Skippy Dies (61 page)

Tom lunges at Farley but several men intervene to hold him back and his punch fails to connect. It seems to waken Farley,
however; he stares at Tom, his mouth open in surprise.

‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’ Howard tugs at his arm.

While Tom wrestles with his captors, he hustles Farley out of the pub. The street outside is wintry and monochrome. Above,
a blood-red sun flares through the clouds, like a last live coal uncovered among the cinderwork of the dying seasons. When
they are a safe distance away, he turns on him. ‘What the fuck are you doing? What was the point of that?’

‘I don’t know, Howard.’ Farley looks off bleakly at the sea. ‘It’s just, they’re just kids, you know? And the people who’re
supposed to be looking after them, and teaching them about maturity and responsibility, we’re worse than they are.’

Howard pushes him away, grinds his teeth. They walk down to the main road, where after five minutes Howard manages to pluck
a taxi from the traffic. He declines Farley’s invitation to come back to his apartment and drink more.

At home there are no messages on his answering machine. He picks up Graves and numbly turns the pages.
We no longer saw the war as one between trade-rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger
generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.

If someone had been looking out for that kid this wouldn’t have happened.

According to the papers, Howard was the last adult to see Daniel Juster alive. Alive, in the rear-view mirror, merging with
the dusk, as if he stood on the threshold right at that moment, a dark door Howard couldn’t perceive. But how was he supposed
to know? And even if he had known, what was he supposed to have done? Bring him home with him? Ditch his car and go and play
with him, in the freezing cold car park? That would somehow have made everything all right? Throwing around a frisbee like
he was fourteen years old? When was the last time he even played frisbee?

But then thinking about it he realizes he remembers the last time quite clearly; and with a disarming vividness finds himself
not so much in the grip of a memory as slipped back to that very time, to the shape and feel of being fourteen – the taste
of apple-flavoured
bubblegum in his mouth, the humiliation of a spot on his chin, the unending turmoil of that endless struggle to stay afloat
in a roiling sea of emotions, and the thousands of hours spent out on the gravel, determined to master an utterly valueless
skill – the frisbee, the yoyo, the Hacky Sack, the Boomering – in the unshakeable belief that in this lay his salvation. Half
of him battling to become visible, the other half just wanting to disappear. God, how had he ever endured it?

A knock at the front door. Howard has lost track of time, but knows that it’s late: hoping against hope – Halley! – he springs
out of his chair to turn the latch. He ducks just in time to dodge the fist that comes flying out of the darkness.

And in the village the wind sets the lids of the wheelie bins chomping at nothing, and in the cinema Hulk bounces and swings
his fists, and in the video-game shop the Christmas games are in, and in Ed’s there’s a special offer, two boxes of doughnuts
for the price of one, someone says it’s because of what happened but someone else says no, actually they’re doing it in all
the branches. It doesn’t matter where you go though, nowhere feels big enough to contain you, even if you’re right in the
middle of the mall it still somehow seems too shallow, like when you were younger and you tried to make your Transformers
visit your Lego town, and they were just out of scale, it didn’t work – it’s like that, or maybe it isn’t, because you also
feel really tinily small, you feel like a lump in somebody’s throat, or actually who cares what you feel, and everywhere you
go you encounter other grey-clad boys from your year, looming up like hateful reflections – Gary Toolan, John Keating, Maurice
Wall, Vincent Bailey and all of the others that are the pinnacle of the evolution that began so many years ago with that one
depressed fish that if you met him now you’d tell him to stay in the sea – there they are, pale-faced but smirking, sleeves
rolled up, and though it’s sad, it’s sadder than a three-legged dog, it’s also flat, it makes you angry, so when someone says
Skippy was a homo you’re almost glad because you can fight them, and they’re glad too, so you fight, until someone gets his
jumper ripped or the security guard chases you out of the mall, and you’ve already been kicked out of the other mall, and
it’s too cold to go to the park, and you think it must be almost time to go to bed but it’s not, it’s only just time for dinner,
which is car-tyre with phlegm sauce and which you leave mostly uneaten, and privately you’re thinking Skippy is a homo too,
you’re thinking,
Fuck you Skippy, though you’re also thinking, Hey, where’s Skippy? or Skippy, did you borrow my – and then you think, Oh fuck,
and everything shakes around the edges again and you have to hold on tight to your lucky condom or your Tupac keyring or your
actual live shotgun bullet, or if you don’t have one of those things, wedge your hands deeper in your pockets or throw a stone
at a seagull or shout after a knacker in the village how his mother was in excellent form last night and run for it, and dream
of being Hulk, or a Transformer in a Lego town going
smash! bash! crash!
stomping the whole city to the ground, incinerating the little yellow-headed Lego people with your laser eyes till the smiles
melt right off their faces.

