Absolute Zero Cool (23 page)

Let us be ash and blind butterflies on the wing, Cassie. Let us be black snow settling soundless on the cusp of always.

Cassie, you said irony is a sharp tool but a paper-thin shield.

•

‘I thought we were dumping the Cassie novel,’ I say.

Billy shrugs. ‘Now that she’s gone, it’s starting to make sense.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, not sense, exactly. I mean, the excerpts are still rubbish. I’m saying it makes sense to maintain Cassie’s presence, even if it’s just, y’know, by lamenting her absence or some shit.’

‘Fair enough.’ I light a cigarette, toss the Zippo down. ‘So what d’you think, will she dob you in to the cops this time?’

‘Hard to say,’ he says. ‘We were getting on a lot better this time around, until the miscarriage anyway. And she’s got Tony, so it’s not like she’s a woman scorned or anything.’

‘How’re you making out?’

‘Good days, bad days. You know how it goes.’

‘Put a tune to it and I’ll sing along. Listen,’ I say, ‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘What’s that?’

‘About Cassie, and the, y’know.’

‘Miscarriage,’ he says. ‘It’s okay to say it out loud.’

‘Yeah. Anyway, and don’t take this the wrong way . . .’

‘Spit it out, man.’

‘Well, I was thinking you could channel all that energy, the loss and the pain, make it a creative thing. It sounds a bit crass, I know, but––’

‘No,’ he says. ‘That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. It’s like Cyril Connolly said, the pram in the hall is the death of art. So,’ he shrugs, not meeting my eye, ‘I’m thinking that maybe no pram means I can really push this. For now, anyway.’

‘Fair play,’ I say. ‘That takes balls, man. If I was where you are right now, I wouldn’t be able to––’

‘It’s why I want to blow the hospital for real,’ he says. ‘No prams, pre-natal classes or delivery ward, no incubators, no nothing.’

‘No physiotherapists,’ I say.

‘You think this is about Cassie?’ he says.

‘Isn’t it?’

He shakes his head. ‘It’s about being honest,’ he says. ‘Being true to the spirit of it. I mean, what are we doing wasting our fucking time writing about this shit when we could be doing it?’

‘You’ve lost the plot, Billy. I mean, you’ve literally gone and lost the fucking plot.’

‘You’re the one,’ he says, ‘whinging about having to write comedy crime fiction when the country’s going down the tubes. All I’m saying is, stop writing it and just do it.’ He shrugs. ‘If you’re worried about being implicated,’ he says, ‘I can always say it was loosely based on an original story. Like, those guys who flew into the Twin Towers, that shit was in a Stephen King book years before.’

‘You’re insane,’ I say. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you’re not entertaining, but you’re Section Eight. And you need to think about seeing someone, I don’t know, maybe a grief counsellor. There’s some serious issues you need to work out.’

‘As opposed to you,’ he says, fiddling with the Zippo, ‘sitting here only fantasising about blowing up a hospital.’ He flicks the lid of the Zippo, cranks the wheel. A faint pop as the flame blossoms.

‘Boom,’ he says.

•

‘Your health is your wealth, son,’ the old man says. He does not meet my eye saying this.

‘So they say.’

A hospital is the last bastion of unnecessary kindness. This is not necessarily a good thing. Kindness is chocolate, a sweet treat that is debilitating when indulged to excess. In the novel Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk had his Space Monkeys undermine America’s unhealthy obsession with excessive personal wealth by vaporising financial institutions. Thus it is logical that we should vaporise health institutions in order to undermine our unhealthy obsession with excessive health.

But I understand that the ex-mechanic, this shrivelled expression of humanity, is having second thoughts. I appreciate that he is contemplating one last overhaul in a desperate attempt to jump-start his engine. This is his choice and privilege. He is entitled to renege on the unspoken agreement he has with Death, to welch on their non-verbal contract.

‘The young fella came to see me yesterday,’ he says.

‘About time.’

He nods, sucking on his chocolate. ‘Brought the nippers with him. Three of them, they were bouncing on the bed, pillow-fights, the works. I wasn’t in the bed at the time, but still.’

‘That must have been nice.’

‘It was. I was dreading them coming, but then when they got here . . .’

‘Nothing like a few kids to brighten up a place.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, son. Those wee shites, they’d have bounced on the bed whether I was in it or not. The young fella’s breeding savages out there.’ A twinkle in the faded blue eyes I haven’t seen for some time. ‘But it’s not the nippers I’m talking about.’

‘No?’

‘It’s just, when you’re on your own, and thinking, you’d be thinking things you wouldn’t if there was people around.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘Ridiculous things,’ he says.

‘Sure, but if you can’t be daft in the privacy of your own mind . . .’

‘It’s not like that, son. I mean, maybe the Pope changed his mind on this one too, but there was a time when thinking something was a sin in itself. Going ahead and acting on it, that was just taking the piss.’

‘I couldn’t say for certain,’ I say, ‘but I don’t think he’s changed his mind on that one. But for what’s it worth, I think that’s all a bunch of bullshit. The whole point of having free will is you get to make decisions. You can’t tell your mind what to think, it’s your mind that tells you what to think. But you can tell your body what to do, or what it shouldn’t do.’

He laughs. Phlegm rumbles in his chest like faint thunder breaking. ‘You can try, son. You get to a certain age, you can try and tell your body what to do.’ A wan smile. Perhaps even now his mind is allowing the memories to spool, those glory days when his body obeyed instructions. This may or may not be a good sign. This may or may not represent the final run-through, the slow-motion passage of his life before his eyes, the settling of accounts, the last balancing of the books in which acts are allotted their contexts, reasons and justifications. The subconscious dialogue of confession and absolution, which may or may not represent the longing for more than enough that is the defining characteristic of humanity.

