Authors: Paul Murray
Quizzical looks.
‘Because my dick is so long, you see, that it comes all the way down my trousers and out onto the floor.’
Silence, and then: ‘Let
me
give you some advice, Skippy – never, ever do anything Mario tells you. Ever.’
‘Yeah, Skip, just go over and say hi, that’s all you need to do.’
‘Okay, well, maybe I’ll just wait a little while and then…’
‘Do it
now
, her friends will be back in a minute.’
‘Yeah, or someone else’ll make a move on her.’
‘I feel nauseous…’
‘True love,’ Geoff says cheerfully.
‘Come on, Skip, Carl’s not here.’
‘Juster, as your Acting Principal I order you to go over there and hit on that girl,’ Dennis commands. ‘That’s more – hey,
where’s he going? Hey, she’s over that way!’
Ruprecht waddles after his friend. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Get them to leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to her now.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t feel well. I can’t breathe.’
‘Hmm…’ Ruprecht strokes his chin. He may never have been in love, but he knows all about not breathing. ‘Perhaps you might
find this helpful.’ He presses something into his hand. Skippy looks down and just has time to recognize the blue tube of
Ruprecht’s asthma inhaler, before Dennis sneaks up behind him and shoves him with both hands, sending him careering into Frisbee
Girl.
‘Someone had to do something,’ Dennis says querulously, in response to the accusing looks the others are giving him. ‘He could
have gone on mooning over this bimbo for ever.’
‘I wonder if he’s using my line,’ Mario cranes his neck.
‘I’m not sure he’s saying
anything
,’ Ruprecht bites his thumb pensively.
‘It doesn’t matter what he says to her,’ Dennis says. ‘Skippy and that girl are from two different worlds. It’s like a fish
trying to hit on a supermodel. That fish could have the best lines in the world, it wouldn’t make any difference. It’s still
a fish, with, you know, scales and stuff.’
‘So why did you push him into her?’ Geoff demands.
‘To bring him back to reality,’ Dennis says self-righteously. ‘The sooner he finds out the truth, the better. Hot girls like
her don’t go
out with weedy losers. They just don’t. That’s the way it works.’
There is a meditative silence, then Geoff says, ‘That’s how it
usually
works. But maybe tonight is different.’
‘Why the hell would tonight be any different, you anus?’
‘Because of Hallowe’en.’ Geoff turns his festering, Play-Doh visage to Dennis, and in his beyond-the-grave basso expands,
‘
The ancient feast of Samhain, when the gates between our world and the Otherworld are opened, and unholy spirits march unchecked
through the land. All laws are suspended, and nothing is as it seems…
’
‘Sure,’ Dennis says, ‘except tonight’s not Hallowe’en, it’s Friday 26 October.’
With a gasp, Ruprecht checks his watch and then, without a word of explanation, sprints for the side-door out to the corridor.
Dennis, Mario and Geoff look at each other incredulously. No one has ever seen Ruprecht sprint before.
‘Hmm,’ Dennis says thoughtfully, ‘I see what you mean,’ and they return to observing Skippy with renewed interest.
So far, things have gone predictably badly. He crashed right into her, spilling half her drink, and now she’s looking at him
with a mixture of terror and contempt, the latter gaining the upper hand with every second he stands here twitching and blinking
and not saying anything. But it’s impossible to think! Up close she’s even more beautiful, and every time she looks at him
he feels like he’s been hit by lightning.
‘Uh, sorry,’ he manages to croak at last.
‘That’s okay,’ the girl says in a deeply ironic tone. She makes to move past him. Impulsively, he sidesteps into her path.
‘Daniel,’ he blurts. ‘Uh, that’s who I am.’
‘O-
kay
,’ the girl responds, and then when he doesn’t get out of the way, with obvious reluctance, she says, ‘Lori.’
‘Lori,’ he repeats, then falls back into the twitching, blinking silence. Behind the scenes, his brain, dashing around trying
to put out the fires that have sprung up all over the place, shouts at
him,
Say something else! Say something else!
But it does not tell him what, so he opens his mouth with no idea what’s going to come out until he hears himself speak the
words, ‘Do you like…Yahtzee?’
‘What’s “Yahtzee”?’ pronounced in a tone of pre-emptive disgust that could burn through metal.
‘It’s a game of skill and chance,’ Skippy says miserably. ‘Played with dice.’
