Skippy Dies: A Novel

But the past isn’t done with him yet. Howard’s sitting in front of the TV news that night – already on his fourth beer, a fringe benefit of not having a job to go to tomorrow – when he realizes he’s staring at an image of his own house. It appears with its neighbours, a series of gently sloping triangles silhouetted on the crest of the hill, behind the brassy bouffant of a reporter.

He starts; then, with an eerie sense of impending revelation, of a kind that perhaps haunts all inhabitants of the television age, he leans forward and turns up the sound.

The story is about the new Science Park. It seems that, while digging the foundations, engineers unearthed some kind of prehistoric fortress. On the orders of the development company, however, they kept schtum and continued with their work, and apparently the whole thing would have been bulldozed if a disgruntled Turkish labourer, denied his overtime for the fourth week running, hadn’t blown the whistle. ‘Archaeologists are calling it a “find of incalculable value”,’ the reporter says. ‘We put these allegations to the project’s Publicity Director, Guido LaManche.’

‘No,’ Howard says, out loud.

But it is he: Guido LaManche, bestower of wedgies, infamous farter, doughnut-eating champion, pioneer of the bungee jump in Ireland – here he is now in a well-tailored suit, telling the reporter that as far as he can see these commentators are generating much heat but very little light.

‘ “A find of incalculable value,” ’ the reporter reminds him.

Guido permits himself a gentle, slightly flirtatious chuckle. The years have been good to him; he is slimmer and fitter, and speaks with the confidence and surety of the world-shaper. ‘Well, Ciara, the truth is that in a country like Ireland, you can’t build a sandcastle without making a find of incalculable value. If we were to ring-fence every single historic this or that we discovered, there would literally be nowhere left for anyone to live.’

‘So you’re saying it should be bulldozed,’ the reporter says.

‘I’m saying we need to ask ourselves where our priorities lie. Because what we are trying to build here isn’t just a Science Park. It’s the economic future of our country. It’s jobs and security for our children and our children’s children. Do we really want to put a ruin from three thousand years ago ahead of our children’s future?’

‘And what about those who say that this “ruin” gives us a unique insight into the origins of our culture?’

‘Well, let me turn that question around. If the position was reversed, do you think the people of three thousand years ago would have stopped building their fortress so they could preserve the ruin of our Science Park? Of course not. They wanted to move forward. The whole reason we have the civilization we have today – the only reason you and I are standing here – is that people kept moving forward instead of looking backward. Everybody in the past wanted to be a part of the future, just as today everybody in the Third World wants to be a part of the First. And if they had a choice, they would swap places with us in a second!’

‘Moving forward!’ Howard claps his hands like he’s cheering on a racehorse; at which point the power cuts out, leaving him with his beer in the dark.

Moving forward. After the bungee jump, Guido had relocated to a private school in Barbados, never to be seen again. It hadn’t made much difference: in the eyes of the school, Howard was really the one to blame. Cowardice, that was the unforgiveable sin for a Seabrook boy. Most people were kind enough not to say it to his face, but he knew it with every breath he took, and he has lived with it every day and night since.

But Guido did not live with it. Guido moved forward. He wasn’t about to let one fleeting episode determine the whole trajectory of his life thereafter. For Guido the past, like a Third World country, was merely another resource to be exploited and abandoned when the time comes; and that is why civilization is built by men like him and the Automator, and not men like Howard, who have never quite worked out which stories are disposable, and which, if any, you’re actually supposed to believe.

He’s still laughing – or is he crying? – when the phone rings. It takes him a while to locate it in the chaotic darkness, but the ringer is persistent. Answering, he is addressed by a gruff male voice that cannot quite conceal its youth. ‘Mr Fallon?’

‘Who is this?’

A cautious pause ensues, and then, ‘It’s Ruprecht. Ruprecht Van Doren.’

‘Ruprecht?’ Howard gets an unsettling worlds-collide sensation. ‘How did you get this number?’

There is a scuffling sound, as of rodents tussling in the under-growth, and then, ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Now?’

‘It’s important. Can I come over?’

