Absolute Zero Cool (17 page)

‘What is it they’re looking for?’

‘I’m probably best off not knowing.’

This is a hospital accountant’s wet dream: a relatively healthy patient who possesses insurance and is unconcerned as to the outcome of an indefinitely prolonged series of expensive examinations.

‘Want me to ask?’ I say. ‘If you change your mind, I can probably find out.’

He shakes his head. ‘No news is good news, son.’

He sticks with the peach yoghurt and Dairy Milk, reaches for the battered leather purse on the bedside locker. I wave him off. ‘Consider it a welcome-back gift.’

‘Appreciate it, son.’

I wheel my cart out of his room. The corridor is ablaze with red rags, green lights, white flags. The blood pounds in my ears. Tomorrow I bomb Cambodia back to the Stone Age.

Maybe.

•

‘Remind me,’ Billy says, ‘that we need to get a letter from the old man. For Cassie, like.’

‘You’re going to bump him off?’

‘I don’t know. I like the guy. Being honest, I don’t want him to go.’

‘Even if he wants to?’

‘That’s his choice, sure. But I don’t have to be the one who makes it happen.’

‘True.’

He sips his cappuccino, leaving a little frothy moustache on his upper lip.

‘Listen,’ I say, ‘about the whole blowing up the hospital thing.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, most books come in around ninety or a hundred thousand words. We’re nearly halfway there already and we still haven’t come up with a plausible plan.’

‘Leave it with me,’ he says.

‘I’ve been leaving it with you.’

‘Yeah . . .’ He tugs at the tip of his nose, then discovers the creamy cappuccino moustache and wipes it away. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘how would you feel if I went ahead and wrote that up myself?’

‘Sound, no problem. Just so I know there’s something happening.’

‘What I mean is, I write those sections up, then deliver them to you when we’re finished.’

‘How do you mean, when we’re finished?’

‘When the book’s done.’

‘What’re you talking about, Billy? The whole point of redrafting is to blow up the hospital. I can’t write around that not knowing what you’re saying. It’d be a train-wreck.’

‘Call it an experiment,’ he says.

‘In wrecking trains, yeah.’

‘I hear you, man. But . . .’

‘But what?’

He glances away, and suddenly I realise what the problem is. ‘You think I’m going to steal your idea?’ I say. ‘You think I’m going to plagiarise you?’

‘You’ve never come up with anything like it before,’ he says.

‘Leaving the ethics of it aside,’ I say, ‘and saying I do steal your idea, what’s to stop you pulling another trick like putting Rosie in the shed? Or maybe dropping her in the pond this time?’

An angry flash in the Newman-blue eye. ‘I won’t tell you again,’ he says. ‘I didn’t put Rosie in any fucking shed.’

‘I didn’t do it. And Debs damn sure didn’t do it.’

He stares. Then he shakes his head, disappointed.

‘So who put Rosie in the shed?’ I persist. ‘There’s no way she could have crawled all the way out there herself.’

He shrugs, then gathers together his notebooks and pen, his papers, and packs them away in his satchel. ‘You’re a fucking nutcase,’ he says, getting up. He touches his fore and middle fingers to his lips, then waggles them at me. A catch in his throat. ‘Give Rosie a kiss from Uncle Billy.’

Then he slouches away across the decking and disappears behind the stand of bamboo.

Three days pass with no sign of Billy. I believe he is sulking and will return when he realises he needs me more than he needs his self-pity.

After a week, though, I start to wonder if he’s ever coming back.

This leaves me contemplating a half-finished redraft, which is akin to going to work in my underwear for the rest of my life. Who wants to be found dead in only their underwear?

A half blown-up hospital isn’t much of a metaphor.

Debs arrives from the doctor’s with Rosie’s test results.

‘Asthma,’ she says. She is dangerously calm.

‘Shit. That young?’

‘The doctor asked how often we dust and hoover. I said it was every week or so.’ This is a lie. The C-section means Debs can’t hoover, or dust anything over shoulder height, which in turn means the house hasn’t been properly dusted since Rosie was born. ‘And she asked if either of us smoke.’

‘You know I’ve only ever smoked upstairs.’

‘Doesn’t matter. She says anywhere in the house is bad news.’

‘So it’s my fault?’

‘It’s not a matter of blame, it’s how we can help Rosie now. Which means you stop smoking or only smoke outside. You know which one I’d prefer,’ she adds.

‘I can’t write without smoking. You know this.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘To you, maybe.’

‘Then you’ll have to convert the shed or something.’

‘You’re serious.’

‘A baby with asthma. That’s serious.’

‘Okay, yeah. I hear you. I’ll take a look at the shed and see if it’ll work.’

She says something about the cost of medicines, but all I can hear is a rushing in my ears, a wheezing become a whirlwind roar.

The following morning I’m up at the hospital early, heading for the smoking area where the porters congregate for their pre-work toke.

Billy joins me as I leave the car park, appearing from nowhere to fall in beside me.

‘Apology accepted,’ he says.

He seems different. Something weary about him.

‘We need to talk,’ I say.

‘You heard?’

‘Heard what?’

‘About Austin.’

‘No. What about him?’

‘Topped himself, didn’t he?’ Bitterness leaking like a toxic spill. ‘Took this big fucking scissors . . .’ He tilts his chin in the air, pulls his fists together under his Adam’s apple. ‘Nearly sliced his fucking head off, they reckon.’

‘Fuck, Billy.’

‘Fuck won’t cover it, man. Fuck won’t even nearly cover it.’

‘You can’t hold yourself––’

He wheels around under the walkway connecting the old and new hospital buildings. ‘He didn’t go topping himself while he had a fucking job, did he? Happy as a pig in shite, he was, smoking his fucking head off. And where is he now? Fucking nowhere, that’s where he is.’

