Skippy Dies (22 page)

‘And where did they go, then?’ Vince Bailey asks.

‘Where did who go?’

‘The gods, or the fairies, or whoever they were?’

‘Well, I don’t know…’ Ms Ni Riain hasn’t considered this.

‘Maybe they were hit by a meteor,’ Niall Henaghan interjects eagerly. ‘Like the dinosaurs?’

‘
Maybe they’re still there…
’ a zombified voice suggests.

‘Geoff, I’ve told you a hundred times about that voice.’

‘
Sorry
.’

‘Anyway, none of this is getting us any closer to understanding the Modh Coinníollach. Where were we?’ Ms Ni Riain settles
her attention on the textbook – but at that moment the bell goes. School’s out! The boys leap out of their seats; she smiles
ruefully, realizing she’s been had. ‘All right. Have a good holiday, boys. Enjoy the dance tonight.’

‘Happy Hallowe’en, Miss!’

‘Happy Hallowe’en!

‘
Happy Hallowe’en
…’

‘Oh, Geoff, for the last time…’ She trails off; Geoff has already left the room…

By four o’clock – except for the small gaggle that scurries back and forth between the Art Room and the Sports Hall, arms
heaped with dyed-black netting, papier-mâché skulls, partially eviscerated pumpkins with craft knives still jutting from their
flanks – the school is utterly deserted. Or so it appears; beneath the superficial emptiness, the air groans with the freight
of anticipation: the silence shrieks, the space trembles, crammed with previsions so feverish and intense that they begin
to threaten to flicker into being, there in the depopulated hallways. Meanwhile, above the old stone campus, sombre grey clouds
gather, laden and growling with pent-up energies of their own.

Upstairs, although the sun has not yet quite set – and although, of course, for the rest of the world it does not officially
fall for another five days – Hallowe’en is in full swing. The Gothic environs of the Junior Rec Room abound with bedsheet
ghosts, plastic-fanged vampires, rubicund Osama bin Ladens and robed Jedi. Frankenstein’s Monster applies contusions to Victor
Hero (deceased); two incompletely wrapped mummies quarrel over the last roll of toilet paper; the Scarlet Pimpernel hatches
a plan with the Green Goblin to buy drink with the Goblin’s big brother’s fake ID. Here and there older boarders from the
higher years, still waiting around for lifts home, look on scornfully and make sarcastic remarks. But the boys barely hear,
being too caught up in the moment, and in their costumes, where they feel curiously at home – seeming to
inhabit
them in a way quite different to the awkward relationships they have with their school uniforms.

Now, as the sun’s last rays glimmer out, the air momentarily shivers – tightening, drawing in on itself, as though experiencing
a chill. Through the window the first car-headlights sweep up the avenue; a
caravan of others wink in the distance beyond the tennis courts. An elf and what looks like a pint-sized science teacher bustle
out of their dorm room to call on another three doors down.

‘Yes?’ Dennis quarter-opening the door.

‘Are you nearly ready?’

‘
I
am, but I’m waiting for Niall.’

Strolling up the corridor, clicking his fingers, Mario appears in a dark brown leather jacket, a pair of impenetrably black
sunglasses and a glistening patina of hairgel.

‘Are you bitches hot to trot? It’s about to start.’

‘Who are you supposed to be, the Fonz?’

‘I am going as the famous stud, Mario Bianchi,’ Mario says, with a snap of his gum.

Dennis just rolls his eyes.

‘What in God’s name is that
smell
?’ Ruprecht covers his nose with a tweedy sleeve.

‘That, my friend, is aftershave. Some day, if you ever start shaving and you stop being a gay, you will maybe use it yourself.’

‘It smells like you’ve been pickled,’ Ruprecht says.

Mario chews his gum, unperturbed, runs a hand through his slimy hair. ‘So what are we waiting for?’

‘Niall,’ Dennis says, still keeping himself semi-concealed behind the door.

Mario turns his attention to Skippy, panning slowly up from his runners, fitted out with tiny wings, to his crepe-paper hunting
hat, which sports a long speckled feather. ‘Who are you? Wait, let me guess… you’re that faggy elf, from that gay game of
yours?’

Skippy’s been working on his costume for the last three nights, and it does look impressively elvish. Over a green tanktop
(one of several) of Ruprecht’s that has shrunk in the wash, he’s slung a quiver of glo-stick Arrows of Light; a plywood-and-tinfoil
Sword of Songs hangs from his belt in a scabbard made from tennis-racket grip, alongside a rolled-up map of Hopeland (authentic
parchment effect: soak an ordinary sheet of paper in strong coffee, then put it in the oven at 200 degrees).

