IV: Fall
On the way home from work I duck into The Book Nest, a small but perfectly formed bookshop facing the river, and pick up copies of Jean de Florette, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Love in the Time of Cholera. Once home, I ring Cassie.
‘Hey, K.’
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Good, yeah.’
She sounds cautiously friendly. There is no reason she should not. All things considered, and one blazing row apart, our parting was amicable. Plus, we shared and still share the grief of miscarriage.
There is also a very good chance that Cassie feels the pangs of guilt most women feel when a relationship fails, no matter whose fault it was, the subconscious guilt of extinguishing all those babies who might have been.
‘So what’s up?’ she says.
‘There’s some stuff I’ve found, I didn’t want to chuck it in case you wanted it back.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
‘There’s a few CDs. And some of your book club books.’
‘That’s okay, you keep them.’
‘There’s something else.’
‘What? K, if you still have photos of––’
‘No, it’s nothing like that. It’s tapes of you singing.’
‘Singing? Me?’
‘Sure. You sing in your sleep.’
‘In my sleep?’
‘No one else ever told you that?’
‘Singing what?’
‘I don’t know, it’s hard to tell.’
She considers this. ‘You taped me singing in my sleep?’
‘I thought you might want a record of it.’
‘And how come you’re only telling me about it now?’
‘For the reason you’re pissed off. It’s an invasion of privacy.’
‘Too fecking right it is.’
‘Which is why I’m giving them back. Or should I just destroy them?’
‘No,’ she sighs, ‘don’t destroy them.’
‘Okay. I’ll leave them here for pick-up. You still have your key, right?’
‘Yeah. I suppose I should give that back.’
‘Not unless you want to.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’d mean I’d have to find another key-holder.’
‘You want me to be your key-holder?’
‘Not if it’s going to be a problem. Otherwise, yeah. Why not?’
‘No reason.’ A telling pause. ‘Listen, K? I’d rather meet in town. Would you mind?’
‘No problem. By the way, you might like to know – I’m dumping that novel. I thought about it and you’re right, I don’t have the right to write about you like that.’
‘That’s your decision, K. It has nothing to do with me anymore.’
‘I know that. I’m not trying to woo you back or anything. I’m just saying, if you want the manuscript and the discs, you can have them.’
‘Just burn them, K.’
‘Will do. So where do you want to meet?’
We arrange a time and place: F—’s, next Saturday, early afternoon. This is to ensure there is no opportunity for drunkenness and irresponsible nostalgia. We agree to be on our best behaviour for the duration of the meeting. We arrange our lives with the care of an old spinster retying a red satin bow around a bundle of yellowing letters, and then hide our lives away at the bottom of our battered hope chests.
‘K? Any weird shit and I’ll walk. Okay?’
‘If it’ll help, I’ll learn sign language. It’s just too much effort to be weird in sign language.’
She snorts, says goodbye, hangs up. I spend the evening practising her signature by turning it upside down and copying out the meaningless squiggle. When I am confident I have it right I sign her name on the fly-leaf of Jean de Florette, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Love in the Time of Cholera.
My line for today is, People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. (Logan Pearsall Smith)
The old man, the ex-mechanic, dies. This is despite his express wish to the contrary. This is as sad as it is inevitable, although its inevitability should go some way towards alleviating the sadness. The old man simply arrived at a point in space and time where irrational hope intersected with irreversible logic.
On the way to the funeral, to cheer myself up, I go into a bookies and place a bet on my not dying.
The woman behind the counter is nonplussed but intrigued. ‘Ever?’
‘What kind of odds can you give me?’
‘None. There are no odds. There can’t be.’
‘Why not?’
‘Everyone dies is why not.’
‘You’re saying it’s impossible for me not to die.’
‘Correct.’
‘Have you any idea of what the odds were against my being born in the first place?’
‘Better than those against you’re not dying, that’s for sure.’
‘You think?’
‘Everything dies.’
‘Okay. But not everything lives in the first place. The odds against my being born were hundreds of trillions to one. And that’s a conservative estimate.’
She thinks about this. ‘How would you collect? I mean, just say you never died. How would you collect?’
‘You won’t have to worry about that. You’ll be dead.’
We decide on a one-euro bet at odds of a billion-to-one. ‘Best of luck,’ she says, signing off with a flourish.
At the cemetery the rain is a drizzled blessing. The old man’s family drift towards the exit. Most people don’t stick around for the final act. The fat lady sings a siren’s song.
The gravedigger leans against a convenient tombstone, smoking and staring me down. He is mid-thirties, tall and lean, unshaven. I smoke and stare back.
He nods at the hole. ‘I have to wait until you go before I can start filling him in.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I dunno. It’s traditional.’
‘You think the old man would mind me watching him being filled in?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Put yourself in his shoes. Take a guess.’
He takes a drag off his cigarette. ‘If it was me, yeah, I’d mind. If it was me, I’d rather be left alone.’
‘He used to be a mechanic,’ I say. ‘Played centre-back on the team that won the double in 1961. In the last six months he had the grand total of three hospital visits, and he liked to eat peach yoghurt and Dairy Milk chocolate. They think it was gangrene killed him.’
By way of empathy, the gravedigger places a thumb against one nostril and snorts the other nostril clear. ‘I’ve work to do,’ he says.
‘There’s a meteor on the way,’ I say, ‘it’s called Asteroid 1950 DA. It’s still eight hundred years away. But it’s coming.’
That grabs him. ‘Like in the film?’ he says.
I nod. ‘Check this out. NASA put a probe on a meteor, a different one, travelling at twice the speed of a bullet three hundred million miles away. They wanted to know what it was made of.’
‘And?’ he says. ‘What was it made of?’
‘No idea. What I’m saying is, they can put a probe on a meteor travelling at twice the speed of a bullet three hundred million miles away, but they can’t know for sure it was gangrene killed an old man.’
He takes a vicious drag on his cigarette, tucks it into a corner of his mouth and picks up his spade. ‘That gangrene’s some cunt alright.’
He shovels dirt into the hole. It lands with a metallic-sounding clatter.
‘Most people worry about dying in a car crash,’ I say, ‘or from falling down stairs, or being hit by a meteor. But the vast majority of deaths are the result of internal degeneration. In effect, we’re being sabotaged by the partisan elements of our constituent components.’ He shovels on, still smoking. ‘Beware the enemy within,’ I say. ‘The fuckers are working behind the lines, blowing up train tracks, cutting down telephone lines and assassinating minor representatives of officialdom. How are you supposed to organise reprisals against your own colon?’
The gravedigger unloads a spatter of dirt, takes a last drag from the cigarette and flips it away. It lands on a neatly tended grave of pristine crystal chips. ‘This meteor,’ he says. ‘It’s eight hundred years away?’
‘Give or take a couple of years.’
‘How come I never heard about it?’
‘Why should they tell you? I mean, now you know, what’re you going to do about it?’
He shrugs. ‘Not one fucking thing.’ He pats his pockets, finds his cigarettes, lights up. ‘Pity it’s not eight hundred fucking minutes away.’ He tucks the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, digs into the heap of earth. ‘I’ll give them fucking meteors,’ he mutters.
I toss the betting slip into the gaping hole and walk away through the drizzle towards the exit. I notice that tombstones are erected by the living for the living. I notice how the dead have no stake in their death.
Life is a perverse anomaly. Perhaps this is why my pulse stutters when the world begins to turn away, when the trees start to rust, when the whiff of decay drifts up out of the earth. Autumn is the world’s way of reminding us that life is lived in parentheses, a temporary state of enervation preceded and followed by non-being.
Today, in the chat-room, Yasmin presses me to commit to going along to meet Shane on Saturday night. She has investigated timetables. She informs me that if I catch the 16.10 train from Dublin I will get to Sligo at 19.05, which means we can meet Shane before he goes onstage and be back at the station in time for the 21.30 train to Dublin.
I tell Yasmin I am excited, but so nervous my pants are damp. I tell her that I might be grounded for life if I am caught.
Yasmin says that some things in life are worth being grounded for. She says that my mum will be angry, for sure, but that no mother can stay angry forever.
We continue in a similar vein for some time until Yasmin confesses that it is her birthday on Saturday, which is why her mother is bringing her to meet Shane. She says she will be twelve, and that she wanted it to be a surprise for me.
I am touched. Now there is no way I can disappoint her. I confirm that I will get the train and see her at Sligo station on Saturday evening at 19.05.
We sign off with our usual kissy-kissies.
The blood roars in my ears. Below in the valley, four-square in my path, the Rubicon wends its lazy way to the sea.
