Skippy Dies: A Novel

‘Hey, Von Blowjob, let me see your homework.’

‘No way, there isn’t time.’

‘I just want to see it, that’s all. Come on, Cujo won’t be here for – hey, Skippy, let me see your homework… hey! Skippy?’

‘Earth to Skippy!’

‘Hmm? What?’

‘Whoa, are you feeling okay? You look sort of green.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Like you’re actually green, like frog-coloured?’

‘I’m just a bit –’

‘Hey, everyone, look at Skippy!’

‘Shut up, Geoff.’

‘He’s turning amphibious!’

‘Hey, maybe if you turn into a frog you’ll be able to speak French better. Hey, everyone, Skippy thinks if he turns – ow!’

Max Brady, waiting to get his homework back from Dennis, scans the doorway. ‘Where is the old bastard?’

‘Maybe he’s feeding his snakes.’

‘Maybe he had a meeting with Satan.’

‘Or he’s off delivering lard to the poor.’

‘ “What is this, lard?” “You’ll eat it and like it!” ’

Turning in his desk, Vincent Bailey says sotto voce that he heard Cujo’s in one of his bad moods today. Yeah, Mitchell Gogan says, he heard that in Cujo’s fifth-year class this morning the priest caught someone playing a game on his phone under his desk and he put the boy’s head inside the desk and whacked the lid closed on top of him so hard he had to get stitches.

‘That’s bollocks, Gogan.’

‘Yeah, the fifth-year desks don’t even have lids.’

‘I’m just saying that’s what I heard.’

‘I heard that once he hit a guy so hard he nearly died.’

‘Well, he’s not allowed hit people any more,’ Simon Mooney interjects. ‘My dad’s a lawyer and he says that the law is, teachers aren’t allowed –’

‘Shh! Shut up! Here he comes!’

Instantly all conversation vanishes, and the class dutifully rise to their feet. The priest enters and crosses to the lectern. In the prevailing silence his black eyes scour the room, and although the boys do not move, interiorly they huddle together, as if caught in the midst of some icy wind.

‘Asseyez-vous.’

Father Green: previous generations took some clandestine solace in the fact that this translates neatly as Père Vert. Mention him to your dad and he’ll definitely remember him, and most probably chuckle at the terror he inspired – that is the way dads’ memories seem to work, like nothing they felt when they were this age was really real! Nowadays, whether it’s another instance of dumbing-down, or that the priest’s mood swings have grown more extreme with the years, the linguistic esprit has been jettisoned in favour of the more direct Cujo; because that’s what his French class is like, being trapped in a small room with a rabid animal. Rail-thin, a head taller than the tallest of the boys, on his best days the priest looks like the end of the world; his presence itself is like smouldering kindling, or knuckles cracking over and over.

On paper, though, Father Green is close to sainthood. As well as his various campaigns for Africa – the Seabrook Spinners Sponsored Cycle, the Seabrook Telethon featuring Miss Ireland runner-up Sophie Bienvenue, the Lucky Shamrock pins the boys go out and sell on St Patrick’s Day – he makes regular trips to deprived areas of Dublin, delivering clothes and food. Sooner or later, most of the boys will end up ‘volunteering’ on one of these runs – travelling in the priest’s lumbering estate to wastelands of glass and dog-shit, carrying black bags and boxes into tiny houses with boarded-up windows while youths their own age collect in scabby gangs to jeer at them every time they come out to the car, and the priest glowers terrifyingly at pupil and hoodlum alike, in his black raiment looking like a single downward stroke of a pen, a peremptory, unforgiving slash through the error-strewn copybook that is the world. You’ve got to wonder just how glad the Poor are to see him, rapping on the door with his false smile and his troop of trembling helpers. They should count their blessings they’re not cooped up in French class with him four days a week, waiting for him to explode.

