Skippy Dies (46 page)

‘This is a crazy mania,’ Mario says morosely. ‘Carl is going to pulverize him. Skippy will be lucky if he ever gets to ogle
a woman again.’

‘Do you think we should do something?’ Niall says.

‘Do something?’ Dennis repeats. ‘Like what?’

‘Like, stop him somehow.’

‘And just let this Neanderthal waltz off with the great love of his life, is that it?’ Like many pessimists, Dennis becomes
strangely energized when things are actually at their worst. ‘He should sit tight and let himself be bullied and trampled
over for another four years, and then some day when he’s an accountant married to some mediocre-looking girl the bullies didn’t
want he can take revenge by giving Carl Incorporated a really exacting audit?’

‘But what’s the point of a fight he’s guaranteed to lose?’

‘I don’t know what the point is,’ Dennis avows. ‘But we’ve been getting pushed around this dump for nine years now and if
one person has actually found the guts to do something about it, I’m not about to stop him. Maybe it’ll inspire the rest of
us to stop being such a bunch of losers. In fact, this is exactly what Robert Frost was writing about in that poem.’

‘I thought you said it was about anal sex.’

‘Poems can be about more than one thing. You guys can say what you want. I’m with Skippy. He knows what he’s doing. You’ll
see.’

Skippy’s locked in a cubicle in the bathroom. In his hand is the tube of pills. He knows he probably shouldn’t. But it feels
like his head is about to fly away, and maybe just a half would be enough to make the room stop spinning round –

The phone rings. It’s her! ‘Daniel, are you going to fight Carl?’

How does she know? ‘Am I what?’ he says, hurriedly stowing the pills in his back pocket.

‘Oh my God,’ she moans. ‘Daniel, are you?’

‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ he says.

‘Oh God,’ she says again, breathlessly. She sounds even more freaked out than he is, which in spite of everything sets a little
ember of warmth aglow in his heart. ‘Daniel, Carl’s
dangerous
, you don’t know what he’ll do –’

‘Can I ask you a question?’ He doesn’t want to, but can’t stop himself. ‘Are you and him… are you, uh…’

She sighs in a way that’s almost a groan. ‘Listen, Daniel –’ she stops and sighs again; he waits with his entire insides coiled
into one impossibly tight spring that is pulling his chin down into his shoulders – ‘I haven’t seen Carl since before the
Hop. But he gets ideas into his head. He’s wild, Daniel. So stay away from him.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Skippy says, simply and not unheroically.

‘Arrgh – I mean it. It’s stupid to fight him. You don’t
need
to. Do you understand? Just come up to the house like we said, okay? Just stay away from Carl, and come straight up.’

‘Okay.’

‘Do you promise?’

‘I promise,’ he says, crossing his fingers, and opens the cubicle door.

Behind the swimming pool, boys continue to cram into the shrinking space. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and invisible
messages flying back and forth, leaving barely enough oxygen to breathe; morale in the Juster camp has been dealt a further
blow by the discovery that Damien Lawlor has opened a book on the fight and is giving even money on Carl to win in twenty
seconds or less, and ten to one on Skippy requiring an ambulance, with the proviso that there has to be an actual ambulance,
and he has to be stretchered into it. He meets their disapproval with his well-practised blank look. ‘What?’ he says.

‘That’s bollocks, Lawlor.’

‘What’s Carl ever done for you? He’s kicked your ass loads of times, I’ve seen him.’

‘Look,’ Damien says, pausing to take five euro from Hal Healy on Carl to KO Skippy in one punch at eleven to two, ‘my heart
is one hundred per cent, completely behind Skippy. I have a totally unshakeable belief in him. This is a completely separate
business venture, run by my head. The two things have nothing to do with each other.’ He gazes from one frosty, sceptical
face to the next. ‘You people need to learn how to compartmentalize,’ he tells them.

‘What are the odds on Skippy winning?’ Geoff demands.

‘Skippy winning… let me see…’ Damien pretends to leaf through his book. ‘Ah, that would be… a hundred to one.’

‘I’ll take five euro on Skippy to win,’ Geoff says firmly.

‘Are you sure?’ Damien says, surprised.

‘Yes,’ Geoff replies.

‘Me too,’ Mario says, proffering a note of his own. ‘Five euro on Skippy to win.’

Dennis and Niall follow suit, and so does Ruprecht, albeit somewhat reluctantly, as he has computed the odds himself and come
up with a figure astronomically higher. ‘Five euro on Skippy to win at a hundred to one,’ Damien repeats blithely, handing
Ruprecht his chit. ‘Best of luck, gentlemen.’

