Skippy Dies: A Novel

That night Halley dreams of old loves; she wakes, flushed and guilty, some hours before dawn. ‘Howard?’ she calls his name gently, as if somehow he might know. In the velvet darkness her voice sounds thin, careful, concealing. But he does not respond; beside her, the drowsing bulk of his away-turned body rises and falls, placid and oblivious, a gigantic unicellular organism sharing her bed.

She closes her eyes but can’t fall back to sleep, and so instead she conjures up again the substance of the dream, a flame of hers from years ago, in a sun-flooded apartment on Mulberry Street. Awake it doesn’t take, though; it feels like someone else’s life and she like a voyeur, watching from outside.

By the time she’s showered, the sun has come up. It has been raining during the night, and the day is drenched and quivering and singing with colour.

‘Morning, morning.’ Howard bustles into the room with his jacket already on and kisses her on the cheek before opening the refrigerator. He sets the toaster, pours some coffee, and sits down at the table, studying his lesson plan. For the last two weeks he has tried not to look at her; she does not know why. Has she changed somehow? In the mirror her face does not seem different. ‘So what’s going on today?’ he says.

She shrugs. ‘Write about technology. How about you?’

‘Teach kids history.’ Now he looks up, smiles at her, flat and false as a cereal commercial.

‘You know what, though, I’m going to need the car this afternoon.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah, I have to go see this Science Fair.’

‘At the RDS? Farley’s going to be there, you should say hello.’

‘I will. But the car. Can I come into school lunchtime and pick it up?’

‘Why not just take it now? I can get the bus in.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure, makes more sense than you having to – whoops, in that case I’d better skedaddle though –’ He looks at his watch and is grabbing a kiss in the next instant: then in the same flurry of movement he has closed the door behind him.

This is the way they live now, like two actors in the final performances of a show no one comes to see any more.

The morning is a quagmire of e-mails and missed calls, voice-mails promising more e-mails, more calls. Still, the prospect of an afternoon in the outside world makes it easier to bear. People are always telling Halley how lucky she is to be able to work at home. No commute! No boss in your face! You don’t even have to get dressed! She herself used to write up the housebound life, or fully networked society as it was called then, as the great promise of the digital revolution. Now here she is, thrilled to be going to a science fair for teenagers because it gives her an excuse to put on make-up. Be careful what you wish for, she supposes.

In Ballsbridge she parks the car and leaves the bright afternoon for the darkness of the exhibition hall. Inside it is murky and frenetic with activity, like a juvenile ant colony. Everywhere she looks, arcane contraptions hum, spark, crackle, splash; animals dutifully nose electrodes and spin wheels; computers encrypt, decrypt, configure. For all the commotion, though, science is palpably of secondary importance to the teenaged exhibitors; between the stalls, stares are being swapped so nakedly lustful that even to pass through them is to feel vaguely violated.

She does the rounds of the exhibits, speaks to their breathless or monosyllabic progenitors, while around her their peers, obviously attending under duress, shuffle by with the hopeless expressions of prisoners on a death march – pasty, raw-boned kids in dreary uniforms, fidgeting, slapping each other, repeating unfunny jokes. Seeing Howard’s friend Farley looming in the distance, she makes her way to the Seabrook stalls, where a study of the heat-release system in reptiles has been thrown into jeopardy by a gecko gone AWOL. A couple of boys are crawling around in the space behind the stall in search of it, proffering little pieces of Mars Bar; the other two members of the team appear more concerned with looking cool in front of the Loreto girls with the wind generator on the other side of the aisle. ‘I knew we should have brought a reserve gecko.’ Beside her, Farley shakes his head. ‘That guy’s not coming back.’

‘How is everything? Gecko aside.’

‘Everything’s fine. Counting down to Christmas, I suppose, like everybody else.’

