Absolute Zero Cool (6 page)

Still, I slide off the moped and stand beside Billy. When he cuts the engine we hear the screams.

‘The incidence of accidents outside hospitals is five times that of any other public building,’ Billy says. ‘Anyone who works in a hospital knows to take it slow coming to work.

‘Take that guy, the one whose daughter just died. He’s a hazard. Reflexes dull, his peripheral vision full of cherubic faces. All he can think is how he wishes it was him laid out. Except in the back of his mind he’s agonising about how he has to ring his mother-in-law and confess that he never imagined his life could be such a colossal failure.’

There’s an abrupt waaa-rooo from behind. Everyone turns to watch an ambulance inch past the stalled traffic, two wheels up on the verge. A young fair-haired priest riding shotgun, tense, grey-faced.

‘This guy,’ Billy says, nodding down the hill, ‘he pulls up to the junction here. He edges out, maybe indicating, maybe not, and for a split-second his hand-eye coordination locks into a memory of pushing a swing. He hears the squeals of a child. Squeals of delight segue into a screech of brakes.

‘Crunch,’ he says.

The paramedics swarm the vehicles. Hoarse shouts relay orders. The priest, uncertain, hangs back. If he jumps in too soon, he’s a nuisance. If he leaves it too late he’s a waste of space.

‘Someone loses a leg,’ Billy says. ‘A son loses an eye. A mother gets paralysed from the waist down. A father dies, maybe even the father who was on his way back in to comfort the mother fretting over the unnatural lack of a maternal bond with her new daughter.

‘Such things,’ he says, ‘are spoken of in hushed tones and called tragedies, which is shorthand for the entirely avoidable consequences of human fallibility. Such things prompt people to wonder if God really exists.’ He shrugs. ‘Every cloud has its silver lining.’

By now Billy’s monologue has heads turning in our direction.

‘Keep it down,’ I mutter.

But he cranks it up a notch. ‘The priests,’ he declaims, ‘say that such things are sent to test us. If true, this is a cruelty so pure it verges on the harsh beauty of an Arctic sunset.

‘Could any god really be so insecure? “Hey folks, your kid is dead – do you still love me?”’

The frowns and disapproving glares become audible as shushes and hisses.

‘A question like that,’ Billy tells the nearest hisser, ‘should cause its asker to spontaneously combust in a shame-fuelled fireball.’ He shakes his head. ‘Except priests deal in shame. They’re emotional pornographers. Priests are up to their oxters in the pus-filled boil of your fear, groping for the maggots they placed there before your birth. The concept of Original Sin,’ he says, ‘is an evil so pure it verges on genius.’

A man whose fists are already clenched turns and strides towards us, his stiff-legged demeanour leaving no doubt as to his intentions. Billy slips his helmet back on, flips up the visor.

‘Even the paedophiles,’ he crows, ‘wait for the child to leave the womb.’

The Polish security guard on the gate barely glances at my ID as I badge us back in, although, being an officious jobsworth with little else to do, he does ask that we dismount from the moped, switch off the engine and walk it up the long drive, for fear of disturbing the early-evening still.

‘We should write about him,’ I say as we trudge up the tree-lined avenue, midges off the lake dive-bombing us like so many tiny Stukas.

‘The security guard?’

‘Maybe not him specifically. But the idea that an artists’ retreat needs a security guard, to make sure the hoi polloi doesn’t get in among the artists and infect them with any kind of reality.’

‘Maybe he’s there to keep the artists in,’ Billy grins. ‘Maybe artists’ retreats are all a government plot to keep the thinkers away from the proles, so there’s no danger of any sparks flying.’

‘Billy,’ I say, ‘there’s a four-piece interpretive dance troupe using one of the studio spaces, they’re writing a free-form jazz ballet for trees. I’m having a hard time seeing those guys storming any barricades.’

‘Cassie has her book club tonight,’ he says. ‘Fancy brainstorming a jazz ballet on how the barricades come to life, reconstitute themselves as trees and march against the fascist lackeys?’

