Skippy Dies (21 page)

‘All right so,’ he says as Skippy finally, breathlessly, wraps up his paean. ‘Black hair, medium height, wide mouth, pale.
That could be a few different people – Yolanda Pringle, maybe, or Mirabelle Zaoum. What’re her kegs like?’

‘Her kegs?’

‘Medium small,’ Dennis says from the bed.

‘I would say about a 30B,’ Mario estimates.

‘Um,’ Skippy says.

‘What she does have is an ass,’ Dennis says.

‘Yes, this is one smoking hot ass,’ Mario says. ‘It is the kind of ass a man will not forget in a hurry.’

‘Hmm,’ Titch muses, and then, relinquishing the telescope, ‘well, I’ll have a think about it. But it doesn’t look like she’s
going to show today.’

‘No,’ Skippy says mournfully.

‘Don’t worry about it, T-man,’ Dennis chips in cheerfully from the bed. ‘This girl’s about a trillion miles out of Skippy’s
league anyway.’

Titch receives this expressionlessly, then turns back to Skippy. ‘Give me a call next time you see her,’ he says, and wanders
out of the room without goodbye, like he’s exiting a lift full of strangers in a department store.

‘The eleventh dimension is infinitely long, but only a very small distance across,’ Ruprecht is telling Geoff and Victor,
‘maybe no more than a trillionth of a millimetre. That means it exists only a trillionth of a millimetre from every point
in our three-dimensional world. It’s closer to your body than your own clothes. And on the other side of it – who knows? There
could be another universe just one millimetre away, only we can’t see it because it’s in another dimension. There could be
an infinite number of them, floating all around us.’ His voice lofts rapturously. ‘Imagine it! An infinite number of universes,
whose qualities we can’t even begin to guess at! With totally different laws of physics! Shaped like cylinders or prisms or
doughnuts!’

‘Doughnuts?’ The word lights a synapse in Geoff’s brain, which for the last few minutes has been playing a counting game with
the clouds ambling by outside.

‘Why not? Or, or shapes that are entirely new –’

‘Or banana-shaped,’ Geoff, who has realized he is feeling a little peckish, suggests.

‘Or shaped like the Formula One track at Silverstone?’ Victor adds.

‘Maybe,’ Ruprecht says. ‘Maybe.’

‘Could there be,’ it suddenly strikes Geoff, ‘a universe that’s full of beer?’

‘Theoretically, I suppose, yes.’

‘And how would you get,’ Geoff says slowly, ‘from
this
universe, into the one that’s full of beer?’

‘That’s one of the things we’re hoping to find out,’ Ruprecht informs him grandly. ‘Professor Tamashi’s holding an online
roundtable on Friday night to discuss that very issue, among others.’

‘Hmm. Uh, Ruprecht, Friday night is the Hop?’

‘The Hop?’ Ruprecht repeats vaguely. ‘Oh yes, that’s right, so it is.’

‘In that case, I have a feeling this online round-table will have to go ahead without Mario,’ Mario says from the bed. ‘I
don’t know about you guys, but I am planning to score a lot of bitches at this Hop. Probably I will start with one really
hot girl, straight sex, no frills. Then I will have a sixty-nine. Then it will be time for a threesome.’

‘Mario –’ Dennis sits up ‘– what makes you think any girl is going to go anywhere near you? Let alone like fifteen different
girls.’

Mario hesitates, then says conspiratorially, ‘I have a secret weapon.’

‘You do?’

‘You bet, mister.’ He flips open his wallet. ‘Read it and weep, boys. It is my lucky condom, which never fails.’

A silence, as Mario smugly returns his wallet to his pocket, and then, clearing his throat, Dennis says, ‘Uh, Mario, in what
way exactly is there anything
lucky
about that condom?’

‘Never fails,’ Mario repeats, a little defensively.

‘But –’ Dennis pinches his fingers to his nose, brow furrowed ‘– I mean, if it was really a lucky condom, wouldn’t you have
used it by now?’

‘How long have you had it in there, Mario?’ Geoff says.

‘Three years,’ Mario says.

‘Three
years
?’

‘Without using it?’

‘Doesn’t that sound more like an
unlucky
condom?’

Mario looks troubled as his unshakeable faith in the luckiness of the lucky condom begins to show cracks.

‘It was definitely pretty unlucky for the condom, to wind up in your wallet!’

