Absolute Zero

By D.S. Lewis

“I lived in Cambodia in the time of Khmer Rouge. I lived through an experiment. It was the worst experiment in history.”

Sebastiana Sarinn survived Year Zero in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Ten years on she has made a new life, working as a prostitute in London. But a simple accident...losing her bag on a train...leads to harrowing consequences, both for Sebastiana and for embittered loner Selwyn Bodkin, who finds himself drawn into her terrible past. Can either escape the scars of history?

Absolute Zero is a novel about the weight of the past and the damage caused by its collision with the present. In this darkly  twisted story of addiction, obsession, deception and criminality, the author compellingly recreates both the fractured  social landscape of Thatcher’s Britain and the terrifying world of the Khmer Rouge.

D.S. Lewis is a journalist and historian, specialising in South-East Asia and modern Britain. He has lived in Germany and France, and currently resides in the UK.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Glanville Press
• Release date: Jul 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9780995508910

Book preview

To Wendy,

whose unstinting love inspired this book, whose indefatigable faith nurtured it through dark moments, and whose skills as an editor greatly improved it.

ONE

As the past and present scrape together, the past is ground smooth but the present is made more jagged. They move in parallel, but on unreliable compass bearings and at inconsistent speeds. Collisions are inevitable—like ship and iceberg—and their impacts range from the inconsequential to the catastrophic.

Simon rolled forward with the swell of human traffic shuffling towards the station exit. It was commuter hour at Gloucester Road Tube. It was 1985, a dull morning in the first week of September, with London poised between late summer and early autumn. The holiday season was most definitely over. The heat and the tourists were in retreat. But the summer had not been that hot and the tourists never really left.

It was his first day and Simon Merideth-Smith had not completed the required reading. Nothing serious anyway. Not since school, the first time around. Last night it had seemed okay. Last night he had been full of abstinent intent. When he’d rolled that final skinny joint, the one before bed, he had promised himself he’d skim the books before class. It would be something to do on the Tube. But here he was, the journey almost over, and they lay dormant still within the expensive leather case—his mother’s gift to mark his belated return to education.

The lift from the District Line was out of order. He trudged up the circular stone staircase, steps worn smooth from a century of passing feet. His gait was jagged. His dishevelled ginger hair floated like an ember on the grey tide. The jostling bodies, the worn faces with glass-eyed vacancy, made him twitchy. Was this how the future looked? Was this his future, this regulated march towards the careworn world of work? The years herded away from him, stretching to the horizon, tramping mechanically onwards to distant decrepitude. He could feel his rising anxiety. The palpitations were like a drumbeat, a rhythmic, nagging pulse which demanded some relief. He wanted a smoke, just a few hits would do it, or a quick line. Nothing hardcore, just something, a little something. Something to turn down the noise, tweak the volume a notch and soften the jarring of those worn and unforgiving steps.

He was glad to hit the street. He pushed through a group of tourists blocking the station entrance, and stepped onto the pavement of Gloucester Road. The sun was breaking through a bank of dirty cloud. The traffic was snarled. The sallow morning stuttered with angry horns and floated raw on the cloud of exhaust fumes. He set off towards the college with a reluctant plod. He shouldn’t have to do this; it wasn’t right. At the age of twenty-three it wasn’t right that he should have to do this.

A smartly dressed woman passed him. She was walking quickly with her head high. He tried to snag her stare but his smile went unacknowledged as she dodged along the congested pavement. He followed in her wake, studying the billowing flow of her unbuttoned coat, the sheen of her bottle black hair, and the regular swing of her beaded shoulder bag. He rode her scented slipstream and felt the pull of the past. She stirred memories of a girl he had left in Phuket. He quickened his pace. Visions of a bedroom dawn made him wince. He saw Sroy’s sculpted beauty in the pale grey light. The London street receded beneath the softness of a sigh and the smell of crumpled cotton.