I meet Cassie just after five in F—’s. This bright, busy bar is a temple to voluntary subjugation. Even on a Saturday it is thronged with men wearing symbolic nooses, and women who believe their mission in life is to propagate the genes of well-hung men.
I appreciate Cassie’s tactics. She believes that I will not cause a scene in a bar crowded with conventional people doing conventional things. In this she is correct: I have no intention of causing a scene. My plan depends on being surrounded by hordes of conventional people doing conventional things.
Cassie is late. She does not apologise, because she is deliberately late. She sits down on the other side of the table.
‘So what I can get you?’ I say.
‘G&T, thanks.’
‘Sound.’ I get up to go to the bar. ‘The bag’s under the table, by the way.’
From the bar I watch her rummage through the black refuse sack. I see her frown, puzzled. She is holding Love in the Time of Cholera. By the time I return with her coffee she has unearthed Jean de Florette and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She holds up the latter as I sit down. ‘These aren’t mine,’ she says.
‘No? So whose are they?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘They’re not mine, I know that. I thought they were yours when I saw your name inside.’
She says, puzzled, ‘Yeah, I saw that too. But I don’t remember buying them.’
‘I thought you wrote your name on all your books.’
‘Well, I do . . .’
‘Hey, don’t sweat it. If you don’t want them, I’ll take them. They’re good books.’
But her instinctive reaction is to protect and cherish. To own. She stashes the books in the refuse sack. She doesn’t mention the tapes of her singing in her sleep.
‘Odd,’ she says.
‘We all get old, Cass. Maybe your memory isn’t what it used to be.’
‘Maybe it isn’t. Maybe if it was,’ she says, ‘I’d stand up and walk out this very second.’
I nod. I allow my shoulders to sag. In this way I implicitly accept the burden of guilt for the failure of our relationship. This is what every woman craves: the illusion of absolution from responsibility. I believe they crave this because they understand, subconsciously, that on their shoulders – or hips, to be precise – falls the agonising responsibility for the propagation of the human race. Feminism is Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, begging for the cup to be taken from its lips while knowing it cannot be.
Or maybe she’s just happy to see me admit it was all my fault.
‘Before you go,’ I say, ‘there’s something I want you to know.’
She sips her G&T with her pinky finger aloft. She shakes her head. ‘Save it, K. You’d be wasting your time. It’s over. Oh-ver.’
‘Don’t get me wrong, Cass. I’m not trying to change your mind. I’d just like you to know why I am the way I am. There’s a reason for everything, except maybe the universe itself.’
She holds herself stiffly. She sips again at the G&T, observing me across the rim of the glass. She is intrigued despite herself.
Women should be sent to colonise Mars. In a straight choice, women will pick drama over oxygen every time.
‘Go on,’ she says.
I take a deep breath. ‘I’ve never told you this, but I was in a serious car accident a few years ago. You know how I hate cars?’ She nods. ‘I’m not giving you any light at the end of the tunnel bullshit,’ I say, ‘but it was a near-death experience. It happened so fast it was over before I knew it was starting. But here’s the thing. I had enough time to realise I was dead and to hope that it didn’t kill the passenger too. I didn’t mind so much for myself, but my last thought was a terrifically sad one, because I thought the passenger was going to die too. All that realising happened in a split-second,’ I add.
‘How come you didn’t tell me this before?’ From her tone I can tell that she doesn’t believe me, but that she is desperately anticipating any evidence that might allow her to. She sips at her G&T. ‘And what has this to do with us, anyway?’
‘Well, obviously I didn’t die. And the passenger was fine too. But the shock was traumatic. It’s still ongoing. It’s left me with an acute awareness of the fragility of life and a very shallow pool of emotional responses. Most of the time I only have enough emotion to keep me covered. I can’t afford to make an emotional investment, otherwise I’d bankrupt myself.’
‘K?’
‘What?’
‘Try speaking English. Just this once. I mean, I’m listening, but I’m not hearing anything genuine.’
‘It’s not easy to talk about this, Cass. The brain isn’t really engineered to verbalise concepts relating to its own annihilation. But what I think I’m trying to say is, I sold you short on the emotional side of things. Because if I hadn’t, I’d have wound up slitting my wrists.’
She flushes. ‘I knew it. I can’t believe you’re threatening––’
‘Cass? Relax. I’m not threatening anything. I’m explaining how it was then, not how I want it to be now. You’ve made your decision and I respect that. And to be perfectly honest, if one of us has to be happy, I’d rather it was you. No disrespect, but I think I can take the shit better than you.’
She sips her G&T. She says, in a doubtful tone, ‘How do I know you’re not spoofing?’
‘What do I have to gain by spoofing? You’re with Tony now. I’m only telling you this so you’ll know why I was acting like a prick.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself. You are a prick.’
‘I know. I’m thinking about counselling.’
This is the magic word. If there’s one thing women love more than talking, it’s talking about talking. ‘Really?’ she says. ‘You’re seriously thinking about that?’
‘Thinking about it, yeah. But I don’t know, it all sounds a bit faggoty to me. Want another one of those?’
‘Yeah, go on. And don’t be such a homophobe.’ She drains her glass. ‘Not so much ice this time,’ she says.
From the bar I watch her rummage through the refuse sack again. Even from the bar I can tell that I am giving Cassie exactly what she wants, which is to be absolved of all blame, always. Even from the bar I can tell that the Rohypnol is already taking effect, and that Cassie is in for an interesting evening.
My line for tonight comes courtesy of Eugene Ionescu: The basic problem is that if God exists, what is the point of literature? And if he doesn’t exist, what is the point of literature?
Sermo Vulgus: A Novel (Excerpt)
God has seen it all, Cassie. There’s no shocking God. If there is an omniscient being responsible for the entire universe, its palate is by now irreversibly jaded.
God has seen ecosystems deliberately wiped out. He has seen races, civilisations and species obliterated. God has overseen the destruction of planets, taken bets on the exact time of a sun’s winking out, coolly noted whole galaxies freeze to within a quark of absolute zero. Cassie, if the scientists are correct about the Big Bang, God has observed the destruction of at least one infinite universe to date.
Cassie, put your humiliation in perspective. On the cosmic scale, the fourteenth-century genocide of thirty-four million Chinese by the Mongol hordes wouldn’t even make the Top One Million list of atrocities.
Tonight the last matriarch of an undiscovered Amazonian species of tree spider passed away. Tonight the ghosts of a vanquished galaxy waved placards as they marched in mute protest past the gates of God’s many-roomed mansion. Tonight an infinite universe sweated blood and prayed that the cup of self-immolation be taken from its lips.
All, alas, to no avail.
Yasmin awaits, but first I must ensure Cassie will be comfortable for the evening. We walk back to my place with the intention of smoking a joint while listening to the new Antony and the Johnsons album. I allow Cassie to open the front door with the key she holds on my behalf. This is the ex-lovers’ equivalent of two Verdun survivors symbolically signing the Versailles Treaty.
Cassie is under the impression that we are acting out a charade to prove how truly evolved human beings are: how we can love and hate, then shake hands and part with no hard feelings.
In reality Cassie is under the influence of three G&Ts and enough Rohypnol to make an elephant forget it has a trunk. She is merry, tipsy and determined to be sophisticated in a potentially embarrassing situation. Thus she will not – indeed, does not – notice the slightly acrid taste of two Nytols crushed into her glass of Pinot.
I put ‘Swanlights’ on the stereo. Cassie lasts until well into track four, ‘I’m In Love’, before she begins to slur her words. By track eight, ‘Thank You For Your Love’, Cassie is in a funny way. Her head slumps onto her chest. She emits a gentle snore. I allow the album to play out, then pick her up in a fireman’s lift and carry her into the bedroom. There I rumple the sheets before undressing Cassie and carelessly strewing her clothes around the room, although I carefully place her pants atop the lamp on the bedside locker.
And now for the train station. Spare not the horses, James.
The pulse stutters and flares. Events march steadily on. Circumstance develops its own momentum.
The vacuum-sealed underground chamber is rapidly approaching its capacity to absorb silane gas. The moment is imminent.
Perhaps the old ex-mechanic’s death was an omen.
Thus we make a feint designed to distract attention away from the hospital basement. Thus we draw Joe’s prematurely grey gaze onto us. Thus we require an ex-lover’s garbled and essentially unprovable accounts of disaffected lunacy, including that of alleged rape, the administering of illegal drugs, and the blowing up of hospitals.
Now is not the time to panic. Now is the time for cool heads and dry trousers.
My line for today is, You should never have your best trousers on when you turn out to fight for freedom and truth. (Henrik Ibsen)
•
‘I’m curious,’ I say.
Billy glances up from his notes. ‘About what?’
‘All this silane gas in the bunker. You said earlier on you’d been doing it for eight months, right?’
