Absolute Zero Cool (29 page)

No Rosie.

I struggle through the crowd, grab at Dad’s sleeve. ‘Where is she?’

‘We got her to a doctor,’ he shouts. ‘Just outside the emergency room. Then they started pushing everyone out . . .’ A helpless agony glittering in his eyes.

A hand grips my shoulder. I turn, expecting Debs, but already she’s trying to force her way through the crowd in the direction of the ER, a salmon leaping at a tidal wave.

The hand is Frankie’s. ‘What’s wrong?’ he shouts.

‘My baby girl, Frankie. She’s in there. She’s still in there.’

‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘Fuck.’

In his eyes I see the frantic calculation, the adding up and taking away, black marks being wiped, laurels conferred.

‘Come on,’ he says, pulling back, going with the surge away from the hospital.

Now, moving away from the seething mass, circling the hospital uphill, there is no resistance. No crowds, no cops, no blue flashing lights. A pain in my chest like I’ve been shot. Frankie panting, explaining as we go. An escape hatch, built into the hospital’s basement in the time of Cuban crisis. The one that’s off the CCTV map, the one the porters used for ducking in and out for sneaky tokes. We scramble down the steep grassy incline, come out in a small courtyard amid rusting ambulances, the unseeing X-ray machines, one-wheeled wheelchairs, the bric-à-brac of decades’ waste.

Frankie fumbles for a key.

‘Christ, Frankie.’

‘I have it, K. I have it . . .’

The key goes in the lock. The tumblers turn. We’re in.

A long dark corridor, dimly lit by strip lighting.

‘The emergency ward,’ I say. ‘That’s the last place they saw her.’

‘This way,’ he says.

•

I sense that some of you still anticipate a happy ending. My invisible antennae twitch as they scent the precious few molecules of optimism in the ether.

This is not to sneer. I understand and appreciate your desire, your need, for upbeat conclusions. I am moved to applaud your longing for some form of natural justice to materialise from the great indifference. I am proud to own up to my role in the human conspiracy when I recognise my own reflection in your contradictory wish to see the hospital vaporised and the miraculous escape of everyone therein, with the obvious exception of Yasmin the Paedophile.

But we must adhere to logic at all times. The hospital is doomed. The bomb disposal wallahs are doomed. The human race is doomed. All of these things are so inescapable as to render futile the very recording of their inevitability.

All that is left now is the possibility of wonder. Logic and wonder are not mutually exclusive.

Cling to your faith, if you must, when the night comes on and the universe reverts to its default setting of cold and empty darkness. In this much, at least, the universe is a magnanimous parent, allowing a fretful child its soother for one last night. But it is time to grow up, people. Time to put away the rubber sheets and spinning tops.

Meanwhile, it being impossible to evacuate a hospital without attracting attention, the media has arrived in force. A nation is alerted to the asp at its bosom. News being news, the venom spreads. Other nations are alerted. Other nations swoon in horrified ecstasy before the altars of their TV screens.

I too am fixated on a TV screen, watching the drama unfold as the announcer speaks words I do not understand. I see miles of fluttering yellow tape. I see men in bulky jackets wearing truncated submachine guns strapped to their chests. I see the bomb disposal squad arrive and disappear into the hospital. I note the heavy trudge of the truly aware and dedicated. Only I know for sure that they will never reappear.

This is how the scriptwriter feels when the hero’s car plunges off a bridge. This was how God felt as He watched the Jews file into the showers and reach for a soap fashioned from the sludge of their brethren.

The doors close behind the team. From this moment on we must close our eyes and surrender to the imagination, the better to identify with those men now descending into the bowels on our behalf. We must strain every nerve and sinew to consider ourselves worthy of the sacrifice of every single man who charged across No Man’s Land, with the obvious exception of Hitler. We must want to be them, to empathise with their imminent annihilation, if we are to be worthy of what comes next.

I close my eyes. I see them descend the stairs one heavy step at a time, burdened by their equipment and the weight of their mortality. I hear them speak in hoarse tones. I hear them deploy coarse humour to deflect their fears. I hear them speculate on the nature of the explosive device they are about to confront. I hear in their irreverent jocularity the confidence of men who have made an art of probability.

I swoon as they run through their poignant routine of superstitious gestures. They shake hands. They make the usual promises to one another, to convey final words to loved ones should the worst materialise.

Meanwhile, down in the basement, Yasmin lays Rosie on the ground and contemplates the sealed bunker door. He wipes his sweating palms on his white coat.

•

Frankie charges ahead. He seems to know his way instinctively in the dark, anticipating corners, dodging around pieces of equipment parked against the walls. Meanwhile I’m banging into beds, barking my shins, the pain in my chest white-hot, the sweat icy cold.

We cross the atrium, hurdling the low benches, past the reception area. Turn into the deserted A&E, ghostly and draped in shadow, the emergency lights casting pale glimmerings. We each take one side, go past the cubicles whipping back the curtains, ducking down to peer under the beds. Nothing.

‘Are you sure she’s still in here?’ Frankie pants.

‘She didn’t come out, Frankie. Check everywhere.’

Faint beep-beeps sound over the blood pounding in my ears, a flat-line beeeeeeeeeep from somewhere off the main ward.

‘I’ll do the nurses’ station,’ he says, pointing across the ward. ‘You check the––’

The faintest of shudders, an almost imperceptible brightening, is our only warning.

‘Get down, Frank––’

Too late. The ward erupts. Beds, chairs, humans, machines: straws in a twister.

A whirlwind, reaping.

•

Were this
Moby-Dick
we might say, ‘Thar she blows!’

