by Paul Murray
She knows her body will not like this. Her body wants to eat food, it wants to grow and make itself stronger. Even now her stomach is mewling with hunger, not knowing that it’s in control of the enemy. But she has the answer to this too, in fact the answer has been here all along – tucked away inside her favourite bear, a baggie of at least one hundred pills, enough to last her for a couple of weeks at least. She reaches for Lala, finds the secret tear underneath his left arm. She’ll start now with one pill or maybe two. Soon she’ll have everything back under control.
Something is following Carl.
In the beginning he just feels it, in the classroom, in Texaco, outside Lori’s house. It’s watching him but it doesn’t let him see it, he turns round and it’s gone. He asks Barry if he’s noticed anything.
‘Like what?’ Barry says.
‘Just like someone following us around.’
‘Shit, you mean like the pigs?’
But Carl doesn’t mean the pigs. He doesn’t know what he means. But just because he doesn’t know what it is doesn’t stop it from watching him, even in places where it’s impossible to watch him, in Deano’s flat or in his own room, or in his dreams where he starts to feel it too, the same pair of eyes that track him invisibly when he’s awake, there silently in the dream-space. For a long time though he doesn’t see it, it’s just a feeling, so he smokes more and more of the superskunk and tries to bury it under the feeling of nothing.
And then one night he is with Janine. They are in the greenhouse talking about what to do about the Plan, which is over because Carl ruined it. He doesn’t remember why he did it. It was a very good plan, the way that Janine explained it. We trick Lori’s mom and dad so they think she is going out with Skippy, but really she is going to meet you. They won’t know about you. Skippy won’t know about you. The only people that know about you will be the three of us. Lori will have to be with Skippy a little bit sometimes for the Plan to work. But it won’t mean anything. And the two of you can be together, Janine said, my love, and she ran her tongue over Carl’s neck. And Carl understood. Lori would be with Skippy sometimes, but it wouldn’t mean anything, the same way it didn’t mean anything when he was with Janine. It was just a trick to fool her parents, so she could say, I’m going to meet Skippy, and then she would go to meet Carl. He understood, he could see it was an excellent plan. But then at the last minute, when it was actually happening, he realized he didn’t understand. Most of him did but he couldn’t explain it to the part that didn’t. And he worried about whether the boy Skippy understood. That’s why he sent the film from the roof of Ed’s, so that everyone would know what was going on, everyone would know that Lori was his. But you see that was not part of the Plan. So what happened then was, instead of bringing him and Lori together, he has actually split them apart, and now he is in Janine’s granny’s greenhouse and everything is different. She is telling him Lori will not see him, will not talk to him. She is crying. He is breaking her granny’s flowerpots. She is begging him to stop. She is telling him that it will blow over, that Lori will come around, that she will talk to her. She is saying you can’t blame yourself for this, Carl! She keeps scrambling up his leg to try and kiss him, and he keeps pushing her back but then she gets close enough that he sees something. I love you, she says, but he doesn’t hear her, he is staring deep into her eyes.
The dead boy is staring back out at him.
Carl always thought it was him. Now he knows for certain.
After that Dead Boy becomes braver, he will appear not just in eyes and dreams but like a hologram beside Carl, or behind him, or in front of him, there and gone, a split-second at a time. No one else can see him, only Carl. ‘See what?’ they say. ‘A person.’ ‘Yeah right, haven’t you ever heard the saying, don’t get high on your own supply?’ and then they laugh. And right in the middle of them Dead Boy will be standing, staring at Carl with his big empty eyes.
Carl tries to get used to him and ignore him. Then he tries to fight him, to hit him kick him stab him, one day in school when he sees him standing in the window he throws a chair at him he screams at him in his bedroom, Stay away from me, but nothing works, just Mom appears at the door with messy hair asking if he wants a sleeping pill.
