Skippy Dies: A Novel

Friday at last. Within an hour of the final bell, the halls of the school are bare: the boys gone home, the teachers relocated to the Ferry, a small pub in the lee of the school that has long been the local for Seabrook faculty – to the perpetual dismay of the proprietor, who has seen the lucrative underage market decamp elsewhere.

Howard finds these staff drinking sessions hard work. ‘I just have nothing to say to these people. I have nothing to say to them on a Monday morning. What am I going to have to say to them at the end of the week?’

‘Howard, you are “these people”,’ Farley tells him. ‘Stop living in denial. You’re a teacher, accept it.’

He can accept it, just, when someone is paying him for his trouble; but to give up the first precious hours of his weekend in the name of esprit de corps – that, most Fridays, is too much.

But not this Friday. Tonight he comes down to the pub directly, and sits watching the door with a grim expression while Jim Slattery pours hurling anecdotes into his unhearing ear and Tom Roche lours at him from the bar like a soured and crippled Peter Pan. The door, however, fails to deliver what he hopes for.

‘I was sure she’d be here,’ he says dolefully.

‘She didn’t come last week,’ Farley says, through chattering teeth. They have come out to the canopied smoking deck to scan the side-gate of the school; the outdoor heater does not work and the temperature is merrily plummeting towards zero.

‘She said she would today. She said so.’

Since their brief encounter after class on Wednesday, and her mysterious parting joke/threat, Howard has made repeated attempts to get Aurelie McIntyre on her own. It’s infuriating, like trying to romance a will-o-the-wisp. Everything about her remains defiantly ambiguous, including the question of whether or not she wants to be romanced; yet the more elusive she is, the more impossible and pointless and not-worth-doing it seems to pursue her, the more inextricably Howard finds himself bound to her; the more he thinks about her, the more he craves just a word, just a moment of her time. He’d been looking forward to tonight for two whole days: even if she didn’t talk to him, he thought, at least he’d have an hour or two to look at her, to take in her unearthly beauty from across the crowded bar.

‘Obviously I can’t help wondering how Halley fits into all this,’ Farley says.

‘Mmm,’ Howard says.

‘Because doesn’t she think you love her? And you’re going to marry her?’

Howard mumbles indistinctly.

‘Then what are you doing chasing around after Aurelie? I mean, like I say, I’m just wondering.’

Howard sighs testily. ‘I’m not chasing her. I’ve barely even spoken to her. I don’t know if there’s anything real about this at all.’

‘But you want it to be real.’

Howard sighs again, watching the crystalline sparkles that twinkle in his breath. ‘I do love Halley,’ he says. ‘And I know I have a great life with her. It’s just that… it sometimes feels kind of bitty. You know?’

‘Not really.’

‘I mean, we go to a film, we eat dinner, we fight, we joke, we go out with friends – sometimes it seems like none of it really adds up to anything. It’s just one thing after another. And twenty-four hours later I’ve forgotten it all.’ He takes a swig from his beer. ‘I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s just not how I expected my life would be.’

‘What did you expect?’

Howard ponders this. ‘I suppose – this sounds stupid, but I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc.’ Seeing Farley’s blank look, he elaborates: ‘A direction. A point. A sense that it’s not just a bunch of days piling up on top of each other. Like, for instance, this book I’m reading, this Robert Graves book –’

‘This is the book that Aurelie recommended to you?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’ Farley raises his hands placatingly. ‘Carry on.’

‘Well, he’s just so brave. Like, he’s leading his regiment into battle, he’s going into no man’s land in the middle of the night to rescue his comrades – this is before he even turns twenty-one.’

‘So what, you’re going to leave Halley and go off and live in a trench with Aurelie, is that it? And wait for the Germans?’

‘No,’ Howard says irritably, ‘I just…’

At that moment the door opens, and Jim Slattery bustles out. ‘Aha,’ he salutes the two of them. ‘Cassius and Brutus.’

‘Heading off?’ Farley returns. Jim leaves at precisely this time every Friday.

‘Hell hath no fury like a woman watching the dinner go cold,’ the older man chuckles. ‘You lads will find out about that some day.’ He looks along the deck and into the night sky. ‘Chilly out here.’ He rubs his hands together. ‘Or maybe it’s just age. Anyhow. I’ll leave you young bucks to it. As you were, gentlemen…’

He ambles off, his tuneless whistle fading into the traffic.

‘I just don’t want to end up like him,’ Howard says, when he’s out of sight. ‘Thirty-five years’ work and what’s he got to show for it? Colleagues who ignore him, students who laugh at him, a wife who makes his lunch every day so he won’t God forbid eat a pub sandwich. Teaching the same damn thing over and over and over, King Lear and The Road Not Taken…’

‘He doesn’t seem to mind,’ Farley says. ‘In fact I bet he still gets misty-eyed when he reads out The Road Not Taken.’

‘You know what I’m saying, though? I mean, some day we’re going to be dead.’

Farley laughs. ‘Howard, you’re the only person I know who went directly from losing his virginity to a mid-life crisis.’

‘Mmm.’

The door opens again; Howard hears Tom’s voice from inside, loud with alcohol. Two young women from the building society down the street have emerged onto the deck to light cigarettes. Their eyes flick cursorily over Howard and Farley. ‘Howdy,’ Farley says. They smile through their shivers. He goes over to bum a cigarette.

‘If it’s any comfort to you,’ he says, returning to Howard, ‘what you were saying about lacking a sense of an overarching structure – about life feeling bitty – scientifically speaking, that does happen to be one of the big questions of our time.’

Howard takes a wary slug from his beer.

