Skippy Dies: A Novel

The door swings open with a creak and you step inside, into the Great Hall. Spiderwebs cover everything, drifting from floor to ceiling like veils from a thousand left-behind brides. You look at the map and go through a door on the far side of the hall. This room used to be the library; books cover the floor in dusty piles. On the table is a scroll, but before you can read it the grandfather clock bursts open and there are one, two, three zombies coming at you! You swipe at them with the torch and duck round the other side of the table, but more appear in the doorway, drawn by the smell of someone alive –

‘Skippy, this is totally boring.’

‘Yeah, Skip, do you think someone else could have a go, maybe?’

‘I’ll just be a second,’ Skippy mumbles, as the zombies pursue him up a rickety staircase.

‘What do you think these zombies do all day?’ Geoff wonders. ‘When there’s no one around they want to eat?’

‘They order pizza,’ Dennis says. ‘Which Mario’s dad delivers.’

‘I told you a thousand times, my father is not a pizza deliveryman, he is an important diplomat in the Italian embassy,’ Mario snaps.

‘Seriously, though, how often is anyone going to call into their creepy house? Like, what do they do, just wander around it all day long, moaning to each other?’

‘They sound sort of like my parents,’ Geoff realizes. He gets up and stretches out his arms and staggers around the room, saying in a sepulchral zombie voice, ‘Geoff… put out the garbage… Geoff… I can’t find my glasses… We’ve made great sacrifices to send you to that school, Geoff…’

Skippy wishes they would stop talking. Heat coils round his brain like a fat snake, tighter and tighter, making his eyelids heavy… and now just for a second the screen blurs, enough time for a raggy arm to fling itself around his neck – he shakes awake, he tries to wriggle free, but it’s too late, they’re all over him, pulling him to the ground, crowding around till he can’t even see himself, their long nails slashing down, their rotten teeth gnashing, and the little spinning light that is his soul whirls up to the ceiling…

‘Game over, Skippy,’ Geoff says in the zombie voice, laying a heavy hand on his shoulder.

‘Finally,’ Mario says. ‘Now can we play something else?’

Skippy’s dorm, like all the other dorms, is in the Tower, which sits at the end of Our Lady’s Hall and is the very oldest part of Seabrook. In days of Yore, when the school was first built, the entire student population ate, slept and sat through classes here; nowadays, day boys form the majority of the pupils, and out of each year of two hundred there are only twenty or thirty unlucky souls who have to come back here after the bell has gone. Any Harry Potter-type fantasies tend to get squashed pretty quickly: life in the Tower, an ancient building composed mostly of draughts, is a deeply unmagical experience, spent at the mercy of lunatic teachers, bullies, athlete’s foot epidemics, etc. There are some small consolations. At a point in life in which the lovely nurturing homes built for them by their parents have become unendurable Guantánomos, and any time spent away from their peers is experienced at best as a mind-numbing commercial break for things no one wants to buy on some old person’s TV channel and at worst as a torture not incomparable to being actually genuinely nailed to a cross, the boarders do enjoy a certain prestige among the boys. They have a sort of sheen of independence; they can cultivate mysterious personae without having to worry about mums or dads showing up and blowing the whole thing by telling people about amusing ‘accidents’ they had when they were little or by publically admonishing them to please stop walking around with their hands wedged in their pockets like a pervert.

Unarguably the best thing about being a boarder, though, is that the Tower overlooks, in spite of the feverish tree-planting efforts of the priests, the yard of St Brigid’s, the girls’ school next door. Every morning, lunchtime and evening the air rings with high feminine voices like lovely secular bells, and at night-time, before they close the curtains, you can see without even needing to look through the telescope – which is a good thing, because Ruprecht is extremely particular about what his telescope is used for, and always keeps it pointed into the girl-less reaches of the sky above – your female counterparts walking around in the upper windows, talking, brushing their hair or even, if you believe Mario, doing naked aerobics. That’s as close as you’ll get, though, because, while it’s the constant subject of plans and boasts and tall tales, no one has ever verifiably breached the wall between the two schools; nor has anyone conceived of a way past the St Brigid’s janitor and his infamous dog, Nipper, not to mention the terrifying Ghost Nun who legend has it roams the grounds after dark wielding either a crucifix or pinking shears, depending on who you talk to.

