Skippy Dies: A Novel

Eleven years later, two hours after his last class, Howard is still haunting the school. First he attends a meeting about the upcoming Father Desmond Furlong Memorial Concert, to which he contributes mostly by way of nods or ambiguous throat-clearing noises; then he installs himself in the staffroom where, taking advantage of the silence, he corrects a class’s worth of essays on the Land Acts, appending meticulous individual critiques and advice for future projects. He has moved on to potential questions for the fourth-year Christmas exam when the cleaner starts hoovering pointedly under his feet; accepting defeat, he slinks for the door.

It’s Friday, and Farley has been sending regular texts from the Ferry, which Howard has ignored; Tom is bound to be there, and tonight of all nights he would prefer to avoid him. When he reaches his car, however, he realizes that even the prospect of being beaten to a pulp is more appealing than another night in his lonely house. Perhaps he can hide out in a corner without being seen? It’s worth a shot: pocketing his keys, he turns in the direction of the pub.

The time is after six, and most of his colleagues are, in their own parlance, ‘well-oiled’. To Howard’s dismay, Farley is talking to Tom, conspicuously flushed and laughing too loud. He salutes them curtly and heads for the snug, where a little crowd has gathered around Finian Ó Dálaigh, the restored geography teacher, who’s in the middle of a diatribe about the bastards in the Department of Education: ‘Those bastards do nothing but sit around in their fine government buildings playing battleships, I’d like to see them supervise four hundred maniacs running around a gravel yard…’

‘H-bomb.’ Farley materializes at his elbow. ‘Why didn’t you come over?’

‘You were talking to…’ Howard nods clandestinely over his glass at Tom, waiting at the bar with his back to them.

‘So?’ Farley says. ‘He’s not going to bite you, is he?’

Howard stares at him. ‘How do you know? Don’t you realize what day it is?’

‘Friday?’

‘It’s the anniversary, you clown, the anniversary of the accident. Eleven years.’

‘Oh, for –’ Farley swats his hand at the idea. ‘Howard, I swear, no one in the world is aware of that except you. Forget about it, for God’s sake. You’ve got enough to worry about.’ He drains his glass and sets it down on a nearby ledge. ‘Aha, perfect timing,’ as Tom appears beside them and hands him a drink.

‘Sorry, Howard,’ he says, ‘are you all right for a pint?’

‘I’m still on this one,’ Howard mutters.

‘It’s nearly gone – excuse me.’ Tom grabs the lounge girl and orders another beer. This is the first drink he has ever bought for him; Howard raises his eyebrows in bewilderment. Farley shrugs back at him. Well, perhaps he is right, Howard thinks, perhaps it is only himself who keeps clutching on to the past, who’s been obsessively watching the calendar. Tom is certainly in better form tonight than he has been lately – relaxed and jovial, if not what you could call sober. It’s Howard who remains stiff and diffident, unable to settle; he can’t help feeling thankful when Jim Slattery ambles up.

‘Found myself thinking of you the other day, doing ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ with the fourth-years. You remember it, I’m sure, Wilfred Owen…?’ He tilts his head back oracularly: ‘Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning… Gives Graves a run for his money there, eh? Drowning on dry land. Such a striking image. Mustard gas,’ he explains to the others. ‘What did for Hitler in the First World War, though it didn’t kill the scut.’

‘Ah,’ says Farley.

‘Dedicated it to a teacher, as a matter of fact, Owen did. Woman called Jessie Pope wrote this jingoistic doggerel, prodding youngsters to go off and get themselves shot to pieces. “Who’s for the Game?”, other such rubbish.’ He sighs over his ginger ale. ‘No wonder boys learned to stop listening to their teachers.’

‘It’d never happen now,’ Howard agrees mordantly.

‘That reminds me. You were saying something the other day about one of your boys turning up an ancestor who’d fought in the war. It struck me that that could make a very interesting project for them – discovering their own forebears’ actions during the war, I mean.’

‘Yeah,’ Howard says non-committally.

‘Need a fair bit of spadework, of course, if they wanted to unearth anything significant, war record wasn’t popular in Ireland, as you know yourself. But this is probably the first generation that would even be able to research it – so you’d be breaking new ground in all kinds of ways.’

‘That would certainly be interesting,’ Howard says. And it probably would; but over the last few days, in his double-loneliness, he’s found it hard to muster enthusiasm about anything, even the classes he was enjoying so much.

‘Well, just a thought,’ the older man says. ‘I’m sure you have plenty to be going on with yourself.’ He checks his watch. ‘Hell’s bells – I’d better be getting home, or it’ll be the firing squad for me. Good luck, Howard.’ Tapping the handle of his satchel at the other two: ‘Till Monday, gentlemen.’

Howard turns lugubriously back to Farley and Tom, who are immersed in a discussion about the junior swimming team’s prospects in the meet in Ballinasloe tomorrow. Tom is getting drunker by the minute, gesturing so expansively that at one point he knocks the glass clean out of Peter Fletcher’s hand behind him, although somehow it doesn’t break and Tom continues his monologue without even noticing, as Fletcher decamps stoically to the bar. Howard decides to follow suit, not wanting to be left with Tom if Farley should get called away.

