Skippy Dies: A Novel

It’s November.

The laneway down to the side-gate is slick with fallen leaves, beaten flat and sodden with rain and grit; it’s no longer so much fun to have them wedged down your jumper or, indeed, covering your sheets when you turn back the duvet in your dorm. Everything smells of decay, although the frost in the morning hides this nearly till noon, when the watery sun reaches its feeble peak.

The boarders begin trickling back Saturday morning, and on Monday classes resume for all. Initially, the dejection of return is partly offset by the excitement of reunion. A single week in the Outside – that tilt-a-whirl of flux and adventure! – provides more stories than a whole term in this dump where time stands still. People have chugged a lot of beers and gotten really, really drunk. They have accidentally or deliberately set fire to things. They have visited Disneyworld, they have been bitten by dogs, they have watched 18-cert movies. There have been tonsillectomies, orthodontal work, sexual awakenings, haircuts. Vaughan Brady has had his ears bandaged after getting his head stuck in railings attempting to reach a five-euro note; Patrick ‘Da Knowledge’ Noonan comes back from Malta with a mahogany-like tan with which he almost passes for black, much to the dismay of Eoin ‘MC Sexecutioner’ Flynn, around whom Patrick has taken to making pointed remarks about ‘the Man’ and ‘Whitey’.

With each passing second, though, the school’s morbid gravity reasserts its control: the old familiar inertia sets in, and soon encounters with the world outside have become little more than dim dreams, wild jumbles of shapes and colours quickly fading like Patrick Noonan’s tan, until by the end of the first day’s classes, it’s as if the boys have never been away at all.

‘It’s as if we’ve never been away, except worse,’ Dennis amends, stretched out in the attitude of a corpse on Ruprecht’s bed. At the window it’s already getting dark; the clocks have gone back, and from now until Christmas the slim supply of sunshine available to them will dwindle daily to a sliver.

‘Ha ha! I have got you now, little treasure-stealing leprechaun,’ emits Mario, gathered over a tiny, futuristic-looking phone.

‘I wish I was dead.’ Dennis is in especially bad form after a week in Athlone being dragged to novenas by his stepmother. ‘I wonder why I don’t die. It’s not like I have any reason to live.’ He settles back and closes his eyes. ‘Maybe if I just lie here quietly enough, I can just… stop… being… alive…’

‘Go and die on your own bed,’ Ruprecht mutters, not looking up from his calculations.

‘That’s it, Blowjob, you’re out of my will,’ says Dennis’s corpse, then sits up abruptly as BETHani comes on the stereo. ‘Jesus Christ, Skip, are you playing that damn song again?’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Nothing was wrong with it, the first four hundred times.’

‘Don’t pay any attention to him, Skip,’ Geoff says. ‘He’s just jealous because he’s never been in love.’

‘I don’t mind anyone being in love,’ Dennis says. ‘I mind them endlessly going on about it when the whole thing’s totally imaginary.’

‘It’s not imaginary!’ Skippy rejoins pinkly.

‘Oh no, of course not, incredibly hot Frisbee Girl grabs you and pulls you out of the Hop and the two of you go running around in the dark and then she kisses you?’

‘That’s what happened!’

‘She? Kissed you? Like, come on, Skippy.’

‘But you saw us leave together! You were the one who pushed me into her, don’t you remember?’

‘No.’

‘We were talking to Mario – Mario, remember, you’d struck out with all those girls? They kept telling you they had to take their insulin and running away?’

‘Hmm, that does not sound like the kind of thing that would happen.’

‘Are you sure you didn’t dream it, Skippy?’

Arrrgh – Skippy’s been having this same conversation ever since he got back. At first he was sure Dennis was behind it – it has all the hallmarks of one of his practical jokes. But the thing is, it’s not just his friends who’re playing dumb. No one remembers him leaving with Lori; no one remembers even seeing them speaking together. Meanwhile, all trace of the event has been removed: the Sports Hall restored to its normal role (while smelling oddly of disinfectant), the Hallowe’en posters replaced by new ones advertising auditions for the Christmas concert. It’s as if the night never happened; and Skippy is left facing the horrific prospect that he did actually dream the entire thing.

‘Although if it’s a dream that you truly believe in your heart,’ Geoff attempts to console him, ‘then in a way, you know, it is real?’

‘It’s not a dream in my heart,’ Skippy scowls.

‘Whether you dreamed it or not –’ Mario emerges temporarily from his phone, which is new ‘– the key question is, did you get this bitch’s digits? This is the mark of success or failure in any romantic encounter.’

‘No,’ Skippy says miserably.

‘Did you say you’d meet her after the holidays?’ Geoff asks.

‘No.’ Skippy plonks abjectly down on the side of the bed.

