He just shrugged. He wished he had some beer. He waited for her to lie down but she didn’t. Why are you barred? she said. He told her about the Gook. The Gook? she said, so he told her as well what Barry told him about the war and the Marines who died getting ambushed in the jungle by gooks and when they went home to their own country, America, instead of a hero’s welcome people spat on them. That’s terrible, she said. We should teach this Gook a lesson.
Like what?
Like a reminder of home, she said.
They took the staples out of the old copybook and started folding the pages into aeroplanes. When there were enough planes they poured lighter fluid over them. Then Carl shinned down the drainpipe and emptied the rest of the lighter into the bin outside the Doughnut House doors. He lit a piece of paper and threw it in. The bin went foom! the heat whacked his eyes, he pegged it back around and hoisted himself up onto the roof, and they both looked down over the edge as the doors burst open and the Gook charged out with a fire extinguisher in one hand and a blanket in the other that he flapped at the burning bin. That’s when they lit the first plane and sent it swirling and flaming down on top of him. The Gook let out a little shriek, covering his head. They lit another one and launched it, he hopped out of the way, but then there was another, and another and another, until the sky was filled with pieces of falling fire, sailing down around the Gook, and he just stood there in the middle of it with his mouth open, not moving at all – then he realized what was going on, and he started to jump up and down, a hoppity Rumpelstiltskin dance of rage, jabbering in Gook and shaking his fist at the rooftop, where the two of them were holding their hands over their mouths, about to explode from laughing.
But he had to go back inside to call the police, so they could jump down and hide in the park. But when the police had driven on they came out again and climbed back up there. The sky was dark blue, the doughnut sign was a big wide-open mouth, a mouth with no face around it or whose face was the whole world. Underneath it half of Lori was pink. The trees almost out of sight in the dark. Her wide-open mouth, her white bra. The pills in her coat pocket, her mouth swallowing his, she forgot to stop his fingers unbuttoning her jeans and sliding down into… Then her phone rang, the ringtone was that BETHani song, the one where she’s in the changing room and the teacher is watching her through the hole in the wall. She put a hand on Carl’s wrist.
Hi Dad. No I’m in Janine’s. No watching TV. Just me and Janine.
The outline of his knuckles against the zip of her jeans. Carl did not breathe.
No! Dad. No there are no boys. No it’s okay Janine’s mom will drive me home I love you bye.
She fished out his hand and gave it back to him with a fake smile like an air hostess handing you your complimentary meal. I’d better go home, she said.
Okay, he said.
Loreliar.
The girl on the stairs is naked except for her stockings and she slides shiny wet fingers between her legs and looks out at Carl. Beside her not-naked Lori appears and disappears like a wave on Morgan Bellamy’s phone. If you knew how you could move her face from the phone onto the girl on the computer. A nerd would know how to do it. But Carl does not know how, so he has to switch back and forth from the computer to the phone, like he’s carrying the face in his mind and imagining it onto the body, so the waves of black hair melt into each other, and Lori’s lollipop lips turn into the wet shine on the girl on the stairs’ fingers – as Carl stands over her, You better do what I say!!! No no Carl! Hiding her face with her wet hand. Carl’s fist raised up. Oh so you like fists??!!!
‘– a divorce!’ Carl’s mom screams, clattering up the stairs. Carl stuffs his boner back in his pants, zips himself up, flips the computer screen to FUN FACTS ABOUT THE NETHERLANDS! ‘I’ll get a divorce, mister, and I’ll clean you out!’ She has stopped outside Carl’s door to shriek down, it is like nails going over a blackboard. ‘So I hope your little floozies have… have good career prospects!’
‘I’ll get you fucking committed first!’ Dad’s voice bounces up from below. ‘There’s not a judge in the land who’d take your side, you bloody mad bint –’
The sound of Mom sinking to the floor on the landing: this is usually where she ends up when they are fighting. ‘Why don’t you go,’ she sobs, the words mixed with the snick of the flint as she tries to light a cigarette. ‘Why don’t you just go, and leave my son and me in peace? Why don’t you go once and for all, so we can live our lives with some semblance of dignity?’
‘I’ll tell you why, because I’m afraid you’ll burn my fucking house down! Dignity, if you had even the smallest conception of what that meant you’d take one look at yourself and –’
Carl in his room, his head filling up with hotness, stares at the textbook. The fusion of two cities into a single urbanized mass known as a _______________.
Mom lets out a scream and there is the sound of something hitting something else, probably she threw her shoe at him. ‘You’re a lunatic!’ Dad shouts. ‘A lunatic!’ Her bedroom door bangs, and at the same moment Carl’s phone jingles with a new message.
HEY WAT YOU DOIN
Fuck you, bitch.
NOTHIG HOMWORK
Because of a lack of natural resources, the Netherlands must import
IM SO BORD!!!!
Downstairs the front door slams, Dad’s Jag starts up. The sound of the bathroom door locking and Mom crying behind it.
I NED SUM XITMENT…
The black-haired girl’s eyes roll back in her head, as her hand plunges between her legs right up to the wrist.
The chief exports of the Netherlands are pull your panties down bitch and if you say another word I will break your skull.
Carl writes back,
OK.
Skippy and the telescope have become almost inseparable. Mornings, lunchtimes, at the end of every schoolday he dashes upstairs and attaches himself to the eyepiece, and for the hours that follow he will either be euphorically happy or speechless with despair, depending on whether or not he has caught a glimpse of Frisbee Girl. In less than a week, Ruprecht has seen him transformed from his usual amiable Ruprecht-helping self to a mooneyed somnambulant who doesn’t want to do anything except look out the window and ask over and over whether Ruprecht, or whoever else happens to be in the room, thinks this girl, whom he has never spoken to, will be at the Hop or not.
Ruprecht might have found all this quite annoying, but by a strange coincidence, he too has a new fascination. For the last five nights, he has been pulled deeper and deeper into its mysterious involutions; the more he investigates it, the more shadowy it becomes, and the more shadowy, the deeper it draws him in.
‘They call it M-theory.’ Monday evening: outside, a damasked sunset is crashing tremulously through a pale blue sky, gilding church steeples and phone masts, the tiled roofs of houses and the scaffolding of new apartments.
‘What does the M stand for, Ruprecht?’
‘No one knows.’
‘No one knows?’
‘The theory’s so complicated that they’re only beginning to understand it. So no one can agree what the M is for.’ This, for Ruprecht, is one of its chief attractions. Who could resist a theory so obscure they don’t even understand the name of it? ‘Some people say it’s for Multiverse. Others say it’s for Magic. Matrix. Mystery. Mother.’