Skippy Dies (3 page)

‘Sorry,’ he says again, reflexively.

‘Stop apologizing,’ she laughs.

He introduces himself. ‘I’m Howard Fallon. I teach History. You’re standing in for Finian Ó Dálaigh?’

‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘Apparently he’s going to be out till Christmas, whatever happened to him.’

‘Gallstones,’ Howard says.

‘Oh,’ she says.

Howard wishes he could unsay
gallstones
. ‘So,’ he rebegins effortfully, ‘I’m actually on my way home. Can I give you a lift?’

She cocks her head. ‘Didn’t you have a meeting?’

‘Yes,’ he remembers. ‘But it isn’t really that important.’

‘I have my own car, thanks all the same,’ she says. ‘But I suppose you could carry my books, if you like.’

‘Okay,’ Howard says. Possibly the offer is ironic, but before she can retract it he removes the stack of binders and textbooks
from her hands and, ignoring the homicidal looks from a small clump of her pupils still mooning about the corridor, walks
alongside her towards the exit.

‘So, how are you finding it?’ he asks, attempting to haul the conversation to a more equilibrious state. ‘Have you taught
much before, or is this your first time?’

‘Oh’ – she blows upwards at a wayward strand of golden hair – ‘I’m not a teacher by profession. I’m just doing this as a favour
for Greg, really. Mr Costigan, I mean. God, I’d forgotten about this Mister, Miss stuff. It’s so funny.
Miss McIntyre
.’

‘Staff are allowed to use first names, you know.’

‘Mmm… Actually I’m quite enjoying being
Miss McIntyre
. Anyhow, Greg and I were talking one day and he was saying they were having problems finding a good substitute, and it so
happens that once upon a time I had fantasies of being a teacher, and I was between contracts, so I thought why not?’

‘What’s your field normally?’ He holds open the main door for her and they step out into the autumn air, which has grown cold
and crisp.

‘Investment banking?’

Howard receives this information with a studied neutrality, then says casually, ‘I used to work in that area myself, actually.
Spent about two years in the City. Futures, primarily.’

‘What happened?’

He cracks a grin. ‘Don’t you read the papers? Not enough future to go around.’

She doesn’t react, waiting for the correct answer.

‘Well, I’ll probably get back into it someday,’ he blusters. ‘This is just a temporary thing, really. I sort of fell into
it. Although at the same time, it’s nice, I think, to give something back? To feel like you’re making a difference?’ They
make their way around the sixth-years’ car park, a series of Lexuses and TTs – and Howard’s heart sinks as his own car comes
into view.

‘What’s with the feathers?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing.’ He sweeps his hand along the car’s roof, ploughing a mighty drift of white feathers over the side. They
pluff to the ground, from where some float back up to adhere to his trousers. Miss McIntyre takes a step backwards. ‘It’s
just a… ah, sort of a gag the boys play.’

‘They call you Howard the Coward,’ she remarks, like a tourist inquiring the meaning of a puzzling local idiom.

‘Yes.’ Howard laughs mirthlessly, shovelling more feathers from his windscreen and bonnet and not offering an explanation.
‘You know, they’re good kids, generally, in this place, but there’s a few that can be a bit, ah, high-spirited.’

‘I’ll be on my guard,’ she says.

‘Well, like I say, it’s just a small percentage. Most of them… I mean, generally speaking it’s a wonderful place to work.’

‘You’re covered in feathers,’ she says judiciously.

‘Yes,’ he harrumphs, swiping his trousers summarily, straightening his tie. Her eyes, which are a brilliant and dazzling shade
of blue custom-made for sparkling mockingly, sparkle mockingly at him. Howard has had enough humiliation for one day; he is
just about to bow out with the last shreds of his dignity, when she says, ‘So what’s it like, teaching History?’

‘What’s it like?’ he repeats.

‘I’m really liking doing Geography again.’ She gazes dreamily around at the ice-blue sky, the yellowing trees. ‘You know,
these titanic battles between different forces that actually created the shape of the world we’re walking around in today…
it’s so
dramatic
…’ She squeezes her hands sensually, a goddess forging
worlds out of raw matter, then fixes The Eyes on Howard again. ‘And History – that must be so much fun!’

This isn’t the first word that springs to mind, but Howard limits himself to a bland smile.

‘What are you teaching at the moment?’

