Skippy Dies (81 page)

All these fantasies had been summarily squashed by the Automator. Ever since, Howard has been in the Ferry, trying to stoke
up the remnants of his anger – ‘He
hit
me! The fucker actually
hit
me’ – sufficiently that he can… that he can what? Take the coach behind the swimming pool and teach him a lesson, like they
were both fourteen years old? And then everything would be peachy, the world restored? Too late: reality has indelibly set
in again. So he abandons his plans and just drinks. The pain in his hand provides an excellent excuse. It is excruciating,
and has extended itself to colonize his entire body; everything pounds at him, like clumsy fingers on a piano – the laughter
and grumbling of the other drinkers, the beauty of the beautiful lounge girl, the hideous carpet, the miasma of body odour…
and now a familiar hound’s-tooth jacket.

‘Ah, Howard, wasn’t expecting to find you here…’ Jim Slattery pulls up a stool, motions to the lounge girl. ‘Mind if I…?’

Howard makes an indifferent gesture with his good hand.

‘Didn’t make it to the concert?’

‘Sold out.’

‘Yes, indeed, even those of us with tickets – that is to say, there was a group of late arrivals from KPMG, Greg asked me
if I wouldn’t mind… Didn’t bother me, of course, especially if it gives me the chance of a snifter without herself being any
the wiser – cheers.’ The clink of glass causes Howard to wince, and the wince to set off a chain of small agonies. ‘Good lord
– what happened to your hand?’

‘Caught it in a mousetrap,’ is the tight reply.

‘Oh,’ Slattery says equanimously. He sips at his drink, swirls it around his mouth. ‘I heard you’d been in the wars lately.
That is to say, not just with the mice.’

‘Rodents of one kind or another,’ Howard says; then reflecting, he adds glumly, ‘mostly brought it on myself, though.’

‘Oh well. Things will come round, I’m sure.’ Howard merely grunts at this; the older man clears his throat and changes the
subject. ‘You know, I came across something the other day that made me think of you. An essay by Robert Graves. “Mammon and
the Black Goddess”.’

‘Ah, Graves.’ Howard, who feels that the poet has something to answer for in his present situation, smiles sardonically. ‘Whatever
happened to old Graves?’

‘Well, I daresay you know most of the story – married after the war, moved to Wales, tried to live the domestic life. Didn’t
last long, as you can imagine. He got himself mixed up with a poetess, an American named Laura Riding, and took off with her
to Mallorca, where they set up shop with her as his muse. She was as mad as a hatter, by all accounts. Ran away with an Irishman,
named Phibbs if I recall.’

‘Some muse,’ Howard remarks bitterly.

‘As a matter of fact that fitted Graves’s conception of things pretty neatly. The muse is an embodiment of the White Goddess,
you see. If she settles down with you and starts a home, then she loses her powers. Becomes merely a woman, so to speak. Which
means no more poetry, which in Graves’s eyes was almost as bad as
death. If she deserts you, on the other hand, then you find another muse to inspire you, and the whole circus starts all over
again.’

‘Makes you wonder why you’d even bother,’ Howard says.

‘There must have been an element of self-punishment to it, I think. Graves had always suffered tremendous guilt over his part
in the war, the men he’d killed and seen killed. And then, you see, his son died – his son David was killed in Burma, in the
Second World War. Graves had encouraged him to sign up, and helped him to get into the Royal Welch Fusiliers, his old regiment.
It was directly after the death of his son that he started writing about the White Goddess, all this business about suffering
and sacrifice in the name of poetry. Trying to make sense of it all, in his own barmy way.’

Howard says nothing, recalls Kipling and Ruprecht Van Doren.

‘But that’s what was interesting about this essay,’ Slattery says. ‘Near the end of his life Graves met a Sufi mystic, who
told him about another goddess, a Black Goddess. Mother Night, the Greeks called her. This Black Goddess existed beyond the
White. Instead of desire and destruction, she represented wisdom and love – not romantic love, but real love, as you might
say, reciprocating, enduring love. Of those who devoted their lives to the White Goddess, and this endless cycle of ravagement
and restoration, a very few, if they managed to survive it, would eventually pass through her to the Black Goddess.’

‘Good for them,’ Howard says. ‘And what about everybody else? All the mugs who don’t manage to transcend or whatever?’

