Excerpt of Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
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Skippy Dies
Skippy and Ruprecht are having a doughnut-eating race one
evening when Skippy turns purple and falls off his chair. It is a
Friday in November, and Ed’s is only half full; if Skippy makes a
noise as he topples to the floor, no one pays any attention. Nor is
Ruprecht, at first, overly concerned; rather he is pleased, because
it means that he, Ruprecht, has won the race, his sixteenth in a
row, bringing him one step closer to the all-time record held by
Guido ‘The Gland’ LaManche, Seabrook College class of ’93.
Apart from being a genius, which he is, Ruprecht does not have
all that much going for him. A hamster-cheeked boy with a chronic
weight problem, he is bad at sports and most other facets of life
not involving complicated mathematical equations; that is why he
savours his doughnut-eating victories so, and why, even though
Skippy has been on the floor for almost a minute now, Ruprecht is
still sitting there in his chair, chuckling to himself and saying,
exultantly, under his breath, ‘Yes, yes’ – until the table jolts and his
Coke goes flying, and he realizes that something is wrong.
On the chequered tiles beneath the table Skippy is writhing in
silence. ‘What’s the matter?’ Ruprecht says, but gets no answer.
Skippy’s eyes are bulging and a strange, sepulchral wheezing
issues from his mouth; Ruprecht loosens his tie and unbuttons his
collar, but that doesn’t seem to help, in fact the breathing, the
writhing, the pop-eyed stare only get worse, and Ruprecht feels
a prickling climb up the back of his neck. ‘What’s wrong?’ he
repeats, raising his voice, as if Skippy were on the other side of a
busy motorway. Everyone is looking now: the long table of Seabrook
fourth-years and their girlfriends, the two St Brigid’s girls,
one fat, one thin, both still in their uniforms, the trio of shelfstackers
from the shopping mall up the road – they turn and
watch as Skippy gasps and dry-heaves, for all the world as if he’s
drowning, though how could he be drowning here, Ruprecht
thinks, indoors, with the sea way over on the other side of the
park? It doesn’t make any sense, and it’s all happening too quickly,
without giving him time to work out what to do –
At that moment a door opens and a young Asian man in an
Ed’s shirt and a badge on which is written, in mock-cursive, Hi
I’m, and then, in an almost unreadable scrawl, Zhang Xielin,
emerges behind the counter, carrying a tray of change. Confronted
by the crowd, which has risen to its feet to get a better
view, he halts; then he spies the body on the floor and, dropping
the tray, vaults over the counter, pushes Ruprecht aside and prises
open Skippy’s mouth. He peers in, but it’s too dark to see anything,
so hoisting him to his feet, he fastens his arms around
Skippy’s midriff and begins to yank at his stomach.
Ruprecht’s brain, meanwhile, has finally sparked into life: he’s
scrabbling through the doughnuts on the floor, thinking that if
he can find out which doughnut Skippy is choking on, it might
provide some sort of a key to the situation. As he casts about,
however, he makes a startling discovery. Of the six doughnuts
that were in Skippy’s box at the start of the race, six still remain,
none with so much as a bite gone. His mind churns. He hadn’t
been observing Skippy during the race – Ruprecht when eating
competitively tends to enter a sort of a zone in which the rest of the world melts away into nothingness, this in fact is the secret of his record-nearing sixteen victories – but he’d assumed Skippy
was eating too; after all, why would you enter a doughnut-eating
race and not eat any doughnuts? And, more important, if he
hasn’t eaten anything, how can he be –
Excerpted from Skipp Dies: A Novel by Paul Murray, published August 2010 by Faber and Faber, Inc., and affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by
Paul Murray. All rights reserved.