‘Well, in my last class we were doing the First World War.’

‘Oh!’ She claps her hands. ‘I
love
the First World War. The boys must be enjoying that.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ he says.

‘You should read them Robert Graves,’ she says.

‘Who?’

‘He was in the trenches,’ she replies; then adds, after a pause, ‘He was also one of the great love poets.’

‘I’ll take a look,’ he scowls. ‘Any other tips for me? Any other lessons you’ve gleaned from your five days in the profession?’

She laughs. ‘If I have any more I’ll be sure and pass them on. It sounds like you need them.’ She lifts the books out of Howard’s
arms and aims her car key at the enormous white-gold SUV parked next door to Howard’s dilapidated Bluebird. ‘See you tomorrow,’
she says.

‘Right,’ Howard says.

But she doesn’t move, and neither does he: she holds him there a moment purely by the light of her spectacular eyes, looking
him over with the tip of her tongue tucked in the corner of her mouth, as if she is deciding what to have for dinner. Then,
smiling at him coyly with a row of pointed white teeth, she says, ‘You know, I’m not going to sleep with you.’

At first Howard is sure he must have misheard her; and when he realizes that he has not, he is still too stunned to reply.
So he just stands there, or perhaps totters, and the next thing he knows she’s climbed into her jeep and pulled away, sending
white feathers swirling about his ankles.

The door swings open with a creak and you step inside, into the Great Hall. Spiderwebs cover everything, drifting from floor
to ceiling like veils from a thousand left-behind brides. You look at the map and go through a door on the far side of the
hall. This room used to be the library; books cover the floor in dusty piles. On the table is a scroll, but before you can
read it the grandfather clock bursts open and there are one, two, three zombies coming at you! You swipe at them with the
torch and duck round the other side of the table, but more appear in the doorway, drawn by the smell of someone alive –

‘Skippy, this is totally boring.’

‘Yeah, Skip, do you think someone else could have a go, maybe?’

‘I’ll just be a second,’ Skippy mumbles, as the zombies pursue him up a rickety staircase.

‘What do you think these zombies do all day?’ Geoff wonders. ‘When there’s no one around they want to eat?’

‘They order pizza,’ Dennis says. ‘Which Mario’s dad delivers.’

‘I told you a thousand times, my father is not a pizza deliveryman, he is an important diplomat in the Italian embassy,’ Mario
snaps.

‘Seriously, though, how often is anyone going to call into their creepy house? Like, what do they do, just wander around it
all day long, moaning to each other?’

‘They sound sort of like my parents,’ Geoff realizes. He gets up and stretches out his arms and staggers around the room,
saying in a sepulchral zombie voice, ‘
Geoff… put out the garbage… Geoff… I can’t find my glasses… We’ve made great sacrifices to send you to that school, Geoff…
’

Skippy wishes they would stop talking. Heat coils round his
brain like a fat snake, tighter and tighter, making his eyelids heavy… and now just for a second the screen blurs, enough
time for a raggy arm to fling itself around his neck – he shakes awake, he tries to wriggle free, but it’s too late, they’re
all over him, pulling him to the ground, crowding around till he can’t even see himself, their long nails slashing down, their
rotten teeth gnashing, and the little spinning light that is his soul whirls up to the ceiling…

‘
Game over, Skippy
,’ Geoff says in the zombie voice, laying a heavy hand on his shoulder.

‘Finally,’ Mario says. ‘Now can we play something else?’

Skippy’s dorm, like all the other dorms, is in the Tower, which sits at the end of Our Lady’s Hall and is the very oldest
part of Seabrook. In days of Yore, when the school was first built, the entire student population ate, slept and sat through
classes here; nowadays, day boys form the majority of the pupils, and out of each year of two hundred there are only twenty
or thirty unlucky souls who have to come back here after the bell has gone. Any Harry Potter-type fantasies tend to get squashed
pretty quickly: life in the Tower, an ancient building composed mostly of draughts, is a deeply unmagical experience, spent
at the mercy of lunatic teachers, bullies, athlete’s foot epidemics, etc. There are some small consolations. At a point in
life in which the lovely nurturing homes built for them by their parents have become unendurable Guantánomos, and any time
spent away from their peers is experienced at best as a mind-numbing commercial break for things no one wants to buy on some
old person’s TV channel and at worst as a torture not incomparable to being actually genuinely nailed to a cross, the boarders
do enjoy a certain prestige among the boys. They have a sort of sheen of independence; they can cultivate mysterious personae
without having to worry about mums or dads showing up and blowing the whole thing by telling people about amusing ‘accidents’
they had when they were little or by publically admonishing them to please stop walking around with their hands wedged in
their pockets like a pervert.

