Skippy Dies (75 page)

‘But
he
could see it?’

‘Well, no. He had a housemaid who was a medium. Everything came through her. But from his own work in physics, and Raymond’s
descriptions of the other world, Lodge believed he was on the point of proving conclusively that there was life after death.
The key was this fourth dimension, this extra dimension right next to ours but separated from us by an invisible veil. Lodge
thought that the new electromagnetic waves he’d discovered could pass through this veil.’

‘How?’ Ruprecht’s eyes pinned on him in as lynx-like a fashion as is possible for a chronically overweight fourteen-year-old.

‘Well, there was an idea at the time that space was filled by an invisible material called ether. Scientists didn’t understand
how these waves they’d discovered, light waves, radio waves and so forth, could travel through a vacuum. There must be something
that carried them. So they came up with ether. Ether was what allowed light to travel from the sun to the earth. Ether connected
everything to everything else. The spiritualists proposed that it didn’t stop at matter either. It joined our souls to our
bodies, it linked the worlds of the living and the dead.’

‘Ether.’ Ruprecht nods to himself.

‘Right. Lodge thought that if electromagnetic waves could traverse this ether, then communication with the dead was not only
scientifically plausible but within the grasp of the technology of the time. In Raymond’s accounts of Summerland, the dead
soldiers reported being able to hear very faint emanations from the world of the living – music, especially, certain pieces
of music came through the veil. So in his book Lodge outlines the first principles of how this communication would work.’

‘And what happened?’ Ruprecht has leaned so far across the table that he appears to be floating above his seat; Howard, beginning
to
feel uncomfortable, attempts to inch his chair back only to find it welded to the floor. ‘Nothing happened,’ he says.

‘Nothing?’ Ruprecht doesn’t understand.

‘Well, it failed, obviously, I mean it was wrong, it was all wrong. Because there was no ether. There was no mysterious substance
joining everything to everything else. Lodge became a laughing stock, his reputation was ruined.’

‘But…’ Ruprecht is scanning the table in disbelief, like an investor being told his entire portfolio has gone south. ‘But
how could it not work?’

Howard does not quite understand what is going on here, why Ruprecht should be taking this so personally. ‘I think it’s important
to remember the context in which Lodge was working,’ he says carefully. ‘Yes, he was a great scientist. But he was also a
man who had just lost his son. Other champions of spiritualism were in the same position – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance,
had also lost a son in the war. The people who bought Lodge’s book, the ones who conducted seances themselves, the soldiers
in the trenches who saw the ghosts of their friends – these were all people in mourning. This was a world that had literally
gone crazy with grief. At the same time, it was an age when science and technology promised they could deliver all the answers.
Suddenly you could talk to somebody on the other side of the world – why shouldn’t you be able to talk to the dead?’

Ruprecht is hanging on his words, glassy-eyed, with bated breath. ‘But the point was, you couldn’t,’ Howard says, and repeats
it, ‘you couldn’t,’ to bolster himself against the hostility with which this information is received – a stare that is pitched
somewhere between crestfallen and mutinous.

‘But he says in his experiments he did talk to dead people,’ the boy says.

‘Yes, but that might be best understood as a manifestation of –’

‘Like just because no one believed him doesn’t mean it wasn’t true.’

‘Well…’ Howard doesn’t know quite how to respond.

‘Lots of things that are true people think they aren’t,’ Ruprecht’s voice, while remaining at the same pitch and volume, intensifies
in some impalpable way, causing the foreign couple to look up from their map. ‘And lots of things that aren’t true they tell
us they are.’

‘Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean –’

‘How do you
know
he was wrong? How do you know the soldiers and people just hallucinated everything they saw? How do you know?’

He delivers all this with such vehemence, doughy head turning an angry pink, like some vengeful jellyfish, that Howard prefers
not to contradict him; instead he just nods ambivalently, gazing at the half-melted ice cubes at the base of his polystyrene
cup. The tourists leave their table and go outside.

‘Let me tell you about another famous man of that time,’ Howard says at last. ‘Rudyard Kipling, the writer. He wrote
The Jungle Book
, among other things – you’ve seen the film, I’m sure, you know, Baloo?
Do-be-do, I want to be like you
…’

Ruprecht looks at him in bafflement.