‘So?’
‘That means you had to have been doing it long before we started the redraft.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘Well, were you? Or did you just write that?’
‘What does it matter? The tank is gassed. We’re ready to rock ‘n’ roll.’
‘I’m not saying it matters. I’m just asking.’
‘Ask no questions,’ he says, ‘hear no lies.’
•
I go to the station. Quelle surprise, the train is late. I smoke and observe the faces of those waiting on the platform.
Finally the train arrives. The passengers disembark. There is no twelve-year-old waiting with her mother for eleven-year-old Jennifer travelling from Dublin. This represents gross dereliction on Yasmin’s behalf. For this she may need to be placed on the naughty step forever.
I leave the station and go outside to the car park, there to sit on the low wall, facing back towards the station and the hotel next door. I smoke another cigarette. I watch as the travellers disperse into the early evening. No twelve-year-old and her mother hove into view, running late and anxious that eleven-year-old Jennifer not be left alone at the mercy of men in shabby raincoats.
This is disappointing. This represents a significant blow to my plans. This represents a waste of precious Rohypnol.
I am about to leave when I realise I am thinking too literally. Too fixedly. And so I do not leave. Instead I take out another cigarette, then get up from the low wall and approach the maroon Mercedes parked in front of the hotel with a view of the station car park and the T-junction beyond. The man in the Mercedes is forty-ish, bald on top and shaved at the sides, with a bluey stubble. He pretends not to see me. I hold up the cigarette and tap on his window, then go through the motions of lighting a cigarette. He puffs out his cheeks and punches in the dashboard cigarette lighter. His window descends with a whining hum.
‘There you go,’ he says, passing me the glowing lighter. I spark my cigarette and hand it back, saying, ‘Thanks, Yasmin.’
His reaction is nothing that would convict him in a court of law. A faint flush behind the bluey stubble, eyes that are quickly averted.
‘No bother,’ he says, reaching for the cigarette lighter.
‘You can drive away,’ I say, ‘and have me track you down through your registration number. Or we can chat about it now.’
‘Say again?’ he says. He still holds the glowing lighter aloft, like a middle-aged devotee of Star Wars.
‘I’m Jennifer,’ I say. ‘Oh, and happy birthday.’
‘The fuck’re you talking about?’
‘You have options here, Yasmin.’ Again, a barely perceptible flinch. ‘You can try to explain away to the cops all those emails on your computer arranging to meet an eleven-year-old girl at the train station. Or maybe you’re an IT whizz, you know how to deep-clean your PC, although you don’t look like any kind of geek to me. Anyway, option two: you and I can have a chat, see if we can’t come to some kind of arrangement.’
By now his jowls are an unhealthy shade of plum.
‘Don’t worry,’ I say, ‘I’m not after money. All I need is an alibi for this evening. Other than that, you’re free and clear.’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re––’
‘Sound,’ I say. ‘On you go.’ I step back from the Mercedes, glancing at its registration number. ‘I obviously made a mistake. My apologies.’
He slots the lighter back into the dashboard and starts the engine.
‘You’ll appreciate,’ I say, ‘that as a good citizen it’s my moral duty to report my suspicions to the cops. I don’t know how seriously they’ll take me, or how quickly they’ll respond. So you’ll have maybe a whole day to get your computer deep-cleaned. Maybe even a week. And maybe they won’t come looking for it at all. A word of advice, though. Don’t dump it and buy a new one. That’ll look bad. A schoolboy error, that. Even worse than having your PC deep-cleaned the day before the cops come calling.’
I walk away, out of the car park and across the road towards Wine Street. I’m waiting at the traffic lights for the green man to show when the Mercedes pulls up. He reaches across and opens the door.
‘Get in,’ he says.
I get in. The lights go green. ‘Have you ever seen Raging Bull?’ I say. ‘The De Niro flick, the boxing one.’
He nods tersely.
‘Whatever happened to Robert De Niro?’ I say. ‘Huh?’
‘What?’
‘I’m guessing here,’ I say, ‘so correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d say you’re a laptop man rather than a PC. So you can take it to bed with you. Am I right?’
A cherry flush beneath the bluey stubble.
‘I’ll be needing your laptop, Yasmin,’ I say.
Two uniformed cops swing by my flat. One of them, burly, with a football-wide face and bright pink cheeks, says, ‘William Karlsson?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Sir, I’d like to ask you to accompany us to the Garda Station.’
‘The station? Why? What for?’
‘Purely routine, sir. So you can help us with our enquiries.’
‘Yeah, but what’s the enquiry about?’
‘I’d rather we discussed that at the station.’
I bite my lower lip and swallow dry. ‘Am I under, ah, arrest?’
‘We’re hoping that that won’t be necessary, sir. We always prefer it when people come along voluntarily.’
This discretion is not for my benefit. This discretion is preferable to arresting someone and then filling out the relevant reports in triplicate.
‘Yeah,’ I say, trying to pitch my tone somewhere between anxious and dazed. ‘Okay. Just let me grab my jacket.’
We drive to the station in a squad car. I am escorted to an interview room that contains one desk, three chairs, an ashtray and two detectives. I sit down on the chair opposite the detective sitting behind the desk. He is sallow, narrow-faced. Right now his expression is sour. His tie is loose but his hair is neatly coiffed. It glistens under the harsh sodium light.
He switches on a tape-recorder and announces the time, establishes who we all are. Then he tells me I’m entitled to have legal representation present.
I waive. ‘Look, what’s this all about?’
His lips thin. This is distasteful for him. ‘There’s been an allegation of rape.’
‘You’re what?’ This meaningless ejaculation is designed to promote my innocence.
‘Rape,’ he says.
‘But . . . I mean, who . . . ?’
‘Cassie Kennedy.’
‘Cassie? But me and Cass . . .’ I shake my head violently, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. ‘No fucking way, man.’
‘Watch the language,’ growls the other detective, who is leaning against the wall.
I hold up a hand, an apology. ‘Sorry, but . . .’ I shake my head again. I meet the sallow detective’s eye. ‘This is . . . There’s just no way.’
‘Ms Kennedy says you met her last Saturday evening.’
‘That’s right, yeah. But I only met her to give back some of her stuff, books and shit. They were in a black rubbish bag.’ I am attempting to babble. ‘I gave her the stuff, we had a couple of drinks, then we went back to my place for, for . . .’
‘For what?’
‘To listen to music. A few glasses of wine.’
‘Listen to music,’ the Growler sneers.
‘No, seriously. The new Antony and the Johnsons album. Cassie’s a fan but she hadn’t heard that one yet.’
‘Then what?’ the Sallow Guy says.
‘She fell asleep halfway through.’
‘Some fan,’ sneers the Growler.
‘What happened then?’ Sallow Face says.
‘I couldn’t wake her so I went out again. I’d had a couple of pints, I fancied a few more. I didn’t want to waste the buzz.’
‘Where’d you go?’
‘D—’s.’
‘Anyone see you there?’
‘Everyone saw me. I was sitting at the bar.’
‘I mean, anyone who can verify you were there.’
‘Sure. The barman, for one. And I ended up chatting to a bloke, he was sitting beside me.’
‘About what?’
‘Movies, mostly. There was boxing on the TV, we were talking about boxing movies. The Fighter, Raging Bull, y’know.’
‘Did you catch his name?’
‘I don’t know. Sean, I think. Or Shane, maybe.’ I shrug. ‘I was a bit jarred at that stage.’
‘You just left her in your flat?’ the Growler cuts in.
‘Why not? She used to live there. She had a key, she could lock up when she was going.’
‘She says she woke up naked in your bed.’
‘Maybe she did. I wasn’t there. And it’s not so long since that was our bed.’
‘She says she can’t remember getting into it.’
‘Yeah, well, she’d had a few gins, some wine––’
‘How about some Rohypnol, hey?’
‘No fucking way, that’s––’
‘I already told you to watch the language.’
‘Okay. But there’s no way I gave Cassie anything she didn’t want.’
‘So how come she just fell asleep and doesn’t remember getting undressed?’
I tug at my nose. I look from one detective to the other. I clear my throat. ‘Did she mention smoking dope?’
‘Say again?’
‘We smoked a couple of joints. Nothing too heavy, but maybe on top of the gin and wine . . .’
‘She didn’t say anything about any joints.’
‘Well, we smoked them.’
‘Why wouldn’t she say she’d smoked dope if she did?’
‘Maybe she didn’t want it coming out. Maybe she thought it’d affect her professionally. Or maybe she doesn’t remember, Cass never was much of a drinker.’
The Growler says, ‘We’re going to want to take a swab.’
‘Sure. No problem. Look, I never touched her.’
