Skippy Dies: A Novel

‘I’m just wondering if it’s going to be entirely safe…’ Jeekers in the wings.

‘I don’t imagine anyone will get hurt,’ Ruprecht says. ‘Though there may be some structural damage.’

‘Oh my God,’ Jeekers whimpers to himself. But it’s too late – Titch is already introducing them; and now they are walking out onto the stage. The lights are so bright, and so hot! Yet even through them it seems he can feel the icy gaze of his parents, the avid gleam of their eyes as they wait to grade him out of ten in this new field of endeavour; and although he cannot see them, and in spite of what he is about to do, he works up a watery smile and directs it into the great darkness.

Two days ago, Jeekers was eating lunch in the yard on his own, just as he does every day, when Ruprecht sat down beside him and told him he wanted to get the Quartet back together. Jeekers was surprised to hear this, after everything that had happened. But then Ruprecht explained why. He wanted to use the Quartet to get a message to Skippy. I know it sounds unorthodox, he said, but the fact is that there’s a sound scientific principle behind it – here he reeled off a list of nineteenth-century names who had apparently tried a similar thing. Where they went wrong, he said, was in thinking of us, our four-dimensional spacetime, as here, and the other dimensions as there, which meant they needed some kind of magical substance to bridge the gap in between. But in fact, you don’t need any such substance – or rather, according to M-theory, ordinary matter is also itself the magical substance! He paused here, looking at Jeekers with eyes that blazed like Catherine wheels.

Strings, he said. If they ripple one way they make stuff, and if they ripple another way they make light, or nuclear energy, or gravity. But in each case they perform these ripples in eleven dimensions. Each string is like a chorus line with a stage curtain falling down the middle of it, so that one part is in our world, and the other is in the higher dimensions. The same string that makes up one quark of one atom of the handle of your tennis racket could at the same moment be revolving in an entirely other universe. So if every string goes beyond the veil, might it not be possible to somehow pass a message along the string from our side so it reaches the other side?

Like two tin cans tied together? Jeekers said.

Exactly! Ruprecht said. Once you see it, the concept is quite simple. It merely becomes a question of how. That’s where the Quartet comes in.

In Lodge’s book, he explained, the soldiers in Summerland, which was what they called the Otherworld, reported that they could hear certain musical performances from the Albert Hall. What they were hearing were radio broadcasts. Evidently certain combinations of sonic architecture and radio frequency have this ‘amphibious’ quality that enables them to travel over to the higher dimensions. My theory is that some kind of sympathetic resonance must be involved. The tricky thing then is to find these amphibious frequencies. In the past they used human mediums, who sniffed them out by a process of intuition. However, with a simple recalibration of the Van Doren Wave Oscillator, we can alleviate all need for a medium by translating our sonic ‘message’ into every possible frequency – one of which has, of necessity, to be the one audible to the dead…

Listening to him elaborate on his plan, Jeekers recognized that Ruprecht had finally lost the plot. His experiments had always been a little zany for Jeekers’s taste; still, in the past he could appreciate that they did have some exhilarating, if fleeting, points of correspondence with reality. This, though – this was delusion, nothing more.

So why – why, why, why! – had he said yes? It’s not that he hasn’t felt sorry for Ruprecht over these last few weeks, and of course he feels terrible about what happened to Skippy. But when he thinks of how much trouble they’re going to get into – and right in front of their parents! It’s all right for Dennis and Geoff, they don’t have academic records to protect. But Jeekers is putting his whole future in jeopardy! Why?

Yet even as he asks it he knows the reasons why. He is doing it precisely because it is pointless and foolish and out of character. He is doing it because it is the kind of thing he would never, ever do, because the kind of thing he does do – following the rules, working hard, being Good like a boy ordered from a catalogue – has lately come to seem quite empty. It might have something to do too with Dad getting Mr Fallon fired, even when Jeekers begged him not to; or maybe the creeping realization that it was the Best Boy that Dad loved, not Jeekers, and that if he was kidnapped, and the Best Boy left in his place, Dad would not be sad.

