Skippy Dies: A Novel

Howard is amazed how quickly he loses track of things without the clanging school bell to chop his day into forty-minute portions. Darkness seems to fall shortly after he’s got out of bed; he finds himself increasingly dependent on the TV for any sense of reality, and whenever there is a power cut he experiences, in that first second of darkness before his eyesight adjusts, a terror that it is he, in fact, who has been switched off.

Yesterday Finian Ó Dálaigh had appeared at his door with a card signed by the whole Seabrook faculty. At first Howard thought it was for him, a gesture of support. It wasn’t, of course; it was for Tom Roche. There was going to be a presentation during the concert, an award for his years of dedicated service to Seabrook. ‘I didn’t think you should be left out,’ Ó Dálaigh said considerately. ‘Thank you,’ Howard said. He wrote his name on a blank space in the interior; after some deliberation, he left it at that.

A presentation for his years of dedicated service to Seabrook. Today, on the way home from the supermarket with a bootful of discount beer, Howard stopped his car outside the police station. He sat there for five full minutes, in the cold. Then he pulled out again and drove home.

He starts drinking early, and as the fatal hour of the concert approaches, combines it with a half-hearted sally against the creeping entropy that has been taking over the house. He doesn’t get far; before long, he’s hunkered on the floor with a boxful of Halley-memorabilia – photographs, cinema stubs, museum plans from foreign cities, all spread out in front of him. This has been happening a lot lately. The feebler his grip on the present, the more vivid the past – which for so long he has let disappear behind him, a frothing wake swallowed in the cold endless ocean of a world’s lived lives – seems to become; this sense is only amplified when the power goes and he has to light a candle to supplement the waning daylight. He doesn’t mind – on the contrary, he feels like he could happily spend the rest of his life here, revisiting city-breaks, holidays, friends’ parties. He only wishes he had Halley with him, so he could say, Hey, look at this one, do you remember such and such? And hear her reply, Yes, yes, that’s how it was.

And then at the back of a cupboard he finds the camera – the magical summer camera, the one she was reviewing a couple of months ago. With a sense of exhilaration, knowing that it contains actual moving images of her, he switches it on; and moments later, there she is, that day in the kitchen, with a cigarette in her hand and the light falling across her. His heart leaps, watching her shimmer at him from the screen; and then sinks, as the little scene disintegrates, inexplicably and inexorably, into a fight. He plays the clip again with numb fingers, watching their conversation unravel, listening to her tell him to forget it, to put that thing away. Even on the tiny screen the sadness etched into her face is unmistakeable. You did that, Howard.

Everything clangs like bells inside his head. He switches off the camera and sets it down. He scoops up the photographs and stubs and tickets, but the box slips from his grip and the contents, all those days so carefully misremembered, scatter across the floor like orphans escaped from an ogre’s cellar. He lets out a roar, he bends again to pick them up, but this time manages to scorch his elbow on the candle. Fuck it! Fuck! Grinding his teeth in rage, he flattens his hand and thrusts it palm-down into the flame. He holds it there for as long as he is able, and then for a little while more, until all thoughts have been seared from his head, and then still more. Tears run down his cheeks, lightning bolts flash beneath his eyelids. The pain is astonishing, like a new world underneath this one, raw and vivid and shivering. The air fills with the smell of cooking meat. Finally, with a cry, he pulls his hand away and staggers to the bathroom.

His whole hand is inert; it feels like an alien substance, a lump of fire or of pure pain grafted onto the end of his arm. When he runs cold water over it, it’s like his whole body has been hit by something – like a knight lanced in a joust, or two waves clashing, matter and antimatter. One forgets quite how painful pain is, how literal and unironic. He stands there sobbing, the water drilling into his flesh, the agony shrill in his ear like an alarm. His mind, however, suspended above the scene, is suddenly crystal-clear.