Unarguably the best thing about being a boarder, though, is that the Tower overlooks, in spite of the feverish tree-planting
efforts of the priests, the yard of St Brigid’s, the girls’ school next door. Every morning, lunchtime and evening the air
rings with high feminine voices like lovely secular bells, and at night-time, before they close the curtains, you can see
without even needing to look through the telescope – which is a good thing, because Ruprecht is extremely particular about
what his telescope is used for, and always keeps it pointed into the girl-less reaches of the sky above – your female counterparts
walking around in the upper windows, talking, brushing their hair or even, if you believe Mario, doing naked aerobics. That’s
as close as you’ll get, though, because, while it’s the constant subject of plans and boasts and tall tales, no one has ever
verifiably breached the wall between the two schools; nor has anyone conceived of a way past the St Brigid’s janitor and his
infamous dog, Nipper, not to mention the terrifying Ghost Nun who legend has it roams the grounds after dark wielding either
a crucifix or pinking shears, depending on who you talk to.

Ruprecht Van Doren, owner of the telescope and Skippy’s room-mate, is not like the other boys. He arrived at Seabrook in January,
like a belated and non-returnable Christmas gift, after both his parents were lost on a kayaking expedition up the Amazon.
Prior to their deaths, he had been schooled at home by tutors flown in from Oxford at the behest of his father, Baron Maximilian
Van Doren, and consequently he has quite a different attitude to education from his peers. For Ruprecht, the world is a compendium
of fascinating facts just waiting to be discovered, and a difficult maths problem is like sinking into a nice warm bath. A
cursory glance around the room will give an idea of his current projects and interests. Maps of many kinds cover the walls
– maps of the moon, of near and far-off constellations, a map of the world stuck with little pins marking recent UFO sightings
– as well as a picture of Einstein and scoresheets commemorating notable Yahtzee victories. The telescope, bearing a sign
that reads
in big black letters
DO NOT TOUCH
, points out the window; a French horn gleams pompously from the foot of the bed; on the desk, hidden beneath a sheaf of inscrutable
printouts, his computer performs mysterious operations whose full nature is known only to its owner. Impressive as this may
be, it represents only a fraction of Ruprecht’s activity, most of which takes place in his ‘lab’, one of the dingy antechambers
off the basement. Down here, surrounded by yet more computers and parts of computers, more towers of unfathomable papers and
electrical arcana, Ruprecht constructs equations, conducts experiments and continues his pursuit of what he considers the
Holy Grail of science: the secret of the origins of the universe.

‘Newsflash, Ruprecht, they know about the origins of the universe. It’s called the Big Bang?’

‘Aha, but what happened
before
the Bang? What happened during it? What was it that banged?’

‘How would I know?’

‘Well, you see, that’s the whole point. From the moments
after
the Bang until this moment right now, the universe makes sense – that is to say, it obeys observable laws, laws that can
be written down in the language of mathematics. But when you go before that, to the very, very beginning, these laws no longer
apply. The equations won’t work out. If we could solve them, though, if we could understand what happened in those first few
milliseconds, it would be like a master key, which would unlock all sorts of other doors. Professor Hideo Tamashi believes
that the future of humanity could depend on our opening these doors.’

Spend twenty-four hours a day cooped up with Ruprecht and you will hear a lot about this Professor Hideo Tamashi and his groundbreaking
attempts to solve the Big Bang using ten-dimensional string theory. You will also hear a lot about Stanford, the university
where Professor Tamashi teaches, which from Ruprecht’s descriptions of it sounds like a cross between an amusement arcade
and Cloud City in
Star Wars
, a place where everyone wears jumpsuits and nothing bad ever happens.
Ruprecht has had his heart set on studying under Professor Tamashi more or less since he could walk, and whenever he mentions
the Prof, or Stanford and its
really first-rate
lab facilities, his voice takes on a starry, yearning quality, like someone describing a beautiful land glimpsed once in
a dream.