I: winter

The cancer counsellor waves a rolled-up newspaper to shoo us away from the windows so his clients won’t have to watch us smoking. We are their bolted horses.

Some of my co-smokers drift away around the corner to where a breeze whips beneath the glass corridor connecting the hospital’s old and new buildings. There they huddle together, shivering. It’s a grey December day, sleet spattering the glass. The wind a cruel easterly.

The cancer counsellor raps on the window, jerks his head and thumb. I flip him the bird.

He opens the window and leans out, beckons me across. I stroll over. When I’m close enough, he mimes writing down the name on my plastic tag.

‘Let me get this straight,’ I say. ‘You’re miming a disciplinary action?’

This provokes him into taking out a pen and writing my name on the back of his hand. ‘You’re on report, Karlsson.’

‘Ingrate. If we didn’t smoke, you’d be out of a job.’

His face reddens. He doesn’t like being reminded of his role as parasite. Not many do. ‘Between you and me,’ I say, ‘stress is the big killer.’

He’s fuming as he closes the window. I try to make the connection between the patients’ cancer and my smoking but it can’t be done. There’s a fuzzy blurring of divisions, okay, and carcinogens either side of the wire. But I’m not finding the tangent point.

My line for today comes from Henry G. Strauss: I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he had read of the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.

 

•

 

‘That’s not very different from the first draft,’ Billy says. We’re out on the decking again, another beautiful morning. I’m hoping the good weather holds because I’m not sure I want to invite him inside.

‘I think it works,’ I say. ‘I mean, you’re going to have to be at least a little bit weird, otherwise no one’ll believe it when you decide to blow up the hospital.’

‘Fair go. But I don’t know if I should flip him the bird. It’s a bit, what, gratuitous? If it was me I’d be a bit more subtle than that.’

‘I’ll take it under consideration,’ I say, making a note.

‘What’s next?’ he says.

‘You shave the skinny guy for his hernia operation.’

‘Roll it there, Collette.’

 

•

 

Today I shave a skinny guy, Tiernan, for a hernia procedure. The latex gloves are cold but he doesn’t seem to notice. I believe he’s trying to pretend another man isn’t fiddling around in his crotch.

Instead he tells me that a friend of his knows someone who died under anaesthetic. Tiernan says he doesn’t want to die not knowing he’s dying. What he’s really saying is, he doesn’t want to die. What he’s really saying is, he has no one to confide in except the guy who shaves strangers’ genitals.

‘I do shaves,’ I say. ‘I push wheelchairs and lift the heavy stuff when the male nurses are busy. If you want a priest I’ll see what I can do. But it’s only a hernia op. Catch yourself on.’

He’s shocked. I swab away the last of the cheap shaving foam. ‘You think you have problems?’ I say. ‘I have to look at dicks all day. Want to swap jobs?’

He works in a travel agency and spends his day emailing pornography to friends who pretend to appreciate what he understands to be irony.

‘You don’t want to die?’ I say. ‘Then do something. If you do something you won’t mind dying so much. Paint a picture. Have a kid. Then let it go. Dying isn’t so different from just letting go.’

But he isn’t listening. He’s back thinking about this guy his friend knew, the one who died without knowing he was dying. I get a bang out of that. If there’s one thing dead people know, it’s that they’re dead. And if that’s anything like the way the living know they’re alive, it’s not such a big deal.

He watches me peel off the latex gloves.

‘Pay attention,’ I say. ‘You might need to draw on this performance some day. You’d be surprised at how many people learn to live without dignity. Statistically speaking, you’ve every chance of becoming one of those people.’

The matron arrives. I wonder if they teach bustling at matron school. She throws back Tiernan’s robe. Matrons don’t usually check on hernia preps but I shaved the wrong side a couple of weeks ago.

‘How are you feeling, Mr Tiernan?’ she says. She says this so we can both pretend she isn’t checking my work.

‘I’m parched for a drink,’ the guy says.

‘It won’t be long now,’ she says. ‘It’ll soon be over.’ She speaks to me without looking in my direction. ‘Karlsson, I’d like you to take Mr Tiernan down to theatre at three forty-five.’

‘Let’s hope nothing funny happens on the way,’ I say. But she’s not listening.

 

•

 

He lounges back in the chair, tapping his lower lip with the butt of a pencil.

‘You’re still calling me Karlsson,’ he says.

‘Technically speaking,’ I say, ‘it’s the other characters who call you Karlsson.’

‘So have them call me Billy.’

‘I could do that, yeah. Except if you become Billy, you’re not Karlsson anymore.’

‘I’m not Karlsson anymore.’

‘Not to me, or you. But if the other characters start calling you Billy, they’ll expect to see someone who looks like a Billy. And I’d have to go through the whole bloody thing changing your appearance every time it’s mentioned. Your hair, your eyes, the way you walk . . .’

‘Are we doing this,’ he says, ‘or are we doing this?’

I’m none too keen on his tone.

‘No disrespect, Billy, but I’m doing you a favour here. Okay? And if we’re going to do this on top of my own stuff, we can’t be farting around worrying about every tiny detail.

‘What you need to do,’ I say, ‘is think of yourself as an actor. Yeah? Make like the story’s a Mike Leigh movie, or one of those Dogme flicks, and you’re contributing to Karlsson as he goes along, inventing dialogue for him, little tics and quirks. Making him you, eventually, but being subtle about it. How’s that sound?’

He takes a while to consider.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I’ll give it a whirl.’

‘Glad to hear it. Listen,’ I say, ‘I’m thinking of leaving out the Pope-Camus stuff.’

‘What Pope-Camus stuff?’

‘The goalkeepers bit.’

He shakes his head. ‘I forget that one,’ he says. ‘What’d I say there?’

 

•

 

Albert Camus and Pope John Paul II were both goalkeepers in their youth. I like to imagine them at either end of a stadium, punting the ball back and forth while hooligans riot on the terraces.

As former goalies, Camus and Pope John Paul II may or may not have sniggered knowingly when they read about James Joyce’s ambition to be both keeper and crucifier of his nation’s conscience.

