Skippy Dies: A Novel

The night of the break-up Halley slept on the sofa. She wouldn’t take the bed, no matter how he pleaded with her; it was plain she would have preferred to go, if she’d only been able to summon the energy. Howard was surprised at the way she’d capitulated. He had expected screaming, punches, excoriation. Instead, she simply sank onto the couch as if he’d sapped her across the back of the head; she cried longer and harder than all the other times he’d seen her cry put together. And he could not comfort her; he was transformed into some monstrous creature whose touch brings only pain.

The next morning she left. He has not seen her since. He guesses she is staying with one or other of the motley straggle of friends she has assembled in her time here – people from work, Americans she’d met on expat forums, other émigrés and cast-aways who’d found themselves stranded on the margins of Dublin life. She calls to the house when he’s not there to collect her belongings; every time he comes home from work some new small thing is gone, as if he’s being burgled in instalments.

The house feels different without her. Though she still has clothes in the wardrobe, though her hairdryer still sits atop the dresser, her razor on the shelf in the shower, the rooms seem bare, denuded; her absence dominates the house – becomes, oxymoronically, a kind of physical presence, shaped and palpable, as though she moved out and this emptiness moved in to take up the space she left. There is a new kind of silence that the stereo turned up all the way can only fill one side of; the air that meets him when he unlocks the door now is clean and clear, smokeless, odourless, breathable.

‘I just wish you hadn’t gone and told her about Aurelie,’ Farley says. ‘You could have done it without telling her that.’

‘It wouldn’t be fair, just giving her half the story.’

‘You’ve burned your bridges now, though. She won’t take you back.’

Howard sighs. ‘What could I do, Farley? If your hand’s in the fire, you know?’

‘How’s that?’

‘Something my dad used to say. If your hand’s in the fire, eventually you have to accept that the only solution is to take it out. Aurelie was the catalyst, that’s all. It would have happened sooner or later.’

But he’s not sure this is true. If he hadn’t met Aurelie, maybe it would never have happened; maybe he would never have found the courage to leave Halley; maybe he’d have stayed with her, got married and lived the rest of his life without ever knowing what real love could feel like – how singular, how incandescent, how complete. Aurelie changed everything, and the truth is that when he confessed to Halley, he did it in part for her – as a kind of prayer to her, a declaration of faith on which to found a different kind of life.

An attempt, as well, to conjure her back from whatever cloud she’d vanished behind. She never came back after mid-term break; according to the Automator, ‘unforeseen circumstances’ had forced her to extend her holiday. Every day Howard sees her classes trooping despondently from the Geography Room to the study hall, or carrying votive bundles of cardboard and paper to the recycling bins, their faces anxious, hopeful, like Indians doing a rain dance. He knows how they feel. Since mid-term he’s existed in a constant state of tension, braced against every moment as the one that might finally restore her. Even out of school, even on his own, shopping in the supermarket, sitting at the traffic lights, he finds himself holding his breath. But the days are a series of ghost pregnancies, delivering nothing.

‘Unforeseen circumstances.’ He can imagine what – who – that means. Seabrook was supposed to be a career break for her, a transitional phase; she hadn’t intended to get mixed up with anyone, especially not someone already mixed up with someone else. Now she’s wondering what she’s got herself into, and whether there’s still time to get herself out. If only he could talk to her! If only he could let her know that this is real to him, more real than anything that has happened before! Or better yet, magically transport the two of them to the time in the future when they’ve started out on a life together, the chaos and agony of these interim weeks already faded, the blizzard of flyaway moments that is the past replaced by something exhilarating, serene, lit from within…

As for Halley, except for Farley he tells no one that she’s gone. Remembering what happened to Jim Slattery all those years ago, he’s haunted by the thought that somehow the boys will find out. But so far the news appears not to have reached them. In fact, he finds his classes going unusually well. The second-years in particular: thanks to his mid-term reading on the First World War, which having nothing better to do he’d continued after Halley left, Howard finds himself able to speak about his subject from a rare position of authority, and to his surprise, the boys listen. Listen, speak, formulate theories: in the limbo days after mid-term, while he waits for Aurelie to return and his new life to begin, these classes – which have so often resembled trench warfare themselves, a huge amount of labour and bloodshed for a dismally small area of terrain – become something he actually looks forward to.

This weekend is his first as a single man for almost three years. He has neglected to make plans and spends most of it in his house. It feels, at the start, a lot like the times his parents left him home alone as a teenager. He is free to stay up as late as he wants, listen to music as loud as he wants, eat what he wants, drink what he wants, download porn, belch, walk around in his boxer shorts. By seven o’clock he is drunk; by eight, the novelty has worn off and he finds himself slumped over the kitchen table, watching the microwave defrost a frozen spring roll. Then he hears the key turn in the door and Halley walks in.

Both of them freeze, she by the light switch, he at the table. It is a moment quite electrifying in its cold, untempered immediacy – not quite like seeing a ghost, more like discovering, in the face of another, that you have become a ghost yourself.

