Skippy Dies: A Novel

Carl and Barry spend their whole lunchtime down in the junior school playground, trying to find more pills. It is total bullshit. You ask the kids a question and they just look at you, it’s like they speak a different language down here that over the summer Carl and Barry have forgotten. And all of them act mental, so you can’t tell which ones might have prescriptions. After half an hour, Barry’s got exactly one pill, which might just be a mint. He’s really angry. Carl wishes he had not thrown away their pills! He doesn’t remember now why he did it, he doesn’t know why he does things sometimes. He thinks about Lollipop waiting for him this evening and him not coming.

Now the bell goes and the kids run back inside in one big swarmy yell. ‘Fuck it,’ Barry says, and he and Carl begin the trudge back over the rugby pitches towards the senior school. But then they see something.

The boy’s name is Oscar. Last year he was in third class, four below Carl and Barry, but he was already famous for the trouble he got into. Not just messing in class – weird shit, like getting stuck in ventilation shafts, eating chalk, pretending he was an animal and yelping down the corridors. Now, walking along with his bag trailing in the grass behind him, you can see him talking to himself, the fingers of his hands flashing out again and again like little pink explosions. Then he stops, and looks up, and gulps. That’s because Carl and Barry are blocking his way.

‘Hello there,’ Barry says.

‘Hello,’ Oscar answers in a small voice.

Barry tells Oscar politely that he and Carl are doing a science experiment in the senior school using these pills. But they have run out! He shows Oscar the sweets they have brought for anyone who can help them find new pills. Even before he can finish, Oscar is jumping up and down, shouting, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’

‘Shh,’ Barry says, looking over his shoulder. ‘Come this way a second.’ They bring Oscar behind one of the big trees. ‘Do you have them with you?’ Barry says. ‘In your schoolbag?’

‘No,’ Oscar says. ‘My mum gives me them in the morning.’

‘In the morning?’ Barry asks.

‘After my Shreddies,’ Oscar says. ‘But I know where she keeps them! I can reach them if I stand on a chair.’

He is all ready to run off and get them right now! But Barry tells him to wait till after school. ‘You go home and bring us back as many pills as you can. Don’t take them all or your mum will notice. We’ll wait for you over there in the mud-piles, okay? And we’ll give you this whole bag of sweets.’

Oscar nods in excitement. Then he says, ‘I have a friend who gets pills too.’

‘That’s brilliant,’ Barry says. ‘Bring him too. But make sure you come as quick as you can. It’s urgent.’

The kid runs off, his schoolbag bumping along the ground after him. Barry’s eyes are shining with cleverness. ‘Back in business,’ he says.

At 3.45 Carl and Barry go down to the mud-piles, through the trees along the side of the pitches so no one sees them. Trucks dumped the piles here two summers ago, a whole string of them from the long-jump sandpit right up to the back wall of the school. Carl and Barry’s class used to play War on Terror on them every lunchtime until a boy from fifth class split his head open and his parents took the school to court. Now no one is allowed to play on them, or even run in the yard any more.

Oscar waits for them in the very last of the mounds. Another even twitchier boy is with him. Oscar says his name is Rory, his face is a weird fizzy white that reminds Carl of the drink his mom drinks for her stomach. Between them they have twenty-four pills. But there is a problem.

‘We don’t want sweets,’ Oscar says.

‘What?’ Barry says.

‘We don’t want them,’ Oscar says.

‘But you made a deal,’ Barry says.

Oscar just shrugs. Behind him the chalky sick-looking kid folds his arms.

‘Look,’ Barry says, ‘look at all the sweets we have.’ He holds the bag open for them to see. ‘Mars Bars, Sugar Bombs, Gorgo Bars, Stingrays, Milky Moos, Cola Bottles…’

The kids don’t say anything. They know it’s a shit deal. In junior school all anyone does is make trades, for football stickers, lunches, computer games, whatever, you know when someone’s trying to rip you off. Above the black ridge, light is bleeding out of the sky. Carl thinks they should just grab the kids and take the pills from them. But Barry has explained to him already that what they want to establish here is an ONGOING RELATIONSHIP. If you TAKE the pills today, what will you do tomorrow? (Ever since last night when Carl threw away the pills, Barry’s been speaking to him in a SLOW, CAREFUL voice, the same way Carl’s remedial maths teacher does when she’s telling him, Now say if you want to save for a new bike that costs two hundred euro, and you put a hundred euro in the bank, and the RATE OF INTEREST is ten per cent, then it would take you… Carl, it would take you…?)

