Skippy Dies: A Novel

Howard stumbles out into December. The night, once it has slipped its fingers beneath his insulation of alcohol, is exceptionally cold, with a sour, chemical note to the air. He walks back in the direction of the school car park, deferring until he gets there the knowledge that he is unfit to drive and has not enough money for a taxi. His conscience taunts him with memories of the many times Halley rescued him from comparable situations, driving across the whole city sometimes to pick him up, and he falls morosely into his fantasy of earlier on – calling at her door, attractively bloodied from his encounter with Tom Roche, to be swept up into her arms. Somehow he doesn’t think turning up unbruised, sacked and drunk will have quite the same effect.

The moon tonight is full, and bright enough that he notices it disappear when he turns in the gate. He looks up, and sees an enormous black cloud printed over the school. It is of an unusual solidity, and low enough to partially obscure the Tower. The very next moment, all the lights in the upper floors come on; and now – he finds himself braced for it – the frenetic shrilling of the alarm clamours into the sleeping yard. Breaking into a run, he hurries down the avenue, through the car park, the dense black cloud growing over his head all the while, until, passing the Sports Hall, he arrives in the Quad.

The never-opened doors at the top of Our Lady’s Hall have been flung open, and boys are pouring out like pyjama’d ants from a disturbed nest, coils of black smoke snaking out with them at ankle height and slithering opportunistically into the night. Already the heat is palpable, a tropical warmth on his cheek. Bright amorphous hands beat at the leaded glass of the windows, and from within comes a rapturous roar of destruction, mingled with crashes and breaking. Howard locates Brian Tomms by the doors, hollering at the exiting boys to line up in order of their dorms. ‘What’s going on?’ he yells over the alarm.

‘Fire.’ Tomms does not appear surprised to see Howard. ‘Seems to’ve started in the basement. We’ve put in a call to the fire brigade, but it’ll probably have eaten up the Tower by the time they get here.’ He speaks in calm, clipped tones, a general surveying his battlefield. ‘Looks deliberate to me.’

‘Can I do anything?’

‘We’ve got most of the boys out. These are just the last few.’

As he speaks the crocodile line begins to peter out and Tomms descends the steps to oversee the prefects as they do the head-count. The boys, dim-eyed, tuft-haired, wait in orderly two-by-two rows. A few are filming the event with their phones – the white shapes behind the glass like furious dancing ghosts – but most merely look on vacantly, as though attending a special midnight assembly, lending the scene a weird peace.

Then it is broken by a commotion at the doors. Two fifth-years struggle to contain a handful of smaller boys, who are apparently attempting to run back into the school. Tomms runs over to help the prefects, and as they are jostled out into the Quad, Howard identifies the breakaways as Geoff Sproke, Dennis Hoey and Mario Bianchi from his second-year History class. The tears on their cheeks, in the unearthly light, give their faces the appearance of melting wax. ‘He’s still in there!’ blurts Geoff Sproke from behind the chain of arms. ‘He’s not!’ Tomms shouts him down. ‘He’s not, we checked!’ As he speaks, a plume of fire shoots over the roof, bathing the onlookers in a freakish orange glow. ‘Ruprecht! Ruprecht!’ the boy’s friends cry, throwing themselves once more against their captors. The sound is pitiful and thin against the flames, like kittens crying for their mother. With a sinking heart, Howard reels around and stumbles towards the doors. Heat blasts his face; beneath its bandages, his hand sings ecstatically, as if recognizing its own.

Burning, Our Lady’s Hall has become something alive, something new and terrible. Flames race over the walls, seizing and devouring, and the dull matrix of the school beneath them – the chipped timber, the shabby plasterwork, the doorways, the desks, the statue of the Virgin – seems already to have retreated from the world, half-turned to shadow. Looking on, Howard feels like a dinosaur watching the first meteors fall; like he’s witnessing an evolutionary leap, the arrival of an insuperable future. He imagines Greg’s tropical fish boiling in their tank.

Tomms appears by his side at the threshold. Howard looks back at him in a daze. ‘We have to do something.’

‘There’s no one in there,’ Tomms says. ‘We checked all the dorms.’

‘Then where’s Van Doren?’

Tomms does not reply. ‘Could he be in the basement?’ Howard says, thinking aloud.

‘If he’s in the basement, it’s already too late. But why would he be down there?’

No reason, of course; and yet, looking into the phantasmagoria of clashing light, Howard has a terrible sense of something left undone. And then, ‘What was that?’

‘What?’

‘Didn’t you hear that? It sounded like… music.’

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ Tomms says. His nostrils twitch, detecting the alcohol on the other teacher’s breath. ‘Come on, Howard, we need to get everyone clear.’

‘I was sure I heard music,’ Howard repeats distractedly.

‘How would there be music?’ Tomms asks. ‘Come on, there’s nothing more we can do.’ He may not be an expert on history like Fallon, he may not have grand conversations about the First World War in the staffroom with Jim Slattery, but he knows plenty about fires – how they work, how hot they get, when you can be a hero and when you can’t. ‘Nothing,’ he repeats confidently.

But before he can stop him Howard’s disappeared into the burning school.