Skippy Dies (82 page)

Dennis remains silent, then issues a long, slow tocking with his tongue. ‘Geoff, how long have you known me? Is that really
the kind of thing you think I’d think? Because if it is I’m very disappointed.’

‘Mmm, yeah, I knew you’d say that too.’

‘I’m going to bed,’ Dennis says peremptorily. ‘I don’t have to sit here and listen to my character being assassinated.’

He gets up; then he stops, sniffing the air. ‘Did you just cut one?’ he says.

‘No.’

Dennis sniffs the air again. ‘That is
rough
. You need to stop eating those urinal cakes, Geoff.’

With that he’s gone, and now Geoff’s alone in the Rec Room. But he doesn’t
feel
alone, not nearly as alone as you can feel sometimes, when the room is full of people playing table tennis and copying homework
and throwing wet tissues at each other: in the wake of Ruprecht’s song, everything seems unusually placid, contented, still;
and you can sit, just another object, not so colourful as the pool table nor so lightful as the Coke machine, and think of
what Skippy might say if he were here, and what you, Geoff, might say back to him; until a yawn comes over you, and you rise
and pad back out to get your toothbrush and go to bed – so tired all of a sudden you don’t notice the evermore acrid tint
to the air, nor the first wisps of malign black smoke as they creep up the stairs.

It sounded like when you set an animal on fire. Then all around him were black bodies rising out of the grass. They rose up,
they were screaming, only Carl could hear them.

Then he was on the street outside his house. He didn’t know how he got there. The noise was gone, they were gone, but the
night kept getting darker and darker. He blinked to push it back but then it came crashing in again. Lights did not make any
difference. The rain in the pocks of the path joined up to make words he could not say, words made of secret letters. Every
word was a shell that held an empty universe.

The key was in the door. There was mud on his trousers.

Carl’s life had become a series of scenes featuring Carl. They joined up for a second like words made of rain in the pocks
of a path then came apart again. Everything was like an answer that was on the tip of your tongue. Coats. Tiny flowers of
the wallpaper.

He could not remember how things join up!

The bodies, the shadows, a thousand, a million, going,
WE ARE THE DEAD
. So loud, the horrible sound! The Druid staring at Carl with his mouth open. Then in a glow Dead Boy at their front.

That’s when Carl ran, he ran all the way back home.

The living room smelled like chemicals.
I love the smell of napalm in the morning
. Light shot at you from everywhere! Gleam gleam went the wood and glass, the TV, the rowing machine, the gin bottle. Through
the dark. On the couch Mom lay. From the doorway it looked like a fairy-tale with a princess fallen asleep in an enchanted
garden. The curtain was open, the streetlight shone on her bare legs. Carl reached down and very gently, like he was plucking
a flower, took the burned-down cigarette from between her fingers. He carried it to the fireplace and put it there.

In the kitchen he poured water into a glass. He held up the glass and looked into it. In the glass the room: the cream walls,
the grey refrigerator, the cookery books with famous TV chefs on the never-opened covers, all shivery and blurred. He drank
and felt the room wobbling icy-cold in his stomach. Now when you open your eyes there will be nothing there.

Carl!

He opened his eyes. He was in the living room. Mom rose silver out of her sleeping body and floated above it. She watched
Carl but did not speak. The moon was full, they had turned it into a streetlight. She looked down sad like something terrible
was going to happen. But it was not she who said Carl’s name.

Standing right next to Carl was Dead Boy.

Oh fuck!

Now when you stared at him he did not disappear any more. That was what happened on the hill, that was why Carl was screaming.
You screamed and screamed, FUCK OFF and I’M SORRY, he just hovered, he just smiled. Now he was here in Carl’s house, there
was nowhere left to run.

He is dead. I’ve been wanting to talk to you, he said.

He can talk?!

First you had to smoke the poppies first, then I can talk to you.

???

The poppies are made of In the war they grew out of the bodies From the
LAND OF DEATH
People spat on them So They moved underground To give them
ANTEROGRADE AMNESIA
so When you smoke them Now you can see us

Do you live in the dolmen? Carl said.

Dead Boy nodded. It is very cold, he said.

Yes that is what THEY said, now he remembered We are cold We are sad.

I am cold too, he said.

