Skippy Dies: A Novel

‘Wild Horses’ fades into REM’s ‘Everybody Hurts’, extending the mass kissing for another three minutes. To a dark corner where a boy in a red Formula One outfit is welded to the mouth of a sexy secretary, a girl in a dress unfortunately resembling an exploding wedding cake totters up. In a trembling voice, she says, ‘Titch?’ Formula One ignores her. She waits a moment, unsure, then taps him on the back. ‘Titch?’

He breaks off and turns round, exasperated. Sexy Secretary, looking daggers at Wedding Cake, wipes a damp chin with her sleeve.

‘Titch, we need to talk,’ Wedding Cake says.

Elsewhere, a thirties gangster with a pencil-moustache adorning her upper lip approaches a sexy GI and a princess. ‘Hey, Alison? – Oh my God, sorry Janine, you look just like Alison from behind!’

‘That’s okay, Fiona! I think Alison’s over there with Max Brady?’

‘Thanks!’ Thirties gangster moves off. Sexy GI’s smile vanishes instantly, and she says to the princess, ‘That bitch, there’s no way I look like fucking Alison Cummins from behind. Her arse is like three times the size of mine!’

‘Fiona looks like a lesbian in that suit,’ the princess says.

‘She’s such a stupid cunt,’ the sexy GI says.

The princess, the GI, the scuba-diver and the Victorian-lady-who-looks-like-a-wedding-cake knew it would be dodgy trying to sneak drink inside so they had three Breezers and a naggin of vodka each before they came in – well, no one actually finished the naggin except Victorian Lady and then she kept falling over on the way up here and they practically had to carry her past the pervy old priest. Still, the princess is quite locked, and the GI is even more locked. In the car park she took two of the pills, and now she’s talking really fast and loud and not making that much sense.

‘Looks like KellyAnn’s finally hunted down Titch,’ the princess says, looking at the scene unfolding in the corner.

‘Oh my God, she’s not going to tell him now?’ the scuba-diver says.

‘What does she think he’s going to do,’ the GI says, ‘stop kissing Ammery Fox and get down on one knee right here in the fucking Seabrook gym hall and say, Oh, KellyAnn, please marry me? I mean, hello?’

‘He’s quite good-looking,’ the princess judges.

‘He’s nothing special,’ the GI says dismissively. ‘He’s a boy, you know?’

A strongman with a handlebar moustache and leopardskin leotard interposes himself between the girls and glances from one to the other, smiling. They gaze back at him with expressions of naked disgust of the kind ordinarily reserved for, say, sex offenders. The strongman withdraws, looking significantly less strong.

‘God, I’m so sick of these fucking boys,’ the GI declares. ‘I need a man.’

‘Me too,’ the princess says.

‘Oh Jesus – Lori, don’t look but that weird fucking Robin Hood thing is completely staring at you again,’ the scuba-diver says.

‘Oh my God, what is his problem?’

‘Maybe I should go over and tell him to stop freaking you out.’

‘Don’t waste the oxygen.’

‘Did you hear anything from Prince Charming?’ the GI asks.

The princess’s face falls.

‘Oh, Lori…’ The GI reaches out and lays a hand on the princess’s shoulder. ‘Don’t let him ruin your night. Switch off your phone and stop thinking about him.’

‘I’m not thinking about him,’ the princess mumbles, hair falling over her face.

‘I suppose he at least might have had some drugs,’ the GI says. ‘God, this thing is so fucking boring. Seabrook boys are such invertebrates.’ She withdraws her hand, wraps her bare arms around herself. ‘I need a shag so badly.’

Near the heart of the dancefloor, Niall/Trudy has been arrested on his way back from the toilets by a heartstoppingly lovely girl dressed as Natasha Fatale, arch-enemy of Bullwinkle the Moose. The girl wants to know where he got his lipstick. Niall, sweating profusely, is not sure how to proceed. Should he tell her he got it from his sister and he doesn’t know the name? Or should he tell her the truth, that he fell in love with it in a little boutique in Sandy-cove village? The heartstopping girl waits expectantly. Niall feels one of his breasts slide inexorably out of his corset.

Dennis and Skippy, meanwhile, are over by the punchbowl watching Ruprecht, who has somehow got talking to a girl.

‘Is he the guy from The Karate Kid?’ the girl is shouting over the music.

‘He’s Professor Emeritus of Physics at Stanford,’ Ruprecht shouts back.