Suddenly there was a homeless guy in his way. Some bum was blocking the view, standing in the flow of people, shouting. He was moving from side to side, searching for engagement. He was shouting things about politics and God. Unintelligible things. He wasn’t protesting; it was more a series of jumbled complaints—aggressive complaining aimed at passing strangers, or God, or demons that only he could see. And he wanted money. They always wanted money. He was holding out a dirty paper cup imploring donations. He had a grubby white dog, short-haired and sullen, on the end of a piece of rope.

Simon was ready for him. He feinted right and then darted left. But the homeless guy was too quick. Life on the street had taught him to be quick. He blocked off the gap, forcing Simon to halt.

‘Spare some change?’ Up close he looked less mad, less threatening. His eyes were nervous, embarrassed even. He was wearing a padded nylon jacket, dirty and torn at the shoulder, but beneath it his body was thin. Simon ran the calculation. He knew that if he had to, he could take him.

‘Can’t help you, man. I’m late.’ Simon was attempting to keep the woman in sight. He tried to walk on but the homeless guy blocked his way.

‘Please bro’, just some change. A cup of tea.’ The dirty hand was reaching for Simon’s sleeve.

‘I told you. I’m late.’ Simon turned his left shoulder towards him, preparing for action.

‘Where ya rushin’ bro’? Where’s the fire?’

‘I’m going to work,’ Simon said. It was almost true.

‘You’re going to Hell my friend!’ shouted the guy. ‘You’re going straight to Hell!’ The hollow face swooped in, the stubble, the decayed and broken teeth, the booze breath.

Simon pushed past. The homeless guy was still shouting behind him. ‘Get ready for the flames. You’re going down to Hell!’ It was a roar now, a barely coherent howl. Simon was hurrying, almost jogging. He wanted to put yardage between himself and the madman. He wanted to close on the woman. She was still visible, but some way ahead and moving fast.

She reached the junction where the congested Gloucester Road exploded into the multi-lane torrent of Cromwell Road. The pedestrian lights had changed to red but she crossed at a trot, without hesitation, her bobbing head glancing to the right as the phalanx of traffic approached. Simon was running now. But as he left the pavement he knew it was a mistake. He could not make landfall. The wall of traffic was too close, approaching too fast. In the nearside lane a black Ford Sierra was accelerating. It was suddenly so close that it seemed to block out the light. He reeled back, throwing himself towards the safety of the pavement. He stumbled on the kerb and went down. His briefcase burst open, spewing books and files. He heard the shriek of brakes and the scream of car horns.

The Sierra swerved to avoid him and clipped the white lorry in the next lane. The impact sounded like a shot to the head. The driver lost control as the car cannoned back towards the kerb a few yards beyond where Simon lay. It mounted the pavement and ploughed into a man who was pushing a handcart of flowers, killing him instantly.

Simon was only dimly aware of the noise. His right arm was spiking, jagged with pain. He looked down and saw his hand displaced at a crazy angle, his wrist bent in a way that he knew instinctively was wrong, terribly wrong. There was no blood but the swelling was already obscene. He tried to stand but his legs were not working properly. Someone was talking to him, telling him to be still until a doctor arrived. Someone was asking his name. He could hear a siren. Someone was shouting for an ambulance. Someone had collected his spilt books but the briefcase was missing. He turned his head towards the gutter and threw up.

A few yards away the Sierra was slouched half on the pavement, surrounded by scattered flowers. Its left wing was crumpled, the bonnet dented and the windscreen shattered. The driver was out. People were trying to get him to sit down but he was walking in erratic circles, sobbing and swearing. A crowd had gathered. Someone had put a jacket over the body. The dead man was Reg Booth, a local trader; he was recognised from his smashed flower-trolley. His body lay crushed on the pavement amid the strewn stems and torn petals, but his head was on the inside, lying in the footwell of the Sierra’s passenger seat.