Barry stomps down to one end of the dugout, then comes back again and takes out his wallet. There is a twenty-euro note in there. He waves it under Oscar’s nose. ‘Twenty euro, and the sweets.’ Oscar doesn’t even look at the money. Across the pitches the clock strikes four. The girls will be arriving soon. ‘What is it you want?’ Barry shouts. ‘How can we do a deal if you won’t say what you want?’

The two small boys look at each other. Then in the distance a banger goes off. Oscar’s face lights up. ‘Fireworks!’ he says.

‘You just thought of that now!’ Barry says.

‘Fireworks!’ the white-faced kid speaks for the first time.

‘Where the fuck are we supposed to get fireworks?’ Barry says. But now the two boys are yapping away about what kind and how many – ‘Bangers – rockets – quartersticks!’

‘Okay, okay,’ Barry says. ‘You win. If you want fireworks, fair enough. But we can’t get them to you till tomorrow. So here’s what we’ll do. You give us the pills now for our experiment, and then tomorrow we’ll meet you here again, same time, same place, with the fireworks.’

‘Ha ha!’ Oscar laughs – actually laughs! ‘No way.’

Barry makes a noise like Gnnnhhhh through his teeth, and Carl can tell he is thinking, Fuck the deal, let’s teach these faggots some respect. But then he turns to Carl and says, ‘Watch them,’ and he pegs it off across the rugby pitches.

‘Where’s your friend gone?’ Oscar asks. Carl says nothing, just folds his arms and tries to look like he knows what’s happening.

‘What’s your science project about?’ the white-faced kid Rory asks.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Carl says. He looks out into the going-dark evening. Maybe Barry won’t come back. Maybe he’s gone to meet Lollipop on his own! This is all a trick, he arranged it with the kids, and –

Panting, Barry clambers back into the dugout. In his hand is a plastic bag. ‘Fireworks,’ he says.

Every kind: Black Holes, Sailor Boys, Spider Bombs and others. Barry fans them out on the ground. ‘You can’t have all of them,’ he says, like a dad in a shop. ‘Pick out three each.’ The boys stare, whispering the names to each other. ‘Today, arseholes. And give me those pills first.’

They hand over the pills without even thinking – the white-faced kid’s in a Smarties box, Oscar’s wrapped in old clingfilm that smells like sandwiches. Barry counts them into Morgan Bellamy’s tube. Then he nods, and the two kids snatch up the fireworks before he can change his mind.

Now Carl and Barry are hurrying back over the pitches. The squishy ground is going hard with cold, the grass and trees are dark like night is spreading up from below.

‘Where did you get all that stuff?’ Carl asks.

‘Firework fairy.’ Barry smiles mysteriously. He is happy again now. As they walk he tells Carl how it just goes to show, everybody has a price, and often it’s a lot less than you expect. But he does not let Carl carry the pills or even touch them.

There are no lights behind Ed’s. First all Carl sees are the glowing tips of their cigarettes. Then the faces come out of the dark. Five of them: Lollipop, Crinkly-Hair and three others, talking in American-girl accents, waving around their Marlboro Lights. It is strange seeing them here, among the weeds and the cans and the bashed-up supermarket trolleys. The Tower stares over the scraggly trees and bushes like a giant stone face. But no one real is watching.

‘Hey, ladies,’ Barry says, like this is all totally normal, like he has just wandered over to their table at LA Nites. They look back at him without speaking, and as the boys come closer, the three new girls huddle together, their eyes flicking from Barry to Carl and back again.

‘Weren’t you supposed to be here a half-hour ago?’ Crinkly-Hair sounds pissed off.

Rising above the others, Lollipop gazing right at him. Carl feels his dick wake and stir in his pants.

‘We had some trouble with our connection,’ Barry tells her.

‘I thought that was your own personal prescription,’ Crinkly-Hair says.

Barry can’t think of an answer, so he just smiles. The new girls are looking really unhappy now, like Carl and Barry are two total scumbags. ‘Well, are we going to do business or not?’ Barry says. He takes out the orange see-through tube and holds it out, the way you’d hold out food to a stray cat. With a shrug, Crinkly-Hair comes over to him, and one by one the other girls follow. But Lollipop stays at the edge, looking over to where Carl is standing guard by the gap leading back to the road.