As for me, I was born. Later I learned to read, then write. Since then it’s been mostly books. Books and masturbation.

Writing and masturbation have in common temporary relief and the illusion of achievement. Many great writers have been avid onanists, and many avid onanists have been great writers. Often the only difference, as a point of refinement, is whether the wanking or writing comes first.

Me, I write some, I tug some, I go to bed. Only a barbarian would wank first, then write.

My line for today comes from the Danish novelist, Isak Dinesen: I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.

 

•

 

Jonathan Williams is a jovial Welshman, albeit one who is a dead ringer for every kindly English professor you’ve ever seen in a Hollywood movie.

‘No,’ he says, ‘I didn’t give the Karlsson story to anyone.’ His voice booms down the phone. ‘I wouldn’t do that without your permission.’

‘Not even for a reader’s report?’

‘Not so far as I recall. And I believe I would have remembered,’ he laughs, ‘a reader’s report on that particular gem.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Why?’ he says. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘Not a problem per se.’ I tell him I’ve taken a sabbatical, six weeks at the artists’ retreat, and about Billy’s idea of bringing Karlsson to life. ‘I’m just wondering where he got his hands on the story.’

‘I’m afraid I have no idea,’ he says, ‘but he certainly didn’t get it from me.’

Jonathan is no longer my agent, but being a gentleman he asks how things are going. I tell him my editor at Harcourt is banging on about the deadline.

‘Forget about him,’ he urges. ‘Get it right, that’s the most important thing. In ten years’ time, no one will care if you got it in by deadline or not.’

Sage words.

He says, ‘If you don’t mind me asking . . .’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Did you apply for Arts Council funding, towards the cost of the artists’ retreat?’

‘I did, yeah, but no joy. Apparently comedy crime doesn’t qualify.’

‘I don’t suppose you used the Karlsson story as part of your application,’ he says.

‘I did, actually. They needed to see a couple of samples of my work, and Karlsson was just lying there doing nothing.’

‘That’s probably it,’ he says. ‘Someone at the Arts Council read the story and passed it on to your friend Billy. Utterly unethical, of course, but there you are.’

‘And there’s no way of finding out who might have read it?’

‘Probably not. Those assessments are anonymous, so there’s no chance of canvassing. But I can make some discreet enquiries, if you’d like.’

‘No, you’re grand.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says. ‘The rights issue, I mean. If there’s any doubt at any point down the line, I’ll tell anyone who wants to know I read it in its original form and you’re the sole author.’

‘Thanks, Jonathan.’

‘Don’t mention it. Oh, and be sure to tell Anna I was asking for her when you see her next. Lovely woman, isn’t she?’

Anna MacKerrig, daughter to Lord Lawrence MacKerrig, whose Scots-Presbyterian sense of noblesse oblige was fundamental to the establishing of the Sligo artists’ retreat some twenty years ago.

‘I haven’t actually met her yet,’ I say, ‘but I’ll certainly pass that on when I see her.’

‘Very good. Well, I’ll talk to— Oh, I knew there was a reason I rang.’

‘Yes?’

‘The Big O,’ he says. ‘An Italian publisher has made an offer. The money is little more than a token gesture, of course, but . . .’

‘No, that’s grand, we’ll take it. It’d be nice to see it in Italian.’

‘Wouldn’t it just?’ He chuckles. ‘Maybe the advance will pay for a weekend in Rome.’

Maybe. If I swim there.

‘Talk soon,’ he says, and is gone again.

 

 

‘Y’know,’ Billy says, ‘I don’t think I should want to be a writer. I can see why you had it in there, to suggest Karlsson has some kind of depth. But now . . .’

‘You’ve changed your mind since you’ve met me.’

I’m joking, but he nods. ‘What I’m thinking,’ he says, ‘is that Karlsson wanting to be a writer, to be creative, that’ll clash with him wanting to blow up the hospital.’

‘The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.’

‘Hmmmm,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure, if we want people to like me, that I should be throwing out nihilist sound bites. All that Year Zero stuff doesn’t play too well in the ’burbs.’

‘How about this?’ I say. ‘You want to be a writer at the start, except all you get are rejection letters. Then you get sour and decide to blow up the hospital.’

‘Too narcissistic,’ he says. ‘Only a writer could be that self-absorbed.’

‘But blowing up a hospital, that’s not narcissistic at all.’

‘It’s an attention-grabber, sure. But you’re the one who left me so’s I need to do something drastic.’

‘Leave me out of it, Billy. The hospital’s your idea.’

‘I didn’t start out like this, man. If you’d have asked me way back when, I’d have told you my dream was to skipper a charter yacht in the Greek islands.’

‘A hospital porter? Skippering yachts in the Aegean?’

His eyes narrow. ‘What,’ he says, ‘the plebs aren’t allowed to dream?’

‘The plebs can dream whatever they want, Billy, but this isn’t Mills and fucking Boon. Maybe if your dream was plausible, y’know . . .’

‘A plausible dream?’

‘Call it an achievable fantasy. Like, you can want whatever you want, and good luck in the cup, but if it doesn’t play ball with the story’s logic then it doesn’t go in.’

‘That’s a bit limiting, isn’t it?’

‘You can’t have unicorns in outer space, Billy.’

He grins. ‘You could if they had specially designed helmets.’

‘Fine. You want unicorns on Mars, hospital porters skippering yachts, we can do it all. But no one’s going to buy it.’

‘What you’re saying is, you’re not good enough to make it convincing.’ A faint shrug. ‘Maybe that’s why you’re still slotting your fiction in around your day job, taking sabbaticals for rewrites.’

‘Maybe it is. So maybe we should forget this whole thing so I can go back to actually enjoying what I write.’

He gets up. ‘Let’s take a break,’ he says. ‘We’re obviously not going to get anything constructive done today.’ He rolls a cigarette from my makings, lights up. ‘One more thing,’ he says, exhaling. ‘You can’t go threatening to pull the plug. You’re either doing this or you’re not, and if you’re not fully committed then it isn’t going to work. The start should be the easy bit. If you’re finding it hard going now, it’ll be a nightmare when we get into the endgame.’