Anyway, here he is. And as he looks across the stage – at the other three primed over their instruments, Geoff’s triangle lilting ever so slightly back and forth, like a leaf in anticipation of a breeze; Dennis’s smirk just visible at the mouthpiece to his bassoon; Ruprecht breathing very slowly, focus fixed on the back of the auditorium, on his lap the mangled horn that Jeekers still can’t look at without setting off an interior pandemonium of alarm; and then at Father Laughton, poor unsuspecting Father Laughton, as he raises his baton – the weird thing is, even though he knows Ruprecht is wrong and there is no chance of this working, still, at this precise moment in time – beneath the bright lights, shaking with nerves, surrounded by parents and priests in the Sports Hall on a Saturday night – reality does feel distinctly unreal, and what seemed unreal, conversely, feels a lot closer than before…

And the music, when it begins, sounds so beautiful. Pachelbel’s familiar melody, worn threadbare by endless TV commercials for cars, life assurance, luxury soap, by street-performers in black-tie, mugging for tourists in high summer, by any number of attempts to invoke Old-World Elegance, accompanied by haughty waiters bearing trayfuls of tiny cubes of cheese – tonight it seems to its audience entirely new, to the point of an almost painful fragility. What is it that makes it so imploring and so sweet, so disconcertingly (for the older members of the audience who have come tonight expecting merely to be pleasantly bored and now find themselves with lumps in their throats) personal? Something to do with the horn that large boy in the silver suit is playing, perhaps, a new-fangled instrument that looks like it must have been run over by a truck, but produces a sound that’s like nothing you’ve ever heard – a hoarse, forlorn sound that just makes you want to…

And then the voice comes in, and you can actually see a shiver run through the decorous crowd. Because there is no singer on the stage, and given that Pachelbel’s Canon does not have a vocal part, listeners could be forgiven for mistaking it for a ghost’s, some spirit of the hall roused by the music’s beauty and unable to resist joining in, especially as the voice – a girl’s – has an irresistibly haunting quality, spare, spectral, carved down to its bare bones… But then one by one the audience members spot beneath the mike stand over to the right, ah, an ordinary mobile phone. But who is she? And what’s she singing?

You fizz me up like Diet PepsiYou make me shake like epilepsyYou held my hand all summer longBut summer’s over and you’re gone

Holy smokes – it’s BETHani! A new murmur of excitement, as younger spectators crane their necks to hiss in the ears of parents, aunts, uncles – it’s ‘3Wishes’, the song she wrote after she broke up with Nick from Four to the Floor, when there were all those pictures of her at her mum’s wearing skanky clothes and actually looking quite fat – some people said that was all just part of the publicity, but how could you think that if you listened to the words?

I miss the bus and the walk’s so longI got split ends and my homework’s wrongThere’s a hole in my sneaker and gum on my seatAnd the world don’t turn and my heart don’t beat

– which the girl who’s singing now fills with such longing, such loneliness, only amplified by the crackling of the phone, that even parents who view BETHani with suspicion or disapproval (often coloured, in the case of the dads, by a shameful fascination) find themselves swept up by its sentiments – sentiments that, separated from their r’n’b arrangement and grafted onto this melancholy spiralling music three hundred years old, reveal themselves as both heart-rending and also somehow comforting – because their sadness is a sadness everyone can recognize, a sadness that is binding and homelike.

And the sun don’t shine and the rain don’t rainAnd the dogs don’t bark and the lights don’t changeAnd the night don’t fall and the birds don’t singAnd your door don’t open and my phone don’t ring

So that as the chorus comes around once more, you can hear young voices emerge from the darkness, singing along:

I wish you were beside me just so I could let you knowI wish you were beside me I would never let you goIf I had three wishes I would give away two,Cos I only need one, cos I only want you

– so that for these few moments it actually seems that Ruprecht could be right, that everything, or at least the small corner of everything that is the Seabrook Sports Hall, is resonating to the same chord, the same feeling, the one that over a lifetime you learn a million ways to camouflage but never quite to banish – the feeling of living in a world of apartness, of distances you cannot overcome; it’s almost as if the strange out-of-nowhere voice is the universe itself, some hidden aspect of it that rises momentarily over the motorway-roar of space and time to console you, to remind you that although you can’t overcome the distances, you can still sing the song – out into the darkness, over the separating voids, towards a fleeting moment of harmony…

And then – just as manly hands throughout the Hall move clandestinely to brush away rogue tears – something happens. At first it’s hard to detect what it is, other than that it’s wrong, very wrong. Heads recoil involuntarily; a spasm of distress flickers across Father Laughton’s cheek, as at some transcendental tooth-ache.

