by Paul Murray
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.
‘This is a crazy mania,’ Mario says morosely. ‘Carl is going to pulverize him. Skippy will be lucky if he ever gets to ogle a woman again.’
‘Do you think we should do something?’ Niall says.
‘Do something?’ Dennis repeats. ‘Like what?’
‘Like, stop him somehow.’
‘And just let this Neanderthal waltz off with the great love of his life, is that it?’ Like many pessimists, Dennis becomes strangely energized when things are actually at their worst. ‘He should sit tight and let himself be bullied and trampled over for another four years, and then some day when he’s an accountant married to some mediocre-looking girl the bullies didn’t want he can take revenge by giving Carl Incorporated a really exacting audit?’
‘But what’s the point of a fight he’s guaranteed to lose?’
‘I don’t know what the point is,’ Dennis avows. ‘But we’ve been getting pushed around this dump for nine years now and if one person has actually found the guts to do something about it, I’m not about to stop him. Maybe it’ll inspire the rest of us to stop being such a bunch of losers. In fact, this is exactly what Robert Frost was writing about in that poem.’
‘I thought you said it was about anal sex.’
‘Poems can be about more than one thing. You guys can say what you want. I’m with Skippy. He knows what he’s doing. You’ll see.’
Skippy’s locked in a cubicle in the bathroom. In his hand is the tube of pills. He knows he probably shouldn’t. But it feels like his head is about to fly away, and maybe just a half would be enough to make the room stop spinning round –
The phone rings. It’s her! ‘Daniel, are you going to fight Carl?’
How does she know? ‘Am I what?’ he says, hurriedly stowing the pills in his back pocket.
‘Oh my God,’ she moans. ‘Daniel, are you?’
‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ he says.
‘Oh God,’ she says again, breathlessly. She sounds even more freaked out than he is, which in spite of everything sets a little ember of warmth aglow in his heart. ‘Daniel, Carl’s dangerous, you don’t know what he’ll do –’
‘Can I ask you a question?’ He doesn’t want to, but can’t stop himself. ‘Are you and him… are you, uh…’
She sighs in a way that’s almost a groan. ‘Listen, Daniel –’ she stops and sighs again; he waits with his entire insides coiled into one impossibly tight spring that is pulling his chin down into his shoulders – ‘I haven’t seen Carl since before the Hop. But he gets ideas into his head. He’s wild, Daniel. So stay away from him.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Skippy says, simply and not unheroically.
‘Arrgh – I mean it. It’s stupid to fight him. You don’t need to. Do you understand? Just come up to the house like we said, okay? Just stay away from Carl, and come straight up.’
‘Okay.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘I promise,’ he says, crossing his fingers, and opens the cubicle door.
Behind the swimming pool, boys continue to cram into the shrinking space. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and invisible messages flying back and forth, leaving barely enough oxygen to breathe; morale in the Juster camp has been dealt a further blow by the discovery that Damien Lawlor has opened a book on the fight and is giving even money on Carl to win in twenty seconds or less, and ten to one on Skippy requiring an ambulance, with the proviso that there has to be an actual ambulance, and he has to be stretchered into it. He meets their disapproval with his well-practised blank look. ‘What?’ he says.
‘That’s bollocks, Lawlor.’
‘What’s Carl ever done for you? He’s kicked your ass loads of times, I’ve seen him.’
‘Look,’ Damien says, pausing to take five euro from Hal Healy on Carl to KO Skippy in one punch at eleven to two, ‘my heart is one hundred per cent, completely behind Skippy. I have a totally unshakeable belief in him. This is a completely separate business venture, run by my head. The two things have nothing to do with each other.’ He gazes from one frosty, sceptical face to the next. ‘You people need to learn how to compartmentalize,’ he tells them.
‘What are the odds on Skippy winning?’ Geoff demands.
‘Skippy winning… let me see…’ Damien pretends to leaf through his book. ‘Ah, that would be… a hundred to one.’
‘I’ll take five euro on Skippy to win,’ Geoff says firmly.
‘Are you sure?’ Damien says, surprised.
‘Yes,’ Geoff replies.
‘Me too,’ Mario says, proffering a note of his own. ‘Five euro on Skippy to win.’
Dennis and Niall follow suit, and so does Ruprecht, albeit somewhat reluctantly, as he has computed the odds himself and come up with a figure astronomically higher. ‘Five euro on Skippy to win at a hundred to one,’ Damien repeats blithely, handing Ruprecht his chit. ‘Best of luck, gentlemen.’