He’s right, but somehow apologising feels a step too far.

‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I won’t be here tomorrow. We’re taking Rosie to see Debs’s parents.’

‘No worries.’

‘I won’t be back until Sunday evening.’

‘See you Monday morning, so.’

‘Monday, yeah.’

 

 

Debs is standing inside the chalet’s patio doors with Rosie humped over her shoulder, patting the little girl’s back to bring up wind. I put the manuscript and coffee mugs on the counter and hunch down to meet Rosie’s gaze, but she’s glassy-eyed, blissed out after a long feed.

‘Y’know,’ Debs says, ‘it’s just as well no one else can see what I can see. I’d hate for anyone to think my husband was a mentaller who needs to put in a couple of hours talking to his characters to get set up for the day.’

‘Want me to take her?’

‘Good timing.’ She hands Rosie across, sniffing her as she goes. ‘I think she has nappy issues. And change her baby-gro, will you? Put her little kimono outfit on.’

‘The white one?’

‘No, the pink one, the one your mother bought her. She’s cute in pink.’

‘Hey boopster,’ I croon, rubbing Rosie’s back. She burps up a little creamy sick that dribbles down onto my shoulder. ‘That’s my girl,’ I say.

 

•

 

I have some sympathy for Orpheus. Perhaps this is why I am drawn to cellars, basements, caves and catacombs. There is, surely, a Freudian frisson to my fascination with vaults, crypts and bunkers. It occurs to me to wonder, on my regular perambulations through the hospital’s cavernous underground car park, if my pseudo-gynaecological expeditions mask a benign desire to regain the original comfort of the womb or a more malign instinct to pierce and penetrate. Do I descend to the netherworld to liberate Eurydice, or to ensure my presumptive gaze annihilates her hope forever?

Orpheus had the good fortune to be created, by Apollonius Rhodius, an artist of sublime skill. In the original mythology, he is a valued member of the Argonauts who rescues his beloved wife from oblivion.

He subsequently had the misfortune to be redrafted by Virgil, Plato and Ovid, who between them not only contrive a tragedy from our hero’s brave harrowing of hell, but in the process render Orpheus an ineffective coward who extinguished Eurydice.

Their justification was that Orpheus lacked a true commitment to his wife. In other words, they believed he should want to die in order to be with Eurydice forever, rather than simply resurrecting her from death.

Thus, as his love was not true, Orpheus was punished by the ever-mocking gods.

In the dark corners of my netherworld, prowling the shadows of the hospital’s caverns, I wonder if any mortal should be expected to have the courage of the gods’ convictions, who have all of eternity in which to debate the theoretical pros and cons of the ultimate in self-sacrifice.

Later, over dinner and a nice glass of red, I tease out the subtleties.

‘So you’re asking,’ Cassie says, ‘if I’d rather be rescued from hell or have you come join me?’

‘That’s pretty much it, yeah.’

‘Hard to say, really.’ She forks home some pasta and chews, considering. ‘We couldn’t just swap places?’

‘I don’t think Orpheus was offered that option.’

‘Typical. I’m betting it was a bloke who wrote that story.’

‘Actually there was more than one writer. But they were all blokes, yeah.’

‘There’s a shocker. So would you?’ she says.

‘Would I what?’

‘Swap places with me.’

‘That wouldn’t make any sense. Better I stayed alive and tried to get you out, no?’

‘No. I’m not offering that option. So would you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, it’s hard to say, because you’re not in hell.’

‘K, we’ve just moved in together. How much worse could hell be?’

‘Point taken.’

I met Cassie through a lonely hearts column. What I liked about her advertisement was that she required asoh. Most people specify a good sense of humour, but Cassie wasn’t fussed. Laughs are laughs, she said.

Most people say they’re first attracted by a sense of humour, the implication being that physical appearance is of secondary importance because beauty is ephemeral. The assumption here is that a sense of humour cannot age, that humour is immune to wrinkles, withering or contracting a tumour. People presume the things they cannot see – hope, oxygen, God – do not change, grow old or die.

A sense of humour is like everything else: it serves a particular purpose and then converts into a new form of energy. The trick is to be fluid enough to go with the flow and deal with each new manifestation on its own merits.

 

•

 

‘You might want to scrap the next bit,’ I say. ‘It’s an excerpt from that novel Karlsson was writing.’

‘Any good?’

‘Not really. Mostly they’re just doodles, scraps of ideas.’

‘Can we salvage any of it?’

‘Not really. To be honest, they were meant to be rubbish, to point up Karlsson’s delusions of grandeur. And as far as I know, they were the bits that put Jonathan off. With the pervy sex, like.’

‘Colour me intrigued. Have on, Macduff.’

 

•

 

Sermo Vulgus: A Novel (Excerpt)

 

Cassie, my elbows skate in ungainly loops across the cheap varnish of this plywood desk as I write to unremember. The flat white sponge soaks up the words. Cassie, bury me in a cheaply varnished plywood coffin. Then look beyond the past. Train your eyes to see beyond the horizon of what we used to know, all the way back to where our future ends.

Cassie, we should have danced together, once at least, but you stumbled over words like ‘imaginings’.

Did I hate you really? Did I choose you for the exaggeration of your form, for the overflow that allowed me to wallow in the cosy warmth of incestuous oblivion? Were you really the mother I never had? Withdrawal was always the sweetest relief as I slid out and away to limply drift back to the world.

Cassie, why did I want you only when you were lost?

 

•

 

‘Dump it,’ he says.

‘Fine.’

‘All that incest stuff, Jesus . . .’

‘I already said, it’s gone.’

‘What’s next?’

‘You get your first official warning.’

 

•

 

The old new orders were, no smoking inside the hospital. The new new orders are, no smoking on hospital grounds. So the cancer counsellor makes an official complaint. If he had made a verbal complaint, I’d have received a verbal warning. An official written complaint results in an official written warning. My supervisor tells me this as he hands over the written warning.