‘They’re medically developed by scientists,’ Barry is explaining to the new girls.

‘I read about them in Marie Claire,’ one of the girls says. ‘They stop you getting hungry.’

‘That’s right,’ Barry says. ‘In Hollywood everyone takes them.’

‘How much do they cost?’ another girl asks.

‘Three euro each,’ Barry says. ‘Or ten for twenty.’

‘Yesterday you were going to give us five for five,’ Crinkly-Hair says.

Barry shrugs. ‘Supply and demand,’ he says. ‘I don’t control the market. If you don’t want them there are some girls from Alex’s who said they’d take the lot.’

‘I’d say,’ Crinkly-Hair says sarcastically, but the other girls are reaching into bags for purses decorated with slinky cartoon cats and glittery flowers. Carl turns to watch the entrance while the deal goes through. Behind him he hears their voices counting, first coins, then pills. Every second it gets darker, like the air is filling up with particles. He realizes someone is standing beside him. It is Lollipop. She is looking at Carl. ‘I have a problem,’ she says.

It is only the second thing he has ever heard her say. He makes a sound somewhere between ‘Huh?’ and ‘What?’

‘I want to buy some diet pills,’ she says. ‘But I don’t have any money.’

‘You don’t have any money?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t have any?’

‘No.’

She looks at him with expressionless green eyes. This close he can almost taste how red her lips are. The others are talking among themselves. ‘Last night your friend said that you might be able to work something out?’ she says. She raises an eyebrow. Her school blouse is two buttons open and if he leans forward Carl can make out the top half of a white tit.

‘What do you mean?’ he says.

‘I don’t know.’ She noses the toe of her shoe against the ashy black ground. Carl lunges for her with his mouth. She pulls back, but takes his hand and leads him across the clearing and into the trees.

In here the air tastes of wet leaves and through the weeds he can see old initials graffitied on the wall. She is standing right up against him, an inch away, he smells the smell of her, it is sweet like strawberries. She pushes her hair back with her hand. The other voices seem far away. She leans in and upwards and her mouth is on his, her tongue strokes through it, deeper and deeper, like an oar through the water… She stops. ‘Are you Carl or Barry,’ she says.

‘Carl.’

‘My name is Lori,’ she says. ‘Short for Lorelei.’

‘Lollipop,’ he mumbles.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

Then she’s kissing him again. The smell of her hair and skin swirl all around him. He sticks a hand on her left tit. She lifts it off but doesn’t take her mouth away. For another twenty seconds, thirty, her thin body crushes up tighter and tighter against him, as if she’s screwing herself into place with her tongue. Then, like the claw in the fairground when the money runs out, she separates herself from him and steps backwards. She gazes at him with her expression of expressionlessness.

‘Um, Lori, what are you doing in there?’ goes Crinkly-Hair from outside.

Lori moves him aside with her hand and walks back into the clearing. A second later Carl limps out after her, pulling his jacket down over his boner. Going up to Barry, he says, ‘Ten.’

At first Barry doesn’t get it, but then he clicks and without a word counts out the ten pills. Lori stands beside Carl not looking at him and holds her hands cupped for Barry to pour the pills into, like she’s waiting for communion. And the pills do look like little communions. Then she puts them in the pocket of her coat and goes back to her friends.

It is completely dark now. Before they go Barry tries to make each of the girls take his number, but they are chattering to each other like he isn’t there, like this is all over and they are already far away. They leave without saying goodbye.

When they are out of sight, Barry lets out a whoop. ‘Our first score! Check it out, dude!’ He opens his fist on a nest of notes and coins. Then he hugs Carl. ‘This is just the beginning, hombre. We are going to fucking rule this neighbourhood!’ Holding his hands up to the sky, he turns to the traffic going by and shouts into the headlights, ‘We are the men! We are the fucking men!’

They start walking towards Burger King. Barry looks at Carl slyly. ‘She sucked your dick, didn’t she?’

Carl says nothing, then slowly nods with a half-smile.

‘Damn!’ Barry laughs, and strikes his thigh. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

Carl laughs too, then he looks back – but the girls are gone, of course. They are long gone.