Authors: Paul Murray
We get it from a
mysterious Druid
, Deano says, in a spooky voice. Barry looks at Mark.
This bloke that calls himself the Druid, Mark says.
Fuck off, Barry says.
I’m serious, Mark says.
Seriously, Deano says, that’s what he’s called.
Why?
It’s what he calls himself. He’s a nutjob. You’d get on with him, he says to Carl.
What’s a Druid, Carl says.
When do we get to meet him? Barry says.
What do you want to meet him for, Deano says.
It just seems like we should meet him, Barry says. If we’re part of the gang.
The gang, Ste says, with a chuckle.
Trust me, you’re not missin anything, Deano says. Bats cunt. Off his rocker. Gives me the fuckin willies.
Well, can we come next time? Barry says. When are you going to meet him next?
Mark doesn’t say anything, neither does Deano.
Saturday, Ste goes from the couch.
What? says Barry.
We’re going to see him on Saturday, Mark says. Outside the door the toilet flushes. There’s some stuff coming in.
Can we come? Barry says.
Youse can take my place if you want, Deano says. You wouldn’t hear me complainin.
Barry’s eyes glow like he’s in
Reservoir Dogs
. Ren’s eyes pop out and explode.
Hur-hur-hur, goes Ste. You’re like Ren, and this dozy fucker’s like your man Stimpy, he says to Barry.
Carl’s phone calls to him through the wall of fog surrounding his mind. Where is it? It’s right in front of you. Janine is
talking, Come and meet me, she says, it’s important. He rolls his eyes but gets up. Through the door in the hall, Knoxer has
his hand in Carl’s jacket where it hangs by the stairs. When he sees Carl he takes it out and smiles and pats Carl’s cheek.
Then he goes into the living room with the others. A moment later Carl is standing there with a churn of anger in his stomach
but no idea why it’s there so he just leaves.
Janine is waiting in the church car park. They can’t go to the greenhouse any more, her granny called the police after it
got wrecked. Don’t worry, she thinks it was Romanians, Janine says. Carl doesn’t care what she thinks. He hates Janine but
she is the only way he has left to get messages to Lori. Every day he tells her something to tell her and she comes back with
nothing. But there must be something he can say that would make her talk to him! There must be something!
Today Lori collapsed in class, Janine tells him.
They are behind the trees, watching the rain.
She hasn’t been eating, she says. For days. Today in English she had to stand up to read something and she just keeled over.
The doctor came in and she had to go to hospital.
She puts her hand on his hand. If she could open the door marked Janine in Carl’s soul, she would find a wall of black puke
that would pour out and drown her. I think she’s been obsessing about Daniel, she says.
Carl doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t take Janine’s head and smash it against the wall. You see, if she wanted to Janine could
tell Lori about what he’s been doing with her, and that would be the absolute total end of everything. So he has to keep seeing
Janine to stop her from telling Lori he’s seeing Janine! It’s like a riddle! It’s like a cage with invisible bars! She stares
at him spastically. Dead Boy flashes up in her eyes, he is laughing at Carl.
I need some more vitamins, she says,
He takes a little baggie out of his pocket. They’re for free, he mumbles.
I want to pay you, she says. She kisses him on the cheek, it’s like being pressed into wet ground.
Don’t worry, she tells him, sliding her hands under his shirt, this is strictly business. She sucks at his neck like quicksand,
she rubs his trousers. He looks away at the rain and the fallen leaves. She cries out, Stop thinking about her, Carl!
And she kisses him desperately like a starving animal and Carl kisses her back to stop her talking and puts his hand into
her pants to close her eyes, his fingers slip-sliding into her, deeper deeper deeper, like they think that that way is a way
back to Lori.
He had gone there for an explanation. Ruprecht has always believed in explanations; he has always seen the universe as a series
of questions posed to its inhabitants, with the answers waiting like prizes for the boy lucky and diligent enough to find
them. To believe in explanations is good, because it means you may believe also that beneath the chaotic, mindless jumble
of everything, beneath the horrible disjunction you feel at every moment between you and all you are not, there dwells in
the universe a secret harmony, a coherence and rightness like a balanced equation that’s out of reach for now but someday
will reveal itself in its entirety. He knew the horror of what had happened could not be undone. Still, an explanation might
fix it in time, seal it in, silence it. He imagined her breaking down and confessing, like people did on TV, spilling out
answers like tears, he sitting in judgement until he finally understood.