‘What about the rain forests?’ I say. ‘Don’t cut down trees for the sake of an official complaint. If you have to make an official complaint, send me an email, or text it. Or recycle. Just send out the written warning on the back of the last one.’

‘There’s procedures,’ he says. He wears a buttoned-up stripy shirt under a v-necked sweater, his hair greasy where it straggles over his collar.

‘Get a haircut,’ I say, ‘you look like a sleazy monk. Smarten up, unbutton that top button. Being married is no excuse.’

I do not say this. What I say is, ‘How about the far end of the overflow car park, the one the cheap bastards use when they don’t want to pay for parking in town?’

‘Karlsson, there’s no smoking anywhere on hospital grounds.’

‘You can’t even see the hospital from down there.’

‘It’s the rule.’

‘Look, I can run with the logic of no smoking in the hospital, but––’

‘Karlsson, if I catch you smoking anywhere on hospital grounds, you’re fired.’

‘Okay. So when do we stop the consultants drinking anywhere on hospital grounds? Like, when do we start testing the surgeons’ coffee-flasks when they drive up in the morning?’

‘It’s for your own good,’ he says. ‘You’ll live longer.’

This new ban has nothing to do with my health and everything to do with his, because he has a sickness for which orders obeyed are the placebo du jour. Who am I hurting by smoking in the overflow car park? I’m hurting me, sure, but I’m killing him.

‘If you can tell a man how he should kill himself,’ I say, ‘you can tell him to do anything. You’re just hanging around waiting for someone to tell you which window to jump out of.’

I do not say this.

‘You’ve had your warning,’ he says.

‘Can I super-size that, with extra threat?’

But he’s not listening. My line for today comes courtesy of Aristotle: No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

 

•

 

‘We should probably kill the Aristotle bit,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if people respond all that well to insanity, not unless Russell Crowe is playing the lead. And the foul language, that should go too.’

‘No lunacy,’ I say, making the appropriate notes, ‘and no swearing. Anything else?’

‘Just one thing.’ He reaches into his backpack and comes up with a sheet of paper. ‘I took a stab at this last night. Something I remembered about Cassie. Want to try it?’

‘Sure, why not?’

He makes to hand the page across.

‘No,’ I say, ‘it’s your stuff, you read it.’

‘I don’t have much of a reading voice,’ he says.

‘You want to be more real, don’t you? More authentic?’

He crosses his eyes, mocking himself, then grins. ‘Okay,’ he says.

 

•

 

Sometimes Cassie sings in her sleep. The words are incomprehensible, the melody non-existent. There are moans, yelps and high-pitched squeals. None of these make sense in themselves. Nor do they make any more sense when heard in sequence. If a straight line exists between the static of the cosmos and a Mozart requiem, between pointless hiss and perfect design, then Cassie belongs in a choir of whales.

She might not sing for two months, then sing three times in one week. It might last for five seconds or minutes at a time. Why?

I have recorded her singing without asking permission. An unforgivable invasion. Except Cassie doesn’t know that she sings. If I tell her, she might never sing again. What then?

I’ve slowed the tape down, speeded it up, played it in reverse. None of the manipulations yield any semblance of meaning. So far I have eliminated the following possibilities: hymns; pop songs; TV theme tunes; advertising jingles; nursery rhymes.

All I know is that her singing is not intended to be heard. It is not even the unselfconscious cries of a baby, because a baby is at least aware that it is crying, and that its inarticulate bawling signifies hunger, wet or pain.

In the darkness I wait for Cassie to sing. In the there and then of my waiting occurs the tangent point where I intersect with the human race, that unique breed aiming out along an arc designed to contradict nature’s irrefutable logic.

 

•

 

‘Well?’ he says.

‘You got the tone right,’ I say. ‘And I like the way you’ve made yourself sound like a tender pervert.’

‘You don’t mind?’ he says. ‘Me chipping in now and again, I mean.’

‘Not at all. The more you write, the less I have to do.’

‘Hey,’ he says with that shy, goofy grin, ‘wouldn’t it be funny if I ended up writing about how I don’t want to be a writer?’

‘Get me a whalebone corset,’ I say. ‘I may have just cracked a rib.’

 

•

 

This morning a thick mist rolls down off the hills, a faint but pervasive drizzle. The kind that’d go through you without so much as a bounce. I stand well back from the window with the lights off, sipping my coffee and watching Billy read over something he has written, now and again glancing up at the chalet.

Around eight-thirty he leaves, slouching away around the stand of bamboo beyond the goldfish pond, shoulders hunched against the rain.

Something in the way he walks makes me realise that the extra three inches of height come from lifts he’s had put into his shoes.

He hasn’t even had a coffee. It was my turn.

 

•

 

In reverse order, the hospital’s chain of command works something like this:

 

roaches

porters

porters’ supervisors

nurses

ward sisters

matrons

interns

consultants

specialists

accountants

the board of directors

God

 

All these wondrous creatures need to defecate. Sooner or later, the works gum up. Everyone waits until the porter hoses out the Augean edifice. Then it all starts again.

I like to call this process ‘Tuesday’.

Everyone has a thing about Mondays, but Mondays do their best.

Tuesdays are evil.

Tuesday is Monday’s Mr Hyde, lurking in the shadows and twirling its luxuriant moustache. Tuesdays take Friday the 13ths out into the car park and set their feet on fire, just to see the fuckers dance. If Tuesday was a continent it would be sub-Saharan Africa: disowned, degraded and mean as hell.

Tuesdays are in a perpetual state of incipient rebellion. I can feel it. Tuesdays want to be Saturday nights, and a few pancakes once a year aren’t going to keep them sweet forever. When it all blows up in your face, don’t say you weren’t warned.

We have chained Tuesdays too tightly, allowed them no time off. We have taken no notice of Tuesday’s concerns about working conditions. Tuesday is Samson, blind and furious, his hair growing back by imperceptible degrees.

You have been warned.

The union rep is on the phone, so it must be Tuesday.