It’s no secret that Father Green hates teaching, and he especially hates teaching French. Lessons are frequently suspended for tirades – usually directed at Gaspard Delacroix, the unfortunate exchange student – on the subject of France’s decadence. He seems to believe the language itself to be morally corrosive, and most of the class is spent doing grammar, where its grossness can be partly contained; even then, those languorous elisions, those turbid glottals, enrage him. But what doesn’t enrage him? Air particles enrage him. And the boys, with their expensive haircuts and bright futures, enrage him even more. The best they can do is stay quiet and try not to set him off.

Today, however – pace the stories of V. Bailey and M. Gogan – the priest seems in uncharacteristically jovial spirits, full of bonhomie and playfulness. He collects the copybooks and breezes through yesterday’s homework, commenting, accurately, on how dull it is, and apologizing for putting such clever young men to such uninspiring work, which, although he’s probably being sarcastic, they giggle at obediently; he pokes gentle fun at Sylvain, the anti-hero of the French textbook, who in today’s exercise is discussing with his dweeby French friends all the lame places they have been that day using the past tense of the verb aller, before he sets them to work on an introductory letter to a fictitious pen pal while he checks through their copybooks.

Gradually, the oppressive mood in the classroom lifts. In the distance, there is birdsong, and a shaky ascending scale from Father Laughton’s music class. Behind Skippy, Mario very quietly begins to tell Kevin ‘What’s’ Wong how he had sex with his French pen pal’s hot sister last summer. As he elaborates, he starts unconsciously kicking the back of Skippy’s chair. Thin pages flap through the priest’s bony fingers. Skippy, who is still decidedly green about the gills, turns round and stares meaningfully at Mario, but Mario doesn’t notice, being involved in an impressively detailed account of the sexual predilections of the French pen pal’s sister, whom he is now claiming is a famous actress.

Kick, kick, kick, goes his foot against the chair. Skippy pulls at his hair, flushing.

‘What’s she been in?’ Kevin ‘What’s’ Wong asks.

‘French things,’ Mario says. ‘She’s very famous, in France.’

‘Stop kicking my seat!’ Skippy hisses.

Keeping his head craned close to the copybook he’s marking, Father Green lilts to himself, ‘I’m so piiiiimmmmp it’s ri-dick-i-less.’

Instantly everyone stops what they’re doing. Did he just say what they think he said? Father Green, as if becoming aware of this shift of attention, looks up.

‘Stand up, please, Mr Juster,’ he says pleasantly.

Skippy rises uncertainly to his feet.

‘What were you talking about there, Mr Juster?’

‘I wasn’t talking,’ Skippy stammers.

‘I distinctly heard talking. Who was talking?’

‘Uhh…’

‘I see, no one was talking, is that correct?’

Skippy doesn’t reply.

‘Lying,’ Father Green counts on his fingers. ‘Talking during class. Obscenity – do you know the meaning of obscenity, Mr Juster?’

Skippy – who’s rapidly paling, becoming a ghost-frog – hoists a shoulder indeterminately.

‘We live in an age of obscenity,’ Father Green announces, quitting his lectern and addressing the class as if this were a new area of French grammar. ‘Profanity of language. Profaning of the divine temple that is the body. Lustful images. We are immersed in it, we learn to love it, like pigs in excrement, is that not so, Mr Juster?’

Skippy stares back at him queasily. One hand grips the desk, as if that’s all that’s propping him up.

‘I’m so piiiiimmmmp it’s ri-dick-i-less,’ the priest repeats, louder now, in an excruciating American drawl. Nobody laughs. ‘Today while driving in my car,’ he explains in a mock-conversational tone, ‘I chanced to turn on the radio, and this is what I heard.’ He pauses, screws up his face and then relays, ‘Oh baby, I like to play rough, and when I’m pumpin’ my stuff you just can’t get enough…’

Heads sink leadenly into arms: they can begin to see what’s coming up next.

‘I confess to finding myself a little confused –’ Father Green scratches his head in a caricature of puzzlement ‘– as to what the fellow meant, and I made a note to myself to ask one of you boys. What stuff is he pumping, Mr Juster?’

