chapter 3

This chapter is set in Dublin in the not too recent past. Frank makes a difficult journey in even more difficult personal circumstances...
Temple Bar

Frank was tired and still bleeding internally when he turned into the narrow lane in the so-called Bohemian centre of Dublin. What it had in common with the magnificent slums of the Belle Epoque which Frank had been lucky enough to experience first-hand was vomit, urine and faeces. Sludgy puddles of semi-digested food and alcohol, snaking trails of dark piss and the occasional turd too large to have been produced by a dog decorated the paving slabs. The hypodermic syringes, condoms and fast-food wrappings were of course jetsam of the new century, still devoid of nostalgic qualities, although he felt the narcotic elements had a certain style.

The school was surrounded by a half-hearted fence of corrugated iron, rusting despite the galvanising process due to its weekly anointments of urine, bearing faded fly-posters and site safety notices. The door and windows were boarded up, and although potential squatters had forced open a couple of entrances, Frank was confident that the malevolent atmosphere of the institution would drive out anyone attempting to make shelter no matter how temporary. He stepped over the nettles growing in the rubbish that filled the narrow space between fence and school, one flicking up inside his trouser leg, brushing pain into his lower left calf. He coughed a worm of blood onto his lips and used it to massage the rash. He was uncomfortable, frustrated and very tired. His elegant plans had come to nothing and for the first time in over a century he found himself having to take emergency measures. He was not even preparing a rear-guard action. This was full-fledged retreat; he was cashing in his insurance, after which he would lick his wounds before finding another suitable victim and commence upon a further modest plan to enrich himself.

The rubbish on the heavy iron manhole cover required some work to be cleared, and the huge rectangle of cast iron was almost impossible for him to move in his weakened state. Sweat ran grime into his eyes and his face was smeared with black blood and cat-shit flavoured earth by the time the door was lifted past the point of equilibrium and it crashed over, opening the damp vacuum of the basement to the Dublin sky for the first time in fifteen years or so. Of course he knew the exact day, in fact the very second, when he had last used this redundant doorway, but he was hardly in the mood to recall it now. His kidneys ached, his entrails were knotted with pain and his lungs were refusing to play their full part in respiration. In short he was dying and to make matters worse he looked a mess and stank of his own various excretions.

School basements were magnificent repositories of personal and educational histories. He remembered his father’s maps of the world with all the purple countries being once under the influence of Norway and the pink forming the British Empire. He had resented the scale of the British influence, but had reasoned that most of it was intolerably hot and peopled by Negroes or Orientals, therefore hopelessly unmanageable and intellectually insignificant. Low temperatures suppressed the basic appetites and encouraged abstract thought. As a child he had imagined that it was only a matter of time before the scientific and industrial superiority of the Scandanavians would colour the world, by which he meant Europe, most of Russia and the North Americas a satisfying purple. That was all before he had left his nation behind as his contemporaries fell into sloth, old age and the grave. He was, by virtue of his genius, a self-made man in a quite literal sense.

He made his way past the large sagging boxes in the gloom which rapidly deepened into total void. He supposed that somewhere in those boxes was the school record of his nemesis, the one who had brought him to this embarrassing u-turn in his long and successful career. Fuck her, he thought, recoiling at the taste of the thought. Still, it was acceptable to express annoyance in these special circumstances. He would put it all behind him once he had carried out the transfer. He struck a match and located the lift, and with it the emergency lighting. The heavy lever’s thud announced the weak 25 watt illumination and the grinding of the gears. Frank stood on the iron grill and felt the platform jerk downwards. The musty smell of old earth came up to meet him and for a moment he was in the intersection of centuries. Then he had left the twentieth century behind and was in the circular sub-basement with its medieval walls and air.

