Skippy Dies (50 page)

And then a hand – whose hand neither of them can remember afterwards, but a hand in desperation – reaches for the door, and
this time, miraculously, it gives. Without a second thought they hurry through it to crouch on its far side, ears pressed
to the wood, as the voice outside, now accompanied by an ugly dragging noise, passes right by them, no more than a couple
of inches away (they can’t suppress a shudder)… and then recedes, or rather ebbs, or rather, actually, dissipates…

As soon as it’s gone they feel warmer, braver; straightening up, they dust themselves off, scoffing at the idea that either
of them thought for a second that whatever was outside was the Ghost Nun: ‘I don’t even believe in the stupid Ghost Nun.’
‘No, me neither.’

It is the smell that returns them to their surroundings, like a finger tapping them on the shoulder. Potent and alien and
deep, it suffuses the air to the point, it almost seems, of replacing it; as they inhale, they realize that it has been present
in the atmosphere all along, too rarefied to notice until now. Whatever the mysterious feeling of difference is, this is the
source, the omphalos.

‘We, ah, seem to be in the Locked Room…’ Ruprecht says at last.

‘Yes,’ says Mario.

There is silence, silence and darkness.
The dead walk… futurity becomes a womb
…

‘Okay then,’ Ruprecht says, with false bravado, ‘let’s get this show on the road.’ He stumps with his pod into the shadows;
Mario hastens after, following the clinking from Ruprecht’s bag, trying not to think about the legends Niall’s sister spoke
of – and then he sees it, the blue corpse of a girl suspended from the rafters, dangling there right in front of him!

Luckily he is too shocked to scream. And when he has steadied himself, he realizes that it is not a girl at all, only a school
blouse, hanging there weightlessly in space.

Ducking beneath it, he presses on. Even in the darkness the room appears considerably larger than they expected. As their
eyes adjust, they make several other unexpected discoveries. It is not, for instance, bare.

‘Show me that map again,’ Ruprecht says. Bringing it right up to his face, he studies it carefully. ‘Hmm,’ he says.

This is unquestionably the place. And yet, instead of cobwebs and cracked floorboards, there are clothes horses, washing machines,
jumbo-sized boxes of detergent. ‘More of a laundry than a classroom,’ Ruprecht muses to himself. Perhaps an abandoned laundry?
And yet the tracksuit tops with the St Brigid’s crest, the skirts and jumpers, some damp, some dry, heaped in baskets or strung
on criss-cross lines, none of these looks especially old –

He studies the map again. ‘You don’t hear any music, do you?’ he asks Mario. ‘Like supernatural music?’

Mario doesn’t reply. With another
Hmm
, a kind of verbalized frown, Ruprecht forges on through the thick foliage of wet fabric. No evidence of a looming Otherworld
presents itself; reaching the back of the room, his only new discovery is three huge sacks filled to the brim with girls’
unmentionables, waiting to be washed. This puts the tin hat on it, as far as Ruprecht is concerned –

‘There’s no Mound in here!’ he exclaims. ‘Just piles and piles of schoolgirls’ underwear!’

A sound from outside. Someone’s coming! These voices are unambiguously modern, vital, somewhat raucous, the kind that might
shout matily to one another over the judder of laundry –

‘We have to get out of here!’ Ruprecht says. ‘Quick, the window!’

He pries open the bolt and shoves up the sash, and is on the point of wriggling through when he realizes he is on his own.

‘Mario!’

Team Condor’s cinematographer and navigator is rooted to the spot, slack-mouthed and staring, as if in a trance.

‘Mario!’ Ruprecht cries. ‘What’s wrong with you! Mario!’

The voices outside stop abruptly. But still Mario does not respond. A huge, happy smile spreads slowly across his face, like
the man who has found the back door to the Promised Land; then, uttering a single, incomprehensible noise, like
bleer
or
meep
, he breaks loose of Ruprecht and dives headlong into the pile of knickers –

Skippy’s back in his room. The others are still out on their operation; he makes it in here without talking to anyone. He
knows what he has to do now, he doesn’t want to waste any more time. He closes the door and switches off all the lights except
for the lamp on his desk. He takes a blank sheet of paper from the stack in Ruprecht’s printer, and sits down.