‘Well, anyway. When the war broke out, Kipling’s only son, John, wanted to join up. Because he was only sixteen, Kipling had
to pull some strings to get him into the service. The commander of the Irish Guards was a friend of his, and through him Kipling
got his son a commission. John went off to train and a year later he was sent to the Western Front. About forty minutes into
his first battle he disappeared and was never seen again.

‘Kipling was heartbroken. He sunk into a black, black depression. Things got so bad that although he’d always denounced seances
as hocus-pocus he was on the point of trying them, in the hope of contacting his son. But then he was approached by the colonel
of the Irish Guards. Every regiment had a record of their experiences in the war, and the colonel asked Kipling if he would
write theirs.

‘Now Kipling was as British as they come. Cut him and he bled orange, as they say. He thought the Catholic Irish were no better
than animals. But because it was his son’s regiment, he, probably the most famous writer in the world at the time, agreed
to write the regimental history. Not only that, but he made the decision to write about the men – not the officers, not the
great battles, not any broader themes of the war. He used the regimental diaries and the personal accounts of the Irish soldiers.
And as he did he was overwhelmed by their courage, their loyalty and their decency.

‘The book took him five and a half years to complete. He found it extremely difficult. But afterwards he said it was his greatest
work. He’d had a chance to commemorate the bravery of these men, and to keep the memory of his son alive. A man called Brodsky
once said, “If there is a substitute for love, it is memory.” Kipling couldn’t bring John back. But he could remember him.
And in that way his son lived on.’

This parable doesn’t produce quite the effect he intended; in fact, he is not sure that Ruprecht, tracing Sprite-spirals on
the table with a straw, is even listening. The youth behind the counter looks at his watch and begins to dismantle the coffee
machine; an electric fan whirrs, like the smooth sound of time passing inexorably from underneath them. And then, not looking
up, Ruprecht mumbles, ‘What if you can’t remember?’

‘What?’ Howard rouses from his interior exertions.

‘I’m forgetting what he looks like,’ the boy says huskily.

‘Who? You mean Daniel?’

‘Every day more little pieces are gone. I’ll try and remember something and I won’t be able. It just gets worse and worse.
And I can’t stop it.’ His voice cracks; he looks up imploringly, his face a mess of tears. ‘I can’t stop it!’ he repeats;
then, right in front of Howard, he punches himself in the head with his fists, hard as he is able, then again, and again,
shouting over and over, ‘I can’t stop it! I can’t stop it!’

From behind the counter the Asian boy looks on aghast; Howard finds himself staring back at him helplessly, as if he might
know what to do, before realizing it is up to him. ‘Ruprecht! Ruprecht!’ he calls, and thrusts his hands into the whirl of
fists,
like two sticks into the spokes of a bicycle wheel, until he manages to get a grip on the boy’s arms and immobilize them.
Ruprecht’s shuddering gradually subsides into peace, punctuated by sharp, wheezing intakes of breath. He reaches into his
pocket for his asthma inhaler and tugs on it sharply.

‘Are you okay?’ Howard says.

Ruprecht nods, his head damasked with embarrassment even more deeply than before. Fat tears drip onto the table. Howard feels
sick to the stomach. Still, to fill the unbearable silence, he forces himself to say, ‘You know, Ruprecht… what you’re feeling
is perfectly normal. When a loss occurs –’

‘I have to go,’ Ruprecht says, sliding himself out of the plastic chair.

‘Wait!’ Howard stands as well. ‘What about your project, do you want me to send you some books, or…’

But Ruprecht’s already at the threshold, his thin
Thank you, bye
truncated by the swinging shut of the swing-door, and Howard is left shrivelled under the electric lights, and the cool,
evaluating gaze of the impassive Asian youth as he tamps out coffee grounds into the garbage.

It is night. Janine is lying on the street. Carl is standing over her.

I had to tell her, Carly, I had to.

It’s hard to understand what Janine is saying. In the windows of the houses the curtains are closed. In Lori’s window the
light is not on any more, and she’s not in the car when it jumps through the gate.

I did it for us, Janine says. She gets to her knees, she hugs his legs, she shrivels her body against Carl’s side like a leech.
She’s gone, Carl, it’s over! Why can’t you just forget her?