‘Not tonight,’ I say. ‘Debs is out with the girls, it’s someone’s birthday. Anyway, I’m babysitting.’

Billy finds this hilarious.

‘What?’ I say. ‘You think I can’t take care of Rosie?’

‘It’s not that,’ he says. ‘Just the phrase, “babysitting”, it’s something teenage girls do when they can’t get a date on Friday night. I’m pretty sure a parent doesn’t babysit.’

‘So what would you call it?’

‘I dunno. “Being a father”?’

Billy’s niggles are starting to piss me off, especially when I have the guilt to deal with, the fact that Debs isn’t just working all her normal hours while I’m on sabbatical, she’s also doing most of the parenting with Rosie too.

‘And suddenly you’re this expert on being a father,’ I say.

‘Hey, there’s no need for––’

‘Come back to me when you’ve changed your first nappy,’ I say, ‘and then we’ll get pedantic about the language of parenting.’

‘Jesus Christ, you’re a moody bugger.’ He swings a leg across the moped, starts the engine, revs it into a thin whine. ‘Enjoy your babysitting,’ he sneers, then wheels around and clatters away down the avenue.

Debs is pacing the floor when I get inside the chalet, Rosie on her shoulder and already tucked into her Igglepiggle baby-gro. The little girl is rosy-cheeked but her eyes are dull.

‘Everything okay?’ I say.

‘More or less,’ Deb says. ‘She’s been doing a lot of coughing, though. I think she might have picked up a bug in crèche.’

‘Have you given her anything?’

‘Some Tixylix, yeah. But I don’t want to overdo it.’

‘She’ll be grand,’ I say. ‘You go ahead, I’ll take care of it from here.’

She nods uncertainly.

‘Look,’ I say, ‘you’ve earned tonight, and you’re entitled to enjoy it without worrying. So just go.’

She hands Rosie across, kisses the crown of her head. ‘Ring me later,’ she says, ‘just so I know she’s okay.’

‘I’ll text you,’ I say, ‘but it’ll be fine. Go.’

I get Rosie settled on the couch and make soup, a sandwich, get out that day’s pages and a green pen. By nine-thirty Rosie’s cough has worsened and there’s an audible wheeze from her chest. I ring my mother.

‘She’s already had some cough syrup,’ I say, ‘so I don’t want to overdose her on that.’

‘Would you like me to come over?’ she says.

‘No, you’re grand. I just want to ease her coughing.’

‘Try some warm honey,’ she says. ‘That worked with all of you. Do you have any honey over there? I can––’

‘You’re fine. There’s some in the fridge.’

‘Well, let me know how it goes.’

‘I will.’

I put a spoonful of honey in a pot, warm it on the stove. Add a little milk. Then, because Rosie is getting fractious, the cough hacking her awake whenever she manages to doze off, I break open a sleeping pill and carefully measure out a quarter of the dosage. This I stir into the milk-and-honey.

By ten-thirty Rosie is sleeping peacefully in my arms. No cough, and I can only hear the underlying wheeze if I put my ear to her chest. I tap ‘All quiet on the Western front’ into the phone, text that to Debs and then my mother.

Today’s pages lie on the coffee table undisturbed, the green pen nowhere to be seen.

My line for today comes courtesy of Cyril Connolly: There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

Billy arrives in contrite form, bearing blueberry muffins as a token of reconciliation.

‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘I know nothing about being a father. And anyway, I’m pretty sure there’s no blueprint. Everyone does it their own way, right?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I mumble through a mouthful of muffin.

‘Are you sure?’

‘’Course, yeah.’ I stand, pick up the cafetière. ‘Want a fresh drop?’

‘Still working on this one,’ he says, holding up his steaming mug. ‘So what is it?’

‘What’s what?’

‘Why you’re buzzing around like a blue-arsed fly. I mean, plates for the muffins? Fresh coffee two minutes after the last pot? What’s going on?’

‘Ach,’ I say, slumping back into the chair, ‘it’s nothing.’

‘Is Rosie alright?’