The goggles stare down from the door. The swimming trophy gleams with little fragments of remembering. Driving through Thurles
on the creaky old bus. The day like elastic, stretched tighter and tighter till the moment of the race when all of time snaps.
In the bleachers the blank space where Mum and Dad aren’t. The green underwater hotel, the room where you can’t sleep, the
numbers that count down in gold to the door –

Hurry, Skippy, hurry! You have to do it now!

It’s like he can see the door opening again.

Come on, come on!

Slowly opening, the streams of future wrapping around him and pulling him forward into it –

No! He picks up his pen. He writes,
Dear Coach
.

Ruprecht has not returned by lights-out. The next morning, however, when Skippy opens his eyes, he is there – lying on the
duvet in his underpants, staring at the ceiling as if it has done him some grievous wrong.

‘How did your mission go?’ Skippy asks.

‘Not well.’ Bits of what appears to be foliage litter his hair.

‘Did you visit any higher dimensions?’

‘No.’

‘Did you find the Mound?’

‘No.’

Skippy gets the feeling he isn’t that eager to talk about it, and drops the subject. At breakfast, however, Dennis is less
forbearing.

‘I don’t understand,’ he says with an expression of concern. ‘Didn’t you follow the map?’

Ruprecht, gazing blackly into his breakfast, says nothing.

‘Hmm, maybe you should have asked one of the nuns,’ Dennis remarks contemplatively. ‘Did you ask them, Ruprecht? Did you ask
the nuns to show you their mound?’

Ruprecht’s eyes narrow, but he remains silent; then the door opens and Mario enters the Ref. Seeing Ruprecht at the table,
he halts. ‘Oh,’ he says, and hovers there, as if uncertain how to proceed. Still without speaking, Ruprecht gives him a long
hostile stare. Then he rises, leaving his meal half-eaten, and departs the room.

Once he is gone, Mario is able to shed some light on Ruprecht’s Stygian mood. It appears that after being ‘sidetracked’ in
some manner that Mario doesn’t go into, the two of them were surprised in the St Brigid’s laundry room and narrowly escaped
capture,
only to spend two hours in a tree hiding from the janitor’s dog. (Odysseas, it turned out, was already in the tree following
an earlier incident, and presented to the infirmary this morning with hypothermia and mauling.)

‘No one actually saw you though?’

‘No. But we had to leave behind the pod.’

Ruprecht’s fury now becomes quite understandable. To have pan-dimensional travel in the palm of your hand, and then leave
it in a girls’ school laundry room – ‘Holy smoke, Mario, you don’t think the nuns will work out how to use it, and claim the
Nobel Prize for themselves?’

‘That’s just the kind of thing they would do, those sneaky nuns,’ Mario says bitterly.

‘What were you doing in the laundry room, anyway?’ Skippy asks.

‘Following the map,’ Mario says. ‘That’s where it said the Mound was.’

‘How strange,’ Dennis says, shaking his head. ‘Could it be Niall’s sister made a mistake? I suppose we’ll never know.’

‘Ruprecht can build another pod though, right? I mean it was mostly just tinfoil.’

‘The problem is that he has no blueprint. From the original design he keeps making changes, but these he does not write down.
So it is impossible to replicate exactly.’

Later that day, Ruprecht approaches Skippy. His expression is feverish. ‘I’ve devised a foolproof plan to get my pod back
from St Brigid’s,’ he says. ‘I call it, “Operation Falcon”.’

Skippy looks dubious.

‘This is your chance to get in on the ground floor!’

‘No way, Ruprecht, not after how that last one went.’

‘That was Operation Condor. This is Operation Falcon. It’s a totally different operation.’

‘Sorry.’

Ruprecht trudges off to canvass the others.

Bad as he feels for his room-mate, Skippy can’t deny that he
personally is having a great day. He woke that morning with the memory of the night before waiting for him, like a gold coin
hidden under his pillow, and whenever he thinks about it, which is every few seconds, he is overtaken by a big daffy smile.

‘You kissed her again, didn’t you?’ Dennis is finding Skippy’s uncharacteristic happiness disconcerting and even somewhat
offensive.

‘Whoa, Skip –’ Geoff is awestruck ‘– that means she’s your girlfriend. Holy shit – you have a
girlfriend
!’

And then at lunch break he leaves maths class and walks directly into Carl.