She wants to ask him about Howard, try to discover what might be on his mind, what she can do; but she hesitates, and a moment later two boys arrive from another Seabrook exhibit – one swarthy with a daunting single eyebrow, the other with pale, ginger features strafed with acne, both of that slightly dysmorphic cast common to teenage boys, as though their faces have been copied out of a catalogue by someone working in an unfamiliar medium – to tell Farley that someone spilled Coke on their laptop.

‘ “Someone”?’ Farley repeats.

‘It just sort of happened,’ the ginger boy says.

‘Oh God,’ Farley sighs, ‘sorry, Halley,’ as he follows them away.

How strange that Howard spends his whole day with these creatures, she thinks. She finds her energy sapped just from being around them a few moments.

Climbing into the car afterwards – an ancient Bluebird, a compendium of idiosyncrasies held together by rust that represents Howard’s only significant investment in life prior to meeting her – she pretends to herself that she doesn’t feel bad about going home. She turns on the radio, hums unlisteningly over the chatter of voices, does not resist as her mind slips back to those grand days of irrational exuberance, when hardly a day went by without a new start-up starting up, or an IPO, or some other such glamorous wing-ding, as her old editor called them, for Halley to dress up for; the great days of the Internet Boom, when all the talk was of the future, imagined as a kind of secular, matte-black Rapture, an epoch of convergence and unending bliss that it was widely believed, there at the end of the twentieth century, was just about to arrive, and Halley spent her nights in a little apartment on Mulberry Street –

The dog bounds out in front of her in a flash of golden fur that disappears immediately out of sight. She jams on the brakes, but the car, with a surprisingly heavy, almost industrial sound, has already hit it. Opening the door she scrambles out onto the street – her street, with her house, and the rest of the day as it should have been, only yards away! – at the same moment that the woman from the house opposite opens hers and runs down the footpath towards her.

‘It just appeared out of nowhere,’ Halley gabbles, ‘it jumped right out in front of the car…’

‘The garden gate was open,’ the woman says, but her attention is on the dog, kneeling to stroke its pink-tinged head. It lies flat on its side, a little distance from the car bumper; its brown eyes smile at Halley as she crouches down beside it. Blood is trickling along the gravel from underneath its head. ‘Oh, Polly…’

A car has pulled up behind Halley’s. Unable to pass, the driver gets out and stands over them. ‘Oh, the poor thing… did you hit her?’

‘She came out of nowhere,’ Halley repeats miserably.

‘Poor old girl.’ The man hunkers down by the two women. The dog, enjoying the attention, looks from one to the other, thumps its tail weakly on the ground. ‘She needs to be taken to the vet,’ the man says. They begin to discuss how she might best be lifted. If a sheet were slid under her, a kind of hammock? – A shrill scream issues from a short distance away. The woman’s little girl is frozen by the garden gate.

‘Alice, go inside,’ the woman commands.

‘Polly!’ the girl cries.

‘Go inside,’ her mother repeats, but the girl is dashing pell-mell down the path and by the time she reaches them is already in floods of tears. ‘Polly! Polly!’ The dog pants and licks its chops, as if to try and calm her.

‘Shh, Alice… Alice…’ The woman half-rises as the little girl begins to wail, her entire head turning mauve, becoming one huge mouth. ‘Shh…’ The woman presses the child’s head into her body; the small hands fling themselves around her skirt. Gently she leads her back towards the house. ‘Come on now… it will be okay…’

Absently, Halley swirls her fingertips over the drab tarmac while the man phones the DSPCA. Before long the woman from the house re-emerges, a white sheet bundled in her arms. She waits for the man to finish his call and then the three of them lift the dog to the side of the road. There is no longer any need to take it to the vet. They stretch the cover loosely over its body.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Halley pleads yet again.

‘I kept meaning to do something about that gate,’ the woman says distractedly. ‘I suppose the postman must have left it open.’