She will not tell him where the hospital is and the car drives too fast for Carl to follow it on his bike.

Here – Janine’s voice goes black and she reaches into her pocket – if you won’t believe me, see for yourself. I took a picture
of her. Go on, look, that’s who you’re in love with.

The face twisted up like a piece of chewing gum.

No!

So he throws her phone as hard as he can and leaves her crawling around someone’s garden crying, Wait ring me ring me so I
can find it.

Now he’s at home trying to watch TV. I wouldn’t wipe my arse with a Daewoo, Clarkson is saying. On the bed the new All-Blacks
jersey. Downstairs Mom goes, Because you can’t! And Dad going, Last time I looked this was my fucking house! I’M TRYING TO
WATCH TV, shouts Carl. Clarkson says, Dead Boy. Carl’s head snaps back to the screen. Give me something with a bit of oomph,
Clarkson says. A shiver goes up Carl’s arm, tingling in every scar.

That’s when the phone rings. Barry. It’s happening, he says.

What? Carl says.

Night after tomorrow. The connection, dude. They’re taking us with them to meet the Druid.

Carl’s brain reaches back into the endless black dark of his memory.

Do you know what this means? Barry is saying. It means we’re in. We’re made men.

And then in the phone but not Barry’s voice: He will be waiting for you, Carl.

He jerks up on his bed. What did you say?

Then Barry again like nothing has happened: This is so big-time, dude. Like seriously, do you know what this means?

But Carl does not know what it means.

At night is when it happens the worst: he’ll wake up and feel it, like actually be able to feel it, another constellation
of moments disappeared out of his memory. Where
exactly
did Skippy sit that day in the Ref? What was it he always took out of his burger, the pickle or the onion? What was the name
of the dog he had before Dogley? So many things to remember! And though Ruprecht tried his best to hold them in place – lying
in bed, reciting them to himself, avoiding talking or listening to people, to keep new images, new memories, from pushing
out the old ones – still he forgot and at last he realized that the forgetting was never going to stop, that no matter what
he did the moments would keep trickling away, like blood from a wound that could never heal, until all of them were gone.
That realization was almost worse than anything that had come before. It made him so angry! He churned, he seethed, he boiled
with anger – at himself, at Skippy, at the whole world! – and in his fury, he vowed to forget everything once and for all,
get it over with. But it turned out he couldn’t do that either, all he could do was become angrier and angrier on the inside,
while on the outside he grew evermore fat and pale and dead.

When they went to the park he hadn’t thought about science in a long time. He hadn’t turned on his computer in weeks, he didn’t
even use that part of his brain any more, because what good had it done, M-theory, Professor Tamashi, any of it? Wasn’t Dennis
right, wasn’t it just a giant Rubik’s cube for Ruprecht to while away the hours with, arranging its blocks and colours safe
in the knowledge that it could never actually be solved? And yet when Howard mentioned the scientist it was as if he, Sir
Oliver Lodge as he turned out to be called, had reached
across the decades and tapped him on the shoulder. And ever since, no matter how much Ruprecht wanted him to go away, he’d
remained there. Tapping.

He should have known better than to expect a teacher to shed any light on it though. What do teachers know about what is true?
Look at all the falsehoods they teach every day! The maps in Geography that make Africa look small and Europe and the US really
big, the books of Euclidean geometry that says everything’s made of straight lines when nothing in the real world is made
of straight lines, all that stuff about how good it is to be meek, and how if you’re meek and follow the rules everything
will turn out great? When it obviously won’t? So when Ruprecht returns to his room from the Doughnut House he tries a different
source. And on the Internet he finds quite a different story from the one Howard told him.

In this account, Victorian science was a long way from the materialistic, conservative affair the teacher described; and Lodge’s
experiments, far from being the manifestations of a demented mind, were only one element of a concerted scientific effort
to undo the final mystery of life after death. Other participants included Alexander Graham Bell, with his telephone, Thomas
Edison, creator of the Spirit Finder, John Logie Baird, inventor of television (to whom Edison’s ghost appeared in a seance),
William Crookes, Nikola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi – in fact, when you looked at it, almost all twenty-first-century communication
technology originated in scientific attempts to speak to the dead.