On the bed, Ruprecht stares vacantly into space, his body drawn in around him.
‘Skippy’s dead, Blowjob! He’s dead, and you can’t bring him back! Not you, not every bent scientist in every laboratory in the world!’ Breathing heavily, Dennis pauses, then turns his dreadful gaze on the others. ‘You bummers need to get it through your heads that this is real. None of the stupid bullshit we do to distract ourselves is going to help any more. Spiderman isn’t going to help. Eminem isn’t going to help. Some fucking gay lame tinfoil time machine isn’t going to help. All that stuff is over, don’t you see? He’s dead! He’s dead, and he’s going to stay dead for ever!’
‘Stop saying that!’ Ruprecht gasps.
‘Dead,’ chants Dennis, ‘deado, deadsville, deadorama, deadington –’
‘I mean it!’
‘Dead-dead-dead,’ to the tune of ‘La Marseillaise’, ‘dead-de-de dead-dead-dead, dead-de –’
Ruprecht rises from the bed and, inflating himself like one of those Japanese pufferfish, to surprisingly alarming effect, hurls himself at Dennis. The latter throws a punch that lams directly into Ruprecht’s midriff, but his fist simply gets lost in the folds of Ruprecht’s flab; a split-second expression of horror crosses his face before he is bowled over and disappears underneath his antagonist, who proceeds to bounce on top of him like a malevolent Buddha.
‘Stop, stop!’ Geoff cries. ‘Come on, you’re hurting him!’
It takes all four of them to haul Ruprecht away. Dragging himself up from the floor, Dennis dusts himself down and, with white cheeks, levels a maledictive finger: ‘Skippy’s dead, Blowjob. Even if your stupid plans ever worked, it’d still be too late. So stop getting everybody’s hopes up for nothing.’ With that he hobbles out of the room.
As soon as he’s gone, the others cluster around Ruprecht to sympathize and reassure: ‘Don’t listen to him, Ruprecht’, ‘Tell us the rest of your plan, Ruprecht.’
But Ruprecht won’t say anything, and after a while, one by one, they drift away.
When they have gone, Ruprecht lies for a long time on his duvet, Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, held loosely in his hands. On the other side of the room, the empty bed, its sheets turned down, crisp and hospital-white, roars at him like a locomotive.
The sun has set long ago, and the only light in the room now comes from the computer screen, where SETI diligently chomps through the barrage of unintelligible noise that hits the Earth every second, searching for anything that might resemble a pattern. For some minutes Ruprecht watches from his bed as the bars file across the screen and drop off the far side. Then he rises, and shuts the computer down.
The School Board sits in conclave for almost three hours before Brother Jonas knocks on the door of his fourth-year class and summons Howard to the Acting Principal’s office.
Tom’s is the only face not to turn his way when he enters. As well as Father Green, the Automator and Father Boland, the school president – one of those sleek, silver-haired, ageless men who manage to connote prestige and power without ever having expressed a single memorable thought – there are two men Howard does not know. One is a priest, small and gaunt, with a foxy, Jesuitical cast of features and a mobile jaw that works constantly, as though chewing some indigestible foodstuff; the other, an innocuous balding man in rimless glasses, perhaps forty. Brother Jonas hovers by the door; Trudy, the only woman in the room, brandishes her pen and minute-pad expectantly.
‘Well, before anything else, let’s make sure we’re all reading from the same page here,’ the Automator announces heavily. ‘Howard, do you have anything you want to add, subtract or modify, with regard to the statement you made this morning?’
Seven pairs of eyes bore into him. ‘No,’ Howard says.
‘Because these are very serious allegations you’re making,’ the Automator warns.
‘They aren’t allegations, Greg. I passed on to you exactly what Tom… what was said to me by Mr Roche last night.’
This meets with a cold silence; the silver-haired president permits himself a slight shake of the head. Howard flushes. ‘Are you suggesting I shouldn’t have passed it on? Are you suggesting I should have listened to him confess a crime and then clapped him on the shoulder and sent him home right as rain, is that it?’
‘No one’s suggesting anything, Howard,’ the Automator snaps. ‘Let’s all try to keep a professional attitude here.’ Eyes closed, he massages his temples a moment, then says, ‘Okay. Let’s go over this one more time. Trudy?’
Rising from her chair, Trudy arranges her papers and reads, in a clear, neutral voice, Howard’s account of his adventure of last night: how at some time between eleven and twelve he had opened the door to find Mr Roche there in an agitated state; how Mr Roche told him, after he’d brought him in and made him tea, that the night of the junior swimming team’s meet in Thurles, Daniel Juster had come to his hotel room suffering from pains in his leg; how after Mr Roche had treated him manually for cramps the boy became upset and told him that his mother, who had been supposed to attend the meet, was extremely ill; how Juster had grown more and more distressed until Mr Roche made the decision to give him a sedative in the form of painkillers that he carried to treat his spine injury. Shortly afterwards the boy lost consciousness from the effects of the painkillers, at which point Mr Roche sexually molested him.
‘ “Apart from a panic attack on the bus back to Seabrook the following day, for which he gave him another sedative, Mr Roche told me that the boy showed no signs of being aware of what had happened. But then last Wednesday, three days before the junior team’s semi-final meet in Ballinasloe, Juster wrote him a letter telling him he was leaving the swimming team. Mr Roche grew alarmed. He contacted Juster’s father and persuaded him to discourage the boy from quitting. Juster’s mother’s health was precarious and he knew the boy was afraid of doing or saying anything that might upset her. His father called Juster and at that point the boy agreed to go along to the meet. Shortly afterwards, however, he overdosed on painkillers.’” Trudy, as she concludes, cannot resist raising her lowered eyes for a swift left-right sweep, with the satisfaction of a pupil who has performed her lesson well.
‘You’re happy with that?’ the Automator puts to Howard.
‘I’m not happy with it…’ Howard mutters. The Automator switches to his neighbour. ‘Tom?’
Tom says nothing; a tear slides like a raindrop down his stony cheek. There is a collective sighing and creak of chairs. The little foxy man takes a fob from his pocket, fogs the glass with his breath and buffs it with his cuff, aspirating, ‘Dear, dear, dear.’
The Automator folds his brow in his hand. Emerging blinking, he says, ‘Jesus Christ, Tom, were you planning to do it again? Were you bringing him down there to do it again?’
‘No!’ Tom blurts. ‘No.’ He does not look up. ‘I wanted to show him that it was all right. That was why I wanted him to go. If this time it was all right… it might be as if… the last time never…’ He dissolves into sobs. ‘I didn’t mean for this to happen,’ he gurgles. ‘I loved that boy. I love all my boys.’
The Automator considers this impassively, his mouth a tight line. Then, turning to the table at large, he says, ‘Well, look, we need to decide what the hell we’re going to do here.’ There is a general susurrus of papers and trouser legs. ‘I’m not a man of the cloth, I don’t have a direct line to God, so it could be I’m all wrong about this. But what I’m thinking is that there is not much to be gained by taking it to the next level.’
‘By the next level, you mean turning it over to the police?’ Father Green clarifies in his arch manner. At the word, Tom lets out a moan and reburies his face in his hands.