Skippy Dies (20 page)

‘– a divorce!’ Carl’s mom screams, clattering up the stairs. Carl stuffs his boner back in his pants, zips himself up, flips
the computer screen to
FUN FACTS ABOUT THE NETHERLANDS
! ‘I’ll get a divorce, mister, and I’ll clean you out!’ She has stopped outside Carl’s door to shriek down, it is like nails
going over a blackboard. ‘So I hope your little floozies have… have good career prospects!’

‘I’ll get you fucking committed first!’ Dad’s voice bounces up from below. ‘There’s not a judge in the land who’d take your
side, you bloody mad bint –’

The sound of Mom sinking to the floor on the landing: this is usually where she ends up when they are fighting. ‘Why don’t
you go,’ she sobs, the words mixed with the snick of the flint as she tries to light a cigarette. ‘Why don’t you just go,
and leave my son and me in peace? Why don’t you go once and for all, so we can live our lives with some semblance of dignity?’

‘I’ll tell you why, because I’m afraid you’ll burn my fucking house down! Dignity, if you had even the smallest conception
of what that meant you’d take one look at yourself and –’

Carl in his room, his head filling up with hotness, stares at the textbook. The fusion of two cities into a single urbanized
mass known as a _______________.

Mom lets out a scream and there is the sound of something hitting something else, probably she threw her shoe at him. ‘You’re
a lunatic!’ Dad shouts. ‘A lunatic!’ Her bedroom door bangs, and at the same moment Carl’s phone jingles with a new message.

Fuck you, bitch.

Because of a lack of natural resources, the Netherlands must import
and
from
.

Downstairs the front door slams, Dad’s Jag starts up. The sound of the bathroom door locking and Mom crying behind it.

The black-haired girl’s eyes roll back in her head, as her hand plunges between her legs right up to the wrist.

The chief exports of the Netherlands are
pull your panties down bitch
and
if you say another word I will break your skull
.

Carl writes back,

Skippy and the telescope have become almost inseparable. Mornings, lunchtimes, at the end of every schoolday he dashes upstairs
and attaches himself to the eyepiece, and for the hours that follow he will either be euphorically happy or speechless with
despair, depending on whether or not he has caught a glimpse of Frisbee Girl. In less than a week, Ruprecht has seen him transformed
from his usual amiable Ruprecht-helping self to a mooneyed somnambulant who doesn’t want to do anything except look out the
window and ask over and over whether Ruprecht, or whoever else happens to be in the room, thinks this girl, whom he has never
spoken to, will be at the Hop or not.

Ruprecht might have found all this quite annoying, but by a strange coincidence, he too has a new fascination. For the last
five nights, he has been pulled deeper and deeper into its mysterious involutions; the more he investigates it, the more shadowy
it becomes, and the more shadowy, the deeper it draws him in.

‘They call it M-theory.’ Monday evening: outside, a damasked sunset is crashing tremulously through a pale blue sky, gilding
church steeples and phone masts, the tiled roofs of houses and the scaffolding of new apartments.

‘What does the M stand for, Ruprecht?’

‘No one knows.’

‘No one
knows
?’

‘The theory’s so complicated that they’re only beginning to understand it. So no one can agree what the M is for.’ This, for
Ruprecht, is one of its chief attractions. Who could resist a theory so obscure they don’t even understand the name of it?
‘Some people say it’s for Multiverse. Others say it’s for Magic. Matrix. Mystery. Mother.’

‘Wow,’ Victor Hero says huskily.

‘It’s all at a very early stage, obviously,’ Ruprecht says, ‘but what they
think
is that everything is made up of
membranes
. There are different kinds of membrane. Some are tiny particles. Others are huge universes. All of them floating around in
eleven dimensions.’

‘Eleven?’ Geoff says.

‘That’s right,’ says Ruprecht. Geoff does some counting on his fingers and looks confused.

‘I know what you’re thinking. Where are these seven extra dimensions? Good question. The answer is, all around us. You see
–’ Ruprecht takes off his glasses, getting into his stride now ‘– cosmologists believe that in our universe’s original state,
at the moment of creation, it existed as one pure, symmetrical, ten-dimensional structure. All stuff, all forces, were united
as one into this structure. However, with the Big Bang, this “higher” universe, as we might call it, broke down. “Our” universe,
that is, the dimensions we can see, expanded into spacetime. The higher dimensions, meanwhile, curled up to become very, very
tiny. But although we can’t see them, they’re still
here
. In fact, the extra dimensions exist at every single point in space.’

Head-scratching from Geoff and Victor.

‘It’s a tricky idea to grasp,’ Ruprecht says. ‘By way of illustration, try thinking of a very narrow cylinder.’

‘A hair,’ Victor says.

‘Mario’s dick,’ Dennis says, from Ruprecht’s bed.

‘Hey!’ Mario exclaims.

‘Okay –’ Ruprecht determined not to be steered off-course ‘– to us, the very narrow cylinder of Mario’s dick looks like a
line, that is to say it looks one-dimensional. But to a very small creature, say an ant, that’s walking along Mario’s dick,
he’ll realize that as well as going lengthways he can go in a
circular
direction too. Even though
we
might not be able to perceive it, that very small ant is aware that Mario’s dick has two dimensions, i.e. girth as well as
length.’

