Skippy Dies (35 page)

‘They did not go into it, but they were very specific about it not being because they didn’t love me, and I know because I
asked them that very question.’

‘What did they say? Did they say it would be character-building?’

Mario suddenly takes on a hunted look.

‘Face it, Mario, the only reason any of us are here is that our parents don’t want a bunch of stinky, no-longer-cute adolescents
getting in their hair.’

Skippy turns round. ‘Would you say “Hi” or “Hey”? If you were talking to a girl?’

‘I would say, “Put on your crash-helmet, hot stuff, because you are about to have the ride of your life!” ’

‘I would say, “Please ignore my friend, his parents dropped him on his head when he was a baby, over and over, because they
do not love him.” ’

Ed’s buzzes with blonde hair and St Brigid’s plaid; but Lori’s not there, and the table where they sat that night is occupied
by two others blithely unaware of its history. At the back of the restaurant, however, they find Ruprecht, surrounded by maths
books.

‘What have you got so far?’ he asks.

‘ “H,” ’ Skippy says.

‘ “H,” ’ muses Ruprecht. ‘ “H”.’

‘A haiku would be nice and sort of different,’ Geoff says, mostly to himself. ‘Lori, your eyes… your big green eyes…’

‘How about asking her a riddle?’ Ruprecht says.

‘A riddle?’

‘Yes, a riddle always grabs the attention. Something about your name, for instance. Instead of “this is Skippy,” you could
say, “Who am I? Above a rope, or Down Under. Pass over my name, and you will find it.” Something like that.’

‘What?’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘Ruprecht, have you ever actually
met
a woman?’

‘
Lorelei Wakeham
,’ Geoff blurts, ‘
your sad eyes of emerald are my only stars
.’

Everybody stops dead and stares at Geoff. ‘It’s a haiku,’ he explains.

Ruprecht repeats the words softly to himself:

‘Seventeen syllables,’ he pronounces.

‘Holy smoke, Geoff, that’s really beautiful.’

‘Oh, it’s just a little something I thought up,’ Geoff demurs.

‘You see, this, this is what I have meant by oomph,’ Mario tells Skippy. ‘A haiku like this is the express train to Sexville.’

‘Yeah, and Geoff can recite it at your funeral after Carl kills you,’ Dennis scowls; but the heady combination of Japanese
poetry and chocolate doughnuts sweeps away any misgivings, and Skippy hurries to key in his message before anyone can change
his mind.

Ever since the Hop, Ruprecht has been acting strangely. According to Mario, who also stayed in school over mid-term, he spent
most of the break in his laboratory, and since term resumed he has scarcely been seen. In the morning and at lunch break he
skips the Ref and heads directly for the basement, huffing down the corridor with papers spilling from his pockets and a distrait
air; meanwhile in class he keeps putting up his hand to ask convoluted questions no one can follow – haranguing Lurch about
Riemannian space
, pestering Mr Farley about
Planck energy
, in religion, most startlingly, asking Brother Jonas whether God was God in all universes, or ‘just in this universe’.

Loss of appetite, sleeplessness, erratic behaviour – if you didn’t know better, you’d almost think Ruprecht, like his room-mate,
was in love. You do know better, though, so you conclude it’s far more likely to be something to do with this new theory he’s
been going on about.

Actually, Ruprecht has discovered, the term “M-theory” is something of a misnomer.
Theory
suggests a hypothesis of some sort, a line of inquiry, a set of principles, at the very least a vague idea of what it is,
itself,
about
. M-theory offers none of these things. It is pure enigma: a nebulous, shadowy, multi-faceted entity infinitely bigger than
what it was originally intended to explain. Confronted with it, the best scientists in the world are as schoolboys – less
than schoolboys,
cavemen
, primitives who, foraging with their stone axes in the jungle, stumble upon a spaceship squatting huge and opaque amid the
ferns. It swallows entire fields of mathematics like they were nothing at all. The most complicated equations devised by the
most brilliant minds operating at the very limit of human capability represent only the most childish gestures at description
of its
outermost edges, weak flames that reveal the barest inkling of the vastness retiring back into the darkness. For all their
labours, the reality of the theory – what it actually
means
, what it
says
, what it is a theory
of
– remains hidden behind the inscrutable M, and while each of them dreams of being the one who will crack it, bring the theory,
like King Kong wrapped in chains, into the light, they are prone, late at night, to the chilly thought that rather than illuminating,
their efforts are merely feeding it, gorging it with knowledge, which it devours with no sign of satiety.