‘What’s a hundred to one?’ None of them sees Skippy coming; out here in the cold and surrounded by older boys he looks paler and scrawnier than ever, and also, although bone-dry, somehow gives the impression of being soaking wet.
‘Nothing,’ Mario says quickly.
‘How do you feel?’ Ruprecht asks him.
‘Great,’ Skippy says, shivering, and wedges his hands in his pockets. ‘Where’s Carl?’
Carl is not here yet; the mob is getting restless. Five past four becomes ten past becomes a quarter past; a drizzle sets up as the light fades, at the edges of the gathering stray bodies begin to drift away, and Geoff Sproke decides to allow himself to entertain the tiniest hope that Carl will not show – that he is so stoned he forgets about it, or that he is arrested by the police en route for locker arson, or just that he is a neglectful person who is too lazy to come along. In fact, as soon as Geoff opens the door, he finds all kinds of reasons for the fight not to happen, and the small hope skips free and expands until suddenly it is almost a certainty, and Geoff feels a kind of elation, and is just about to poke Skippy, looking so pensive and grey-faced there, and explain to him that he needn’t worry because Carl’s not coming, meaning victory goes to him by default, so he can go and hang out with Lori and everything will be good and happy for all of them for ever – when there’s a collective intake of breath and the hubbub shifts to a single pitch and everybody turns to look in one direction and Geoff’s face falls and the hope dwindles instantly and is extinguished.
At first Carl doesn’t even seem to notice the crowd – he loiters by the boiler room, finishing a cigarette. Then, flicking away the butt, he lopes towards them. Instantly the bodies around Skippy
melt away, and he finds himself at the centre of a perfectly circular clearing, though Mario’s still at his ear, jabbering about some one hundred per cent fail-safe and lethal karate move that they do in Italy –
‘Italian karate?’ Skippy murmurs.
‘It’s the deadliest form of karate there is,’ Mario is saying, and there is more, but Skippy no longer hears him. He is fixed on Carl, who’s laughing to himself like he can’t believe he’s even bothering to do this, and other people are laughing too, because as he comes closer you can see just how huge he is, and how ridiculous is the idea of Skippy trying to fight him, and Skippy blushes at the realization that his grand gesture is in fact a joke, as embarrassing as it will be brutal. Yet at the very same time a voice keeps repeating inside him: every Demon has a weak spot – every Demon has a weak spot – over and over, as if the owl from Hopeland is there on his shoulder – every Demon has a weak spot – then Carl takes off his school jumper and rolls up his shirtsleeves, and this voice stops with all the others.
His arm is covered, from the wrist to the elbow, with long, thin cuts. There must be a hundred of them, in different states of freshness – some bright-red, others sour, dull, fragmenting into scabs – winding up his forearm so densely there is hardly any untouched skin left to see, as if he’s being woven anew from tiny red threads. Now for the first time he looks at Skippy and though he is still smiling, behind his eyes Skippy can see his brain bucking and fizzing and short-circuiting in the grip of some flashing, clanging force, and suddenly and very vividly he understands that Carl has no brakes or conscience or anything like that and when he said he was going to kill him that’s exactly what he meant –
‘Okay then.’ It’s Gary Toolan, of course, ushering any stragglers out of the ring and bringing the two fighters together to shake hands. It’s like shaking hands with Death, Skippy can feel the life sucked out of him, and he’s just realizing that he’s never actually been in a fight before, he doesn’t even know what you’re supposed to do, the idea of walking over to someone and hitting them seems absurd – when Gary Toolan shouts, ‘Fight!’ and Carl runs at him, and he ducks out of the way by the skin of his teeth. In an instant the crowd has transformed, becoming a screaming, baying frenzy, like when you throw the switch on a blender, their voices a single bloodthirsty gurgle from which only rare individual words emerge, kill – smash – fucking – down, just as the faces are mostly a blur, which is probably a good thing because the two or three that momentarily, inexplicably, pop out at Skippy are contorted into masks of such pure undiluted hatred that if he were to stop and think about it – instead he tries to remember Djed’s moves from Hopeland – better than nothing, right? – fighting the Ice Demon, the Fire Demon, doing the forward roll and jab, the spinning kick, the tiger throw – sometimes Skippy practises these in his bedroom when Ruprecht’s not around, although never on any enemy more formidable than his pillow – but these go out of his head straight away, as the fists come at him and again he just manages to get out of the way – except he doesn’t, Carl’s grabbed him, there’s a tearing noise as Skippy’s jumper rips and Carl’s fist pulls back and this is it, this is the end of the fight already –
