Skippy Dies (15 page)

‘Are you still playing that thing?’ The door flies open and Ruprecht comes bustling into the room. Without waiting for a reply
he sits down at his computer, drumming his fingers anticipatorily on his thigh as it wakes itself up. ‘Father Green was looking
for you,’ he says over his shoulder.

‘I know.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Just to see if I was feeling better.’

‘Oh.’ Ruprecht’s stopped listening – frowns into the screen as his inbox loads.

Earlier this month, Ruprecht wrote the following e-mail, which was transmitted by satellite into space:

By logging on to the METI website, you can chart the message’s progress. It hasn’t even got as far as Mars yet; still, every
night Ruprecht checks his computer to see if any extraterrestrials have mailed him back.

‘Who the hell’s going to want to reply to
that
? It’s the gayest e-mail I ever heard,’ Dennis says. ‘And furthermore, that’s a total lie about you being a keen sportsman,
unless you count eating doughnuts as a sport.’

‘It’s quite possible that doughnut-eating is considered a sport in distant galaxies,’ Ruprecht says.

‘Yeah, well, even if it is, and even if there are a bunch of fat lame Yahtzee-playing aliens out there, they’re still not
going to get your gay message for like a hundred years. So you’ll totally be dead by the time they get back to you.’

‘Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t,’ is Ruprecht’s somewhat mysterious response to this.

METI stands for Message to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and is an offshoot of SETI, the Search for same. This Search, a
collaborative effort involving nerds from all over the world, concentrates primarily on the random transmissions that bombard
the
Earth from space every day. These transmissions are picked up by the SETI radio observatory in Puerto Rico, divided up into
little parcels of data and sent out to the PCs of Ruprecht and others like him, which will trawl through them with the aim
of finding, amid the mass of unintelligible static thrown out by the stars, a sequence or pattern or repetition that might
intimate the presence of intelligent communicating life.

Behind the emergence of METI is none other than Professor Hideo Tamashi, the celebrated string theorist and cosmologist. It
was he who organized the space-mail; on another occasion, he and a group of schoolchildren broadcast a performance of Pachelbel’s
Canon in D Major. According to Professor Tamashi, the existence of extraterrestrial life is, statistically, more likely than
not; moreover, the future of humanity could depend on making contact. ‘In the next thirty or forty years, ecological collapse
may well make Earth unliveable,’ Ruprecht explains. ‘If that happens, the only way we’ll survive is by colonizing a new planet,
which realistically we could only do by travelling through hyperspace.’ Travelling through hyperspace requires unlocking the
secrets of the Big Bang; however, the ten-dimensional theory the Prof maintains holds the key is itself so fiendishly difficult
that he believes the only way to solve it in time is if some kindly superior alien civilization takes us under its wing.

Tonight, though, the ETs are keeping their counsel. Ruprecht, with a little sigh, shuts down the computer and rises from his
chair.

‘Nothing?’

‘No.’

‘But you think they will come someday? Like to Earth?’

‘They have to,’ Ruprecht responds grimly. ‘It’s as simple as that.’

He makes a couple of adjustments to his Global UFO Sightings Map, then fishes his toothbrush from his washbag and pads out
to the bathroom.

Outside, the laurels swoosh in the cold air, and the darkness is tinged with the pink glow of the neon Doughnut House sign,
like sugar on the night. Alone in the room, Skippy runs for cover as
zombies crash through the floorboards and stretch after him with sinewy arms and splintered nails. Once upon a time they were
people, maybe a family even, and when you look into their decaying faces it’s like you can still see a sad spark of who they
were…

Later, with the lights out: ‘Hey, Ruprecht.’

‘Yes?’

‘Say if you could travel in time –’

The sound of Ruprecht propping himself on his elbows in the opposite bed. ‘It’s quite consistent with Professor Tamashi’s
theories,’ he says. ‘Merely a case of sufficient energy, really.’

‘Okay, well – does that mean you could stop the future?’

‘Stop the future?’

‘Well, like, say if we started going back in time tonight, could we just keep going back for as long as we wanted? So we’d
never actually get to tomorrow?’

‘I imagine so,’ Ruprecht says, pondering this. ‘Or if you travelled at the speed of light, time would stop, so it would always
be today.’

‘Huh,’ Skippy says thoughtfully.

‘The problem in either case is energy. Travelling in time would require gaining access to hyperspace, which costs an enormous
amount of power. And the closer you approach the speed of light, the more your weight increases and prevents you from reaching
it.’