‘Holy shit, Skip, you can’t even imagine stuff properly,’ Dennis says. ‘So what’s the plan now, stare at her out of that creepy telescope for the rest of your life?’

‘I don’t know,’ Skippy says glumly. ‘I suppose I could wait outside the gates after school until she comes out. Or call over to her house?’

‘No and no.’ Mario shoots these down straight away. ‘You have to keep your cool. You don’t want to come across like some crazy stalker.’

‘You know, as opposed to the guy who watches her all day through his telescope,’ Dennis says.

‘How about you become really, really good at something she likes?’ Geoff suggests. ‘Like, you know she likes frisbee, okay, so how about you train at frisbee until you’re one of the world’s top frisbee players, and then one day she sees you on TV and she remembers you and she writes you a letter, but you’re all like, See you later, bitch, I’m a professional frisbee player now, I’ve got chicks all over me. But then back in your lonely hotel room one night you start thinking about her, and you realize you still love her, so you write her a letter back, except you write it on a frisbee and you throw it from the top of the wall so it goes in her classroom window and then she comes out and sees you standing on top of the wall and then, you know, you get married?’

Skippy looks doubtful.

‘Get the digits,’ Mario repeats. ‘Then we’ll have something to work with.’

‘Lori Wakeham?’

‘Yeah, I was talking to her at the…’

‘Why would you want Lori Wakeham’s number?’

‘Well, you see, I was talking to her at the Hop, and I just wanted to give her a call and…’

‘You were talking to her?’

‘Yeah, I don’t know if you remember but actually you were the one who –’

‘Hey, Titch, good job on KellyAnn Doheny,’ Darren Boyce says, bouncing by.

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Titch says expressionlessly.

‘No really, good job,’ Darren Boyce says, and laughs to himself as he walks off.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Titch shouts at his retreating form, then slamming his locker door he stamps off towards the exit. Skippy trots after him. He can appreciate he’s going out on a limb here and is prepared to abase himself as much as is required.

As they approach the pool table Jason Rycroft detaches himself from it and intercepts them. ‘All right, Titch?’

‘All right,’ Titch returns, a little defensively.

‘What are you doing with this bummer?’ Jason nods at Skippy.

‘Oh, he’s fucking driving me mad looking for some bird’s phone number.’

‘Juster? What’s he going to do with a bird, take her to the playground?’ Jason turns to Skippy. ‘Seriously, Juster, no offence or anything, but I mean have your balls even dropped yet?’

Titch laughs. ‘Yeah, Juster, stick to your Nintendo.’

Skippy goes red. In the playground in the rainy night-time park, her fingernail scratching hearts into the old black wood of the swing…

‘Oh, here, Titch, I have something for you.’ Jason Rycroft reaches into his bag, takes something out and puts it into Titch’s hand. ‘Thought you might need it.’ He bounces away, yukking. Titch and Skippy look at the object in Titch’s hand. It is a soother.

‘Fucking arsehole,’ Titch says, flicking it over his shoulder. They stand there a moment, staring after Jason Rycroft. Actually Skippy doesn’t know if Titch remembers he’s there. At last he says, ‘So…’

‘For fuck’s sake, Juster,’ Titch explodes, ‘don’t be a twat all your life, will you not.’ With that he storms off, carrying Lori’s number with him.

In English class they’re doing haiku: Ruprecht, your fat ass / I am going to kick it so hard / Your nuts fall off – ‘Ha ha, I think you’ll find a haiku is supposed to have seventeen syllables?’ While Kipper Slattery recites slender poems about wheat-sheaves and cherry trees at the top of the room, Skippy sinks deeper into gloom. From his bedroom in mid-term it had all seemed so simple. They had kissed, that was the important part, surely when you kiss someone everything else just falls into place! But when you get in close there’s a thousand tiny barriers in the way, like an army of microscopic terriers chewing at your ankles, too small to see but making it impossible to move…

‘Wakey-wakey, Skip! Class is over!’ Mario standing over his desk.‘Time to go, Skippy,’

Geoff addresses him in haiku form,‘Geography next, I like

Our sexy teacher.’

‘He is busy moping about his dream-girl,’ Mario says.

‘Well, then there’s no point us bothering him,’ Geoff says.

‘No, there is no point me bothering him with her phone number,’ Mario says.

‘Nope, I wouldn’t bother him with that.’

‘What?’ Skippy says, head jerking up.

‘What?’ says Mario.

‘What did you say about her number?’

‘What number? Oh, you mean this number?’ Mario is waving a strip of paper. He pulls it out of reach as Skippy makes a grab, then relents and hands it to him. Skippy gazes at it in astonishment. LORI, it says in Mario’s flamboyant scrawl, followed by a number – a crystalline shard of her, like a strand of DNA.

‘But how…?’

Mario shrugs smugly, a sort of smrug. ‘I am Italian,’ is all he will say. ‘Come on, Geoff, we’re going to be late.’