‘I didn’t think you’d be here,’ Halley says.

‘Yeah,’ is all Howard can think to say. He wishes he was wearing trousers. ‘Can I get you something? Tea?’

He doesn’t know quite what tack he should take with her – chastened? Solicitous? Tender? Stoic? The question is moot: ‘Someone’s waiting,’ she says, gesturing towards the road where an indistinct figure sits inside a car. She goes to their bedroom and begins to throw things in a box. He waits in the kitchen for her to finish, which she does in fifteen or twenty minutes – whisking back through the house and bidding him goodnight with all the warmth of a solicitor’s letter. Then she is gone, and he is left with the hum of the electricity, to go into the bedroom, if he so desires, and see what she has taken.

He drinks the rest of the beer and goes to bed early, but he can’t sleep. The bereaved dog across the road has taken to howling into the small hours of the night, long ululations laden with rage and grief for its lost companion. Howard lies there for an hour or two, listening to the howls and watching the ceiling; then, with a sigh, he throws back the sheets and goes down to the kitchen to sit at the bar with one of his library books (now overdue, and subject to a fine, the borrowing sheet pasted to the fly-leaf informs him sternly, of one penny a week).

He’s read so many books about the war at this point that he’s in danger of becoming a buff; he’s even started to develop Ideas. At some point in his reading, he realized the conflict had coalesced into two separate wars. The first, the war of the generals and the dons as well as the dull school textbook, proliferates with causes, strategies, notable battles, and is fought in the moral light of the so-called ‘Big Words’ – Tradition, Honour, Duty, Patriotism. In the other war, however, the one the soldiers actually experienced, these features are nowhere to be found. In this war, any kind of overarching meaning, even straight enmity between the two sides, seems to dissolve into nothing, and the only constants are chaos, destruction and the sense of being lost in a machinery too huge and powerful to be understood. The very battlefields of this war – so clearly delineated on the arrow-strewn relief maps of the first – are deracinated, volatile, pitching themselves up without warning into the sky, to make landmarks, place names, measurements meaningless. The two disparate accounts remind Howard strangely of what Farley said in the Ferry that night about the differing explanations of the universe – the relativistic and the quantum, or the very large and very small. The generals during and the dons after it wanted more than anything else for the war to make sense, to embody the classical concept of conflict, to look, in short, like a war, just as Einstein tried to fit all of creation into his one perfect geometric scheme; but in the same way that the subatomic particles defied any attempt at explaining them, rebelled towards an evermore violent schemelessness and disorder, so the war, the more its leaders insisted on the contrary, spiralled into incomprehensibility, the more soldiers in their tens and hundreds of thousands were wiped out. From those soldiers’ perspective, meanwhile, the war was one sprawling, senseless confusion, a four-year horror story with no discernible point, other than to belie not only the generals’ causes and big words but the very idea of a comprehensible and God-sanctioned world – which seems to Howard nicely quantum, if nothing else.

‘You could argue that the Great War was, in historical terms, like the Big Bang – a singular event, for which none of our explanations is sufficient, but which at the same time our whole civilization is founded on. The force of it blew the century apart. From a strictly ordered regime where everyone knew their place, where everything was arranged in nice harmonious symmetries, the Western world entered a period of great turbulence and discord, what the poet TS Eliot called “an immense panorama of futility and anarchy”, which, arguably, we are still living in today. At the same time that Einstein was working on the theories that would completely overturn classical ideas of what space and time were, how reality worked, the war was reordering our whole concept of civilization. Empires centuries-old disappeared overnight, people lost faith in institutions they had trusted without even thinking about it, like a child trusts its parents. The old world fell and our modern world was born, as a direct result of the war – not so much from the outcome of the fighting, as from the terrible things the soldiers, ordinary men, had seen and endured.

‘So what was the war like for that ordinary soldier? To even get to the Front, he would have marched twenty miles a day, carrying equipment weighing anything from forty to a hundred pounds. While in the front line, he might spend an entire day standing up to his armpits in muddy water. He rarely slept for more than two hours at a time, and exhaustion was one of the major sources of trauma during the conflict. In fact, almost fifty per cent of the casualties during the war on the Western Front came not from battle but from the conditions the men were living in. Trench foot. Head lice. Rats. The war was a boom time for rats. Two of them could produce over eight hundred offspring in a single year, so soon there were tens of millions of them, flocking to the corpses…’

The boys listen with open mouths. They eat up details like this, the gruesomer the better – but what harm is that? Isn’t the main thing that they are actually interested? Although admittedly not everyone sees it that way.

‘I’m just wondering if this stuff is going to be in the exam,’ Jeekers Prendergast says in his twangy, nervous voice. ‘I mean, if it’s not covered in the book.’ The class groans, but Jeekers holds his ground. ‘It’s just that, ah, according to your lesson plan, we’re supposed to be doing the Easter Rising this week –’

‘Yeah, when are we going to do some Irish history?’ Jeekers finds an unlikely ally in the form of Muiris de Bhaldraithe, piping up disaffectedly from the back row.