‘So what’s the
point
of it?’ Dennis takes a dim view both of the theory and of Ruprecht’s obsession, which he suspects to be just another layer
of self-mystification.

‘Well, I suppose the “point” would be a total explanation of reality,’ Ruprecht harrumphs. ‘I imagine that’s what the basic
“point” would be.’

‘But it’s just a load of maths. How’s that going to help anybody?’

‘There is already too many maths,’ Mario chimes in. ‘More beaver, less maths, that’s what I say.’

‘Yes, well, if Newton had said that, we wouldn’t have the law of gravity,’ Ruprecht says. ‘If James Clerk Maxwell had said,
“More beaver, less maths,” we wouldn’t have electricity. Maths and the universe go hand in hand. Formulae worked out in a
single copybook with a single pencil can transform the entire world. Look at Einstein. E=mc
²
.’

‘So what?’ says Dennis.

‘So, if it weren’t for “a load of maths”, we’d all be living in shacks in fields, tending sheep.’

‘Good,’ says Dennis.

‘Oh, you’d like living in a world without phones or DVDs, would you?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘You’d like going to hospital and being operated on without an anaesthetic, in candlelight, by doctors who had no clue what
was wrong with you because there were no X-ray machines?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘You would?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, good.’

‘Good.’

‘Good.’

The theory is not without its doubters, to be sure, and not all of them are as ill-informed as Dennis.

‘Mathematically, yes, it does have a lot of explanatory potential,’ Mr Farley says, after yet another Science class has been
diverted into a discussion of the possible physics of other universes. ‘But that doesn’t actually make it
true
. A lot of people have very compelling theories about what happened to Atlantis. There’s even a theory that Ireland is the
remnant of Atlantis. But unless they could verify it somehow, show you some sort of proof, you wouldn’t believe them, would
you?’

‘No,’ Ruprecht admits.

‘The fact is that it would take a trillion trillion times more power than our most powerful energy source to find any evidence
for M-theory. On those grounds alone, many scientists would say that it simply isn’t commensurate with twenty-first-century
science. That is, even if it’s true, there’s not a lot
we
can actually do with it, any more than Galileo could have used, for instance, computer operating code if he’d stumbled across
it back in the seventeenth century. So while it’s undoubtedly interesting, we shouldn’t let it obscure the less glamorous
but just as important scientific work there is to do here on planet Earth. Does that sound fair?’

‘Yes,’ Ruprecht concedes.

No! The more arguments he hears against it, the deeper his adoration grows for this esoteric, unreadable scripture that the
crude unthinking world will not take time to understand – the longer he spends in his basement lost in topologies, mapping
out the imaginary surfaces that undulate beneath its hyperspatial penumbra, shunning human company except for other faceless
devotees in sleepless Internet chatrooms, reciting back and forth
those golden shibboleths, string, multiverse, supersymmetry, gravitino, the theory’s hundred names…

In fact, maybe it is love after all. Why can’t we fall in love with a theory? Is it a person we fall in love with, or the
idea of a person? So yes, Ruprecht has fallen in love. It was love at first sight, occurring the moment he saw Professor Tamashi
present that initial diagram, and it has unfolded exponentially ever since. The question of reason, then, the question of
evidence, these are wasted on him. Since when has love ever looked for reasons, or evidence? Why would love bow to the reality
of things, when it creates a reality of its own, so much more vivid, wherein everything resonates to the key of the heart?

Once upon a time there was a beautiful young girl named Lorelei who lived on the banks of the river Rhine. She fell in love
with a sailor who was going off to sea. ‘When I come back I will marry you,’ he said, so every day she would go up to the
cliffs and watch out for his ship. But it never came. Finally one day she got a letter from him. He said he had married another
girl, so Lorelei threw herself off the cliff and into the river. To this day she appears on a rock, singing her song and combing
her hair. If you hear the song, you can’t escape it, you will sail onto the rocks and she will pull you underwater. If you
see her, she is so beautiful that you go insane.