Slattery’s face crumples into a smile. ‘Graves said that the best thing to do was to develop a strong sense of humour.’

‘A sense of humour,’ Howard repeats.

‘Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humour and you’ll at least be able to take your humiliations
with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, it’s our own expectations that crush us.’ He raises his glass, sending ice
cubes tumbling about his upper lip, and drains it. ‘I suppose I should be
getting along, before my own goddess starts to wonder. Goodbye, Howard. Keep in touch. I hope I’ll see you before too long.’

Just as the door closes behind Slattery, the lights go out in the pub, and the sudden darkness is filled by a dim but quite
unearthly noise – at once eerie and, somehow, mechanical… but it lasts for only a few seconds, and then power is restored,
and all returns to normal. The drinkers settle back into their chat; Howard, with no one to talk to, contents himself with
nursing his drink and watching the lounge girl as she crosses and recrosses the floor, tray in hand – another muse-in-waiting,
another goddess who would transform everything, whose beauty you could surely never get tired of…

Muses, goddesses, it sounds so preposterous, but wasn’t that how Halley had appeared to him in the beginning? A fragment of
pure otherness, a radiance who burned through the stale facts of his life like a flame through an old picture? She told him
stories of her home and he heard something transcendental; he looked at her and he saw another world – America! – a magic
soil where dreams, like seeds, would alight and instantly take root – far away from this tiny island where you never lost
your old nickname, where people couldn’t help sliding into the positions left by their fathers and mothers, the same ones
at the top, middle and bottom all the time, the same names in the school yearbook.

And she, no doubt, had done the same with him. She had looked at him and seen Ireland, or whatever she thought that was; she
had seen history, paganism, romantic landscapes, poetry, and not a man who needed help to love. From the beginning, each was
for the other first and foremost a flesh-and-blood representative of a different life, a passport into a fresh new future;
what had happened since then was nothing more or less cruel than the real person seeping through the illusion – not a gateway
to anything, just somebody like you, fumbling their way through the day.

A sense of humour, he thinks. A sense of humour. If only someone had told him before.

Two hours after the chaos that closed the Seabrook College 140th Anniversary Concert – when it seemed that nothing could ever
be quiet again – and the school is calm once more, although anyone who was present at the Quartet’s performance is still experiencing
it as a ringing in his ears, and over the next few days a lot of people will be talking IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Everyone else
has gone to bed; Geoff, Dennis and Mario are sitting on the slatted benches of the unlit Rec Room.

‘What did he say?’ Mario asks. ‘Are you going to be expelled?’

‘Probably,’ Dennis says.

‘We have to go and see him first thing on Monday,’ Geoff says. ‘He said he needed time to think before he decided what our
punishment should be?’

‘Shit-o-rama,’ Mario says. ‘This is a high price to pay for a foolish experiment that did not work.’

‘Totally worth it,’ Dennis says. ‘Best thing Von Boner’s done in his whole useless overweight life.’

In terms of the comprehensive destruction of a night’s entertainment, Ruprecht’s experiment was an unqualified success. The
multifrequencied Pachelbel loop, building and building so unendurably, was merely a starter, noise-wise. Just as the Automator
took the stage, the Van Doren Wave Oscillator crashed. Instantly, the Sports Hall was filled with a jangle of indescribable
static: keening, popping, crackling, hissing, tweeting, belching, roaring, gurgling, a bedlam of utterly alien sounds unleashed
at such a volume as to be palpable physical presences, a menagerie of impossible beasts marauding through our reality, disembodied,
robotic voices interspersed among them, like a demented mechanical Pentecost…

Too much for this audience; they fled for the doors. Hats were
lost in the jostle, spectacles crushed, women knocked to the ground; they ran until they reached the entrance to the car park,
where, a safe distance away, they turned back to view the still-ululating Hall, as though expecting it to implode or lift
off into the sky. It did not; instead, after a couple of moments, the noise came to a sudden halt, as the sound-desk shorted
out and with it the school power supply, at which point a large minority of them stormed back in again to track down the Automator
and ask him
what the hell kind of bloody game he was playing at
.

‘I’m damned if I’m paying you ten thousand a year to turn my son into a
terrorist
–’

‘This never would have happened in Father Furlong’s day!’