Now the question becomes what to say to her. A text message is deemed preferable to a call: other than that, though, there is little consensus.

‘Why don’t I just say, Hi Lori, this is Daniel, it was nice to talk to you the other night, if you want to meet up again sometime give me a call.’

‘That’s fine,’ Mario says, ‘if you want to send her into a coma. You need something with oomph.’

‘How about a haiku?’ Geoff says.

‘How about, instead of “if you want to meet up again”, you say, “if you want me to sex you hard”,’ Mario says.

It’s the end of the school day; they are walking down the laneway to the Doughnut House. In the dusk the world appears pale and exhausted, like a vampire’s been drinking from its veins: the thin pink filament of the just-come-on doughnut sign, the white streetlights like dowdy cotton bolls against the grey clouds, the soft hand-like leaves of the trees with the colours leeched away to match the asphalt.

‘What have you got so far?’ Geoff asks.

Skippy presses a button. ‘ “Hi,” ’ he says.

‘That’s all you have after four hours?’

‘It’s the only thing everyone agrees on.’

Geoff frowns. ‘Actually, I’m not all that crazy about “Hi”.’

‘What’s wrong with “Hi”?’

‘It just seems like the kind of thing my mum would say.’

‘It’s the kind of thing everyone says.’

‘Have you thought about “Hey”? Don’t you think “Hey” might be more kind of rockin’? Or “Yo”?’

Dennis and Mario, meanwhile, have fallen behind to debate the merits and demerits of Mario’s new phone. ‘The thing you don’t understand about this phone is that it’s state of the art, which means, this is the best phone you can get.’

‘I do understand that, you moron, I’m saying what’s the point of having a state-of-the-art phone when everyone who’s going to call you on it is living six feet away from you?’

‘I think what it is, is, you are jealous of my state-of-the-art phone, which has a camera and an MP3 player.’

‘Mario, if you can’t see why your parents suddenly gave you that gay phone you’re even dimmer than I thought. I mean, think about it, they leave you in school for the entire holiday, and then they give you some rinky-dink piece of plastic so they can talk to you without having to see you face-to-face. They couldn’t say, “We don’t love you” more clearly if they wrote it in skywriting over the rugby pitches.’

‘That shows what you know, because my parents do love me.’

‘Well, why did they leave you here over mid-term, then?’

‘They did not go into it, but they were very specific about it not being because they didn’t love me, and I know because I asked them that very question.’

‘What did they say? Did they say it would be character-building?’

Mario suddenly takes on a hunted look.

‘Face it, Mario, the only reason any of us are here is that our parents don’t want a bunch of stinky, no-longer-cute adolescents getting in their hair.’

Skippy turns round. ‘Would you say “Hi” or “Hey”? If you were talking to a girl?’

‘I would say, “Put on your crash-helmet, hot stuff, because you are about to have the ride of your life!” ’

‘I would say, “Please ignore my friend, his parents dropped him on his head when he was a baby, over and over, because they do not love him.” ’

Ed’s buzzes with blonde hair and St Brigid’s plaid; but Lori’s not there, and the table where they sat that night is occupied by two others blithely unaware of its history. At the back of the restaurant, however, they find Ruprecht, surrounded by maths books.

‘What have you got so far?’ he asks.

‘ “H,” ’ Skippy says.

‘ “H,” ’ muses Ruprecht. ‘ “H”.’

‘A haiku would be nice and sort of different,’ Geoff says, mostly to himself. ‘Lori, your eyes… your big green eyes…’

‘How about asking her a riddle?’ Ruprecht says.

‘A riddle?’

‘Yes, a riddle always grabs the attention. Something about your name, for instance. Instead of “this is Skippy,” you could say, “Who am I? Above a rope, or Down Under. Pass over my name, and you will find it.” Something like that.’

‘What?’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘Ruprecht, have you ever actually met a woman?’

‘Lorelei Wakeham,’ Geoff blurts, ‘your sad eyes of emerald are my only stars.’

Everybody stops dead and stares at Geoff. ‘It’s a haiku,’ he explains.

Ruprecht repeats the words softly to himself:

Lorelei WakehamYour sad eyes of emeraldAre my only stars.

‘Seventeen syllables,’ he pronounces.

‘Holy smoke, Geoff, that’s really beautiful.’

‘Oh, it’s just a little something I thought up,’ Geoff demurs.

‘You see, this, this is what I have meant by oomph,’ Mario tells Skippy. ‘A haiku like this is the express train to Sexville.’

‘Yeah, and Geoff can recite it at your funeral after Carl kills you,’ Dennis scowls; but the heady combination of Japanese poetry and chocolate doughnuts sweeps away any misgivings, and Skippy hurries to key in his message before anyone can change his mind.