Absolute Zero Cool (2 page)

‘Hold up,’ he says. ‘Are you telling me you never even sent it away?’

‘I didn’t just bury it.’ He has presence, I’ll give him that, an intensity that leaves me feeling faintly, ridiculously, defensive. ‘I mean, I gave it to Jonathan.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He said he’d never read anything like it before. He reckoned he had to stop taking notes about halfway in, just read it through. I think the pervy sex stuff had him a bit freaked.’

‘That’s good, right?’

‘Not in today’s market. Freaking your agent isn’t cool anymore.’

‘And he never read it again?’

‘He was about to but I stopped him. I was showing him The Big O that day.’

We sit in silence. The sun clears the hills to the south and the grounds come alive. Clematis buds starting to show, some pink apple blossom, snowdrops and daffodils nodding on the faint breeze off the lake. Now and again a quick flash of orange in the pond, the pair of golden carp, Jaws and Moby-Dick. The little fountain pootling away.

‘So how’d The Big O do?’ he says, gazing off up the hill at the hospital, its glass frontage ablaze as it mirrors the sunrise.

‘It did alright, yeah. Got picked up in the States, a two-book deal, some decent wedge.’

‘The States?’

‘Yeah. Harcourt. Of course, then they went and merged with Houghton Mifflin and my editor got the boot, so it didn’t get a lot of play over there. Still, the reviews were nice, enough to get them behind the second book.’

‘And this is what you’re working on now.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So what happens to me?’ he says. The cigarette, forgotten, burns down between his fingers.

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘You can’t just leave me stuck here.’

‘I hear you. But I’m already committed to this,’ I nod at the pages scattered across the table, ‘I’ve a deadline to meet. I can’t just bunk off and start writing something new.’

‘If it’s good enough,’ he says, ‘they’ll wait for it.’

‘I doubt that. The industry’s changed a lot in the last five years, you wouldn’t believe how tight things have got. And I have other responsibilities going on. I mean, I’m married now. And we have a baby, Rosie.’

He congratulates me, grudging it.

‘The point I’m making,’ I say, ‘is that I can’t afford to spend any time on anything that isn’t at least potentially commercial. Or to be perfectly frank, anything I don’t enjoy doing. That dark shit is hard work. And if I don’t like––’

‘If it’s dark,’ he says, ‘whose fault is that?’

‘Mine, sure. But––’

‘But schmut. If you made it dark you can make it funny. Just go back over it.’

‘Make euthanasia funny?’

‘Just listen to me a minute,’ he says. ‘Can you just listen? You owe me that much, at least.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘See,’ he says, ‘I’m just not that kind of guy. The Karlsson guy, I mean. I even changed my name when I dyed my hair. I’m called Billy now.’

‘Billy?’

‘I’m aiming to normalise things all round.’

‘Then the eye-patch is probably too much.’

‘That was just to get your attention.’ He peels off the patch. There’s an empty socket underneath, a puckered purple wound that puts me in mind of a sucked-out prune. He pats the pockets of his zip-up sweater and comes up with a pair of tinted shades, slips them on.

‘What happened to your eye?’ I say.

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Anyway, this Karlsson guy – I’m not him. Not anymore. And I don’t think I ever was. I mean, I liked Cassie. Liked her a lot. And even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t just kill her to get off on a euthanasia rap. I’d have done a flit. The old folks, they were one thing, they wanted to die and I was helping them out. But Cassie, no way.’

‘I never actually said you killed her.’

‘No, but you left it hanging.’

‘As far as I can remember,’ I say, ‘I gave you a happy ending, you got away with it. The cop investigating, he turned out insane, had all these theories about population control. A big fan of the Chinese, if memory serves.’

‘Even I didn’t believe that,’ he says. ‘That ending was a mess.’

I allow that it was.

‘You can do better than that,’ he says.

‘Not with you I can’t.’