The sudden flaring blinds. The flash of flame precedes the explosion by a micro-second. Yasmin is incinerated in less time than it takes to say whoomph.

In the same micro-second the explosion reverberates within the underground chamber. Constrained thus, it turns in on itself. The support pillar to the rear of the chamber buckles. Even above the boom of the explosion I believe I can hear the scream of rending steel. Perhaps this is the scream of the plucked radish.

The hospital groans. Perhaps it is a frisson anticipating sexual release.

The convulsion shatters every window in the hospital. Outside, behind the ribbons of fluttering yellow tape, the instinctive gasp of the watchers creates its own sonic boom in response. Then the yelps and yowls as shards of flying glass begin to shower down.

Distracted, the watchers do not see the hospital tilt. They do not see the hospital rend itself from its foundations like some huge concrete Samson. They panic nonetheless, as brick, mortar, glass and chrome crash down in random revenge on their erstwhile tormentors like so many cluster bombs.

Where I am, I see the camera lens shake. Where I am, I hear the commentator attempt to articulate terror via a strangled yelp. This is no easier in Greek than it is in English.

I see a cloud of dust and smoke rise from the smouldering rubble. This is the logic of poetry carried through to its inevitable conclusion. I think that I shall never see / A poem as true as a fallen tree, etc.

Pandora you witch, Narcissus my old friend: can you hear what I hear?

Tonight the Great White will convene an emergency war council and there shelve its plans to grow legs and invade.

Tonight Herostratus howls again at the moon.

Tonight I hear Pilate’s sigh, Prometheus croon a lullaby.

Tonight the Jews drag Hitler from his bed and inject his eternal veins with his own faeces.

•

When I come-to I have no idea of how long I’ve been out. It can’t have been long or I wouldn’t have come-to at all; the swirling smoke would have killed me in minutes. Coughing hard, trying to work out if anything has been broken, if the damage is––

Rosie.

I haul myself to my feet, banging my head on the overhang of the nurses’ station. Eyes streaming, I lurch forward and stagger out of control, lose my footing. The floor has reset at a weird angle, dropping away. Careful now, impossible to see the floor through the smoke, I inch across the ward.

‘Frankie?’

My voice sounds comes out a croak, but even that much effort is enough to get my scorched lungs heaving.

But even as I choke on the roasted air, it occurs to me that Billy’s theory about the silane gas igniting every last atom of oxygen is a bust. That his idea of––

The basement.

A voice in the back of my head telling me it’s pointless, it’s too late.

Sabotage.

No, self-sabotage. The future operating behind the enemy lines of the present.

‘Now listen good. This is how we get you in.

‘There’ll be an elderly couple carrying a baby, it’ll have breathing problems.

‘She’s your ticket inside.

‘Once you’re in, make for the basement.’

If I am to die, it will not be smoke that kills me.

If I am to die, I will die of being a man.

The stairwell to the basement is a chimney funnelling hot, oily smoke. A permeable barrier I have to lean into to penetrate, the banister too hot to touch. Stumbling blind, eyes streaming, I expect to be fried alive when I burst through the double-doors into the basement proper, but the bizarre thing is that it seems cooler, the smoke thinning out.

Then I’m hurtling around the corner towards the bunker. A faint wail from the murk, a baby’s cry. Hope shoots through my chest just as my feet connect with something solid and down I go, face-first into the concrete.

No pain, not at first, just shock. I kneel there coughing, so weak I can barely hold myself upright, but then the smoky haze shifts and I see him: Billy, kneeling close enough to touch, his face contorted as his hands pump Rosie’s chest. Then he’s gone and I hear a ragged scream, and he looms into view again, his wild eyes bloodshot and streaming, and I understand that he is not giving Rosie CPR.

He’s trying to crush her tiny chest.

I hurl myself across Rosie, smash my forehead into his face.

The impact is cold, hard. A crash, then splintering.

When I open my eyes again, Billy is gone.

When I open my eyes again, Billy was never there.

In his place a reflection, a crazy-paved Picasso portrait of the author as agent provocateur. In his place a shattered pane of glass, the wall mounting that houses the coiled rubber hose.

In Case of Emergency, Break Glass.

I look down to see Rosie’s pale blue eyes goggling. Her mouth pursed open in a perfectly round O. My hands on her chest, the fragile ribs beneath, and beneath that, nothing.

No heartbeat.

Instinctively I place one hand beneath her neck, tilt her head back. Bend down and place my lips on hers, breathe into her mouth, then gently pump her chest once, twice, three times.

Does she stir? Or is it my hands trembling?

If not now, never . . .

I untuck my shirt, get Rosie underneath it, go. Stepping across Yasmin’s prone body, his face and hands melted into blackened lumps. Back across the underground car park, out into the smoke-choked stairwell. Staggering blind. The heat roasting now. I can hear my eyebrows crisp, smell the acrid whiff of burning hair.

Out into the reception area, wheel right. I trip over some rubble in the corridor, come down hard on one knee. The pain shoots up through my hip, whiplashing my spine.

Dim daylight to be seen at the end of the corridor, the hos-pital’s main doors. On. On.

The glass doors have been blown out, the automatic sliding mechanism melted. I duck under and step through, collapse to my knees. The weight of Rosie dragging me down.

A dazzle, a blaze of lights. Screams. The smoke-filled muck tastes like the purest Arctic air.

I hear a croaking, barely audible: ‘I need help here. Help.’

Then a rushing, footsteps pounding. Arms around me. I’m falling.

‘I have her, man. I have her. You can let go now. LET GO!’

I let go and she’s gone and I fall.