Skippy Dies: A Novel

It is late when Father Green descends from the Tower. The lights are out in Our Lady’s Hall, but there is moon enough in the windows for him to make his way; although by now, no doubt, he could make it in his sleep, if he were the kind to sleep. This is his favourite time, when the school has gone to bed, and he may finally get to work! The poor will always be with us, says the Lord, so there is always work to be done; he may no longer be a young man, but Father Green has no intention of shirking his duties – and tonight, for the first time in a long time, he feels a tingle of the old vigour! The old sap, rising in his –

What?

He thought he heard footsteps. When he turns round, though, the hall is empty. Of course it’s empty, who would be there, at this hour? Lately his mind has grown fond of tricks like this – shapes coming out of the shadows, strange echoes, as of someone behind him. Perhaps he should speak to the nurse, have her check him over… oh, but think how ‘Greg’ would love that! No, he’ll wait, it will fade away in due course, Deo volente.

Passing beneath the Virgin he crosses himself, then walks down the steps to the basement. His office used to be on the top floor. Now that is a ‘computer room’, and his charitable work is consigned to the underworld. Progress. Father Green hears rumours that if Desmond Furlong does not return, Acting Principal Costigan – ‘Greg’ – intends to demolish the Old Building altogether – that’s right, this same one whose construction Père Lequintrec oversaw, brick by brick, back when there was not a school in the country worthy of the name as far as Catholic boys were concerned. Back when the order was strong, when they had that zeal! Instead of being content to serve merely as window-dressing, at a finishing school for young financiers.

‘Greg’. ‘Call me Greg, please.’ And he, of course, is ‘Jerome’. ‘Jerome, I don’t know how you do it.’ ‘Jerome, you’re an inspiration to us all.’

He turns on the light of the dingy office, opens a draft of a request for donations from corporate friends of the school. How many times has he written this same letter? Tonight though he can’t bring his mind to focus on it.

‘Jerome, just a quick word if I may…’

Father Green had been on his way to the Residence for dinner; he had barely noticed the Acting Principal approach. Typically, ‘Greg’ steers clear of him – one of the old dinosaurs, nothing to be done with him except wait for him to die. And yet here he was – was he? Yes, he was! – interrogating the priest about this business with the boy getting sick in his morning French class! ‘Gather you had a little dust-up with one of your second-years,’ he said.

Well! Father Green had been so surprised he hadn’t managed to reply; and it must have looked like an admission of guilt, because the Acting Principal proceeded directly into a telling-off – couched, albeit, in all sorts of patronizing flannel: ‘Times have changed, Jerome… sometimes I myself… bear in mind these boys aren’t quite as robust as in our day…’ (In our day! Did he take ‘Jerome’ for such a fool?) ‘Might be more productive in the long run, Jerome, if you went a little easier on them.’

Ah yes. Go easy: the motto of the age. For these children, as for their parents, everything must be easy. It is their entitlement, it is their right, and anything that infringes on it, anything that requires them to lift themselves even momentarily from their cosy stupor, is wrong. They will live their lives without ever knowing want or hardship, and they will take this as no more than their due, sanctioned, somewhere in the vaporous satellite-strewn heavens, by the same amorphous God who brings them Swedish furniture and four-wheel-drive jeeps, who appears when summoned for weddings and christenings. A kindly, twinkle-eyed God. An easy God.

Go easy. Well, that got his blood up, all right! He was within an inch of grabbing ‘Greg’ by the lapels! Damn it, man, do you think that God no longer keeps the books? Look around you! Sin is everywhere! It is more powerful than ever before, polluting, poisoning, corroding like a cancer! The boys need someone to frighten them! They need someone to tell them the truth! That their souls are in peril, that their only hope is to prostrate themselves before God, beg Him for the divine grace to be freed of their wickedness!

But he did not grab ‘Greg’s’ lapels, and he did not say any of this; he merely smiled, promised to mind his temper in future, and to apologize to the boy whose feelings were hurt. It was no great surrender; he is all too aware of the impotence of his efforts. The torments of Hell mean nothing to these boys. Souls, God, sin, these are words from another time. The superstitious ravings of an old scarecrow.