He forges through the glistening Friday faces, the circular, alcohol-infused conversations. It’s not just Tom; since Halley left, all these exchanges, the countless minor social transactions that make up the fabric of the day, have come to seem impossibly difficult. He keeps saying the wrong thing, taking people up wrong; it’s as if the world has been fractionally recalibrated, leaving him chronically misaligned. In this kind of form, maybe his empty house would be better after all. He buys drinks for Farley and Tom and extricates himself from the proceedings with the excuse that he is driving, although at two drinks he’s already well over the limit.

Outside the crowded pub the night is clear, and walking back through the school he feels more himself again. The dark frost-spangled pitches, overhung by the laurel trees, glister all around him, and the silhouette of the Tower looms up over the null expanse of the yard as though rearing out of the past. He opens the car door and spends a moment in the austere radiance of the moonlit campus, before turning the key in the ignition.

And then all of a sudden there’s a kid in front of his car. He appears out of nowhere to flare up phosphorescent in the headlights – Howard swerves frantically, misses him by an inch, jolts up the kerb and onto the manicured lawn surrounding the priests’ residence, where he sits tilted in the cold interior, blood hissing in his ears, unsure what just happened. Then, switching off the engine, he climbs out of the car. To his disbelief – to his fury – the boy is continuing blithely down the avenue.

‘Hey!’

The figure turns.

‘Yes, you! Get back here!’

Reluctantly the boy makes his way back. As he draws nearer, a white slip of face discloses itself. ‘Juster?’ Howard says incredulously. ‘Jesus Christ, Juster, what the hell were you doing? I nearly drove right into you.’

The boy looks at him uncertainly, then at the car mounted on the grass, like he’s being asked to solve a puzzle.

‘I missed knocking you down by this much,’ Howard shouts, demonstrating with finger and thumb. ‘Are you trying to get killed?’

‘Sorry,’ the boy says mechanically.

Howard clenches his teeth, trapping an expletive. ‘If I’d hit you, you really would have been sorry. Where the hell are you coming from, anyway? Why aren’t you in Study Hall?’

‘It’s Friday,’ the boy says, in that maddening monotone.

‘Have you got permission to be out?’ Howard says, and then sees that in his hand the boy is holding, surreally, a white frisbee. ‘And what are you doing with that?’

The boy looks blank, then follows Howard’s finger to the plastic disc in his own hand, apparently surprised to find it there. ‘Oh – uh, I was going to play frisbee.’

‘Who with?’

‘Um…’ the boy scours the asphalt, bringing a hand to his head. ‘Just me.’

‘Just you,’ Howard repeats sardonically. Greg was right, there is something seriously awry with this boy. Someone needs to tell him a few home truths. ‘Nothing strikes you as odd about playing frisbee in the dark, on your own?’

The boy does not reply.

‘Don’t you understand –’ Howard feeling his temper beginning to fray ‘– that there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things? You exist in a society, in the society of this school, you’re not an island who can just, you know, do what he wants. Although I’ll tell you what, if you want to be an island, if you want to be some isolated weirdo out on the margins of things, you’re right on course. Just keep going as you’re going, mister, and before long people will be crossing the street to avoid you. Is that what you want?’

The boy still does not speak, merely huddles into himself, continuing to stare at the ground as if he can see his reflection in the tarmac; his breathing, however, has taken on the snuffling quality that presages tears. Howard rolls his eyes. Say a word to these kids and they just dissolve. It’s impossible, impossible. Suddenly he feels emptied out, as if all the exhaustion of the rollercoaster week has hit him in a single wave.

‘All right, Juster,’ he surrenders. ‘Get inside. Have a good weekend. And for God’s sake, if you’re going to play frisbee, find another human being to play with. Seriously, you’re giving people the willies.’ He returns to his car, opens the door. Juster, however, stays where he is, head bowed, passing the disc through his fingers like a vaudevillian’s hat. Howard feels a twinge of guilt. Was he too hard on him? Half in and half out of the car, he casts about in his mind for some neutral remark to take his leave with. ‘And good luck with your swim meet tomorrow! How are you set for it? Confident?’

The boy mumbles something Howard does not hear.

‘Attaboy,’ Howard says. ‘Well, see you Monday!’

Nodding agreement with himself, in the absence of any reaction from Juster, he climbs into his car.

At the gate he checks his mirror. It seems at first that the boy has gone; but then he sees the frisbee, a dim double of the moon, hovering a couple of feet from the ground, in the same spot Howard left him. He purses his lips. These kids, they want you to live their whole lives for them. Teach me! Entertain me! Solve my problems! Sooner or later you have to step back. There’s only so much a teacher can do. Good thing he got those brakes fixed, though. A dead student, that’s all he needs.