It’s the song – it appears to have somehow bifurcated; that is to say, it continues on as it was, but also and at the same time in a different key. The result is viscerally, nails-across-a-blackboard ugly, but the musicians do not seem to have noticed, and continue not to notice as the song does it again, so that there are now three versions playing at once, in different keys – and then another, and another, like parallel-universe Canons somehow gathered into the same auditorium, getting louder all the while. Wildly you look to either side of you, wondering if you’re going mad, because this surely is what madness must sound like. Everywhere you see hands pressed to ears, faces shrivelled up like snails retreating into their shells. Now as the layers mount on top of one another, some supra-song begins to loom above them, a song of all possible songs, something not so much heard as felt, like the awful oppressive atmospheric weight preceding a storm or other impending catastrophe. The volume soars; still Ruprecht et al. play on impassively. The engineer at the sound-desk regards his levels in horror; and now the Automator staggers out from the wings and into the waves of ineluctable noise, which has now achieved the status of unthinkable, impossible, no longer remotely discernible as a song; he lurches over the stage, like a man in a hurricane, only to be assailed, just as he reaches Ruprecht, by a peal of sonic energy that is like nothing on Earth –

*

Howard had driven to Seabrook at full tilt – his hand, bound clumsily in a huge swollen mitten of linen bandage, screaming every time he had to change gears or apply the brake, making him scream along with it – without knowing quite what he would do when he got there. The vague plan he had in his mind, of unmasking the coach in front of a gasping audience, followed by a Hollywood-style punch-up, Howard and Tom mano a mano, had, he knew, some serious holes (how could he fight with an injured hand? How could he fight a disabled man?); still, for the moment he preferred to leave these to one side, instead racing ahead to the aftermath, in which he arrived at Halley’s door, bruised and bloody from his encounter, but – as she would recognize instantly – inwardly restored. She would quieten his burbled apologies with a finger to the lips; she would smile that smile he had missed so much – so bright and strong, like a kinder, warmer cousin of light – and take him by his good hand inside to her bed.

All these fantasies had been summarily squashed by the Automator. Ever since, Howard has been in the Ferry, trying to stoke up the remnants of his anger – ‘He hit me! The fucker actually hit me’ – sufficiently that he can… that he can what? Take the coach behind the swimming pool and teach him a lesson, like they were both fourteen years old? And then everything would be peachy, the world restored? Too late: reality has indelibly set in again. So he abandons his plans and just drinks. The pain in his hand provides an excellent excuse. It is excruciating, and has extended itself to colonize his entire body; everything pounds at him, like clumsy fingers on a piano – the laughter and grumbling of the other drinkers, the beauty of the beautiful lounge girl, the hideous carpet, the miasma of body odour… and now a familiar hound’s-tooth jacket.

‘Ah, Howard, wasn’t expecting to find you here…’ Jim Slattery pulls up a stool, motions to the lounge girl. ‘Mind if I…?’

Howard makes an indifferent gesture with his good hand.

‘Didn’t make it to the concert?’

‘Sold out.’

‘Yes, indeed, even those of us with tickets – that is to say, there was a group of late arrivals from KPMG, Greg asked me if I wouldn’t mind… Didn’t bother me, of course, especially if it gives me the chance of a snifter without herself being any the wiser – cheers.’ The clink of glass causes Howard to wince, and the wince to set off a chain of small agonies. ‘Good lord – what happened to your hand?’

‘Caught it in a mousetrap,’ is the tight reply.

‘Oh,’ Slattery says equanimously. He sips at his drink, swirls it around his mouth. ‘I heard you’d been in the wars lately. That is to say, not just with the mice.’

‘Rodents of one kind or another,’ Howard says; then reflecting, he adds glumly, ‘mostly brought it on myself, though.’

‘Oh well. Things will come round, I’m sure.’ Howard merely grunts at this; the older man clears his throat and changes the subject. ‘You know, I came across something the other day that made me think of you. An essay by Robert Graves. “Mammon and the Black Goddess”.’