For a long time now Father Green has wondered what he is doing here. The thought of retirement appals him: he has watched too many of his colleagues deliquesce into inertia – men he worked with side by side on the missions, in the heathen wilderness with nothing but their faith to guide them, now pottering about the Residence like gummy smiling zombies, pacifically awaiting death. And yet work – which had always been his salvation – work too has lost its savour. He does not mean teaching: that has never interested him, and today’s boys are worse than ever before, steeped in licentiousness, an orchard of apples rotting on the branch. But in the council flats, on the estates, where he used to see, in the first years after they recalled him from Africa, a kind of promise amidst the desolation – a hopefulness, an honesty, a capacity for change – now the desolation is all he sees. The same problems of twenty years ago: mildewed rooms, sinks full of bottles, children running around half-wild over ground littered with syringes; the same easy capitulations, the same weakness, the same abrogation of responsibility. And here in his office, the same endless scrabbling after pennies, the endless, ignominious banging of the drum.

Perhaps everything he believed for so many years is simply wrong? Perhaps there simply is no grain of goodness in the heart of man, waiting to be brought to the light, perhaps man is base to the core, any flicker of virtue merely a trick of the light, a – what is the word? – a corposant. On his darker nights (and most nights, now, seem dark) he has wondered if he has not spent forty-four years toiling after a myth.

Is it not strange how a single chance encounter may throw an entirely new light on one’s situation? How an exchange so brief as to appear quite without significance may reveal a way forward, a new path where before there was none? This evening Father Green had acceded to ‘Greg’s’ request and mounted the stairs to the Tower to apologize to the boy whose feelings he had allegedly hurt. It was a nonsense of course – he had been caught speaking obscenely in class for one, and for another these boys had no feelings, they were the very embodiment of the modern age, insensate to the core, and Father Green made his little pilgrimage in the same spirit of indifference and defeat with which he has carried out so many of his duties in recent times. But the moment the boy opened the door – well, too much to call it a Damascene conversion; too much, of course, absurd. And yet it was clear in the instant, that silvered instant on the threshold, the priest had made a mistake. He had made a mistake about this boy, and the shock of it echoed back through him, causing him to ask himself what other mistakes he might have made in the recent past. Because you could see – impossible to describe in retrospect the clarity, the vividness of it – you could see the innocence in this boy’s face. He was diff erent – how had Father Green never noticed it before? Younger than his peers, for one: not yet slipped down the sinkhole of pubescence, still retaining the miniature perfection of the child, his roseate skin unblemished, his gaze bright and unclouded. But that accounted only for part of it. There was a fragility to him, an unworldliness, a purity that verged almost on a kind of anticipatory pain, as of a fruit that if it is touched at all must bruise; and a shadow of grief, perhaps at the iniquity of the world he found himself in, beholding which Father Green had felt moved to a spontaneous tenderness such as he had not experienced in a long time, and reached out to console the boy (recalling it now, he feels this sensation pass through him once more, and in the lonely office his hand unfolds to caress the empty air).

The conversation that followed was desultory: was the boy feeling better? He was. Did he accept Father Green’s apology for losing his temper? He did. But Father Green had already learned a profound lesson: that despair too is a sin, and a most insidious one, because it obscures those instances of God’s grace that are among us, and leads us into solipsism and hardness of heart. He had allowed himself to be clouded by pessimism, curdled by rage, but God in his mercy had given him a chance to atone. And the nature of his penance is clear: he must help this boy. For here is one who may be helped, who may yet be saved from the depredations of his time – subtly, of course, obliquely, an invisible hand gently steering him towards goodness. One could still do that, couldn’t one, one could still take a boy under one’s wing? And in saving him – Father Green’s mind is racing now – might he not thereby rediscover his own lost path? Might this boy not be the Lot who saves, for Father Green, the profaned city in which he is lost? Even as he asks the question, he hears his heart respond unequivocally, yes! Yes, Jerome, yes!

Was that a – laugh? Did he hear someone laughing, out there in the dark? One of the boys, no doubt – he leaps for the door. But outside there is nothing; only a prickling silence that mocks his paranoia. He holds his head. Late, Jerome, it is late. At this hour one labours merely under illusions.

He turns out the light, sets off back through the school towards the Residence. As he goes he imagines the trials that might afflict a youngster, and how best a concerned friend might help to tease these out. He ignores the curious sense he has that someone is following him. Just another of these irritating tics that have plagued him these last few weeks.

But he knows who it is.