Absolute Zero Cool (21 page)

‘It’s not supposed to be a fucking novel or anything, Cass. I’m the one who should be pissed off here. That was my fucking diary you were reading.’ I find that Cassie responds well to the hint of repressed emotion suggested by the judicious use of expletives. ‘You’ve some fucking cheek,’ I say, ‘rummaging through my drawers.’

More silence and shallow breathing. Then a stilted giggle. ‘You should be so lucky,’ she says.

I snort sarcastically. Then I breathe out. There will be some grovelling to be improvised when next we meet, but the worst of the crisis is over. We are no longer in breach. We are Code Blue. We are stood down, at ease, waiting for the other to speak first.

‘Give me a buzz,’ I say, ‘if you change your mind about the wedding.’

‘K?’

‘What?’

‘Did you ever think we’d get married?’

‘No.’

Cassie rings. I am permitted to accompany her to the wedding. I am not allowed to pick her up beforehand. Instead I am ordered to meet her at the church. Afterwards, at the reception, she ignores me and mingles with the friends and family of the bride. She has had a hard time of it recently, so I make it known that I’m cutting her some slack and spend what amounts to a working day propped at the bar alone. Not long after midnight, she weaves unsteadily through the throng, a sheepish-looking guy in tow wearing an exquisitely tailored suit.

She says, ‘K, meet Tony. Tony, K.’

‘Alright, K?’

‘Tony?’ I say. ‘The Tony? Ex-Tony?’

Cassie nods. ‘We’ve had a good chat upstairs,’ she says, ‘and we’ve decided we’re giving it another go.’

‘Go?’

‘We’re getting back together. Just so you know.’

‘Cass,’ I say, ‘that’s a hell of a lot of slack.’

The point of the exercise is not to demolish a hospital. It is to demonstrate how it can be done and to highlight the vulnerability of hospitals.

Unfortunately, in the process we may have to actually bring down a hospital.

The destruction of a hospital should not be news. Hospitals are bombed and torched every day. We do not hear about this because these hospitals house brown people, people with slanted eyes, and people who may or may not wash as often as creamy-pink people with rounded eyes who have access to an excess of running water.

For this we have our old friend Perfidious Albion to thank. During the Boer War (1899-1902), the British army targeted the civilian population as a means of bringing the elusive guerrillas to heel. One result of this policy was the concentration camp. Another was the legitimisation of the civilian as target. Despite the best efforts of the Black-and-Tans during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), this policy did not really catch on until WWII (1939-1945). Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and subsequently Palestine, Cambodia, East Timor, Chechnya, Northern Ireland, the Balkans and the Twin Towers, et al, bear witness to this policy.

Perversely, it was the British nurse Florence Nightingale who invented the concept of the modern hospital during the Crimean War (1854-1856).

Back then, the hospital was regarded as an innovative step on the path to universal compassion. Today, in many parts of the world, it is a means of housing the non-contributors in a place where they can be exterminated with a single payload.

Often these non-contributors are in a hospital because they have stepped on a land mine. This is because the land mine was not designed to kill. It was designed to wound and maim, to create cripples and amputees who are useless in terms of the war effort, but still need to be fed, drugged and cared for.

There are nations who fear hospitals the way cattle fear the slaughterhouse. There are men and women whose role is to poison the food, water and minds of non-participating civilians. There are men and women whose role and perhaps vocation it is to blow up hospitals.

What may or may not provoke outrage is the destruction from within of a hospital tending to creamy-pink persons, with said destruction instigated by a creamy-pink person.

Look for the enemy within. From ’flu germs to Quislings to the planet’s molten core, the enemy is always within.

Mankind nurtures the seeds of its own destruction. ‘Mankind’ was an oxymoron long before it was coined. ‘Mankind’ is the unkindest cut of all. Hospitals are mere Band-Aids on the gushing artery of de-oxygenated poison that is the human condition.

•

‘Okay,’ I say. I put the sheets of paper to one side, start building a smoke. ‘I like all this, you know that.’

‘But?’

‘But we’re still not getting any practical intel on how you’re going to blow the hospital.’

‘Change the fucking record, man. You’re stuck in a groove.’

‘You don’t get it, do you? How long have we been doing this now?’

He shrugs. ‘A month?’

‘Nearly five weeks. Five weeks, Billy, we’ve been dancing around blowing up this hospital, and you still haven’t worked it out.’

‘I have, you know. I just haven’t told you.’

‘I’m not talking about the technical details. I’m talking about what the hospital represents.’

A frown. ‘But we know all that. It’s civilisation at its best, except it’s undermining society by keeping the sick and weak alive, yadda-ya, especially at a time when we can’t afford hospitals anymore. So we––’

‘That’s just the McGuffin, Billy. The bullshit to keep the intellectuals on board. But it’s not what the hospital is really about.’

‘So what is it about?’

‘Well . . . I don’t know if you remember me saying, but when I wrote that first draft I was, y’know . . .’

‘Depressed, yeah. Getting shit out of your system. So what?’

‘I was sick, Billy. Depression’s a disease.’

‘I’m not saying it’s not, but . . .’ He comes up short, the Newman-blue eye ablaze. ‘Fuck.’

‘What?’

‘The hospital,’ he says. ‘It’s you. All that wank about sick-building syndrome, it’s all about you being sick.’

‘Not exactly. It’s more about me getting cured.’

‘So Karlsson . . .’

‘The old people he killed off, they were the fucked-up thoughts I was having, y’know, self-harm, overdose, all this. So I sent Karlsson into the hospital to eradicate them, wipe them out. Except a lot of other dark stuff came up. The pervy stuff, the Hitler thing, the Spartans, sharks . . .’

‘That’s why you let him get away with it,’ he says. ‘Why you gave him a free pass at the end.’

