From poppies? Like – poppies?
Yeah, then it comes up here from Spain, through Africa.
This is like fuckin Geography class, Knoxer says. I’m goin for a shite.
The &(*DEAD BOY→% revolves around the @@):/ DEAD BOY *¥
But where do you get it? Barry says. Deano looks at Mark. Mark shrugs.
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.