This may or may not be a jump-started engine growling a throaty roar.

‘Any word back from those tests yet?’ I say.

‘There’s loads of words alright,’ he says. ‘Some of them I even understand.’ He rubs his fingers together, collecting melted chocolate in a little ball, which he then wipes on the sheet. ‘Not giving a damn, son – that’s a tough one to keep up. The young fella, he was near crying when he left yesterday.’

‘No son wants to see his father in hospital.’

He snorts. ‘What’s wrong with him is, if I go, he has to go too. Not straightaway, but sometime.’

‘I hear you.’

‘What I never realised, starting out, was how you never stop looking after them.’

I hand him the opened carton of peach yoghurt. He looks up, the faded blue eyes crackling fiercely. ‘Are you with me, son?’

I nod. ‘You’re the boss,’ I say.

Joe, my prematurely grey supervisor, calls me into his office.

‘This is strictly routine, Karlsson. I don’t want you to think you’re under suspicion or anything.’ He gestures at the pile of buff-coloured manila folders on his desk. ‘It’s just that I have orders to interview everyone.’

‘About what?’

‘I’m sure you’ve heard about the files that went missing, that they fell into the wrong hands.’

‘Loose lips sink ships.’

‘Exactly. So what have you heard?’

‘That files went missing and now some people are trying to sue the hospital.’

‘Anything else?’

‘No, that’s about the height of it. No one ever tells the porters anything.’

‘It was one of the porters who was supposed to shred and then burn those files.’

‘So I hear. To me, that’s a dereliction of duty.’

He thinks about this. ‘And none of the lads have been acting weird lately?’

‘They’re hospital porters, Joe. They live at the bottom of the shit-pile, barrowing loads of shit around, all day, every day. Removing the occasional corpse to relieve the boredom. I mean, define weird.’

‘Well, has anyone been acting strangely? Suspiciously?’

‘Everything’s relative, Joe. Some people might say that not shredding and burning files is a normal, unsuspicious activity.’

He lolls back in his leather chair, studying me shrewdly through his ironically thick spectacles. ‘I’m not asking you to snitch on anyone,’ he says. ‘But are you trying to tell me something?’

‘Nope.’

‘We both know that it only takes one bad apple to ruin the barrel.’

Right now I am suffering from cliché overload. I am being invisibly electrocuted by twee aphorisms.

‘Joe, with all due respect, shouldn’t you already know who was responsible for shredding those files? Shouldn’t there be a paper trail?’

He shifts uncomfortably in the orthopaedic chair. ‘Let’s just say that the system they had in place lacked cohesion, and that steps have been taken to implement a new system that has in-built accountability.’

‘Well, that’s something at least. I’d hate to lose my job because the suits upstairs haven’t the wit to keep an eye on sensitive material.’

‘How do you know the files contained sensitive material?’

‘No one sues because the spuds were too hard, Joe.’

He thinks this over. ‘Karlsson, I’m getting the impression here – and maybe I’m wrong – but I’m getting the impression that you have something you want to tell me. And I’ve told you already, whatever is said between these four walls remains confidential.’

‘Wouldn’t that make for a pretty pointless investigation? I mean, I appreciate the sentiment, but where’s the point in saying what I have to say if you can’t guarantee me it’ll be heard by the right people?’

His prematurely grey eyes glitter. ‘What I mean is, all information will be treated as if it was received anonymously.’

‘Well, that’s different.’

He leans forward, joining his hands and resting them on the desk. ‘So – do you have something you want to tell me?’

‘What do you know about the Polynesians?’

He blinks. ‘What?’

‘The Polynesians.’

He purses his prematurely grey lips. ‘Not much. They came from the Pacific. They had rafts, they sailed them from island to island.’

‘That’s them. Those guys, they started moving east from New Guinea about four thousand years ago. Sailed out into the Pacific as far as Fiji, Samoa. The rafts carried themselves, their livestock, their portable agricultural systems. They learned to navigate by the stars, by ocean swells, by the flight paths of seabirds. Joe, forget your Phoenicians – these guys were the best sailors of all time, bar none. In relative terms, these guys not only aimed for the moon, they overshot and wound up in a whole new galaxy.’ Joe makes to speak. I hold up a hand. ‘Here’s the thing, Joe. The Polynesians made it to Easter Island around 70 AD. The west coast of South America is as far from Easter Island as Easter Island is from the Polynesian Islands. That’s a distance of five thousand miles with only Easter Island in between, and they didn’t even know Easter Island was there. Bear in mind, Joe, that these guys were toting livestock and portable agricultural systems on Stone Age rafts. I mean, where did they think they were going?’

He spots his opportunity. ‘Karlsson, I don’t think––’

‘Here’s the thing. When those guys hit Easter Island, it was covered in forest. It was a paradise. Seabirds, fish, food aplenty. Arable land. More fruit trees than you could shake a banana at. And they cut them all down to transport those huge statues. A couple of tribes got into a competition to see who could build the biggest statue, and the bigger the statue, the more trees were needed to transport it. Things were going well, they were living in a paradise, they could afford the time and energy.’

‘Karlsson––’

‘Hold on, Joe. Now these Polynesians, the one thing they needed above all was trees to make rafts with. And they cut down every last fucking tree on the island. Easter Island isn’t Australia or even Madagascar. The guy who cut down the last tree, he knew he was cutting down the last tree. But he cut it down anyway.’

By now Joe’s eyes are glazing over. ‘What’s your point, Karlsson?’

‘The point is, not only did they destroy their source of food and shelter, they also eradicated their only means of escape from self-imposed genocide.’

He thinks about this. He says, dully, ‘And what has that to do with the missing files?’