Skippy Dies: A Novel

The first time Halley set eyes on Howard was at a showing of The Towering Inferno. When she heard about him, her sister had wondered aloud how much of a future you could have with someone you’d met at a disaster movie. But at that point Halley wasn’t feeling picky. She had been in Dublin just over three weeks – not so long that she didn’t still get lost all the time on the infuriating streets that kept changing their names, but enough to disabuse her of most of her illusions about the place; enough too, with the deposit and first month’s rent for her new apartment, to separate her from most of the money she’d brought, and cut the time available for soul-searching and self-finding quite drastically. That afternoon she’d spent in an Internet café, reluctantly updating her résumé; she hadn’t had a conversation since the night before, a stilted exchange with the Chinese pizza delivery boy about his native Yunan province. When she spotted the poster for The Towering Inferno, which she and Zephyr must have watched twenty times together, it was like catching sight of an old friend. She went in and for three hours warmed herself in the familiar blaze of collapsing architecture and suffocating hotel guests; she stayed in her seat until the ushers started sweeping round her feet.

Standing on the kerb outside the cinema she unfolded her map of the city, and was scouring it for any place that might serve to use up the next couple of hours when a taxicab hurtled by and whipped it out of her hands. The map flapped madly up into the air, then swooped back down to spread itself over the chest of a man who’d just come out the cinema door. Halley crimsoned with embarrassment, then noticed that the man – bewilderedly unwrapping himself from the two-dimensional image of the city, so it looked almost as if he’d popped out of the map himself – was kind of cute.

(‘Cute how?’ Zephyr asked her. ‘Irish-looking,’ Halley said, by which she meant a collection of indistinct features – pale skin, mousy hair, general air of ill-health – that combine to mysteriously powerful romantic effect.)

The man looked right and left, then saw her cringing on the far side of the cobbled street. ‘I believe this is yours,’ he said, presenting her with the incorrectly folded map.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Didn’t I see you inside at the film?’

She nodded vaguely, pulling at her hair.

‘I noticed because you stayed right to the end. Most people leap out of their seats the instant they see the credits appear. I always wonder what they’re in such a hurry to get back to.’

‘It’s hard to comprehend,’ she agreed.

‘Yeah,’ the man said, pursing his lips reflectively. The conversation had reached its natural conclusion and she knew he was considering whether he should leave it there in its brief, formal perfection or risk ruining that perfection by attempting to bring it a stage further; she found herself hoping he would take the chance. ‘You’re not from Dublin, are you?’ he said.

‘Hence the map,’ she said, and then, realizing this sounded acerbic, ‘I’m from the United States. California originally. But I’ve come from New York. What about you?’

‘Here,’ he said, gesturing at the surrounding streets. ‘So – where was it you were looking for?’

‘Oh,’ she said. Not wanting to admit the dismal truth, that she had been looking merely for a destination, any destination, she squeezed her eyes tight shut and tried to remember one of the little triangles on the tourist map. ‘Uh, the museum?’ There was bound to be a museum.

‘Ah right,’ he said. ‘You know, I’ve never been there since it moved. But I can show you where it is. It’s not far.’ With a shall-we gesture, he turned, and she followed him downhill to the quays, a fracas of trucks and bus stops and seagulls. He pointed upriver at the far bank. ‘It’s about half an hour’s walk,’ he said. ‘Although, actually, I’d imagine it must be closing soon.’

‘Oh.’ She weighed her options. He was around her age and didn’t seem psychotic; it would be nice to have a conversation not predicated on pizza delivery. ‘Well, is there anywhere nearby I could get a drink?’

‘Never a problem in this town,’ he said.

Halley had left New York, her job and her friends and come to Ireland without any real plan, other than to be elsewhere, and vague notions of plumbing her own depths and writing some as-yet unconceived masterpiece; now, as she took a seat in the warm, dim, hops-scented snug, she already wondered if her true reason had been to fall in love. She’d grown so sick of the life she’d been living; what better way to forget all that than to lose yourself in someone new? To literally bump into someone, a stranger amid millions of other strangers, and let yourself discover him: that he has a name (Howard) and an age (twenty-five) a profession (history teacher) and a past (finance, murky) – every hour revealing more of him, like a magical pocket map that, once opened, will keep unfolding until it has covered the whole of your living-room floor with places you have never been?

(‘Just be careful,’ Zephyr said. ‘You’re so bad at these things.’ ‘Well it doesn’t have to be anything serious,’ she said, and didn’t mention that she’d already kissed him, on a bridge over some body of water she didn’t know the name of, before exchanging phone numbers and parting for the night, to walk around in the maze of heteronymous streets till she found a policeman who could tell her where she was; because Halley believed that a kiss was the beginning of a story, the story, good or bad, short or long, of an us, and once begun, you had to follow it through to the end.)