‘I’m not the problem, man. The story’s the problem.’

‘The story’s what it is,’ I say. ‘And it’s told now.’

‘I didn’t hear any fat ladies singing.’

I stub out my cigarette. ‘Listen, uh, Karlsson, I have to––’

‘Billy.’

‘Billy, yeah. Look, Billy, I have to go. Deborah’s coming to visit today, and I’ve some pages to get straight before lunch. So . . .’

‘The story was too freaky,’ he says. He’s holding up a hand to delay me. ‘Too out there but not big enough. Plus you had me down as a total dingbat. These are things that can be changed.’

‘I really don’t know if they can.’

‘Tell me this,’ he says. ‘How long have you spent thinking about me in the last five years?’

‘I’ve thought about you, sure. And I wish––’

‘I’ve got a way to make it bigger. Although you’d have to be more honest about me. If it was to work, I’d have to be more real. More me, y’know?’

‘Right now you’re sitting across the table smoking my cigarettes.’ As much as he’s a distraction, I’m intrigued by the guy’s chutzpah. ‘I don’t know if I could handle you getting any more real.’

‘That’s because I’m Billy now. Karlsson never showed up, did he?’

‘He never did, no.’

‘Just as well. He’d probably have kidnapped little Rosie and tortured her until you’d rewritten the story the way he wanted it.’

‘Y’know, I think Karlsson liked who he was. I don’t think he’d have had any issues with what happened to Cassie.’

‘Because the guy was a sociopath.’ He shrugs. ‘Who wants to live like that?’ He leans in, drops the shades, pierces me with the Newman-blue eye. ‘You think I wouldn’t like a little Rosie to play with?’

‘Do you?’

‘I don’t know.’ He sits back, slipping the shades back in place. ‘I’m not feeling it, if that’s what you’re asking. But they say men don’t become fathers until their baby is born, maybe even a while after.’

‘That was true for me, yeah.’

‘Look, all I’m asking for is one more go, see if I can’t make it out this time.’

‘Out of this limbo.’

‘Sure. Maybe if I was to get some kind of written permission from the old folks, so I’d have something to show Cassie when she found out about the euthanasia. That could help.’

‘It’d help you and Cassie, maybe. But it wouldn’t do much for the conflict in the story.’

‘That’s the other thing,’ he says. ‘I think you need a different kind of conflict. I mean, a hospital porter bumping off old people? You can get that stuff in the newspapers. Why would anyone want to read it in a book?’

‘I guess it’d depend on how interesting the killer is.’

‘Between you and me, you’re no Patricia Highsmith.’

I allow that I’m not, although I remind him it’s comedy crime I write.

‘If you want my opinion,’ he says, ‘the conflicts that work best are between the reader and a character they like, okay, but who’s doing stuff they wouldn’t generally tolerate. Lear,’ he ticks them off on his fingers as he goes, ‘Raskolnikov, Hazel Motes, Long John Silver, Tom Ripley––’

‘I take your point.’

‘Your mistake,’ he says, ‘was to make Karlsson a total wackjob. No one who wasn’t a complete fruit could like him.’

‘Okay, so say I make you likeable. What then?’

‘We blow up the hospital.’

After lunch, a picnic out on the decking, I tell Debs I’m half-thinking about having another go at the Karlsson story.

‘Who?’ she says.

I tape Rosie’s nappy in place, snap the buttons on her baby-gro. ‘Karlsson, the hospital porter.’

She frowns, remembering. ‘The guy who killed all the old people?’

‘I’m thinking of making it a comedy. But don’t worry, I’ll work on it in the evenings, once the other stuff is out of the way.’

‘Your father’s a space cadet,’ she tells Rosie. The child, warm and dry again, gurgles like a faulty faucet.

‘It’s just a redraft,’ I say. ‘Nothing major.’

‘I’ll redraft the marriage licence,’ Debs says. She tickles Rosie’s tummy. ‘But don’t worry, it’ll be nothing major.’

