‘He can say what he wants,’ Dennis retorts. ‘We’re part of Seabrook history now. I mean, people are going to be talking about this for decades.’ The moon has peeped out from behind a cloud, and he is seized with a creeping euphoria. ‘The look on my mum’s face! Oh, Van Boner, you are a genius after all!’ A thought occurs to him. ‘Hey, maybe if I get expelled I could write his biography. What do you think? Bummer on the Loose: The Ruprecht Van Doren Story.’
‘Where is Ruprecht, anyway?’ asks Mario. ‘He’s not in his room.’
‘He seemed pretty down,’ Geoff remarks cautiously.
‘Well, what did he expect?’ Dennis says. ‘Skippy’s going to appear in a big ball of light and give us all high fives?’
‘I did not say to Ruprecht before, but if I am in Heaven getting it on with a sexy angel, there is no way I am coming back to attend some gay school concert,’ Mario says, then with a yawn rises from the bench. ‘Anyhow, I have heard enough bollocks for one evening. For the record, I hope you are not expelled. I would miss you guys, though this does not make me a homosexual.’
‘’Night, Mario.’
‘Yeah, whatever.’ The door wheezes shut behind him. For a time, the remaining two sit in silence, each occupied with his own thoughts; Geoff turned to the window, as if the faint silvering cast by the unveiled moon might reveal everything absent to be right out there in the yard…Then, after taking a moment, perhaps to summon up courage, he says casually to Dennis, ‘You don’t think it worked?’
‘What?’
‘Ruprecht’s experiment, you don’t think it worked?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Not even a little bit?’
‘How could it possibly have worked?’
‘I don’t know,’ Geoff says, and then, ‘it’s just that when all that noise started… I thought I heard a voice that sounded like Skippy’s.’
‘Are you talking about the German truck driver?’
‘Didn’t he sound a lot like Skippy?’
‘Okay, explain to me why Skippy would be talking in German, about trucks.’
‘I suppose,’ Geoff admits.
‘Geoff, you should know by now that none of Ruprecht’s ideas ever works. And this one was off the wall even by his standards.’
‘Right,’ Geoff says. His face falls a little; then rouses, as he is struck by something. ‘Hey though – if you didn’t ever think it would work, how come you agreed to do it?’
Dennis considers this, and then at last, ‘I would say malice.’
‘Malice?’
‘Like the Automator said. Malice, wanting to spoil the concert for everybody, that sort of thing.’
‘Oh.’ Geoff allows a polite interval to elapse while he affects to take this on board. In the moonlight he has been seized by a tingle of euphoria – the same sensation Dennis had earlier, reflecting on the concert, only Geoff’s is from a different source. Then, attempting to muffle his delight, he says, ‘I know the real reason you did it.’
‘Oh, you do?’ Dennis all caustic surprise. ‘Enlighten me, please.’
‘You did it because you wanted all of us to be together again. You knew it wouldn’t work, and you knew we’d get in trouble, but you also knew that what Skippy would want, if he was here, is for us all still to be friends? And this was the only way to do it. And even though it didn’t work, it did sort of work, because when we’re all together, it’s like Skippy’s there too, because each of us has his own little jigsaw piece of him he remembers, and when you fit them all together, and you make the whole picture, then it’s like he comes to life.’
Dennis remains silent, then issues a long, slow tocking with his tongue. ‘Geoff, how long have you known me? Is that really the kind of thing you think I’d think? Because if it is I’m very disappointed.’
‘Mmm, yeah, I knew you’d say that too.’
‘I’m going to bed,’ Dennis says peremptorily. ‘I don’t have to sit here and listen to my character being assassinated.’
He gets up; then he stops, sniffing the air. ‘Did you just cut one?’ he says.
‘No.’
Dennis sniffs the air again. ‘That is rough. You need to stop eating those urinal cakes, Geoff.’
With that he’s gone, and now Geoff’s alone in the Rec Room. But he doesn’t feel alone, not nearly as alone as you can feel sometimes, when the room is full of people playing table tennis and copying homework and throwing wet tissues at each other: in the wake of Ruprecht’s song, everything seems unusually placid, contented, still; and you can sit, just another object, not so colourful as the pool table nor so lightful as the Coke machine, and think of what Skippy might say if he were here, and what you, Geoff, might say back to him; until a yawn comes over you, and you rise and pad back out to get your toothbrush and go to bed – so tired all of a sudden you don’t notice the evermore acrid tint to the air, nor the first wisps of malign black smoke as they creep up the stairs.
It sounded like when you set an animal on fire. Then all around him were black bodies rising out of the grass. They rose up, they were screaming, only Carl could hear them.
Then he was on the street outside his house. He didn’t know how he got there. The noise was gone, they were gone, but the night kept getting darker and darker. He blinked to push it back but then it came crashing in again. Lights did not make any difference. The rain in the pocks of the path joined up to make words he could not say, words made of secret letters. Every word was a shell that held an empty universe.
The key was in the door. There was mud on his trousers.
Carl’s life had become a series of scenes featuring Carl. They joined up for a second like words made of rain in the pocks of a path then came apart again. Everything was like an answer that was on the tip of your tongue. Coats. Tiny flowers of the wallpaper.
He could not remember how things join up!
The bodies, the shadows, a thousand, a million, going, WE ARE THE DEAD. So loud, the horrible sound! The Druid staring at Carl with his mouth open. Then in a glow Dead Boy at their front.
That’s when Carl ran, he ran all the way back home.
The living room smelled like chemicals. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Light shot at you from everywhere! Gleam gleam went the wood and glass, the TV, the rowing machine, the gin bottle. Through the dark. On the couch Mom lay. From the doorway it looked like a fairy-tale with a princess fallen asleep in an enchanted garden. The curtain was open, the streetlight shone on her bare legs. Carl reached down and very gently, like he was plucking a flower, took the burned-down cigarette from between her fingers. He carried it to the fireplace and put it there.
In the kitchen he poured water into a glass. He held up the glass and looked into it. In the glass the room: the cream walls, the grey refrigerator, the cookery books with famous TV chefs on the never-opened covers, all shivery and blurred. He drank and felt the room wobbling icy-cold in his stomach. Now when you open your eyes there will be nothing there.
Carl!
He opened his eyes. He was in the living room. Mom rose silver out of her sleeping body and floated above it. She watched Carl but did not speak. The moon was full, they had turned it into a streetlight. She looked down sad like something terrible was going to happen. But it was not she who said Carl’s name.
Standing right next to Carl was Dead Boy.
Oh fuck!
Now when you stared at him he did not disappear any more. That was what happened on the hill, that was why Carl was screaming. You screamed and screamed, FUCK OFF and I’M SORRY, he just hovered, he just smiled. Now he was here in Carl’s house, there was nowhere left to run.
He is dead. I’ve been wanting to talk to you, he said.