‘Wow, sort of like the universe is holding on to you?’

‘You might put it that way, yes. But anyway, you hardly want to stop time now, not with mid-term coming up!’

‘Ha ha, right…’

Silence resettles like a fresh snowfall that covers the room. Soon Ruprecht’s breathing turns into murmurous snores and little
chomping noises; he’s having the dream where he’s being given the Nobel Prize, which he imagines as a large silver trophy
filled with fudge… Ghostly grey-black moonlight creeps through the window; Skippy watches it gleam on his swimming trophy,
the photo of Mum and Dad.

And once they’re sure he is asleep, they file into the room and gather round his bed, their long wasting limbs hanging limp
by their sides, their rotting breath breathing
WE ARE THE DEAD
as they grab his hand and pull him up the stairs to a room and a Shape in a bed that lifts its head and draws aside the covers
to reveal its body to him, skin faded to the same colour as the bedsheets it rises out of, reaching for him with hands that
turn into hands that grip him freezing tight, and its mouth closes on his so he can’t scream or even breathe or wake up Ruprecht,
he stretches under the pillow for the pills but they are gone! someone must have come in and taken them! and now the room
fills with water and he starts drowning, the hands pulling him down below the surface –

He pulls his eyes open. There is no water, no one in the room except him and Ruprecht. The pills are where they always are.
The ghostly almost-light hangs in the room like somebody there. He turns away from it, his hand wrapped around the little
amber tube.

It is late when Father Green descends from the Tower. The lights are out in Our Lady’s Hall, but there is moon enough in the
windows for him to make his way; although by now, no doubt, he could make it in his sleep, if he were the kind to sleep. This
is his favourite time, when the school has gone to bed, and he may finally get to work! The poor will always be with us, says
the Lord, so there is always work to be done; he may no longer be a young man, but Father Green has no intention of shirking
his duties – and tonight, for the first time in a long time, he feels a tingle of the old vigour! The old sap, rising in his
–

What?

He thought he heard footsteps. When he turns round, though, the hall is empty. Of course it’s empty, who would be there, at
this hour? Lately his mind has grown fond of tricks like this – shapes coming out of the shadows, strange echoes, as of someone
behind him. Perhaps he should speak to the nurse, have her check him over… oh, but think how ‘Greg’ would love that! No, he’ll
wait, it will fade away in due course,
Deo volente
.

Passing beneath the Virgin he crosses himself, then walks down the steps to the basement. His office used to be on the top
floor. Now that is a ‘computer room’, and his charitable work is consigned to the underworld. Progress. Father Green hears
rumours that if Desmond Furlong does not return, Acting Principal Costigan – ‘Greg’ – intends to demolish the Old Building
altogether – that’s right, this same one whose construction Père Lequintrec oversaw, brick by brick, back when there was not
a school in the country worthy of the name as far as Catholic boys were concerned. Back when the order was strong, when they
had that zeal! Instead of being content to
serve merely as window-dressing, at a finishing school for young financiers.

‘Greg’. ‘Call me Greg, please.’ And he, of course, is ‘Jerome’. ‘Jerome, I don’t know how you do it.’ ‘Jerome, you’re an inspiration
to us all.’

He turns on the light of the dingy office, opens a draft of a request for donations from corporate friends of the school.
How many times has he written this same letter? Tonight though he can’t bring his mind to focus on it.

‘Jerome, just a quick word if I may…’

Father Green had been on his way to the Residence for dinner; he had barely noticed the Acting Principal approach. Typically,
‘Greg’ steers clear of him – one of the old dinosaurs, nothing to be done with him except wait for him to die. And yet here
he was – was he? Yes, he was! – interrogating the priest about this business with the boy getting sick in his morning French
class! ‘Gather you had a little dust-up with one of your second-years,’ he said.

Well! Father Green had been so surprised he hadn’t managed to reply; and it must have looked like an admission of guilt, because
the Acting Principal proceeded directly into a telling-off – couched, albeit, in all sorts of patronizing flannel: ‘Times
have changed, Jerome… sometimes I myself… bear in mind these boys aren’t quite as robust as in our day…’ (In
our
day! Did he take ‘Jerome’ for such a fool?) ‘Might be more productive in the long run, Jerome, if you went a little easier
on them.’

