Skippy Dies: A Novel

But no one answers. She hangs up, goes to the window.

Outside there is a strange red light to the sky, and sirens are whirling over the trees and houses – Lori can’t see though where they are or which way they’re coming. The pills are laid out on her dresser, she sits down in the window sill and she waits.

An hour ago Ruprecht came to see her. That’s two nights running he’s come, if it was anyone else she would think he had a crush. He has this key that can open any door, e.g. the door at the back of the garden, he appears under her window and throws pebbles at the glass just like in Romeo + Juliet (except with Jabba the Hutt as Romeo and Skeletor as Juliet, ha ha). Nurse Dingle has been on both these nights, so Lori could go outside:

‘I just want to get some fresh air?’

‘Okay, sweetheart, but don’t get cold!’

‘I won’t!’ smiley-smile and she slowly walked down to the pergola where he was waiting for her.

When she looked at the window last night and saw him staring back, her heart felt like it had turned into a lump of ice there in her chest. She didn’t know what he could want, except to scream at her again maybe, she didn’t know why she agreed to go outside. She went down the stairs like she was in a dream, a dream where you’re finally being sent to the guillotine, she walked over the grass with her whole body shaking. He was waiting for her among the December roses. She thought he might hit her, but he just stood and stared. He’d gotten fatter since the night in her room – much fatter, she was shocked. And he was shocked too, looking back at her, though he tried not to show it.

For a moment neither of them said anything. She watched the feelings battling in his face, she watched him attempt to smother the hate or cover it over at least. When he spoke at last his words were cold and emotionless. He told her he wanted her to sing with his quartet in the Seabrook Christmas concert.

That was not what she expected. She didn’t know what to make of it. The first thing that came into her head was that it must be a set-up for some kind of revenge, like in that film where they pour blood on the girl?

We need a singer, he said, Skippy told me you could sing. Can you?

She didn’t say anything.

We’re trying to send him a message, he said, send Skippy a message.

Skippy’s dead, she said automatically and instantly she got that horrible picture of kissing him in her room only his skin has gone green and his mouth is full of clay.

I know, he said, still we’re trying to do it.

She didn’t know what he meant, did he mean like a Ouija board? It sounded weird, and also Ruprecht didn’t look well, he looked like he had a fever.

How? she said.

He started talking about strings. Apparently there are these really small strings that everything is made of. Once the strings were part of a much bigger universe, where everything was all joined together. But then it broke in two. One half of it became our universe, which got bigger and bigger and spread out faster and faster and made suns and planets including planet Earth. The other half did the opposite, it shrank until it was extremely tiny, tinier than you could ever conceive of. Now the miniature universe is hidden inside this one, except it’s too small to see or touch. But the strings still join them both together and Ruprecht believed he could use them to conduct this song through to Daniel.

You think he’s in the miniature universe?

There is a certain amount of scientific evidence, he said.

Science has always been Lori’s least favourite class and she did not fully understand what he was talking about here. It sounded like he was talking about Heaven, and in her mind she had a picture from one of Mom’s art CD-roms of everyone looking up at the sky which had been part sort of torn away and light was coming through the hole and angels stood there with Jesus who was holding a flag. She had never imagined Daniel being in Heaven, she never thought of him being anywhere really, because whenever she did think of him her throat bunched up and she had the clay vision.

You don’t have to understand, Ruprecht said. You just have to sing.

His eyes blinked and begged behind their thick glasses. She thought of how desperate you would have to be to come to someone you hated and ask them to do something this weird.

How can I sing? she said. I can’t leave here.

We have a plan for that. But will you do it?

I don’t know, she said, I don’t know. Once she had always wanted to be a singer, but it was so late now for anything like that, she was so tired, her body ached like a heap of old bones, like a game of Jenga that had been going on for ever and now just wanted to fall down. Then she asked Ruprecht what song he was going to do.

BETHani, Ruprecht said. ‘3Wishes’.

And for a split-second it was like everything in the garden lit up, FOOM! as if secretly there was a thousand-watt bulb hanging in the clouds and someone had turned it on. Because ‘3Wishes’ was the song she’d sung that night to Daniel, on the way home from the Hop, and how many dreams had she had where she was back in that night singing it to him?

And so next morning – the morning of today, though it feels so long ago! – she took an extra-long shower and practised scales and training exercises she’d learned from the Internet, and she listened to ‘3Wishes’ a trillion times even though the words were burned into her heart long ago. Then after Group ‘dinner’ she came upstairs and locked her door, and even though she wasn’t leaving her room she did her make-up and hair and put on the dress Mom got her for the interview.

Then she took the pills from Lala’s tummy and laid them out with the pills the nurse had given her on the dresser for when she was finished, because as soon as she’d heard Ruprecht say it, she knew the song was a sign – a sign that the Plan was ready, that tonight the sirens would come for her.