Ruprecht Van Doren, owner of the telescope and Skippy’s room-mate, is not like the other boys. He arrived at Seabrook in January, like a belated and non-returnable Christmas gift, after both his parents were lost on a kayaking expedition up the Amazon. Prior to their deaths, he had been schooled at home by tutors flown in from Oxford at the behest of his father, Baron Maximilian Van Doren, and consequently he has quite a different attitude to education from his peers. For Ruprecht, the world is a compendium of fascinating facts just waiting to be discovered, and a difficult maths problem is like sinking into a nice warm bath. A cursory glance around the room will give an idea of his current projects and interests. Maps of many kinds cover the walls – maps of the moon, of near and far-off constellations, a map of the world stuck with little pins marking recent UFO sightings – as well as a picture of Einstein and scoresheets commemorating notable Yahtzee victories. The telescope, bearing a sign that reads in big black letters DO NOT TOUCH, points out the window; a French horn gleams pompously from the foot of the bed; on the desk, hidden beneath a sheaf of inscrutable printouts, his computer performs mysterious operations whose full nature is known only to its owner. Impressive as this may be, it represents only a fraction of Ruprecht’s activity, most of which takes place in his ‘lab’, one of the dingy antechambers off the basement. Down here, surrounded by yet more computers and parts of computers, more towers of unfathomable papers and electrical arcana, Ruprecht constructs equations, conducts experiments and continues his pursuit of what he considers the Holy Grail of science: the secret of the origins of the universe.

‘Newsflash, Ruprecht, they know about the origins of the universe. It’s called the Big Bang?’

‘Aha, but what happened before the Bang? What happened during it? What was it that banged?’

‘How would I know?’

‘Well, you see, that’s the whole point. From the moments after the Bang until this moment right now, the universe makes sense – that is to say, it obeys observable laws, laws that can be written down in the language of mathematics. But when you go before that, to the very, very beginning, these laws no longer apply. The equations won’t work out. If we could solve them, though, if we could understand what happened in those first few milliseconds, it would be like a master key, which would unlock all sorts of other doors. Professor Hideo Tamashi believes that the future of humanity could depend on our opening these doors.’

Spend twenty-four hours a day cooped up with Ruprecht and you will hear a lot about this Professor Hideo Tamashi and his groundbreaking attempts to solve the Big Bang using ten-dimensional string theory. You will also hear a lot about Stanford, the university where Professor Tamashi teaches, which from Ruprecht’s descriptions of it sounds like a cross between an amusement arcade and Cloud City in Star Wars, a place where everyone wears jumpsuits and nothing bad ever happens. Ruprecht has had his heart set on studying under Professor Tamashi more or less since he could walk, and whenever he mentions the Prof, or Stanford and its really first-rate lab facilities, his voice takes on a starry, yearning quality, like someone describing a beautiful land glimpsed once in a dream.

‘Why don’t you just go then,’ Dennis says, ‘if everything’s so whoop-de-doo over there?’

‘My dear Dennis,’ Ruprecht chortles, ‘one does not just “go” to somewhere like Stanford.’

Instead, it seems, you need something called an academic résumé, something that shows the Dean of Admissions that you are just that fraction smarter than all the other smart people applying there. Hence Ruprecht’s various investigations, experiments and inventions – even the ones, his detractors, principally Dennis, argue, purportedly undertaken for the Future of Humanity.

‘That tub of guts doesn’t give two hoots about humanity,’ Dennis says. ‘All he wants is to ponce off to America and meet other dweebs who’ll play Yahtzee with him and not make fun of his weight.’

‘I suppose it must be hard for him,’ Skippy says. ‘You know, being a genius and everything, and being stuck here with us.’

‘But he’s not a genius!’ Dennis rails. ‘He’s a total fraud!’