I know, Carl, said Dead Boy.

Then he realized: Dead Boy is his friend! He wanted to help him! That was why he’d been appearing!

Carl’s eyes were full of tears. Lori won’t talk to me, he told

Dead Boy. It’s like I’m dead too.

Dead Boy nodded.

I love her, Carl said. How can I get her to talk to me again?

You have to show her that we’re friends now.

But how?

You have to help me finish the quest, Dead Boy whispered.

Everything went dark like the room was filled with [black paint] [millions of crows].

Carl was afraid. The quest?

You have to kill the final Demon. Now it was just Dead Boy’s eyes like two big moons.

It’s the priest, Carl. It’s the peterphile. He’s the one who killed me.

He is? Carl said.

Dead Boy nodded slowly.

Something was not right about this but Carl shook it away.

Everything glowed.

You have to show her.

The holy fire, Mom said above the couch. Her hand was a flame.

And Carl knew what he had to do.

Father Green had intended to attend tonight’s concert, if only out of a childish wish to irritate Greg. But at the very last
minute he had been called out to administer the last rites to an ailing woman on the other side of the city. He drove for
an hour only to find she had made a miraculous recovery. Father Green had no option but to concede the point to his rival.
Well played, sir! When he returned everyone had gone. The halls are empty as he makes his way down to his basement office,
where he will sit and watch the hands of the clock.

No work, Jerome? That’s not like you! Getting old at last?

It has been like this since the boy died. He does not work, he does not sleep. You know he sees him still, in his office,
dutifully folding cardboard sheets into boxes, taping shut the flaps, oblivious to the silent battle raging only a few feet
away, the carnal ravenings of an old man. Even now, approaching Our Lady’s Hall, Father Green thinks he hears footsteps behind
him; and he cannot stop himself from a shiver of hope as he turns round. But of course there is nothing.

At the top of the hall, he stops by the crib – as yet only half-occupied: no Infant, no Kings, only the oxen and donkeys to
keep watch over the Holy Parents as they kneel in the straw. Before it, the offerings for the hampers. He bends to examine
the labels. Mascarpone cheese, semi-sundried tomatoes, lychees. Donations are down this year. The idea of giving food, of
taking actual food from your larder and putting it in another’s, must seem tiresomely Victorian in this ethereal age of numbers
flying through the air. Poverty far too literal for these abstracted people.

That is not the reason, Jerome
.
The reason is you.

Yes. Father Green is aware of the rumours surrounding him.
He sees the graffiti on his door; he hears the whispers, detects the snubs in the corridor, the staffroom, the vestry even.
All in all it has pained him surprisingly little: the blessing of being an unsociable man. Except that now it has taken away
what power he had to do good. For how can a criminal tug at anyone’s conscience? Who will give to a monster? He himself becomes
the excuse not to think of those wretched slums, those addled lives. Irony upon irony! One always underestimates the capacity
of life to diminish one.

So why do you stay?

He asks himself the same question as he descends the steps to the office. Why stay? He has given Greg his scapegoat. Scandal
is averted, the swimming coach may make his escape unblemished, the school continue as a shining beacon of the bourgeoisie.
What they
need
of him now is to go. Go, that they may curse his name and forget this ever happened. And he
wants
to go. He has done enough for Seabrook. Why stay, to be calumnied? To be painted with the sins of another?

It’s obvious, Jerome. You wish the sin had been yours. That’s why you will not tell the truth, that’s why you will not leave.
Instead you must stay here and be punished. Yet you committed no crime.

Only because I was afraid.

Ah, Jerome. Come, it is over. The boy is in the ground, with nothing to touch his lips but the worms. You have done him no
wrong. Why must you torture yourself?

Why?

For Africa? For what happened forty years ago? Who remembers, Jerome? Those little boys? Most likely they are dead too. So
who then? God? But what God do you believe in any more?

The priest sits at his desk, leafs through the paperwork unseeingly.

You would rather punish yourself than accept the alternative, is that not so, Jerome.

That noise outside again. Footsteps?

None of this matters. That is what you will not accept. None of it
has mattered, nothing you did, the good, the bad. And nothing matters now.

Definitely something out there. A smell too, acrid. He rises, crosses the floor.

