Skippy Dies (48 page)

Lori returns to the living room. ‘Just someone looking for directions,’ she says, wiping her hands on her jeans.

‘Oh,’ Skippy says.

She sits down next to him again, but this time with her feet on the floor and her body leaning forward, staring at the screen
with her mouth tight shut. His hand now rests mournful and unloved on top of his knee. He pretends to himself he doesn’t notice
the sick feeling in his stomach. ‘Do you want to start eating the chocolates?’ he asks her.

‘Actually, I’m on a diet,’ she says.

‘Oh.’

‘Don’t say it to my parents, I haven’t told them about it.’

‘Okay,’ he says, and then, gallantly, ‘I don’t think you need to go on a diet, though.’

She doesn’t seem to hear him; she is staring at the TV, where the werewolf-boy is having an intense conversation with the
girl he is in love with.

‘Here, you know what you were saying, about quitting the swimming team?’ Skippy says.

‘What about it?’

‘Like, do you think I should? Just quit?’

She arches her back, wriggles her shoulders, first one, then the other, as though the cat is there clinging to her. ‘I don’t
know,’ she says. ‘I mean, it just sounds so boring.’ She turns back to the TV. ‘Isn’t that the guy who was in that show and
then he got that gross disease?’

Skippy doesn’t know what’s changed but everything has. They watch the rest of the film in silence. Then the door opens and
Lori’s mum is standing there. ‘Homework time, missy.’

Lori looks up at her with a disappointed
aw
face.

‘It’s a school night,’ her mum says. ‘I’m sure Daniel has homework too.’

‘Can I just very quickly show Daniel something in my room?’

Her mum smiles. ‘All right. But be quick.’

Lori flashes a quick smile at Skippy. ‘Okay?’ she says. For a moment Skippy just stares at her uncomprehendingly like she’s
a new letter of the alphabet. Then he remembers himself and mumbles something and follows obediently as she ascends the stairs
again and leads him into her room.

This time the night framed in the window is utterly dark, and in the instant before she switches on the light the stars shine
in on him deliberately like they’re trying to tell him something; then Lori draws the curtains and places herself in front
of him. Her eyes are closed and she is standing there like a sleepwalker, her mouth slightly open, her hands slightly lifted.
He tries to think of something to say, until the meaning of the closed eyes finally penetrates. At once it’s like some crazy
carnival orchestra strikes up inside him, all the instruments playing at the wrong speed in the wrong key, everything whirling
and toppling over, while outside him the room’s so quiet, not even the wind audible through the double glazing, and Lori so
still, her lips parted. He leans into her and her mouth latches on to his, an alien being attaching itself to its host. But
he can’t stop thinking of the voice in the intercom. Was it the same person that was on the phone? Who she was
roaming the streets with? His eyes flick open and see hers, burning green and staring back at him, right up close like planets
filling a
Star Trek
sky. Now they shut, her eyebrows furrowing momentarily – he shuts his too. She takes his hand and thrusts it under her shirt.
His hand locks on her boob and squeezes, hard? soft? through raspy synthetic material. She makes small squirmy noises, her
tongue licks his tongue. Why isn’t he happy? Why does it feel different?

A knock at the door. It’s already over. Lori walks away briskly to open it. Her mother is there with her hand raised to knock
again. ‘Sorry, kids. It’s eight o’clock.’

‘Okay,’ Lori says. ‘Daniel was just about to go anyway.’ She passes under her mum’s arm to the landing, and now he is watching
her shimmering black crown disappear down the stairs, chatting away to her mother as if nothing had happened at all.

In the kitchen, Lori’s dad sets down his PalmPilot and rises from the table. ‘Great to meet you, Dan.’ He outstretches his
hand. ‘Give ’em hell at that swim meet, all right? Show them how we do things in Seabrook College.’

‘I will,’ Skippy says.

Lori sidles over to him and takes his hand. ‘Thanks for coming to see me,’ she says.

‘Thank you,’ Skippy says, meaninglessly.

‘Do you want to hang out again sometime?’

‘Do you?’ He is surprised.

‘Sure,’ she says, swinging his hand a little back and forth.

‘Oh, don’t the two of them look sweet!’ her mother sighs in a pouty baby voice.