Ruprecht’s outfit is decidedly more prosaic – slacks, tie, horn-rimmed spectacles and a brown tweed jacket with leather elbow
patches that is too long and insufficiently wide.

‘Uh, Von Boring, did anyone explain to you that you’re supposed to wear a costume…?’

Ruprecht blinks in surprise. ‘I’m Hideo Tamashi,’ he says.

Mario looks blank.

‘Professor Emeritus of Physics at Stanford? Revolutionized the entire field of cosmology? Probably the most important scientist
since Einstein?’

‘Oh, that Hideo Tamashi,’ Mario says.

Dennis shakes his head. ‘I have to hand it to you, Skippy, Blowjob, I didn’t think you could possibly look any nerdier than
you already are. But this is something really special.’

‘What about you, Dennis?’ Skippy says. ‘Who are you going as?’

Without replying, Dennis steps out into the hall and perfoms a 360 in a rumpled charcoal-grey suit. A neat row of ballpoint
pens pokes from his shirt pocket and a Seabrook pin from his tie. ‘Can’t you tell? Let me give you a clue…’ With two hands
he rubs vigorously at his face and hair, emerging flushed and bellicose, and in a stentorian voice bellows, ‘Come on, you
slackjaws, show some moxie! I’m not running a kindergarten here! Ship up or shape out! My way or the highway!’ His eyes flick
eagerly over the faces of the others, in whom realization is just beginning to twitch… ‘Well, actually, the costume’s not
quite finished – I mean it’s only half of the costume,’ he says cryptically, then, craning his neck, calls into the room behind
him, ‘are you nearly ready in there?’

‘I’m ready,’ Niall’s voice, sounding singularly dejected, returns.

‘Behold, gentlemen…’ The door at last swings open, and Dennis steps aside with a ringmasterly bow to reveal, in the middle
of the room, Niall in a disastrous floral pinafore, a blonde wig and high heels. The dress has been enhanced by two balloons
up top and a cushion in the belly area; Niall, underneath a lurid layer of enthusiastically applied make-up, wears an expression
of profound suffering and humiliation.

It takes a moment for the others to realize the full genius of this double-act, then the first giggles emerge, transmuting
swiftly into guffaws.

‘What are you clowns laughing at?’ Dennis barks. ‘Laughing’s for chumps! Take a note, Trudy –’ resignedly, Niall reaches into
his handbag and produces a clipboard. ‘Van Doren – suspension! Juster – expulsion! The wop I want served up on a pizza! No,
wait – a calzone! God damn it, Trudy, why the hell are you writing so slowly, you’re not pregnant again, are you?’

‘No master, sorry master,’ Niall cringes in falsetto.

‘That’s the spirit.’ Dennis claps him on the back, sending a rugby ball tumbling from between Niall’s legs, swaddled in a
blue and gold Seabrook jersey.

‘If he finds out about this you are so dead,’ Skippy says. ‘You’re deader than dead.’

‘Juster, when I want your opinion I’ll ask for it,’ Dennis continues, then turns to the band of masquers who’ve halted on
their way downstairs to mill around the doorway. ‘Fix that hair! Close that mind! Repeat after me! Page me the second the
old man croaks it! Now, are you boys ready? A Seabrook boy is always ready. Ready to work. Ready to play. Ready to listen
to his teachers, especially the greatest educator of them all, Jesus. As Jesus said to me once, Greg, what’s your secret?
And I said, Jesus – study your notes! Get to class! Shave that beard! You show up to your first day on the job dressed like
a hippie, of course they’re going to crucify you, I don’t care whose son you are…’

In this fashion, the faux Acting Principal and his ersatz wife leave the room and are ushered to the head of the crowd to
lead the procession downstairs, the laughter of the other boys ringing around them and split more or less equally between
admiration of their bravado and gleeful anticipation of the moment they get caught.

‘Wait – I just have to get something –’ The cavalcade’s already tripped away unhearing, down the spiral staircase. Back in
his room, Skippy flips over the pillow and hovers there.

