Absolute Zero Cool

by Declan Burke

  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?’

  ‘It’s a farce,’ he concedes.

  ‘See, this is my whole point. It’s not only a farce, it’s beyond bloody parody. You couldn’t make it up.’

  ‘So dump it,’ he says. ‘Write what you know, isn’t that what they say? Kill the comedy, write a serious one about the hundred billion heist.’

  ‘Can’t. The contract’s for two books, and CAP’s the sequel. And I’ve already been paid, so I need to hit the deadline. If I don’t they’ll be looking for half the advance back.’

  ‘Which I’m presuming is already spent.’

  ‘It just about paid my taxes last year. And with Debs paying for all this,’ I gesture around at the manicured gardens, the goldfish pond, the chalets, ‘I need to focus, get the job done.’

  ‘So you want to pack this thing in, you and me.’

  ‘See, that’s the kicker. Whenever I’m writing comedy, all I can think of is job cuts, what it’s costing Debs, all this. When I’m doing the you-me stuff, it’s never an issue.’

  ‘Redrafts are always easier,’ he says.

  ‘Except Crime Always Pays, that’s a redraft too.’

  We listen in silence to the pond’s fountain tinkling away. Eventually Billy sighs, slaps his palms on his thighs. ‘I think you’re being a bit harsh on yourself,’ he says. ‘If you need someone to bounce off, to read your CAP stuff, give me a shout.’

  ‘Appreciate it. I might just do that.’

  ‘Do you want me to . . . ?’ He reaches for the manuscript.

  ‘No, that’s okay. Not yet, anyway. It’s still early days.’

  ‘Ah.’ He winks, taps the side of his nose. ‘Say no more.’

  He means well, but as always I find the conspiratorial undertone irritating: the whiff of gunpowder, unsayable things muttered in code.

  ‘I’ll let you crack on it with it,’ he says. He gets up and stretches. ‘And listen, any time you need a chat,’ he says, ‘blow off some steam, I’m always here. And stay away from that radio.’ He winks. ‘That Aine Lawlor, she’d mess with any man’s head. Am I right?’

  I generally head for the desk
inside once Billy leaves. Today, though, still antsy, I make some fresh coffee and go back out to the decking, roll a smoke and watch as the unusually warm sun turns the hospital into a blazing bonfire on the hill. Seems appropriate, somehow. Makes it a beacon of sorts. In the early days I’d turn my back on it, the way it loomed over the valley like the gloomy ruin of some mediaeval castle, all that sickness and death and those tiny little tragedies that punctuate each day like so many commas, slipped into the wider narrative to allow us time to breathe, to reflect, to dwell on our own fleeting mortality, all that self-flagellating rot.

  It’s grown on me, though. The hospital, in concept at least, represents all that’s good about the world. Our willingness to care for the sick and dying, the most vulnerable, regardless of caste or creed.

  Mostly, though, I like it because I’m sitting here in a sun-splashed garden, listening to the fountain sing its little heart out and sipping good coffee, a long, long way from all that disease and infection and those splintered bones and breaking hearts atop the hill.

  Hospitals are like brothels or shopping centres, in that you’re content to know they’re there for those desperate or wounded enough to avail of their illusions.

  Perhaps that’s why hospitals are built as predominantly glass structures. Because we know in our heart of hearts they’re bubbles, too delicate to probe with any degree of rigour for fear they’ll explode and take our only pure dream with them in their going.

  •

  This morning Cassie is hung-over and grouchy. She says she wants us to move on to the next level. I interpret this as laziness. She wants something new but she isn’t prepared to go out and find it. The next best thing is to reinvent yours truly, I, Karlsson.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘But what does that involve? Should I get rid of the motorcycle and buy a car?’

  She shakes her head. She sits on the couch cross-legged, eating Rice Krispies and watching Tornadoes roar in off the sea to strafe some dusty coastal town.

  ‘Where are we going, K?’ she says. She says this with a single Rice Krispie stuck to her cheek. It bobs up and down as she speaks. ‘I mean, where are we really going?’

  Cassie labours under the delusion that all journeys have destinations. This may or may not be a vestigial memory of our evolutionary forebears, nomads to whom the whole world was home. Today, locked into the concept of home as blocks of concrete and brick, we have become emotional nomads. Hence soap operas and prostitution. Hence the Next Level. Hence the non-specific but irrepressible desire for change. Motion mutates into emotion.

  This is not necessarily a good thing. History is littered with evolutionary cul-de-sacs. An emotionally aware species will lack the ruthlessness necessary to dispense with its old, sick and incapable. It will undermine itself in its efforts to protect those who cannot protect themselves. An emotionally aware species will expend valuable energy keeping the devil away from the hindmost.

  Every civilisation is undone by its own logic. To wit: 9/11.

  Empathy is a carcinogen. Hospitals are interpretive centres along the highway to extinction. I, Karlsson, hospital porter, am a parasite on the underbelly of a carcinogen.

  Cassie watches war highlights while eating breakfast. I watch the Rice Krispie bob up and down on her cheek as she chews and try to think of one person who performs an indispensable function on behalf of the social organism to which we belong. I cannot think of a single person. This means everyone I know is less useful than the average sweat pore. This is not a pleasant thought at six-thirty in the morning.

  Neither is the prospect of change.

  ‘Cassie,’ I say, ‘the Great White shark is so perfectly adapted to its environment that it doesn’t need to change. If we could communicate the concept of hospitals to the Great White, it would laugh, grow legs and invade.’

  Cassie holds the cereal bowl in both hands, tilts back her head and drains the milk. This does not disturb the Rice Krispie stuck to her cheek.

