Skippy Dies (74 page)

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I mean, not everybody has the ability you have. The ability to care. You’re lucky, you don’t even realize it but you are.’

‘So let me care about you! If I’m so good at it, why won’t you let me do it, instead of running away?’

‘I don’t mean me. I mean the children.’

‘The children?’

‘The boys. They like you. They listen to what you say. Don’t deny it, I’ve seen it.’

What the fuck? ‘Are you talking about
teaching
?’ Howard is flabbergasted. ‘What has that got to do with anything?’

‘I’m saying, not everybody gets to do something good. Those kids will grow up to be better people from being in your class.
That makes you lucky.’

‘Oh wow, I never thought of it that way,’ Howard says. ‘Now I feel so much better.’

‘You should,’ she says. ‘I’d better go. Goodbye, Howard. I hope everything works out for you.’

‘Wait, wait –’ his head is spinning as if he’d downed a bottle of vodka; laughing, he seizes the strap of her bag ‘– wait,
just tell me one thing – what you said at the Hop, remember how you told me that at your own mixer, when you were a kid, no
one would
dance with you? That was a lie, wasn’t it? Just confirm that for me, that it was just another lie?’

She shoots him a cold ugly look and pulls the strap free of his hand. ‘Have you been listening to a single word I’ve said?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Howard says brightly. ‘Goodbye, so. Good luck with the sixth-years. I’m sure they’ll be very interested to hear
about your work, and all the nice things you can get for making rich old men that little bit richer.’

She steps free of him, holds his gaze a moment. ‘A lot richer,’ she says expressionlessly. ‘They pay me to make them a lot
richer.’ With that she turns and walks away, into the school. Howard watches her go, possessed by a strange, hating euphoria;
then, as he moves for his car, he chances to look up, and sees, from an upper window of the building, a handful of his second-year
class – Mooney, Hoey, Sproke, Van Doren – gazing forlornly down at him, and his brief sense of victory is instantly and thoroughly
replaced by a crushing sense of failure. He waves at them limply, and gets into his car without waiting to see if they wave
back.

But the past isn’t done with him yet. Howard’s sitting in front of the TV news that night – already on his fourth beer, a
fringe benefit of not having a job to go to tomorrow – when he realizes he’s staring at an image of his own house. It appears
with its neighbours, a series of gently sloping triangles silhouetted on the crest of the hill, behind the brassy bouffant
of a reporter.

He starts; then, with an eerie sense of impending revelation, of a kind that perhaps haunts all inhabitants of the television
age, he leans forward and turns up the sound.

The story is about the new Science Park. It seems that, while digging the foundations, engineers unearthed some kind of prehistoric
fortress. On the orders of the development company, however, they kept schtum and continued with their work, and apparently
the whole thing would have been bulldozed if a disgruntled Turkish labourer, denied his overtime for the fourth week running,
hadn’t blown the whistle. ‘Archaeologists are calling it a “find of incalculable value”,’ the reporter says. ‘We put these
allegations to the project’s Publicity Director, Guido LaManche.’

‘No,’ Howard says, out loud.

But it is he: Guido LaManche, bestower of wedgies, infamous farter, doughnut-eating champion, pioneer of the bungee jump in
Ireland – here he is now in a well-tailored suit, telling the reporter that as far as he can see these commentators are generating
much heat but very little light.

‘ “A find of incalculable value,” ’ the reporter reminds him.

Guido permits himself a gentle, slightly flirtatious chuckle. The years have been good to him; he is slimmer and fitter, and
speaks with the confidence and surety of the world-shaper. ‘Well, Ciara, the truth is that in a country like Ireland, you
can’t build a
sandcastle without making a find of incalculable value. If we were to ring-fence every single historic this or that we discovered,
there would literally be nowhere left for anyone to live.’

‘So you’re saying it should be bulldozed,’ the reporter says.

‘I’m saying we need to ask ourselves where our priorities lie. Because what we are trying to build here isn’t just a Science
Park. It’s the economic future of our country. It’s jobs and security for our children and our children’s children. Do we
really want to put a ruin from three thousand years ago ahead of our children’s future?’

‘And what about those who say that this “ruin” gives us a unique insight into the origins of our culture?’