The girl looks utterly lost for a reply; after a few moments, she simply gives up and walks away. Ruprecht, who initiated the conversation only because the girl, dressed as a saucy waitress, was carrying a chocolate cake, which turned out to be fake, is unphased, and rejoins the others just as Mario trudges over with a grim expression.

‘How’s it going, Mario?’ Dennis asks innocently.

‘Pff, fuck these school-going girls.’ Mario makes a dismissive gesture. ‘In Italy, I prefer to date the girls who are in college – those who are nineteen, twenty, and have a good knowledge of sexual techniques. These girls, who are repressed and frigid, do not know which way is up.’

‘They don’t know much about science either,’ Ruprecht adds.

‘Also, what is with this music from days of Yore, that is badly cramping my style?’

Mario’s not the only one asking. Over in the DJ booth, Wallace Willis has just segued from Led Zeppelin into ‘All Right Now’ and is so engrossed in Paul Kossoff’s classic riff that at first he pays no attention to the irate voices emanating from somewhere below: ‘Yo, cracker!’ ‘Hey, honky – yo, you jus’ gonna ignore me?’ Finally he realizes that the voices are addressing him, and peers over the side of the booth to see two smallish, disputatious-looking boys in trousers the size of refrigerators making inscrutable hand-gestures at him. ‘That’s right, nigga, we be talkin’ to you!’

‘Dang, G, what up wid dis music y’all playin?’

Wallace, who’s dressed in a pristine white sailor-suit and holding an enormous lollipop, slides off his headphones. ‘What?’ he says.

‘Nigga, this be the shit my dad listens to!’ one of them says.

‘Yeah, homes, what is it, One Hundred Greatest Jeans Commercials?’ the other adds, waving a plastic machine-gun at him.

‘This is Free,’ he informs them.

‘G, I don’t care if it cost you fifty fuckin’ dollars, put on som’in wi’ bass!’

‘Yeah, motherfucker, this ain’t yo’ Aunt Mabel’s birthday party, play some hip-hop, dawg!’

‘No requests,’ Wallace says.

‘You makin’ a mistake,’ one of the voices warns.

‘The Acting Principal asked me to be the DJ,’ Wallace replies primly, and replaces the headphones over his ears. The two bad-tempered gangstas, both of whom are, incontestably and in spite of their best efforts, white, lour at him a moment longer, and then abruptly disappear.

Midway through the next song – ‘Hold the Line’ by Toto – the sound cuts out. The crowd shuffles to a halt, and the hall is filled with a frazzle of consternation. It can’t be the storm that’s to blame this time, because the turntables are still lit up, and the disco lights still skirling over the now-static heads. There must be a connection loose somewhere. Wallace Willis casts about for grown-up assistance, but can’t seem to locate Mr Fallon and Miss McIntyre. He unlatches the half-door to his booth, descends the steps and is stooping to examine the jumble of cables beneath it when the music starts up again. Everybody cheers and resumes dancing. But the song that is playing now is not the song that was playing a moment ago; in fact it is not a song that features in Wallace’s music collection at all. Wait, he shouts, stop dancing, this is the wrong song! This is the wrong song! But nobody appears to hear him – they are too busy throwing gangsterish shapes and shaking their booty to the interloping song’s extremely loud bass line…

Bass. It’s only now that Wallace realizes what has happened. This is not a programming error, or a crossed wire, or a freak occurrence brought about by the storm. His sound system has been hijacked! By the boys with the giant trousers!

I’m a case of champagne and she’s falled off the wagon / I’m slayin the ho like St George slayed the dragon…

Hunched over, he follows the wires in the hope of finding the point where the takeover has occurred. But it’s so dark, and behaviour on the dancefloor is getting increasingly raucous, and after he has been bumped three or four times Wallace decides to concentrate instead on finding the teachers. Even after a full circuit of the hall, though, they are nowhere to be seen. Wallace begins to get worried. The unauthorized music is having a strange effect on people, making them shoutier, jumpier, and their dance moves decidedly more provocative. Things are in danger of getting out of hand. Where are the teachers? A terrible thought hits him. Are the wide-trousered boys behind this disappearance too? He remembers those Uzis slung around their necks – is the whole party now under the control of gun-toting, rap-loving gangstas?