But that is not what happened. Instead, like a theory that promises everything and delivers nothing, that spreads like a virus
to nullify what you thought you already knew, she had left him only with questions, terrible questions. Why didn’t he tell
Ruprecht about his mum? Why did he want to quit the swimming team? In Ruprecht’s dreams every night now he is back in the
Doughnut House – back amid the shouts, the lights, people crying, doughnuts scattering the floor, and Skippy, rapidly becoming
a figure from the past, sprawled drowning on the tiles beneath him, while the sea beats away in the distance, unheard under
the traffic, a dark blue line lost in the greater darkness of the night – Why? Ruprecht yells at him in these dreams. Why,
why, why? But Skippy doesn’t answer, he is going, going, slipping away through
his fingers, even while Ruprecht is holding him, even though he holds on as tight as he can.
The days that follow see an exponential increase in Ruprecht’s doughnut intake. He eats them constantly, at every hour of
the day and night, as though in an endless race with some invisible, inexorable competitor. The other boys find this creepy,
given what’s happened, but for Ruprecht it’s like the more he eats, the less they mean, and the less they mean, the more of
them it seems he can eat, as if they are genuinely becoming zeros that take up no space, crowding into his stomach, a bellyful
of nothings. His skin becomes pocked with angry-looking hives, and he is no longer able to do up the top button of his trousers
– Dennis jokes that it’s a good thing he didn’t go ahead with that new portal idea or he might have got stuck halfway into
a parallel universe, but Niall, for once, doesn’t laugh.
In the classroom he ceases to be a moribund non-participant, but although his hand goes up all the time, the answers he gives
are never the right ones. Eight colours in a rainbow? The capital of Sweden is Oslo? Erosion, a process of gradual wearing
away, from the Greek word
eros
meaning love? No one has ever witnessed Ruprecht getting a question wrong before; there is, initially, a certain level of
Schadenfreude at this lapse in perfection, even among his teachers. But from straightforward wrongness it soon degenerates
into something much more unsettling. A hydrogen atom has two
dads
, the main export of Russia is
C sharp
, Jesus instructs us to
diff ract sunlight
; every time the teacher asks a question, often before they’ve finished asking, there is Ruprecht with some dizzyingly untrue
response, and when they ignore him, he shouts things out, completing their sentences for them, turning whole lessons into
gibberish, snowdrifts of nonsense so deep and bewildering the teachers often have no choice but to abandon the class and start
again from the very beginning. They give him the benefit of the doubt, hoping he’ll snap out of it; but time goes by and Ruprecht’s
behaviour only gets worse, his grades lower, his homework more obscene, until finally, feeling as if they are banishing
their firstborn, they start asking him to leave the classroom. Soon he’s spending the greater part of his day out on the corridor,
or in Study Hall – or in the infirmary getting an icepack on his nose, because the forces of darkness do not like this new
rebellious Ruprecht either, do not welcome his deviation from his ordained role in the hierarchy. The messages posted on his
back become more virulent, and the blows intensify too, slaps becoming punches, shin-kicks heading groinward; every time he
takes a piss someone will push him into the urinal. Ruprecht carries on like none of it is happening.
‘Please stop,’ Geoff Sproke begs him.
‘Stop what?’ Ruprecht asks blandly.
‘Just… just be yourself again?’
Ruprecht merely blinks like he doesn’t know what Geoff means. And he is not the only one. The whole of the second year is
undergoing some dark psychic metamorphosis whereby each of them is less and less himself. Test results are plummeting, indiscipline
soars – boys talking among themselves, turning their backs, telling the teachers if they object to fuck off, fuck themselves,
get fucked. Every day brings some new outrage. Neville Nelligan, previously unassuming middle-of-the-roader, asks Ms Ni Riain
how she’d like to smoke his cock. Kevin Wong pulls a punch on Mr Fletcher in Science class. Barton Trelawney kills Odysseas
Antopopopolous’s pet hamster, Achilles, by lifting it out of its cage and squeezing it into pulp with his bare hands. Bus
stops are vandalized, chippers defaced with flung punnets of curry sauce. One morning Carl Cullen gets up in the middle of
his Remedial Maths class, lifts his chair and puts it right through the classroom window.