‘What’s a hundred to one?’ None of them sees Skippy coming; out here in the cold and surrounded by older boys he looks paler
and scrawnier than ever, and also, although bone-dry, somehow gives the impression of being soaking wet.

‘Nothing,’ Mario says quickly.

‘How do you feel?’ Ruprecht asks him.

‘Great,’ Skippy says, shivering, and wedges his hands in his pockets. ‘Where’s Carl?’

Carl is not here yet; the mob is getting restless. Five past four becomes ten past becomes a quarter past; a drizzle sets
up as the light fades, at the edges of the gathering stray bodies begin to drift away, and Geoff Sproke decides to allow himself
to entertain the tiniest hope that Carl will not show – that he is so stoned he forgets about it, or that he is arrested by
the police en route for locker arson, or just that he is a neglectful person who is too lazy to come along. In fact, as soon
as Geoff opens the door, he finds all kinds of reasons for the fight not to happen, and the small hope skips free and expands
until suddenly it is almost a certainty, and Geoff feels a kind of elation, and is just about to poke Skippy, looking so pensive
and grey-faced there, and explain to him that he needn’t worry because Carl’s not coming, meaning victory goes to him by default,
so he can go and hang out with Lori and everything will be good and happy for all of them for ever – when there’s a collective
intake
of breath and the hubbub shifts to a single pitch and everybody turns to look in one direction and Geoff’s face falls and
the hope dwindles instantly and is extinguished.

At first Carl doesn’t even seem to notice the crowd – he loiters by the boiler room, finishing a cigarette. Then, flicking
away the butt, he lopes towards them. Instantly the bodies around Skippy melt away, and he finds himself at the centre of
a perfectly circular clearing, though Mario’s still at his ear, jabbering about some one hundred per cent fail-safe and lethal
karate move that they do in Italy –

‘Italian karate?’ Skippy murmurs.

‘It’s the deadliest form of karate there is,’ Mario is saying, and there is more, but Skippy no longer hears him. He is fixed
on Carl, who’s laughing to himself like he can’t believe he’s even bothering to do this, and other people are laughing too,
because as he comes closer you can see just how huge he is, and how ridiculous is the idea of Skippy trying to fight him,
and Skippy blushes at the realization that his grand gesture is in fact a joke, as embarrassing as it will be brutal. Yet
at the very same time a voice keeps repeating inside him: every Demon has a weak spot – every Demon has a weak spot – over
and over, as if the owl from Hopeland is there on his shoulder –
every
Demon has a weak spot – then Carl takes off his school jumper and rolls up his shirtsleeves, and this voice stops with all
the others.

His arm is covered, from the wrist to the elbow, with long, thin cuts. There must be a hundred of them, in different states
of freshness – some bright-red, others sour, dull, fragmenting into scabs – winding up his forearm so densely there is hardly
any untouched skin left to see, as if he’s being woven anew from tiny red threads. Now for the first time he looks at Skippy
and though he is still smiling, behind his eyes Skippy can see his brain bucking and fizzing and short-circuiting in the grip
of some flashing, clanging force, and suddenly and very vividly he understands that Carl has no brakes or conscience or anything
like that and when he said he was going to kill him that’s exactly what he meant –

‘Okay then.’ It’s Gary Toolan, of course, ushering any stragglers
out of the ring and bringing the two fighters together to shake hands. It’s like shaking hands with Death, Skippy can feel
the life sucked out of him, and he’s just realizing that he’s never actually been in a fight before, he doesn’t even know
what you’re supposed to do, the idea of walking over to someone and hitting them seems absurd – when Gary Toolan shouts, ‘Fight!’
and Carl runs at him, and he ducks out of the way by the skin of his teeth. In an instant the crowd has transformed, becoming
a screaming, baying frenzy, like when you throw the switch on a blender, their voices a single bloodthirsty gurgle from which
only rare individual words emerge,
kill
–
smash
–
fucking
–
down
, just as the faces are mostly a blur, which is probably a good thing because the two or three that momentarily, inexplicably,
pop out at Skippy are contorted into masks of such pure undiluted hatred that if he were to stop and think about it – instead
he tries to remember Djed’s moves from Hopeland – better than nothing, right? – fighting the Ice Demon, the Fire Demon, doing
the forward roll and jab, the spinning kick, the tiger throw – sometimes Skippy practises these in his bedroom when Ruprecht’s
not around, although never on any enemy more formidable than his pillow – but these go out of his head straight away, as the
fists come at him and again he just manages to get out of the way – except he doesn’t, Carl’s grabbed him, there’s a tearing
noise as Skippy’s jumper rips and Carl’s fist pulls back and this is it, this is the end of the fight already –

And then from Carl’s pocket comes a merry electronic jingling. Carl stops where he is, fist frozen mid-air. The jingling continues
– people laugh, it’s that
BETHani
song, ‘3Wishes’. Dropping Skippy to the ground, Carl takes out the phone. ‘Hello?’ he says, and walks away towards the trees.

