Flubber Cooke puts up his hand. ‘Mermaids?’
‘No,’ Mr Farley says. ‘Anyone else – thank you, Ruprecht, the correct answer is amphibians.’ He turns to chalk it up on the board. ‘The word comes from the Greek amphibios, meaning “double life”. Amphibians, for instance frogs, are organisms that can breathe on land and in water. They’re important in evolutionary terms, because life on Earth began in the sea, so the first vertebrates to crawl out onto the land must have had amphibious tendencies. And each of you has a more recent amphibious past, because babies, when they are in the womb, actually breathe liquid oxygen through gills, just like fish. The presence of gill slits on the foetus, furthermore, is taken by some to be evidence of our aquatic prehistory…’
‘I wonder why they don’t just let you stay amphibious,’ Ruprecht ponders as they rejoin the throng of the corridor after class. ‘So that it’s up to the individual to choose where he wants to live, on the land or in the water.’
‘Regarding the whole mermaids issue, being amphibious would certainly make it easier to have sex with them,’ Mario says.
‘Mermaids don’t have beavers, you clown. Even if you were amphibious you couldn’t have sex with them,’ snaps Dennis.
‘What’s the point of mermaids if you can’t have sex with them?’
‘Well, I suppose the key thing to remember is that mermaids are imaginary,’ Ruprecht notes. ‘Although interestingly, some marine biologists speculate that the legend may have arisen from large aquatic mammals of the sirenian class like dugongs and manatees, which have fish-like bodies but human-like breasts, and nurse their pups on the water’s surface.’
‘Von Blowjob, find a dictionary and look up “interesting”.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ Geoff says, ‘is why did the first fish, like the one who started land animals, suddenly decide one day to just leave the sea? Like, to leave everything he knew, to go flopping around on a land where no one had even evolved yet for him to talk to?’ He shakes his head. ‘He was a brave fish, definitely, and we owe him a lot, for starting life on land and everything? But I think he must have been very depressed.’
Skippy doesn’t contribute to this. That second pill is beginning to seem like a really bad idea. He’s getting a weird feeling, a sort of sleepiness, but not nice sleepiness like earlier – this time it’s pricklier, hotter, with a taste in his mouth. Then he remembers he’s got religion next, and he feels even worse.
Religion class is chaotic at the best of times, but Brother Jonas’s is like a circus where the animals have taken over. The brother is from Africa and has never quite caught on to how things work here; on Dennis’s Nervous Breakdown Leaderboard he’s usually near the top, along with Ms Twanky (Bus. Org.) and Father Laughton, the music teacher. Taking his seat, Skippy notices that Morgan Bellamy, who usually sits at the next desk, is out today. Why does this feel like a bad sign?
‘Who does the world belong to?’ Brother Jonas is asking. He has a voice that is soft and dark and rough like the pads on a dog’s paw, and his sentences go up and down tropically, like music: difficult to understand and easy to make fun of. ‘To whom has God promised the world?’
No answer; the hum of conversation continues as before, but the instant the brother turns to drag the chalk shrieking across the blackboard, everyone jumps out from behind their desks and starts hopping about and flailing their arms. This is a new routine – a kind of a rain dance, performed in absolute silence, at the end of which, when Brother Jonas begins to turn round again, you jump into somebody else’s desk, so that he’s confronted with thirty serene and attentive faces patiently awaiting his words, but all in different places from before. The chalk scrapes and squeaks. Around Skippy, bodies whirl and jig. Skippy, however, stays where he is. Suddenly he is certain jumping around would not be a good plan. Even watching the others makes his stomach lurch.
Now the Brother has finished writing and everybody’s scrambling into their seats.
‘Juster!’ Lionel Bollard, 140 pounds of creatine and ski-tan, is trying to shove him out of his chair. ‘Juster! Move!’
Doggedly, Skippy hangs on. Brother Jonas faces the class again. He begins to speak, then pauses, aware that something is amiss, but not sure what. Lionel has ducked into a desk behind and to the right; Skippy can feel his eyes crawling over him.
‘The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth,’ Brother Jonas pronounces, pointing to the words written on a gradually sloping incline on the blackboard, a caravan of letters going down a hill. ‘We may believe that the world belongs to the merchants, who can purchase it with their wealth. Or to the politicians and the judges, who decide men’s fates. But Jesus tells us that in the end…’
‘Dan-ielllll…’ Lionel starts to sing, ever so softly. ‘DAN-iellll…’
Skippy ignores him. Ignoring is what you are supposed to do with bullies, so they get bored and leave you alone. But the problem in school is they don’t get bored, because whatever else there is to do is more boring still. The chalk squeals over the board again, and boys leap up and cavort like they’re possessed. Skippy’s head spins like a top. Lights are flashing on and off in the corners of his vision. Now Lionel’s right beside him. ‘Daniel,’ he whispers, so low it can barely be heard, like it might just be happening in his imagination. ‘Daniel…’
His eyelids are so heavy, but he knows that if he closes them he’ll get those whirling pits that make you feel even worse.
‘So we must ask ourselves: what is it to be meek? Jesus tells us that whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. The meek man – yes, Dennis?’
‘Yes, I was wondering… roughly how big would a soul be, roughly? I’m thinking, bigger than a contact lens but smaller than a golf ball, would that be about right?’
‘The soul does not have a weight or a size. It is a bodiless manifestation of the eternal world and a most precious gift from the Almighty Father. Now, everyone, please open your books to page thirty-seven – am I meek in my own life?’
‘Daniel… I’ve got a present for you, Daniel…’ Lionel starts hacking up phlegm from the depths of his throat and gurgling it in his mouth.
‘Am I meek in my own life? Do I listen to my teachers, my parents and my spiritual advisors? Am I a – Dennis, is your question about how to be more meek?’
‘Would it be fair to say that Jesus was a zombie? I mean, he came back from the dead, right? So technically, couldn’t you say he was a zombie? I mean, wouldn’t that be the correct term, technically?’
Sweat breaks in waves over Skippy’s zombie flesh. It doesn’t seem to make any difference how often he wipes it away. Every noise in the classroom is amplified: Jason Rycroft’s syncopated pencil-tattoo, Neville Nelligan’s snuffling nose, the escalating, bee-like hummmmmm arising from Martin Anderson, Trevor Hickey and unidentified others, the hideous gurgling of Lionel and above it all inside your head the terrible carcinogenic SCRRRRCCCHHHH, SCRRRRRCCCHHH, SCRRRRRCCCHHHHH –