Focus, Daniel, focus! Coach calls from the side.

They are the first to use the pool since the holiday. The surface has been harvested of bluebottles and Band-Aids, it shines
like amethyst. In the lanes around Skippy, the machine-like churn of the team, ploughing steadily up and down. But he can’t
do it. It’s like the water is conspiring against him, like he can feel the individual molecules pushing him back. Like something
is there, trying to take hold of him.

Come on, Dan, get it together!

He shakes it off, plunges back into the spell of chlorine, imagines himself surging towards a girl kneeling at the top, combing
her hair as she waits for him, humming irresistibly,
If I had three wishes I would give away two…

Dawn is just breaking, pinkening the perspex roof, as they climb out for the showers.

So where is the race taking place? Coach asks.

Ballinasloe, Antony ‘Air Raid’ Taylor says.

And when?

November 15th, Siddartha Niland says, his golden body rippling and glistening.

Wrong and wrong, Coach says. The race is going on this very minute, right here. He taps his head. In your mind, he says. That’s
where a race is won or lost. If you don’t have the right attitude, it doesn’t matter how strong or how fit you are. From now
until November 15, I want that race to be all you think about. Write it in your diaries, on your calendars, on the insides
of your eyelids. Everything else comes second. Even girls. Girls will still be there when the race is over. And you’ll do
a lot better with them if we win.

Everybody laughs.

Now I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again. Not everybody’s going to make the cut. If you made it last time, don’t assume
you’ll be selected this time. If you were left out last time, you could be racing this time. A lot can happen between then
and now.

After training Skippy gets sick in the toilets by the Ref.

Later in his room he puts an X on the Garfield calendar. The swimming goggles look down at him from their hook; he feels his
whole arm go cold, as if he’d plunged it into a barrel of ice-water.

The knackers did not kill Carl. When they saw what he had done to his arm they did not even break it. So now everything is
even and they can all be friends.

Friends?

We have a good thing going with those pills, dude, Barry says. These guys can help us. Give us protection, access to distributors,
good deals on other products. All we have to do is cut them a little slice of our profits.

They broke your arm, Carl says.

They had to, Barry said. That’s just the way it works. It’s just business, that’s all.

So now they see the knackers nearly every day. In the park, behind the shopping mall, in Deano’s flat. Deano is the one with
bad teeth. Shaved-Head, he’s the leader, is called Mark. Greasy-Hair = Knoxer, Spots = Ste. Barry laughs and jokes with them
like that night never happened, and at school he walks around like he’s ten feet tall. He gives shit to fifth-years twice
his size and they back off. How do they know Barry has the knackers on his side? It’s like they just know.

One night Deano tells them about Mark. See your man? He acts hard but he’s really a posh cunt like youse lads. He went to
your school then the priests kicked him out for dealing hash. Now he’s stuck with us bunch of scumbags. But it’s good, see,
cos he’s got ambitions. He’s like you, he says to Barry, always thinkin.

The deal is they hand over a cut of their Ritalin sales to Mark, and once a fortnight they buy other stuff from him for a
special price. Their first consignment is a few E’s and some coke but mostly the mental weed. Carl and Barry are supposed
to sell it but they end up smoking most of it themselves. It fries your brain, it’s like on a hot day when the tar on the
road melts and your feet get stuck in it or like when you have a shower and the bathroom mirror gets all fogged up, like you’ll
be talking to someone and then all of a sudden it’ll be like half an hour later and instead of fractions the teacher will
be going on about exports and it will be a different teacher and you will be in a different room without knowing how you got
there.

It’s good that they have something new to sell though because there are serious problems with the diet pill market. Some of
the junior school parents have got suspicious about how hyperactive their kids have been lately, and started tightening up
on the prescriptions. Carl and Barry’s supply has been cut in half, but it doesn’t even matter because the girls aren’t buying
anyway. Why not? They never stay interested in anything for more than two weeks, Barry says, that’s the problem with girls
as a customer base. He tries ringing a couple of them up offering them coke but this just seems to freak them out. Now a couple
of them buy like one E a week and the rest totally ignore Carl and Barry.