The Growler is fishing up a pole. He knows that the combination of Cassie’s delay in reporting her suspicions and the red-tape of police bureaucracy, along with the fact that Cassie was drugged and thus physically relaxed if not actually compliant, means that any evidence of rape would be negligible at best. Ditto for Rohypnol.
This case will not be pursued on the basis of my guilt. It will be pursued on the likelihood of securing a conviction.
In my favour is the recent furore over the cops in Mayo who managed to tape themselves threatening rape against some Shell to Sea protestors. Now is not the time for any cop to toss around false rumours of rape.
Sallow Face says, ‘Why do you think Miss Kennedy would make these allegations against you?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’
‘You were in a relationship that ended recently. Is that correct?’
‘What has that to do with anything?’
‘Revenge is a common motive for rape.’
‘Maybe so, but I didn’t . . .’ I pause, swallow thickly. ‘Cassie and me, we split because she didn’t want kids. Or not yet, anyway.’
‘Miss Kennedy claims the relationship ended badly.’
‘If they don’t end badly, they don’t end at all. One person wants kids, another doesn’t . . .’ I shrug. ‘Being honest, we weren’t even having sex that often by the time we split up. She’d had a miscarriage.’
‘So you went and raped her,’ the Growler says, ‘because that was the only way you could exert any influence over the situation.’
‘Look,’ I say, ‘rape is a hate crime. As far as I know it has nothing do with sex and a lot to do with power.’ Sallow Face nods along, hoping to encourage me into an incriminating statement. ‘What I’m saying is, if anyone was feeling powerless, it was Cassie. She couldn’t convince me to keep things going without kids. And to tell you the truth, I was worried about her on Saturday night. How would I flip over from that into hating her enough to rape her?’
‘How come you were worried?’
‘That carry-on with the books.’
‘What books?’
‘The books and the other stuff she left behind when she packed. There were a couple of books in there, she didn’t recognise them.’
‘So?’
‘Cassie signs her name on her books, every book she ever bought. That’s how I knew they were hers when I was clearing out those shelves. But when she took them out of the bag she went into this whole thing about how they weren’t hers, she couldn’t remember buying them.’
‘It’s easy enough forget about a couple of books,’ the Growler growls.
‘For some people, maybe. But Cassie’s a reader, she loves books. And she’d signed these ones.’
The Growler doesn’t like my ‘some people’ jibe. ‘Why would you be so worried about her forgetting a couple of books?’ he persists.
‘It’s not just the books. I’ll be straight with you – when I saw the cops at the door tonight, I thought they were coming to arrest me for blowing up the hospital.’
The Growler half-chokes, but Sallow Guy only squints. He’s heard about the hospital before. ‘Go on,’ he says.
‘Cassie and me, we had a lot of arguments before we broke up.’ He’s heard about this too. ‘My job is crap, but it gives me plenty of time to write.’
‘What’s this about blowing up a hospital?’ the Growler growls.
‘This story I was writing, it’s about a guy who wants to blow up a hospital. Cassie read it and accused me of wanting to blow up the hospital.’
‘What – the hospital here?’
‘Exactly.’ I half-grin, then bite on my inner lip. ‘I mean, she accused me of planning to blow up the place where I work.’
The detectives exchange glances. Sallow Guy says, ‘Go on.’
‘I gave Cassie the story to read, I thought she’d like it. But she went ballistic.’ I shrug. ‘Sometimes Cassie wasn’t so good at picking up on irony.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Well, the story’s about this porter who gets so freaked out at being on the bottom of the shit-pile, not being appreciated, that he decides to blow up his hospital. Reading between the lines, it’s a parable about how writers are demented by their own egos. The hospital coming down is supposed to be this impossible pursuit, like the whale in Moby-Dick. Because, at the end, the hospital never blows up. He’s just this sociopath fantasist.’ I shrug. ‘But Cassie didn’t get any of that. She just freaked. I don’t know, maybe she didn’t read all the way to the end.’
‘What has that to do with her claiming you raped her?’
‘All I’m saying is, Cassie took things too literally sometimes.’
‘Things don’t get much more literal than rape.’
‘You’re singing to the choir on that one, man. Look – I like Cassie. I trust her, she still has the keys to my flat. We just want different things.’
The detectives exchange glances.
‘This guy she’s hooked up with now,’ I say, ‘Tony, her ex. I met him, he seems a good guy, he’s going to make her happier than I could and good luck to them both. I’m happy she’s happy, I told her that on Saturday night. The last thing I want to do is go raping her.’ This much, at least, is true. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Maybe I should just have told her I was pissed off. Maybe she got pissed off I wasn’t pissed off it all ended.’
This statement meets with silence. This is not exactly misogyny in action. It is not exactly three men in a room not fathoming the impenetrable workings of the female mind. It is not exactly worth an alibi in itself. But every little helps.
Sallow Guy says, ‘We’ll need to take that swab.’
‘Fine. Take whatever you need, I have nothing to hide.’
‘We’re also going to want to have a look around your flat.’
‘For what?’
‘We’ll know that,’ the Growler growls, ‘when we find it.’
‘It’d also look good,’ Sallow Face says, ‘if you voluntarily surrendered your passport. To show willing.’
‘No problem. I’m not going anywhere.’
Sallow Face sniffs. ‘We appreciate your co-operation, Mr Karlsson.’ He sounds mechanical, as if speaking by rote. ‘This must be a difficult situation for you.’
‘It’s no picnic for Cassie, either.’
The Growler coughs. Sallow Guy announces for the benefit of the tape that he’s terminating the interview, then switches off the recorder. He says, ‘Get this guy signed out.’
The Growler leaves. Sallow says, ‘This book.’
‘Which book?’
‘The one about the hospital. We’ll need to see it.’
‘Sure thing.’
He stands up. ‘By the way,’ he says, ‘where’d you get your hands on that dope you smoked on Saturday night?’
My line for today is, A genius working alone is invariably ignored as a lunatic. (Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard)
The protocols must be observed. Cassie must now be questioned as to the motives behind her allegation of rape. The issue of illicit drug-taking will be raised. Her ability to remember details as basic as the ownership of her own property will be queried.
For my part, and given my position in a public health institution, my employers must be notified of my illicit drug-taking. The police will also make enquiries as to my previous behaviour in the workplace, in particular the possibility that I have been chastised for sexual harassment, improper suggestions, or a malignant attitude towards women in general. This represents the opportunity my supervisor has been praying for. This is manna indeed.
He stands behind his desk rocking on his heels. He makes no attempt to appear caring, understanding or compassionate about my situation. This is progress. This is the instinctive outworking of the selfish gene that propelled the Homo sapiens species to the top of evolution’s queue. This is the human race winning a game defined and understood only by the human race.
‘There’s rules, Karlsson. Even if this was not a multi-gendered workplace environment it would still be necessary to suspend you pending the outcome of this investigation.’ A December dawn glows in his prematurely grey eyes. ‘Don’t consider it as a vote of confidence or otherwise. Try to see it as an opportunity we’re affording you, to take some time out in order to deal with what must be a difficult situation.’
‘Joe, that thing I said about your kid . . .’
He waves me off. ‘Karlsson, you and I both know you said what you said at a time of great personal stress.’ He bares his teeth in a dry canine smile. ‘I’ve told you before, anything said in this office stays in this office. You and I, we have a confidential relationship.’
‘You’re missing the point, Joe.’
A smirk. ‘About what, the Polynesians?’
‘The point is, even if you tell the cops about our conversation, and even if they arrest me, I’ll be back out on bail inside twelve hours. Don’t doubt it. I’m thinking of your kid here, Joe. What you have to do is decide what’s more important, personal revenge or a daughter growing up with a face like torched chip wrappers.’
He leans on the back of the orthopaedic chair. He seems to sag. He tries to work the canine smile again but winds up looking like a sick puppy.
‘Karlsson . . .’
‘You’re out of your depth, Joe. Get back to the shallow end where the kiddies play. The big boys play by different rules and even the rules would make you vomit. Joe,’ I say, ‘when you write that report for the cops, imagine you’re writing it on scorched chip wrappers.’
His eyes glaze over.
‘If you want my advice,’ I say, ‘then you’ll tell the cops that I’m innocent until proven otherwise, and you’d be setting up the hospital for bankruptcy if anyone here so much as looks crooked at me over these outrageous allegations. Trust me, you’ll sleep better.’
I leave, closing his door quietly behind me. The blood roars in my ears. Tomorrow I rouse the Mongol hordes from hibernation and point them south-west, complete with the Black Plague fleas that infest their horses.
•
‘You don’t look convinced,’ I say.
