‘What?’ he says.
‘Are you all right, Skip?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Was there a lot of stuff in there?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘What do you mean?’
There is a pause, an exchange of looks, and then Ruprecht: ‘Skippy, I think what happened to your locker may not have been an accident.’
‘You can’t go to Lori’s house, Skip!’ Geoff blurts. ‘Carl will kill you.’
‘I’m going to go.’ Skippy is adamant. ‘Carl’s not going to stop me.’
‘But, uh, Skip, what if he does stop you?’
‘He can try,’ Skippy says defiantly.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Maybe it’s time someone stopped him.’ He doesn’t even know it’s what he’s thinking until the words leave his mouth, but as soon as they do, he knows he means it.
‘What are you talking about? You don’t stand a chance against him!’
‘This way you’re going to lose the girl, and get stomped into the ground.’
‘And you’ve got a race in three days!’ Geoff remembers. ‘Skippy, how will you be able to race if you’re stomped into the ground?’
‘Skippy?’
Downstairs, bitter smoke from the cheap wood of the locker still inflects the air, and heads turn and snicker at Skippy as they drift back to class. He ignores them, sweeping the hallway from left to right, until there, in the doorway of the Mechanical Drawing Room, he sees him: the only person Skippy knows whose back looks angry… Heart beating in his ears like a kettle-drum, with a momentum that seems to come from elsewhere, he moves through the tunnel of air connecting the two of them, and stretches out his hand to tap Carl on the shoulder.
Around them, the corridor comes to a standstill. In the doorway, Carl slowly turns, and his bloodshot eyes fall emptily on Skippy. They show no sign of knowing who he is; they show no sign of anything. It is like staring into an abyss, an infinite, indifferent abyss…
Skippy swallows, then in one quick rush charges, ‘You set fire to my locker!’
Carl’s expression doesn’t alter; when at last he speaks it’s as if every word is a deadweight that must be hauled up with chains and pulleys from the bottom of his feet. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ he says.
Apologize! Walk away! Thank him for doing such a thorough job! ‘After school,’ Skippy says, praying his voice won’t break. ‘Behind the swimming pool. You and me.’
A low buzz emanates from the encircling crowd. It takes a moment for Carl to react; then slowly his jaw drops and a leaden series of laughs come out. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! The hollow laugh of a robot that laughs without knowing why things are funny. Gently he places a hand on Skippy’s shoulder and, leaning in to his ear, whispers, ‘You faggot, I am going to kill you.’
Within minutes the news is all over schooclass="underline" no way out now, even if he wanted it. The general response seems to be simple mystification.
‘You’re going to fight Carl?’
Skippy nods.
‘You are?’
Skippy nods again.
‘He’s going to massacre you,’ Titch or Vince Bailey or whoever it is says.
Skippy just about manages a shrug.
‘Well, good luck,’ they say, and wander off.
All through class, faces keep flicking back to Skippy, scrutinizing him like he’s a ten-foot lizard sitting there at the desk; and the day, which had been going so torturously slowly, begins to hurtle, as if time itself were panting to view the fight. Skippy tries to grasp on to the teachers’ lessons, if only to slow things down. But it’s as if the words themselves know they are not intended for him and pass him by. This must be what it’s like being dead, haunting the living, he thinks. Like everything is made of glass, too slippery to hold on to, so that you feel like you’re falling just standing still.
Two minutes after the final bell, the first boys arrive at the patch of gravel at the back of the Annexe. Enclosed by the swimming pool on one side, the boiler room and an ever-growing chaos of brambles on the others, it can’t be seen from anywhere else in the school; whenever there’s a score to be settled, for as long as anyone can remember, this is where it’s been done. In no time at all the space is packed, and from the chatter it’s clear there is little doubt about the outcome: the crowd’s been drawn here not by the promise of a close-fought battle, but by the chance to see some actual bodily harm.
‘This is a crazy mania,’ Mario says morosely. ‘Carl is going to pulverize him. Skippy will be lucky if he ever gets to ogle a woman again.’
‘Do you think we should do something?’ Niall says.
‘Do something?’ Dennis repeats. ‘Like what?’
‘Like, stop him somehow.’
‘And just let this Neanderthal waltz off with the great love of his life, is that it?’ Like many pessimists, Dennis becomes strangely energized when things are actually at their worst. ‘He should sit tight and let himself be bullied and trampled over for another four years, and then some day when he’s an accountant married to some mediocre-looking girl the bullies didn’t want he can take revenge by giving Carl Incorporated a really exacting audit?’
‘But what’s the point of a fight he’s guaranteed to lose?’
‘I don’t know what the point is,’ Dennis avows. ‘But we’ve been getting pushed around this dump for nine years now and if one person has actually found the guts to do something about it, I’m not about to stop him. Maybe it’ll inspire the rest of us to stop being such a bunch of losers. In fact, this is exactly what Robert Frost was writing about in that poem.’
‘I thought you said it was about anal sex.’
‘Poems can be about more than one thing. You guys can say what you want. I’m with Skippy. He knows what he’s doing. You’ll see.’
Skippy’s locked in a cubicle in the bathroom. In his hand is the tube of pills. He knows he probably shouldn’t. But it feels like his head is about to fly away, and maybe just a half would be enough to make the room stop spinning round –
The phone rings. It’s her! ‘Daniel, are you going to fight Carl?’
How does she know? ‘Am I what?’ he says, hurriedly stowing the pills in his back pocket.
‘Oh my God,’ she moans. ‘Daniel, are you?’
‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ he says.
‘Oh God,’ she says again, breathlessly. She sounds even more freaked out than he is, which in spite of everything sets a little ember of warmth aglow in his heart. ‘Daniel, Carl’s dangerous, you don’t know what he’ll do –’
‘Can I ask you a question?’ He doesn’t want to, but can’t stop himself. ‘Are you and him… are you, uh…’
She sighs in a way that’s almost a groan. ‘Listen, Daniel –’ she stops and sighs again; he waits with his entire insides coiled into one impossibly tight spring that is pulling his chin down into his shoulders – ‘I haven’t seen Carl since before the Hop. But he gets ideas into his head. He’s wild, Daniel. So stay away from him.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Skippy says, simply and not unheroically.
‘Arrgh – I mean it. It’s stupid to fight him. You don’t need to. Do you understand? Just come up to the house like we said, okay? Just stay away from Carl, and come straight up.’
‘Okay.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘I promise,’ he says, crossing his fingers, and opens the cubicle door.
Behind the swimming pool, boys continue to cram into the shrinking space. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and invisible messages flying back and forth, leaving barely enough oxygen to breathe; morale in the Juster camp has been dealt a further blow by the discovery that Damien Lawlor has opened a book on the fight and is giving even money on Carl to win in twenty seconds or less, and ten to one on Skippy requiring an ambulance, with the proviso that there has to be an actual ambulance, and he has to be stretchered into it. He meets their disapproval with his well-practised blank look. ‘What?’ he says.