  ‘This is exactly the kind of crap I’m talking about,’ she says. ‘Jesus, K – I need more from life than sharks growing legs. And tuck your fucking shirt in for once, you look like something out of The Little Rascals.’

  She flounces out to the kitchen. I don’t mention the Rice Krispie. She will find it herself when she checks the mirror on the way out to work, and she will remove it then. This may be as close to self-actualisation as Cassie will ever come.

  My line for today is: Our feminine friends have this in common with Bonaparte, that they think they can succeed where everyone else has failed. (Albert Camus, The Fall)

  •

  ‘More sharks,’ Billy says. ‘And the Krispie thing – I wouldn’t have not mentioned that to her. What if she hadn’t checked the mirror on the way out?’

  ‘Even nuns check the mirror on the way out, Billy.’

  ‘Fair go,’ he says. ‘But listen – the girl’s restless. Why wouldn’t I ask her, y’know, how she’d feel about having a baby?’

  ‘You want to?’

  ‘I think the time is right. It’s just a feeling, but . . .’

  ‘You’ll never know for sure, man. At some point you’ll have to take that leap of faith.’

  ‘Maybe, yeah.’

  ‘So go for it. If it’s not working out, you could always wipe it.’

  He frowns. ‘Wipe it?’

  ‘That’s one option, sure.’

  He’s dubious, his lower lip pushed out. ‘Dunno about that,’ he says. ‘And even leaving me out of it, I don’t think Cassie’s the type who’d be able to follow through.’

  ‘I don’t know if being a particular type has anything to do with it. It’s more you find yourself in a situation, a set of circumstances with limited options, and it just so happens that it’s the lesser of two evils.’

  ‘Killing a baby,’ he says, ‘is the lesser of two evils.’

  ‘It’s a figure of speech, yeah. “Kill your babies”.’

  ‘That’s one seriously ugly figure of speech.’

  ‘Well, it’s not a pretty thing to have to do.’

  ‘You’ve done it?’

  ‘Sure, plenty of times.’

  ‘Plenty of times?’

  ‘Of course. Any writer’ll tell you that it’s a vital part of the— What? What’s wrong?’

  Billy, having shoved back his chair, standing now, just shrugs. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘it’s up to you how you live your life, but I don’t appreciate your tone.’

  ‘My tone?’

  ‘Maybe it’s different for you now you have Rosie, but talking that way about abortion, it’s just not healthy.’

  ‘Abortion? Billy, I’m talking about redrafting, taking out the things you think you like best. “Killing your babies”, they call it. It’s a figure of speech.’

  ‘To you,’ he says. ‘Except in this situation, this set of circumstances, killing babies means, y’know, killing a baby.’

  I’m thinking that this is a bit rich from a guy who’s planning to wipe out a whole hospital.

  ‘Look, Billy, I’m only offering advice here. You’re the one who’s writing the Cassie stuff now, so it’s your call as to whether she gets pregnant, and what happens after that.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘but what if we make Cassie pregnant and she doesn’t want the baby, and I’m the one has to kill it off?’

  ‘Then you go back and redraft, make it so she was never pregnant.’

  ‘And everyone pretends like this baby never existed.’

  ‘It never did exist. It doesn’t exist now, does it?’

  ‘No,’ he says, although I can hear a note of uncertainty.

  ‘Billy,’ I say, ‘you haven’t made Cassie pregnant already, have you?’

  ‘Don’t be such a fucking pill.’

  ‘Alright. Well look, here’s a suggestion. Why don’t you try to kill off someone else, we’ll say we don’t need him, or her, and you write him or her out. See if you can do it, and if you can, how you feel after. How’s that?’


  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re the one doing it, you choose.’

  He mulls it over. ‘How about Austin?’

  ‘Austin?’

  ‘He’s one of the porters, he only gets a few lines anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, okay. So long as he’s not supposed to do anything important later on.’

  ‘That lad’s a stoner,’ Billy says. ‘A waste of space. He won’t be missed.’

  •

  Tommo says, ‘Kill your babies.’

  To be precise, he croaks this through a lungful of exhaled smoke. Tommo is into the late afternoon leg of a wake-‘n’-bake, horizontal on the couch, the drapes pulled. Killer Tommo twiddles his controller, sending his POV avatar roaming through the airport on the TV, blasting away at enemy soldiers and cowering civilians alike.

  I advance into the apartment until I enter his field of vision. He pauses the game, smiles up at me sloppily. ‘Hey, K. How’s she hanging?’

  He offers a hit off his joint. I decline. ‘Word to the wise, Tommo,’ I say. ‘Frankie was looking for you all morning.’

  ‘Kill your Frankies.’

  ‘No, really. He was seriously pissed. He had to watch the monitors himself. There was no relief cover, Austin rang in sick too. Frankie was up and down the stairs all day.’

  ‘Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out.’

  ‘I’m just letting you know, he was seriously pissed.’

  Tommo frowns. He struggles into a half-sitting position. ‘K,’ he says, ‘who the fuck let you in?’

  ‘Austin.’ I jerk a thumb at Austin, who is sitting in the armchair nearest the TV, sucking on a hookah. Austin gives us a thumbs-up, then exhales and subsides into the armchair, bong tube a-dangle.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Tommo says, ‘now you’re here, shut the fuck up about Frankie. Take a hit or take a hike. But go easy,’ he says, ‘it’s pure Thai.’ He takes a deep draw on the joint, beckons me closer. I understand he is offering a blowback, so as to ease me in gently. I kneel down as he sits forward, until our lips are almost touching. Then he exhales into my open mouth. ‘You might want to ring in sick for tomorrow before you start in proper,’ he says. ‘Trust me, it’ll be too much hassle after the first draw.’