‘I’m not.’ Billy scratches under his chin. ‘To be honest, I don’t like the idea of Cass being even allegedly raped.’
‘It’s better than killing her off.’
‘Sure, yeah. But still . . .’
‘What?’
‘She’s going to look a fool, isn’t she? Humiliated. She’s gone to all the bother of reporting it, and that couldn’t have been easy. Now it’s looking like the cops aren’t going to take her seriously.’
He’s been a moody sod all day. ‘What’s on your mind, Billy? I mean really.’
He shrugs. ‘Would it have been so difficult,’ he says, ‘I mean the first time around, to have written a story about K and Cass just sailing a yacht in the Greek islands? People like happy endings in the Greek islands. Look at Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.’
‘I can’t write fat books, man.’
‘It wouldn’t have had to have been a whole novel,’ he says. ‘A short story would have done the trick.’
‘What’s done is done, Billy.’
‘Except,’ he says, ‘Karlsson was never Karlsson, was he? He was you. You without the choice to be you or not.’
‘Choice?’
‘Sure. The freedom to be whatever he wanted to be.’
I laugh. ‘And what makes you think I have free will?’
‘You’ve a lot more of it than K had.’
‘I’m just a character in everyone else’s story, Billy. They’re just characters in mine.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Read up on your Buddha, man. The whole world, the whole universe, it’s all just an illusion.’
He pats the table. ‘Seems a solid enough illusion to me,’ he says.
‘Let me put it this way,’ I say. ‘If I had free will, I’d be the one sailing a yacht around the Greek islands. Except I’m sitting here talking to you.’
He makes a fist and pounds the table. ‘You made a choice, man. That’s different. That’s my whole point.’
‘Billy,’ I say, ‘the whole idea of free will, it’s pie in the sky. The Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Christians – they all believe it’s all pre-ordained. And they can’t all be wrong.’
‘They can, y’know,’ he says. ‘I mean, if it’s all mapped out, what’s the bloody point of being alive in the first place?’
‘Maybe so you can accept that it’s all pre-ordained and acknowledge your place in the grand scheme. Appreciate the beauty of the design. Imagine for a second you’re a single tiny tile in a huge mosaic and you’re––’
‘Gimme a break,’ he groans. ‘What’re you on, PCP?’
‘Hey, Hemingway?’ Deborah steps out onto the patio, shading her eyes with one hand. ‘It’s nearly ten-past and your parents are expecting us for seven. Can you get Rosie changed and put her in the car?’
‘Sure thing, hon.’ Tonight is a rare night for us, dinner for two over flickering candles, and Debs doesn’t want to lose a single second of it. ‘Be right with you.’
She raises a sardonic eyebrow, then taps her wrist with one finger and goes back inside.
‘There you go,’ I say. ‘That’s how much free will I have.’
‘You could have said no,’ he says. ‘Told her you were too busy.’
‘To Debs?’ I laugh as I stand up. ‘Free will’s a marvellous idea, Billy, but I’d rather keep both balls, cheers all the same.’
He grins, then gathers his notes together. ‘If you’re going to be out and about,’ he says, ‘d’you fancy a pint later on, after dinner?’
‘Yeah, maybe. I’ll see how it goes. Debs might be tired.’
‘I’ll text you, we can take it from there.’
‘Do that.’
•
We need to think Greek, people. We need to think Egyptian and Roman. Who now speaks the language of Cheops, Aristotle or Julius Caesar? Who today worships Amun-Re, Athena or Vulcan?
Think instead of the pyramids, the Parthenon, the Coliseum. A civilisation defines itself by its buildings. Eras are marked – literally and figuratively – by their physical constructs.
Forget literature, language, religion. If you want to be remembered, become an architect. A civilisation leaves behind nothing but its buildings and its prejudices. If you start taking down their buildings, they’re going to sit up and take notice.
There’s nothing to pique the imagination quite like a missing hospital.
My line for today is, Politicians, buildings and whores achieve respectability if they survive for long enough. (Robert Towne, Chinatown)
September 14th
Dear Mrs Kerins –
There is a bomb planted on the third or fourth floor of the hospital, depending on whether you count the basement as an actual floor. This bomb is of a sensitive nature. Any attempt to defuse it will result in premature detonation. It is timed to explode at precisely 22.55 on Saturday night, September 17th. I advise you to sign your husband out of the hospital before that time on that date.
Yours sincerely,
A Friend
Naturally, I do not choose Mrs Kerins at random. According to the files, Mrs Kerins is the young wife of a long-term in-patient with a pancreatic tumour. By a stroke of good fortune, however, when cross-referencing the files, I discover that Mrs Kerins is seven months pregnant.
This represents instant pathos. This ensures that Mrs Kerins will not spend very long wondering if my note is a hoax. It ensures that she will immediately panic and then attempt to dilute her misery by telling anyone who will listen to her dreadful news.
Inevitably, news of the bomb warning will reach the ever-twitching antennae of the Fourth Estate. This in turn ensures that the Health Service Executive will not have the luxury of presuming that the warning is a hoax, or of quietly searching the third and fourth floors in order to establish the validity of the warning before evacuating the hospital. Further, it ensures that the HSE will not be responsible for the premature explosion of a bomb, and thus will not have the blood of innocent civilians on its hands, or no more than it currently has.
I hope you are not disappointed. Perhaps you presumed I would incinerate all patients, staff and visitors along with the hospital building itself. But this would not be a logical move. The point of a terrorist bomb, as is the case with a land mine, is not to kill per se. A good novel and the terrorist bomb have this much in common: they are about questions, not answers.
The terrorist bomb is the first wave of paratroopers parachuted in to establish a bridgehead on a front page near you, behind whom arrive the justifications, the context and the irresistible moral relativism. The point of the terrorist bomb is to force a crack in the façade of the status quo, through which trickles those all-essential rumours of suffering, agony and victimhood.
I have no desire to annihilate those who are already suffering. If I had I would have helped the ex-mechanic to die. I would have bludgeoned the non-contributing homeless with lump hammers. I would have suffocated old Mrs McCaffrey with her embroidered pillow. But I did not.
It is my fervent wish that the hospital is evacuated before the silane rips through the superstructure, igniting every atom of oxygen it encounters. It would be utterly illogical to create a pantheon of counter-martyrs to my cause.
Of course, the hasty evacuation of the hospital may result in collateral damage, a.k.a. the untimely demise of certain patients who are currently hooked up to the various machines sustaining them. This is unfortunate and regrettable, although in time those men and women may come to be revered as the first martyrs in the cause of rejuvenating the ruthless streak that has sustained the human race for over a million years now.
I expect no thanks for this.
No thanks, please.
•
While Debs adds a few more strokes of blusher to the masterpiece-in-progress that is her perception of herself, I get Rosie settled in the spare room of my parents’ house. I powder her bum and apply a little cream to a red patch, then get her nappy on snug and slip her into the one-piece with the picture of Pooh Bear and Piglet on the chest. Then I sit on the edge of the bed and cradle her, her head nestling in the crook of my arm, and bounce gently left and right while she sucks on her bottle. Some nights it can take ages to send her off, as Rosie struggles to drink her bottle on a wheezy chest. Tonight, though, it’s as if she senses that her Mum and Dad need her to go down quietly. She lies in my arms virtually inert, her blue eyes unblinking, while I croon my version of the lullaby:
Rock-a-bye baby, in the tree-top
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.
If the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, Daddy break your fall.
Halfway through the fifteenth rendition, her eyes finally close and the almost empty bottle falls away from the tiny pink lips. I raise her up in my arms to allow my nose to touch the warm peach of her cheek, listening for any sound of wheezing, but tonight she is calm, untroubled.
I lay her in the cot and place Sleepy Bear beside her, outside the blanket so that its weight prevents her from tossing the covering off, but close enough for a snuggle if she reaches out in her sleep.
Then I watch her until Debs decides we are fashionably late for our own date. I decide that the childless ascetics may preach until their tongues fall out, but a sleeping baby is the warm lie to their truth of free will.
•
One of the benefits of being a hospital porter is the freedom that comes with being systematically underestimated. Thus, for example, no one will suspect that a hospital porter might possess two computers, the better to hide incriminating material, such as evidence of a hasty departure from the country. Thus no one suspects that a hospital porter might have the wit and wherewithal to secure two passports, one of which he can hand in to the police when requested to do so.
I ring Yasmin.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ I say.
‘Shit.’
‘We have a problem.’
‘What’s wrong?’
There’s a faint sibilance, a slight slurring, that suggests Yasmin has been drinking.
‘It’s your laptop,’ I say.
‘What about it?’
‘I hid it at work where no one would find it. At the hospital, I mean. Down in the basement.’
