Skippy Dies (39 page)

Ruprecht returns from the lab that night to find Skippy sitting with the lights out and the duvet wrapped around him, doing
battle with a deathly-white hydra that breathes frost and flails its limbs like blizzards of razors.

‘Nasty-looking character,’ he says.

‘Ice Demon.’ Cross-legged on the floor, Skippy tugs the controller left and right, his mouth set in a tight line, his expression
one of furious concentration; when Mr Tomms comes down the corridor for lights-out he switches off the machine and gets into
bed without saying another word.

Then, just when Ruprecht is sure he is asleep, through the darkness: ‘Carl hitting me doesn’t necessarily have anything to
do with Lori.’

‘No?’

‘Carl’s an asshole. He’s always doing that kind of thing. He doesn’t need a reason.’

‘That’s true,’ Ruprecht concedes.

There is a pause, then the voice comes back over the gulf of floor between the beds. ‘Anyway, how would he even know I’d texted
her?’

Springs groan as Ruprecht redistributes himself, folding his hands on his stomach and twiddling his thumbs computatively.
‘Well, the surmise would be that your friend had told him…’

This followed by another pause, as in a long-distance phone conversation in days of Yore; and then the defiant reply, ‘She
wouldn’t do that.’ He turns on his side, towards the wall, and, shortly after, tinny music rises from his headphones, the
BETHani
song in miniature like a distant field of harmonizing grasshoppers.

Ruprecht, still humming with sugar from a feed of doughnuts
earlier, cannot sleep. He gets up, opens the SETI window, spends a while watching the computer processing the meaningless
news the universe brings it; he makes a list of random M words, moose, marker, milk, minnow, to see if any unusual connections
emerge; he watches the softly rising and falling shape of his friend, cocooned in his nimbus of nanomusic.

He is thinking about asymmetry. This is a world, he is thinking, where you can lie in bed, listening to a song as you dream
about someone you love, and your feelings and the music will resonate so powerfully and completely that it seems impossible
that the beloved, whoever and wherever he or she might be, should not
know
, should not pick up this signal as it pulsates from your heart, as if you and the music and the love and the whole universe
have merged into one force that can be channelled out into the darkness to bring them this message. But in actuality, not
only will he or she not know, there is nothing to stop that other person from lying on his or her bed at the exact same moment
listening to the exact same song and thinking about
someone else entirely
– from aiming those identical feelings in some completely opposite direction, at some totally other person, who may in turn
be lying in the dark thinking of another person still, a fourth, who is thinking of a fifth, and so on, and so on; so that
rather than a universe of neatly reciprocating pairs, love and love-returned fluttering through space nicely and symmetrically
like so many pairs of butterfly wings, instead we get chains of yearning, which sprawl and meander and culminate in an infinite
number of dead ends.

Just as the shape of natural objects like rainbows, snowflakes, crystals and blossoming flowers derives from the symmetrical
way that quarks arrange themselves in the atom – a remnant of the universe’s lost state of perfect symmetry – so Ruprecht
is convinced that the unhappy state of affairs regarding love can be traced right back to the subatomic. If you read up on
strings, you will learn that there are two different types, closed and open-ended. The closed strings are O-shaped loops that
float about like angels, insouciant of spacetime’s demands and playing no part in
our reality. It is the open-ended strings, the forlorn, incomplete U-shaped strings, whose desperate ends cling to the sticky
stuff of the universe; it is they that become reality’s building blocks, its particles, its exchangers of energy, the teeming
producers of all that complication. Our universe, one could almost say, is actually
built out of loneliness
; and that foundational loneliness persists upwards to haunt every one of its residents. But might the situation be different
in other universes? In a universe where, for instance,
all
of the strings were closed, what would love look like there? And energy? And spacetime? The siren call of the question mark:
his thoughts drift laterally, inevitably, away from Skippy and his predicament to grander matters – universes coiled voluptuously
in secret dimensions, sheets of pure sparking otherness, crimped topographies cradling forms unsullied even by being dreamed
of…