The girl looks like if she were any more bored she would actually be dead. ‘Do you have any drugs?’ she says.
‘I have an asthma inhaler,’ he replies eagerly.
The girl just looks at him. ‘Um,’ he says. Inside his whole body groans in agony. He couldn’t help it, it was right there
in his hand! Now he stares at his shoes, from which one of the wings is coming off again, wishing the ground would swallow
him up – when something else hits him. Scrambling off his quiver, he fishes down past the Arrows of Light – ‘I have these.’
He produces the tube breathlessly.
‘What are they,’ she says, without seeming too enthusiastic.
‘They’re, um, travel-sickness pills.’
‘Travel-sickness pills?’
Skippy’s head bobs mutely. She gazes at him as if urging him to complete the thought. ‘But you’re not going anywhere,’ she
says finally.
‘No, but…’ He wants to explain about the pills and how they take you away from where you are even though you’re still there;
but it sounds stupid even before he says it, and he tails off, sinking under the weight of his own foolishness. She is right,
he isn’t going anywhere. He has ruined everything for ever, there is no way he’ll be able to wipe this from her memory. Now
he just wants it to be over. ‘No,’ he says.
The girl is frowning, as though she’s doing maths in her head. Then she says, ‘What happens if you mix travel pills and asthma
inhaler.’
‘I don’t know,’ Skippy says. Glancing over his shoulder, her
eyes suddenly fix and widen. Skippy turns too, and sees that the main doors have been opened. He’s surprised, because when
he checks his watch it’s still only 9.45.
‘This thing is totally lame,’ the girl decides. ‘I’m getting out of here.’ And before Skippy can say anything, she is walking
away, every step she takes a sledgehammer whomping his heart into little tiny pieces. Then she pauses, and over her shoulder,
in the careless way you might speak to a stray dog you’d met in the park, she says, ‘Coming?’
For some reason he starts babbling about how he thinks you have to ask permission before you can leave. But she’s already
halfway across the hall.
‘Hey, wait up!’ He comes to and chases after her, catching up with her as she enters the cloakroom; and side by side they
step out into the night.
‘Holy shit,’ Dennis says.
‘This Hallowe’en is powerful stuff,’ Mario says. He reflects a moment. ‘Perhaps these supernatural forces are also behind
the mystery of my failure with the ladies tonight. If a born loser like Skippy can score a hottie-to-the-max like that, you
know that some crazy shit is going down.’
Meanwhile, a long-limbed shadow is pushing through the crowd. Another reversal – this is a shadow for which people get out
of the way. It rolls its eyes and gnashes its teeth, it seizes girls as it moves through the hall, pulling off masks and boring
into their eyes before casting them aside – and now it catches sight of someone, blundering in tears in the opposite direction,
her voluminous dress slipping down her arms so it looks like she’s escaping from an enormous pink-and-white jellyfish. It
makes for her, grabs her wrist and pulls her into it. ‘Where’s your friend?’ it demands. ‘Lori, where is she?’
But the weeping girl just bursts out into fresh wailing. The shadow swears and goes back the way it came, shouldering people
left and right in spite of the path that has opened up in front of it.
Howard and Miss McIntyre do not make it back to the Sports Hall by the end of the song. As soon as they pass through the door,
they find themselves bewitched by the strangeness of the school at night. Its inky silence, its somnolence, make the familiar
corridors feel like the underground chambers of a mausoleum, untrodden for centuries; Howard has to resist the temptation
to yawp! hoot, jump around, shatter the echoey hush. Every step promises to take them deeper into uncharted terrain. Soon
the music is only a distant murmur.
At last they shore up in the Geography Room. Overhead, thunder roars continuously, as though they are in the foundations of
some celestial interchange, into which bodiless locomotives come crashing every instant. ‘We’ll have one quick drink and then
we’ll go back,’ Miss McIntyre says. She searches through the carrier bags for the ingredients – apparently she was serious
about the Cosmopolitans – while Howard, hands in his pockets, looks at the pictures on the walls. The Geography Room is covered
from floor to ceiling with photographs, charts and illustrations. One wall is devoted to aerial shots of the earth, wild weaves
of colour that reveal themselves, when you read the text below, to be clouds around Everest, a rainbowed view of Patagonian
ice-sheets, a hundred thousand flamingos in flight over a lake in Kenya, a blue faro of the Maldives. On another, pictures
of happy banana-pickers in South America, happy miners in the Rhine-Ruhr Valley, happy tribes in their rainforests, rub shoulders
with graphs depicting the
CHIEF EXPORTS OF EUROPE, MINERALS AND THEIR USES, COLTAN
–
FROM THE CONGO TO YOUR PHONE!