‘So?’
‘They’re about to find it.’
‘Fuck.’
‘You heard about the hospital?’
‘No. What about it?’
‘There’s some kind of bomb alert.’
A low moan. ‘A fucking bomb?’
‘They’re pretty sure it’s a hoax but they’re evacuating everyone anyway. Then they’re going to search the whole building.’
‘Fuck. Fuck-fuck-fuck.’
‘I want that laptop, Yasmin. And you’re going to get it.’
‘But if they’re evacuating the––’
‘Who’s going to notice you? One more guy in all that confusion.’
Right now, if I were Yasmin, I’d be weighing the pros and cons. The main con, obviously, being that the bomb is real. The main pro being the opportunity to destroy all evidence of his life-ruining perversion.
It is all I can do not to murmur that it’s all a con.
‘But how would I get in?’ he says.
‘That’s the easy bit, Yasmin.’
‘Stop fucking calling me that.’
‘You’d rather I called the cops instead, left an anonymous tip?’
Even over the phone I can hear his teeth grinding.
‘So where is it?’ he says.
‘A janitor’s cubbyhole, in the basement, it looks like some kind of old bunker. There’s a light-switch to the left when you go in. The laptop’s on the top shelf, the shelves against the back wall. Look for the cardboard box with Granny Smith apples on it. Got it?’
‘Granny Smith, yeah.’
‘Good. Now listen, this is how we get you in . . .’
September 15th
Dear Cass –
I appreciate that you will understand my suicide to be an admission of guilt, as will the police. But I did not rape you.
Yes, I took advantage of your generous nature, and yes, I undressed you and placed you naked in the bed that was once ours. Yes, it is true I forced you against your will to become my unwitting accomplice. But I did not do anything else you might construe as immoral, physically invasive or humiliating.
You should also know that my suicide has nothing to do with the failure of our relationship. Neither has it anything to do with the hospital.
I choose suicide as the only logical option open to a sentient creature in a meaningless universe. By the time you read this I will have already chosen suicide. In effect, you are reading the words of a dead man.
There is no reason you should consider this a ghoulish experience. The novels of Durrell, Golding, Hemingway and Joyce are all suicide notes written by dead men. Words only truly come alive, if they ever do come alive, when their author is dead.
To paraphrase Norman Mailer, it’s tough to dance when your father is watching.
At this point I would like to apologise for all those actions of mine that caused you pain and grief. Unfortunately, I can’t. I say this knowing that honesty is wasted on the living. It is possible to be truly honest only to the dead, and the dead could care less about what we believe to be truth.
I say these things because I know that your narcissism will not allow you to leave this letter unopened. Yours is the narcissism of the age, which demands that everyone see their reflection in everyone else’s mirror too. It is the narcissism that has stunted the collective imagination to the point where you cannot envisage the world existing without your presence to inspire it. In every mirror you see the fulcrum upon which the universe turns.
It is for this reason that the novelist hesitates before printing his final full-stop. The good novelist is all mirror. A good novel is an indefinitely protracted suicide.
I am not, sadly, a good novelist. Hence my suicide.
Cassie, believe me when I say that I did not rape you. Believe me too when I say that I would have murdered you and every last one of the seven billion liars to be considered a good novelist.
But then, where would I have found the time to write?
Yours,
K
•
Debs finds my Billy dilemma amusing.
‘If you didn’t want to meet him for a pint,’ she says, ‘why didn’t you just say so?’
‘You don’t know Billy. He’d think I’m ashamed to be seen out with him or something.’
As is usual in these straitened times, the restaurant is only half-full, despite it being a Saturday night. Conversations murmur, tiny streams filtering into a placid pond. Deborah swirls her red wine. ‘No reason you should be,’ she says, ‘just because he’s some fruitcake who wants to blow up a hospital.’
I’ve spent the evening bringing her up to speed on the latest developments. She’s particularly fascinated by the idea that Billy wants to evacuate the hospital before he blows it for real. ‘Albert Schweitzer, this guy,’ she reckons.
‘If he rings,’ I say, ‘we can say we’re on our way home, Rosie got sick.’
‘No way,’ she says. ‘Don’t you dare tempt fate like that. And what if we bumped into him afterwards? Unless you think we should actually go home early, on the first night out we’ve had since God was a boy?’ She shakes her head, sets her napkin aside. ‘If you want to meet him,’ she says, ‘then meet him. But we’re not going home early, and you’re not to use your daughter as an excuse. Hear me?’
She crosses the restaurant, goes out through the glass doors and turns towards the Ladies. I wait until she is out of sight before turning on my phone, which she has asked me to switch off so that we can enjoy our rare night out in peace.
A beep-beep tells me I have a text message. It’s from Billy.
It reads: ‘The shark has jumped. Repeat: THE SHARK HAS JUMPED.’
The shark?
The phone vibrates in my hand, letting me know I have a missed call. I dial 171, hear my father’s voice.
‘Son? Son? Shite, it’s his answering thing . . . Listen, Rosie’s took sick, she’s . . . she’s turned blue. She was wheezing bad, and now she’s hardly breathing. We’re on our way to the hospital now, so ring us as soon as you get this.’
For a moment I go blank. When the waitress asks if everything is alright, I even say, automatically, ‘It was lovely, thanks.’
And then I see the expression on her face, something wary about it, and I realise where I am, what it is she must be looking at. I scramble out of my chair and rifle my pockets for money, telling the waitress that there’s an emergency and my wife is in the Ladies and would she mind telling her we need to leave immediately, please?
Debs sees me from the Ladies and sprints back to the table. ‘What?’ he says. ‘What is it?’
‘Rosie. Mum and Dad have taken her to the hospital, they’re saying,’ I choke up, ‘they’re saying she’s turned blue.’
‘Fuuuuuuck.’
Down the stairs, out to the street, hail a taxi.
‘The hospital?’ the guy says. ‘No can do, chief. They’re evacuatin’ it.’
‘They’re what?’
‘Evacuatin’.’ He enunciates each syllable, relishing it. Cabbie gossip doesn’t get any juicier than this. ‘A bomb scare. Fuckin’ Real IRA, they’re sayin’. Bastards.’
‘Just get us as close as you can. There’s a fifty in it.’
The guy takes us up Connaughton Road, past the tinkers’ caravans, and drops us within sight of the hospital’s entrance. It’s chaos. A hovering helicopter whump-whumps overhead, its backwash sending up mini-cyclones of dust and paper wrappers. A steady stream of patients come out, squinting against the blasting dust, on crutches and swathed in bandages, some limping and supported by others, all dressed in pyjamas and dressing gowns, some pushing wheeled frames and holding aloft IV drips. Porters push beds while nurses direct the traffic. Cops in fluorescent yellow jackets try to clear a path, to allow the patients out while keeping the swelling crowd back. Walkie-talkies crackle. Blue lights flash, ambulances and fire engines. Despite the chopper’s clattering, Eileen Magner bawls her breathless schtick to an RTE camera. I’m screaming at a cop that our daughter is in there but he’s not listening.
‘There!’ Debs points over my shoulder, and I see Mum and Dad being herded away, funneled by the surging mass. They’re shouting something at the nearest cop but he’s turning away, his broad back a solid wall.
No Rosie.
I struggle through the crowd, grab at Dad’s sleeve. ‘Where is she?’
‘We got her to a doctor,’ he shouts. ‘Just outside the emergency room. Then they started pushing everyone out . . .’ A helpless agony glittering in his eyes.
A hand grips my shoulder. I turn, expecting Debs, but already she’s trying to force her way through the crowd in the direction of the ER, a salmon leaping at a tidal wave.
The hand is Frankie’s. ‘What’s wrong?’ he shouts.
‘My baby girl, Frankie. She’s in there. She’s still in there.’
‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘Fuck.’
In his eyes I see the frantic calculation, the adding up and taking away, black marks being wiped, laurels conferred.
‘Come on,’ he says, pulling back, going with the surge away from the hospital.
Now, moving away from the seething mass, circling the hospital uphill, there is no resistance. No crowds, no cops, no blue flashing lights. A pain in my chest like I’ve been shot. Frankie panting, explaining as we go. An escape hatch, built into the hospital’s basement in the time of Cuban crisis. The one that’s off the CCTV map, the one the porters used for ducking in and out for sneaky tokes. We scramble down the steep grassy incline, come out in a small courtyard amid rusting ambulances, the unseeing X-ray machines, one-wheeled wheelchairs, the bric-à-brac of decades’ waste.
Frankie fumbles for a key.
‘Christ, Frankie.’
‘I have it, K. I have it . . .’
The key goes in the lock. The tumblers turn. We’re in.
A long dark corridor, dimly lit by strip lighting.