It gets hard to concentrate on things. Mark gives him jobs to do and he can’t find the money afterwards. Did he forget to take it? Did he leave it somewhere? You better get it from somewhere, dude, Barry says, otherwise he’s going to freak. So Carl ends up replacing it himself. After a while he starts running out of replacement money. But Mom’s written her ATM pin at the back of her address book.
Get it together, Barry says. You snooze you lose in this game, bro.
Barry is jealous because Carl has been suspended for a week because of throwing the chair. But being suspended is not that great. Most of the time he just goes to Deano’s gaff. Deano lives in the flats behind the shopping mall with his mom, only he calls her Ma, she looks like his granny and most of the time she stays in the kitchen drinking cups of tea and pretending not to know what they’re doing. Outside, everything smells like piss. The blokes are all scobes in tracksuits and the birds are mingers with ponytails and earrings as big as their heads, they laugh at Carl and call him a Seabrook bum boy and a poshie. But no one ever tries to mess with him because they know Deano has a sawn-off in a sports bag under his bed. He sits there with the others watching Ren and Stimpy and smoking and Dead Boy flicks in and out and Carl’s heart screams Lori Lori Lori Lori until the grass blots it out.
So where does all this shit come from? Barry says one night.
What? Mark says.
All this stuff we smoke and we sell, where does it come from?
A stork brings it, Deano says.
We buy it off the fuckin Mafia, Ste says.
Really? Barry goes.
No, you thick cunt, Ste says. Barry goes red.
What do you fuckin care where it comes from, Knoxer says. Are you on fuckin work experience or something?
Work experience! Deano says, laughing so hard snot comes out of his nose.
Knoxer is a cunt with greasy hair. Gee, Ren, says Stimpy, he is holding out a plate of sick.
It comes from different places, Mark says. They make the pills mostly in Holland. Coke, that’s all from South America. And heroin, that comes from poppies that these ragheads grow in Afghanistan.
From poppies? Like – poppies?
Yeah, then it comes up here from Spain, through Africa.
This is like fuckin Geography class, Knoxer says. I’m goin for a shite.
The &(*DEAD BOY→% revolves around the @@):/ DEAD BOY *¥.
But where do you get it? Barry says. Deano looks at Mark. Mark shrugs.
We get it from a mysterious Druid, Deano says, in a spooky voice. Barry looks at Mark.
This bloke that calls himself the Druid, Mark says.
Fuck off, Barry says.
I’m serious, Mark says.
Seriously, Deano says, that’s what he’s called.
Why?
It’s what he calls himself. He’s a nutjob. You’d get on with him, he says to Carl.
What’s a Druid, Carl says.
When do we get to meet him? Barry says.
What do you want to meet him for, Deano says.
It just seems like we should meet him, Barry says. If we’re part of the gang.
The gang, Ste says, with a chuckle.
Trust me, you’re not missin anything, Deano says. Bats cunt. Off his rocker. Gives me the fuckin willies.
Well, can we come next time? Barry says. When are you going to meet him next?
Mark doesn’t say anything, neither does Deano.
Saturday, Ste goes from the couch.
What? says Barry.
We’re going to see him on Saturday, Mark says. Outside the door the toilet flushes. There’s some stuff coming in.
Can we come? Barry says.
Youse can take my place if you want, Deano says. You wouldn’t hear
me complainin.
Barry’s eyes glow like he’s in Reservoir Dogs. Ren’s eyes pop out and explode.
Hur-hur-hur, goes Ste. You’re like Ren, and this dozy fucker’s like your man Stimpy, he says to Barry.
Carl’s phone calls to him through the wall of fog surrounding his mind. Where is it? It’s right in front of you. Janine is talking, Come and meet me, she says, it’s important. He rolls his eyes but gets up. Through the door in the hall, Knoxer has his hand in Carl’s jacket where it hangs by the stairs. When he sees Carl he takes it out and smiles and pats Carl’s cheek. Then he goes into the living room with the others. A moment later Carl is standing there with a churn of anger in his stomach but no idea why it’s there so he just leaves.