The room is like a shrine to the harmonious working of the world: a panoply of facts and processes,
natural, scientific, agricultural, economic, all coexisting peacefully on its walls, while the human fallout from these interactions,
the corollary of coercion, torture, enslavement that accompanies every dollar earned, every step towards alleged progress,
is left for his class: History, the dark twin, the blood-shadow.
‘I really like these volcanoes,’ he says, stopping at the pictures by the door. ‘You don’t see enough volcanoes these days.’
‘Vodka… cranberry juice… damn, there’s something else…’ Miss McIntyre says to herself. ‘Sorry, what was that?’
‘I was just remembering what you said before, about the Earth being forged out of all these grand forces… It’s true, you look
at these pictures and you realize we’re walking through the set of this incredible epic they stopped filming a hundred million
years ago…’
‘Cointreau!’ she exclaims and returns to the carrier bags. ‘Cointreau, Cointreau… oh, to hell with it.’ She takes a swig from
the vodka bottle, and passes it to him. ‘Come on, it’ll warm you up.’
‘Cheers, so,’ he says. She makes a fist and playfully punches the base of the bottle. He drinks. The vodka burns all the way
down to his stomach. ‘I can’t hear the music at all now,’ he says to distract himself from the discomfort.
‘We’ll go back in a minute,’ she says. She hops up on the teacher’s desk and crosses her legs beneath her; from here she regards
Howard mockingly, like an imp on a toadstool. ‘So you’re nostalgic for the Palaeozoic now, is that it?’
‘Definitely quieter, these days. No new mountains, same old continents and oceans. Occasional earthquake kills a few thousand,
that’s as much drama as we get.’
She receives this with an amused smile, like someone holding a royal flush in a poker game for matchsticks. ‘Dramatic things
can still happen,’ she says. ‘All this, for a start.’ She gestures behind her, at the blackboard, on which is written:
GLOBAL WARMING:
DEFORESTATION –> DESERTIFICATION
LOSS OF HABITATS –> DECREASE IN BIODIVERSITY –>
MASS EXTINCTION
RISING TEMPERATURES –> DROUGHT –> CROP FAILURE
POLAR ICE CAPS MELTING –> RISING SEAS –> FLOODING
DIVERSION OF GULF STREAM –> GLACIATION –> ICE AGE
‘An ice age, that would be dramatic enough for most people, no? Or Dublin, London, New York being underwater?’
‘That’s true,’ Howard says.
‘Some scientists think we’re already past the point of no return. They give the world as we know it another fifteen years.
We could be the very last generations of the species.’ She reels this off in a conversational tone, the same mischievous light
flickering in her eyes, as if it’s some rambling shaggy-dog joke, not for young ears. ‘The boys take it
very
seriously. Recycling their Coke cans, using energy-efficient lightbulbs. Yesterday, they were all writing letters to the
Chinese ambassador. The Chinese government want to build a dam in a UNESCO Heritage Site, it’s going to destroy the homes
of millions of people, including the Naxi – they’re one of the world’s last surviving matriarchies, Howard, did you know that?
The boys were so angry! But most people seem to be able to let that stuff just slide over them.’
‘They don’t have you to inspire them,’ Howard says.
‘I suppose we can’t really conceive of our way of life ever changing,’ she says, ignoring his clunky flattery. ‘Let alone
coming to an end. It’s just like the boys here doing stupid things – you know, climbing electricity pylons, jumping their
skateboards off ten-foot walls – because they can’t imagine getting hurt. They think they’ll go on for ever. So do we. But
nothing goes on for ever. Civilization ends, everything ends, that’s what you teach them in History class, isn’t it?’
She utters these words softly, like a lullaby. Her stockinged knee is rested against his thigh. The air seems to shoot with
sparks.
‘History teaches us that history teaches us nothing,’ Howard remembers.
‘That doesn’t say much for history teachers, does it,’ she whispers up at him.
Standing before her at the top of the class, Howard is aware, suddenly, of the empty rows of pupils’ desks behind him, that
nobody in the entire world knows where they are. ‘You teach me something, so,’ he goads her gently. ‘Educate me.’