‘Maybe we could do something on Friday? I’m not
grounded
any more –’ shooting a look at her dad, who pretends to be fixed on his PalmPilot.

‘We could go and see a film?’ he says.

‘Sure, and then we could go for ice cream,’ she says.

‘
Too cute!
’ Lori’s mum exclaims, hands to her cheeks. ‘I can’t look at you any more, I’ll just
die
!’

‘
Mom
,’ Lori blushes, but she can’t help grinning down at her shoes. Skippy grins too but does not know why. He feels like he’s
inside a sitcom, but he can’t find where they are on the script. Maybe if he just keeps smiling no one will notice. Maybe
nothing was wrong after all – maybe second kisses are always different to the first.

She brings him to the door to say goodbye.

‘Thank you so much for coming,’ she says again. She is boxed in the yellow light of the doorway like a toy fairy.

‘It was fun,’ he says. He is outside now, on the flagstones; as he stands there he feels the cold scurry away with the warmth
of his body, hungry goblins happening upon an unguarded bakery.

‘Well, I’d better go and do my homework,’ she says.

‘Okay,’ Skippy says. ‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

The door closes. He gets his bike and turns dazedly towards the darkness. The gates glide slowly open before him, a mouth
spitting him out. Then behind him he hears the latch.

‘Daniel, wait!’ She is running over the flagstones, her bare arms luminous in the dusk. ‘Wait,’ she says, arriving.

He notices how sometimes her eyes, even when they are open, are closed, like when she was kissing him upstairs; now they are
open-open again, urgent.

She composes herself, suppresses her shivers. ‘That was really brave, what you did today.’

Skippy semi-shrugs, pretending not to know what she’s talking about.

‘It was – I mean, I know I told you not to, but still it was so amazing that someone would care enough about me to do that,
even when…’ There is more but it’s like she can’t say it; instead she just gazes at him, pleadingly, biting her lip, cheeks
flushed with cold, as if she wants him to guess what it is, or she thinks he might even know what it is; but Skippy doesn’t
know, and just looks back at her helplessly. ‘Oh,’ she moans, like this is something she shouldn’t be doing, and then the
next thing she is kissing
him again, and this time it’s like the first time, like they’re tumbling down into a dream, warm and sweet with sleep, everything
above left behind a million miles away – it’s funny how a kiss, which is just two mouths, can feel like this, like for ever,
like infinity.

‘Okay.’ She detaches herself so she can look at him.

‘I’ll call you about Friday,’ he says, not able to keep from smiling but managing at least to stop himself saying
I love you
.

She studies his face before answering, suddenly, for some reason, very solemn. ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘Goodbye, Daniel.’ She hurries
back inside, and the door clunks shut behind her.

Skippy reels down the driveway and onto the road. He wants to paint her name across the sky. He wants to shout it out to the
world at the top of his voice. He makes his way back to Seabrook through the starry night, barely noticing the time go, even
though he has to wheel Niall’s bike alongside him – he must have ridden over glass or something on the way up here, because
when he came out of her house both his tyres had punctures.

In the afterglow of Skippy’s victory, the mood in Ruprecht’s dorm room, where Team Condor has assembled for its final run-through,
is buoyant. As omens go, the fight couldn’t have been better; and now the stage seems set for a second contribution to the
history books.

The full line-up looks like this: R. Van Doren (Team Commander and Scientific Director), D. Hoey (First Officer) and M. Bianchi
(Navigator and Cinematographer) constitute the ‘A-unit’ that will carry the pod into St Brigid’s; G. Sproke has the dual role
of i) Janitor Diversion, and ii) Point Man back at Seabrook HQ.

The plan is simple and bold. While the St Brigid’s janitor, Brody, is being diverted by Geoff in search of a lost football,
planted earlier that evening, the A-unit – having neutralized Brody’s dog, Nipper, with dog biscuits – will breach the partition
wall via rope-ladder, Geoff keeping them apprised of his and the janitor’s exact location by casually singing the theme song
to
Bunnington Village
, which apparently is the only song he knows all the words to. Upon successful breach of the main school building, the A-unit
will proceed to the Locked Room and unlock the Locked Door using Ruprecht’s OpenSesame!™ Skeleton Key, ‘Guaranteed 100% Effective
on Every Known Form of Lock’, as endorsed by Mossad and purchased by Ruprecht on eBay; an electric drill, purloined from Potato-Head
Tomms’s woodwork class, is to be brought as backup. The pod having been erected in the Locked Room, and the power cable relayed
back to the lab via Geoff, a portal into higher-dimensional space will be opened, this time recorded by a functional camera,
and international fame and fortune, newspaper headlines to the tune of
NEW DAWN USHERED IN BY SCHOOLBOY
, last-second rescue of Earth from ecological
disaster, golden era of harmony and peace, etc., etc., will ensue.

