Skippy Dies: A Novel

‘Hey, Blowjob, you fat moron,’ Dennis charges as Ruprecht emerges blinkingly from his basement. ‘You’ve crossed the line this time, you fuckwad!’

‘What?’ Ruprecht is mystified.

‘Did you tell Father Laughton I played the bassoon?’ Dennis’s bassoon, a present from his stepmother, is a tightly guarded secret kept permanently underneath his bed.

‘Oh, that,’ Ruprecht says.

‘You idiot, now he wants me to play with you in the crappy Christmas concert.’

‘Yes!’ Ruprecht’s chubby face lights up. ‘Won’t it be fun?’

‘I’ll saw my hands off before I appear on stage with you and your Orchestra of Gays!’ Dennis bellows. ‘Do you hear me? I’ll saw my hands off!’

But it is already too late for that: his stepmother has caught wind of his participation via her vast network of religious, and is right behind it. ‘Music has wonderful healing power,’ she tells him that morning, adding sadly, ‘you are such an angry boy.’

Other boys have been more adroit, however, and the priest, faced with a mass vanishing act on the part of the school’s musical community, has been forced to scale back his original concept. Instead of a full symphony, the Christmas concert orchestra will now be a quartet, with Ruprecht and Dennis joined by Brian ‘Jeekers’ Prendergast on viola and Geoff Sproke on triangle. ‘It’s quite unconventional,’ Father Laughton, ever the optimist, pronounces. ‘It’s terribly exciting.’

The participation of Jeekers, while doing little for the Quartet’s street-cred, comes as no great surprise: Jeekers’s parents are obsessed with Ruprecht and with making their son more Ruprecht-like. It is, in its small way, a tragic story. In any other school, in any other year, Jeekers – academically gifted, diligent to a fault – would have been undisputed top dog. The caprices of fate, however, have consigned him to the same class as Ruprecht, in which Ruprecht, in every exam, in every test, in every Friday just-for-fun quiz, reigns supreme. This drives Jeekers’s parents – his mother, a pinch-faced dwarf with the permanent appearance of sucking sulphuric acid through a straw; his father, a wound-up solicitor who makes Pol Pot look like the Fonz – into paroxysms. ‘We didn’t raise our son to come in second place,’ they shriek. ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you even trying? Don’t you want to be an actuary?’ ‘I do, I do,’ Jeekers pleads, and so it’s back into the study, surrounded by homework timetables, performance-tracking graphs, brain-boosting fish oils and vitamins. His extra-curricular activities, meanwhile, largely revolve around shadowing Ruprecht, doing whatever he’s doing, be it the Quartet or Chess Club, in the hope of discovering whatever it is that gives him that edge.

The choice of music for the performance has been left to Ruprecht, who has gone for Pachelbel’s Canon in D, explaining to Jeekers that the Canon is the piece favoured by Professor Tamashi for his METI broadcasts into space.

‘I really like that song,’ Geoff says. Then his brow puckers. ‘Although it really reminds me of something.’

‘But, ah,’ Jeekers feels he has to point out, ‘we won’t be broadcasting into space. We’ll just be playing to our parents.’

‘Perhaps,’ twinkles Ruprecht. ‘But you never know who might be listening in.’

‘I’m in hell,’ Dennis whispers to himself.

‘What’s going on with the girl, Skip?’ Geoff asks as they make their way back to class after break. ‘Has she texted you back yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Hmm.’ Geoff strokes his chin. ‘Well, I suppose it’s only been a couple of days.’

A couple of endless days. He knows she is alive: yesterday morning, he saw her through the telescope, emerging from a silver Saab and tripping, with a shake of her hair, the few steps to the door of St Brigid’s. But maybe she lost her phone? Maybe she has no credit? Maybe she never got the message? Maybes surround her in a fog, like Ruprecht’s theory that doesn’t explain anything, just hangs a question mark over everything it touches; and the phone remains smug and mute in his pocket, like someone with a secret they will not tell.

‘Maybe you should send her another haiku,’ Niall suggests.

‘Send another message and you might as well paint a big L-for-loser right there on your forehead,’ Mario says. ‘Right now, your strategy is to sit tight and play it cool.’

‘Yeah,’ Skippy agrees glumly, but then: ‘Are you sure that was the right number you gave me?’

‘Sure I’m sure. I don’t make a mistake about something like that.’

‘Like you’re sure it’s her number?’

Mario clicks his teeth. ‘I’m telling you, that’s her number. Go and check for yourself, if you don’t believe me.’

‘Go and check for myself?’ This does not sound right to Skippy. ‘What do you mean, go and check for myself?’

‘The toilet,’ Mario replies blithely. ‘In Ed’s Doughnut House.’

Skippy stops in his tracks. ‘You got her number from a toilet?’

‘Yes, it is on the door of the middle cubicle.’

At first Skippy is too dumbstruck even to respond.

‘Holy smoke, Mario,’ Geoff says, ‘a toilet door…?’

‘What’s the problem? It’s not like someone’s going to put up a fake number. We can go back and look if you want – it is in the middle cubicle beneath a drawing of a joint that is also an ejaculating penis.’

Skippy has now recovered his power of speech, and uses it; Mario retaliates, the others join in, and they become so engrossed in the argument that none of them notices the figure coming towards them out of the crowd – not until the last second when, moving with a facility and speed surprising in someone of his build, he looms up behind Skippy like a shadow, seizes either side of his head and quickly, deftly, dashes it against the wall.

Skippy drops to the ground like a swatted fly, and for several moments he remains there, sprawled beneath the noticeboard, diverting the flow of his schoolmates. Then, with Geoff’s help, he drags himself into a sitting position, and gingerly touches his bleeding temple. Dennis watches Carl shoulder his way back through the pullulating hall. ‘I suppose that means it must have been the right number,’ he says.