A choke in his throat, the Newman-blue eye glittering.

‘Billy . . .’

‘I can’t deal with this right now,’ he says. ‘Just . . . I don’t know.’ He turns away, sucks down a deep breath. ‘I just can’t deal with it.’

‘Okay.’ I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘That’s fine. Get back to me whenever you think you’re––’

He shakes off my hand and takes a step or two away. Then he stops, takes another deep breath. ‘It’s not just Austin,’ he says, without turning around.

‘What is it?’

Even from behind I can see him swallow hard. He pats the pockets of his jacket, comes up with a folded piece of paper. ‘Here,’ he says, holding it out. Its creases are worn brown.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s, uh, it’s Cassie.’ He turns. Tears stream down his face, both sides, from the empty socket behind the eye-patch too. His face wizening like a Tayto packet exposed to flame.

‘Jesus, Billy. What’s wrong, man?’

‘She lost it,’ he whispers. ‘It’s gone. Fucking gone.’

•

She went away to nothing before she ever began. Like some particle a-blink in its own future, borrowing too heavily, too improbably, against her fully being. Gone in a wink, as a bloody smear, a slim trickle. No more and no less. No less than enough, at least, to see her a girl. Squinting at the ultrasound, coached by the midwife, we bore witness to the strangest of all true revelations: eyes and a mouth, the tiny bumps that would have become toes.

An inch, she was. Oh, the miles she had come to come so far. The light-years. The thirty thousand billion cells. The trillions of particles, the number of random collisions to create a thinking thing. All lost, wasted, gone.

Did she think, though? Had she even a dim awareness of her floating? Amniotic is such a cold word and yet no colder than space, she her own sun and we revolving in orbits drilled in the void by her gravity’s pull. We gave her a name, blue eyes, a birthday, and decided she would have had Cassie’s heart and my build. Her own sense of humour.

Impolitic, of course, to mourn so hard for one so fragile. Not the done thing in this day and age. Shush your snuffles now, lest the abortionists grow sensitive to whispers of murder. A child-to-be lost is shield and weapon. If you must, if you really must, turn that sword on yourself and fall upon, but fall silent, with honour. Pierce no womb but your own.

Some day the sun will flicker and go out, leaving all cold and still. Some day, and not soon enough, the planets will wobble in their orbits and start their slow decline to the singularity left behind, that miniscule nothing with the power to draw All to itself, and in, and then gone forever.

•

They did the math and decided it must have happened out in Lissadell, stoned immaculate, Antony and the Johnsons for a soundtrack. Curled up on a blanket in a cosy dune, the idea being to wait for sunrise, except they were nicely toasted, and Billy had finally accepted that love was as essential as cruelty.

And now it’s gone.

‘I’m so sorry, Billy. I didn’t know.’

He wolfs down a lungful of spliff, his expression bleak. ‘How could you? We told no one.’

‘How’s Cassie?’

‘Broken.’

‘I know, it’s a tough––’

‘She’s broken,’ he insists. ‘Busted. Snapped in fucking two. No fixing her.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Listen,’ I say, ‘it’s no consolation, but it happened to Debs and me too. I mean, I’ve been where you are. I know how it feels. If you need someone to talk to . . .’

‘You know how you felt,’ he says. ‘That’s just projection.’

‘Sure, but I can empathise with––’

‘Spare me. Listen,’ he says, dropping the spliff, grinding it out with his heel, ‘I have to go.’ He hands across the sheaf of papers. ‘That’s where I’m up to right now,’ he says. ‘But I should warn you, you mightn’t like where it’s going.’

‘It is what it is, Billy.’

‘Isn’t it just?’

I watch him shuffle off, then go inside and downstairs to find a quiet corner in the canteen, sip on a weak coffee.

Despite his heartbreak, Billy has been a busy boy.

In his absence I toast him with the weak coffee. When Debs had her miscarriage, I was hard put to write my own name, let alone do any serious work. Sounds melodramatic, I know, but it felt like a death.

No reason it shouldn’t. The doctors and scientists, the pragmatists, can say what they like about cell bundles, draw time-lines to their hearts’ content. But life is life.

How not to mourn its absence, its potential, its hope?

Pandora, my muse.

•

Good news, people: my supervisor does not die in a car wreck. He does not apply the brakes of his Opel Corsa too sharply as he underestimates a tight bend, and so does not experience the gut-sucking horror of impending Nothingness.

He lives!

O joy, O rapture, etc.

Bear with me, people. Apply logic at all times. What is to be gained from the death of my supervisor? More importantly, what do I lose? I lose anonymity and gain the title of prime suspect.

There’s no percentage in the breaking-in of a new supervisor. Plus, the guy already drives like a chimp with three bananas. It’s only a matter of time before he takes himself out.

Be aware, at all times, that words are only tools. Do not be lulled by apparent patterns. Resist the seductive blandishments of cosily sequential icons. History has its own agenda.

The hospital is an imposing edifice. Technically speaking, it is two imposing edifices, connected to one another by a long glass corridor.

The first building belongs to an era of tuberculosis, vaulted ceilings and Cuban crisis. The second is a more contemporary construction. It boasts an excess of glass coupled with manifold variations on a theme of polished surface, an essential element of the contemporary urban experience.

Shop windows, car mirrors, reflective tiles, buffed floors, aluminium frames, plate glass: it is possible to walk from one end of a modern city to the other without once losing sight of yourself. This may or may not be a sop to the multitudes wracked with doubts as to their very existence. It may or may not be to facilitate the raging narcissism that has colonised society’s soul. I project, therefore I am.