Ah yes. Go easy: the motto of the age. For these children, as for their parents, everything must be easy. It is their entitlement,
it is their
right
, and anything that infringes on it, anything that requires them to lift themselves even momentarily from their cosy stupor,
is
wrong
. They will live their lives without ever knowing want or hardship, and they will take this as no more than their due, sanctioned,
somewhere in the vaporous satellite-strewn heavens, by the same amorphous God who brings them Swedish furniture and four-wheel-drive
jeeps, who appears when summoned for weddings and christenings. A kindly, twinkle-eyed God. An
easy
God.

Go easy
. Well, that got his blood up, all right! He was within an inch of grabbing ‘Greg’ by the lapels! Damn it, man, do you think
that God no longer keeps the books? Look around you! Sin is everywhere! It is more powerful than ever before, polluting, poisoning,
corroding like a cancer! The boys
need
someone to frighten them! They need someone to tell them the
truth
! That their souls are in peril, that their only hope is to prostrate themselves before God, beg Him for the divine grace
to be freed of their wickedness!

But he did not grab ‘Greg’s’ lapels, and he did not say any of this; he merely smiled, promised to mind his temper in future,
and to apologize to the boy whose feelings were hurt. It was no great surrender; he is all too aware of the impotence of his
efforts. The torments of Hell mean nothing to these boys.
Souls
,
God
,
sin
, these are words from another time. The superstitious ravings of an old scarecrow.

For a long time now Father Green has wondered what he is doing here. The thought of retirement appals him: he has watched
too many of his colleagues deliquesce into inertia – men he worked with side by side on the missions, in the heathen wilderness
with nothing but their faith to guide them, now pottering about the Residence like gummy smiling zombies, pacifically awaiting
death. And yet work – which had always been his salvation – work too has lost its savour. He does not mean teaching: that
has never interested him, and today’s boys are worse than ever before, steeped in licentiousness, an orchard of apples rotting
on the branch. But in the council flats, on the estates, where he used to see, in the first years after they recalled him
from Africa, a kind of promise amidst the desolation – a hopefulness, an honesty, a capacity for change – now the desolation
is all he sees. The same problems of twenty years ago: mildewed rooms, sinks full of bottles, children running around half-wild
over ground littered with syringes; the same easy capitulations, the same weakness, the same abrogation of responsibility.
And here in his office, the same endless scrabbling after pennies, the endless, ignominious banging of the drum.

Perhaps everything he believed for so many years is simply wrong? Perhaps there simply
is no grain of goodness in the heart of man, waiting to be brought to the light, perhaps man is base to the core, any flicker
of virtue merely a trick of the light, a – what is the word? – a corposant. On his darker nights (and most nights, now, seem
dark) he has wondered if he has not spent forty-four years toiling after a myth.

Is it not strange how a single chance encounter may throw an entirely new light on one’s situation? How an exchange so brief
as to appear quite without significance may reveal a way forward, a new path where before there was none? This evening Father
Green had acceded to ‘Greg’s’ request and mounted the stairs to the Tower to apologize to the boy whose feelings he had allegedly
hurt. It was a nonsense of course – he had been caught speaking obscenely in class for one, and for another these boys had
no feelings, they were the very embodiment of the modern age, insensate to the core, and Father Green made his little pilgrimage
in the same spirit of indifference and defeat with which he has carried out so many of his duties in recent times. But the
moment the boy opened the door – well, too much to call it a Damascene conversion; too much, of course, absurd. And yet it
was clear in the instant, that silvered instant on the threshold, the priest had made a mistake. He had made a mistake about
this boy, and the shock of it echoed back through him, causing him to ask himself what other mistakes he might have made in
the recent past. Because you could see – impossible to describe in retrospect the clarity, the vividness of it – you could
see
the innocence in this boy’s face. He was
diff erent
– how had Father Green never noticed it before? Younger than his peers, for one: not yet slipped down the sinkhole of pubescence,
still retaining the miniature perfection of the child, his roseate skin unblemished, his gaze bright and unclouded. But that
accounted only for part of it. There was a fragility to him, an unworldliness, a purity that verged almost on a kind of anticipatory
pain, as of a fruit that if it is touched at all must bruise; and a shadow of grief, perhaps at the iniquity of the world
he found himself in, beholding which Father Green had felt moved to a
spontaneous tenderness such as he had not experienced in a long time, and reached out to console the boy (recalling it now,
he feels this sensation pass through him once more, and in the lonely office his hand unfolds to caress the empty air).