Absolute Zero Cool (30 page)

For a moment I can only lie there, stunned. Choking, eyes streaming. Stick figures swimming in a blurred glare. A jealous spasm as I realise the professionals are swarming Rosie. A nurse, two paramedics. The plastic gleam of an oxygen mask as it disappears into their midst.

The child, of course.

Nothing matters but the child.

It is as if the decision is made for me. As if it has always been made.

I get one knee underneath me, then the other. A crippled sprinter waiting for the gun to crack.

The hospital’s smoking maw awaits.

One last glance over my shoulder. Rosie nestling in the nurse’s arms. Bawling, now. Both of them.

I drift away into the hospital, wraith-like, disembodied.

•

Sermo Vulgus
: A Novel (Excerpt)

Cassie, I would have eaten of the fruit too. Who would be daughtered to the fool who would not eat to know Everything?

The whole point of being alive is to store away enough answers to last an eternity of questions.

Cassie, the universe is eighty percent composed of dark matter, of which we know Nothing. Cassie, my one love, the energy of the universe is three-quarters composed of dark energy, of which we know Nothing.

Tonight my universe comes to an end. Tonight, on this remote and lonely beach, my infinity will suffer its fatal inversion. Tonight I back away out of the story, quite literally.

The sea is calm tonight, Cass. The Aegean usually is. There is an almost full moon. The sand is black and cold, coarsely grained. I sit on the beach and watch the stars and imagine each grain of sand as a microscopic diamond.

Cassie, you said you would never wear diamonds. They are too hard, you said, hard as the bones our yesterdays gnaw. You said only braided lightning would grace your finger. Can’t we at least try, you said, to draw a straight line through the heart of every sun?

This moment is timeless. In this moment meshes everything I might possibly be and everything I might once have been.

Cassie, I am reaching back to that moment when sperm and egg engendered the latest in an infinite number of unique infinities. I am wondering at how the shockwaves of that collision still oscillate. The ripple is eternal.

Cassie, my ripple is only one of an infinite number of unique oscillations eternally intersecting with all other ripples. I am tempted to throw a stone into the calm Aegean just to watch the ripple fade and mutate into another, more appropriate, form of energy.

But I am my own stone.

I strip off. I arrange my socks and shoes neatly. I tuck my wallet into one shoe. I walk to the water’s edge. I stand there for a moment, looking up at the almost full moon.

Cassie, the dilemma is this: to commit suicide is to renounce the flesh. But I am flesh forged of flesh, will forged of will, choice forged of choice.

I retrace my footsteps, walking backwards in the footprints already made in the sand. Past my neatly folded pile of clothes, my wallet, the rented scooter, the deserted shacks of this remote fishing village on the northern coast of a small Aegean island.

And so I retreat, step by step. Back I go, to melt into the limbo of a universe which is overwhelmingly composed of dark materials we cannot comprehend.

Cassie, what if the universe is made of love?

Nothing left now to say. Nothing, except that it would have been enough to see, just once, that miracle when the quantum chaos prompted the unknowing child to smile up at me. To conjure even a boson’s worth of illusion from the pitiless void, to justify the miles we crossed to come so far. The light-years. The thirty thousand billion cells. The trillions of particles, the unimaginable number of random collisions required to create a thinking thing.

All gone, wasted, lost.

We should have made babies, Cass.

One would have been enough.

•

‘So that’s pretty much that,’ Billy says. By now the shadows have lengthened so far that the gecko in his Irish racing green clings to last patch of sun above the door. ‘I mean,’ he flicks dismissively through the final few pages, ‘there’s a whole section here, the big Poirot reveal when Debs tells the cop, Sallow Face, how you worked as a hospital porter to research your book, except you were sick, suffering from male post-partum depression, under pressure with deadlines, couldn’t pay the mortgage, all this. Sick as two small hospitals, Sallow Face tells her.’

The sheets are white, the walls are white, the tiles on the floor are white.

‘But if you ask me,’ he says, ‘you’re only pandering there. Anyone who didn’t pick up on all that won’t have read this far anyway.’

I scribble on the pad, hold it up.

Rosie?

‘Oh yeah,’ he says, flicking back a page or two. ‘There’s a good bit here about how the X-rays showed some deep-tissue scarring. Smoke damage, but not from the hospital. More like someone had been blowing smoke directly into her lungs over a period of time. D’you want to leave that in?’

I nod.