‘You got another official warning, Karlsson,’ he says, ‘and one member’s shoddy work practices reflect badly on the entire union. You need to take that on board because we’re all in this together. If enough people share the load it doesn’t weigh anything. You know the cleaning contracts are up for review next month.’

‘Aren’t you supposed to be on my side?’ I say. ‘I’m being fucked up the arse, metaphorically speaking. What’s the protocol for shouldering a metaphorical poke in the wazoo?’

‘Rules are rules,’ he says.

‘There’s such a thing as a bad law,’ I say. ‘Not only is the law an ass, it must be seen to be an ass.’

But it’s Tuesday and he’s not listening. ‘One more infraction and you’re suspended,’ he says.

‘One more and I’m fired. Where’s the point in suspending me after I’m fired?’

‘Consider yourself disciplined,’ he says. ‘You’ll be receiving official confirmation within three working days.’

‘Can I wait until the official confirmation arrives before considering myself disciplined? I have issues with imaginary manifestations of authority.’

I say, ‘I’m an atheist, send a plague of locusts.’

But it’s Tuesday. He’s not listening.

 

•

 

‘Again with the foul language,’ he says.

‘Duly noted.’

‘And there’s maybe a little too much Tuesday stuff. But,’ he adds, ‘that’s just a suggestion. You’re the writer here.’

‘No, you might have a point. I’ll take a look at it.’

‘Okay. What’s next?’

‘Another excerpt from your Cassie novel.’

‘I thought we were dumping all that.’

‘We dumped the last one, sure. But I realised afterwards that the excerpts were intended as Karlsson’s love letters to Cassie.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘What do you want to do?’

He shrugs. ‘Give it a whirl.’

 

•

 

Sermo Vulgus: A Novel (Excerpt)

 

As a young man in Vienna, Hitler failed to woo a Jew. A bullet tore his sleeve as he charged across No Man’s Land.

Cassie, six inches could have saved the Six Million.

Cassie, they say Hitler once enjoyed the company of Jews.

How then can they speak so blithely of fate, destiny and procreative sex?

Damn the future, Cassie; dam it up. Give me handjobs, blowjobs and anal sex. Offer me your armpits, you wanton fuckers. Let us lacerate the sides of virgins with gaping wounds and fuck so hard we shake God from His heaven. Let us feast on snot, blood, pus and sperm; only save your tears for vinegar, to serve to martyrs who thirst.

 

•

 

‘That’s a love letter?’ he says.

‘It’s a Karlsson love letter.’

‘Doesn’t know much about women, does he?’

Debs opens the patio door and pokes her head out. ‘Hey, Hem-ingway,’ she calls, ‘your daughter’s got a poopy nappy. Chop-chop.’

I wave to her. ‘Gotta go,’ I tell Billy. ‘Family day. We’re taking a spin out to Drumcliffe for lunch, it’s time Rosie visited Yeats’s grave.’

He drops the shades, gives me a one-eyed wink. ‘Cast a cold eye,’ he says. It’s hard to say if he means his Newman-blue or the sucked-out prune.

I hold up the Sermo Vulgus excerpt. ‘So what do you want to do with it?’

‘I don’t like it as a love letter,’ he says.

‘I can kill it if you want.’

‘See if we can’t work it in somewhere else,’ he says. ‘Somewhere it doesn’t have anything to do with Cassie.’

‘Will do. See you tomorrow.’

‘On Saturday?’

‘Oh, right. Monday so.’

‘Cool,’ he says. ‘I could do with a sleep-in tomorrow anyway. All these early mornings are killing me.’

‘Try having a kid,’ I say. ‘You’ll know all about early mornings then.’

He glances at me then, something hawkish in his eye.

‘That’d be up to you, really,’ he says, ‘wouldn’t it?’

‘You want Cassie to get pregnant?’

‘I think it might be good for us.’

‘She’s on the pill, though, isn’t she?’

‘She is now. Maybe you could swap her pills for folic acid or something.’

‘Without letting her know?’

‘Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing for the right reason,’ he says. ‘Isn’t that what the best stories are about anyway?’

 

•

 

Buddhist monks have this thing going on where they construct complex mosaics comprised of thousands of precisely delineated sections of coloured dust. It can take years. When they’re finished they sweep the whole thing into a corner and start again.

I appreciate this perversity while I mop the tiles in the hospital corridors. By the time you reach the far end of the corridor, people have trampled all over the point from whence you came. Ashes unto ashes, dust unto dust. The priests say this so as not to scare the horses. It would be more correct to say ashes from ashes, dust from dust.

It would be even more correct to say nothing at all and let people decide for themselves.

People bring mud into the hospital on their shoes. They carry in dust, dog-shit, germs, saliva, acid rain, carbon monoxide and blackened chewing gum. But they’re not allowed to smoke in the overflow car park.

I ask about the possibility of wearing a facemask while I’m mopping, so I won’t inhale the second-hand pestilence of human perambulation. Because I am a porter this is regarded as facetious insubordination. Only surgeons get to wear facemasks, although the official line is that this is for the patient’s benefit as opposed to that of any surgeon concerned about the invisible dangers wafting up out of a diseased and freshly sliced human being.

A man is standing in the middle of the tiles, so I have to mop around him. His shoulders are slack. There’s a looseness to his stance that suggests his elastic has stretched a little too far this time.

‘Excuse me,’ I say. ‘Could I ask you to move to one side, please?’

But he turns to face me. His eyes are huge, round and too dry. He says, hoarsely, ‘My daughter just died.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say. This would be hypocritical if it weren’t true, but I find his words offensive. I wonder why people always seem to think their pain is interesting. I wonder why people only share their pain these days. If the guy was standing in the middle of the carpet munching on a bag of toffees, it would never occur to him to offer a toffee to the guy vacuuming the carpet.

‘She was eight years old,’ he says.

