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 –
TELL LORI
The overweight St Brigid’s girl in the booth turns pale and whispers something in the ear of her companion. Skippy blinks up at Ruprecht imploringly. Clearing his throat, adjusting his glasses, Ruprecht examines the message crystallizing on the tiles.
‘Tell Lori?’ he says.
Skippy rolls his eyes and croaks.
‘Tell her what?’
Skippy gasps.
‘I don’t know!’ Ruprecht gabbles, ‘I don’t know, I’m sorry!’ He bends down to squint again at the mysterious pink letters.
‘Tell her he loves her!’ the overweight or possibly even pregnant girl in the St Brigid’s uniform exclaims. ‘Tell Lori he loves her! Oh my God!’
‘Tell Lori you love her?’ Ruprecht repeats dubiously. ‘Is that it?’
Skippy exhales – he smiles. Then he lies back on the tiles; and Ruprecht sees quite clearly the rise and fall of his breast gently come to a stop.
‘Hey!’ Ruprecht grabs him and shakes him by the shoulders. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’
Skippy does not reply.
For a moment there is a cold, stark silence; then, almost as if from a united desire to fill it, the diner explodes in a clamour. Air! is the consensus. Give him air! The door is thrown open and the cold November night rushes greedily in. Ruprecht finds himself standing, looking down at his friend. ‘Breathe!’ he shouts at him, gesticulating meaninglessly like an angry teacher. ‘Why won’t