Skippy Dies: A Novel

Autumn deepens. A fresh chaos of yellow leaves covers the lane up to the school each morning, as if it’s been visited overnight by woodland poltergeists; after school, you make the return journey through a strange, season-specific gloaming, a pale darkness, spooked and paradoxical, which makes your classmates up ahead seem to fade in and out of existence. The hobgoblin shadow of Hallowe’en, meanwhile, is everywhere. The shopping malls bristle with pumpkins and skeletons; houses lie swathed in cotton-wool cobwebs; the sky cracks and fizzes with firework-tests of increasing rigour. Even teachers fall under the spell. Classes take odd detours, routines slowly vaporize, until by the late stages of the week, the rigid precepts of everyday termtime seem no more real, or even slightly less real, than the fluorescent ghosts glowing from the windows of Ed’s Doughnuts next door…

It’s crossed Skippy’s mind – though he knows it makes no sense, given that other people have seen her too – that Frisbee Girl herself might not be real: that she too may be a kind of Hallowe’en emanation, a dark mirage of smoke and wishes who exists only in the far end of the telescope and will, if he tries to get any closer to her, vanish entirely. And so, while half of him is dying for it to be Friday, can scarcely comprehend how he can possibly make it till Friday – the other half hopes that Friday will never come.

Time, however, has no such reservations; and now he wakes up in the pitch-darkness of the last morning of term.

For the last quarter of the swimming team’s final training session Coach reels in the laneway markers and brings out the net so they can play water polo. With a whap! the ball sails into the air; white and gold and brown bodies leap and splash, yells and hoots clang and rebound from the yellow roof, steam wafts across the water like poison gas over a gaudy blue battlefield. Skippy’s floating near the back where there’s not much happening. Come over here a minute, Daniel, Coach says.

He crouches down as Skippy swims up to him. It hurts him to bend like this, you can see it in the way his eyes screw up.

You’ve missed a lot of training lately.

Sorry, Coach, I was sick. I have a note.

Notes are all well and good, but you’ll need to make that work up somehow. The meet’s only two weeks after we come back from break, you know. There are going to be some good schools there. And your times lately have not been great.

Yes, Coach.

I really want to include you on the team, Daniel, but I’ll need to see a marked improvement when you come back.

Okay, Coach.

You’re going home for mid-term?

Yes.

There’s a pool up there – where are you again, Rush?

Yeah, there’s a pool and also I swim in the sea too.

I see. That’s good. Well, try and get as much practice as you can over the holiday, all right?

Yes, Coach.

Good. Coach’s mouth tightens. The skin of his face is wrinkly but his eyes are clear blue, like a swimming pool waiting for someone to dive in. Daniel, is everything all right with you? Lately I’ve been getting the impression that there’s something on your mind.

No, Coach, not at all.

You’re sure? This… this illness of yours, you’re over that?

Oh yeah, totally.

Okay. The eyes monitor his unblinkingly. I just want you to know that if there is something bothering you, you can come to me and talk about it. That’s what I’m here for. Everything private and confidential.

Thanks, Coach.

I’m not some old teacher. I’m your coach. I take care of my boys.

I know that, Coach. Everything’s fine though.

That’s good. You’re looking forward to seeing your parents, I bet?

Sure.

How are they doing?

Fine.

Your mum?

She’s fine.

Coach’s hand on his shoulder. You give them my very best, okay? They should be very proud of you. You say that to them from me. He stands up.

Okay I will.

And remember, train hard! I want you on that bus to Galway.

Okay.

But Coach has turned away and is blowing his whistle at Siddartha Niland, who is jumping around waving a pair of swimming togs. In the shallow end Duane Grehan is crying out, My shorts! My shorts!

Steam rolls around the water in swaggering piles. But to your skin it is freezing cold.