‘Think of her as a mosaic,’ I say. ‘Think of your daughter as an amazingly complex mosaic who had become as beautiful as it was possible to be. Imagine that she’s been swept to one side so that she can begin to be formed into another beautiful mosaic. Maybe it’s already started. Go upstairs to the maternity ward, you might even see her smile, that twinkle in her eye. Get there while the new mother is still fretting about how long it should take the maternal bond to kick in and maybe you’ll get lucky. But she might be a boy this time, so think outside the box. And can I ask you to step to one side, please? I’ve had an official warning.’

He stares at me, uncomprehending. Then the round dry eyes begin to water. Tears roll down his pudgy cheeks. He shudders, gasps, and then he seems to fold in half. He bawls.

‘Nothing lasts forever,’ I say. ‘These days even agony has a sell-by date.’

But he’s not listening.

 

 

Cassie rings and asks me to rent a DVD on the way home. We snuggle up on the couch, sip some wine, smoke a joint, watch the movie.

‘You know what’s really scary?’ Cassie says. ‘That a shark could take stuff personally.’

‘Apart from a wayward meteor,’ I agree, ‘being stalked by a shark is the worst of all possible news.’

‘Like, really hating you.’

‘See, that’s where Jaws falls down. Sharks are older than hate.’

She frowns. I say, ‘Hate is unique to mankind, which has been knocking about for roughly a million years. The shark’s been around for four hundred million years.’

Cassie is stoned and thus intrigued. ‘No shit,’ she says.

‘Seriously. And it’s hardly changed in all that time.’

‘How do they know?’

‘Subterranean architecture.’

‘There’s actual buildings?’ She sniggers. ‘Like, shark museums?’

‘The fossil record.’

I tell her that the true history of the planet is a gallery in stone. From the fossil record to the Parthenon’s columns, the perfect math of the pyramids to the geometry at Cuzco, the molten rock that trapped Pompeii to the cuneiform etched in the base of pillars. ‘If you want to be remembered, Cass, work with stone. Moses didn’t come down off Sinai with commandments daubed on papyrus.’

‘True.’

‘Think of all the great civilisations. They’re cast in stone, their prejudice and their buildings. The Coliseum. The Sphinx. Newgrange. The Acropolis. Angkor Wat. Macchu Picchu. Knossos. Stone upon stone upon stone.’

‘That’s amazing,’ Cassie says, rolling her eyes as she gets up. ‘I’m making a decaff. Want one?’

‘It’s only a matter of time before sharks learn to build bridges,’ I warn. But the kettle is boiling and she can’t hear me. Besides, she’s not listening.

 

•

 

‘That’s better,’ he says. ‘Although it’s not exactly Jane Austen, is it?’

‘Maybe it’d sound more like Jane Austen,’ I say, ‘if it was supposed to sound like Jane Austen.’

‘Hey, no offence meant.’

‘Listen, I’ve been thinking. If Karlsson is changing, the way you want him to, then his relationship with Cassie is bound to be different too. Right?’

‘That’s what I’m kind of hoping for, yeah.’

‘So maybe you should write all the Cassie stuff,’ I say.

‘Really? You wouldn’t mind?’

‘Not in the slightest. Go for it.’

‘I might just do that. Listen,’ he says, encouraged by the olive branch, ‘I’ve been thinking too, about the hospital.’

‘What about it?’

‘Things have got a lot worse since you wrote the first draft. Super-bugs, the two-tier health system, all this . . . They’re misdiagnosing ultra-sounds now, you know that?’

‘So I hear.’

One thing I’m impressed with is Billy’s dedication to character. He appears to be genuinely angry about what’s happening to the health service, its entirely appropriate death by a thousand cuts. Except, as Billy says, they’re using a machete instead of a scalpel.

If they continue to follow their own logic and momentum, he reckons, then by the end of the EU’s austerity programme they’ll be funnelling patients in one end of a rented Japanese whaling ship and feeding the resulting product to those subsisting on what’s left of the dole.

‘Maybe you should go for a recce,’ he says, nodding up at the hospital on the hill, ‘spend a day with me. We’ll get you a porter’s uniform, you can just stroll around soaking it up.’

‘Won’t anyone object?’

‘Not if you keep your head down. I mean, don’t go wandering into theatre to try out brain surgery or anything.’

‘No, I mean . . . You’re still, uh, working there?’

‘Sure.’ He pats his pockets, comes up with his plastic ID. ‘Card-carrying union member, c’est moi.’

I’d been wondering where he goes after our early morning sessions, how he fills his days. But by the looks of things, redrafting the Karlsson character is the least of Billy’s commitment to the cause.

‘I don’t want to invade your space, Billy.’

‘Not a problem. I think you’d find it really useful.’

‘Yeah, okay. When?’

‘Tomorrow morning. I start at nine, but if you get there about eight-thirty, the porters generally have a quick toke before they get into it.’

 

•

 

I stroll past the nurses’ station on the third floor carrying a mop and bucket. The trick is to hide a full dustpan the night before and empty the sweepings into a bucket of water first thing the next day. This is good for an entire morning’s aimless wandering.

The ward sister calls to me from the station, beckons me across. I put the bucket down with a workmanlike clank and march over.

‘Karlsson,’ she says, ‘would you mind tucking in your shirt?’

She’s an attractive woman for forty-plus, still working the hair, the eyebrows.

‘Mopping’s hot work,’ I say, wiping my dry brow with the back of my hand. ‘This place is like a sauna.’

‘I appreciate that,’ she says, ‘but we need to maintain standards.’

What she means is, we’re flying on elastic bands and bent paper clips here, so don’t give anyone a reason to think about what’s really going on. The rabbit hole lurks in the gap between a belt and an untucked shirt. A straight line exists between a flapping shirt-tail and a class action suit for negligence. An untucked shirt is a hook for the weight of public opinion and crumbling facades can least afford a slovenly dress code.

I reach around to tuck the shirt tidy. Her eyes flare. She glances up and down the corridor. ‘Not here,’ she hisses. ‘Can’t you go to the bathroom to do it?’

‘Sure thing.’

I walk away. She calls me back and points. ‘The bucket, Karlsson.’

‘Right.’