For a time the Automator explains away the growing anomie as a process of ‘resettling’. But soon the malaise begins to spread
through the school. When the senior rugby team are defeated in the first round of the Paraclete Cup by traditional whipping
boys Whitecastle Wood, the Acting Principal finds himself under the cosh. The senior team
is
Seabrook; this humiliation
seems to articulate something deeply amiss at the very heart of the school. There are whisperings among parents and the higher
echelons of the alumni organization; those priests who do not approve of the Automator’s plans for modernization, who have
grave doubts about the very idea of a lay principal, become more vocal about their misgivings – especially since the word
from the hospital is that Father Furlong is out of danger and on the road to recovery.
‘Des Furlong’s not coming back, they can get that through their heads for a start. Man’s heart’s like a puff-pastry, how do
they think he’d be up to running a school?’ A whole new vein has appeared in recent days to throb in the Automator’s forehead.
‘I’ve got teachers moaning at me because they can’t control their classes, I’ve got parents whining down the phone because
their kids flunk a test, I’ve got the rugby coach telling me the team’s got no morale, everyone expects me to have the answer,
I feel – God damn it, I feel like I’m carrying this place on my own! On my own!’
‘Tea?’ a low voice at his elbow causes Howard to start. He keeps forgetting Brother Jonas is there: he has an eerie capacity
to melt into the background. Trudy is on sick-leave; the absence of her feminizing touch heightens the militaristic feel of
the Acting Principal’s office.
The Automator turns to Howard with his newly characteristic expression, a blend of brow-beating and entreaty. ‘I want your
professional opinion, Howard. What the hell is wrong with these kids?’
‘I don’t know, Greg.’
‘Well, Jesus, give me something. You’re out there on the ground. You must have some idea what’s bugging them.’
Howard draws a long breath. ‘The only reason I can think of is Juster. This all started after Juster’s… after what happened.
Maybe they’re reacting to it somehow.’
The Automator dismisses this summarily. ‘With all due respect, Howard, what the hell’s Juster got to do with the senior Cup
team? He wasn’t even a blip on their radar! Why in God’s name should they care what happened to him?’
Howard stares with loathing at the Automator’s gleaming white collar. This is not the first of these impromptu meetings; apparently
the contract he signed had a hidden rider, making him the Automator’s confidant and confessor. He takes another calming breath,
gathers his words. ‘Well, I don’t know, Greg. I don’t know why they should care.’
‘I mean it’s not as if – you haven’t
told
anyone what we discussed up here, have you?’ His eyes narrow on Howard, a hunter drawing a bead.
‘I haven’t said anything,’ Howard says.
‘Well then!’ the Automator ejaculates, as though the object of the exercise were to make Howard look a dunce. ‘You’re on the
wrong track, Howard. This has nothing to do with Juster. These kids have short memories, they’ve moved on.’
The Automator is right of course: the boys don’t know what happened, they have no reason to be reacting. And yet it seems
to Howard that while the full facts of the Juster episode may have remained within these four walls, the
spirit
of those facts did not; instead it escaped to roil like poison gas down the stairs and through the corridors, slowly infiltrating
every corner, every mind. It makes no rational sense, he knows; still, he can taste it in the classroom every morning, the
same darkness he encountered that day in the office.
He knows better than to offer this to the Automator. Instead he says, ‘There’s a rumour going around that Father Green… that
he had some involvement in the boy’s death.’
The Automator sets his mouth, half-turns away. ‘I’m aware of that,’ he says.
‘In which case what it must look like is that we’re sitting here allowing –’
‘Damn it, Howard, I said I’m aware of it!’ He goes to the aquarium, to which three new fish have been added – ‘Seabrook Specials’
the Automator calls them, big blue-and-gold fellows
imported from Japan. ‘Jerome Green didn’t do us any favours, quitting out of the blue like that. I know what it looks like.
But obviously I can’t say anything without making it worse. And I can’t get rid of Jerome, no matter how much I might like
to.’