‘Well, let me turn that question around. If the position was reversed, do you think the people of three thousand years ago
would have stopped building their fortress so they could preserve the ruin of our Science Park? Of course not. They wanted
to move forward. The whole reason we have the civilization we have today – the only reason you and I are standing here – is
that people kept moving forward instead of looking backward. Everybody in the past
wanted
to be a part of the future, just as today everybody in the Third World wants to be a part of the First. And if they had a
choice, they would swap places with us in a second!’

‘Moving forward!’ Howard claps his hands like he’s cheering on a racehorse; at which point the power cuts out, leaving him
with his beer in the dark.

Moving forward. After the bungee jump, Guido had relocated to a private school in Barbados, never to be seen again. It hadn’t
made much difference: in the eyes of the school, Howard was really the one to blame. Cowardice, that was the unforgiveable
sin for a Seabrook boy. Most people were kind enough not to say it to his face, but he knew it with every breath he took,
and he has lived with it every day and night since.

But Guido did not live with it. Guido moved forward. He wasn’t about to let one fleeting episode determine the whole trajectory
of his life thereafter. For Guido the past, like a Third World country, was merely another resource to be exploited
and abandoned when the time comes; and that is why civilization is built by men like him and the Automator, and not men like
Howard, who have never quite worked out which stories are disposable, and which, if any, you’re actually supposed to believe.

He’s still laughing – or is he crying? – when the phone rings. It takes him a while to locate it in the chaotic darkness,
but the ringer is persistent. Answering, he is addressed by a gruff male voice that cannot quite conceal its youth. ‘Mr Fallon?’

‘Who is this?’

A cautious pause ensues, and then, ‘It’s Ruprecht. Ruprecht Van Doren.’

‘Ruprecht?’ Howard gets an unsettling worlds-collide sensation. ‘How did you get this number?’

There is a scuffling sound, as of rodents tussling in the under-growth, and then, ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Now?’

‘It’s important. Can I come over?’

Dazedly Howard casts an eye over the chiaroscuro dereliction of the house. ‘No… no, I don’t think that would be appropriate.’

‘Well, how about Ed’s? Ed’s in half an hour?’

‘Ed’s?’

‘Beside the school. It’s important, half an hour okay?’ The boy hangs up. Howard stands there a moment in mystification, dial
tone burring in his ear. Then the significance of the venue strikes him, and with it the realization that there is only one
possible reason Ruprecht should urgently want to see him. Somehow he has come to suspect the coach.

He pulls on a jacket as he dashes outside. The night has grown teeth, and the cold binds with the anticipation in his stomach
to banish the fug of cheap beer. What has Ruprecht found out, and how? An overheard conversation? Did he hack into the school
network? Or maybe Juster left a note that’s only surfaced now? He climbs into the car, and as the distance between him and
the answer diminishes, exhilaration courses over him like the freezing
air that gusts through the vents. He bursts breathless through the doors of the Doughnut House.

The diner is almost empty; Ruprecht sits alone at a two-person table with a box of doughnuts and two polystyrene beakers.
‘I didn’t know what flavours you liked –’ he gestures at the box of doughnuts. ‘So I got a mix. And I didn’t know what kind
of drink you like, so I got Sprite.’

‘Sprite is perfect,’ Howard says. ‘Thank you.’ He takes a seat and looks around the room. He has not been in here for years.
It is little changed: generic Americana on the walls, glossy backlit photographs of pastries and croissants above the counter,
air with an anonymous odour you can’t quite put your finger on – the smell of fluorescent lights, maybe, or of polystyrene
beakers, or whatever the mysterious arid liquid is that they are selling as coffee. He remembers the excitement in school
when it had first opened. An international chain, right here in Seabrook! Back then, when Ireland was a global backwater,
this had seemed nothing short of a wonderful kindness, like a mission opening a school in the jungle; flocking into its bland
homogenous interior, designed by committee and replicated the world over, he and his friends had felt proudly apart from the
parent-dominated city immediately outside, aligned instead with something almost mythic, something that transcended the limits
of time and space to be a kind of everyplace, an everyplace belonging to the young.

‘I’m sorry you got fired,’ Ruprecht says to him.

Howard flushes. ‘Well, I haven’t actually been, ah, it’s more of a sabbatical…’

‘Was it for taking us to the park?’