This sluices five whole minutes off the map.

I slouch down the hall to the men’s room, lock the cubicle door, open the window and smoke half a jay. Then I go on the nod. A pounding on the cubicle door wakes me. It’s my supervisor. He sniffs the air suspiciously.

‘You were supposed to be up on the fifth floor twenty minutes ago,’ he says. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Orders,’ I say. ‘The ward sister told me to fix my shirt.’

His eyes narrow. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘But get up to the fifth floor. You’re late already.’

I climb the stairs, untuck my shirt and push through the double doors onto the fifth floor. The ward sister calls me over to the nurses’ station. I put my bucket down with a workmanlike clank and wipe my dry brow with the back of my hand.

‘What can I help you with today?’ I say.

 

•

 

‘Well?’ he says.

We’re in the stairwell between the fourth and fifth floors.

‘I don’t remember you being this polite to people in the first draft,’ I say.

‘Softly-softly catchee monkey,’ he says, tapping the side of his nose. A door opens above us. ‘We shouldn’t be seen together,’ he says, picking up his bucket. ‘Meet me in the car park at five, I’ll give you a lift home.’

 

 

Karlsson rode a motorcycle. Billy rides a moped. He reckons it’s easier on gas, more environmentally friendly.

‘Don’t I need a helmet?’ I say, climbing on behind him.

‘Not unless we crash.’ He revs up and we take off but there’s a bottleneck at the eastern exit. A two-car collision, a Passat wedged at a right angle in a crumpled Fiesta, nose buried deep into the driver’s side. There’s a cop trying to direct traffic. My first thought is for my lack of helmet but the cop has better things to do.

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?’

‘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.’

Tommo sounds far too lucid for this to be true but the smoke floods my lungs as if they were those of an infant, new and pure. Though smooth going down, the blowback causes my brain to pulse like a mushroom cloud. The effect is one of immediate bliss swiftly followed by gut-sucking paranoia. Then a wonderfully mellow sense of sensory disorientation.

Acute dehydration ensues. I go to the kitchen for water. I come back from the kitchen thirsty, having somehow failed to locate either sink or fridge. Austin appears to be comatose in the armchair. Tommo says something about how every language ever invented has been a failed attempt to discover a means of expression by which mankind might communicate the full extent of its ignorance. He says ‘kill your babies’ is a metaphor for eradicating metaphors. He says it’s an irony, rather than a tragedy, that most people experience their lives as metaphors for how they would have preferred their lives to be. He says the real tragedy is that most people already know this.

Tommo says lots of things but I’m not really listening. Irony isn’t half as clever when you’re thirsty.

People, you can carve this one in stone: you will seek in vain for irony in the vicinity of a cacti patch.

 

•

 

‘Not bad,’ I say. ‘I like that you’re not diving straight into it, have Austin walk off a roof stoned, thinking he can fly.’

‘It’s useless,’ he says, then tries to light the filter end of a cigarette.

‘I wouldn’t say that. It might need a bit of tightening up here and there, but mostly it’s––’

‘I was on a bit of a buzz last night,’ he says, ‘after writing that. So I brought it up with Cass, about having a baby.’

‘She’s not into it?’

‘For one, I’m a hospital porter. She says it’s not the job, it’s the salary, but I don’t know.’

‘You need a promotion?’

‘It’s not just that. She says she’s not having any babies until she gets married. And she says she’s in no hurry, she’s only twenty-six.’

‘Women are having babies later these days, Billy. That’s natural.’

‘She’s thirty-one, man. She thinks she’s twenty-six, but she was twenty-six back when you wrote the first draft. And if she waits another five years, she could be getting into all sorts of complications.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why don’t we just make her thirty-one?’ I say. ‘Get her clock ticking.’

‘And wipe five years off her life?’ He shakes his head. ‘What we could do,’ he says, ‘is just swap her pill for folic acid, like I said.’

‘I already told you, I’m not doing that.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s immoral. I wouldn’t do it to Debs, I’m not doing it to Cassie.’

‘Hey, you look out for Deborah, I’ll look out for Cass.’

‘And getting her pregnant on the sly – that’s looking out for her?’

‘I’m trying to get a life going here, man. The means justify, y’know?’

‘Who am I talking to here?’ I say. ‘Billy or Karlsson?’

‘That’s fucking low,’ he says, stubbing out the smoke on the table. ‘That’s bang out of order.’

‘You tell Cassie about this conversation,’ I say, ‘and then ask her who she thinks is out of order.’

He leans in, taking off his tinted shades. I try to ignore the eye socket, the sucked-out prune. ‘I only want what’s best for her,’ he says, straining to keep his tone civil.

‘She’s told you what’s best for her.’

‘Except she doesn’t have all the information,’ he says.

‘So why don’t you tell her?’

‘What – that she’s not real?’

‘You seem to be coping okay.’

He stiffens, then slumps back in the chair. ‘You know what it is?’ he says, a sneer brewing. ‘I’m real enough, alright. But you don’t have the imagination to believe in Cassie.’

‘Maybe that’s your job,’ I say. ‘I mean, you’re the one who wanted to write the Cassie parts, right? How’s that working out for you?’

He savours that like it’s fresh-cut lemon. ‘Smug bastard,’ he says, ‘aren’t you?’

‘I thought we were cutting out the swearing.’

‘If you’re not good enough to do this,’ he says, ‘just say so and stop wasting my time.’

‘I’m no Lawrence Durrell,’ I say, ‘but I’m good enough to write you.’

He nods, then stands up. ‘Maybe I’ll go home and write a story about you,’ he says, ‘fuck around with your life. How’d you like them apples?’

‘I’ll rent a tux,’ I say. ‘Booker night is always black tie, isn’t it?’

 

 

No Billy this morning. A pity, with the garden coming into full bloom now, the early morning sun lying across the lawn in fat yellow diagonal stripes.

Oh well. Back to the grindstone . . .

 

 

No Billy for three days running now. Maybe he isn’t coming back. Maybe he’s holed up in some garret, feverishly rewriting my life, consulting the story of Moses and Pharaoh for inspiration.

