‘The Hun,’ Howard says to the floor.
‘What?’
‘The Nazis are the Second World War. I’m doing the First.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake – are you even listening to me? Are you even aware you have a life here? Am I just some phantasm who interrupts your reading? You have to fucking commit to things, Howard, you have to wake up to the people around you, who are depending on you! Even though you find it boring, it’s still your life!’
She lets him have it, both barrels, all the frustration that’s been building up for the last few weeks and longer; Howard listens in silence, shoulders hunched, eyes screwed up as if he’s got a stomach pain, and the more she chastises, the more his brow creases into this stymied attitude, somewhere between bafflement and agony, and the more he doubles up, until with a start she wonders if he is actually going to be sick, at which point he sits abruptly on the arm of the armchair and says, almost to himself, ‘I can’t do this any more.’
‘What?’Halley says.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Howard says in a strangulated voice.
At some preconscious level she must know what’s coming, because she already feels like she’s been punched in the stomach: there is no air in her lungs, she does not seem able to breathe new air in. Not now, she thinks, not now! But the next thing he is babbling to her about Robert Graves and Hallowe’en, ‘Wild Horses’ and global warming, a substitute geography teacher who drinks Cosmopolitans – it descends on Halley in a rain, and before she can unpick the sense of it the blood has drained from her face, her fingers buzz with lightness…
And a part of her is thinking of feminism! A part of her is thinking of all the women who fought for their rights, and feeling ashamed for letting them down, because as the story of his infidelity unspools, she feels only an agonizing crumbling, a horrible literal disintegration, as though she’s turned into slush and cascaded all over the floor; he tells her how he doesn’t know how he feels, he doesn’t know what he wants – and all she wants is for him to mop her up and gather her together as she was; she wants to plead and beg and cry so that he’ll unsay what he’s just said, hold her in his arms, tell her that nothing has changed, that everything is all right. But of course that is not what happens.
By the morning after the incident in Our Lady’s Hall, Skippy’s temple has blossomed into a gruesome purple-red flower. Some bruises you wear like badges of honour: when you got it playing rugby, or quad racing, or falling off something while drunk, no opportunity is lost to show off a good contusion. A bruise inflicted by someone else, however, is a whole other story: it’s like a big flashing arrow marking you out as punchable, and before long there’ll be boys queuing up to add bruises of their own, as if they’d just been waiting for somebody to show them it could be done. In one morning Skippy’s had a week’s worth of shit from people – swinging the door shut on him, tripping him up in the corridor, not to mention a punishment essay from Ms Ni Riain, three pages on the Gaelic origins of the name Seabrook, for coming late to class. By lunchtime he’s too dispirited even to eat; while the others go to the Ref, he skulks off on his own.
‘Poor sucker,’ Niall says. ‘He’s got it bad.’
‘That bang on the head was the best thing that could have happened to him,’ Dennis says, carrying his tray to the table. ‘Maybe now he’ll realize what a stupid idea all this Frisbee Girl stuff was. And we won’t have to listen to that gay BETHani song any more.’
‘That song really reminds me of something,’ Geoff says with a frown.
‘It’s a shame though,’ says Niall. ‘Because he does really like her.’
‘Really liking something is an automatic way of making sure you don’t get it.’ Dennis has just come from Quartet rehearsal – forty-five minutes of sarcastic remarks (‘Ah, I think you’ll find the piece is in four-four time?’) and eye-rolling from Ruprecht – and is in an especially bilious mood. ‘That’s the way it goes in this stupid crappy world.’
‘I suppose,’ Niall says. ‘Though I don’t see why.’
‘Maybe God made it that way to test us?’ Geoff suggests.
‘Oh sure, Geoff, and then at the end we all get lollipops,’ Dennis scowls.
‘Well, the thing is, of course –’ Ruprecht raises his head from his copybook like a sagacious hamster ‘– that the universe is asymmetrical.’
‘What? What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I mean, what we’re looking at here is a system that went from a high degree of symmetry in the moments immediately after the Big Bang – ten dimensions, all matter and energy conjoined – to the quite low degree of symmetry we have now, with some dimensions curled up, disunited physical forces, what have you. Obviously, it’s still a little bit symmetrical, we have our laws of physics, relativity, rotational symmetry, and so forth. But when you compare it to some of the other possible topologies that M-theory allows for, our universe does seem quite unbalanced. And patterns that occur on a quantum level carry all the way up.’
Dennis puts down his fork. ‘Blowjob, what the hell are you talking about?’
‘Exactly the same thing you are. The fundamental structure of the universe means that things consistently fail to balance out. Toast lands butter side down. Intelligent students get wedgies, instead of being respected as the future leaders of their society. You can’t get what you want, but someone else, who doesn’t want it, has it in spades. Asymmetry. It’s everywhere you look.’ He hefts his pudgy body around on the bench, scanning the room. ‘Over there, for instance. Philip Kilfether.’ He points to where Philip Kilfether, Seabrook’s Smallest Boy, sits just visible behind his juice carton. ‘All Philip Kilfether has ever dreamed of, since he was old enough to talk, is becoming a professional basketball player. But because of his underdeveloped pituitary gland, he’s never going to be more than four feet tall.’
They gaze at the tragic sight of Philip Kilfether, who spends hours on the basketball court every day, dashing from one end to the next as the ball whizzes unreachably over his head, and more hours still in his room, decorated wall-to-wall with posters of Magic, Bird, Michael Jordan and other famously tall men, performing stretching exercises in defiance of the medical prognosis. Murmurs of comprehension rise from the company at the table.
‘Skippy and this frisbee-playing girl is another obvious example. He likes her. She kisses him. The path of least resistance would seem to be to continue in that vein. But instead, she vanishes and Carl beats him up. It’s baffling.’
‘Or, how about Caetano,’ Geoff chips in. ‘He was in love with this girl in Brazil and he spent his entire life-savings on buying her this MP3 player because one day they were watching the Shopping Channel together and she said she’d like an MP3 player and then practically the very next day after he gave it to her she got off with this guy who was fixing her parents’ drains in their summerhouse even though she told Caetano this other time that the guy was an idiot and he had these really hairy knuckles and smelled of drains and then when Caetano asked her to give him the MP3 player back she wouldn’t?’
‘The asymmetry does seem particularly pronounced when girls are involved,’ Ruprecht observes.
‘Wow, Ruprecht, you really think in another universe girls wouldn’t be so asymmetrical?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Ruprecht says, adjusting his glasses donnishly. ‘As I say, patterns occuring on a quantum level are replicated on every scale.’