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A Novel
by Paul Murray
‘Wait!’ he exclaims, jumping up and waving his hands at
Zhang. ‘Wait!’ Zhang Xielin looks at him, panting, Skippy lolling
over his forearms like a sack of wheat. ‘He hasn’t eaten anything,’
Ruprecht says. ‘He isn’t choking.’ A rustle of intrigue
passes through the body of spectators. Zhang Xielin glowers
mistrustfully, but allows Ruprecht to extricate Skippy, who is surprisingly heavy, from his arms and lay him back down on the
ground.
This entire sequence of events, from Skippy’s initial fall to the
present moment, has taken perhaps three minutes, during which
time his purple colour has faded to an eerily delicate eggshell
blue, and his wheezing breath receded to a whisper; his contortions
too have ebbed towards stillness, and his eyes, though open,
have taken on an oddly vacant air, so that even looking right at
him Ruprecht’s not a hundred per cent sure he’s even actually
conscious, and it seems all of a sudden as if around his own lungs
Ruprecht can feel a pair of cold hands clutching as he realizes
what’s about to happen, though at the same time he can’t quite
believe it – could something like that really happen? Could it really happen here, in Ed’s Doughnut House? Ed’s, with its authentic jukebox and its fake leather and its black-and-white photographs of America; Ed’s, with its fluorescent lights and its tiny plastic forks and its weird sterile air that should smell of doughnuts but doesn’t; Ed’s, where they come every day, where nothing ever
happens, where nothing is supposed to happen, that’s the whole point of it –
One of the girls in crinkly pants lets out a shriek. ‘Look!’ Jigging
up and down on her tiptoes, she stabs at the air with her
finger, and Ruprecht snaps out of the stupor he’s fallen into and
follows the line downwards to see that Skippy has raised his left
hand. Relief courses through his body.
‘That’s it!’ he cries.
The hand flexes, as if it has just woken from a deep sleep, and
Skippy simultaneously expresses a long, rasping sigh.
‘That’s it!’ Ruprecht says again, without knowing quite what
he means. ‘You can do it!’
Skippy makes a gurgling noise and blinks deliberately up at
Ruprecht.
‘The ambulance is going to be here in a second,’ Ruprecht tells
him. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’
Gurgle, gurgle, goes Skippy.
‘Just relax,’ Ruprecht says.
But Skippy doesn’t. Instead he keeps gurgling, like he’s trying
to tell Ruprecht something. He rolls his eyes feverishly, he stares
up at the ceiling; then, as if inspired, his hand shoots out to search
the tiled floor. It pads blindly amid the spilled Coke and melting
ice cubes until it finds one of the fallen doughnuts; this it seizes
on, like a clumsy spider grappling with its prey, crushing it between
its fingers tighter and tighter.
‘Just take it easy,’ Ruprecht repeats, glancing over his shoulder
at the window for a sign of the ambulance.
But Skippy keeps squeezing the doughnut till it has oozed
raspberry syrup all over his hand; then, lowering a glistening red
fingertip to the floor, he makes a line, and then another, perpendicular
to the first.
T
‘He’s writing,’ someone whispers.
He’s writing. Painfully slowly – sweat dripping down his forehead,
breath rattling like a trapped marble in his chest – Skippy
traces out syrupy lines one by one onto the chequered floor.
E, L – the lips of the onlookers move soundlessly as each character
is completed; and while the traffic continues to roar by outside,
a strange kind of silence, almost a serenity, falls over the
Doughnut House, as if in here time had temporarily, so to speak,
stopped moving forward; the moment, rather than ceding to the
next, becoming elastic, attenuated, expanding to contain them, to
give them a chance to prepare for what’s coming –
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.
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