frank chapter 2

Prologue

Frank had been born in the year 1861 on the tiny island of Edgeøya, part of Svalbard, an archipelago that lies inside the Arctic Circle at the point where the Barents Sea becomes the Norwegian Sea. His father, Oscar Kørner, was a soil scientist and radical non-conformist who was convinced that the rich mineral deposits on the Islands could be exploited to create a Norwegian technological revolution that would see his country rapidly outstrip the creaking steam engines and bureaucracy of the British Empire. Frank’s mother Sylvia was a member of the Sámi people, a nomadic tribe that lived without respect of national borders between Norway, Finland and Russia. His father’s enormous intelligence, Old Norwegian aristocratic blood, outspoken desire to end the union with Sweden, and penchant for outdoor copulation with his savagely beautiful wife had led to his forced exile from Oslo in 1859. At the age of three Frank’s unnaturally thin fingers were already able to slip tiny samples of plant or insect into a microscope’s slide, and without aid of written language he had produced a small catalogue of the few animals and plants that lived in his immediate environment. His elegant and precise drawing style, an example of which was said to have much impressed John Ruskin, led to his parents considering a future in Fine Arts, but Frank’s true passion was for science. By the age of ten he had, together with his father, produced microscopes of incomparable quality and was able to observe single cells with a level of detail which would only become available to mainstream European scientists in the next century.

Commercial miners began to arrive on the archipelago in the 1880s, but they rarely troubled Oscar Kørner and his small family, confining most of their activities to the larger areas of Spitsbergen and Barents Island which were b y now more generally known to be rich in coal and metals. At seventeen Frank’s mind had turned to the improbability of life arising and surviving in the intense cold of the Arctic Circle. He began to study the effects of freezing on plants and animals. Because he had the microscopy he was able to witness and notate the finest details of changes to both plant and animal cells. Protective strategies within the cells relating to what are now called chromosomes, but which Frank called threads of life led him to attempt to freeze and then re-animate some of his own cells. The rest, as they say, is history, but of course it is a history unknown to other scientists. The isolation of his environment and his inherited distrust of the state led Frank to take a singular and self-centred path. His father’s earlier attempts at mining had opened up a spectacular underground cavern which contained a lake of stagnant water, rich with minerals and organic molecules, and maintained at a perfect 1.742o Celsius for millennia. Frank placed his own frozen cells in that liquid; his papers refer to it as the nutriment, and watched with amazement as mitosis took place.

Now began the phase of his life which Frank called the Promethean Years in his interviews with Professor O’Connell in St. Patrick’s Hospital Dublin during the Irish Civil War.

frank

I am posting Frank weekly, one chapter at a time. at the moment my view is that the chapters should follow the sequence of posting, but time, and particularly fictional time is fluid, so I am considering ways of making the time line of Frank more accessible in the context of electronic media. Suggestions from any Fran readers welcome.

Here's chapter 1
Forest Hill

Frank contemplated the black rectangle of infinity embedded like a Rothko in a frame that stretched the limits of stilled perception. The amber grey beneath contained a thin silence that belied the frantic and frankly disgusting activities of the millions of inhabitants of this city. A slip in the focus of his recently rheumy eyes brought up another picture, this time of his own angular self, arms crossed at the elbows on the cheap desk, the white shirt creased and stained by street-lighting. He felt that the fields of colour were real and this travesty of a portrait abstract and impenetrable. He pulled a cheap untipped cigarette from the pack on the table. Lighting it a comet flared against the sky and then the acrid smell of tobacco tinted the distant stars and hidden planets. He tried to focus on his own image again, an act that generally offended him; or rather that had offended him for the last few years, but now he felt that the night was pooled between the far side of the window and his reflection, that he had to reach out to himself through the viscous black feeding liquid, and horrifically he saw himself smashed in that liquid like a fragile shell. Crisp shards of himself splintering into the ink, turning in it, and due to their improbable thinness, becoming invisible. He was pixillated and dissolved not into the eternal night but the machined glass.

Rapid physical movement was anathema to him, but now his hands clawed at his real face, fingers hooked into hollows at temple and jaw; steadying, recovering, assembling. He gasped and ground the cigarette into an aluminium ashtray he had stolen from a cab-office. You’re getting shaky Frank, he thought; is this what it’s like for everyone? Getting old, facing the end? He stood and turned his back on the window, receiving the room, resonant with the smell of fried bacon and talc. The bed-sitter creaked as he moved to the sink and splashed water into his face. He looked up at the cerise walls, small regular blobs of white showing where some past tenant; he liked to think the last tenant but suspected a much more extensive history, had removed posters and the blue tacked bits of emulsion. The bed of course was the nadir of his fallen state. If the walls carried their history of popular aspiration through posters the bed’s history was far more noxious. It was impossible to think of any kind of sex except the individual taking place on that poor palette. He despised procreation for all the obvious reasons and regarded masturbation as the absolute proof of man’s partial evolution from apes.

Life without immortality was truly appalling.