Absolute Zero Cool (20 page)

We, however, live in an over-civilised society that celebrates above all else the illusion of perfection. It is inconvenient that old people should die and in their dying remind us of the necessity of accepting the inevitable. Thus we keep old men alive and conduct tests to allow us discover how best to prolong their torture.

The old man sucks on his Dairy Milk, a crafty gleam in his faded blue eyes.

‘Whatever happened about that old woman?’ he says. ‘Y’know, her that died, the one there was all the fuss over.’

‘There was an investigation. It proved inconclusive.’

‘Is that a fact?’ He peers at me over the rim of his blue-veined fist as he sucks on his chocolate. ‘And what exactly were they investigating?’

‘I’m not too sure. I think they thought there was something odd about the way she died.’

‘And why would they think that, now?’

‘As far as I remember there was no obvious reason why she should have died. They weren’t expecting it.’ I shrug. ‘Maybe they were just pissed off that she died before they were ready to let her go.’

He appreciates this. ‘When it’s your time, it’s your time.’

‘I don’t believe in fate.’

‘I’m not talking about fate, son. When the engine claps out, it claps out.’ He licks at his chocolate. ‘Tell me this and tell me no more. Why did they have this investigation?’

‘I got the feeling they thought someone helped her to die.’

The crafty gleam flickers again. ‘I’ve heard about that class of a thing. What’s this they call it again?’

‘Euthanasia.’

‘Aye, euthanasia.’ His chest rumbles. He meets my eye. ‘That’s a big word for a small enough thing.’

‘Not everyone thinks it’s a small thing. Some people think it’s one of the biggest things going.’

‘They’re just looking at it from the wrong angle, son. When you’re old you’re looking at the whole world through the wrong end of the telescope. Things that used to be huge, you can’t hardly see them anymore. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not old enough to have earned an opinion.’

‘I’m talking about this euthanasia caper.’

‘Oh.’ I consider. ‘I suppose it depends. Some people think it’s a civic duty, that the world would be a healthier place if everyone in it was pulling their weight. But it’s a tough one to call.’

He has finished his chocolate. He sucks his fingers one by one. ‘How would it depend?’

‘Well, some people get into so much pain they’d do anything to get out of it. But when you’re in agony, it can be hard to care about anything else.’

He nods and hands me the tub of peach yoghurt. I unpeel the lid and hand it back. He digs in and slurps down a spoonful. ‘Son, I used to care. Nowadays I couldn’t give a tinker’s damn. And I’m not in pain.’

My line for today is the inscription on the tomb of the Cretan writer, Nikos Kazantstakis: I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.

•

‘How come we’re prolonging the old guy’s agony?’ Billy says.

‘He isn’t in agony. He just said, he isn’t even in pain.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Forget the old guy, Billy. What’s happening with the hospital?’

‘It’s all in hand. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Listen,’ I say, ‘so far all I’ve heard is a load of bullshit about Herostratus and blueprints being art. And I need to know that––’

‘I know what you need. I heard you the first time.’ He shakes his head. ‘Why is this such an issue for you? How come you have such a problem delegating?’

‘It’s not that. It’s about the plausibility.’

‘Trust me,’ he says, ‘it works. Okay?’

‘That’s not good enough.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because everything’s different now.’

‘Different how?’

‘You don’t see it?’

‘See what?’

‘It’s too big. Blowing up a hospital, like.’

‘Too big for what?’

‘To allow Karlsson to just walk away at the end. Once he’s done here, he’s done. No sequel, no series.’

‘I don’t follow,’ he says.

I take a deep breath. ‘In the first draft, okay, Karlsson might or might not have been guilty of euthanasia. And he might have killed Cassie, it was never fully decided either way. But this time? He’s blowing up a whole hospital and making a big deal about it, like he’s some kind of Robin Hood.’

‘And?’

‘There’s a pay-off expected, Billy. Like the femme fatales in film noir. They get all the best lines, get to look all sexy and shit, but they need to go out in a blaze of glory at the end. It’s natural justice.’

‘Bullshit it’s natural justice. It’s you fucking around and bending the story out of shape.’

‘Into shape.’

‘Because that’s what people expect.’

‘That’s the game, Billy. Giving people what they want.’

Here follows a heated exchange about the pros and cons of writing a conventionally conservative crime novel that adheres to the paradigm of three-act classical tragedy.

‘Whoa,’ Billy says. ‘You never told me it was a crime novel.’

‘We’re blowing up a hospital, Billy.’

‘So you’ll kill off Karlsson just because some assholes can’t handle the truth.’

‘You don’t see it? It’s Karlsson who’ll kill off Karlsson. The guy believes he’s doing everyone a favour by blowing up the building, right? Except his disease is logic, and by his own logic he sees himself as the incarnation of everything the hospital stands for. So he has to go down with it, the captain with his ship. Jimmy Cagney, top o’ the world.’

‘So what happens to me?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘If Karlsson goes, where’s that leave me?’

‘I don’t know. Where are you now?’

‘I’m here with you,’ he says, ‘planning to blow up a hospital. But where’ll I be when the hospital’s gone?’

‘Don’t lay this trip on me, Billy. You’re the one came up with the big idea, and you’re the one who decided he wanted to write it all by himself. It’s not my bag to worry about what happens after it comes off. If it comes off.’

‘It’ll work, don’t you worry about that.’

‘Great. All I need to know is that it’s actually going to happen, and that it’ll be plausible when it does.’

‘Don’t sweat it,’ he says. ‘You’ll get your pound of flesh.’