The cancer counsellor waves a rolled-up newspaper to shoo us away from the windows so his clients won’t have to watch us smoking. We are their bolted horses.

Some of my co-smokers drift away around the corner to where a breeze whips beneath the glass corridor connecting the hospital’s old and new buildings. There they huddle together, shivering. It’s a grey December day, sleet spattering the glass. The wind a cruel easterly.

The cancer counsellor raps on the window, jerks his head and thumb. I flip him the bird.

He opens the window and leans out, beckons me across. I stroll over. When I’m close enough, he mimes writing down the name on my plastic tag.

‘Let me get this straight,’ I say. ‘You’re miming a disciplinary action?’

This provokes him into taking out a pen and writing my name on the back of his hand. ‘You’re on report, Karlsson.’

‘Ingrate. If we didn’t smoke, you’d be out of a job.’

His face reddens. He doesn’t like being reminded of his role as parasite. Not many do. ‘Between you and me,’ I say, ‘stress is the big killer.’

He’s fuming as he closes the window. I try to make the connection between the patients’ cancer and my smoking but it can’t be done. There’s a fuzzy blurring of divisions, okay, and carcinogens either side of the wire. But I’m not finding the tangent point.

My line for today comes from Henry G. Strauss: I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he had read of the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.

•

‘That’s not very different from the first draft,’ Billy says. We’re out on the decking again, another beautiful morning. I’m hoping the good weather holds because I’m not sure I want to invite him inside.

‘I think it works,’ I say. ‘I mean, you’re going to have to be at least a little bit weird, otherwise no one’ll believe it when you decide to blow up the hospital.’

‘Fair go. But I don’t know if I should flip him the bird. It’s a bit, what, gratuitous? If it was me I’d be a bit more subtle than that.’

‘I’ll take it under consideration,’ I say, making a note.

‘What’s next?’ he says.

‘You shave the skinny guy for his hernia operation.’

‘Roll it there, Collette.’

•

Today I shave a skinny guy, Tiernan, for a hernia procedure. The latex gloves are cold but he doesn’t seem to notice. I believe he’s trying to pretend another man isn’t fiddling around in his crotch.

Instead he tells me that a friend of his knows someone who died under anaesthetic. Tiernan says he doesn’t want to die not knowing he’s dying. What he’s really saying is, he doesn’t want to die. What he’s really saying is, he has no one to confide in except the guy who shaves strangers’ genitals.

‘I do shaves,’ I say. ‘I push wheelchairs and lift the heavy stuff when the male nurses are busy. If you want a priest I’ll see what I can do. But it’s only a hernia op. Catch yourself on.’

He’s shocked. I swab away the last of the cheap shaving foam. ‘You think you have problems?’ I say. ‘I have to look at dicks all day. Want to swap jobs?’

He works in a travel agency and spends his day emailing pornography to friends who pretend to appreciate what he understands to be irony.

‘You don’t want to die?’ I say. ‘Then do something. If you do something you won’t mind dying so much. Paint a picture. Have a kid. Then let it go. Dying isn’t so different from just letting go.’

But he isn’t listening. He’s back thinking about this guy his friend knew, the one who died without knowing he was dying. I get a bang out of that. If there’s one thing dead people know, it’s that they’re dead. And if that’s anything like the way the living know they’re alive, it’s not such a big deal.

He watches me peel off the latex gloves.

‘Pay attention,’ I say. ‘You might need to draw on this performance some day. You’d be surprised at how many people learn to live without dignity. Statistically speaking, you’ve every chance of becoming one of those people.’

The matron arrives. I wonder if they teach bustling at matron school. She throws back Tiernan’s robe. Matrons don’t usually check on hernia preps but I shaved the wrong side a couple of weeks ago.

‘How are you feeling, Mr Tiernan?’ she says. She says this so we can both pretend she isn’t checking my work.