Skippy Dies: A Novel

Ruprecht has not returned by lights-out. The next morning, however, when Skippy opens his eyes, he is there – lying on the duvet in his underpants, staring at the ceiling as if it has done him some grievous wrong.

‘How did your mission go?’ Skippy asks.

‘Not well.’ Bits of what appears to be foliage litter his hair.

‘Did you visit any higher dimensions?’

‘No.’

‘Did you find the Mound?’

‘No.’

Skippy gets the feeling he isn’t that eager to talk about it, and drops the subject. At breakfast, however, Dennis is less forbearing.

‘I don’t understand,’ he says with an expression of concern. ‘Didn’t you follow the map?’

Ruprecht, gazing blackly into his breakfast, says nothing.

‘Hmm, maybe you should have asked one of the nuns,’ Dennis remarks contemplatively. ‘Did you ask them, Ruprecht? Did you ask the nuns to show you their mound?’

Ruprecht’s eyes narrow, but he remains silent; then the door opens and Mario enters the Ref. Seeing Ruprecht at the table, he halts. ‘Oh,’ he says, and hovers there, as if uncertain how to proceed. Still without speaking, Ruprecht gives him a long hostile stare. Then he rises, leaving his meal half-eaten, and departs the room.

Once he is gone, Mario is able to shed some light on Ruprecht’s Stygian mood. It appears that after being ‘sidetracked’ in some manner that Mario doesn’t go into, the two of them were surprised in the St Brigid’s laundry room and narrowly escaped capture, only to spend two hours in a tree hiding from the janitor’s dog. (Odysseas, it turned out, was already in the tree following an earlier incident, and presented to the infirmary this morning with hypothermia and mauling.)

‘No one actually saw you though?’

‘No. But we had to leave behind the pod.’

Ruprecht’s fury now becomes quite understandable. To have pan-dimensional travel in the palm of your hand, and then leave it in a girls’ school laundry room – ‘Holy smoke, Mario, you don’t think the nuns will work out how to use it, and claim the Nobel Prize for themselves?’

‘That’s just the kind of thing they would do, those sneaky nuns,’ Mario says bitterly.

‘What were you doing in the laundry room, anyway?’ Skippy asks.

‘Following the map,’ Mario says. ‘That’s where it said the Mound was.’

‘How strange,’ Dennis says, shaking his head. ‘Could it be Niall’s sister made a mistake? I suppose we’ll never know.’

‘Ruprecht can build another pod though, right? I mean it was mostly just tinfoil.’

‘The problem is that he has no blueprint. From the original design he keeps making changes, but these he does not write down. So it is impossible to replicate exactly.’

Later that day, Ruprecht approaches Skippy. His expression is feverish. ‘I’ve devised a foolproof plan to get my pod back from St Brigid’s,’ he says. ‘I call it, “Operation Falcon”.’

Skippy looks dubious.

‘This is your chance to get in on the ground floor!’

‘No way, Ruprecht, not after how that last one went.’

‘That was Operation Condor. This is Operation Falcon. It’s a totally different operation.’

‘Sorry.’

Ruprecht trudges off to canvass the others.

Bad as he feels for his room-mate, Skippy can’t deny that he personally is having a great day. He woke that morning with the memory of the night before waiting for him, like a gold coin hidden under his pillow, and whenever he thinks about it, which is every few seconds, he is overtaken by a big daffy smile.

‘You kissed her again, didn’t you?’ Dennis is finding Skippy’s uncharacteristic happiness disconcerting and even somewhat offensive.

‘Whoa, Skip –’ Geoff is awestruck ‘– that means she’s your girlfriend. Holy shit – you have a girlfriend!’

And then at lunch break he leaves maths class and walks directly into Carl.

For some reason, after the fight yesterday all thought of him disappeared from Skippy’s mind; he hadn’t considered what would happen when their paths inevitably crossed again. From the way the boys around him instantly come to a halt, though, from the way the air of the hall quickens, he realizes they’ve been waiting for this moment all morning. There is nothing more he can do now than brace himself for the blow – the sucker punch, the sly kick to the ankles, the swift knee groinwards –

But Carl seems not even to see him; instead he drifts on by like an old, grizzled shark hulking through particoloured schools of minnows, oblivious to the catcalls and heehaws aimed at his receding bulk.