For some reason, after the fight yesterday all thought of him disappeared from Skippy’s mind; he hadn’t considered what would
happen when their paths inevitably crossed again. From the way the boys around him instantly come to a halt, though, from
the way the air of the hall quickens, he realizes they’ve been waiting for this moment all morning. There is nothing more
he can do now than brace himself for the blow – the sucker punch, the sly kick to the ankles, the swift knee groinwards –

But Carl seems not even to see him; instead he drifts on by like an old, grizzled shark hulking through particoloured schools
of minnows, oblivious to the catcalls and heehaws aimed at his receding bulk.

In today’s History class, Howard the Coward – who looks like he hasn’t slept much lately, or washed, or shaved – wants to
talk about
betrayal
. ‘That’s what the war was really about. The betrayal of the poor by the rich, the weak by the strong, above all the young
by the old. “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied” – that’s how Rudyard Kipling put it. Young
men were told all kinds of stories in order to get them to go and fight. Not just by their fathers, of course. By their teachers,
the government, the press. Everybody lied about the reasons for war and the true nature of the war. Serve your country. Serve
the King. Serve Ireland. Do it in the name of honour, in the name of courage, for little Belgium. On the other side of the
water, young German men were being told the same thing. When they got to the Front, they were betrayed again, by incompetent
generals who sent wave after wave of them into machine-gun fire, by the newspapers who instead of telling the true story of
the war churned out this brave-Tommies-death-or-glory stuff, making it seem like a great big adventure, encouraging even more
young men to enlist. After the war, the betrayal continued. The jobs the soldiers had been promised would be kept for them
had mysteriously disappeared. They could be heroes and wear medals, but no one wanted “war-damaged goods”. Graves’s friend
Siegfried Sas-soon called the war “a dirty trick played on me and my generation”…’

‘Did he seem a little off-balance to you?’ Mario asks afterwards.

‘One of these days he’s going to come in with uniforms for us and we’re all going to march off to the Somme,’ Dennis says,
and taking out his ledger moves Howard five places up the Nervous
Breakdown Leaderboad, so that he’s just behind Brother Jonas and Miss Timony.

‘Betrayal,’ Ruprecht muses to himself, while letting his gaze linger over Dennis.

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ Ruprecht says airily. ‘I just like saying the word. Betrayal. Betrayal.’

‘What’s your problem, asshat?’

‘Betrayal,’ Ruprecht muses. ‘Has kind of a ring to it, doesn’t it? Betrayal.’

‘Get bent, Blowjob, don’t try and blame me for losing your gay pod.’

‘Guys, come on,’ Geoff pleads. ‘The audition’s in two hours.’

It is, and by four o’clock, what looks like a kind of musical zoo has gathered outside the door of the Sports Hall. Folk and
rock groups, choirs and quartets, dancers both tap- and break-; here, warbling up and down his scales, is Tiernan Marsh, the
fourth-year wheeled out at all official events to share his angelic tenor, although he’s better known among the student population
for his propensity to eat his own scabs; here Roland O’Neil, bass wizard of Funkulus, quivers slightly in his tight pink leggings
under the baleful stare of John Manlor, hirsute lead singer of MANLOR, definitely the most impressive act the school has in
terms of sideburns; here Titch Fitzpatrick, running over his MC routine for the hundredth time, affects not to notice the
unmistakeable smirk on the face of his rival for the slot, Gary Toolan, nor to hear Gary Toolan’s not quite
sotto
enough remarks, such as ‘What’s he going to do, change nappies on stage?’

Just ahead of the Van Doren Quartet in the line is Trevor Hickey, aka ‘The Duke’, who with no visible means of making music
is staring into space, mumbling a speech to himself: ‘…
since the dawn of time… our oldest and most indefatigable foe…
’

Geoff keeps catching snatches of this, and curiosity eventually reels him in. ‘Uh, Trevor, where’s your instrument?’

‘
Shock and amaze
– oh, I’m not giving a musical performance.’

‘Not musical…?’ Geoff repeats, and then the penny drops. ‘Here, you’re not going to do
Diablos
, are you?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

Geoff gazes at him with a mixture of awe and concern. ‘It’s just,’ he says, after a moment, ‘you know, the Automator’s in
there.’

‘Mmm-hmm.’ Trevor’s ceaseless shifting from foot to foot is only partly to do with nerves; he has eaten five cans of beans
on either side of going to bed in order to build up a plentiful supply of trapped wind, or as he calls it, ‘The Power’.

‘I’m just wondering, you know, whether the Christmas concert might not be more of a family-type show?’