‘The emergency ward,’ I say. ‘That’s the last place they saw her.’
‘This way,’ he says.
•
I sense that some of you still anticipate a happy ending. My invisible antennae twitch as they scent the precious few molecules of optimism in the ether.
This is not to sneer. I understand and appreciate your desire, your need, for upbeat conclusions. I am moved to applaud your longing for some form of natural justice to materialise from the great indifference. I am proud to own up to my role in the human conspiracy when I recognise my own reflection in your contradictory wish to see the hospital vaporised and the miraculous escape of everyone therein, with the obvious exception of Yasmin the Paedophile.
But we must adhere to logic at all times. The hospital is doomed. The bomb disposal wallahs are doomed. The human race is doomed. All of these things are so inescapable as to render futile the very recording of their inevitability.
All that is left now is the possibility of wonder. Logic and wonder are not mutually exclusive.
Cling to your faith, if you must, when the night comes on and the universe reverts to its default setting of cold and empty darkness. In this much, at least, the universe is a magnanimous parent, allowing a fretful child its soother for one last night. But it is time to grow up, people. Time to put away the rubber sheets and spinning tops.
Meanwhile, it being impossible to evacuate a hospital without attracting attention, the media has arrived in force. A nation is alerted to the asp at its bosom. News being news, the venom spreads. Other nations are alerted. Other nations swoon in horrified ecstasy before the altars of their TV screens.
I too am fixated on a TV screen, watching the drama unfold as the announcer speaks words I do not understand. I see miles of fluttering yellow tape. I see men in bulky jackets wearing truncated submachine guns strapped to their chests. I see the bomb disposal squad arrive and disappear into the hospital. I note the heavy trudge of the truly aware and dedicated. Only I know for sure that they will never reappear.
This is how the scriptwriter feels when the hero’s car plunges off a bridge. This was how God felt as He watched the Jews file into the showers and reach for a soap fashioned from the sludge of their brethren.
The doors close behind the team. From this moment on we must close our eyes and surrender to the imagination, the better to identify with those men now descending into the bowels on our behalf. We must strain every nerve and sinew to consider ourselves worthy of the sacrifice of every single man who charged across No Man’s Land, with the obvious exception of Hitler. We must want to be them, to empathise with their imminent annihilation, if we are to be worthy of what comes next.
I close my eyes. I see them descend the stairs one heavy step at a time, burdened by their equipment and the weight of their mortality. I hear them speak in hoarse tones. I hear them deploy coarse humour to deflect their fears. I hear them speculate on the nature of the explosive device they are about to confront. I hear in their irreverent jocularity the confidence of men who have made an art of probability.
I swoon as they run through their poignant routine of superstitious gestures. They shake hands. They make the usual promises to one another, to convey final words to loved ones should the worst materialise.
Meanwhile, down in the basement, Yasmin lays Rosie on the ground and contemplates the sealed bunker door. He wipes his sweating palms on his white coat.
•
Frankie charges ahead. He seems to know his way instinctively in the dark, anticipating corners, dodging around pieces of equipment parked against the walls. Meanwhile I’m banging into beds, barking my shins, the pain in my chest white-hot, the sweat icy cold.
We cross the atrium, hurdling the low benches, past the reception area. Turn into the deserted A&E, ghostly and draped in shadow, the emergency lights casting pale glimmerings. We each take one side, go past the cubicles whipping back the curtains, ducking down to peer under the beds. Nothing.
‘Are you sure she’s still in here?’ Frankie pants.
‘She didn’t come out, Frankie. Check everywhere.’
Faint beep-beeps sound over the blood pounding in my ears, a flat-line beeeeeeeeeep from somewhere off the main ward.
‘I’ll do the nurses’ station,’ he says, pointing across the ward. ‘You check the––’
The faintest of shudders, an almost imperceptible brightening, is our only warning.
‘Get down, Frank––’
Too late. The ward erupts. Beds, chairs, humans, machines: straws in a twister.
A whirlwind, reaping.
•
Were this Moby-Dick we might say, ‘Thar she blows!’
The sudden flaring blinds. The flash of flame precedes the explosion by a micro-second. Yasmin is incinerated in less time than it takes to say whoomph.
In the same micro-second the explosion reverberates within the underground chamber. Constrained thus, it turns in on itself. The support pillar to the rear of the chamber buckles. Even above the boom of the explosion I believe I can hear the scream of rending steel. Perhaps this is the scream of the plucked radish.
The hospital groans. Perhaps it is a frisson anticipating sexual release.
The convulsion shatters every window in the hospital. Outside, behind the ribbons of fluttering yellow tape, the instinctive gasp of the watchers creates its own sonic boom in response. Then the yelps and yowls as shards of flying glass begin to shower down.
Distracted, the watchers do not see the hospital tilt. They do not see the hospital rend itself from its foundations like some huge concrete Samson. They panic nonetheless, as brick, mortar, glass and chrome crash down in random revenge on their erstwhile tormentors like so many cluster bombs.
Where I am, I see the camera lens shake. Where I am, I hear the commentator attempt to articulate terror via a strangled yelp. This is no easier in Greek than it is in English.
I see a cloud of dust and smoke rise from the smouldering rubble. This is the logic of poetry carried through to its inevitable conclusion. I think that I shall never see / A poem as true as a fallen tree, etc.
Pandora you witch, Narcissus my old friend: can you hear what I hear?
Tonight the Great White will convene an emergency war council and there shelve its plans to grow legs and invade.
Tonight Herostratus howls again at the moon.
Tonight I hear Pilate’s sigh, Prometheus croon a lullaby.
Tonight the Jews drag Hitler from his bed and inject his eternal veins with his own faeces.
•
When I come-to I have no idea of how long I’ve been out. It can’t have been long or I wouldn’t have come-to at all; the swirling smoke would have killed me in minutes. Coughing hard, trying to work out if anything has been broken, if the damage is––
Rosie.
I haul myself to my feet, banging my head on the overhang of the nurses’ station. Eyes streaming, I lurch forward and stagger out of control, lose my footing. The floor has reset at a weird angle, dropping away. Careful now, impossible to see the floor through the smoke, I inch across the ward.
‘Frankie?’
My voice sounds comes out a croak, but even that much effort is enough to get my scorched lungs heaving.
But even as I choke on the roasted air, it occurs to me that Billy’s theory about the silane gas igniting every last atom of oxygen is a bust. That his idea of––
The basement.
A voice in the back of my head telling me it’s pointless, it’s too late.
Sabotage.
No, self-sabotage. The future operating behind the enemy lines of the present.
‘Now listen good. This is how we get you in.
‘There’ll be an elderly couple carrying a baby, it’ll have breathing problems.
‘She’s your ticket inside.
‘Once you’re in, make for the basement.’
If I am to die, it will not be smoke that kills me.
If I am to die, I will die of being a man.
The stairwell to the basement is a chimney funnelling hot, oily smoke. A permeable barrier I have to lean into to penetrate, the banister too hot to touch. Stumbling blind, eyes streaming, I expect to be fried alive when I burst through the double-doors into the basement proper, but the bizarre thing is that it seems cooler, the smoke thinning out.
Then I’m hurtling around the corner towards the bunker. A faint wail from the murk, a baby’s cry. Hope shoots through my chest just as my feet connect with something solid and down I go, face-first into the concrete.
No pain, not at first, just shock. I kneel there coughing, so weak I can barely hold myself upright, but then the smoky haze shifts and I see him: Billy, kneeling close enough to touch, his face contorted as his hands pump Rosie’s chest. Then he’s gone and I hear a ragged scream, and he looms into view again, his wild eyes bloodshot and streaming, and I understand that he is not giving Rosie CPR.
He’s trying to crush her tiny chest.
I hurl myself across Rosie, smash my forehead into his face.
The impact is cold, hard. A crash, then splintering.
When I open my eyes again, Billy is gone.
When I open my eyes again, Billy was never there.
In his place a reflection, a crazy-paved Picasso portrait of the author as agent provocateur. In his place a shattered pane of glass, the wall mounting that houses the coiled rubber hose.
In Case of Emergency, Break Glass.
I look down to see Rosie’s pale blue eyes goggling. Her mouth pursed open in a perfectly round O. My hands on her chest, the fragile ribs beneath, and beneath that, nothing.
No heartbeat.
Instinctively I place one hand beneath her neck, tilt her head back. Bend down and place my lips on hers, breathe into her mouth, then gently pump her chest once, twice, three times.
Does she stir? Or is it my hands trembling?
If not now, never . . .
