She doesn’t reply. Pacing distractedly back and forth over the room, he says, ‘I want to try again, Halley. I’ve been thinking – we could get out of here. Start over somewhere else. Back to the States even, we could get married, and move back to the States. To New York. Or wherever you wanted to go.’
In fact this is a plan he has thought of only now – but as he speaks it sounds so perfect! A new, committed life, somewhere far away from Seabrook! In one fell swoop all their problems would be solved!
But when she answers, although a measure of affection has returned to it, her voice sounds sorrowful and weary. ‘When your hand’s in the fire, right?’
‘What?’
She sighs. ‘You’re always looking for ways out of things, Howard. Escape routes out of your own life. That’s why you liked me, because I wasn’t from here, and I seemed to offer something new. When I stopped being new, you slept with that woman, whoever she was. Now because you don’t have me I look like a way out again. You have something to aim for, you have a quest to get me back. But don’t you see, if you did get me back the quest would be over and you’d be bored again.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ he says.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because it’ll be different, because I feel different.’
‘It can’t just be feelings. How can I trust my life to a feeling?’
‘What else is there?’
‘There has to be something,’ she says. He can’t think of anything to say to this, and while he is searching about, she speaks again. ‘The point is that life isn’t a quest, Howard. And it’s not the kind of fire you can take your hand out of. You need to accept that, and start dealing with it.’
The hostility has dropped from her voice now and her tone is the plaintive mixture of urgency and pity of someone trying to save a self-destructive friend. Howard waits for a moment after she has finished talking and then says softly, ‘And what about us?’
The hum of the empty phone line is like a knife twisting between his ribs.
‘I don’t know, Howard,’ she says at last, in a small sad voice. ‘I need time. I need a little bit of time to work out where I’m going. I’ll call you in a little while, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay. Take care, Howard. Bye.’ The line clicks dead.
The day after the Board Meeting, Father Green fails to arrive for his morning classes. The official word is that he’s been taken ill, but this is confuted almost instantly by a sighting of the priest lugging boxes down Our Lady’s Hall, hale and hearty, or as hale and hearty as he ever is. He doesn’t turn up for his afternoon classes either, and then the news emerges – from no particular source, it’s just there, floating in the ether – that he has retired from teaching to concentrate on his charity work.
This is greeted with incredulity. The priest’s loathing of the French language, and indeed of his students, has never been too closely disguised; still, most expected that he would keep teaching until he died, if only in order to spite them, and perhaps himself too (of those, more than a few privately believed he would never actually die). But now, just like that, he’s gone, and right in the middle of term-time; although of course he’s still there, carrying in deliveries for his hampers, carrying out hampers to his car, making runs to St Patrick’s Villas and the bleak housing estates to the north and west of the city.
All very strange and sudden; and then someone remembers that on the day Skippy died he’d been in Father Green’s office packing hampers, and they put two and two together.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, duh, what do you think? After a million years’ teaching he’s just quit overnight, with no one to replace him? There’s no way they’d let him do that unless some serious shit was going down.’
‘Yeah, and remember it was like that actual day, and there was no one there except Skippy and Cujo…’
‘Holy shit…’
‘But wait, come on, if he did do it, they’d hardly just let him get away with it, would they?’
A moment’s thought elicits the realization that this is exactly the kind of thing They would do. The more the boys think about it, the more they see Father Green making his rounds, with his eternal air of impassive rectitude, of existing on some higher spiritual plane in which they feature as free-roaming coagulations of dirt, the more the rumour crystallizes into certainty.
‘This is bollocks,’ Geoff Sproke, fists clenched, avows for the umpteenth time. ‘This is total fucking bollocks.’
It is total bollocks; but who’s going to do anything about it? Geoff, who cried at the end of Free Willy 2? Niall, always cast as the heroine in school plays? Bob Shambles, with his collection of naturally occurring hexagons? Victor Hero, probably the least aptly named boy in history?
No, not them, and not Ruprecht either. Ruprecht’s mouth is usually full of doughnut these days, and even in those rare moments when he is not eating, he has little to say. He does not scribble equations on scraps of paper; he does not check the computer for signals from outer space; the upstretched Ruprecht arm, a landmark for so many teachers, disappears from the classroom horizon, and when Lurch gets stuck solving a problem, he merely watches, chewing his gum impassively as the maths teacher gets more agitated and the jumble of wrong numbers sprawls gradually over the entire board. It’s the same when someone calls him a shithead or kicks his arse or punches him in the back of the head; he will stumble but not fall down, and, righting himself, continue on his way without so much as turning round.
The rest of the gang might well have found these developments worrying, and possibly even done something about it: the thing is, though, there does not seem to be a gang any more. Without anything actually being said, they have relocated themselves to opposite sides of the classroom; after lunch, bolted as quickly as its noxiousness will allow, Mario now plays football in the yard, while Dennis and Niall have taken up smoking cigarettes with Larry Bambkin and Eamon Sweenery by the lake in Seabrook Park, and Geoff has succumbed at last to the lure of Lucas Rexroth’s role-playing group, and spends his lunch hour exploring the dread Mines of Mythia in the guise of Mejisto the Elf. When their paths do cross, in the corridor or the Study Hall or the Rec Room, they feel embarrassed without quite knowing why; the not-knowing makes them feel more embarrassed still, and resentful of the other for making them feel this way, and so before long they go from avoiding to actively persecuting each other – flicking ears, mocking peccadilloes, spilling to third parties secrets entrusted in happier times, e.g. Dennis in the Ref the other evening, ‘Hey, everyone, know what Geoff’s afraid of? Jelly!’, brandishing a gelatinous bowl at him as Geoff squeaks and cringes. ‘What’s the matter, Geoff? Too wobbly for you?’, till Geoff, pushed past the brink, blurts out, ‘Dennis’s stepmum isn’t his stepmum, she’s his real mum, he just pretends she isn’t because he hates her!’ Stunned silence from Dennis, giggles and jeers from Mitchell Gogan and the others at his table, though ultimately they don’t care either way.
It’s as if Skippy had been one of those insignificant-looking pins that it turns out holds the whole machine together; or maybe it’s that each of them is secretly blaming the others for saying or doing something that brought this whole thing down on them, or not saying or not doing something that might have stopped it. Whatever the reason, the less they see of each other, the better, and Ruprecht, who was always more Skippy’s friend than theirs anyway, is allowed to continue on his downward spiral without interruption.