Dazedly Howard casts an eye over the chiaroscuro dereliction of the house. ‘No… no, I don’t think that would be appropriate.’

‘Well, how about Ed’s? Ed’s in half an hour?’

‘Ed’s?’

‘Beside the school. It’s important, half an hour okay?’ The boy hangs up. Howard stands there a moment in mystification, dial tone burring in his ear. Then the significance of the venue strikes him, and with it the realization that there is only one possible reason Ruprecht should urgently want to see him. Somehow he has come to suspect the coach.

He pulls on a jacket as he dashes outside. The night has grown teeth, and the cold binds with the anticipation in his stomach to banish the fug of cheap beer. What has Ruprecht found out, and how? An overheard conversation? Did he hack into the school network? Or maybe Juster left a note that’s only surfaced now? He climbs into the car, and as the distance between him and the answer diminishes, exhilaration courses over him like the freezing air that gusts through the vents. He bursts breathless through the doors of the Doughnut House.

The diner is almost empty; Ruprecht sits alone at a two-person table with a box of doughnuts and two polystyrene beakers. ‘I didn’t know what flavours you liked –’ he gestures at the box of doughnuts. ‘So I got a mix. And I didn’t know what kind of drink you like, so I got Sprite.’

‘Sprite is perfect,’ Howard says. ‘Thank you.’ He takes a seat and looks around the room. He has not been in here for years. It is little changed: generic Americana on the walls, glossy backlit photographs of pastries and croissants above the counter, air with an anonymous odour you can’t quite put your finger on – the smell of fluorescent lights, maybe, or of polystyrene beakers, or whatever the mysterious arid liquid is that they are selling as coffee. He remembers the excitement in school when it had first opened. An international chain, right here in Seabrook! Back then, when Ireland was a global backwater, this had seemed nothing short of a wonderful kindness, like a mission opening a school in the jungle; flocking into its bland homogenous interior, designed by committee and replicated the world over, he and his friends had felt proudly apart from the parent-dominated city immediately outside, aligned instead with something almost mythic, something that transcended the limits of time and space to be a kind of everyplace, an everyplace belonging to the young.

‘I’m sorry you got fired,’ Ruprecht says to him.

Howard flushes. ‘Well, I haven’t actually been, ah, it’s more of a sabbatical…’

‘Was it for taking us to the park?’

Without knowing why this embarrasses him so, he affects not to have heard. ‘Quiet tonight,’ he says, smiling glassily.

‘People don’t really come here any more,’ Ruprecht replies in a monotone.

Howard wants to ask him why he still comes here, he of all people; but instead he says, ‘It’s good to see you, Ruprecht. I’ve been meaning to have a word with you.’

Ruprecht says nothing, watches his eyes. Howard finds his mouth has gone dry, slurps from his Sprite. ‘On the phone you said there was something important you needed to talk about.’

Ruprecht nods. ‘I just wanted to know something for this project I’m doing,’ he says, keeping his voice carefully neutral.

‘What kind of project?’

‘Sort of a communications project.’

He catches Ruprecht’s eye just as something surfaces to peek out at him; then it bolts back into the impenetrable recesses of the boy’s mind. ‘Well, that’s good,’ he says. ‘That you’re doing a project. Because it seems like you’ve been a bit under the weather lately. You know, you haven’t been taking as much interest in class as you used to.’

Ruprecht does not respond to this, traces invisible ideograms with the end of his straw on the tabletop.

‘Since what, ah, what happened to Daniel,’ Howard expands. ‘I mean, it seems like it affected you a great deal.’

The boy continues to devote his full attention to his straw pictures, but his cheeks crimson and his face assumes an expression of misery.

Howard looks over his shoulder. The only other customers are a foreign couple, pored over a map; behind the till, a bored-looking Asian is emptying coins from plastic baggies.

‘Sometimes in these matters,’ he says, ‘what you really need is closure. To understand what’s happened, tie up any loose ends that might exist. Often that, tying up the loose ends, that’s what will help you to move on.’ He clears his throat. ‘And if tying those loose ends seems difficult, or even dangerous, you should know that there are people who are ready to help you. Who will coach you through it. Do you understand me?’