‘Fuck you, Billy. I told you from the start that this had to be a commercial prospect. You knew that. And if it’s going to be commercial, we’re going to need justice and redemption and all the rest of that horseshit. Crime and fucking punishment, Billy.’

He stares. ‘You just don’t give a shit, do you?’

‘You want to know who I give a shit about? Debs and Rosie, that’s who. Except every second I spend on you and your story is a second I’ll never get back with them. So if I’m going to do this, you can be damn sure I’m going to make it worth their while in the long run. That’s my pound of flesh. You don’t like it? Then take a fucking hike. I’ve better books I could be writing.’

He snickers. ‘Do you, though?’

‘Between you and me, Billy, I’ve written better than you out of my system to get at a story.’

‘Except I’m still here,’ he says. ‘I’m still here.’

•

In our favour is the sheer size of the hospital. The smug arrogance inherent in its vast scale. Pride comes before a fall, etc. ‘The bigger they are, the harder they fall’ is entirely appropriate when applied to a large building.

A hospital is not a leaning tower in Pisa. A hospital cannot function at an angle. The weight of all that massed concrete means one thing: once it starts to go, it’s gone.

We need to think positive, people. We cannot despair when we look upon the hospital’s monolith. We cannot allow ourselves to be blinded by the sunset blazing upon its windows. We cannot be dazzled by its chrome and steel, its buffed and shining floors.

Achilles had his heel, Troy its wooden horse. The terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Centre knew their Homer. Ozymandias still drifts to the four corners of the compass, reduced now to dust, sand and fragments of memory. Could Victoria have ever imagined that the blood-reddened map of the world might be reduced to Gibraltar’s apes and the ghettoes of East Belfast? Even the most paranoid pharaoh could not have dreamt the living nightmare of a tourist economy.

It is the sheer size of an empire that allows cracks to form and germs to fester.

Thus, this: it is the vast volume capacity of the hospital that will prove its undoing. We need to start thinking inside the box. We need to start thinking small. We need to start thinking molecular.

A question: what is it that exists on every floor of every hospital, in every last nook and cranny, that must by necessity exist in the lungs, heart and bloodstream of each and every living human being?

My line for today is, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! (Percy Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’)

Cassie discovers my folder of notes, which includes the work-in-progress magnum opus,
Sermo Vulgus
. She stumbled across the manuscript, she says, while dusting the spare bedroom I use as a study-cum-office.

‘You were dusting inside the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet?’

But she’s not listening. Incandescent with rage, she waves the manuscript in my face. ‘How dare you put in that sex crap?’

‘What sex crap?’

She refers to the pages in her trembling hand. ‘“Give me handjobs, blowjobs and anal sex. Offer me your armpits, you wanton fuckers. Let us lacerate the sides of virgins with gaping—”’

‘Right, yeah. Well,’ I say, ‘it’s supposed to be an honest document of how––’

‘Who the fuck gave you the right to be honest about me?’

This is a valid question. All the truly valid questions are unanswerable.

While I am not answering, I think about how she does not ask why someone might want to blow up a hospital. If Cass sincerely believes that Sermo Vulgus represents the febrile outworkings of my diseased imagination, why then does she not query the possibility of my assistance in suspected cases of euthanasia detailed in the accompanying notes?

My theory is that Cassie’s reaction is symptomatic of the narcissism that plagues modern civilisation. Today a Dutch masterpiece is reduced to the status of a chin being stroked in a fogged shaving mirror: ‘Mmm, yes, but what does it say to me?’

The Sistine Chapel has been re-veneered with reflective tiles. The Louvre has become a fairground Hall of Mirrors. The world is a looking-glass, and we Alice.

This is a regression that will ultimately lead to the narcissism of the infant. The baby is so self-aware – and so only self-aware – that it has no need of a mirror, and no conception of what a reflection might be.

‘This is the last fucking straw, K. That’s it. I’ve fucking had enough.’

She throws the manuscript in my face, not neglecting to include a contemptuous wristy flourish. She flounces out of the room. She soon flounces back.

‘Don’t think I’m even worried about that crap being published,’ she says. This represents the second negative critique of my work, one courtesy of an ex-mechanic, the other from a practicing physiotherapist. It would appear I am missing my target audience. ‘It’s the fucking betrayal that kills me,’ she says. ‘Do you have the slightest fucking idea of what I’m talking about?’

In the prevailing spirit of honesty I am compelled to say no, I don’t.

She shakes her head. Her mouth drops open. For a moment she threatens speechlessness. Then she falls back on her old reliable. ‘Who gave you the right to be honest about me?’

‘I dunno. The same guy who gave you the right to be dishonest with all the rest of the seven billion liars?’

This buys me a goodly portion of furious, albeit wordless, disbelief. Then she drops to her knees, hauls a sports bag out from under the bed and marches off to pack.

I go into the kitchen and check the calendar.

Yep, it’s Tuesday.

I let her cool down for a week before ringing her mobile.

‘What do you want to do about this wedding?’ I say.

‘K, you’re a fucking space cadet. No kidding. If there was a hotline for nutbags, I’d be on it dobbing you in.’

‘You’ll be miserable on your own at a wedding.’

‘I’ll be miserable if you’re there.’

‘So either way you’ll be miserable. My way, you get to take it out on me. And don’t shoot the messenger, okay, but if you turn up on your tod they’ll just reckon you can’t pull a bloke.’

There is quiet. There is shallow breathing. ‘K, seriously – what’s going on with that manuscript? You can’t be serious about that shit.’