‘Yeah, Mario, your wallet is like the Alcatraz of condoms.’

‘It’s like the condom Bermuda Triangle!’

‘Condoms tell each other stories about your wallet, “Oh, he disappeared into Mario Bianchi’s wallet, and he was never seen
again.” ’

‘Yeah, I bet right this very second your lucky condom is in there whistling the theme from
The Great Escape
and digging a tunnel out of your wallet with a plastic coffee stirrer –’

‘What do you know about it?’ Mario rounds on them. ‘Eh, you silly nerds, all you know about is this foolish business of the
theory of many dimensions. Well, I tell you about something that is happening in
this
dimension, and that is this Friday I will be boning countless ladies. And that, which I call Mario-theory, is something that
you can see with your own eyes, and not just some equations that only gays can understand! So don’t come crawling to me looking
for one of my many bitches in the sex orgy I am having, after you have struck out with every girl at the Hop!’

Autumn deepens. A fresh chaos of yellow leaves covers the lane up to the school each morning, as if it’s been visited overnight
by woodland poltergeists; after school, you make the return journey through a strange, season-specific gloaming, a pale darkness,
spooked and paradoxical, which makes your classmates up ahead seem to fade in and out of existence. The hobgoblin shadow of
Hallowe’en, meanwhile, is everywhere. The shopping malls bristle with pumpkins and skeletons; houses lie swathed in cotton-wool
cobwebs; the sky cracks and fizzes with firework-tests of increasing rigour. Even teachers fall under the spell. Classes take
odd detours, routines slowly vaporize, until by the late stages of the week, the rigid precepts of everyday termtime seem
no more real, or even slightly less real, than the fluorescent ghosts glowing from the windows of Ed’s Doughnuts next door…

It’s crossed Skippy’s mind – though he knows it makes no sense, given that other people have seen her too – that Frisbee Girl
herself might not be real: that she too may be a kind of Hallowe’en emanation, a dark mirage of smoke and wishes who exists
only in the far end of the telescope and will, if he tries to get any closer to her, vanish entirely. And so, while half of
him is dying for it to be Friday, can scarcely comprehend how he can possibly make it till Friday – the other half hopes that
Friday will never come.

Time, however, has no such reservations; and now he wakes up in the pitch-darkness of the last morning of term.

For the last quarter of the swimming team’s final training session Coach reels in the laneway markers and brings out the net
so they can play water polo. With a
whap!
the ball sails into the air; white
and gold and brown bodies leap and splash, yells and hoots clang and rebound from the yellow roof, steam wafts across the
water like poison gas over a gaudy blue battlefield. Skippy’s floating near the back where there’s not much happening. Come
over here a minute, Daniel, Coach says.

He crouches down as Skippy swims up to him. It hurts him to bend like this, you can see it in the way his eyes screw up.

You’ve missed a lot of training lately.

Sorry, Coach, I was sick. I have a note.

Notes are all well and good, but you’ll need to make that work up somehow. The meet’s only two weeks after we come back from
break, you know. There are going to be some good schools there. And your times lately have not been great.

Yes, Coach.

I really want to include you on the team, Daniel, but I’ll need to see a marked improvement when you come back.

Okay, Coach.

You’re going home for mid-term?

Yes.

There’s a pool up there – where are you again, Rush?

Yeah, there’s a pool and also I swim in the sea too.

I see. That’s good. Well, try and get as much practice as you can over the holiday, all right?

Yes, Coach.

Good. Coach’s mouth tightens. The skin of his face is wrinkly but his eyes are clear blue, like a swimming pool waiting for
someone to dive in. Daniel, is everything all right with you? Lately I’ve been getting the impression that there’s something
on your mind.

No, Coach, not at all.

You’re sure? This… this illness of yours, you’re over that?

Oh yeah, totally.

Okay. The eyes monitor his unblinkingly. I just want you to know that if there is something bothering you, you can come to
me and talk about it. That’s what I’m here for. Everything private and confidential.

Thanks, Coach.

I’m not some old teacher. I’m your coach. I take care of my boys.

I know that, Coach. Everything’s fine though.

That’s good. You’re looking forward to seeing your parents, I bet?

Sure.

How are they doing?

Fine.

Your mum?

She’s fine.

Coach’s hand on his shoulder. You give them my very best, okay? They should be very proud of you. You say that to them from
me. He stands up.