‘But it’s for charity!’ Wallace squeaks, out loud. No one hears. Picturing the two unfortunate teachers tied up in a closet somewhere, he hurries towards the back door, fighting his way through writhing bodies that, a moment ago, belonged to titchy piffling second-years, but now, as if bathed in some new colour of light, appear quite unfamiliar…

A group of boys has managed to fish down some of the black lost-soul-like balloons, unknotted their umbilici and sucked in their contents; now they are rapping over the bassline in voices squeaky with helium, like a chorus of gangsta rats. One of them, a Colonel Kilgore with a cheroot between his teeth and cheeks daubed with axle-grease, reaches into his fatigues and pulls out his phone: pressing a button to call up a message that reads:

LET ME IN

Strafing the dancers with his machine-gun, he moves towards the double-doors…

She gots the assitude/And I gots the latitude / We in-ex-tric-er-ab-ly linked, like heart attacks and fatty food…

The floor quivers with bass; the staticky, alien energy that had been buzzing about the edges of everything earlier in the night seems now to converge, infiltrating the space like an invisible gas.

‘Hey, Skipford, look, your girlfriend is on her own!’

‘Her friend ran off to get sick, you should go and talk to – hey, she’s looking at us! Hallo there! Hey! That’s right, over he– ow! What?’

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘What’s the problem? You want to talk to her, right? Do you want to talk to her or don’t you?’

‘Well, yeah, but not right this second…’

‘Skippy, if you want to talk to her, I can now reveal to you a chat-up line that is one hundred per cent foolproof and fail-safe. It is something I have been developing for several months for personal use, but I will tell it to you because you are my friend, and I would rather see you nailing this hot bitch than Carl, who has spat in my lunch more times than I can count. So here it is: when I see a chick I want to score, I go up to her and say, Pardon me, you are stepping on my dick.’

Quizzical looks.

‘Because my dick is so long, you see, that it comes all the way down my trousers and out onto the floor.’

Silence, and then: ‘Let me give you some advice, Skippy – never, ever do anything Mario tells you. Ever.’

‘Yeah, Skip, just go over and say hi, that’s all you need to do.’

‘Okay, well, maybe I’ll just wait a little while and then…’

‘Do it now, her friends will be back in a minute.’

‘Yeah, or someone else’ll make a move on her.’

‘I feel nauseous…’

‘True love,’ Geoff says cheerfully.

‘Come on, Skip, Carl’s not here.’

‘Juster, as your Acting Principal I order you to go over there and hit on that girl,’ Dennis commands. ‘That’s more – hey, where’s he going? Hey, she’s over that way!’

Ruprecht waddles after his friend. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Get them to leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to her now.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t feel well. I can’t breathe.’

‘Hmm…’ Ruprecht strokes his chin. He may never have been in love, but he knows all about not breathing. ‘Perhaps you might find this helpful.’ He presses something into his hand. Skippy looks down and just has time to recognize the blue tube of Ruprecht’s asthma inhaler, before Dennis sneaks up behind him and shoves him with both hands, sending him careering into Frisbee Girl.

‘Someone had to do something,’ Dennis says querulously, in response to the accusing looks the others are giving him. ‘He could have gone on mooning over this bimbo for ever.’

‘I wonder if he’s using my line,’ Mario cranes his neck.

‘I’m not sure he’s saying anything,’ Ruprecht bites his thumb pensively.

‘It doesn’t matter what he says to her,’ Dennis says. ‘Skippy and that girl are from two different worlds. It’s like a fish trying to hit on a supermodel. That fish could have the best lines in the world, it wouldn’t make any difference. It’s still a fish, with, you know, scales and stuff.’

‘So why did you push him into her?’ Geoff demands.

‘To bring him back to reality,’ Dennis says self-righteously. ‘The sooner he finds out the truth, the better. Hot girls like her don’t go out with weedy losers. They just don’t. That’s the way it works.’

There is a meditative silence, then Geoff says, ‘That’s how it usually works. But maybe tonight is different.’

‘Why the hell would tonight be any different, you anus?’

‘Because of Hallowe’en.’ Geoff turns his festering, Play-Doh visage to Dennis, and in his beyond-the-grave basso expands, ‘The ancient feast of Samhain, when the gates between our world and the Otherworld are opened, and unholy spirits march unchecked through the land. All laws are suspended, and nothing is as it seems…’

‘Sure,’ Dennis says, ‘except tonight’s not Hallowe’en, it’s Friday 26 October.’

With a gasp, Ruprecht checks his watch and then, without a word of explanation, sprints for the side-door out to the corridor. Dennis, Mario and Geoff look at each other incredulously. No one has ever seen Ruprecht sprint before.