‘You’re damn right it has girth!’ Mario shouts. ‘I don’t need an ant to tell me it has girth!’

‘According to string theory, which Professor Tamashi and other scientists have been using to try to solve the Big Bang, in
addition to the four dimensions of spacetime we know, there are six of these very small, curled-up dimensions, making ten
all told. And the strings, which are little strands of energy, wiggle around vibrating in these ten dimensions.’

‘Like Dennis’s mother,’ Mario, seeking vengeance for the ant slur, interjects, ‘wiggling around vibrating with her vibrator,
because she is a famous slut, and also, she has ten dimensions because she is a fat bitch.’

‘That about sums her up,’ Dennis says coolly; gah, Mario’s forgotten that Dennis hates his stepmother and so is immune to
insults on that front –

‘Wait, what are these strings again?’ Geoff asks.

Ruprecht’s eyebrow beginning to twitch just a little – ‘Well, if you remember, I told you about it two minutes ago.’

‘Oh, right, they’re little bits of energy that everything’s made out of?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘But, uh, Ruprecht, things aren’t made out of strings, they’re made out of atoms. We did that in science class.’

‘Yes, but what are atoms made out of?’

‘How should I know what they’re made out of?’

‘Well, I’m telling you, they’re made out of these little strings.’

‘But didn’t you say the strings were in another dimension?’

‘Yeah, Ruprecht, how can they be here if they’re actually in another dimension?’

Ruprecht coughs loudly. ‘They exist in
ten
dimensions. Because ten is the number required mathematically for the theory to make sense. They vibrate at different frequencies,
and according to the frequency they vibrate at, you get different kinds of particle. The same way that if you pluck a violin
string you can get different notes, C, D, E –’

‘F,’ contributes Geoff.

‘F, yes –’

‘G –’

‘
Similarly
, a string vibrating at one frequency will give you a quark, say, and a string vibrating at another frequency will give you
a photon. That’s a particle of light. Nature is made of all the musical notes that are played on this superstring, so the
universe is like a kind of a symphony.’

‘Wow…’ Geoff looks in wonderment at his own arm, as if half-expecting it, now its cover’s blown, to start chiming and tootling.

‘But didn’t you say there were
eleven
dimensions?’ Victor Hero remembers.

‘That’s right. The major stumbling block of string theory was the Big Bang. Like all the other theories before it, string
theory broke down when it came to the first moments of the universe. What use is a new theory if it can’t solve the old problems?’

Geoff and Victor agree, not much use.

‘When they added the
eleventh
dimension, though, everything changed. The theory didn’t break down any more. But instead of just giving an account of
our
universe, scientists found themselves looking at a model of a whole
sea
of universes.’

‘Holy smoke,’ Geoff says.

‘I wish
I
was in the eleventh dimension,’ Dennis comments dolefully. ‘With some porn.’

‘Describe her to me again?’ Skippy, meanwhile, is at the telescope with Titch Fitzpatrick. As Ruprecht makes his exposition,
Skippy reels off the vast treasure of detail he has garnered from his few brief sightings of Frisbee Girl. Detaching himself
from the eyepiece, Titch looks off to the left, one finger on his jaw, frowning and nodding. ‘Hmm…’

When it comes to the ladies, Titch is the undisputed expert. He has got off with more or less every girl worth getting off
with in the Seabrook area, his strike rate dwarfing even that of sporting stars like Calvin Fleet and Beauregard ‘The Panzer’
Fanning; it is widely held that at the end of last summer, at a party
in Adam O’Brien’s house, he had full actual sex with KellyAnn Doheny, a second-year from St Brigid’s. Non-teenagers might
find his appeal difficult to understand, as he isn’t especially handsome, or big, or even funny; his features are striking
only in their regularity, the overall effect being one of solidity, steadiness, the quiet self-assurance one might associate
with, for instance, a long-established and successful bank. But that, in fact, is the whole point. One look at Titch, in his
regulation Dubarrys, Ireland jersey and freshly topped-up salon tan, and you can see his whole future stretched out before
him: you can tell that he will, when he leaves this place, go on to get a good job (banking/ insurance/consultancy), marry
a nice girl (probably from the Dublin 18 area), settle down in a decent neighbourhood (see above) and about fifteen years
from now produce a Titch Version 2.0 who will think his old man is a bit of a knob sometimes but basically all right. The
danger of him ever drastically changing – like some day joining a cult, or having a nervous breakdown, or developing out of
nowhere a sudden burning need to
express himself
and taking up some ruinously expensive and embarrassing-to-all-that-know-him discipline, like modern dance, or interpreting
the songs of Joni Mitchell in a voice that, after all these years, is revealed to be disquietingly feminine – is negligible.
Titch, in short, is so remarkably unremarkable that he has become a kind of embodiment of his socioeconomic class; a friendship/sexual
liaison with Titch has therefore come to be seen as a kind of self-endorsement, a badge of Normality, which at this point
in life is a highly prized commodity.