Ruprecht’s eyes flash up-from-under at him, seeking to puzzle him out.

Howard waits, on tenterhooks. Then at last, ‘Is that, is tying the loose ends, what you wanted to talk to me about?’

The boy takes a deep breath. ‘You mentioned a scientist,’ he says hoarsely. ‘When we were in the park, you mentioned a scientist, a pioneer in electromagnetic waves.’

For a moment Howard is at sea. What is he talking about? Is this some sort of code?

‘You said he had worked out how to communicate –’ Ruprecht brings his voice down to a whisper ‘– with the dead.’ His eyes glimmer with desperation; and finally Howard understands. Ruprecht has no clue about Coach or any kind of wrongdoing; he has no plan to bring anyone to justice; all that remains locked up in Howard’s own head. The disappointment is crushing – so much so that for an instant he teeters on the verge of telling the boy himself, telling him everything. But does he really want to be the one who visits the repulsion and cynicism of that world on Ruprecht’s? Instead, to sweeten the bitterness, he picks up a doughnut and takes a bite. It is surprisingly good.

‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘His name was Oliver Lodge. At the time he was one of the most famous scientists in the world. He’d made all sorts of groundbreaking discoveries involving magnetism, electricity, radio waves, and in his later years he attempted to use these, as you say, to communicate with the spirit world. There was a lot of that going on at the end of the Victorian era – seances, fairies, psychic photography, and so on. Maybe it was a reaction to the society of the day, which was very materialistic and technology-obsessed – quite like ours, actually. It made the scientists of the period very angry, especially because the spiritualists were claiming to use science, specifically new inventions like cameras, gramophones and radios, to contact the spirit world. So a group of scientists, including Lodge, got together to study supernatural phenomena with the aim of exposing the whole thing as the fraud it was.

‘But then war broke out, and Lodge’s son Raymond was killed in battle. The next thing, Lodge was caught up in the very stuff he was supposed to be disproving. He claimed he had communicated with his dead son – in fact, he wrote a book, part of which was supposedly dictated to him by the boy, from beyond the grave. According to this book, which became a huge bestseller, the other world, the afterlife – Summerland was the name his son gave it – was only a hair’s breadth away from the world familiar to you and me. But it existed in a different dimension, so you couldn’t see it.’

‘But he could see it?’

‘Well, no. He had a housemaid who was a medium. Everything came through her. But from his own work in physics, and Raymond’s descriptions of the other world, Lodge believed he was on the point of proving conclusively that there was life after death. The key was this fourth dimension, this extra dimension right next to ours but separated from us by an invisible veil. Lodge thought that the new electromagnetic waves he’d discovered could pass through this veil.’

‘How?’ Ruprecht’s eyes pinned on him in as lynx-like a fashion as is possible for a chronically overweight fourteen-year-old.

‘Well, there was an idea at the time that space was filled by an invisible material called ether. Scientists didn’t understand how these waves they’d discovered, light waves, radio waves and so forth, could travel through a vacuum. There must be something that carried them. So they came up with ether. Ether was what allowed light to travel from the sun to the earth. Ether connected everything to everything else. The spiritualists proposed that it didn’t stop at matter either. It joined our souls to our bodies, it linked the worlds of the living and the dead.’

‘Ether.’ Ruprecht nods to himself.

‘Right. Lodge thought that if electromagnetic waves could traverse this ether, then communication with the dead was not only scientifically plausible but within the grasp of the technology of the time. In Raymond’s accounts of Summerland, the dead soldiers reported being able to hear very faint emanations from the world of the living – music, especially, certain pieces of music came through the veil. So in his book Lodge outlines the first principles of how this communication would work.’

‘And what happened?’ Ruprecht has leaned so far across the table that he appears to be floating above his seat; Howard, beginning to feel uncomfortable, attempts to inch his chair back only to find it welded to the floor. ‘Nothing happened,’ he says.

