Skippy Dies: A Novel

With posters for the Christmas concert everywhere, Audition Fever has swept the school. At lunch break, after class, the halls are filled with parps, twangs, thumps of varying degrees of musicality, the rec rooms clotted with knots of boys dreaming up routines that range from opera to gangsta to a new form of Wagnerian tropicalia invented by second year’s Caetano Diaz, which he has dubbed ‘apocalypso’. The Seabrook Christmas concert may be small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but as any modern student of fame knows, there is no platform so low that it does not make you look slightly bigger than the next guy. Competition is fierce, and the lowest common denominator does not go unplumbed. Among the rehearsing voices, a surprising number can be heard performing more saccharine versions of already toxically gloopy ballads – ‘Flying Without Wings’, ‘I Believe I Can Fly’, ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ and others, flying-related and not. Credibility is not the issue for these boys that it might have been for previous generations. A lot of contentious arguments have been resolved in the last decade, a lot of old ideas swept away; it is now universally acknowledged that celebrity is the one goal truly worth pursuing. Magazine covers, marketing deals, artificially whitened smiles, waving from behind barriers at the raving anonymous multitude – this is the zenith of a world now uncluttered by spirituality, and anything you do to get there is considered legitimate.

The concert’s musical director is Father Constance ‘Connie’ Laughton, a kindly, epicene man with white hair and a candy-pink complexion whose burning desire to instil a love of classical music in the hearts of his teenage charges, combined with a softly-softly approach to discipline, sees him occupying a regular spot near the top of Dennis’s Nervous Breakdown Leaderboard. While he recognizes the populist leanings of the boys, his own tastes are strictly canonical; in particular he is a fan of the French horn, and has already taken Ruprecht aside for a word in his ear regarding perhaps a performance? No orchestra exists in the school at present, after some past event Father Laughton never talks about, but maybe Ruprecht has some chums, the priest suggests, who might like to accompany him. Dennis laughs long and hard when he hears of this plan. ‘Pity the poor suckers who get roped into that,’ he says. ‘It’s like having the world’s biggest kick-me sign stuck to your back.’

Hot ticket for this year’s concert are the rock group Shadowfax, who, in Wallace Willis and Louis O’Brien, boast not one but two classically trained guitar wizards: actual girls pay actual money to hear the band’s immaculate covers of the Eagles and other giants of adult-orientated rock. Even the Automator is a fan, following the band’s performance of Toto’s ‘Rain in Africa’ at a benefit for victims of the Ethiopian drought organized by Father Green last summer. Not every aspiring performance is musical, however. Down in a shady corner of the basement, at this very moment, a small crowd is gathered around Trevor Hickey, bent over with his bottom in the air and a lit match in his hand that, with the solemnity of the magician stepping into the cage of swords, he slowly extends backwards…

Diablos: the name given to the igniting of, and ignited, farts. Trevor Hickey is the undisputed master of this arcane and perilous art. The stakes could not be higher. Get the timing even slightly wrong and there will be consequences far more serious than singed trousers; the word backdraught clamours unspoken at the back of every spectator’s mind. Total silence now as, with an almost imperceptible tremble (entirely artificial, ‘just part of the show’ as Trevor puts it) his hand brings the match between his legs and – foom! a sound like the fabric of the universe being ripped in two, counterpointed by its opposite, a collective intake of breath, as from Trevor’s bottom proceeds a magnificent plume of flame – jetting out it’s got to be nearly three feet, they tell each other afterwards, a cold and beautiful purple-blue enchantment that for an instant bathes the locker room in unearthly light.

No one knows quite what Trevor Hickey’s diet is, or his exercise regime; if you ask him about it, he will simply say that he has a gift, and having witnessed it, you would be hard-pressed to argue, although why God should have given him this gift in particular is less easy to say. But then, strange talents abound in the fourteen-year-old confraternity. As well as Trevor Hickey, ‘The Duke of Diablos’, you have people like Rory ‘Pins’ Moran, who on one occasion had fifty-eight pins piercing the epidermis of his left hand; GP O’Sullivan, able to simulate the noises of cans opening, mobile phones bleeping, pneumatic doors, etc., at least as well as the guy in Police Academy; Henry Lafayette, who is double-jointed and famously escaped from a box of jockstraps after being locked inside it by Lionel. These boys’ abilities are regarded quite as highly by their peers as the more conventional athletic and sporting kinds, as is any claim to physical freakishness, such as waggling ears (Mitchell Gogan), unusually high mucous production (Hector ‘Hectoplasm’ O’Looney), notable ugliness (Damien Lawlor) and inexplicably slimy, greenish hair (Vince Bailey). Fame in the second year is a surprisingly broad church; among the two-hundred-plus boys, there is scarcely anyone who does not have some ability or idiosyncrasy or weird body condition for which he is celebrated.

As with so many things at this particular point in their lives, though, that situation is changing by the day. School, with its endless emphasis on conformity, careers, the Future, may be partly to blame, but the key to the shift in attitudes is, without a doubt, girls. Until recently the opinion of girls was of little consequence; now – overnight, almost – it is paramount; and girls have quite different, some would go so far as to say deeply conservative, criteria with regard to what constitutes a gift. They do not care how many golf balls you can fit in your mouth; they are unmoved by third nipples; they do not, most of of them, consider mastery of Diablos to be a feather in your cap – even when you explain to them how dangerous it is, even when you offer to teach them how to do it themselves, an offer you have never extended to any of your classmates, who would actually pay big money for this expertise, or you could even call it lore – wait, come back!

As the juggernaut of puberty gathers momentum, quirks and oddities and singularities turn from badges of honour to liabilities to be concealed, and the same realpolitik that moves boys to forsake long-nurtured dreams of, say, becoming a ninja for a more concerted attention to the here and now, forces others, who once were worshipped as gods, to reinvent themselves as ordinary Joe Blows. Rory Moran will put away his pins, Vince Bailey find some product that de-greens his hair; in five years’ time, as they prepare to leave school, how many of the crowd who applaud him now while he takes his bows (‘I thank you. I thank you.’) will remember that Trevor Hickey was once known as ‘The Duke’?