Skippy Dies: A Novel

Two hours after the chaos that closed the Seabrook College 140th Anniversary Concert – when it seemed that nothing could ever be quiet again – and the school is calm once more, although anyone who was present at the Quartet’s performance is still experiencing it as a ringing in his ears, and over the next few days a lot of people will be talking IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Everyone else has gone to bed; Geoff, Dennis and Mario are sitting on the slatted benches of the unlit Rec Room.

‘What did he say?’ Mario asks. ‘Are you going to be expelled?’

‘Probably,’ Dennis says.

‘We have to go and see him first thing on Monday,’ Geoff says. ‘He said he needed time to think before he decided what our punishment should be?’

‘Shit-o-rama,’ Mario says. ‘This is a high price to pay for a foolish experiment that did not work.’

‘Totally worth it,’ Dennis says. ‘Best thing Von Boner’s done in his whole useless overweight life.’

In terms of the comprehensive destruction of a night’s entertainment, Ruprecht’s experiment was an unqualified success. The multifrequencied Pachelbel loop, building and building so unendurably, was merely a starter, noise-wise. Just as the Automator took the stage, the Van Doren Wave Oscillator crashed. Instantly, the Sports Hall was filled with a jangle of indescribable static: keening, popping, crackling, hissing, tweeting, belching, roaring, gurgling, a bedlam of utterly alien sounds unleashed at such a volume as to be palpable physical presences, a menagerie of impossible beasts marauding through our reality, disembodied, robotic voices interspersed among them, like a demented mechanical Pentecost…

Too much for this audience; they fled for the doors. Hats were lost in the jostle, spectacles crushed, women knocked to the ground; they ran until they reached the entrance to the car park, where, a safe distance away, they turned back to view the still-ululating Hall, as though expecting it to implode or lift off into the sky. It did not; instead, after a couple of moments, the noise came to a sudden halt, as the sound-desk shorted out and with it the school power supply, at which point a large minority of them stormed back in again to track down the Automator and ask him what the hell kind of bloody game he was playing at.

‘I’m damned if I’m paying you ten thousand a year to turn my son into a terrorist –’

‘This never would have happened in Father Furlong’s day!’

It took nearly an hour of placating, assuaging and mollifying before the Automator could return to his office, where the Quartet had been confined. When he did, he made little effort to disguise his fury. He railed; he roared; he pounded the desk, sending photographs and paperweights flying. There was a new tone in his voice tonight. Before he’d treated them as he treated all the boys – like insects, flimsy and inconsequential. Tonight he spoke to them like enemies.

Ruprecht got the worst of it. Ruprecht, a deviant who had brought his parents nothing but shame; Ruprecht, whose brilliance covered a deep-rooted degeneracy of which this farrago was merely the latest example. You know what I’m talking about, Van Doren. The Acting Principal stared across the desk at him, like a ravenous animal through the bars of its cage. A lot of things have become clear to me now, he said, a lot of things.

The others were all crying; but Ruprecht just stood there, head bowed, while words fell on him like axes to the chest.

I’ll be honest with you, boys, the Automator concluded. For various legal reasons expulsion can be difficult to arrange these days. It’s not impossible you’ll get away with a long suspension. And in a way I hope you do. Because it means I will have the next four and a half years to make your lives hell. I will make them a living hell. You assholes.

‘Mamma Mia,’ Mario says now.

‘He can say what he wants,’ Dennis retorts. ‘We’re part of Seabrook history now. I mean, people are going to be talking about this for decades.’ The moon has peeped out from behind a cloud, and he is seized with a creeping euphoria. ‘The look on my mum’s face! Oh, Van Boner, you are a genius after all!’ A thought occurs to him. ‘Hey, maybe if I get expelled I could write his biography. What do you think? Bummer on the Loose: The Ruprecht Van Doren Story.’

‘Where is Ruprecht, anyway?’ asks Mario. ‘He’s not in his room.’