He hasn’t taken a pill in days and days. It’s partly because the last time he took one he threw up on Kevin Wong; but it’s
mostly because of seeing her, because the feelings he’s had ever since he saw her have chased away the feelings he was having
before – maybe not chased them away entirely, but to somewhere deep underground, where you can barely hear them whispering
and growling. He’s still freaking out – today, especially, he hasn’t been able to eat and every time he thinks of Frisbee
Girl, which is every second, his heart starts going a trillion miles an hour – but it’s a different kind of freaking out.
It’s not like being attacked by his own brain, joined forces with the stuff around him so he has to cover his head. It’s not
the moments gathered against him, throwing him from one to the other. Instead everything follows on from everything else,
the way it does in a story, and the air around him is turbulent and pure and cold, like standing under a waterfall. Can there
be such a thing as happy terror? All Skippy knows is that he doesn’t feel like blocking it out. Just to be on the safe side,
though, he slips the tube into his quiver; then he runs off after the others, as they twist through the narrow dark-panelled
corridors of the Tower and out into the Quad where they stop and catch their breath…

Night has fallen, utterly black, moon and stars inked out by storm-clouds that seem, even now, still to be arriving on the
scene; the air is full of staticky rain that doesn’t fall but hangs, tingling, waiting for you to walk into it. That’s not
all it’s full of. From the leaf-strewn laneway leading down to Ed’s Doughnut House, from the avenue that snakes past the priests’
residence to the back gate by St Brigid’s, from the road by the tennis court that goes to the main entrance, costumed forms
are arriving, many of them – among the cowboys, devils, giant spiders, rugby internationals, Jasons and Freddys, corpses in
various states of decay – costumed
female
forms. The car park is a riot of bare legs, flashing silver in headlights as they debouch from Saabs, Audis, SUVs; and as
soon as these latter have gone, coats are shrugged off to reveal equally bare arms, bare mid-riffs and as much cleavage as
they can get away with.

It seems the girls have by and large played down creativity in favour of the opportunity to dress slutty. Naughty nurses sashay
up with kinky cowgirls; a pneumatic Lara Croft in thigh-high boots carries the nacreous tail-fin of a mermaid who for one
heart-stopping moment appears naked from the waist up, till you realize she’s wearing a fleshtone leotard; S&M cop, porno-Cleopatra,
four woozy princesses tripping arm-in-arm in princess heels up the bumpy laneway; two Catwomen, already arching their backs
at each other, a host of
BETHani
s in various guises familiar from the videos – all flocking to join the line that extends down the steps from the doors of
the Sports Hall through which music swirls and colours glint like promises…

The boarders, attempting to take this in, are for a moment reluctant to move: it’s as though they’ve stumbled upon Xanadu,
right here in their own school, and they fear they might somehow shatter the illusion, scatter this heady dream to the four
winds… Then, as a man, they think better of it, and hurry down to join the queue.

At the top of the steps the Automator is delivering his last-minute instructions to Howard the Coward and Miss McIntyre: ‘It
is now seven forty-five. At eight-thirty I want these doors
closed
. There is to be ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE after eight-thirty, under any circumstances. Prior to ten-thirty p.m., no one is
to leave except with your permission. Once they leave, there is NO READMITTANCE. Anyone behaving in a disruptive or inappropriate
fashion, I want their parents called immediately. And anyone –’ he raises his voice here ‘– found to be in possession or under
the influence of alcohol or controlled substances of any kind is to be punished with immediate suspension, pending full investigation
by the School Board.’

He casts a searing gaze over the line of suddenly terrified-looking youngsters frozen silently on the hall steps, holding
their alcoholic breath.

‘Good,’ he pronounces. Already late for his fundraising dinner at Seabrook Rugby Club, he takes his leave of the chaperones
and
strides down the line in the direction of the car park; then, a little distance past the tail of the queue, he stops. Scratching
his head, he turns and slowly retraces his steps, as if he is not quite sure what he is looking for, until he arrives at Dennis
and Niall.

A silence falls over the assembled masquers. Smoothing down his red tie, adjusting his charcoal blazer, the Automator stares
at Dennis through narrowed eyes. Dennis, identically attired, hums nervously to himself, keeping his eyes fixed on the reptilian
neck of Max Brady in front of him. Giggles begin to escape up and down the line. The effect, for anyone looking on, which
everyone is, is akin to that of the Automator staring into a fairground mirror. His gaze flicks over to Niall, then back to
Dennis. He begins to say something, then stops; after a full minute of naked staring, in which Dennis comes close to tears,
he grunts, turns on his heel and continues on his way.