Skippy Dies: A Novel

That week of mid-term is the longest of Howard’s life. The house has never seemed so small, so confining – like an underground bunker, shared with a ricocheting bullet that zings off the walls night and day, hour after hour. His teeth ache from smiling vacantly; his muscles throb from maintaining his meticulously arranged slouch on the sofa; everyday conversation is like juggling fire, Halley’s most basic inquiry – Are we out of milk? – setting off a mental pandemonium, every synapse blazing in the panic to construct a reply before the delay becomes obvious. By the second day, he is fantasizing about throwing himself at her feet, confessing everything, simply to bring an end to this exhausting assault on his nerves.

Then he discovers an escape route. Thinking he’d better avoid antagonizing the Automator any further, he goes into the school library Monday morning and borrows a couple of books on Seabrook history as research for his piece for the concert programme. Both are written by the same stylistically unblessed priest, and breathtakingly dull – but while he is reading them Halley leaves him alone. He spends two days blissfully submerged in the mind-numbing minutiae of Seabrook’s past; when he is finished he returns to the library and asks the psoriatic brother in charge if he has anything else on the school. The brother does not. For a moment Howard is at sea. Then he has a brainwave. ‘How about the First World War?’ he says.

There are seventeen books on the First World War. Howard checks out all of them. At home he piles them around him on the living-room table, and reads with an engrossed, not-to-be-disturbed expression; he even keeps a box of candles beside him for when the construction work on the Science Park knocks the power out.

‘You’re really getting into that stuff,’ Halley says, regarding the stacks of books, their stern, catastrophic covers.

‘Oh you know, it’s for the kids,’ he replies abstractedly, and peers into the page to make an imaginary underlining.

For the rest of the week he does nothing but read. Textbooks and yarns, elegies and entertainments, eyewitness accounts and fusty donnish histories, he reads them all; and on every page he sees the same thing – Miss McIntyre’s white body stretched out before him, her mouth straining for his, her intoxicated, half-closed eyes.

He aches to talk to her. Her absence, his powerlessness to reach her, are agonizing. One evening he ends up telling Farley what happened just so he can speak her name: even sketching it minimally down the phone line brings the electricity of that night thrilling through him again, with a strange mixture of shame, pride, shame at his pride. But Farley does not seem to share it. Instead he is sombre, as if Howard had announced some fatal illness.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Howard says.

‘What about Halley?’

‘I don’t know.’ These are all the questions he has avoided asking himself. Why is Farley asking them? ‘I think I’m in love with Aurelie.’ Howard realizes this only as he says it.

‘You’re not, Howard. You barely know her.’

‘What difference does that make?’

‘It makes all the difference. You’ve been with Halley for three years. If you mess it up now, I promise you’ll regret it.’

‘So what do you suggest I do, pretend it never happened? Just bury my feelings away? Is that it?’

‘I’m just telling you what you already know, which is that this thing with Aurelie is a fantasy. It’s a fantasy, you know it. And now you’ve had your fun, you should let it go. You haven’t told Halley anything, have you?’

‘No.’

‘Okay, well, keep it that way. In my experience, honesty is definitely not the best policy with these things. Just sit tight until things are clearer. If she asks, deny everything.’

Howard is angry. How many of Farley’s fantasies has he listened to over the years? Chewing Howard’s ear off about the new waitress in the deli, the new assistant in the pharmacy, the girl at the Internet café with the incredible jugs – all of them, conquered or (mostly) otherwise, forgotten completely two weeks later. Who is he to sermonize? Who is he to dictate what is and isn’t real? To say what Howard is or isn’t feeling? Just because he likes having friends who are living the straight life, likes being able to come over to a nice house where he can eat a nice dinner and tell his wild stories, vicariously enjoy the stability and routine for a night without ever having to submit to the slog of it, the endless strictures and limitations –

Later on, however, when the initial sting has abated, he admits to himself that Farley might have a point. Yes, Miss McIntyre is beautiful; yes, what happened in the Geography Room was exhilarating. But did it actually mean anything?

He’s back on the couch with his books; on the other side of the room, Halley taps at her computer, cigarette smoke gathered at her shoulder, a spectral familiar.

People do crazy things, Aurelie said it herself. They do arbitrary things to test the boundaries, to feel free. But those moments don’t have any meaning beyond themselves. They don’t have any real connection with who you are, they aren’t life. Life is when you’re not doing something arbitrary to feel free. This is life, this living room, the furniture and trappings they have picked out and paid for with slow hours of work, the small treats and fancies their budget has allowed them.

‘You look deep in thought,’ Halley says from her desk.

‘Just straightening something out,’ he says.

She gets up. ‘I’m going to make a smoothie, do you want one?’

‘That’d be great, thanks.’

A life and a place to live it versus a momentary flame of passion. For a grown man, that should hardly be a difficult choice. Confident he’s on the right track now, he sets it out mathematically, constructing an elaborate equation in his head in order to prove it to himself beyond any doubt. On one side he places his relationship with Halley, factoring in as much as he can – the loneliness of his life before he met her, the sacrifices she has made for him, their relative happiness together, as well as more abstract concepts like loyalty, honesty, trust, what it means to be a good person. On the other side –

On the other side Miss McIntyre’s mouth, her eyes, her nails in his back.

Halley is asking something from the kitchen. ‘What?’ he calls hoarsely.

‘Are you in a blueberry mood, or a pineapple mood?’

‘Oh – whatever you think.’ His voice, strained, high, adolescent, melds into the turbulent whine of the blender.

Leaned up louchely against the Geography Room door, telling him, To be bored, that’s really a crime.

Howard has been so bored.

He has been so bored with Howard, and all the accoutrements of being Howard. He does not hold Halley to blame for this; boredom is congenital to cowards, like thin blood is to Russian royalty. But the fact remains that in the Geography Room he had not felt bored. In the Geography Room, lying back in the darkness, he’d felt like he was waking from a long, long sleep.

‘Here you go.’ Halley hands him a tall cold glass, runs her fingers through his hair on the way back to her computer.

‘Oh – thanks…’ Well, maybe for now the best thing would be to wait. Until he returns to school and finds the lie of the land, maybe he should take Farley’s advice. Keep his head below the parapet, and Halley – stealthily, unnoticeably, via a careful weave of mishearings and mistimings – at arm’s length; make do for now with secret visits to his memory, replaying his store of Aurelie-moments, imagining their future life together, a smiling haze of uncomplicated rightness. He sips down cold citrusy pulp, picks up his book and sinks into a fantasy in which he walks with her side by side over war-torn earth, through shards of former trees and khaki-shrouded limbs that reach plaintively up out of the ground: he a Tommy covered head-to-toe in mud, she spotless in a cream angora sweater, giving him a pop quiz on his own life he has not studied for, but to which she, fortunately, has all the answers.