‘Hmm,’ Dennis says thoughtfully, ‘I see what you mean,’ and they return to observing Skippy with renewed interest.

So far, things have gone predictably badly. He crashed right into her, spilling half her drink, and now she’s looking at him with a mixture of terror and contempt, the latter gaining the upper hand with every second he stands here twitching and blinking and not saying anything. But it’s impossible to think! Up close she’s even more beautiful, and every time she looks at him he feels like he’s been hit by lightning.

‘Uh, sorry,’ he manages to croak at last.

‘That’s okay,’ the girl says in a deeply ironic tone. She makes to move past him. Impulsively, he sidesteps into her path.

‘Daniel,’ he blurts. ‘Uh, that’s who I am.’

‘O-kay,’ the girl responds, and then when he doesn’t get out of the way, with obvious reluctance, she says, ‘Lori.’

‘Lori,’ he repeats, then falls back into the twitching, blinking silence. Behind the scenes, his brain, dashing around trying to put out the fires that have sprung up all over the place, shouts at him, Say something else! Say something else! But it does not tell him what, so he opens his mouth with no idea what’s going to come out until he hears himself speak the words, ‘Do you like…Yahtzee?’

‘What’s “Yahtzee”?’ pronounced in a tone of pre-emptive disgust that could burn through metal.

‘It’s a game of skill and chance,’ Skippy says miserably. ‘Played with dice.’

The girl looks like if she were any more bored she would actually be dead. ‘Do you have any drugs?’ she says.

‘I have an asthma inhaler,’ he replies eagerly.

The girl just looks at him. ‘Um,’ he says. Inside his whole body groans in agony. He couldn’t help it, it was right there in his hand! Now he stares at his shoes, from which one of the wings is coming off again, wishing the ground would swallow him up – when something else hits him. Scrambling off his quiver, he fishes down past the Arrows of Light – ‘I have these.’ He produces the tube breathlessly.

‘What are they,’ she says, without seeming too enthusiastic.

‘They’re, um, travel-sickness pills.’

‘Travel-sickness pills?’

Skippy’s head bobs mutely. She gazes at him as if urging him to complete the thought. ‘But you’re not going anywhere,’ she says finally.

‘No, but…’ He wants to explain about the pills and how they take you away from where you are even though you’re still there; but it sounds stupid even before he says it, and he tails off, sinking under the weight of his own foolishness. She is right, he isn’t going anywhere. He has ruined everything for ever, there is no way he’ll be able to wipe this from her memory. Now he just wants it to be over. ‘No,’ he says.

The girl is frowning, as though she’s doing maths in her head. Then she says, ‘What happens if you mix travel pills and asthma inhaler.’

‘I don’t know,’ Skippy says. Glancing over his shoulder, her eyes suddenly fix and widen. Skippy turns too, and sees that the main doors have been opened. He’s surprised, because when he checks his watch it’s still only 9.45.

‘This thing is totally lame,’ the girl decides. ‘I’m getting out of here.’ And before Skippy can say anything, she is walking away, every step she takes a sledgehammer whomping his heart into little tiny pieces. Then she pauses, and over her shoulder, in the careless way you might speak to a stray dog you’d met in the park, she says, ‘Coming?’

For some reason he starts babbling about how he thinks you have to ask permission before you can leave. But she’s already halfway across the hall.

‘Hey, wait up!’ He comes to and chases after her, catching up with her as she enters the cloakroom; and side by side they step out into the night.

‘Holy shit,’ Dennis says.

‘This Hallowe’en is powerful stuff,’ Mario says. He reflects a moment. ‘Perhaps these supernatural forces are also behind the mystery of my failure with the ladies tonight. If a born loser like Skippy can score a hottie-to-the-max like that, you know that some crazy shit is going down.’

Meanwhile, a long-limbed shadow is pushing through the crowd. Another reversal – this is a shadow for which people get out of the way. It rolls its eyes and gnashes its teeth, it seizes girls as it moves through the hall, pulling off masks and boring into their eyes before casting them aside – and now it catches sight of someone, blundering in tears in the opposite direction, her voluminous dress slipping down her arms so it looks like she’s escaping from an enormous pink-and-white jellyfish. It makes for her, grabs her wrist and pulls her into it. ‘Where’s your friend?’ it demands. ‘Lori, where is she?’

But the weeping girl just bursts out into fresh wailing. The shadow swears and goes back the way it came, shouldering people left and right in spite of the path that has opened up in front of it.