‘Consider it done,’ he says, making a note. ‘And if you’re leaving that in,’ he says, ‘you might as well leave the sappy finale. Make it a proper crime novel, like, all that liberal angst curdling into conservative bile.’

I scrawl on the pad.

Read it.

‘You sure?’

I nod.

‘Okay,’ he says. He flicks forward through the pages. ‘So this comes after the big reveal,’ he says, ‘the smoke-scarred lungs, and you ask to hold Rosie one last time, except you can’t, you’re cuffed to the bed, but Debs makes this big gesture of forgiveness and absolution, holds Rosie close to you. Ready?’

I nod again.

A wry grin, a self-conscious clearing of the throat.

The little girl senses me, some instinct turning her head.

‘The little girl senses me,’ Billy says, ‘some instinct turning her head.’

Her face comes up to meet mine with a faintly quizzical expression.

‘Her face comes up to meet mine,’ Billy says, ‘with a faintly quizzical expression. Her wide eyes blue as heaven all over.’

Her wide eyes blue as heaven all over.

O my love, I say. O my one true and precious love . . .

And she smiles her hapless gummy smile, and gurgles, just the faintest of wheezing to be heard, and a flailing hand catches my lower lip like a tiny grappling hook, the fingers so frail and translucent, yet strong enough to grip my lip and pinch so that all that is left to do is lower my face until my nose brushes her cheek, the warm peachy down of her skin, and I inhale her sweet baby smell and it’s enough to finally melt something within, so that there’s a snap and a sudden trickle, and then a gush, a flood, and swept away I understand at last and far too late all that is lost and gone, gone and lost forever.

‘. . . lost and gone, gone and lost forever.’

All that is left now is the small but perfectly formed matter of ritual sacrifice. A token gesture. A sop to those who like their absolution painful and gory. A bloody charade of repentance.

Tonight we sever the only muscle in the human body that is attached at only one end.

This room, appropriately enough, has the appearance of a hospital theatre. White walls, white tiles on the floor, the ceiling, the sheets on the bed. All white.

From beyond the shuttered windows and the balcony overlooking the Aegean I hear the burred thrip-chip of the cicadas. Homer would have heard their ancestors. There is a blessed relief in the prospect of no longer having to make any more sense than the average cicada.

There is a perverse joy too in the idea of sawing through the ligature at the muscle root. The operation would be bloody and painful, it is true, and the benefits are undeniable. Sadly, steak knives and scissors are non-runners, and the perverse joy will have to be deferred. After the excision the wound will need to be staunched and perhaps cauterised, lest I bleed to death. For this reason the severing must appear to be accidental.

Deliberate severance of any human appendage is generally regarded by emergency ward staff as suspicious enough to warrant reporting to the appropriate authorities. By contrast, an accident will be regarded as unfortunate enough to warrant professional but heartfelt sympathy.

My cunning plan runs thusly: I will clamp my tongue between my teeth, as far back as nature allows. Then I will dive headfirst down the marble staircase outside my bedroom door, holding my chin high in the air.

The difficult part, I think, will be the not screaming halfway down.

The bonus in this method is the potential for smashed bone, disfigurement and permanent scarring. The most effective disguise is the one nobody wants to look at.

Would an eyeball gouged from its socket be too much?

On discharge from hospital, I should be to all intents and purposes invisible and mute. From this moment on we must rely solely on the written word. Our tools will be silence, cunning and exile.

Why not? No one was listening anyway.

My line for today, for tonight and forever, comes courtesy of Seamus Heaney: Whatever you say, say nothing.

Heartfelt thanks are due to Sean O’Keeffe at Liberties Press for publishing this novel; to Daniel Bolger for his diligent editing; and to the superb marketing department led by Caroline Lambe.

I would like to thank my agent, Allan Guthrie, and my former agent Jonathan Williams, for their unflagging support at various times, and for their always helpful suggestions. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the Irish Arts Council, and particularly that of Sarah Bannan.

Thanks are also due to those who were generous enough to read the novel and offer their advice and encouragement. These include, in no particular order, Ed O’Loughlin, John Banville, Ken Bruen, Deborah Lawrenson, Adrian McKinty, John McFetridge, Scott Philips, Reed Farrel Coleman and Donna Moore.

I would also like to thank the writers and readers who, through the pages of the blog Crime Always Pays, have been so blindly optimistic on my behalf over the last number of years. You are too many to name, but be assured that I am very grateful indeed.

Finally, a special thank you is due to my family, and particularly my wife Aileen, without whose sacrifices I would be unable to find the time and space in which to write.