It was weird how the idea of singing in front of people, even just down a phone, was actually more frightening than being dead. Eight o’clock came like something falling out of the sky, getting huger and huger until it was all there was. She tried to get sick but there was nothing in her to get sick with. She bit her nails and listened to the tinny crackle of applause, Titch Fitzpatrick introducing the acts, other singers in her phone. Then at last Ruprecht’s voice came in her ear. We’re going on.

She could hardly hear the music but she sang as well as she could, just hoping. She sang walking around barefoot on her carpet and then she stood at the window and sang it looking out at the trees and stars and houses. The metronome tocked in the corner of her room – Ruprecht had set it the night before – she closed her eyes and imagined she was BETHani; then she imagined she was herself, walking back from the Hop with rain in her hair and Daniel beside her. She imagined the song was bringing that night to life around them, and if she kept singing it right, they would be able to walk right back into today… Then there was that freaky noise and the line went dead and she was standing on her own in a silent room.

She thought Ruprecht might call afterwards but he didn’t. Still, she supposed that didn’t matter now. She was feeling a strange floaty feeling – not like when you don’t eat and you’re going to faint, more like when she was little and she’d walk around the garden holding out a mirror and pretend she was tumbling upwards into the treetops and the sky. She stopped the metronome and sat down on the bed for a while, not even thinking. Then she got up and went over to the dresser where the pills were. She was wondering what to do when the pebble came rattling against the glass. Ruprecht! She ran to the door and tripped down the stairs – Don’t get cold, Lori! I won’t – and out into the garden.

But when she went behind the pergola and saw the expression on Ruprecht’s face she got a surprise. His eyes were emptied out and his enormous fatness seemed somehow even heavier than before. It was like they had switched places from the previous night, like now she was feeling lighter but he had sunk deep into himself. In a low flat voice he said to her, It didn’t work.

What didn’t work?

The experiment. The song.

Oh, she said, though she didn’t quite understand, how can a song not work?

The Wave Oscillator crashed. The feedback blew the speakers and shorted out the sound-desk. We only did thirty per cent of the cycle. The message didn’t go through.

Oh, she said again. And then, I’m sorry.

It wasn’t your fault, he said. But I thought you’d want to know.

Thank you, she said. It was then she noticed the rucksack on his back. Are you going somewhere, she said.

I’m leaving, he said.

Leaving? He had a box of doughnuts in his hand too. Where are you going?

I’m not sure, he said. Probably Stanford, they’re doing some really interesting work on strings there. He told her this in a flat heavy voice, as if they could be clubbing seals or baking brownies and it wouldn’t make much difference to him.

Are you leaving because the experiment failed?

He shrugged. There doesn’t seem any particular reason to stay.

What about your friends?

He shrugged again, and smiled a nuclear-winter smile; and with a shudder Lori realized that here was someone on the verge of something terrible – that whatever he might say about Stanford or anywhere else, his plan was the plan of someone starved of hope, who saw the future merely as an exit sign leading into a black void. She knew because this was how she saw it too, and she knew it was all because of Daniel, because of that gap in Ruprecht’s world which he had left there. But what was Ruprecht doing here? What did he expect her to do about it? Hunched beside his bloated body in the cold dark suddenly she felt exhausted, as though the weight of him was dragging her downwards; a nauseating gust of oniony sweat wafted to her from his body and with a violence that surprised her she wished he would go! Bother someone else! Leave her to her plan, the pills that had been arranged on her nightstand to spell lorelei, that would take her away away away from the world and its endless problems.

Ruprecht must have sensed this, because he stood up and said, I should probably get moving.

Okay, she said.

But he didn’t go. Instead he hovered, and the wind, the empty wind, blew around them, around his mass of blubber and her toothpick-skeleton; it reminded her of what he’d said about the two universes, one expanding like it would never stop, the other shrinking and shrinking into itself – both of them running from some horror of the past, two halves of something that used to be whole now running, without thinking, without seeing, away from each other and into death. And she realized that there was no someone else. For some reason she did not understand, Ruprecht had come to her tonight; and she was the last person he would come to. She was all that kept him tethered to the Earth. If she let go of him, if she went through the dark door swung open before her, he too would disappear for ever from the world.

From upstairs the pills called out to her!

And in the distance the sirens, the singing girls, crying, Lori Lori!

But she gritted her teeth and squared her bony shoulders and as he moved for the back gate she called out sharply, Ruprecht!

From the doorway Nurse Dingle’s musical voice, Lori!

In a minute, she yelled back.

Then to Ruprecht, I don’t think you should go to Stanford. Not now.

He blinked back at her expressionlessly. But what could she tell him? What reasons could she give for not going? Look at her, what could she possibly tell anyone about anything?

I know it seems like there’s nothing left here for you, she said slowly. But maybe there is, and you just can’t see it?

Blink, blink, went Ruprecht. God, this was so hard! When she was beautiful this kind of thing was so much easier, all she had to do was look at a boy and he’d be doing cartwheels down the street! But those days were gone, and she found she had no idea how you would get inside the fortress of another person.