Janine is waiting in the church car park. They can’t go to the greenhouse any more, her granny called the police after it got wrecked. Don’t worry, she thinks it was Romanians, Janine says. Carl doesn’t care what she thinks. He hates Janine but she is the only way he has left to get messages to Lori. Every day he tells her something to tell her and she comes back with nothing. But there must be something he can say that would make her talk to him! There must be something!
Today Lori collapsed in class, Janine tells him.
They are behind the trees, watching the rain.
She hasn’t been eating, she says. For days. Today in English she had to stand up to read something and she just keeled over. The doctor came in and she had to go to hospital.
She puts her hand on his hand. If she could open the door marked Janine in Carl’s soul, she would find a wall of black puke that would pour out and drown her. I think she’s been obsessing about Daniel, she says.
Carl doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t take Janine’s head and smash it against the wall. You see, if she wanted to Janine could tell Lori about what he’s been doing with her, and that would be the absolute total end of everything. So he has to keep seeing Janine to stop her from telling Lori he’s seeing Janine! It’s like a riddle! It’s like a cage with invisible bars! She stares at him spastically. Dead Boy flashes up in her eyes, he is laughing at Carl.
I need some more vitamins, she says,
He takes a little baggie out of his pocket. They’re for free, he mumbles.
I want to pay you, she says. She kisses him on the cheek, it’s like being pressed into wet ground.
Don’t worry, she tells him, sliding her hands under his shirt, this is strictly business. She sucks at his neck like quicksand, she rubs his trousers. He looks away at the rain and the fallen leaves. She cries out, Stop thinking about her, Carl!
And she kisses him desperately like a starving animal and Carl kisses her back to stop her talking and puts his hand into her pants to close her eyes, his fingers slip-sliding into her, deeper deeper deeper, like they think that that way is a way back to Lori.
He had gone there for an explanation. Ruprecht has always believed in explanations; he has always seen the universe as a series of questions posed to its inhabitants, with the answers waiting like prizes for the boy lucky and diligent enough to find them. To believe in explanations is good, because it means you may believe also that beneath the chaotic, mindless jumble of everything, beneath the horrible disjunction you feel at every moment between you and all you are not, there dwells in the universe a secret harmony, a coherence and rightness like a balanced equation that’s out of reach for now but someday will reveal itself in its entirety. He knew the horror of what had happened could not be undone. Still, an explanation might fix it in time, seal it in, silence it. He imagined her breaking down and confessing, like people did on TV, spilling out answers like tears, he sitting in judgement until he finally understood.
But that is not what happened. Instead, like a theory that promises everything and delivers nothing, that spreads like a virus to nullify what you thought you already knew, she had left him only with questions, terrible questions. Why didn’t he tell Ruprecht about his mum? Why did he want to quit the swimming team? In Ruprecht’s dreams every night now he is back in the Doughnut House – back amid the shouts, the lights, people crying, doughnuts scattering the floor, and Skippy, rapidly becoming a figure from the past, sprawled drowning on the tiles beneath him, while the sea beats away in the distance, unheard under the traffic, a dark blue line lost in the greater darkness of the night – Why? Ruprecht yells at him in these dreams. Why, why, why? But Skippy doesn’t answer, he is going, going, slipping away through his fingers, even while Ruprecht is holding him, even though he holds on as tight as he can.
The days that follow see an exponential increase in Ruprecht’s doughnut intake. He eats them constantly, at every hour of the day and night, as though in an endless race with some invisible, inexorable competitor. The other boys find this creepy, given what’s happened, but for Ruprecht it’s like the more he eats, the less they mean, and the less they mean, the more of them it seems he can eat, as if they are genuinely becoming zeros that take up no space, crowding into his stomach, a bellyful of nothings. His skin becomes pocked with angry-looking hives, and he is no longer able to do up the top button of his trousers – Dennis jokes that it’s a good thing he didn’t go ahead with that new portal idea or he might have got stuck halfway into a parallel universe, but Niall, for once, doesn’t laugh.