‘Are there any questions?’

‘What about this Ghost Nun?’ Mario says.

Ruprecht pooh-poohs the notion. ‘There is no Ghost Nun. That’s just some silly story they tell to make the girls behave.’

‘Oh,’ Mario says, not looking entirely convinced.

The time of the strike has been set for nineteen hundred hours, when the residents of St Brigid’s, staff and students alike,
will be in the dining hall. With twenty minutes to go, everything is in place. The pod lies on the floor in a tennis bag,
attending its hour. Geoff pores over the instructions for the Cosmic Energy Compressor. Victor Hero has been primed to sign
the team in at study hall. Ruprecht paces about, working on his speech for the camera: ‘… history books have been written
in pencil… though we be young, scorn us not…
(awestruck look
) Can it be so? Are we the lucky ones for whom God has left the door on the latch?
(With growing sense of rapture
) Into what lambent destiny have we taken the first step?’

And though none says it, this same lambent destiny seems already to invest the room, to fizz at their pores, as if the Mound,
anticipating their arrival, has sent its emissaries to hurry them on. Or rather, sent
her
emissaries. Earlier that evening, seeking to fill the nervous interim as much as for extra information, Geoff had returned
to the Druid’s website, and found tucked away there a poem by Robert Graves, on the subject of the White Goddess who ruled
the Otherworld:

None of them knew quite what it meant (‘what’s a tourbillion?’) and Ruprecht said it had no immediate relevance to the task
at hand; but ever since then, each of them finds himself with a vivid mental impression of the Goddess herself, imprisoned
by floorboards and masonry and centuries of coercive unbelief, somewhere underneath their sister school; and experiences
this curiously externalized impatience, as of something tugging at their sleeves…

Then, with five minutes to Zero Hour, there is a groan from the doorway; they turn to see Dennis propped wretchedly against
the jamb. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he croaked. ‘A minute ago I was fine, then suddenly I started feeling really
bad
.’

‘What do you mean, “bad”?’

‘I don’t know… Kind of tingly? And energized? It’s totally inexplicable.’

‘Holy smoke,’ Geoff looking round wildly to the others, ‘it must be his radiation sickness returning.’

‘No, no,’ Dennis dismisses this. ‘Although now that you mention it, the symptoms are completely identical.’

‘Will you be able to do the mission?’ Ruprecht wants to know.

‘Oh yes, absolutely,’ Dennis says, and then collapses.

‘What are we going to do?’ Geoff says after they have carried him over to the bed.

‘We have to get the nurse,’ Niall says.

‘No nurse,’ Ruprecht replies tersely. ‘Nurses ask questions.’

‘But Ruprecht, he’s
sick
.’

‘We can’t jeopardize the mission. Not now.’

‘Maybe you could go instead of him?’ Geoff proposes to Niall.

‘I have a piano lesson,’ Niall mumbles sheepishly.

‘What about you, Victor?’

‘No way,’ Victor says. ‘I’m not getting expelled.’

‘Looks like we’ll have to put it off till another night,’ Mario says to Ruprecht.

‘We can’t put it off till another night,’ Ruprecht replies through gritted teeth. ‘Tonight’s the end of the Cygnus X-3’s radiation
burst. It
has
to be tonight.’

But a condor can’t fly on one wing, everyone knows that. The Operation is in serious trouble, and it must be said that the
Team Commander’s reaction to the crisis leaves something to be desired: stamping about the room like a giant, bellicose toddler,
kicking the wastepaper basket, slippers, anything else that crosses his path, while the rest of the team bow their heads plaintively,
something in the manner of humble banana farmers in the midst of a tropical storm. And then fate intervenes, in the form of
Mario’s room-mate Odysseas Antopopopolous arriving at the door looking to borrow some anti-fungal cream.