Absolute Zero Cool Read Online Free

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