I untuck my shirt, get Rosie underneath it, go. Stepping across Yasmin’s prone body, his face and hands melted into blackened lumps. Back across the underground car park, out into the smoke-choked stairwell. Staggering blind. The heat roasting now. I can hear my eyebrows crisp, smell the acrid whiff of burning hair.
Out into the reception area, wheel right. I trip over some rubble in the corridor, come down hard on one knee. The pain shoots up through my hip, whiplashing my spine.
Dim daylight to be seen at the end of the corridor, the hos-pital’s main doors. On. On.
The glass doors have been blown out, the automatic sliding mechanism melted. I duck under and step through, collapse to my knees. The weight of Rosie dragging me down.
A dazzle, a blaze of lights. Screams. The smoke-filled muck tastes like the purest Arctic air.
I hear a croaking, barely audible: ‘I need help here. Help.’
Then a rushing, footsteps pounding. Arms around me. I’m falling.
‘I have her, man. I have her. You can let go now. LET GO!’
I let go and she’s gone and I fall.
For a moment I can only lie there, stunned. Choking, eyes streaming. Stick figures swimming in a blurred glare. A jealous spasm as I realise the professionals are swarming Rosie. A nurse, two paramedics. The plastic gleam of an oxygen mask as it disappears into their midst.
The child, of course.
Nothing matters but the child.
It is as if the decision is made for me. As if it has always been made.
I get one knee underneath me, then the other. A crippled sprinter waiting for the gun to crack.
The hospital’s smoking maw awaits.
One last glance over my shoulder. Rosie nestling in the nurse’s arms. Bawling, now. Both of them.
I drift away into the hospital, wraith-like, disembodied.
•
Sermo Vulgus: A Novel (Excerpt)
Cassie, I would have eaten of the fruit too. Who would be daughtered to the fool who would not eat to know Everything?
The whole point of being alive is to store away enough answers to last an eternity of questions.
Cassie, the universe is eighty percent composed of dark matter, of which we know Nothing. Cassie, my one love, the energy of the universe is three-quarters composed of dark energy, of which we know Nothing.
Tonight my universe comes to an end. Tonight, on this remote and lonely beach, my infinity will suffer its fatal inversion. Tonight I back away out of the story, quite literally.
The sea is calm tonight, Cass. The Aegean usually is. There is an almost full moon. The sand is black and cold, coarsely grained. I sit on the beach and watch the stars and imagine each grain of sand as a microscopic diamond.
Cassie, you said you would never wear diamonds. They are too hard, you said, hard as the bones our yesterdays gnaw. You said only braided lightning would grace your finger. Can’t we at least try, you said, to draw a straight line through the heart of every sun?
This moment is timeless. In this moment meshes everything I might possibly be and everything I might once have been.
Cassie, I am reaching back to that moment when sperm and egg engendered the latest in an infinite number of unique infinities. I am wondering at how the shockwaves of that collision still oscillate. The ripple is eternal.
Cassie, my ripple is only one of an infinite number of unique oscillations eternally intersecting with all other ripples. I am tempted to throw a stone into the calm Aegean just to watch the ripple fade and mutate into another, more appropriate, form of energy.
But I am my own stone.
I strip off. I arrange my socks and shoes neatly. I tuck my wallet into one shoe. I walk to the water’s edge. I stand there for a moment, looking up at the almost full moon.
Cassie, the dilemma is this: to commit suicide is to renounce the flesh. But I am flesh forged of flesh, will forged of will, choice forged of choice.
I retrace my footsteps, walking backwards in the footprints already made in the sand. Past my neatly folded pile of clothes, my wallet, the rented scooter, the deserted shacks of this remote fishing village on the northern coast of a small Aegean island.
And so I retreat, step by step. Back I go, to melt into the limbo of a universe which is overwhelmingly composed of dark materials we cannot comprehend.
Cassie, what if the universe is made of love?
Nothing left now to say. Nothing, except that it would have been enough to see, just once, that miracle when the quantum chaos prompted the unknowing child to smile up at me. To conjure even a boson’s worth of illusion from the pitiless void, to justify the miles we crossed to come so far. The light-years. The thirty thousand billion cells. The trillions of particles, the unimaginable number of random collisions required to create a thinking thing.
All gone, wasted, lost.
We should have made babies, Cass.
One would have been enough.
•
‘So that’s pretty much that,’ Billy says. By now the shadows have lengthened so far that the gecko in his Irish racing green clings to last patch of sun above the door. ‘I mean,’ he flicks dismissively through the final few pages, ‘there’s a whole section here, the big Poirot reveal when Debs tells the cop, Sallow Face, how you worked as a hospital porter to research your book, except you were sick, suffering from male post-partum depression, under pressure with deadlines, couldn’t pay the mortgage, all this. Sick as two small hospitals, Sallow Face tells her.’
The sheets are white, the walls are white, the tiles on the floor are white.
‘But if you ask me,’ he says, ‘you’re only pandering there. Anyone who didn’t pick up on all that won’t have read this far anyway.’
I scribble on the pad, hold it up.
Rosie?
‘Oh yeah,’ he says, flicking back a page or two. ‘There’s a good bit here about how the X-rays showed some deep-tissue scarring. Smoke damage, but not from the hospital. More like someone had been blowing smoke directly into her lungs over a period of time. D’you want to leave that in?’
I nod.
‘Consider it done,’ he says, making a note. ‘And if you’re leaving that in,’ he says, ‘you might as well leave the sappy finale. Make it a proper crime novel, like, all that liberal angst curdling into conservative bile.’
I scrawl on the pad.
Read it.
‘You sure?’
I nod.
‘Okay,’ he says. He flicks forward through the pages. ‘So this comes after the big reveal,’ he says, ‘the smoke-scarred lungs, and you ask to hold Rosie one last time, except you can’t, you’re cuffed to the bed, but Debs makes this big gesture of forgiveness and absolution, holds Rosie close to you. Ready?’
I nod again.
A wry grin, a self-conscious clearing of the throat.
The little girl senses me, some instinct turning her head.
‘The little girl senses me,’ Billy says, ‘some instinct turning her head.’
Her face comes up to meet mine with a faintly quizzical expression.
‘Her face comes up to meet mine,’ Billy says, ‘with a faintly quizzical expression. Her wide eyes blue as heaven all over.’
Her wide eyes blue as heaven all over.
O my love, I say. O my one true and precious love . . .
And she smiles her hapless gummy smile, and gurgles, just the faintest of wheezing to be heard, and a flailing hand catches my lower lip like a tiny grappling hook, the fingers so frail and translucent, yet strong enough to grip my lip and pinch so that all that is left to do is lower my face until my nose brushes her cheek, the warm peachy down of her skin, and I inhale her sweet baby smell and it’s enough to finally melt something within, so that there’s a snap and a sudden trickle, and then a gush, a flood, and swept away I understand at last and far too late all that is lost and gone, gone and lost forever.
‘. . . lost and gone, gone and lost forever.’
All that is left now is the small but perfectly formed matter of ritual sacrifice. A token gesture. A sop to those who like their absolution painful and gory. A bloody charade of repentance.
Tonight we sever the only muscle in the human body that is attached at only one end.
This room, appropriately enough, has the appearance of a hospital theatre. White walls, white tiles on the floor, the ceiling, the sheets on the bed. All white.
From beyond the shuttered windows and the balcony overlooking the Aegean I hear the burred thrip-chip of the cicadas. Homer would have heard their ancestors. There is a blessed relief in the prospect of no longer having to make any more sense than the average cicada.
There is a perverse joy too in the idea of sawing through the ligature at the muscle root. The operation would be bloody and painful, it is true, and the benefits are undeniable. Sadly, steak knives and scissors are non-runners, and the perverse joy will have to be deferred. After the excision the wound will need to be staunched and perhaps cauterised, lest I bleed to death. For this reason the severing must appear to be accidental.
Deliberate severance of any human appendage is generally regarded by emergency ward staff as suspicious enough to warrant reporting to the appropriate authorities. By contrast, an accident will be regarded as unfortunate enough to warrant professional but heartfelt sympathy.
My cunning plan runs thusly: I will clamp my tongue between my teeth, as far back as nature allows. Then I will dive headfirst down the marble staircase outside my bedroom door, holding my chin high in the air.
The difficult part, I think, will be the not screaming halfway down.
The bonus in this method is the potential for smashed bone, disfigurement and permanent scarring. The most effective disguise is the one nobody wants to look at.
Would an eyeball gouged from its socket be too much?
On discharge from hospital, I should be to all intents and purposes invisible and mute. From this moment on we must rely solely on the written word. Our tools will be silence, cunning and exile.
Why not? No one was listening anyway.
My line for today, for tonight and forever, comes courtesy of Seamus Heaney: Whatever you say, say nothing.