Howard spreads his hands placatingly. ‘I promise, we have time for both –’ his head snaps round involuntarily at the sound of wheels on the gravel outside: could it be? – but no, it’s just Father Green, returning from one of his errands. He collects himself and returns to the boys. ‘We’ll get to the Rising in due course,’ he says. ‘The lesson plan isn’t set in stone. And anyway, Muiris, the war is Irish history. Aside from the fact that the Rising came out of the First World War, many Irishmen fought for the Allies, at the Western Front and elsewhere.’

‘Uh, not according to the textbook, sir,’ Jeekers says, the page of his own carefully laminated copy opened to the box giving the breakdown of war dead.

‘Well, the textbook is wrong, in that case,’ Howard says.

‘Yeah, my great-grandfather fought in the war,’ Daniel Juster says.

‘There you go,’ Howard says to Muiris. ‘I’m sure that many of you have relatives who fought in the war, even if you don’t know about it. And those who didn’t fight were still affected. The war transformed everything. So I think it’s worth spending some extra time on it.’ Also, though he doesn’t say it to Muiris and barely admits it to himself, he feels that keeping himself and the class immersed in the Great War somehow preserves a connection with Miss McIntyre.

After class he finds Ruprecht Van Doren and Geoff Sproke waiting behind.

‘Yes, gentlemen?’

There is a brief, tacit interchange between them, as if to decide who should pose the question; and then Ruprecht says carefully, ‘We were just wondering if you knew anything about the history of Seabrook – the older part of its history?’

‘Like from days of Yore?’ Geoff Sproke chips in.

‘That depends,’ Howard says. ‘Whenabouts in Yore are you talking about?’

Ruprecht meditates on this a moment, then, once again with some delicacy, ‘When the world was ruled by some kind of goddess?’

‘And they built these mounds?’ Geoff blurts, before he is silenced by a look from Ruprecht.

‘Hmm,’ Howard strokes his chin. ‘Sounds like pre-Christian times. Not really my field, boys, sorry. But what’s this about, anyway?’

‘Oh, you know,’ Ruprecht says vaguely.

‘It just seemed interesting, to find out more about the place our school is built on top of,’ Geoff adds, inspired.

‘I’ll ask around,’ Howard says. ‘And if I find anything out, I’ll let you know.’

‘Thanks, Mr Fallon.’ They hasten away, deep in discussion. The opacity of the fourteen-year-old mind: Howard smiles to himself and continues on his way.

Opening the door of the staffroom, he is greeted by an unusual hubbub. Teachers are thronged around the middle of the room, all talking at once in an uncharacteristically jubilant way. From the periphery the school secretary, Miss Noakes, turns to Howard. ‘He’s back!’ she says, beaming at him as though under the influence of some wonderful drug. The meaning of this is obscure to Howard, but it gives him a bad feeling. His own smile wilting like a neglected house plant, he squeezes through the knot of bodies to find at its heart, enthroned on the sofa, Finian Ó Dálaigh, the geography teacher.

‘Not too hard!’ he exclaims comically to the colleagues clapping his shoulder. ‘I’ve still got stitches!’ In his hand is a jar containing something roundish and grey and approximately the size of a golf ball, which someone behind him tells Howard is his gallstone.

‘Howard!’ Ó Dálaigh spots him; he steps forward, hastily re-affixing his smile. ‘What do you make of that, Howard?’ Ó Dálaigh wiggles the jar under his nose. ‘The doctor said it was the biggest one he’d ever seen.’

‘Really…’ Howard coos feebly.

‘Yes, and he said the gallstone was pretty big too!’ The company laughs indulgently, although this witticism is by now on its fourth or fifth outing.

‘Fantastic,’ says Howard through clenched teeth and a thickening glaze of unreality. ‘So… does this mean we’ll have you back at work soon? How long a convalescence are you looking at?’

‘Convalescence be damned,’ Ó Dálaigh declares, thumping his chest. ‘I was bored out my tree lying around there at home, watching the grass grow. Doctor says I’m fighting fit. Says he’s never seen anything like my powers of recovery. I’m going to convalesce right here, standing on my own two feet. Teaching geography!’ A raucous sally of approval from his colleagues. ‘Those little so-and-so’s won’t know what hit ’em!’ Ó Dálaigh, enjoying his moment, adds, to another cheer.

Howard pretends to join in, and when the noise dies down remarks, as if to himself, ‘So I suppose that Miss McIntyre won’t need to come back after all.’

But the name means nothing to the geography teacher; he shrugs, and then launches into a fresh account of his surgery for a new arrival. As for the others, few of them seem to hear him, and those who do merely blink at Howard distractedly, as if he’s mistaken them for his pupils, and started spouting on to them about some phantasmal figure from a textbook.