And in the schoolyard the lisp of a last fallen leaf skating around the tarmac is the only sound, everywhere else is totally
silent, even when people are talking, it’s like someone’s thrown a switch and reversed the polarity of everything so that
being alive now is like being dead, like zombies, grey bodies shuffling loose-limbed through the perpetual gloaming, or like
universes, same difference, matter or energy adrift in nothingness, descending, like veils, through the darkness. Classes
rebegin but it doesn’t make any difference, there is still that empty seat, and in Maths class, calling the roll, Lurch goes,
‘Daniel Ju– oh no, of course not,’ and
scratches his name out
, right there in front of you. Farts go unpunished, clear jinx situations unheeded, Pokémon cards unswapped; the Junior Rec
Room is deserted, the table-tennis table folded up and tidied into a corner, the pool balls lined up in their perspex womb,
the television, unprecedentedly, switched off. You don’t talk about It, and you don’t talk about not talking about It, and
soon the not-talking-about-It has become something real and tangible existing among you, a hideous replacement-Skippy like
an evil twin, a dark blastula that presses evermore insistently against your lives. The dormitory corridor presents only closed
doors, behind which are closed faces, secreted beneath headphones or locked into mute dialogues with illuminated screens.
Geoff hasn’t done his zombie voice after the night in the Ref it escaped without thinking,
My
roast beef needs more GRAVEy
, and sounded different from how it had before – louder than he meant it to be, and not funny, and even sort of frightening,
like it knew something you didn’t.

And then one morning you go to your locker and find a note there from Ruprecht, calling you to an urgent meeting in his room,
and even though it’s probably bullshit you find yourself climbing the Tower stairs to his dorm.

The others are there already, scrunched up on Ruprecht’s bed because no one wants to sit on Skippy’s, even though his duvet
is gone as well as his other stuff. Ruprecht looks feverish and drawn. Ever since that night, in the middle of all this weird
nothingness, he’s been rushing about back and forth from his laboratory, one pen in his mouth and another behind his ear,
stacks of paper and star maps and set squares bundled in his arms. He waits for everyone to sit down, and then he unscrolls
a chart with a familiar shape drawn on it.

‘The Van Doren Portal, Mark Two,’ he says. ‘Let me say at the outset that the science of this is far from being stable. This
operation, if it works at all, will be highly dangerous. But by rebuilding the pod, and recalibrating it to a monotemporal
matrix, I have calculated that it might just be possible to travel backwards to a nodal point in time, e.g. the Hallowe’en
Hop, and bring Skippy, as he was then, forward to the present. If we adjust the figures of the original teleportation for
a temporal “drag” of –’

‘Aaaaugh!’ cries Dennis.

Everyone turns to look at him. He is ice-pale, breathing rapidly, and directing at Ruprecht a stare of unaccountable vehemence.

‘What?’ Ruprecht says.

‘Are you serious?’ Dennis says.

‘I know it sounds far-fetched, but there is a small but real chance we could use the pod to rescue Skippy. In effect we’re
doing the same thing we did with Optimus Prime, only with minor tweaks in order to –’

‘Aaaaugh!’ Dennis goes again.

Ruprecht looks nonplussed; Dennis, in a single strange and complicated
motion, throws his arms over his head as if shielding it from a bomb-blast, or as if it itself is about to explode, and then,
springing up, marches out of the room. The others look around in bemusement, but before anyone has a chance to say anything,
Dennis has marched back in and thrusts something into Ruprecht’s hands. ‘Here!’ he shouts. ‘Special delivery from the eleventh
dimension!’

‘Optimus…?’ Ruprecht turns the plastic robot over in wonderment; then his gaze jabs upwards to Dennis. ‘But… how? I mean…
where was he?’

