Authors: Paul Murray
The choice of music for the performance has been left to Ruprecht, who has gone for Pachelbel’s Canon in D, explaining to
Jeekers that the Canon is the piece favoured by Professor Tamashi for his METI broadcasts into space.
‘I really like that song,’ Geoff says. Then his brow puckers. ‘Although it really reminds me of something.’
‘But, ah,’ Jeekers feels he has to point out, ‘
we
won’t be broadcasting into space. We’ll just be playing to our parents.’
‘Perhaps,’ twinkles Ruprecht. ‘But you never know who might be listening in.’
‘I’m in hell,’ Dennis whispers to himself.
‘What’s going on with the girl, Skip?’ Geoff asks as they make their way back to class after break. ‘Has she texted you back
yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Hmm.’ Geoff strokes his chin. ‘Well, I suppose it’s only been a couple of days.’
A couple of endless days. He knows she is alive: yesterday morning, he saw her through the telescope, emerging from a
silver Saab and tripping, with a shake of her hair, the few steps to the door of St Brigid’s. But maybe she lost her phone?
Maybe she has no credit? Maybe she never got the message? Maybes surround her in a fog, like Ruprecht’s theory that doesn’t
explain anything, just hangs a question mark over everything it touches; and the phone remains smug and mute in his pocket,
like someone with a secret they will not tell.
‘Maybe you should send her another haiku,’ Niall suggests.
‘Send another message and you might as well paint a big L-for-loser right there on your forehead,’ Mario says. ‘Right now,
your strategy is to sit tight and play it cool.’
‘Yeah,’ Skippy agrees glumly, but then: ‘Are you
sure
that was the right number you gave me?’
‘Sure I’m sure. I don’t make a mistake about something like that.’
‘Like you’re sure it’s
her
number?’
Mario clicks his teeth. ‘I’m telling you, that’s her number. Go and check for yourself, if you don’t believe me.’
‘Go and check for myself?’ This does not sound right to Skippy. ‘What do you mean, go and check for myself?’
‘The toilet,’ Mario replies blithely. ‘In Ed’s Doughnut House.’
Skippy stops in his tracks. ‘You got her number from a
toilet
?’
‘Yes, it is on the door of the middle cubicle.’
At first Skippy is too dumbstruck even to respond.
‘Holy smoke, Mario,’ Geoff says, ‘a toilet door…?’
‘What’s the problem? It’s not like someone’s going to put up a fake number. We can go back and look if you want – it is in
the middle cubicle beneath a drawing of a joint that is also an ejaculating penis.’
Skippy has now recovered his power of speech, and uses it; Mario retaliates, the others join in, and they become so engrossed
in the argument that none of them notices the figure coming towards them out of the crowd – not until the last second when,
moving with a facility and speed surprising in someone of his build, he looms up behind Skippy like a shadow, seizes either
side of his head and quickly, deftly, dashes it against the wall.
Skippy drops to the ground like a swatted fly, and for several moments he remains there, sprawled beneath the noticeboard,
diverting the flow of his schoolmates. Then, with Geoff’s help, he drags himself into a sitting position, and gingerly touches
his bleeding temple. Dennis watches Carl shoulder his way back through the pullulating hall. ‘I suppose that means it must
have been the right number,’ he says.
That night Halley dreams of old loves; she wakes, flushed and guilty, some hours before dawn. ‘Howard?’ she calls his name
gently, as if somehow he might know. In the velvet darkness her voice sounds thin, careful, concealing. But he does not respond;
beside her, the drowsing bulk of his away-turned body rises and falls, placid and oblivious, a gigantic unicellular organism
sharing her bed.
She closes her eyes but can’t fall back to sleep, and so instead she conjures up again the substance of the dream, a flame
of hers from years ago, in a sun-flooded apartment on Mulberry Street. Awake it doesn’t take, though; it feels like someone
else’s life and she like a voyeur, watching from outside.
By the time she’s showered, the sun has come up. It has been raining during the night, and the day is drenched and quivering
and singing with colour.
‘Morning, morning.’ Howard bustles into the room with his jacket already on and kisses her on the cheek before opening the
refrigerator. He sets the toaster, pours some coffee, and sits down at the table, studying his lesson plan. For the last two
weeks he has tried not to look at her; she does not know why. Has she changed somehow? In the mirror her face does not seem
different. ‘So what’s going on today?’ he says.