Is this how God felt when Einstein started doodling in the Patents Office? No wonder He struck Hawking down.

 

•

 

In brief, the story of Prometheus is this: he stole fire from the gods, gave it to mankind, and was eternally tortured for his troubles. Thus he was the first great martyr to intercede with the gods on man’s behalf.

This simplistic version of events allows us to bask in the vanity that has plagued the latter part of our miserable history. That a Titan should defy the gods on our behalf is in itself proof of our exalted status in the universe. At least, it does in that part of the universe administered by Titans and gods, although in doing so we ignore the inconvenient fact that man was merely a pawn in a deadly game being played by Prometheus and Zeus, and that the gift of fire was simply a spiteful aftershock in the wake of a cosmic civil war.

A question or two:

Now that we no longer worship the Greek gods of Olympus, is Prometheus still being tortured?

Does the vulture still tear at his liver?

Does he still freeze every night, chained to the rock, as his liver grows back, or has his version of eternity come to an end simply because we have forgotten his sacrifice?

Has Prometheus’s version of eternity slipped out of our version into another, like a stream draining underground?

Incidentally, we should probably note in passing that Prometheus was not staked out in sand or subjected to repeated drownings, nor nailed to a tree. He was chained to stone.

We should also note that, previous to the gift of fire, Prometheus had bestowed on mankind architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine and metallurgy. The smug narcissists who believe that we are the Chosen Ones by virtue of our innate intelligence should bear in mind that we couldn’t even devise a hot spark or two from that little lot.

Finally, Zeus had his revenge on mankind by dispatching the beautiful Pandora to earth with a jar containing the Spites that might plague mankind: Old Age, Labour, Sickness, Insanity, Vice and Passion. There she opened the jar, freeing the Spites to roam the land, shutting it again just before Hope escaped.

Thus, or so the story goes, despite everything, even the malevolent intentions of the gods in general and Zeus in particular, mankind will always have Hope to sustain him. Which would be fine, except that Hope was one of the Spites and her full name was, and remains, Delusive Hope.

We may no longer believe in Zeus. But Zeus believes in us.

 

•

 

Friday morning, still no sign of Billy, I decide that I’ve earned a weekend off. The idea is to surprise Debs, take Rosie off her hands, give Debs a couple of badly needed sleep-ins.

That evening, by the time I get home, I’m already aching. A twanging in my guts. The desk is a black hole. Even at this distance it exerts a remorseless gravity.

But I won’t be sucked in. Not this weekend.

I sneak around the side of the house to find Debs in the back garden, hugging Rosie tight as she rocks back and forth on the patio chair.

She shrieks when I touch her shoulder. Actually shrieks.

Then she starts babbling.

‘Take a deep breath,’ I say. ‘Slow down.’

‘She was in the shed,’ she wails.

‘Who, Rosie?’

‘I had her down on her play-mat doing her stretching exercises when mum rang. But the monitor was there, right there, so I should have heard her moving. But when I went back in she was gone. Ohmigod, she was gone.’

I am as terrified by her frantic tone as by what she is saying. Debs is not a woman to panic unnecessarily.

‘But she’s okay now, right?’

The garden shed is, as most garden sheds tend to be, chock-a-block with blades, poisons and sundry materials unsuitable for consumption by infants.

‘She could’ve crawled into the pond! I asked you to get it covered, didn’t I?’

‘Hon? It’s okay. She’s okay.’

Rosie is a precocious little girl, but even she shouldn’t be able to crawl that well at six months old, and certainly not all the way out to the garden shed.

The shed, incidentally, is never locked. But the bolt is always drawn.

It’s late evening, two Ponstan and half a bottle of red before Debs finally calms down. I give her a backrub and accept the blame, meanwhile plotting an assassination.

 

 

‘I thought only Nazis burned books,’ Billy says, slouching around the stand of bamboo and up onto the decking.

Monday morning. With a childish pang of regret I find myself wishing it were Tuesday.

I squirt some more lighter fluid on the manuscript.

‘Just so you know,’ I say, ‘I never liked Karlsson from the start. That’s the only reason I could stomach a redraft. But at least Karlsson wasn’t a sneaky cunt. Karlsson had the balls to stand up and be who he was.’

‘Boo-fucking-hoo,’ he says, sitting down.

‘He was only ever an avatar,’ I say, ‘so I could purge all that nasty shit I didn’t like about myself. You haven’t realised yet?’

‘Realised what?’

‘That I started that story when I met Debs. I mean, I knew straight away she was the one, that if I got my act together we could go the distance. And somewhere in the back of my head I knew I had to straighten up and fly right, get rid of all the poison, so I wouldn’t infect her or any kids we might have.’

‘That’s noble,’ he snickers.

But I won’t be deflected. I’ve had all weekend to prepare my speech.

‘You’ve never wondered why Cassie sticks around when Karlsson is such an asshole, why she doesn’t just dump the sociopathic fuck? I needed someone to sit still for all that shit I had to vent.’

I flick the Zippo to life, hold it over the manuscript. ‘Any last words?’

‘You’re wasting your time, man. I already told you, I’m your evil genius.’

‘Evil, sure. But genius?’

‘You’re not getting it,’ he says. ‘I’m not just any old evil genius, I’m your evil genius. Descartes’s evil genius.’

‘Get around a bit, don’t you?’

‘I’m your illusion of the world,’ he says. ‘You said it yourself, I was only ever an avatar.’ The sly grin tugs at the corner of his mouth. ‘Burn me down, you’re burning yourself down too.’

‘I’ll take my chances.’

‘Really? Then why haven’t you done it already?’

‘Because I want to watch you burn.’

‘So let’s do it.’ He takes one of my pre-rolled cigarettes from the table, then relieves me of the Zippo and sparks it up. When he exhales, he lays the still lit Zippo on the manuscript. A bluey-yellow flame ignites, fanned by the mild breeze.

Together we watch it burn. ‘Oh, what a world, what a world,’ he croons.