning to do something about that gate,’ the woman says distractedly. ‘I suppose the postman must have left it open.’
The man puts his hand on her elbow and tells her that these things happen. Halley aches for him to say it to her too, but he does not. The three of them exchange phone numbers, as if their drama still has an act to go; ‘I live across the street,’ Halley tells the woman uselessly. Then she gets back in the car and drives it the stone’s throw to her own gate. Once inside, she peeks through the curtains to see the woman, cheeks streaked, still keeping vigil on the corner, by the bedsheet from which the dog’s paws protrude, neatly, two by two. The other retriever lies on the grass in the woman’s garden, snout poking abjectly through the railings; from an upstairs window the little girl looks out, palms pressed to the glass, wailing soundlessly.
Halley closes the curtains and bunches herself up in a corner. The phone flashes at her from the desk with incoming calls; digital fish swim back and forth across the computer screen. For the first time since she arrived in Ireland, she wishes without reservation she were at home. It feels like her whole life here has been tending towards this point, turning her into someone who runs down a dog.
Not long after, she hears Howard coming in, preceded by a whistle like the theme tune to some balsa-wood sitcom. She sits up on the couch, glares at his unwitting, friendly smile. ‘So how was the Fair?’ he asks.
‘What?’
‘The Science Fair?’
The Science Fair! The gecko! The reminder of that distant afternoon and her own part in it – how trivial, how perfectly fucking useless to anyone! – is petrol on the flames of her anger. ‘Howard, why didn’t you get the car serviced?’
‘What?’ Howard, slow-witted, lays down his briefcase and overcoat.
‘The fucking brakes are fucked, Howard, I’ve asked you a million times to bring that heap of shit to the garage and you never fucking do it –’
Howard regards her carefully as if she’s speaking in tongues. ‘Well, I will, if you want me to, I will. What’s wrong, did something…?’
She tells him, in an overheated rush, about the dog, the woman, the little girl.
‘Oh God…’ He musses her hair. ‘I’m sorry, Halley.’ But his sympathy only makes her angrier. Why should he get off scot-free? Yes, she drove the car, but everything else is his fault! His fault!
‘What’s the use of being sorry? God, Howard, what if it had been the little girl who ran out on the road? What would you say then? Sorry?’
Bowing his head, Howard mumbles contritely.
‘Why don’t you just do what you say you’re going to do? You have to think of things, Howard, you have responsibilities, you can’t just float around your own little world, buried in your war books, dreaming you’re fighting the Nazis –’
‘The Hun,’ Howard says to the floor.
‘What?’
‘The Nazis are the Second World War. I’m doing the First.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake – are you even listening to me? Are you even aware you have a life here? Am I just some phantasm who interrupts your reading? You have to fucking commit to things, Howard, you have to wake up to the people around you, who are depending on you! Even though you find it boring, it’s still your life!’
She lets him have it, both barrels, all the frustration that’s been building up for the last few weeks and longer; Howard listens in silence, shoulders hunched, eyes screwed up as if he’s got a stomach pain, and the more she chastises, the more his brow creases into this stymied attitude, somewhere between bafflement and agony, and the more he doubles up, until with a start she wonders if he is actually going to be sick, at which point he sits abruptly on the arm of the armchair and says, almost to himself, ‘I can’t do this any more.’
‘What?’Halley says.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Howard says in a strangulated voice.
At some preconscious level she must know what’s coming, because she already feels like she’s been punched in the stomach: there is no air in her lungs, she does not seem able to breathe new air in. Not now, she thinks, not now! But the next thing he is babbling to her about Robert Graves and Hallowe’en, ‘Wild Horses’ and global warming, a substitute geography teacher who drinks Cosmopolitans – it desce
nds on Halley in a rain, and before she can unpick the sense of it the blood has drained from her face, her fingers buzz with lightness…
And a part of her is thinking of feminism! A part of her is thinking of all the women who fought for their rights, and feeling ashamed for letting them down, because as the story of his infidelity unspools, she feels only an agonizing crumbling, a horrible literal disintegration, as though she’s turned into slush and cascaded all over the floor; he tells her how he doesn’t know how he feels, he doesn’t know what he wants – and all she wants is for him to mop her up and gather her together as she was; she wants to plead and beg and cry so that he’ll unsay what he’s just said, hold her in his arms, tell her that nothing has changed, that everything is all right. But of course that is not what happens.