The man puts his hand on her elbow and tells her that these things happen. Halley aches for him to say it to her too, but he does not. The three of them exchange phone numbers, as if their drama still has an act to go; ‘I live across the street,’ Halley tells the woman uselessly. Then she gets back in the car and drives it the stone’s throw to her own gate. Once inside, she peeks through the curtains to see the woman, cheeks streaked, still keeping vigil on the corner, by the bedsheet from which the dog’s paws protrude, neatly, two by two. The other retriever lies on the grass in the woman’s garden, snout poking abjectly through the railings; from an upstairs window the little girl looks out, palms pressed to the glass, wailing soundlessly.

Halley closes the curtains and bunches herself up in a corner. The phone flashes at her from the desk with incoming calls; digital fish swim back and forth across the computer screen. For the first time since she arrived in Ireland, she wishes without reservation she were at home. It feels like her whole life here has been tending towards this point, turning her into someone who runs down a dog.

Not long after, she hears Howard coming in, preceded by a whistle like the theme tune to some balsa-wood sitcom. She sits up on the couch, glares at his unwitting, friendly smile. ‘So how was the Fair?’ he asks.

‘What?’

‘The Science Fair?’

The Science Fair! The gecko! The reminder of that distant afternoon and her own part in it – how trivial, how perfectly fucking useless to anyone! – is petrol on the flames of her anger. ‘Howard, why didn’t you get the car serviced?’

‘What?’ Howard, slow-witted, lays down his briefcase and overcoat.

‘The fucking brakes are fucked, Howard, I’ve asked you a million times to bring that heap of shit to the garage and you never fucking do it –’

Howard regards her carefully as if she’s speaking in tongues. ‘Well, I will, if you want me to, I will. What’s wrong, did something…?’

She tells him, in an overheated rush, about the dog, the woman, the little girl.

‘Oh God…’ He musses her hair. ‘I’m sorry, Halley.’ But his sympathy only makes her angrier. Why should he get off scot-free? Yes, she drove the car, but everything else is his fault! His fault!

‘What’s the use of being sorry? God, Howard, what if it had been the little girl who ran out on the road? What would you say then? Sorry?’

Bowing his head, Howard mumbles contritely.

‘Why don’t you just do what you say you’re going to do? You have to think of things, Howard, you have responsibilities, you can’t just float around your own little world, buried in your war books, dreaming you’re fighting the Nazis –’

‘The Hun,’ Howard says to the floor.

‘What?’

‘The Nazis are the Second World War. I’m doing the First.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake – are you even listening to me? Are you even aware you have a life here? Am I just some phantasm who interrupts your reading? You have to fucking commit to things, Howard, you have to wake up to the people around you, who are depending on you! Even though you find it boring, it’s still your life!’

She lets him have it, both barrels, all the frustration that’s been building up for the last few weeks and longer; Howard listens in silence, shoulders hunched, eyes screwed up as if he’s got a stomach pain, and the more she chastises, the more his brow creases into this stymied attitude, somewhere between bafflement and agony, and the more he doubles up, until with a start she wonders if he is actually going to be sick, at which point he sits abruptly on the arm of the armchair and says, almost to himself, ‘I can’t do this any more.’

‘What?’Halley says.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Howard says in a strangulated voice.

At some preconscious level she must know what’s coming, because she already feels like she’s been punched in the stomach: there is no air in her lungs, she does not seem able to breathe new air in. Not now, she thinks, not now! But the next thing he is babbling to her about Robert Graves and Hallowe’en, ‘Wild Horses’ and global warming, a substitute geography teacher who drinks Cosmopolitans – it descends on Halley in a rain, and before she can unpick the sense of it the blood has drained from her face, her fingers buzz with lightness…

And a part of her is thinking of feminism! A part of her is thinking of all the women who fought for their rights, and feeling ashamed for letting them down, because as the story of his infidelity unspools, she feels only an agonizing crumbling, a horrible literal disintegration, as though she’s turned into slush and cascaded all over the floor; he tells her how he doesn’t know how he feels, he doesn’t know what he wants – and all she wants is for him to mop her up and gather her together as she was; she wants to plead and beg and cry so that he’ll unsay what he’s just said, hold her in his arms, tell her that nothing has changed, that everything is all right. But of course that is not what happens.