Skippy just gulps.

‘Puuuummmmpin’ it,’ the priest hums to himself. ‘Pummmpin’ it real good… Could it be petrol? Is he perhaps a petrol attendant? Or perhaps he is referring to his bicycle? Is that what the song is about, in your opinion, Mr Juster? Is he referring to his bicycle?’

Skippy quails, his nostrils flare in and out, deep breaths –

‘IS HE REFERRING TO HIS BICYCLE?’

Clearing his throat, Skippy replies in a faint high voice, ‘Maybe?’

The priest’s hand slams on ‘Jeekers’ Prendergast’s desk like a thunderclap; everybody jumps in their seats. ‘Liar!’ he roars. The last of his earlier jollity and good humour has fallen away now, and they realize that it was phony all along, or rather a darker manifestation of his ordinary rage, waiting for its inevitable moment.

‘Do you know what happens to sinful boys, Mr Juster?’ Father Green sweeps his blazing eyes about the room. ‘All of you, are you aware of the fate that befalls impure hearts? Of hell, the endless torments of hell that await the lustful?’

Eyes study folded hands, evading his fervid gaze. Father Green pauses a moment, then changes tack. ‘Do you enjoy pumping your stuff, Mr Juster? Do you like pumping it rough?’

A couple of people snicker in spite of themselves. The boy does not reply; he is gazing at the priest open-mouthed as if he can’t believe this is happening. Geoff Sproke puts his hands over his eyes. The priest, enjoying himself, pacing the boards in front of the blackboard like a barrister, says, ‘Are you a virgin, Mr Juster?’

This, class, is what’s called a double-bind. Note the formal perfection of its construction, the work of a real expert. Obviously Skippy’s a virgin – Skippy’s about as virginal as they come, and will probably stay that way till he’s at least thirty-five. But he can’t admit it, not with a classroom of boys looking at him, even if ninety-five per cent of them are virgins also. Neither, though, can he deny it, because the person asking is a priest, who expects all good Catholics to remain virgins until they are married, or at least is pretending to expect this for the purposes of his little game here. So Skippy merely wriggles and shivers and breathes noisily as his interrogator advances a step or two down the aisle.

‘Well?’ Father Green’s eyes twinkle at him merrily.

Through clenched teeth, Skippy says, ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’ Father Green, in performer mode now, repeats incredulously, with a comical wink for his audience. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘I don’t know.’ Skippy stares back at him, his jaw wobbling, trying not to cry.

‘You don’t know what you mean when you say you don’t know?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Mr Juster, God hates a liar, and so do I. You are among friends here. Why not tell us the truth? Are you a virgin?’

Skippy’s face is shaking and sore-looking now. Five minutes remaining on the clock. Geoff shoots a desperate look at Ruprecht as if he might know what to do, but the light has fallen to make opaque blanks of his glasses.

‘I don’t know.’

The indulgent smile fades from the priest’s lips, and the thunderclouds regather in the room. ‘Tell me the truth!’

Actual tears roll down Skippy’s cheeks. No one is snickering any more. Why can’t he just give Father Green what he wants? But Skippy keeps saying, ‘I don’t know,’ like a halfwit, turning greener and greener, making the priest angrier and angrier, until he says, ‘Mr Juster, I am giving you one last chance.’ And they see his bony hand curled up into a fist on Jeekers’s desk, and they think of the fifth-year with the stitches and all of the other dark legends that swirl serpentine around the priest, and in their heads they scream at him, ‘SKIPPY, FOR FUCK’S SAKE! JUST TELL HIM WHAT HE WANTS TO HEAR!’, but Skippy is clammily, woozily silent and around him the air is full of sparks and the priest’s eyes glitter at him hungrily like wolf eyes, and nobody knows what is going to happen, and then the priest steps forward, and Skippy, who is swaying slightly in place, abruptly straightens, bolt upright, opens his mouth and vomits all over Kevin ‘What’s’ Wong.