‘Yeah, she’s grand.’ I tell him about her wheezy chest, how Debs stayed off the wine the night before, swung around just after midnight to pick up Rosie. ‘Then she was up at the crack this morning, trying to get in ahead of the posse at the doctor’s before getting Rosie to crèche, and still trying to make it into work on time.’

‘Busy-busy,’ Billy says.

‘Exactly. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here . . .’ I gesture at the table, the muffins and cafetière, the pages a white dazzle under the warm sun.

‘A kept man,’ Billy says.

‘Not far off it.’

‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ he says. ‘It’s only for six weeks, right?’

‘It’s not that. Well, it is, but it’s not just that.’

‘So what is it?’

I sip some coffee. It tastes like wet ash. ‘Debs reckons that if I’m going to do this, I need to do it. Like, no distractions. No phone, no TV, no Twitter or email. Books, okay, but no Kindle. Music, sure, but no radio.’

‘And I’m a distraction.’

‘Well, obviously. But that’s not the issue.’

Billy places his pen on top of his pages. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘I’m listening.’

‘Last night, when she called around, Debs was saying they were talking again about public sector cuts yesterday, slicing out twenty thousand jobs, maybe more.’

‘I heard that, yeah. Although not from front-line services.’

There’s something smug in his tone that makes me want to ask him if he really thinks that porters are providing a front-line service. Instead I tell him that Debs is public sector. ‘And she isn’t front-line.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah. So this morning I turn on the radio, Morning Ireland, to see what the story is. First thing I hear is Portugal’s up the spout, and some moron’s raving about how we need to burn the bondholders, default now rather than wait until we fall off the cliff.’

‘About fucking time.’ He rubs his hands gleefully. ‘Burn the fuckers to the ground,’ he declares, ‘wipe them off the map. Absolute fucking zero, man.’

‘You’re talking like a Shinner, Billy. Grow up.’

He nods. ‘When I grow up,’ he says in a childish falsetto, ‘I want to be a German banker, loan some fuckwits a hundred billion without even checking to see if they can pay it back.’

‘It’s not that simple, though, is it? What if it all goes nuclear, the euro goes into meltdown? What happens then?’

‘Fucked if I know. Another Marshall Plan?’

‘America doesn’t have a pot to piss in, Billy, and Standard & Poor is on Obama’s case. Meanwhile, I’ve a baby to feed.’

‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Except your way, she starves slow. My way, she starves fast.’ He shrugs. ‘Deborah was right. You really shouldn’t listen to the radio.’

‘Wouldn’t matter if I didn’t. It’s there all the time, this static in the back of your head, how you’re not just stealing time away from your family, you’re stealing actual money. Like, it’s not cheap here.’

‘True enough,’ he says. ‘But then, you wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t afford it.’

‘I can’t. Debs is the one paying for it.’

‘Fair play,’ he says.

‘And it’s not just that it’s costing us for me to be here. It’s a double whammy, because I’m on sabbatical, so I’m not earning.’

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘But if Deborah is cool with it . . .’

‘See, this is the thing. I don’t know if she is.’

‘From what I’ve seen, she wouldn’t be long telling you if she was pissed off.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘You want my advice,’ he says, popping home a morsel of muffin, ‘you need to blank this shit out. I mean, no offence, but you’re turning into a miserable sod. You’ll be blocked before you know it.’

‘See, it’d be one thing if it was proper crime fiction I’m meant to be writing, but Harcourt want a comedy caper. Like, how’s anyone supposed to take comedy seriously when these bastards are legally blagging the country blind?’

‘Jesus. You’re blocked already, aren’t you?’

‘No, I’m not blocked. It just seems immoral, y’know? I’m stealing time, I’m throwing good money after bad . . .’

‘Keep it up. You’ll be Minister for Finance before you know where you are.’

‘Get real, Billy. These fuckers are screwing us for a hundred billion, give or take a few quid. Meanwhile,’ I nod at the manuscript on the table, ‘I’m redrafting a story called Crime Always Pays, five or six punters running around scamming a couple of hundred grand off each other. Like, who’s going to give a shit about a couple of hundred grand when the government’s stealing seven billion a year and people are dying on hospital trolleys?’