‘Nothing?’ Ruprecht doesn’t understand.

‘Well, it failed, obviously, I mean it was wrong, it was all wrong. Because there was no ether. There was no mysterious substance joining everything to everything else. Lodge became a laughing stock, his reputation was ruined.’

‘But…’ Ruprecht is scanning the table in disbelief, like an investor being told his entire portfolio has gone south. ‘But how could it not work?’

Howard does not quite understand what is going on here, why Ruprecht should be taking this so personally. ‘I think it’s important to remember the context in which Lodge was working,’ he says carefully. ‘Yes, he was a great scientist. But he was also a man who had just lost his son. Other champions of spiritualism were in the same position – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance, had also lost a son in the war. The people who bought Lodge’s book, the ones who conducted seances themselves, the soldiers in the trenches who saw the ghosts of their friends – these were all people in mourning. This was a world that had literally gone crazy with grief. At the same time, it was an age when science and technology promised they could deliver all the answers. Suddenly you could talk to somebody on the other side of the world – why shouldn’t you be able to talk to the dead?’

Ruprecht is hanging on his words, glassy-eyed, with bated breath. ‘But the point was, you couldn’t,’ Howard says, and repeats it, ‘you couldn’t,’ to bolster himself against the hostility with which this information is received – a stare that is pitched somewhere between crestfallen and mutinous.

‘But he says in his experiments he did talk to dead people,’ the boy says.

‘Yes, but that might be best understood as a manifestation of –’

‘Like just because no one believed him doesn’t mean it wasn’t true.’

‘Well…’ Howard doesn’t know quite how to respond.

‘Lots of things that are true people think they aren’t,’ Ruprecht’s voice, while remaining at the same pitch and volume, intensifies in some impalpable way, causing the foreign couple to look up from their map. ‘And lots of things that aren’t true they tell us they are.’

‘Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean –’

‘How do you know he was wrong? How do you know the soldiers and people just hallucinated everything they saw? How do you know?’

He delivers all this with such vehemence, doughy head turning an angry pink, like some vengeful jellyfish, that Howard prefers not to contradict him; instead he just nods ambivalently, gazing at the half-melted ice cubes at the base of his polystyrene cup. The tourists leave their table and go outside.

‘Let me tell you about another famous man of that time,’ Howard says at last. ‘Rudyard Kipling, the writer. He wrote The Jungle Book, among other things – you’ve seen the film, I’m sure, you know, Baloo? Do-be-do, I want to be like you…’

Ruprecht looks at him in bafflement.

‘Well, anyway. When the war broke out, Kipling’s only son, John, wanted to join up. Because he was only sixteen, Kipling had to pull some strings to get him into the service. The commander of the Irish Guards was a friend of his, and through him Kipling got his son a commission. John went off to train and a year later he was sent to the Western Front. About forty minutes into his first battle he disappeared and was never seen again.

‘Kipling was heartbroken. He sunk into a black, black depression. Things got so bad that although he’d always denounced seances as hocus-pocus he was on the point of trying them, in the hope of contacting his son. But then he was approached by the colonel of the Irish Guards. Every regiment had a record of their experiences in the war, and the colonel asked Kipling if he would write theirs.

‘Now Kipling was as British as they come. Cut him and he bled orange, as they say. He thought the Catholic Irish were no better than animals. But because it was his son’s regiment, he, probably the most famous writer in the world at the time, agreed to write the regimental history. Not only that, but he made the decision to write about the men – not the officers, not the great battles, not any broader themes of the war. He used the regimental diaries and the personal accounts of the Irish soldiers. And as he did he was overwhelmed by their courage, their loyalty and their decency.

‘The book took him five and a half years to complete. He found it extremely difficult. But afterwards he said it was his greatest work. He’d had a chance to commemorate the bravery of these men, and to keep the memory of his son alive. A man called Brodsky once said, “If there is a substitute for love, it is memory.” Kipling couldn’t bring John back. But he could remember him. And in that way his son lived on.’