‘Maybe, I don’t know. But the point is, as bad as it got, as extreme as Karlsson was, it never occurred to him to actually blow up the hospital.’

‘You’re saying you were depressed but not so badly you wanted to end it.’

‘If I’d been that badly off,’ I say, ‘I wouldn’t have been able to write the story, would I?’

‘I don’t suppose so.’

‘What got me thinking,’ I say, ‘was when you asked me about the old guy, why we just didn’t get rid of him. Put him out of his pain.’

‘But he isn’t in pain this time.’

‘And maybe that’s the whole point. I’m past all that shit now. I don’t need to purge.’

He cocks his head, scratches his nose. Then he makes a production number of rolling a smoke, lighting up. All done without breaking eye contact. He exhales and says, ‘You don’t want to blow the hospital.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘I’m afraid it is,’ he says. A bitter undertone. ‘You can’t be a little bit pregnant, can you? We either blow it or we don’t.’

‘Look, I understand where you’re coming from. You need the hospital to blow to make the story big enough to be worth publishing. Except I need a happy ending, for myself, because the whole process of redrafting has made me realise how far I’ve come in the last five years. Y’know, Debs and Rosie, finally getting a book published . . .’ I shrug. ‘I’d be lying to myself, and to anyone who read it, if I made it out to be this dark bullshit just for the sake of it.’

‘You’re a fucking sap,’ he says.

‘Try having a kid, man, see what it does to you.’ The words are out before I realise what I’m saying. He flinches. ‘Anyway, that’s why I need to know what you’re doing with the hospital. How you’re going about it.’

‘So you can bend an exploding hospital into a happy ending.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it, yeah.’

‘Houston,’ he says, ‘we have a problem.’

‘Not necessarily. We could––’

He holds up a hand. ‘The problem,’ he says, ‘is too many fucking metaphors. I mean, the hospital’s 9/11, okay, I get that. And it’s a totem for a dangerously compassionate society, sure, and a symbol for the building boom that bankrupted the country . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘Seriously,’ he says, ‘it’s a wonder the thing hasn’t collapsed already under the weight of all these fucking metaphors. Except now you’re tossing another one onto the pile, the hospital’s you on top of everything else? I mean, give us a break.’

‘Back off, Billy. The hospital’s my idea, okay? I built it. You’re like some toddler in crèche, he sees a tower of blocks, his one big idea is to knock it down.’

‘You built fuck-all,’ he says. ‘The hospital was already there. You just started throwing all these metaphors at it, hoping some of the shit would stick.’

‘So build your own hospital, blow that one up.’

‘No, I like your hospital,’ he says. ‘All I’m saying is, you’ve wrapped it in too much horseshit.’

‘You’re telling me to pick a metaphor.’

‘I’m saying, no metaphors.’ A wicked grin. ‘Absolute fucking zero, man. I say we blow it for real.’

•

Frankie rings. He sounds anxious. We hook up in a half-empty pub with blackened beams and exposed brickwork, rough wooden floors and rickety tables. This pub required six months’ work to recreate a look nobody wanted when there was no choice in the matter.

Frankie is halfway down his pint when I arrive. It is not his first. In his eyes swirls a toxic cocktail of fear, rage and weary cunning. A fox, skulking in some low culvert as the hounds spill howling down the slope. I slide up onto the barstool next to him and give the barman the V-for-victory sign, which here translates as ‘Two stout, please’. Frankie’s thick forefinger tappity-taps the counter. ‘Did you hear?’ he says.

‘Hear what?’

‘Some fuckers got their hands on hospital files. Word is, they’re suing big time.’

‘Jesus.’ I give a low whistle. ‘How’d they get them?’

‘Fucked if I know. They’ve called an internal inquiry.’

‘What’s that to do with you?’

‘They were supposed to be torched. Shredded first, then torched.’

‘So?’

‘K, man, the fucking incinerator’s in the basement.’

‘I know, I’m down there all the time.’

‘Yeah, but what I’m saying is, the basement was on my watch the day the files were supposed to be torched. And I didn’t see a thing.’

‘How could you? I mean, if they weren’t torched, how were you supposed to see it happen?’

‘You’re not getting it.’ He slurps down some of his fresh pint. ‘The way it is now, I can’t say for definite if they were torched or not.’

‘That’s not your problem, Frankie. The problem there is that your crew doesn’t have anyone manning the security cameras all the time, like they’re supposed to.’

‘That’s just it, though. The company put that policy in place on the basis of my report. At the time they were delighted, it cut costs, it was kudos for Frankie. But now they’re blaming me for the cameras being unmanned.’

‘Whoa. That’s bang out of order.’

‘Yeah, but that’s how it is.’

‘Fuck. That’s heavy fucking shit, man.’

This won’t look good on Frankie’s CV. His plans for setting up his own security firm are going up in smoke for the want of a batch of torched files. He slurps down the rest of his pint, signals for two more.

‘What can I do?’ I say.

‘One of your boys, the porters, was supposed to torch the files. I need to find out who it was.’

‘One of our boys stole them?’

‘I’m not saying anyone stole them. Who the fuck’d want a load of old hospital files, for fuck’s sakes?’ He makes to spit, then realises he is indoors and swallows instead. ‘I’m saying some fucker didn’t do his job and left them lying around, instead of torching them when I could see him do it.’

‘Relax, man. This isn’t your problem. What you need to do is get your union rep on the case, turn it around.’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘The problem isn’t at the point of incineration, it’s at the point of instigation. If the assholes with the scalpels did their job properly, there’d be no need to burn any files in the first place. Am I right?’

Frankie nods gloomily.

‘Don’t take this lying down,’ I urge. ‘Don’t let them shit all over you. You’re the victim here.’

‘Y’think?’