It took nearly an hour of placating, assuaging and mollifying before the Automator could return to his office, where the Quartet
had been confined. When he did, he made little effort to disguise his fury. He railed; he roared; he pounded the desk, sending
photographs and paperweights flying. There was a new tone in his voice tonight. Before he’d treated them as he treated all
the boys – like insects, flimsy and inconsequential. Tonight he spoke to them like enemies.

Ruprecht got the worst of it. Ruprecht, a deviant who had brought his parents nothing but shame; Ruprecht, whose brilliance
covered a deep-rooted degeneracy of which this farrago was merely the latest example. You know what I’m talking about, Van
Doren. The Acting Principal stared across the desk at him, like a ravenous animal through the bars of its cage. A lot of things
have become clear to me now, he said, a lot of things.

The others were all crying; but Ruprecht just stood there, head bowed, while words fell on him like axes to the chest.

I’ll be honest with you, boys, the Automator concluded. For various legal reasons expulsion can be difficult to arrange these
days. It’s not impossible you’ll get away with a long suspension. And in a way I hope you do. Because it means I will have
the next four and a half years to make your lives hell. I will make them a living hell. You assholes.

‘Mamma Mia,’ Mario says now.

‘He can say what he wants,’ Dennis retorts. ‘We’re part of Seabrook history now. I mean, people are going to be talking about
this for
decades
.’ The moon has peeped out from behind a cloud, and he is seized with a creeping euphoria. ‘The look on my mum’s face! Oh,
Van Boner, you are a genius after all!’ A thought occurs to him. ‘Hey, maybe if I get expelled I could write his biography.
What do you think?
Bummer on the Loose: The Ruprecht Van Doren Story.
’

‘Where
is
Ruprecht, anyway?’ asks Mario. ‘He’s not in his room.’

‘He seemed pretty down,’ Geoff remarks cautiously.

‘Well, what did he expect?’ Dennis says. ‘Skippy’s going to appear in a big ball of light and give us all high fives?’

‘I did not say to Ruprecht before, but if I am in Heaven getting it on with a sexy angel, there is no way I am coming back
to attend some gay school concert,’ Mario says, then with a yawn rises from the bench. ‘Anyhow, I have heard enough bollocks
for one evening. For the record, I hope you are not expelled. I would miss you guys, though this does not make me a homosexual.’

‘’Night, Mario.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’ The door wheezes shut behind him. For a time, the remaining two sit in silence, each occupied with his own
thoughts; Geoff turned to the window, as if the faint silvering cast by the unveiled moon might reveal everything absent to
be right out there in the yard…Then, after taking a moment, perhaps to summon up courage, he says casually to Dennis, ‘You
don’t think it worked?’

‘What?’

‘Ruprecht’s experiment, you don’t think it worked?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Not even a little bit?’

‘How could it possibly have worked?’

‘I don’t know,’ Geoff says, and then, ‘it’s just that when all
that noise started… I thought I heard a voice that sounded like Skippy’s.’

‘Are you talking about the German truck driver?’

‘Didn’t he sound a lot like Skippy?’

‘Okay, explain to me why Skippy would be talking in German, about trucks.’

‘I suppose,’ Geoff admits.

‘Geoff, you should know by now that none of Ruprecht’s ideas ever works. And this one was off the wall even by his standards.’

‘Right,’ Geoff says. His face falls a little; then rouses, as he is struck by something. ‘Hey though – if you didn’t ever
think it would work, how come you agreed to do it?’

Dennis considers this, and then at last, ‘I would say malice.’

‘Malice?’

‘Like the Automator said. Malice, wanting to spoil the concert for everybody, that sort of thing.’

‘Oh.’ Geoff allows a polite interval to elapse while he affects to take this on board. In the moonlight he has been seized
by a tingle of euphoria – the same sensation Dennis had earlier, reflecting on the concert, only Geoff’s is from a different
source. Then, attempting to muffle his delight, he says, ‘I know the real reason you did it.’

‘Oh, you do?’ Dennis all caustic surprise. ‘Enlighten me, please.’

‘You did it because you wanted all of us to be together again. You knew it wouldn’t work, and you knew we’d get in trouble,
but you also knew that what Skippy would want, if he was here, is for us all still to be friends? And this was the only way
to do it. And even though it didn’t work, it did sort of work, because when we’re all together, it’s like Skippy’s there too,
because each of us has his own little jigsaw piece of him he remembers, and when you fit them all together, and you make the
whole picture, then it’s like he comes to life.’