This parable doesn’t produce quite the effect he intended; in fact, he is not sure that Ruprecht, tracing Sprite-spirals on the table with a straw, is even listening. The youth behind the counter looks at his watch and begins to dismantle the coffee machine; an electric fan whirrs, like the smooth sound of time passing inexorably from underneath them. And then, not looking up, Ruprecht mumbles, ‘What if you can’t remember?’

‘What?’ Howard rouses from his interior exertions.

‘I’m forgetting what he looks like,’ the boy says huskily.

‘Who? You mean Daniel?’

‘Every day more little pieces are gone. I’ll try and remember something and I won’t be able. It just gets worse and worse. And I can’t stop it.’ His voice cracks; he looks up imploringly, his face a mess of tears. ‘I can’t stop it!’ he repeats; then, right in front of Howard, he punches himself in the head with his fists, hard as he is able, then again, and again, shouting over and over, ‘I can’t stop it! I can’t stop it!’

From behind the counter the Asian boy looks on aghast; Howard finds himself staring back at him helplessly, as if he might know what to do, before realizing it is up to him. ‘Ruprecht! Ruprecht!’ he calls, and thrusts his hands into the whirl of fists, like two sticks into the spokes of a bicycle wheel, until he manages to get a grip on the boy’s arms and immobilize them. Ruprecht’s shuddering gradually subsides into peace, punctuated by sharp, wheezing intakes of breath. He reaches into his pocket for his asthma inhaler and tugs on it sharply.

‘Are you okay?’ Howard says.

Ruprecht nods, his head damasked with embarrassment even more deeply than before. Fat tears drip onto the table. Howard feels sick to the stomach. Still, to fill the unbearable silence, he forces himself to say, ‘You know, Ruprecht… what you’re feeling is perfectly normal. When a loss occurs –’

‘I have to go,’ Ruprecht says, sliding himself out of the plastic chair.

‘Wait!’ Howard stands as well. ‘What about your project, do you want me to send you some books, or…’

But Ruprecht’s already at the threshold, his thin Thank you, bye truncated by the swinging shut of the swing-door, and Howard is left shrivelled under the electric lights, and the cool, evaluating gaze of the impassive Asian youth as he tamps out coffee grounds into the garbage.

It is night. Janine is lying on the street. Carl is standing over her.

I had to tell her, Carly, I had to.

It’s hard to understand what Janine is saying. In the windows of the houses the curtains are closed. In Lori’s window the light is not on any more, and she’s not in the car when it jumps through the gate.

I did it for us, Janine says. She gets to her knees, she hugs his legs, she shrivels her body against Carl’s side like a leech. She’s gone, Carl, it’s over! Why can’t you just forget her?

She will not tell him where the hospital is and the car drives too fast for Carl to follow it on his bike.

Here – Janine’s voice goes black and she reaches into her pocket – if you won’t believe me, see for yourself. I took a picture of her. Go on, look, that’s who you’re in love with.

The face twisted up like a piece of chewing gum.

No!

So he throws her phone as hard as he can and leaves her crawling around someone’s garden crying, Wait ring me ring me so I can find it.

Now he’s at home trying to watch TV. I wouldn’t wipe my arse with a Daewoo, Clarkson is saying. On the bed the new All-Blacks jersey. Downstairs Mom goes, Because you can’t! And Dad going, Last time I looked this was my fucking house! I’M TRYING TO WATCH TV, shouts Carl. Clarkson says, Dead Boy. Carl’s head snaps back to the screen. Give me something with a bit of oomph, Clarkson says. A shiver goes up Carl’s arm, tingling in every scar.

That’s when the phone rings. Barry. It’s happening, he says.

What? Carl says.

Night after tomorrow. The connection, dude. They’re taking us with them to meet the Druid.

Carl’s brain reaches back into the endless black dark of his memory.

Do you know what this means? Barry is saying. It means we’re in. We’re made men.

And then in the phone but not Barry’s voice: He will be waiting for you, Carl.

He jerks up on his bed. What did you say?

Then Barry again like nothing has happened: This is so big-time, dude. Like seriously, do you know what this means?

But Carl does not know what it means.