Skippy Dies

by Paul Murray

You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone ‘Give me the gun’, etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone’s asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don’t mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg – that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you’d imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of ‘life’. Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors – GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE – keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn’t necessarily need to be closed . . .

It’s not that Howard doesn’t love her. He does, he would do anything for her, lay down his life if it came to it – if for example she were a princess menaced by a fire-breathing dragon, and he a knight on horseback, he would charge in with his lance without a second thought, stare the serpent right in its smouldering igneous eye, even if it meant getting barbecued there on the spot. But the fact is – the fact is that they live in a world of facts, one of which is that there are no dragons; there are only the pale torpid days, stringing by one like another, a clouded necklace of imitation pearls, and a love binding him to a life he never actually chose. Is this all it’s ever going to be? A grey tapestry of okayness? Frozen in a moment he drifted into?

And yet none of them had been quite convincing. Once you’ve seen someone firing peas out of his nostril, or trying and failing, for a full fifteen minutes, to climb over a gym horse, it’s difficult to take him seriously as a top legislator for the UN or a hedge-fund manager at a private bank, no matter how many years have passed. The hall had seemed to Howard no less full of burlesques and pastiches than it does tonight. And he was the pastiche poster-boy, for he had actually switched sides from being one of the students to being one of the teachers, from child, as it were, to grown-up – and it had just happened, one event in a long muddled train of events, without any great catharsis or epiphany on his part, without any interior transformation or evolution whereby he might have known anything worth teaching; instead it was like calling one of the kids from the middle row of his History class and asking him to take over, and while he was at it pay a mortgage, and fret over whether or not to get married.

Credibility is not the issue for these boys that it might have been for previous generations. A lot of contentious arguments have been resolved in the last decade, a lot of old ideas swept away; it is now universally acknowledged that celebrity is the one goal truly worth pursuing. Magazine covers, marketing deals, artificially whitened smiles, waving from behind barriers at the raving anonymous multitude – this is the zenith of a world now uncluttered by spirituality, and anything you do to get there is considered legitimate.

‘Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humour and you’ll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, it’s our own expectations that crush us.’ He raises his glass, sending ice cubes tumbling

From the beginning, each was for the other first and foremost a flesh-and-blood representative of a different life, a passport into a fresh new future; what had happened since then was nothing more or less cruel than the real person seeping through the illusion – not a gateway to anything, just somebody like you, fumbling their way through the day.