In the classroom he ceases to be a moribund non-participant, but although his hand goes up all the time, the answers he gives are never the right ones. Eight colours in a rainbow? The capital of Sweden is Oslo? Erosion, a process of gradual wearing away, from the Greek word eros meaning love? No one has ever witnessed Ruprecht getting a question wrong before; there is, initially, a certain level of Schadenfreude at this lapse in perfection, even among his teachers. But from straightforward wrongness it soon degenerates into something much more unsettling. A hydrogen atom has two dads, the main export of Russia is C sharp, Jesus instructs us to diff ract sunlight; every time the teacher asks a question, often before they’ve finished asking, there is Ruprecht with some dizzyingly untrue response, and when they ignore him, he shouts things out, completing their sentences for them, turning whole lessons into gibberish, snowdrifts of nonsense so deep and bewildering the teachers often have no choice but to abandon the class and start again from the very beginning. They give him the benefit of the doubt, hoping he’ll snap out of it; but time goes by and Ruprecht’s behaviour only gets worse, his grades lower, his homework more obscene, until finally, feeling as if they are banishing their firstborn, they start asking him to leave the classroom. Soon he’s spending the greater part of his day out on the corridor, or in Study Hall – or in the infirmary getting an icepack on his nose, because the forces of darkness do not like this new rebellious Ruprecht either, do not welcome his deviation from his ordained role in the hierarchy. The messages posted on his back become more virulent, and the blows intensify too, slaps becoming punches, shin-kicks heading groinward; every time he takes a piss someone will push him into the urinal. Ruprecht carries on like none of it is happening.
‘Please stop,’ Geoff Sproke begs him.
‘Stop what?’ Ruprecht asks blandly.
‘Just… just be yourself again?’
Ruprecht merely blinks like he doesn’t know what Geoff means. And he is not the only one. The whole of the second year is undergoing some dark psychic metamorphosis whereby each of them is less and less himself. Test results are plummeting, indiscipline soars – boys talking among themselves, turning their backs, telling the teachers if they object to fuck off, fuck themselves, get fucked. Every day brings some new outrage. Neville Nelligan, previously unassuming middle-of-the-roader, asks Ms Ni Riain how she’d like to smoke his cock. Kevin Wong pulls a punch on Mr Fletcher in Science class. Barton Trelawney kills Odysseas Antopopopolous’s pet hamster, Achilles, by lifting it out of its cage and squeezing it into pulp with his bare hands. Bus stops are vandalized, chippers defaced with flung punnets of curry sauce. One morning Carl Cullen gets up in the middle of his Remedial Maths class, lifts his chair and puts
it right through the classroom window.
For a time the Automator explains away the growing anomie as a process of ‘resettling’. But soon the malaise begins to spread through the school. When the senior rugby team are defeated in the first round of the Paraclete Cup by traditional whipping boys Whitecastle Wood, the Acting Principal finds himself under the cosh. The senior team is Seabrook; this humiliation seems to articulate something deeply amiss at the very heart of the school. There are whisperings among parents and the higher echelons of the alumni organization; those priests who do not approve of the Automator’s plans for modernization, who have grave doubts about the very idea of a lay principal, become more vocal about their misgivings – especially since the word from the hospital is that Father Furlong is out of danger and on the road to recovery.
‘Des Furlong’s not coming back, they can get that through their heads for a start. Man’s heart’s like a puff-pastry, how do they think he’d be up to running a school?’ A whole new vein has appeared in recent days to throb in the Automator’s forehead. ‘I’ve got teachers moaning at me because they can’t control their classes, I’ve got parents whining down the phone because their kids flunk a test, I’ve got the rugby coach telling me the team’s got no morale, everyone expects me to have the answer, I feel – God damn it, I feel like I’m carrying this place on my own! On my own!’
‘Tea?’ a low voice at his elbow causes Howard to start. He keeps forgetting Brother Jonas is there: he has an eerie capacity to melt into the background. Trudy is on sick-leave; the absence of her feminizing touch heightens the militaristic feel of the Acting Principal’s office.