Without knowing why this embarrasses him so, he affects not to have heard. ‘Quiet tonight,’ he says, smiling glassily.

‘People don’t really come here any more,’ Ruprecht replies in a monotone.

Howard wants to ask him why
he
still comes here, he of all people; but instead he says, ‘It’s good to see you, Ruprecht. I’ve been meaning to have a word
with you.’

Ruprecht says nothing, watches his eyes. Howard finds his mouth has gone dry, slurps from his Sprite. ‘On the phone you said
there was something important you needed to talk about.’

Ruprecht nods. ‘I just wanted to know something for this project I’m doing,’ he says, keeping his voice carefully neutral.

‘What kind of project?’

‘Sort of a communications project.’

He catches Ruprecht’s eye just as something surfaces to peek out at him; then it bolts back into the impenetrable recesses
of the boy’s mind. ‘Well, that’s good,’ he says. ‘That you’re doing a project. Because it seems like you’ve been a bit under
the weather lately. You know, you haven’t been taking as much interest in class as you used to.’

Ruprecht does not respond to this, traces invisible ideograms with the end of his straw on the tabletop.

‘Since what, ah, what happened to Daniel,’ Howard expands. ‘I mean, it seems like it affected you a great deal.’

The boy continues to devote his full attention to his straw pictures, but his cheeks crimson and his face assumes an expression
of misery.

Howard looks over his shoulder. The only other customers are a foreign couple, pored over a map; behind the till, a bored-looking
Asian is emptying coins from plastic baggies.

‘Sometimes in these matters,’ he says, ‘what you really need is closure. To understand what’s happened, tie up any loose ends
that might exist. Often that, tying up the loose ends, that’s what will help you to move on.’ He clears his throat. ‘And if
tying those loose ends seems difficult, or even dangerous, you should know that there are people who are ready to help you.
Who will coach you through it. Do you understand me?’

Ruprecht’s eyes flash up-from-under at him, seeking to puzzle him out.

Howard waits, on tenterhooks. Then at last, ‘Is that, is tying the loose ends, what you wanted to talk to me about?’

The boy takes a deep breath. ‘You mentioned a scientist,’ he
says hoarsely. ‘When we were in the park, you mentioned a scientist, a pioneer in electromagnetic waves.’

For a moment Howard is at sea. What is he talking about? Is this some sort of code?

‘You said he had worked out how to communicate –’ Ruprecht brings his voice down to a whisper ‘–
with the dead
.’ His eyes glimmer with desperation; and finally Howard understands. Ruprecht has no clue about Coach or any kind of wrongdoing;
he has no plan to bring anyone to justice; all that remains locked up in Howard’s own head. The disappointment is crushing
– so much so that for an instant he teeters on the verge of telling the boy himself, telling him everything. But does he really
want to be the one who visits the repulsion and cynicism of that world on Ruprecht’s? Instead, to sweeten the bitterness,
he picks up a doughnut and takes a bite. It is surprisingly good.

‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘His name was Oliver Lodge. At the time he was one of the most famous scientists in the world. He’d
made all sorts of groundbreaking discoveries involving magnetism, electricity, radio waves, and in his later years he attempted
to use these, as you say, to communicate with the spirit world. There was a lot of that going on at the end of the Victorian
era – seances, fairies, psychic photography, and so on. Maybe it was a reaction to the society of the day, which was very
materialistic and technology-obsessed – quite like ours, actually. It made the scientists of the period very angry, especially
because the spiritualists were claiming to use science, specifically new inventions like cameras, gramophones and radios,
to contact the spirit world. So a group of scientists, including Lodge, got together to study supernatural phenomena with
the aim of exposing the whole thing as the fraud it was.

‘But then war broke out, and Lodge’s son Raymond was killed in battle. The next thing, Lodge was caught up in the very stuff
he was supposed to be disproving. He claimed he had communicated with his dead son – in fact, he wrote a book, part of which
was supposedly dictated to him by the boy, from beyond the grave.
According to this book, which became a huge bestseller, the other world, the afterlife – Summerland was the name his son gave
it – was only a hair’s breadth away from the world familiar to you and me. But it existed in a different dimension, so you
couldn’t see it.’