She shrugs. ‘Write about technology. How about you?’
‘Teach kids history.’ Now he looks up, smiles at her, flat and false as a cereal commercial.
‘You know what, though, I’m going to need the car this afternoon.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah, I have to go see this Science Fair.’
‘At the RDS? Farley’s going to be there, you should say hello.’
‘I will. But the car. Can I come into school lunchtime and pick it up?’
‘Why not just take it now? I can get the bus in.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure, makes more sense than you having to – whoops, in that case I’d better skedaddle though –’ He looks at his
watch and is grabbing a kiss in the next instant: then in the same flurry of movement he has closed the door behind him.
This is the way they live now, like two actors in the final performances of a show no one comes to see any more.
The morning is a quagmire of e-mails and missed calls, voice-mails promising more e-mails, more calls. Still, the prospect
of an afternoon in the outside world makes it easier to bear. People are always telling Halley how lucky she is to be able
to work at home. No commute! No boss in your face! You don’t even have to get dressed! She herself used to write up the housebound
life, or
fully networked society
as it was called then, as the great promise of the digital revolution. Now here she is, thrilled to be going to a science
fair for teenagers because it gives her an excuse to put on make-up. Be careful what you wish for, she supposes.
In Ballsbridge she parks the car and leaves the bright afternoon for the darkness of the exhibition hall. Inside it is murky
and frenetic with activity, like a juvenile ant colony. Everywhere she looks, arcane contraptions hum, spark, crackle, splash;
animals dutifully nose electrodes and spin wheels; computers encrypt, decrypt, configure. For all the commotion, though, science
is palpably of secondary importance to the teenaged exhibitors; between the stalls, stares are being swapped so nakedly lustful
that even to pass through them is to feel vaguely violated.
She does the rounds of the exhibits, speaks to their breathless or monosyllabic progenitors, while around her their peers,
obviously attending under duress, shuffle by with the hopeless expressions of prisoners on a death march – pasty, raw-boned
kids in dreary uniforms, fidgeting, slapping each other, repeating
unfunny jokes. Seeing Howard’s friend Farley looming in the distance, she makes her way to the Seabrook stalls, where a study
of the heat-release system in reptiles has been thrown into jeopardy by a gecko gone AWOL. A couple of boys are crawling around
in the space behind the stall in search of it, proffering little pieces of Mars Bar; the other two members of the team appear
more concerned with looking cool in front of the Loreto girls with the wind generator on the other side of the aisle. ‘I knew
we should have brought a reserve gecko.’ Beside her, Farley shakes his head. ‘That guy’s not coming back.’
‘How is everything? Gecko aside.’
‘Everything’s fine. Counting down to Christmas, I suppose, like everybody else.’
She wants to ask him about Howard, try to discover what might be on his mind, what she can do; but she hesitates, and a moment
later two boys arrive from another Seabrook exhibit – one swarthy with a daunting single eyebrow, the other with pale, ginger
features strafed with acne, both of that slightly dysmorphic cast common to teenage boys, as though their faces have been
copied out of a catalogue by someone working in an unfamiliar medium – to tell Farley that someone spilled Coke on their laptop.
‘ “Someone”?’ Farley repeats.
‘It just sort of happened,’ the ginger boy says.
‘Oh God,’ Farley sighs, ‘sorry, Halley,’ as he follows them away.
How strange that Howard spends his whole day with these creatures, she thinks. She finds her energy sapped just from being
around them a few moments.
Climbing into the car afterwards – an ancient Bluebird, a compendium of idiosyncrasies held together by rust that represents
Howard’s only significant investment in life prior to meeting her – she pretends to herself that she doesn’t feel bad about
going home. She turns on the radio, hums unlisteningly over the chatter of voices, does not resist as her mind slips back
to those grand days of irrational exuberance, when hardly a day went by without a new start-up starting up, or an IPO, or
some other such
glamorous wing-ding, as her old editor called them, for Halley to dress up for; the great days of the Internet Boom, when
all the talk was of the future, imagined as a kind of secular, matte-black Rapture, an epoch of convergence and unending bliss
that it was widely believed, there at the end of the twentieth century, was just about to arrive, and Halley spent her nights
in a little apartment on Mulberry Street –
The dog bounds out in front of her in a flash of golden fur that disappears immediately out of sight. She jams on the brakes,
but the car, with a surprisingly heavy, almost industrial sound, has already hit it. Opening the door she scrambles out onto
the street –
her
street, with
her
house, and the rest of the day as it should have been, only yards away! – at the same moment that the woman from the house
opposite opens hers and runs down the footpath towards her.