A noise summons him back to reality – a tapping, barely audible, at the window. It is a moth, beating a feeble tattoo of yearning
for the moon on the other side of the glass: another unrequited love story, Ruprecht thinks. He lifts the sash to let it out,
then goes to his copybook and writes down moon, moth. Midway through the second word he stops, and for a long moment he remains
motionless, as if stalled over the page; then he hurries back to the window and stares out, as if he could descry there in
the dark the quick upward beat of tiny wings…

Once a week, more if his schedule permits, Father Green makes the journey from the haughty garrisons of the bourgeoisie into
St Patrick’s Villas, to visit those parishioners who are too sickly or frail to attend mass. The journey is less than a mile,
but the Villas belong to a different world, a world corroded by neglect and stinking of human waste. He climbs flaking stairwells
to arrive at graffiti-limned doors; even after he announces himself, a timid eye will size him up and down through a crack
before undoing the final chain. They are women, almost exclusively. Mrs Doran, Mrs Coombes, Mrs Gulaston: liver-spotted, blue-rinsed,
forgotten, and yet, somehow, still here. Inside will be the television, muted in deference though not switched off; floral
wallpaper webbed with damp images of Padre Pio and John Paul II beside pictures in oval frames of long-deceased husbands,
of children and children’s children now living in Ongar or in Spain or simply too busy for the inconsolable laments of age.
He will sit in the kitchen; they bring him tea and he will make himself listen as they tell him of their woes – the electric
heater that is not working, the sores on their legs, the neighbourhood’s decline. It’s all gone to the dogs, Father. It’s
like a jungle. Worse than a jungle! These kids robbin cars and racin them up and down. Breakin bottles. Shoutin and screamin
at all hours. Gurriers they are, on drugs, the lot of them! It’s the drugs have been the ruin of this place. It used to be
a lovely place, Father, you remember. A lovely place. Now you daren’t go out at night. Sure even in broad daylight you’re
takin your life in your hands. They’d knock you down soon as look at you. They’d be in your flat before you’re halfway out
the door.

Father Green nods, sips from his cup. In truth, this has never
been a lovely place, not for the twenty years he has been coming here. The ‘boom’ never penetrated; to look out the window,
it might be the 1980s still, the height of the heroin plague, the police doing nothing, the politicians doing nothing. The
same faces loitering in the forecourt of the boarded-up garage, proud of their intractability, the notoriety of their home.
Wearing their failure like a badge of honour, generation after generation, parent and child. Everybody knows what they are
doing there; you may call the guards if you want, talk to a bored-sounding young man, and an hour later, if so inclined, the
squad car will roll by, and they will disperse until it has gone, or regroup outside the shopping centre, or in the park.
But nothing changes, and no one is overly concerned, as long as ‘the problem’ stays down here, in the slums.

Before he leaves today Father Green stops at the grotto of Our Lady. It used to be that no matter what horrors raged around
it this little corner remained immaculate. Now her devotees are too old and frail to maintain it, and the paintwork on the
plaster statue has bleached with time, turning her serenity to exhaustion, her gesture of providence to a shrug. Reaching
over the railings he fishes out a can, crisp packets, a condom; people eddy around him, glancing indifferently as they go
past, as they might at a tramp rooting through a rubbish bin. He hauls himself painfully back over to the street, cradling
his armful of filth to his chest, goes in search of a receptacle – when out into his path steps a man –

A
black
man, perhaps forty-five years old, glossy-skinned, muscular, the negative of the listless washed-out natives: inside Father
Green a clock winds backwards at supernatural speed, and from the man’s yellow-tinged eyes a corresponding recognition seems
to leap into being, and he raises his hands, huge, animalistic –

Gently they reach out and take the load from his. Thank you, Father, the voice says. Those familiar plodding vowels.
Tank you, Fodda
.

Of course, Father Green whispers, as the man returns inside with the garbage. Through the doorway, carousels and dusky faces
may be glimpsed: a shop, a new shop, it seems.

He is still trembling when he arrives back at the school. At dinner in the priests’ residence he is eager to discuss his encounter;
he waits for the conversation to turn to the past, as it so often does, that he might casually bring it up. Do you know, he
says when the time comes, hearing the words ring high and false in his ears, do you know, making my rounds of St Patrick’s
Villas today I was struck by the influx of Africans to the neighbourhood. A few seemed to me to be just of the age that I
might have taught them on the missions!

