Skippy looks dubious.
‘This is your chance to get in on the ground floor!’
‘No way, Ruprecht, not after how that last one went.’
‘That was Operation Condor. This is Operation Falcon. It’s a totally different operation.’
‘Sorry.’
Ruprecht trudges off to canvass the others.
Bad as he feels for his room-mate, Skippy can’t deny that he personally is having a great day. He woke that morning with the memory of the night before waiting for him, like a gold coin hidden under his pillow, and whenever he thinks about it, which is every few seconds, he is overtaken by a big daffy smile.
‘You kissed her again, didn’t you?’ Dennis is finding Skippy’s uncharacteristic happiness disconcerting and even somewhat offensive.
‘Whoa, Skip –’ Geoff is awestruck ‘– that means she’s your girlfriend. Holy shit – you have a girlfriend!’
And then at lunch break he leaves maths class and walks directly into Carl.
For some reason, after the fight yesterday all thought of him disappeared from Skippy’s mind; he hadn’t considered what would happen when their paths inevitably crossed again. From the way the boys around him instantly come to a halt, though, from the way the air of the hall quickens, he realizes they’ve been waiting for this moment all morning. There is nothing more he can do now than brace himself for the blow – the sucker punch, the sly kick to the ankles, the swift knee groinwards –
But Carl seems not even to see him; instead he drifts on by like an old, grizzled shark hulking through particoloured schools of minnows, oblivious to the catcalls and heehaws aimed at his receding bulk.
In today’s History class, Howard the Coward – who looks like he hasn’t slept much lately, or washed, or shaved – wants to talk about betrayal. ‘That’s what the war was really about. The betrayal of the poor by the rich, the weak by the strong, above all the young by the old. “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied” – that’s how Rudyard Kipling put it. Young men were told all kinds of stories in order to get them to go and fight. Not just by their fathers, of course. By their teachers, the government, the press. Everybody lied about the reasons for war and the true nature of the war. Serve your country. Serve the King. Serve Ireland. Do it in the name of honour, in the name of courage, for little Belgium. On the other side of the water, young German men were being told the same thing. When they got to the Front, they were betrayed again, by incompetent generals who sent wave after wave of them into machine-gun fire, by the newspapers who instead of telling the true story of the war churned out this brave-Tommies-death-or-glory stuff, making it seem like a great big adventure, encouraging even more young men to enlist. After the war, the betrayal continued. The jobs the soldiers had been promised would be kept for them had mysteriously disappeared. They could be heroes and wear medals, but no one wanted “war-damaged goods”. Graves’s friend Siegfried Sas-soon called the war “a dirty trick played on me and my generation”…’
‘Did he seem a little off-balance to you?’ Mario asks afterwards.
‘One of these days he’s going to come in with uniforms for us and we’re all going to march off to the Somme,’ Dennis says, and taking out his ledger moves Howard five places up the Nervous Breakdown Leaderboad, so that he’s just behind Brother Jonas and Miss Timony.
‘Betrayal,’ Ruprecht muses to himself, while letting his gaze linger over Dennis.
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Ruprecht says airily. ‘I just like saying the word. Betrayal. Betrayal.’
‘What’s your problem, asshat?’
‘Betrayal,’ Ruprecht muses. ‘Has kind of a ring to it, doesn’t it? Betrayal.’
‘Get bent, Blowjob, don’t try and blame me for losing your gay pod.’
‘Guys, come on,’ Geoff pleads. ‘The audition’s in two hours.’
It is, and by four o’clock, what looks like a kind of musical zoo has gathered outside the door of the Sports Hall. Folk and rock groups, choirs and quartets, dancers both tap- and break-; here, warbling up and down his scales, is Tiernan Marsh, the fourth-year wheeled out at all official events to share his angelic tenor, although he’s better known among the student population for his propensity to eat his own scabs; here Roland O’Neil, bass wizard of Funkulus, quivers slightly in his tight pink leggings under the baleful stare of John Manlor, hirsute lead singer of MANLOR, definitely the most impressive act the school has in terms of sideburns; here Titch Fitzpatrick, running over his MC routine for the hundredth time, affects not to notice the unmistakeable smirk on the face of his rival for the slot, Gary Toolan, nor to hear Gary Toolan’s not quite sotto enough remarks, such as ‘What’s he going to do, change nappies on stage?’
Just ahead of the Van Doren Quartet in the line is Trevor Hickey, aka ‘The Duke’, who with no visible means of making music is staring into space, mumbling a speech to himself: ‘… since the dawn of time… our oldest and most indefatigable foe…’
Geoff keeps catching snatches of this, and curiosity eventually reels him in. ‘Uh, Trevor, where’s your instrument?’
‘Shock and amaze – oh, I’m not giving a musical performance.’
‘Not musical…?’ Geoff repeats, and then the penny drops. ‘Here, you’re not going to do Diablos, are you?’
‘Mmm-hmm.’
Geoff gazes at him with a mixture of awe and concern. ‘It’s just,’ he says, after a moment, ‘you know, the Automator’s in there.’
‘Mmm-hmm.’ Trevor’s ceaseless shifting from foot to foot is only partly to do with nerves; he has eaten five cans of beans on either side of going to bed in order to build up a plentiful supply of trapped wind, or as he calls it, ‘The Power’.
‘I’m just wondering, you know, whether the Christmas concert might not be more of a family-type show?’
‘Your family don’t fart?’ Trevor turns on him.
‘Well, they mostly wouldn’t set them on fire –’
‘That’s the beauty of what I do, you see,’ Trevor interjects, eyes a-glimmer, already lost in his own myth. ‘Turning tedious bodily functions into a magical encounter with the elements – it’s what the whole world dreams of…’
Beside him, Brian ‘Jeekers’ Prendergast listens to this green with anxiety. Thanks to this ridiculous business with the pods and the mounds, the Quartet is severely under-rehearsed; as if that weren’t enough, it seems the old friction between Ruprecht and Dennis has broken out again, worse than ever. Ruprecht has told Jeekers not to worry, that the piece is so easy it can’t possibly go wrong – but he isn’t the one who’ll have to face Jeekers’s parents if they don’t get into the concert.
‘Next!’ The door swings open and Gaspard Delacroix, creator and sole performer of The Little Sparrow: Gaspard Delacroix Sings the Songs of Edith Piaf, flounces out, tugging off his fright-wig and muttering about philistines. Patrick ‘Da Knowledge’ Noonan and Eoin ‘MC Sexecutioner’ Flynn exchange a single nervous glance; then, with a deep breath, they put on their showbiz faces and troop inside.
The gym is totally empty, save for a single classroom-type desk set right in the middle of the floor, behind which sit the Automator and Father Laughton, the concert’s musical director; Trudy, the Acting Principal’s wife, stands to one side with her clipboard.
The boys mount the stage, gold chains clinking, and spend the next few moments slouching back and forth, mumbling mysteriously to themselves. Then, to an enormous, naked drumbeat that explodes from Sexecutioner’s ghettoblaster to rock the entire hall, they begin to bounce around the boards, making inscrutable hand signals, their vast trousers flapping about them like sails, and Knowledge grabs the mike: ‘I got X-ray EYES, but she’s wearin lead PANTS, so I got to get her BOOTY wi–’