‘He seemed pretty down,’ Geoff remarks cautiously.

‘Well, what did he expect?’ Dennis says. ‘Skippy’s going to appear in a big ball of light and give us all high fives?’

‘I did not say to Ruprecht before, but if I am in Heaven getting it on with a sexy angel, there is no way I am coming back to attend some gay school concert,’ Mario says, then with a yawn rises from the bench. ‘Anyhow, I have heard enough bollocks for one evening. For the record, I hope you are not expelled. I would miss you guys, though this does not make me a homosexual.’

‘’Night, Mario.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’ The door wheezes shut behind him. For a time, the remaining two sit in silence, each occupied with his own thoughts; Geoff turned to the window, as if the faint silvering cast by the unveiled moon might reveal everything absent to be right out there in the yard…Then, after taking a moment, perhaps to summon up courage, he says casually to Dennis, ‘You don’t think it worked?’

‘What?’

‘Ruprecht’s experiment, you don’t think it worked?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Not even a little bit?’

‘How could it possibly have worked?’

‘I don’t know,’ Geoff says, and then, ‘it’s just that when all that noise started… I thought I heard a voice that sounded like Skippy’s.’

‘Are you talking about the German truck driver?’

‘Didn’t he sound a lot like Skippy?’

‘Okay, explain to me why Skippy would be talking in German, about trucks.’

‘I suppose,’ Geoff admits.

‘Geoff, you should know by now that none of Ruprecht’s ideas ever works. And this one was off the wall even by his standards.’

‘Right,’ Geoff says. His face falls a little; then rouses, as he is struck by something. ‘Hey though – if you didn’t ever think it would work, how come you agreed to do it?’

Dennis considers this, and then at last, ‘I would say malice.’

‘Malice?’

‘Like the Automator said. Malice, wanting to spoil the concert for everybody, that sort of thing.’

‘Oh.’ Geoff allows a polite interval to elapse while he affects to take this on board. In the moonlight he has been seized by a tingle of euphoria – the same sensation Dennis had earlier, reflecting on the concert, only Geoff’s is from a different source. Then, attempting to muffle his delight, he says, ‘I know the real reason you did it.’

‘Oh, you do?’ Dennis all caustic surprise. ‘Enlighten me, please.’

‘You did it because you wanted all of us to be together again. You knew it wouldn’t work, and you knew we’d get in trouble, but you also knew that what Skippy would want, if he was here, is for us all still to be friends? And this was the only way to do it. And even though it didn’t work, it did sort of work, because when we’re all together, it’s like Skippy’s there too, because each of us has his own little jigsaw piece of him he remembers, and when you fit them all together, and you make the whole picture, then it’s like he comes to life.’

Dennis remains silent, then issues a long, slow tocking with his tongue. ‘Geoff, how long have you known me? Is that really the kind of thing you think I’d think? Because if it is I’m very disappointed.’

‘Mmm, yeah, I knew you’d say that too.’

‘I’m going to bed,’ Dennis says peremptorily. ‘I don’t have to sit here and listen to my character being assassinated.’

He gets up; then he stops, sniffing the air. ‘Did you just cut one?’ he says.

‘No.’

Dennis sniffs the air again. ‘That is rough. You need to stop eating those urinal cakes, Geoff.’

With that he’s gone, and now Geoff’s alone in the Rec Room. But he doesn’t feel alone, not nearly as alone as you can feel sometimes, when the room is full of people playing table tennis and copying homework and throwing wet tissues at each other: in the wake of Ruprecht’s song, everything seems unusually placid, contented, still; and you can sit, just another object, not so colourful as the pool table nor so lightful as the Coke machine, and think of what Skippy might say if he were here, and what you, Geoff, might say back to him; until a yawn comes over you, and you rise and pad back out to get your toothbrush and go to bed – so tired all of a sudden you don’t notice the evermore acrid tint to the air, nor the first wisps of malign black smoke as they creep up the stairs.