The choice of music for the performance has been left to Ruprecht, who has gone for Pachelbel’s Canon in D, explaining to Jeekers that the Canon is the piece favoured by Professor Tamashi for his METI broadcasts into space.
‘I really like that song,’ Geoff says. Then his brow puckers. ‘Although it really reminds me of something.’
‘But, ah,’ Jeekers feels he has to point out, ‘we won’t be broadcasting into space. We’ll just be playing to our parents.’
‘Perhaps,’ twinkles Ruprecht. ‘But you never know who might be listening in.’
‘I’m in hell,’ Dennis whispers to himself.
‘What’s going on with the girl, Skip?’ Geoff asks as they make their way back to class after break. ‘Has she texted you back yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Hmm.’ Geoff strokes his chin. ‘Well, I suppose it’s only been a couple of days.’
A couple of endless days. He knows she is alive: yesterday morning, he saw her through the telescope, emerging from a silver Saab and tripping, with a shake of her hair, the few steps to the door of St Brigid’s. But maybe she lost her phone? Maybe she has no credit? Maybe she never got the message? Maybes surround her in a fog, like Ruprecht’s theory that doesn’t explain anything, just hangs a question mark over everything it touches; and the phone remains smug and mute in his pocket, like someone with a secret they will not tell.
‘Maybe you should send her another haiku,’ Niall suggests.
‘Send another message and you might as well paint a big L-for-loser right there on your forehead,’ Mario says. ‘Right now, your strategy is to sit tight and play it cool.’
‘Yeah,’ Skippy agrees glumly, but then: ‘Are you sure that was the right number you gave me?’
‘Sure I’m sure. I don’t make a mistake about something like that.’
‘Like you’re sure it’s her number?’
Mario clicks his teeth. ‘I’m telling you, that’s her number. Go and check for yourself, if you don’t believe me.’
‘Go and check for myself?’ This does not sound right to Skippy. ‘What do you mean, go and check for myself?’
‘The toilet,’ Mario replies blithely. ‘In Ed’s Doughnut House.’
Skippy stops in his tracks. ‘You got her number from a toilet?’
‘Yes, it is on the door of the middle cubicle.’
At first Skippy is too dumbstruck even to respond.
‘Holy smoke, Mario,’ Geoff says, ‘a toilet door…?’
‘What’s the problem? It’s not like someone’s going to put up a fake number. We can go back and look if you want – it is in the middle cubicle beneath a drawing of a joint that is also an ejaculating penis.’
Skippy has now recovered his power of speech, and uses it; Mario retaliates, the others join in, and they become so engrossed in the argument that none of them notices the figure coming towards them out of the crowd – not until the last second when, moving with a facility and speed surprising in someone of his build, he looms up behind Skippy like a shadow, seizes either side of his head and quickly, deftly, dashes it against the wall.
Skippy drops to the ground like a swatted fly, and for several moments he remains there, sprawled beneath the noticeboard, diverting the flow of his schoolmates. Then, with Geoff’s help, he drags himself into a sitting position, and gingerly touches his bleeding temple. Dennis watches Carl shoulder his way back through the pullulating hall. ‘I suppose that means it must have been the right number,’ he says.
That night Halley dreams of old loves; she wakes, flushed and guilty, some hours before dawn. ‘Howard?’ she calls his name gently, as if somehow he might know. In the velvet darkness her voice sounds thin, careful, concealing. But he does not respond; beside her, the drowsing bulk of his away-turned body rises and falls, placid and oblivious, a gigantic unicellular organism sharing her bed.
She closes her eyes but can’t fall back to sleep, and so instead she conjures up again the substance of the dream, a flame of hers from years ago, in a sun-flooded apartment on Mulberry Street. Awake it doesn’t take, though; it feels like someone else’s life and she like a voyeur, watching from outside.
By the time she’s showered, the sun has come up. It has been raining during the night, and the day is drenched and quivering and singing with colour.
‘Morning, morning.’ Howard bustles into the room with his jacket already on and kisses her on the cheek before opening the refrigerator. He sets the toaster, pours some coffee, and sits down at the table, studying his lesson plan. For the last two weeks he has tried not to look at her; she does not know why. Has she changed somehow? In the mirror her face does not seem different. ‘So what’s going on today?’ he says.
She shrugs. ‘Write about technology. How about you?’
‘Teach kids history.’ Now he looks up, smiles at her, flat and false as a cereal commercial.
‘You know what, though, I’m going to need the car this afternoon.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah, I have to go see this Science Fair.’
‘At the RDS? Farley’s going to be there, you should say hello.’
‘I will. But the car. Can I come into school lunchtime and pick it up?’
‘Why not just take it now? I can get the bus in.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure, makes more sense than you having to – whoops, in that case I’d better skedaddle though –’ He looks at his watch and is grabbing a kiss in the next instant: then in the same flurry of movement he has closed the door behind him.
This is the way they live now, like two actors in the final performances of a show no one comes to see any more.
The morning is a quagmire of e-mails and missed calls, voice-mails promising more e-mails, more calls. Still, the prospect of an afternoon in the outside world makes it easier to bear. People are always telling Halley how lucky she is to be able to work at home. No commute! No boss in your face! You don’t even have to get dressed! She herself used to write up the housebound life, or fully networked society as it was called then, as the great promise of the digital revolution. Now here she is, thrilled to be going to a science fair for teenagers because it gives her an excuse to put on make-up. Be careful what you wish for, she supposes.
In Ballsbridge she parks the car and leaves the bright afternoon for the darkness of the exhibition hall. Inside it is murky and frenetic with activity, like a juvenile ant colony. Everywhere she looks, arcane contraptions hum, spark, crackle, splash; animals dutifully nose electrodes and spin wheels; computers encrypt, decrypt, configure. For all the commotion, though, science is palpably of secondary importance to the teenaged exhibitors; between the stalls, stares are being swapped so nakedly lustful that even to pass through them is to feel vaguely violated.
She does the rounds of the exhibits, speaks to their breathless or monosyllabic progenitors, while around her their peers, obviously attending under duress, shuffle by with the hopeless expressions of prisoners on a death march – pasty, raw-boned kids in dreary uniforms, fidgeting, slapping each other, repeating unfunny jokes. Seeing Howard’s friend Farley looming in the distance, she makes her way to the Seabrook stalls, where a study of the heat-release system in reptiles has been thrown into jeopardy by a gecko gone AWOL. A couple of boys are crawling around in the space behind the stall in search of it, proffering little pieces of Mars Bar; the other two members of the team appear more concerned with looking cool in front of the Loreto girls with the wind generator on the other side of the aisle. ‘I knew we should have brought a reserve gecko.’ Beside her, Farley shakes his head. ‘That guy’s not coming back.’