chapter twenty eight

Devonshire Rd

The public library afforded Frank the opportunity of internet access. That is, the local authority described it as an opportunity; he regarded it as a buoyancy aid in the ebbing waters of his life. He no longer had an appetite for research: where he had once carved through the oceans of knowledge like a shark, to extend the soggy metaphor, he now foundered, aimlessly waiting to desiccate, fragment and die like a jelly. Incapable of dedicating his attention to any one thing for more than a minute he followed random links that generally had a tenuous connection to one or other of his earlier lives. He did this for most of the hours the library was open to the public, his earphones providing him the programmes of NRK 1 or BBC Radio 3.

It was the case that the library emptied rapidly on Thursday afternoon, due to the arrival of Social Welfare payments which were quickly spent in the budget supermarkets, pubs and bookmakers shops that proliferated in this shabby patch of South-East London. Frank felt the lack of human activity about him as a calmness, an umbilical peace that took him back to Edgeøya, and so he began to read about snow; specifically the conditions that dictated the formation of the hexagonal molecular lattices of individual flakes. He was familiar with it all of course, and thought how little the physics had developed from his father’s discoveries. Just as Frank had never shared his work with the scientific mainstream, his father had kept his work to himself. The rejection of his lifestyle, and particularly his choice of wife, by the Norwegian hierarchy had cost the world dear both in terms of the scientific progress which father and son had made and in the malignity of Frank’s mercenary use of his own developments.

Modern research into snow crystal formation was hampered by the impurities now universally found in the water molecules. The snow in Edgeøya had been untainted by the waste products of the modern world. It was only now that scientists were discovering the modifications to growth that could be achieved with electricity. Frank remembered his father documenting the same thing by use of magnets and his own phenomenal microscopes in the late 1860s. For a moment he felt a twinge of excitement as he read that crystal growth was of fundamental interest to nanotechnology: in the past this would have been the beginning of another episode of personal enrichment at the expense of some egocentric and probably criminal entrepreneur, but now there was no point. He was waiting to die.

The shuffling of the librarian alerted him to the imminent closure of the library. He disconnected in the middle of a string quartet by Klaus Egge and made his way to a tobacconist where he purchased a pack of Senior Service cigarettes, and then made his way along Devonshire Road towards his dismal bed-sit. His stained charity shop raincoat flicked in the unseasonably drizzly breeze, and he again found the relentless rise in the road difficult to manage. He stopped by the bright red post box and opened the pack of Seniors, lit one and deposited the match and cellophane into the letter slit. This was a Victorian post box; probably as old as himself. He considered the box, noticed the corrosion, over-painted in dozens of scarlet tones. The sharply cut lines of the angles and the letters VR gradually being absorbed into the organic flow of red.

It occurred to him that there was a further similarity between himself and this box: they were equally redundant, 21^st Century dinosaurs. These days hardly anybody wrote letters, the post was reserved for bills, and these would soon be all delivered by e-mail. It would not be long before this box was removed to a scrap yard or a local museum, just as had been the fate of the telephone boxes outside the library. He was likewise heading to a scrapheap, albeit one that the rest of humanity accepted as a natural end. Frank had gone beyond that; he had transcended mortality; until Kay had smashed him.

Well, it was too late to do anything about that now. Even his recent attempt at revenge had failed. There was no time to grow another Frank, even if he could get back to the cavern in Edgeøya that housed the nutriment. He could keep his organs together with small doses for a few years, but he knew enough about medicine to know that even a year was a generous estimate of the time he had left. He dropped the Senior into the box and, hoping it would incinerate the contents, continued the difficult trudge to the bed-sit.

The sound of an ersatz tango informed him that the landlady was rehearsing with her ballroom partner. He recoiled at the music and the thought of their debilitated guilty couplings, silently climbing the stairs. To his astonishment he found a letter tucked into the crack between his door and the frame. He snatched it, crushing it in his fist, and entered the room. He sat on the creaking bed and smoothed out the envelope. The stamp was Irish. He smelt the paper and recognised Kay. He tore it open and found a voucher for a seaweed bath in Ballybunion. He had no idea what it meant, but it was not a joke.