Okay I will.

And remember, train hard! I want you on that bus to Galway.

Okay.

But Coach has turned away and is blowing his whistle at Siddartha Niland, who is jumping around waving a pair of swimming
togs. In the shallow end Duane Grehan is crying out, My shorts! My shorts!

Steam rolls around the water in swaggering piles. But to your skin it is freezing cold.

Very last class before mid-term. Until recently, the Irish teacher, Ms Ni Riain, in spite of her advanced years, strangely
conical breasts, and appearance, thanks to whatever brand of foundation she uses, of being made out of toffee, was widely
considered Seabrook’s number one babe, and the object of more than a few fixations – which no doubt says something about the
nature of desire and its surprising willingness to work with the materials at hand. Since the arrival of Miss McIntyre, however,
that particular illusion has been shattered, and Irish is now just another dull class to be struggled through.

There are ways of easing that struggle, though. In the middle of a boring sequence of interchanges on the Modh Coinníollach,
Gaelic’s infamously difficult conditional mood, Casey Ellington raises his hand. ‘Miss?’

‘Yes, Casey?’

‘Someone told me that Hallowe’en actually started in Ireland,’ Casey says with a furrowed brow. ‘That can’t be true… can it?’

The name of the boy who first discovered Ms Ni Riain’s undergraduate degree in Irish folklore is lost to time, but the proud
work he began lives on to this day. Angle it in the right way and a single well-placed question can sometimes burn up an entire
class.

Hallowe’en, Casey Ellington learns, is a direct descendant of the Celtic rite of Samhain. In days of Yore, Samhain – also
known as Feile Moingf hinne, or the Feast of the White Goddess – was one of the most important festivals. Held at the end
of October, it marked the end of one pastoral year and the beginning of the next: an enchanted time, when the gates between
this world and the Otherworld were opened, and ancient forces were let loose on the land.

‘Otherworld?’ Mitchell Gogan raising his hand this time.

‘Irish folklore is dominated by tales of a mysterious supernatural race called the Sidhe,’ Ms Ni Riain says. ‘The Sidhe inhabited
another world which shared the same space as ours but could not be seen by humans.
Sidhe
is usually translated as
fairies
’ – any giggling here is vigorously stifled in the interests of keeping the digression in the air – ‘but these fairies didn’t
have pretty wings or little pink frocks or hang around flower petals. They were taller than humans, and famous for their cruelty.
They’d turn men blind, steal newborn babies, cast spells on whole herds of cattle so that they wouldn’t eat and pined away,
just for fun. It was considered bad luck even to speak their name. On the night of Samhain, all fires were extinguished, and
the entrances to the burial mounds where they were believed to live left open until cockcrow next morning.’

‘They lived in
burial mounds
?’ says Neville Nelligan, no longer sure whether he’s time-wasting or actually interested.

‘They lived in earthworks, beside rivers, beneath particular trees, in underwater caves. They also lived in burial mounds
that dotted the countryside. Originally, the word
sidhe
referred to these mounds, which were built by an older civilization, thousands of years before. Later on, people came to
think of them as palaces that belonged to the fairies and connected their world to ours. There were folk-tales about men who
fell asleep near one of these mounds and woke up with the gift of poetry or storytelling, or who discovered a door in the
hillside and found their way into a feast underground – always with lovely harp music, sumptuous food, beautiful maidens –
only to wake up next morning on the hillside, with no sign of the doorway, and go into the village to find that hundreds of
years had passed and everyone they knew was dead.’

Perhaps it’s the sombre weather, the gaunt wind and skeletal rattling of the fallen leaves outside, or maybe it’s heightened
sensibilities from the incipient Hop, but these stories take on a weird palpability – you can
feel
them, a shivery, mournful fog that weaves
its way through the air. ‘So if they lived in burial mounds –’ Geoff barely daring to believe it ‘– does that mean the fairies
were…
undead
?’

‘Gods, fairies, ghosts, these were all mixed together as inhabitants of the Otherworld,’ the teacher says. ‘Initially the
fairy legends may have started off as stories of the dead living on, feasting in their chambers. Or as a way of explaining
what happened to this previous, pre-Celtic civilization that had now disappeared. But the point is that at Samhain, all of
these strange beings, who lived side by side with us but who for the most part we didn’t see, became visible and went roaming
the land.’