In the following weeks they returned to the little cinema in Temple Bar and saw many more disaster movies together – The Poseidon Adventure, Airport, The Swarm – always staying right to the end; afterwards he led her through the boozy city, its rusting, dusty charms, its rain. Working out of her guidebook, they saw the bullet holes in the walls of the GPO, the forlorn, childlike skeletons in the catacombs of St Michan’s, the relics of St Valentine. As they made their way, she imagined her great-grandfather walking down the same streets, cross-referencing the landmarks with tipsy yarns her father used to tell at the Christmas table, even while she laughed with embarrassment at the obese lines of her compatriots at the genealogy stand in Trinity College, where family trees were sold on elaborate parchment scrolls that looked like university degrees, as though conferring on their buyers an official place in history.

Later, sitting in the pub, Howard would make her tell stories about home. He appeared to have spent his childhood watching bad American TV shows, and when she described the suburb she’d grown up in, or the high school she’d attended, his eyes would iridesce, assimilating these details into the mythical country that invested the CDs and books and movies stacked around his bed. Much as she appreciated whatever mystique her foreignness gave her in his eyes, she did try to convey the mundane truth. ‘It’s really not much different from here,’ she’d tell him.

‘It is,’ he’d insist, solemnly. He told her that he’d once thought of applying for the green card and moving over there. ‘You know, doing something…’

‘So? What happened?’

‘What happens to anyone? I got a job.’ He’d drifted into a position in a prestigious brokerage in London – drifted was his word, and when Halley challenged it he told her that most of his class at Seabrook had ended up working in the City, or in corresponding high-finance positions in Dublin or New York: ‘There’s a kind of a network,’ he said. Salaries were lavish, and he would in all probability have been there still, neither loving nor hating it, if it hadn’t been for the cataclysm he’d brought down on himself. Cataclysm was his word too; he also referred to it as a blowup and a wipeout.

After this cataclysm, whatever it was, he’d returned to Dublin and for the last couple of months had been teaching History at his old school. It was plain when she met them that Howard’s parents – although, he said, they had enrolled his younger self in Seabrook as a conscious effort to bump the family a few rungs up the ladder – regarded teaching there as an unambiguously downward move. Dinner chez Fallon was a riot of cutlery on good china amidst long lakes of silence, like some unlistenable modernist symphony; beneath the prevailing veneer of politeness, a seething cauldron of disappointment and blame. It was like eating with some Waspy clan in New Hampshire; Halley was surprised at how un-Irish they seemed, but then most things in Dublin she found to be un-Irish.

She’d always suspected his relationship with Seabrook to be more complicated than he made out; it wasn’t until they’d been together almost a year that he told her about the accident at Dalkey Quarry. To her it sounded like the kind of drunken disaster so typical of the lives of teenage boys, but for Howard, it became clear, everything that happened before and after was cast in its light. She began to wonder why he had gone back to the school – was it to punish himself? Some kind of atonement? It was as if, she thought, he were trying to deny the past and embed himself in it at the same time; or deny it by embedding himself in it. She didn’t know how healthy a situation this was; whenever she tried to talk about it, though, he’d get irritable and change the subject.

That didn’t matter; there were other things to talk about. Around that time Halley found out about the severance package from the brokerage. It was three times Howard’s salary as a teacher; he had left it sitting in the bank.

She didn’t push him into buying a house. She just told him it was dumb to leave so much money lying dormant. ‘That’s simple economics,’ she said. Howard was the one person in Ireland who wasn’t obsessed with property. The rest of the country talked of nothing else – house prices, stamp duty, tracker mortgages, throwing around the terminology like realtors at a convention – but the concept of actually owning a place had evidently never occurred to him. He needed someone to force him to pay attention to his own life, she told him. ‘Otherwise you’re going to drift right off the face of the Earth.’

And so a few months later they’d moved into a house on the outskirts of the suburbs, looking across a shallow valley onto spinneys of wayward, Seussian trees. Though the neighbourhood was not fancy – she doubted anyone around here was sending their kids to Seabrook – the house was well beyond their means. But the sheer profligacy of it became for her part of the point, the quixotic bravado of the two of them actually taking on life, going up to its doors and yelling, ‘Let us in!’ though they had neither invitation nor evening attire; it made her smile to herself as she dried her first dish, in their first evening in the new house. And the absurdity of compounding the debt by some day – not right away of course, but some day – filling the empty bedrooms, this made her smile too. She hadn’t written so much as a word of a story, but for the first time in a long time she felt she was inside a story of her own, and surely that was better yet.

Only a year and a half has passed since then; still it feels like someone else’s life. Through the window the pretty spinneys of trees have been uprooted, and the estate teeters on the brink of a vast tract of mud. Some day, they are promised, it will be a Science Park; right now there are only great weals and gashes, each one pinned with dozens of tiny stakes, as if some kind of acupuncture, or torture maybe, is being performed on the flayed skin of the earth; all day long you can hear the bulldozers claw, the circular saws slice into concrete, the last of the tree roots being wrenched up and dismembered.

‘I guess we should have read the fine print,’ is all Howard will say on the subject: he doesn’t have to spend every day here, listening to it. In recent weeks the racket has been augmented by a nightly apocalypse of fireworks, attended by car alarms and barking dogs, as well as regular power cuts, as the diggers in the nascent Science Park accidentally cut through cables.

