‘Her kegs?’
‘Medium small,’ Dennis says from the bed.
‘I would say about a 30B,’ Mario estimates.
‘Um,’ Skippy says.
‘What she does have is an ass,’ Dennis says.
‘Yes, this is one smoking hot ass,’ Mario says. ‘It is the kind of ass a man will not forget in a hurry.’
‘Hmm,’ Titch muses, and then, relinquishing the telescope, ‘well, I’ll have a think about it. But it doesn’t look like she’s going to show today.’
‘No,’ Skippy says mournfully.
‘Don’t worry about it, T-man,’ Dennis chips in cheerfully from the bed. ‘This girl’s about a trillion miles out of Skippy’s league anyway.’
Titch receives this expressionlessly, then turns back to Skippy. ‘Give me a call next time you see her,’ he says, and wanders out of the room without goodbye, like he’s exiting a lift full of strangers in a department store.
‘The eleventh dimension is infinitely long, but only a very small distance across,’ Ruprecht is telling Geoff and Victor, ‘maybe no more than a trillionth of a millimetre. That means it exists only a trillionth of a millimetre from every point in our three-dimensional world. It’s closer to your body than your own clothes. And on the other side of it – who knows? There could be another universe just one millimetre away, only we can’t see it because it’s in another dimension. There could be an infinite number of them, floating all around us.’ His voice lofts rapturously. ‘Imagine it! An infinite number of universes, whose qualities we can’t even begin to guess at! With totally different laws of physics! Shaped like cylinders or prisms or doughnuts!’
‘Doughnuts?’ The word lights a synapse in Geoff’s brain, which for the last few minutes has been playing a counting game with the clouds ambling by outside.
‘Why not? Or, or shapes that are entirely new –’
‘Or banana-shaped,’ Geoff, who has realized he is feeling a little peckish, suggests.
‘Or shaped like the Formula One track at Silverstone?’ Victor adds.
‘Maybe,’ Ruprecht says. ‘Maybe.’
‘Could there be,’ it suddenly strikes Geoff, ‘a universe that’s full of beer?’
‘Theoretically, I suppose, yes.’
‘And how would you get,’ Geoff says slowly, ‘from this universe, into the one that’s full of beer?’
‘That’s one of the things we’re hoping to find out,’ Ruprecht informs him grandly. ‘Professor Tamashi’s holding an online roundtable on Friday night to discuss that very issue, among others.’
‘Hmm. Uh, Ruprecht, Friday night is the Hop?’
‘The Hop?’ Ruprecht repeats vaguely. ‘Oh yes, that’s right, so it is.’
‘In that case, I have a feeling this online round-table will have to go ahead without Mario,’ Mario says from the bed. ‘I don’t know about you guys, but I am planning to score a lot of bitches at this Hop. Probably I will start with one really hot girl, straight sex, no frills. Then I will have a sixty-nine. Then it will be time for a threesome.’
‘Mario –’ Dennis sits up ‘– what makes you think any girl is going to go anywhere near you? Let alone like fifteen different girls.’
Mario hesitates, then says conspiratorially, ‘I have a secret weapon.’
‘You do?’
‘You bet, mister.’ He flips open his wallet. ‘Read it and weep, boys. It is my lucky condom, which never fails.’
A silence, as Mario smugly returns his wallet to his pocket, and then, clearing his throat, Dennis says, ‘Uh, Mario, in what way exactly is there anything lucky about that condom?’
‘Never fails,’ Mario repeats, a little defensively.
‘But –’ Dennis pinches his fingers to his nose, brow furrowed ‘– I mean, if it was really a lucky condom, wouldn’t you have used it by now?’
‘How long have you had it in there, Mario?’ Geoff says.
‘Three years,’ Mario says.
‘Three years?’
‘Without using it?’
‘Doesn’t that sound more like an unlucky condom?’
Mario looks troubled as his unshakeable faith in the luckiness of the lucky condom begins to show cracks.
‘It was definitely pretty unlucky for the condom, to wind up in your wallet!’
‘Yeah, Mario, your wallet is like the Alcatraz of condoms.’
‘It’s like the condom Bermuda Triangle!’
‘Condoms tell each other stories about your wallet, “Oh, he disappeared into Mario Bianchi’s wallet, and he was never seen again.” ’
‘Yeah, I bet right this very second your lucky condom is in there whistling the theme from The Great Escape and digging a tunnel out of your wallet with a plastic coffee stirrer –’
‘What do you know about it?’ Mario rounds on them. ‘Eh, you silly nerds, all you know about is this foolish business of the theory of many dimensions. Well, I tell you about something that is happening in this dimension, and that is this Friday I will be boning countless ladies. And that, which I call Mario-theory, is something that you can see with your own eyes, and not just some equations that only gays can understand! So don’t come crawling to me looking for one of my many bitches in the sex orgy I am having, after you have struck out with every girl at the Hop!’
Autumn deepens. A fresh chaos of yellow leaves covers the lane up to the school each morning, as if it’s been visited overnight by woodland poltergeists; after school, you make the return journey through a strange, season-specific gloaming, a pale darkness, spooked and paradoxical, which makes your classmates up ahead seem to fade in and out of existence. The hobgoblin shadow of Hallowe’en, meanwhile, is everywhere. The shopping malls bristle with pumpkins and skeletons; houses lie swathed in cotton-wool cobwebs; the sky cracks and fizzes with firework-tests of increasing rigour. Even teachers fall under the spell. Classes take odd detours, routines slowly vaporize, until by the late stages of the week, the rigid precepts of everyday termtime seem no more real, or even slightly less real, than the fluorescent ghosts glowing from the windows of Ed’s Doughnuts next door…
It’s crossed Skippy’s mind – though he knows it makes no sense, given that other people have seen her too – that Frisbee Girl herself might not be reaclass="underline" that she too may be a kind of Hallowe’en emanation, a dark mirage of smoke and wishes who exists only in the far end of the telescope and will, if he tries to get any closer to her, vanish entirely. And so, while half of him is dying for it to be Friday, can scarcely comprehend how he can possibly make it till Friday – the other half hopes that Friday will never come.
Time, however, has no such reservations; and now he wakes up in the pitch-darkness of the last morning of term.
For the last quarter of the swimming team’s final training session Coach reels in the laneway markers and brings out the net so they can play water polo. With a whap! the ball sails into the air; white and gold and brown bodies leap and splash, yells and hoots clang and rebound from the yellow roof, steam wafts across the water like poison gas over a gaudy blue battlefield. Skippy’s floating near the back where there’s not much happening. Come over here a minute, Daniel, Coach says.
He crouches down as Skippy swims up to him. It hurts him to bend like this, you can see it in the way his eyes screw up.
You’ve missed a lot of training lately.
Sorry, Coach, I was sick. I have a note.
Notes are all well and good, but you’ll need to make that work up somehow. The meet’s only two weeks after we come back from break, you know. There are going to be some good schools there. And your times lately have not been great.