‘It just appeared out of nowhere,’ Halley gabbles, ‘it jumped right out in front of the car…’
‘The garden gate was open,’ the woman says, but her attention is on the dog, kneeling to stroke its pink-tinged head. It lies
flat on its side, a little distance from the car bumper; its brown eyes smile at Halley as she crouches down beside it. Blood
is trickling along the gravel from underneath its head. ‘Oh, Polly…’
A car has pulled up behind Halley’s. Unable to pass, the driver gets out and stands over them. ‘Oh, the poor thing… did you
hit her?’
‘She came out of nowhere,’ Halley repeats miserably.
‘Poor old girl.’ The man hunkers down by the two women. The dog, enjoying the attention, looks from one to the other, thumps
its tail weakly on the ground. ‘She needs to be taken to the vet,’ the man says. They begin to discuss how she might best
be lifted. If a sheet were slid under her, a kind of hammock? – A shrill scream issues from a short distance away. The woman’s
little girl is frozen by the garden gate.
‘Alice, go inside,’ the woman commands.
‘Polly!’ the girl cries.
‘Go in
side
,’ her mother repeats, but the girl is dashing pell-mell down the path and by the time she reaches them is already in floods
of tears. ‘Polly! Polly!’ The dog pants and licks its chops, as if to try and calm her.
‘Shh, Alice… Alice…’ The woman half-rises as the little girl begins to wail, her entire head turning mauve, becoming one huge
mouth. ‘Shh…’ The woman presses the child’s head into her body; the small hands fling themselves around her skirt. Gently
she leads her back towards the house. ‘Come on now… it will be okay…’
Absently, Halley swirls her fingertips over the drab tarmac while the man phones the DSPCA. Before long the woman from the
house re-emerges, a white sheet bundled in her arms. She waits for the man to finish his call and then the three of them lift
the dog to the side of the road. There is no longer any need to take it to the vet. They stretch the cover loosely over its
body.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Halley pleads yet again.
‘I kept meaning to do something about that gate,’ the woman says distractedly. ‘I suppose the postman must have left it open.’
The man puts his hand on her elbow and tells her that these things happen. Halley aches for him to say it to her too, but
he does not. The three of them exchange phone numbers, as if their drama still has an act to go; ‘I live across the street,’
Halley tells the woman uselessly. Then she gets back in the car and drives it the stone’s throw to her own gate. Once inside,
she peeks through the curtains to see the woman, cheeks streaked, still keeping vigil on the corner, by the bedsheet from
which the dog’s paws protrude, neatly, two by two. The other retriever lies on the grass in the woman’s garden, snout poking
abjectly through the railings; from an upstairs window the little girl looks out, palms pressed to the glass, wailing soundlessly.
Halley closes the curtains and bunches herself up in a corner. The phone flashes at her from the desk with incoming calls;
digital fish swim back and forth across the computer screen. For the first time since she arrived in Ireland, she wishes without
reservation she were at home. It feels like her whole life here has been tending towards this point, turning her into someone
who runs down a dog.
Not long after, she hears Howard coming in, preceded by a whistle like the theme tune to some balsa-wood sitcom. She sits
up on the couch, glares at his unwitting, friendly smile. ‘So how was the Fair?’ he asks.
‘What?’
‘The Science Fair?’
The Science Fair! The gecko! The reminder of that distant afternoon and her own part in it – how trivial, how perfectly fucking
useless to anyone! – is petrol on the flames of her anger. ‘Howard, why didn’t you get the car serviced?’
‘What?’ Howard, slow-witted, lays down his briefcase and overcoat.
‘The fucking brakes are fucked, Howard, I’ve asked you a million times to bring that heap of shit to the garage and you never
fucking do it –’