It’s like… Arrgh, come on, Lori, she searched around in her brain for something not useless and black, but all she could think of was something they’d done in French class once about this poet, which she didn’t know if it had anything to do with what they were talking about now. Still, it was all she had so she said it. His name was Paul Éluard, and he said this thing once: There is another world, but it is in this one.

Ruprecht looked baffled.

It’s about how – she could feel herself going red, she squeezed her eyes tight shut, trying to remember what Mr Scott had told them – like, how people are always going somewhere? Like everybody’s always trying to be not where they are? Like they want to be in Stanford, or in Tuscany, or in Heaven, or in a bigger house on a fancier street? Or they want to be different, like thinner or smarter or richer or with cooler friends (or dead, she did not say). They’re so busy trying to find their way somewhere else they don’t see the world they’re actually in. So this guy’s saying, instead of searching for ways out of our lives, what we should be searching for are ways in. Because if you really look at the world, it’s like… it’s like…

What the fuck was she talking about, he must think she’s such a spa.

It’s like, you know, inside every stove there’s a fire. Well, inside every grass blade there’s a grass blade, that’s just like burning up with being a grass blade. And inside every tree, there’s a tree, and inside every person there’s a person, and inside this world that seems so boring and ordinary, if you look hard enough, there’s a totally amazing magical beautiful world. And anything you would want to know, or anything you would want to happen, all the answers are right there where you are right now. In your life. She opened her eyes. Do you know what I mean?

Like strings? he said.

Well, no, not really, she said uncertainly, but then she thought about it and changed her mind. No, actually, totally like strings. Because you told me they’re everywhere, right? They’re all around us, it’s not like they’re just in Stanford.

Ruprecht nodded slowly.

So you could study them right here, couldn’t you?

He began to say something about lab facilities, but she cut him off, because she had just had an idea. Like maybe all you need is someone to help you, she said. Like Daniel did.

He did not reply to this, gazed at her from deep within hamster cheeks.

Maybe I could help you, she said, or rather the idea said, though inside her head a voice shrieked, What are you saying? Like I don’t know anything about science, she said, ignoring it. Or strings or other dimensions. But I could get stuff from the shops for you? I could get my dad to drive you places? Or just, when you’re busy with an experiment I could bring you lunch? I mean, I’m not going to be in this place for ever.

You want to go back out there? exclaimed the voice. To that? But again she ignored it, watched Ruprecht’s eyes watching hers. Why don’t you stay, Ruprecht, she said. For a little while more, at least.

He pressed his lips together; then he bowed his head as if he had arrived somewhere after a very long journey.

The wind shook the leaves and everything in the garden.

After she let him out the back gate, she stood there for a moment, under the splashing ivy. She was thinking about that French class. It was months ago, but now she thought about it, she found she remembered nearly everything – the cream sweater Mr Scott wore, his hair just beginning to need to be cut, the taste of chewing gum in her mouth, fluffy clouds chasing through the trees, the hairs on Dora Lafferty’s neck in front of her, the classroom smell of lipstick and old runners. She remembered telling herself to remember what Paul Éluard said, because it seemed important. But things like the world-inside-this-one are too big to hold in your head by yourself. You need someone to remind you, or else, you need someone you can tell, and you have to keep telling each other, over and over, throughout your whole life. And as you tell them, the things are slowly binding you together, like tiny invisible strings, or like a frisbee that’s thrown back and forth, or like words written on the floor in syrup. TELL LORI. TELL RUPRECHT.

Maybe instead of strings it’s stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter or even a whole word…

Then she walked back towards the house. Suddenly there was mist everywhere, a silver mist, like the Earth was breathing magic breaths; she walked very slowly, with her eyes closed, like a sleepwalker, and as she did she imagined she could feel invisible veils drift over the fine hairs of her arm, break across her face and hands, fragile as a breath or more fragile; she walked and dreamed that she was passing through all these veils and travelling deeper and deeper into… into the night? into where she already was?

Ruprecht left his doughnuts behind. Now the box sits beside her on the window sill. She scoops the pills up from the dresser and replaces them in Lala’s tummy. Outside, the sirens go whirling off in another direction, leaving only the sky stretched over the houses, the lonely beautiful universe, a sad song played on a broken instrument. She wonders if Skippy did hear them tonight. Ruprecht told her that even though you can’t see strings, scientists believed the theory was true because it was the most beautiful explanation. So, Skippy heard their song, that would be the beautiful explanation, wouldn’t it? For tonight?

She picks up her phone and tries Carl again. She doesn’t know what she will say when he answers. Maybe just, Hey, what you doing? Or, Look at all the mist outside, I love it when it’s misty! She listens to the dial-tone, she imagines the phone ringing in the place that is his life, the music rising through the air to touch his ears. Opening the box, she takes out a doughnut. It looks like chocolate. She takes a bite.