Skippy Dies Read Online Free PDF

that although Ruprecht’s present line is that
     they were botanists, drowned while kayaking up the Amazon in search of a rare medicinal plant, Martin Fennessy claims that
     Ruprecht, shortly after his arrival, told him that they were professional kayakers, drowned while competing in a round-the-world
     kayaking race. But nobody believes he or anyone else, with the possible exception of Dennis himself, would do something as
     karmically perilous as lie about the death of his parents.
    That’s not to say Ruprecht isn’t annoying, or that he’s not poison to a body’s street-cred. There are definite drawbacks to
     a public association with Ruprecht. But the bottom line is that for some inexplicable reason Skippy actually
likes
him, and so the way it’s panned out is that if you’re friends with Skippy you now get Ruprecht into the bargain, like a two-hundred-pound
     booby prize.
    And by now some of the others have become quite fond of him. Maybe Dennis is right, and he is talking non-stop bollocks –
     it still makes a change from everything else they’re hearing these
days. 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…
    At the onset of this process – looking down the barrel of this grim de-dreamification, which, even more than hyperactive glands
     and the discovery of girls, seems to be the actual stuff of growing up – to have Ruprecht telling you his crackpot theories
     comes to be oddly comforting.
    ‘Imagine it,’ he says, gazing out the window while the rest of you huddle around the Nintendo, ‘everything that
is
, everything that has
ever been
– every grain of sand, every drop of water, every star, every planet, space and time themselves – all crammed into one dimensionless
     point where no rules or laws apply, waiting to fly out and become the future. When you think about it, the Big Bang’s a bit
     like school, isn’t it?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Ruprecht, what the hell are you talking about?’
    ‘Well, I mean to say, one day we’ll all leave here and become scientists and bank clerks and diving instructors and hotel
     managers –
the fabric of society, so to speak. But in the meantime, that fabric, that is to say, us, the
future
, is crowded into one tiny little point where none of the laws of society applies, viz., this school.’
    Uncomprehending silence; and then, ‘I tell you one difference between this school and the Big Bang, and that is in the Big
     Bang there is no particle quite like Mario. But you can be sure that if there is, he is the great stud particle, and he is
     boning the lucky lady particles all night long.’
    ‘Yes,’ Ruprecht responds, a little sadly; and he will fall silent, there at his window, eating a doughnut, contemplating the
     stars.

Howard the Coward: yes, that’s