But you, you would rather burn than think this. You would rather hellfire, than look at the world and see the truth. See nothing.

Tears, or the ache of tears that will not come. He opens the door. As the red flame leaps for him he staggers backwards. Shock
at first, but then a glimmer of joy.

Hellfire!

Howard stumbles out into December. The night, once it has slipped its fingers beneath his insulation of alcohol, is exceptionally
cold, with a sour, chemical note to the air. He walks back in the direction of the school car park, deferring until he gets
there the knowledge that he is unfit to drive and has not enough money for a taxi. His conscience taunts him with memories
of the many times Halley rescued him from comparable situations, driving across the whole city sometimes to pick him up, and
he falls morosely into his fantasy of earlier on – calling at her door, attractively bloodied from his encounter with Tom
Roche, to be swept up into her arms. Somehow he doesn’t think turning up unbruised, sacked and drunk will have quite the same
effect.

The moon tonight is full, and bright enough that he notices it disappear when he turns in the gate. He looks up, and sees
an enormous black cloud printed over the school. It is of an unusual solidity, and low enough to partially obscure the Tower.
The very next moment, all the lights in the upper floors come on; and now – he finds himself braced for it – the frenetic
shrilling of the alarm clamours into the sleeping yard. Breaking into a run, he hurries down the avenue, through the car park,
the dense black cloud growing over his head all the while, until, passing the Sports Hall, he arrives in the Quad.

The never-opened doors at the top of Our Lady’s Hall have been flung open, and boys are pouring out like pyjama’d ants from
a disturbed nest, coils of black smoke snaking out with them at ankle height and slithering opportunistically into the night.
Already the heat is palpable, a tropical warmth on his cheek. Bright amorphous hands beat at the leaded glass of the windows,
and from within comes a rapturous roar of destruction, mingled with
crashes and breaking. Howard locates Brian Tomms by the doors, hollering at the exiting boys to line up in order of their
dorms. ‘What’s going on?’ he yells over the alarm.

‘Fire.’ Tomms does not appear surprised to see Howard. ‘Seems to’ve started in the basement. We’ve put in a call to the fire
brigade, but it’ll probably have eaten up the Tower by the time they get here.’ He speaks in calm, clipped tones, a general
surveying his battlefield. ‘Looks deliberate to me.’

‘Can I do anything?’

‘We’ve got most of the boys out. These are just the last few.’

As he speaks the crocodile line begins to peter out and Tomms descends the steps to oversee the prefects as they do the head-count.
The boys, dim-eyed, tuft-haired, wait in orderly two-by-two rows. A few are filming the event with their phones – the white
shapes behind the glass like furious dancing ghosts – but most merely look on vacantly, as though attending a special midnight
assembly, lending the scene a weird peace.

Then it is broken by a commotion at the doors. Two fifth-years struggle to contain a handful of smaller boys, who are apparently
attempting to run back into the school. Tomms runs over to help the prefects, and as they are jostled out into the Quad, Howard
identifies the breakaways as Geoff Sproke, Dennis Hoey and Mario Bianchi from his second-year History class. The tears on
their cheeks, in the unearthly light, give their faces the appearance of melting wax. ‘He’s still in there!’ blurts Geoff
Sproke from behind the chain of arms. ‘He’s not!’ Tomms shouts him down. ‘He’s not, we checked!’ As he speaks, a plume of
fire shoots over the roof, bathing the onlookers in a freakish orange glow. ‘Ruprecht! Ruprecht!’ the boy’s friends cry, throwing
themselves once more against their captors. The sound is pitiful and thin against the flames, like kittens crying for their
mother. With a sinking heart, Howard reels around and stumbles towards the doors. Heat blasts his face; beneath its bandages,
his hand sings ecstatically, as if recognizing its own.

Burning, Our Lady’s Hall has become something alive, something
new and terrible. Flames race over the walls, seizing and devouring, and the dull matrix of the school beneath them – the
chipped timber, the shabby plasterwork, the doorways, the desks, the statue of the Virgin – seems already to have retreated
from the world, half-turned to shadow. Looking on, Howard feels like a dinosaur watching the first meteors fall; like he’s
witnessing an evolutionary leap, the arrival of an insuperable future. He imagines Greg’s tropical fish boiling in their tank.