Skippy Dies: A Novel

For the rest of the day, while school continues at some invisible remove, Howard wanders alone in a clammy, evil fog. Farley asks if he wants to go for a drink after work, and Howard can barely look him in the eye. With every moment he feels the secret worming deeper into him, making itself at home, like some monstrous parasite.

When these matters arose in the past: the words spoken so casually, a parent explaining the change of seasons to a child. Is this what he’s been living in all along? Old stories rise up from the depths of his mind – the straying hands of this priest, the sadistic tendencies of another, doors that were kept locked, eyes that lingered for too long in the changing room. Stories, though; stories were all he’d ever taken them for, idle gossip made up to pass the time, like everything in Seabrook. Because otherwise how could those men still be walking around? Wearing Pentecostal doves in their lapels? Surely at that level of hypocrisy God or whoever would be compelled to swing into action! Now it’s as if a panel has been slid back and he’s glimpsed the secret machinery of the world, the grown-up world, in which matters arise – hotel doors are pushed open, pills are dropped into glasses of Coke, bodies are laid bare, while outside life goes on oblivious – and are dispatched again, by small cadres of men in rooms, the priests in their conclave, the Automator and his legal team, it doesn’t really make any difference. A little white lie for the common good. That’s how we keep it on the road.

His last period is free; today he doesn’t feel like staying around, so he gathers his things and makes his way out. At home he unsheathes the contract from its envelope and lays it on the table, from where it seems to glow at him, polar-white.

Halley’s phone rings out three times before she answers it. When she does it’s a shock to hear her voice – outside his own head, independent of his memory. He realizes he’s imagined her suspended in some atemporal state; only now does it hit him that in the moment before his call, and all the moments before that for the last weeks, she’s been doing other things, living through days that he knows nothing about, just as before he met her there were thousands more days as real to her as the hand before her face that he will never have an inkling of, in which he never figured even as an idea.

‘Howard?’

‘Yes.’ He hasn’t planned out what he was going to say. ‘It’s been a while,’ he manages finally. ‘How are you? How have you been?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Are you still staying with Cat? Is it okay?’

‘It’s fine.’

‘And work, how’s that going, it’s all…?’

‘Work’s fine. What do you want, Howard?’

‘I just wanted to see how you were.’

‘Well, I’m fine,’ she says. The ensuing silence has the conclusive air of a raised guillotine.

‘Me too,’ Howard says miserably. ‘Although I don’t know if you heard, we’ve had some trouble at the school, this boy, he was in my History class…’

‘I heard.’ The ice in her voice melts, if only fractionally. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Thanks.’ He has an impulse to tell her everything, about Coach, the Board meeting, the confidentiality clause. But at the last second he recoils, not sure it’ll do him any favours at this point to show her the contaminated world he’s living in. Instead he blurts out, ‘I made a mistake. That’s what I called to say. I’ve been a fool. I’ve done such terrible things. I hurt you. I’m sorry, Halley, I’m so sorry.’

A single word, ‘Okay,’ like a barren atoll in the oceanic silence.

‘Well, I mean, what do you think?’

‘What do I think?’

‘Can you forgive me?’ Spoken out loud the question sounds laughably misjudged, as if he’d started quoting Casablanca at her. Halley doesn’t laugh, though. ‘What about your other woman?’ she says in an indifferent, uninflected voice. ‘Have you checked this with her?’

‘Oh,’ he waves his hand dismissively, as if the past were a smoky image that could be dispelled at a stroke. ‘That’s over. It wasn’t anything. It wasn’t real.’

She doesn’t reply. Pacing distractedly back and forth over the room, he says, ‘I want to try again, Halley. I’ve been thinking – we could get out of here. Start over somewhere else. Back to the States even, we could get married, and move back to the States. To New York. Or wherever you wanted to go.’

In fact this is a plan he has thought of only now – but as he speaks it sounds so perfect! A new, committed life, somewhere far away from Seabrook! In one fell swoop all their problems would be solved!

But when she answers, although a measure of affection has returned to it, her voice sounds sorrowful and weary. ‘When your hand’s in the fire, right?’

‘What?’

She sighs. ‘You’re always looking for ways out of things, Howard. Escape routes out of your own life. That’s why you liked me, because I wasn’t from here, and I seemed to offer something new. When I stopped being new, you slept with that woman, whoever she was. Now because you don’t have me I look like a way out again. You have something to aim for, you have a quest to get me back. But don’t you see, if you did get me back the quest would be over and you’d be bored again.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ he says.

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because it’ll be different, because I feel different.’

‘It can’t just be feelings. How can I trust my life to a feeling?’

‘What else is there?’

‘There has to be something,’ she says. He can’t think of anything to say to this, and while he is searching about, she speaks again. ‘The point is that life isn’t a quest, Howard. And it’s not the kind of fire you can take your hand out of. You need to accept that, and start dealing with it.’

The hostility has dropped from her voice now and her tone is the plaintive mixture of urgency and pity of someone trying to save a self-destructive friend. Howard waits for a moment after she has finished talking and then says softly, ‘And what about us?’

The hum of the empty phone line is like a knife twisting between his ribs.

‘I don’t know, Howard,’ she says at last, in a small sad voice. ‘I need time. I need a little bit of time to work out where I’m going. I’ll call you in a little while, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay. Take care, Howard. Bye.’ The line clicks dead.