‘Come on, Dennis, what about his equations?’ Skippy says.

‘Yeah, and his inventions?’ adds Geoff.

‘His inventions? The time machine, a tinfoil-lined wardrobe attached to an alarm clock? The X-ray glasses, that are just regular glasses glued onto the inside of a toaster? How could anyone take these for the work of a serious scientist?’

Dennis and Ruprecht don’t get on. It’s not hard to see why: two more different boys would be hard to imagine. Ruprecht is eternally fascinated by the world around him, loves to take part in class and throws himself into extra-curricular activities; Dennis, an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic, hates the world and everything in it, especially Ruprecht, and has never thrown himself into anything, with the exception of a largely successful campaign last summer to efface the first letter from every manifestation of the word ‘canal’ in the Greater Dublin Area, viz. the myriad street signs proclaiming ROYAL ANAL, WARNING! ANAL, GRAND ANAL HOTEL. As far as Dennis is concerned, the entire persona of Ruprecht Van Doren is nothing more than a grandiloquent concoction of foolish Internet theories and fancy talk lifted from the Discovery Channel.

‘But Dennis, why would he want to make up stuff like that?’

‘Why does anyone do anything in this shithole? To make himself look like he’s better than us. I’m telling you, he’s no more a genius than I am. And if you ask me, this stuff about him being an orphan, that’s a crock too.’

Well, that’s where Dennis and his audience part company. Yes, it’s true that details of Ruprecht’s ex-parents remain vague, apart from an occasional passing reference to his father’s skills as a horseman, ‘famed the length of the Rhine’, or a fleeting mention of his mother, ‘a delicate woman with aesthetic hands’. And it’s true that although Ruprecht’s present line is that they were botanists, drowned while kayaking up the Amazon in search of a rare medicinal plant, Martin Fennessy claims that Ruprecht, shortly after his arrival, told him that they were professional kayakers, drowned while competing in a round-the-world kayaking race. But nobody believes he or anyone else, with the possible exception of Dennis himself, would do something as karmically perilous as lie about the death of his parents.

That’s not to say Ruprecht isn’t annoying, or that he’s not poison to a body’s street-cred. There are definite drawbacks to a public association with Ruprecht. But the bottom line is that for some inexplicable reason Skippy actually likes him, and so the way it’s panned out is that if you’re friends with Skippy you now get Ruprecht into the bargain, like a two-hundred-pound booby prize.

And by now some of the others have become quite fond of him. Maybe Dennis is right, and he is talking non-stop bollocks – it still makes a change from everything else they’re hearing these days. You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone ‘Give me the gun’, etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone’s asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don’t mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg – that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you’d imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of ‘life’. Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors – GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE – keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn’t necessarily need to be closed…

At the onset of this process – looking down the barrel of this grim de-dreamification, which, even more than hyperactive glands and the discovery of girls, seems to be the actual stuff of growing up – to have Ruprecht telling you his crackpot theories comes to be oddly comforting.

‘Imagine it,’ he says, gazing out the window while the rest of you huddle around the Nintendo, ‘everything that is, everything that has ever been – every grain of sand, every drop of water, every star, every planet, space and time themselves – all crammed into one dimensionless point where no rules or laws apply, waiting to fly out and become the future. When you think about it, the Big Bang’s a bit like school, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Ruprecht, what the hell are you talking about?’

‘Well, I mean to say, one day we’ll all leave here and become scientists and bank clerks and diving instructors and hotel managers – the fabric of society, so to speak. But in the meantime, that fabric, that is to say, us, the future, is crowded into one tiny little point where none of the laws of society applies, viz., this school.’

Uncomprehending silence; and then, ‘I tell you one difference between this school and the Big Bang, and that is in the Big Bang there is no particle quite like Mario. But you can be sure that if there is, he is the great stud particle, and he is boning the lucky lady particles all night long.’

‘Yes,’ Ruprecht responds, a little sadly; and he will fall silent, there at his window, eating a doughnut, contemplating the stars.