And he waits, braced, for what they might say.

I can never understand why in God’s name anyone would leave Africa to come here, Father Zmed remarks. Give up all that sunshine
to live in a slum.

Land of opportunity, Father Crookes responds. Civilization. Read about it in their schoolbooks, quite natural they’d want
to see it for themselves.

It’s our fault then, Father Dundon says gloomily.

What I mean to say is – Father Green attempts to steer the conversation back around – do you think it possible that those
same children we taught might by pure chance have ended up living in Seabrook? Wouldn’t that be… wouldn’t that be marvellous?

Father Zmed’s brilliant diamantine squint searching him out across the table. What is he thinking?

I’d imagine most of ’em would be dead by now, Jerome, Father Crookes says through a mouthful of dessert. Know what the life
expectancy is for the average African man?

Father Dundon sighs. I often wonder did we do the right thing at all. Heard a chap on the radio blaming the Church for the
spread of AIDS over there. Said the Pope was responsible for the deaths of 22 million people.

Well, that’s just –

Of all the silly –

That’s twice as many as Hitler, Father Dundon says.

Oh, come – they know this is wrong but they do not know
why; they look to Father Green to refute it. We can’t rewrite the word of God, he says obligingly. And disease does not give
one licence for immorality. Even in Africa.

Not everyone is like us, though, Father Zmed says to Father Green – fixing on him again with that curiously penetrating gaze,
that barely visible smile. Not everyone has the… moral strength for abstinence.

Then they must pray for it, Father Green says, and crumples his napkin summarily.

Dead, so. Heart eased, he stays with them at the table till well into the night, trading old war stories, what they’d done,
what they’d achieved. Young men faced with an impossible task, a continent, a whole continent subsumed in witchcraft! Natives
who’d kneel down to pray with you, then after sunset melt away into the bush, returning at dawn daubed in blood, eyes rolling
like lunatics. Every night you’d lie half-awake waiting for the footfall outside your tent – drift off expecting to awake
on the altar yourself! Or cooking in a pot! No time for subtleties – only surefire way was to terrify them. His name is Satan.
He lives in a place of flames. That they could understand. Pointing white-eyed into the desert. Yes, yes, Hell. Only God can
protect you. Reading to them from Dante. Sometimes you’d scare yourself! But it worked, that was the thing! They came to heel!
They could learn, they could be lifted out of that squalor! For all its savagery there was hope there! The sheer volume of
souls saved, one came home feeling one had done something! Is it any wonder that they themselves retreat there now, into these
stories each has heard a hundred times, when the present is nothing but ambiguity and accusation, intent on dismantling everything
they believed in?

Perverts, monsters, brainwashers.

Retiring to his room, Father Green stays up for another hour correcting homework. He sits in a small pool of lamplight, reviewing
the bright dull portraits of the world – bicycles to be rented, purchases to be made – that the textbook presents for the
boys to complete. He works steadily, unhurriedly, and although
he knows exactly where Daniel Juster’s copy lies in the pile he pretends to himself that he doesn’t; when he reaches it, he
does not stroke the page, imagining the boy’s own hand travelling slowly across it; nor linger over the handwriting, its guileless,
meticulous loops and crosses, nor sniff the paper, nor kiss, ever so softly, the bitter ink.

Handwriting. Chalk on slate. Plane trees outside a church, wind rolling in from the desert, laughing carefree children, zigzagging
half-naked, ebony-thewed, through the stern young priest’s classes… Those children! Irrepressible! You couldn’t help but smile
– and now, alone in his bed decades later, with the children dead, safely dead, a smile plays again over Father Green’s face,
carrying him down into sleep, a sleep of flames, a thousand tiny white-hot desert tongues licking and searing and scalding
him everywhere, an agony of guilt that is also, dreadfully, an ineffable ecstasy.

Ruprecht is up to something. For two days now he’s been feigning illness to get out of class – stuffing his bed with pillows
and relocating himself to his lab. But what he’s doing down there remains a mystery even to his room-mate; until, late on
Friday night, Skippy awakes to find a portly silhouette standing over his bed. ‘What are you doing?’ he mumbles through the
remnants of his dreams.