Ruprecht bumbles forward and wordlessly helps Skippy to his feet, and in a rapidly cooling froth of sweat he waits – fists
still clenched, every inch of him trembling, not looking at any of the spectators who ten seconds ago were screaming for his
blood – while Carl marches back and forth with the phone beneath the laurels. He speaks in a low voice through gritted teeth;
after a
moment, with a sour ‘All right’, he tosses the phone to the ground. This time there is no smile as he stalks back towards
them – even the onlookers back away involuntarily, and Skippy discovers he has a whole other register of fear –

‘Fight!’

– and instantly they’re back in the blender, the whirl of screams, the hate-masks, through which the white-shirted figure
of Carl thunders, moving so fast it’s like there are a dozen of him, coming at Skippy from every direction, the fists lightning-quick,
every time a little closer, whistling through the air bare millimetres away, as Skippy ducks, wriggles, dodges, with every
last ounce of energy he has, for what seems like hours but is probably only a handful of seconds –

And then he stumbles, one ankle sliding away from him.

It all seems to happen quite slowly.

Carl raises his two fists like a hammer, high over his head –

Skippy’s just standing there, tottering –

and everyone bellows because they know that as soon as he’s hit he’s toast, and that’s when the real fun starts –

As the fists come down he swings out blindly –

he doesn’t know whether it’s meant as a punch or a block –

but it connects with Carl’s jaw:

the impact shoots back through his bones and up his arms; Carl’s head snaps sideways –

and he goes down –

and he doesn’t get up.

Nothing happens for a long moment; it’s as if all sound has been sucked out of the world. And then everyone is cheering! Maniacal,
incredulous, ecstatic cheering, as if this is the first time in their lives they have truly cheered – laughing and whooping
and jumping up and down, like the Munchkins in
The Wizard of Oz
when Dorothy’s house lands on the Witch, the same people who a second ago were roaring at Carl to pull Skippy’s guts out.
Skippy might have found this odd, but he’s too dazed to think about anything, and now he’s swamped by his friends.

‘A glass jaw,’ Niall marvels, ‘who’d’ve thought it?’

‘It was the move he did,’ Mario explains. ‘The Italian karate move, didn’t you see it?’

It seems as if the only person not celebrating – other than Damien Lawlor, who is sunk on his heels, whispering ashen-faced
to himself, ‘I’m
ruined
…’ – is Skippy himself. Instead he’s gazing at the spot of gravel occupied only a moment ago by Carl’s fallen body. Where’d
he go?

‘Legged it,’ Niall pronounces.

‘He’d
better
leg it,’ Ruprecht comments darkly.

‘Come on, Skip.’ Mario takes him by the arm. ‘We should clean you up before you go see your lady. You have a limited amount
to work with at the best of times.’

‘Make way for the champ!’ cries Geoff, clearing a path to the Tower.

And ten minutes later – hair tamed, teeth brushed, irremediably shredded school jumper exchanged for a clean hoodie – Skippy’s
leaving it again, pedalling Niall’s bike uphill towards the gate. The rain has cleared and the clouds given way to a sunset
that blushes deep and fiery, lush pinks and warm reds piled on top of each other in a breathy rushed jumble like a heart in
love; and as he weaves out weightlessly into the traffic, leaving their final words of advice – ‘Full hardcore sex!’ ‘Just
don’t puke on her!’ – to disappear into the evening, the euphoria blossoms inside him at last, and with every yard travelled,
continues, star-like, to grow. The grave canopies of the trees overhead merge with the incoming dusk; the dual carriageway
hooshes by him, its tall streetlamps seeming to sing through the twilight; the chain and wheels hum at his feet, the chocolates
swing from their bag on the handlebars, as he turns down her road, past the old stone houses with their ivy veils, to arrive
at her gates; and there, at the end of the driveway, just as he imagined it, she is – in the lamplight, on the doorstep, laughing
like he’s just told the greatest joke in the world.