By the morning after the incident in Our Lady’s Hall, Skippy’s temple has blossomed into a gruesome purple-red flower. Some bruises you wear like badges of honour: when you got it playing rugby, or quad racing, or falling off something while drunk, no opportunity is lost to show off a good contusion. A bruise inflicted by someone else, however, is a whole other story: it’s like a big flashing arrow marking you out as punchable, and before long there’ll be boys queuing up to add bruises of their own, as if they’d just been waiting for somebody to show them it could be done. In one morning Skippy’s had a week’s worth of shit from people – swinging the door shut on him, tripping him up in the corridor, not to mention a punishment essay from Ms Ni Riain, three pages on the Gaelic origins of the name Seabrook, for coming late to class. By lunchtime he’s too dispirited even to eat; while the others go to the Ref, he skulks off on his own.
‘Poor sucker,’ Niall says. ‘He’s got it bad.’
‘That bang on the head was the best thing that could have happened to him,’ Dennis says, carrying his tray to the table. ‘Maybe now he’ll realize what a stupid idea all this Frisbee Girl stuff was. And we won’t have to listen to that gay BETHani song any more.’
‘That song really reminds me of something,’ Geoff says with a frown.
‘It’s a shame though,’ says Niall. ‘Because he does really like her.’
‘Really liking something is an automatic way of making sure you don’t get it.’ Dennis has just come from Quartet rehearsal – forty-five minutes of sarcastic remarks (‘Ah, I think you’ll find the piece is in four-four time?’) and eye-rolling from Ruprecht – and is in an especially bilious mood. ‘That’s the way it goes in this stupid crappy world.’
‘I suppose,’ Niall says. ‘Though I don’t see why.’
‘Maybe God made it that way to test us?’ Geoff suggests.
‘Oh sure, Geoff, and then at the end we all get lollipops,’ Dennis scowls.
‘Well, the thing is, of course –’ Ruprecht raises his head from his copybook like a sagacious hamster ‘– that the universe is asymmetrical.’
‘What? What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I mean, what we’re looking at here is a system that went from a high degree of symmetry in the moments immediately after the Big Bang – ten dimensions, all matter and energy conjoined – to the quite low degree of symmetry we have now, with some dimensions curled up, disunited physical forces, what have you. Obviously, it’s still a little bit symmetrical, we have our laws of physics, relativity, rotational symmetry, and so forth. But when you compare it to some of the other possible topologies that M-theory allows for, our universe does seem quite unbalanced. And patterns that occur on a quantum level carry all the way up.’
Dennis puts down his fork. ‘Blowjob, what the hell are you talking about?’
‘Exactly the same thing you are. The fundamental structure of the universe means that things consistently fail to balance out. Toast lands butter side down. Intelligent students get wedgies, instead of being respected as the future leaders of their society. You can’t get what you want, but someone else, who doesn’t want it, has it in spades. Asymmetry. It’s everywhere you look.’ He hefts his pudgy body around on the bench, scanning the room. ‘Over there, for instance. Philip Kilfether.’ He points to where Philip Kilfether, Seabrook’s Smallest Boy, sits just visible behind his juice carton. ‘All Philip Kilfether has ever dreamed of, since he was old enough to talk, is becoming a professional basketball player. But because of his underdeveloped pituitary gland, he’s never going to be more than four feet tall.’
They gaze at the tragic sight of Philip Kilfether, who spends hours on the basketball court every day, dashing from one end to the next as the ball whizzes unreachably over his head, and more hours still in his room, decorated wall-to-wall with posters of Magic, Bird, Michael Jordan and other famously tall men, performing stretching exercises in defiance of the medical prognosis. Murmurs of comprehension rise from the company at the table.
‘Skippy and this frisbee-playing girl is another obvious example. He likes her. She kisses him. The path of least resistance would seem to be to continue in that vein. But instead, she vanishes and Carl beats him up. It’s baffling.’