‘How to reconcile the macro and micro. See, there are two big theories of how the universe works. On the one hand you have the quantum mechanical explanation, the Standard Model as it’s called, which says that everything is made of very small things – particles. There are hundreds of different kinds of particle, it’s all very frenetic and weird and disparate – bitty, as you say. Then, on the other hand, there’s Einstein’s relativistic account, which is very geometric and elegant and deals with the universe on a grand scale. Light and gravity are caused by ripples in spacetime, everything’s ruled by these very simple laws – it’s nothing but overarching structure, in short.’

He pauses to pull on his cigarette, exhaling a luxurious torrent of smoke.

‘The thing is, though both explanations are, as far as we can work out, right, neither one works on its own. The curved space account goes to pieces when it runs into subatomic particles. The Standard Model is too chaotic and confused to get us to the big elegant symmetries of spacetime. So neither one is complete, and when you need to use both at the same time, like when you’re trying to describe the Big Bang, they won’t fit together. It’s the same thing you’re talking about – you know, on a quotidian level, it’s difficult to find any evidence of a narrative arc or a larger meaning in your life, but at the same time, if you try and give your life a meaning – like live according to a principle or a mission or an ideal or whatever – then inevitably you distort the details. The small things keep agitating against it and popping out of place.’ Another pull, pearl smoke rushing the twilight. ‘Every couple of years some scientist comes along with the grand unified theory that supposedly ties everything together. String theory, supergravity. M-theory is the latest. But when you look closer they always fall to pieces.’

Howard gazes at him deadpan. ‘That’s not actually very comforting, Farley.’

‘I know,’ Farley sighs. He takes a last drag on his cigarette and dashes it under his heel. ‘Look, if I tell you something, can we go back inside?’

‘Tell me what?’

‘Seriously, I feel bad about telling you, but I think I’m getting frostbite out here.’

‘Just tell me.’

‘Well –’ Farley makes a play of adjusting his shirt-cuffs ‘– it seems a certain someone has volunteered to supervise this Hallowe’en Hop.’

‘Aurelie?’

‘I heard her talking to Greg yesterday.’

‘Why?’ The Hop, coming as it does on the first night of the mid-term holidays, is always drastically undersubscribed in terms of supervision.

‘Beats me.’ Farley shrugs. ‘Maybe she sees it as a novelty.’ He skates his fingertips in a figure-8 over the railing, then adds nonchalantly, ‘They’re going to need at least one other chaperone…’

‘Huh,’ Howard says, and for a moment they silently watch colluding clouds and evening darken the sky.

Then Farley stretches his back. ‘Okay, I’m going to get a drink,’ he says. ‘Are you coming in?’

‘I’ll be in now,’ Howard says distractedly.

‘You ladies care for anything at the bar?’ he hears Farley say to the building-society girls. ‘They do a mean pint of snakebite here.’

The girls titter; the door swings closed. Howard watches his fingers blueing on the glass neck of the beer bottle. He thinks of Halley, at her computer in their little house, wrapping up work for the week, starting to make the dinner. If he could just be certain that this was the life he wanted, and not just the life he’d ended up with because he was afraid to go after the one he wanted. If he could just be sure he wasn’t going to end up a fubsy old duffer in a jacket from thirty years ago, so hopelessly failed he no longer even realizes what might have been…

When Howard and Farley were in their final year of school, Jim Slattery’s wife left him. The boys weren’t told, of course, but it was obvious almost immediately. The teacher started turning up to school in odd socks, unshaven, his hair awry. The back seat of his car filled up with takeaway boxes. His classes, never what could be called linear, grew more rambling than ever; sometimes he would break off for minutes on end, arrested by some mysterious detail in the window. One afternoon, in the middle of another of these strange hiatuses, Guido LaManche had called out from the back row, ‘Where’s your wife, Jim?’

Slattery’s expression gave him away at once. He was too shocked to feign incomprehension or to cover up; he just stood there, open-mouthed. Gleefully, Steve Reece repeated the question: ‘Where’s your wife, Jim?’ And in a flash it had been taken up by the whole class, who chanted it over and over: ‘Where’s your wife, Jim? Where’s your wife, Jim?’

Slattery tried to ignore it, began to burble something about the poem they had just been reading, but the chanting grew louder, drowning him out, and finally, to jeers, he fled the classroom.

The next day the takeaway-littered car was missing from the car park, and instead of English class, at a special assembly, the sixth-years got a lecture from Father Furlong, typically abstruse, on the subject of compassion. This was followed by a more direct address from the Dean that suspended lunchtime exit privileges for the remainder of the week. Neither mentioned Jim Slattery’s name, nor what had happened in that classroom.

Nobody expected to see the English teacher for some time, but the very next day he returned to work. He made no reference to what had happened, simply picked up where he had left off. There were sniggers, catcalls, double-entendres, but these remained isolated. A few weeks later they heard that his wife was back.

Howard remembers that afternoon as if it were yesterday: the page of the book on his desk, the weather outside, the faces around him, and most of all Slattery’s own face – at first confused, as though they had broken into a patois he didn’t understand, and then, understanding, not so much upset for himself as shocked, shocked at the discovery of how cruel his boys could be. It was the first time Howard had seen a grown-up look like that: frangible, as if he would fall to pieces if you touched him.

The funny thing is, although every other element of that class is etched into his memory, Howard can’t seem to recall whether he had taken up the chant. Try as he might, he cannot lay hold of that one detail; his mind has smeared it over, like the face of an informer in a TV documentary. Had he sat back, arms folded in disgust, refusing to open his mouth? Had he kept his head down, so no one could see if he was chanting or not? Or had he – there in the middle aisle, middle row, hiding out in the mainstream – had he joined in the chant, loud as anyone? Smiling at the others to show what a laugh he thought it was? He has no idea, he can’t even hazard a guess; now isn’t that strange?