‘Ah, Graves.’ Howard, who feels that the poet has something to answer for in his present situation, smiles sardonically. ‘Whatever happened to old Graves?’

‘Well, I daresay you know most of the story – married after the war, moved to Wales, tried to live the domestic life. Didn’t last long, as you can imagine. He got himself mixed up with a poetess, an American named Laura Riding, and took off with her to Mallorca, where they set up shop with her as his muse. She was as mad as a hatter, by all accounts. Ran away with an Irishman, named Phibbs if I recall.’

‘Some muse,’ Howard remarks bitterly.

‘As a matter of fact that fitted Graves’s conception of things pretty neatly. The muse is an embodiment of the White Goddess, you see. If she settles down with you and starts a home, then she loses her powers. Becomes merely a woman, so to speak. Which means no more poetry, which in Graves’s eyes was almost as bad as death. If she deserts you, on the other hand, then you find another muse to inspire you, and the whole circus starts all over again.’

‘Makes you wonder why you’d even bother,’ Howard says.

‘There must have been an element of self-punishment to it, I think. Graves had always suffered tremendous guilt over his part in the war, the men he’d killed and seen killed. And then, you see, his son died – his son David was killed in Burma, in the Second World War. Graves had encouraged him to sign up, and helped him to get into the Royal Welch Fusiliers, his old regiment. It was directly after the death of his son that he started writing about the White Goddess, all this business about suffering and sacrifice in the name of poetry. Trying to make sense of it all, in his own barmy way.’

Howard says nothing, recalls Kipling and Ruprecht Van Doren.

‘But that’s what was interesting about this essay,’ Slattery says. ‘Near the end of his life Graves met a Sufi mystic, who told him about another goddess, a Black Goddess. Mother Night, the Greeks called her. This Black Goddess existed beyond the White. Instead of desire and destruction, she represented wisdom and love – not romantic love, but real love, as you might say, reciprocating, enduring love. Of those who devoted their lives to the White Goddess, and this endless cycle of ravagement and restoration, a very few, if they managed to survive it, would eventually pass through her to the Black Goddess.’

‘Good for them,’ Howard says. ‘And what about everybody else? All the mugs who don’t manage to transcend or whatever?’

Slattery’s face crumples into a smile. ‘Graves said that the best thing to do was to develop a strong sense of humour.’

‘A sense of humour,’ Howard repeats.

‘Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humour and you’ll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, it’s our own expectations that crush us.’ He raises his glass, sending ice cubes tumbling about his upper lip, and drains it. ‘I suppose I should be getting along, before my own goddess starts to wonder. Goodbye, Howard. Keep in touch. I hope I’ll see you before too long.’

Just as the door closes behind Slattery, the lights go out in the pub, and the sudden darkness is filled by a dim but quite unearthly noise – at once eerie and, somehow, mechanical… but it lasts for only a few seconds, and then power is restored, and all returns to normal. The drinkers settle back into their chat; Howard, with no one to talk to, contents himself with nursing his drink and watching the lounge girl as she crosses and recrosses the floor, tray in hand – another muse-in-waiting, another goddess who would transform everything, whose beauty you could surely never get tired of…

Muses, goddesses, it sounds so preposterous, but wasn’t that how Halley had appeared to him in the beginning? A fragment of pure otherness, a radiance who burned through the stale facts of his life like a flame through an old picture? She told him stories of her home and he heard something transcendental; he looked at her and he saw another world – America! – a magic soil where dreams, like seeds, would alight and instantly take root – far away from this tiny island where you never lost your old nickname, where people couldn’t help sliding into the positions left by their fathers and mothers, the same ones at the top, middle and bottom all the time, the same names in the school yearbook.

And she, no doubt, had done the same with him. She had looked at him and seen Ireland, or whatever she thought that was; she had seen history, paganism, romantic landscapes, poetry, and not a man who needed help to love. From the beginning, each was for the other first and foremost a flesh-and-blood representative of a different life, a passport into a fresh new future; what had happened since then was nothing more or less cruel than the real person seeping through the illusion – not a gateway to anything, just somebody like you, fumbling their way through the day.

A sense of humour, he thinks. A sense of humour. If only someone had told him before.