‘Or, how about Caetano,’ Geoff chips in. ‘He was in love with this girl in Brazil and he spent his entire life-savings on buying her this MP3 player because one day they were watching the Shopping Channel together and she said she’d like an MP3 player and then practically the very next day after he gave it to her she got off with this guy who was fixing her parents’ drains in their summerhouse even though she told Caetano this other time that the guy was an idiot and he had these really hairy knuckles and smelled of drains and then when Caetano asked her to give him the MP3 player back she wouldn’t?’
‘The asymmetry does seem particularly pronounced when girls are involved,’ Ruprecht observes.
‘Wow, Ruprecht, you really think in another universe girls wouldn’t be so asymmetrical?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Ruprecht says, adjusting his glasses donnishly. ‘As I say, patterns occuring on a quantum level are replicated on every scale.’
‘That’s great, Blowjob,’ Dennis rejoins. ‘Now all Skippy has to do is find his way into a parallel universe.’
‘It is theoretically possible,’ Ruprecht says.
‘Well, is it theoretically possible you could come up with something that might actually help him?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know, like a death ray to shoot Carl with.’
‘Violence never solved anything,’ Ruprecht asserts sanctimoniously.
‘Violence solves everything, you idiot, look at the history of the world. Any situation they have, they dick around with it for a while, then they bring in violence. That’s the whole reason they have scientists, to make violence more violent.’
‘It sounds to me as if your grasp of history is of a similar standard to your ability on the bassoon,’ Ruprecht snaps.
‘Shove it up your hole, Ruprecht, and your lame theory too.’ Dennis kicks back balefully in his chair. ‘The truth is, Skippy’d still be a loser in a parallel universe. We’d all still be losers, even in a universe of tiny girly ants.’
In the hallway some of the swimmers are gathered around the noticeboard. ‘Hey, Juster! Have a look at this!’ Antony Taylor calls out.
Coach has posted up the team for the meet. Your name’s second from the end.
‘I can’t believe he picked you,’ Siddartha Niland says. ‘He might as well throw a fucking brick in the water.’
‘You’d better not blow this for us, Juster,’ Duane Grehan says.
‘Why the fuck would he pick you?’ Siddartha shakes his head. ‘It just doesn’t make any sense.’
Upstairs you call Dad to give him the news. ‘That’s great, buddy!’ Dad’s voice crackles from far away.
‘Do you think you’ll be able to come along?’
‘I hope so, sport, I really hope so.’
‘What does Dr Gulbenkian say?’
‘What does he say?’
‘Wasn’t he coming over?’
‘Oh yeah – oh, you know, just the usual. You know
him. Listen, D, it’s crazy here today, I’d better go. But that’s great news, great news. This’ll really give us a lift.’
You hang up, you go to the window and look through the telescope. From the back of the door, the dead plastic eyes of the goggles watch you watching.
You don’t know why Coach picked you. You’ve got the worst times in the whole squad. It’s not just that you’re slow. Whenever you swim now it’s like there’s this secret tide waiting there just for you; and while all the other boys power ahead in straight lines to the finish, while Coach claps his hands and shouts them on, it is trying to lead you away, down to some unseen place there under the water, a dark door behind which lies a room that, as you descend towards it, you find you almost recognize… and like in a dream when you realize it’s pivoted into a nightmare, that’s when you start freaking out, flailing and thrashing, which only helps the dark magnets pulling you down, till it genuinely seems you’re going to drown, there in the shallows of the school pool – only at the last second something will kick back in and you’ll fight it off, struggle to the surface and claw for the wall as fast as you can, Paddy Last again, Daniel, and behind you it will disappear again, sink back into the innocent blue, waiting for the next time…
She’s not out there. You abandon the telescope, step back into the room. The X of the meet burns red on the calendar. The pills call to you from the dresser. Deep breaths, Skip. Remember what Coach said. A lot can happen between then and now. A mer-boy enrols at Seabrook and bumps you off the team. You get stuck in a lift, you break your arm. Something worse.
For now though it’s back to class, turgid deserts of grammar and rules and facts, the faraway life it is all a preparation for glimpsed through the windows of reading-comprehension texts and business models and vocabulary-boosting role-plays –
‘Good morning, I would like to buy a new bicycle.’
‘Certainly, sir. What kind of bicycle are you looking for? Is it for everyday use?’