She lights a cigarette and stares at the cursor blinking implacably at her from the screen. Then, as if in retaliation, she leans in and hammers:

If memory technology continues to expand at the current rate, data equivalent to the collected experience of an entire human life will soon be storable on a single chip.

Slumping back she gazes at what she’s written, streels of smoke spreading lazily over her shoulder.

What with the phony war going on in Iraq, it’s not a great time to be an American abroad. Hearing her accent, people, strangers, have actually stopped Halley in the street – or the supermarket, or the cinema box-office – to upbraid her on her country’s latest outrage. When it came to looking for a job though, she found that her ethnicity wasn’t a problem. Quite the opposite: to the business and technology community here, an American accent was literally the Voice of Authority, and anything it said treated as dispatches from the mother ship. Another surprise: Irish people are crazy for technology. She’d thought that a country with such a weight of history might be prone to looking backward. In fact, the opposite is true. The past is considered dead weight – at best something to reel in tourists, at worst an embarrassment, an albatross, a raving, incontinent old relative that refuses to die. The Irish are all about the future – had not their own premier even said he lived in the future? – and every new gadget that emerges is written up as further evidence of the country’s vertiginous modernity, seized upon as a stick to beat the past and the yokels of yesteryear barely recognizable as themselves.

There was a time when Halley too had thrilled at the unstoppable march of science. As a cub reporter in New York, seduced away from her ‘real’ stories by the energy of the Internet boom, she’d had the sense of standing right at the heart of a Big Bang – of a new universe exploding into being, transfiguring all that it touched. The things they could do! The great leaps into the unthinkable that were happening every single day! Now in the face of these relentless, self-advertising wonders she feels more and more of an interloper – clumsy, incompatible, obsolete, like a parent whose kids don’t include her in their games any more. And sitting at her desk in her house in the suburbs, it strikes her that in spite of all the changes she has dutifully transcribed there is really very little difference between her life and her mother’s, twenty-five years before – except that her mother spent the day looking after her children, while Halley’s is passed in the company of little silver machines, in the service of an insatiable mortgage. So this anger she finds boiling up in her, the irrational, unfair anger she feels when Howard comes home, for all the hours he spent away from her, is that then the same anger her mother was always so full of?

Her sister tells her she’s depressed. ‘Worrying that you’re turning into Mom is like the textbook definition of depression. The depression textbooks all have pictures of our mom in them. Quit that fucking job, already. I don’t understand why you don’t.’

‘I’ve told you a hundred times, it’s this visa thing. I can’t just quit and find something else. No one’s going to sponsor me for a job I have no experience in. It’s this or wait tables.’

‘Waiting tables isn’t so bad.’

‘It’s bad when you have a mortgage. You’ll see when you’re older. Things get complicated.’

‘Right,’ Zephyr says. There is a combative silence of a kind that keeps breaking into their conversations these days. Zephyr is five years younger, and has just begun studying art in Providence, R.I. Every day over there seems richer with ideas, fun, adventure than the one before; every day Halley seems to have less to tell in response. Pretending to herself that she doesn’t notice costs her no little effort, and often she’ll find herself spinning off mid-conversation into private fugues of jealousy –

‘What?’ realizing Zephyr has asked her a question. ‘Sorry, it’s a bad line.’

‘I just wondered if you’d been writing anything.’

‘Oh… no. Not at the moment.’

‘Oh,’ Zephyr says sympathetically.

‘It’s not a big deal,’ Halley tells her. ‘When something inspires me, then I’ll do it.’

‘Of course you will!’ Zephyr’s voice crackles enthusiastically; Halley winces, hearing echoes of her own past efforts at sisterly bucking-up.

She goes to the window to let the smoke out. Across the street she sees her neighbour’s two golden retrievers bounce anticipatorily about their front garden; a moment later her neighbour’s car pulls up. He unlatches the gate, bends to bury his face in their blond flyaway fur; his wife opens the door to greet him, new baby in her arms, pretty daughter peeping out from behind her. The dogs leap around like this is the greatest thing that’s ever happened. Everyone looks so happy.

Standing there unseen, Halley thinks of the way that Howard braces himself when he comes through the door these days, the cloaked expression of weariness as he asks about her day. He is bored: he is in the grip of some massive boredom. Does it emanate from her? Is she leaking boredom into his life, like a radiating atom, the dull, decaying isotope of a lover? She recalls her parents, how they’d morphed with the decades of recession from the hippie fellow-travellers who’d given her and Zephyr their absurd names into dyspeptic fiftysomethings, walling themselves in with investments as they waited for the sky to fall. She wonders if that’s all that lies ahead, an incremental process of distancing, from the world and from each other. Maybe that was why her parents fought; maybe the fights were misguided attempts to find a way back, to recover the why of things that they had lost.

She waits for the sound of Howard’s car and resolves that tonight she will make herself airy, lightsome, that tonight they will not fight. But already she can feel the anger surge upward through her, bubbling out of her core, because already she can see him coming in, asking her how she is, trying not to be bored as she tells him; trying to keep himself interested, as if this is a project he’s set for his class – trying to be good, trying to make himself love her.