‘In my laundry basket, underneath some Y-fronts,’ Dennis recites.

Ruprecht is baffled. ‘Some kind of wormhole…?’

Dennis slaps a hand to his face, leaving a bright red mark. ‘Oh my god – I put him there, Ruprecht! I put him there!’

‘You…’ Ruprecht trails off, his mouth becoming an anxious
O
, like a baby that has lost its soother.

‘Don’t you understand what I’m saying to you? Your pod
doesn’t work
! It
doesn’t work
!
I
took the robot! Your invention didn’t do anything! Your inventions never do anything!’

‘But –’ Ruprecht increasingly distressed ‘– the Mound? And the music?’

‘I
made that up
, moron! I made it all up! I thought it would be funny! And it was! It was really, really funny!’

The others wince sympathetically; Ruprecht very slowly doubles over, an expression of intense concentration on his face, as
if he’s drunk weedkiller and is making a study of the effects. The sight of this makes Dennis only more ruthless.

‘You know what your problem is, Blowjob? You’re sure you’re right. You’re so sure you’re right, you’d believe anything. You
remind me of my crazy God-bothering stepmother. All day long she casts her little spells, Jesus this, Virgin that, Sacred
whatever, say nine of these, sprinkle some of this on that, hey presto. She’s so busy that she doesn’t even notice that none
of the things she prays for ever actually happens. She doesn’t
care
whether they happen, because all she wants really is something to let her walk
around with her head in the clouds. And you’re no different, except with you it’s maths instead of prayers, and gay universes,
and oh yes, in case we forget, the aliens who are going to come down and build us a spaceship before the Earth goes pop!’

On the bed, Ruprecht stares vacantly into space, his body drawn in around him.

‘Skippy’s dead, Blowjob! He’s dead, and you can’t bring him back! Not you, not every bent scientist in every laboratory in
the world!’ Breathing heavily, Dennis pauses, then turns his dreadful gaze on the others. ‘You bummers need to get it through
your heads that this is
real
. None of the stupid bullshit we do to distract ourselves is going to
help
any more. Spiderman isn’t going to help. Eminem isn’t going to help. Some fucking gay lame tinfoil time machine isn’t going
to help. All that stuff is over, don’t you see? He’s dead! He’s dead, and he’s going to stay dead for ever!’

‘Stop saying that!’ Ruprecht gasps.

‘Dead,’ chants Dennis, ‘deado, deadsville, deadorama, deadington –’

‘I mean it!’

‘Dead-dead-dead,’ to the tune of ‘La Marseillaise’, ‘dead-de-de
dead
-dead-dead, dead-de –’

Ruprecht rises from the bed and, inflating himself like one of those Japanese pufferfish, to surprisingly alarming effect,
hurls himself at Dennis. The latter throws a punch that lams directly into Ruprecht’s midriff, but his fist simply gets lost
in the folds of Ruprecht’s flab; a split-second expression of horror crosses his face before he is bowled over and disappears
underneath his antagonist, who proceeds to bounce on top of him like a malevolent Buddha.

‘Stop, stop!’ Geoff cries. ‘Come on, you’re hurting him!’

It takes all four of them to haul Ruprecht away. Dragging himself up from the floor, Dennis dusts himself down and, with white
cheeks, levels a maledictive finger: ‘Skippy’s dead, Blowjob. Even if your stupid plans ever worked, it’d still be too late.
So stop getting everybody’s hopes up for nothing.’ With that he hobbles out of the room.

As soon as he’s gone, the others cluster around Ruprecht to sympathize and reassure: ‘Don’t listen to him, Ruprecht’, ‘Tell
us the rest of your plan, Ruprecht.’

But Ruprecht won’t say anything, and after a while, one by one, they drift away.

When they have gone, Ruprecht lies for a long time on his duvet, Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, held loosely in his
hands. On the other side of the room, the empty bed, its sheets turned down, crisp and hospital-white, roars at him like a
locomotive.

The sun has set long ago, and the only light in the room now comes from the computer screen, where SETI diligently chomps
through the barrage of unintelligible noise that hits the Earth every second, searching for anything that might resemble a
pattern. For some minutes Ruprecht watches from his bed as the bars file across the screen and drop off the far side. Then
he rises, and shuts the computer down.