‘That’s bollocks, Lawlor.’
‘What’s Carl ever done for you? He’s kicked your ass loads of times, I’ve seen him.’
‘Look,’ Damien says, pausing to take five euro from Hal Healy on Carl to KO Skippy in one punch at eleven to two, ‘my heart is one hundred per cent, completely behind Skippy. I have a totally unshakeable belief in him. This is a completely separate business venture, run by my head. The two things have nothing to do with each other.’ He gazes from one frosty, sceptical face to the next. ‘You people need to learn how to compartmentalize,’ he tells them.
‘What are the odds on Skippy winning?’ Geoff demands.
‘Skippy winning… let me see…’ Damien pretends to leaf through his book. ‘Ah, that would be… a hundred to one.’
‘I’ll take five euro on Skippy to win,’ Geoff says firmly.
‘Are you sure?’ Damien says, surprised.
‘Yes,’ Geoff replies.
‘Me too,’ Mario says, proffering a note of his own. ‘Five euro on Skippy to win.’
Dennis and Niall follow suit, and so does Ruprecht, albeit somewhat reluctantly, as he has computed the odds himself and come up with a figure astronomically higher. ‘Five euro on Skippy to win at a hundred to one,’ Damien repeats blithely, handing Ruprecht his chit. ‘Best of luck, gentlemen.’
‘What’s a hundred to one?’ None of them sees Skippy coming; out here in the cold and surrounded by older boys he looks paler and scrawnier than ever, and also, although bone-dry, somehow gives the impression of being soaking wet.
‘Nothing,’ Mario says quickly.
‘How do you feel?’ Ruprecht asks him.
‘Great,’ Skippy says, shivering, and wedges his hands in his pockets. ‘Where’s Carl?’
Carl is not here yet; the mob is getting restless. Five past four becomes ten past becomes a quarter past; a drizzle sets up as the light fades, at the edges of the gathering stray bodies begin to drift away, and Geoff Sproke decides to allow himself to entertain the tiniest hope that Carl will not show – that he is so stoned he forgets about it, or that he is arrested by the police en route for locker arson, or just that he is a neglectful person who is too lazy to come along. In fact, as soon as Geoff opens the door, he finds all kinds of reasons for the fight not to happen, and the small hope skips free and expands until suddenly it is almost a certainty, and Geoff feels a kind of elation, and is just about to poke Skippy, looking so pensive and grey-faced there, and explain to him that he needn’t worry because Carl’s not coming, meaning victory goes to him by default, so he can go and hang out with Lori and everything will be good and happy for all of them for ever – when there’s a collective intake of breath and the hubbub shifts to a single pitch and everybody turns to look in one direction and Geoff’s face falls and the hope dwindles instantly and is extinguished.
At first Carl doesn’t even seem to notice the crowd – he loiters by the boiler room, finishing a cigarette. Then, flicking away the butt, he lopes towards them. Instantly the bodies around Skippy melt away, and he finds himself at the centre of a perfectly circular clearing, though Mario’s still at his ear, jabbering about some one hundred per cent fail-safe and lethal karate move that they do in Italy –
‘Italian karate?’ Skippy murmurs.
‘It’s the deadliest form of karate there is,’ Mario is saying, and there is more, but Skippy no longer hears him. He is fixed on Carl, who’s laughing to himself like he can’t believe he’s even bothering to do this, and other people are laughing too, because as he comes closer you can see just how huge he is, and how ridiculous is the idea of Skippy trying to fight him, and Skippy blushes at the realization that his grand gesture is in fact a joke, as embarrassing as it will be brutal. Yet at the very same time a voice keeps repeating inside him: every Demon has a weak spot – every Demon has a weak spot – over and over, as if the owl from Hopeland is there on his shoulder – every Demon has a weak spot – then Carl takes off his school jumper and rolls up his shirtsleeves, and this voice stops with all the others.
His arm is covered, from the wrist to the elbow, with long, thin cuts. There must be a hundred of them, in different states of freshness – some bright-red, others sour, dull, fragmenting into scabs – winding up his forearm so densely there is hardly any untouched skin left to see, as if he’s being woven anew from tiny red threads. Now for the first time he looks at Skippy and though he is still smiling, behind his eyes Skippy can see his brain bucking and fizzing and short-circuiting in the grip of some flashing, clanging force, and suddenly and very vividly he understands that Carl has no brakes or conscience or anything like that and when he said he was going to kill him that’s exactly what he meant –
‘Okay then.’ It’s Gary Toolan, of course, ushering any stragglers out of the ring and bringing the two fighters together to shake hands. It’s like shaking hands with Death, Skippy can feel the life sucked out of him, and he’s just realizing that he’s never actually been in a fight before, he doesn’t even know what you’re supposed to do, the idea of walking over to someone and hitting them seems absurd – when Gary Toolan shouts, ‘Fight!’ and Carl runs at him, and he ducks out of the way by the skin of his teeth. In an instant the crowd has transformed, becoming a screaming, baying frenzy, like when you throw the switch on a blender, their voices a single bloodthirsty gurgle from which only rare individual words emerge, kill – smash – fucking – down, just as the faces are mostly a blur, which is probably a good thing because the two or three that momentarily, inexplicably, pop out at Skippy are contorted into masks of such pure undiluted hatred that if he were to stop and think about it – instead he tries to remember Djed’s moves from Hopeland – better than nothing, right? – fighting the Ice Demon, the Fire Demon, doing the forward roll and jab, the spinning kick, the tiger throw – sometimes Skippy practises these in his bedroom when Ruprecht’s not around, although never on any enemy more formidable than his pillow – but these go out of his head straight away, as the fists come at him and again he just manages to get out of the way – except he doesn’t, Carl’s grabbed him, there’s a tearing noise as Skippy’s jumper rips and Carl’s fist pulls back and this is it, this is the end of the fight already –
And then from Carl’s pocket comes a merry electronic jingling. Carl stops where he is, fist frozen mid-air. The jingling continues – people laugh, it’s that BETHani song, ‘3Wishes’. Dropping Skippy to the ground, Carl takes out the phone. ‘Hello?’ he says, and walks away towards the trees.
Ruprecht bumbles forward and wordlessly helps Skippy to his feet, and in a rapidly cooling froth of sweat he waits – fists still clenched, every inch of him trembling, not looking at any of the spectators who ten seconds ago were screaming for his blood – while Carl marches back and forth with the phone beneath the laurels. He speaks in a low voice through gritted teeth; after a moment, with a sour ‘All right’, he tosses the phone to the ground. This time there is no smile as he stalks back towards them – even the onlookers back away involuntarily, and Skippy discovers he has a whole other register of fear –
‘Fight!’
– and instantly they’re back in the blender, the whirl of screams, the hate-masks, through which the white-shirted figure of Carl thunders, moving so fast it’s like there are a dozen of him, coming at Skippy from every direction, the fists lightning-quick, every time a little closer, whistling through the air bare millimetres away, as Skippy ducks, wriggles, dodges, with every last ounce of energy he has, for what seems like hours but is probably only a handful of seconds –