*****

Bodkin heard the sirens in the street below but did not pause. He maintained the steady rhythm of his pacing: from the door’s peeling paintwork to the grubby whiteboard on the opposite wall, five paces; a tight turn; from wall back to door, four-and-a-half. He was troubled by this discrepancy of distance.

He looked at his watch. It was 9.45 am. The next ten minutes were critical. Students were habitually late but when half-an-hour had elapsed it was reasonable to assume that they were not going to show. The private tutorial college where he worked paid by the hour. With one-to-one tuition, such as his first double period on this Tuesday morning, there was always the delicious possibility of a no-show, the luxury of money without work.

The room in which Selwyn Owen Bodkin paced was on the top floor of the South Kensington Academy of Excellence, which occupied a vertical section of a Georgian terrace, wedged among fast-food joints and tourist shops. It was bounded on two sides by arterial roads, chaotic with noise and dirt, but it had a prestigious postal code and a glossy prospectus. It had been founded by its current principal, Rupert Lambert, who had at last found a vocation that gave him the social status and income he had always craved. It also provided him with the company of the young, a commodity that he valued highly. Originally the Academy had catered only to students needing to re-sit their ‘A’ levels, but Rupert had recently added a middle school for the younger teens in order to increase his profit and indulge his pleasure. Profit and pleasure—the dialectic of greed.

Education was up for sale like never before. No longer the preserve of the privileged few, private tuition was now available to all. You just needed money. And money was good. Now that Thatcherism had evolved from hesitant insurgency into brash triumphalism, and its gaudy success trumpeted unconditional victory, money was everywhere. The credo of the age was unassailable: self-interest led to increased prosperity for all. Here was progress. It was official now: greed was good. Not merely inevitable or fashionable, but good; morally good. Good for the country and good for the individual; a necessity for economic and spiritual well-being. The market was supreme. Everything was for sale now, and always would be.

Bodkin glanced once more at his watch. Looking up he caught his reflection in the grimy glass of the window. He looked away. He was no longer young. His hair had thinned and his slackening skin had the colour of curdled milk. His body had become as shapeless as a well-used punch bag. Through his pebble-thick glasses he stared at the street below. Gloucester Road was swollen with traffic. It had become snarled at the junction with Cromwell Road.

He resumed his steady tread. This was a tiny world with which Bodkin had grown familiar. That familiarity had not brought acceptance, however, for his surrender had not been total. At times a terrible hatred would well up and consume him. And even when it had passed, he could detect the metallic taste of stale fury, before it decayed by degrees, rotting into bitterness and self-pity, and finally evaporating into apathy. This cyclical anger was a mark of his resistance. Self-destructive and futile, it nevertheless represented a gesture of defiance. Bodkin retained the capacity to rage and, in that small way at least, his spirit remained unbroken.

He knew that he had been born not only ugly but also unlucky. His father had owned a small shop but the business had foundered. The first ten years of his life existed like the decaying memory of a dream. All that remained were a few photographs and the images in his head that might have been remembered, or dreamt, or manufactured. As his father’s business failed, so the violence between his parents had intensified until, on the eve of his tenth birthday, they had both disappeared. The police collected him from school. The adults tried to protect him from the truth. But truth leaks through the tiniest of cracks and is borne on a breeze of knowing smiles and whispers. The older ones in the children’s home talked about it. They knew how many times his father had stabbed her and how he had hanged himself in the attic, soiling himself in his death throes. He had left no note. There was no explanation or record. At night, alone in the dark, Bodkin had tried to remember them, believing that if he could just try hard enough for long enough they might return. He made extravagant promises of exemplary behaviour, if only they would come back for him. But they returned only in dreams and even then their faces became less clear with the passing years.

Through the thin walls he could hear the sound of the class next door. It was a geography lesson for fourteen and fifteen year olds being taught by Clive, a college-boy whom Bodkin despised. Bodkin detested Clive almost as much as he hated the students. He detested him for his youth and his easy looks, for his inability to teach, but above all for his failure to control a hostile environment. Bodkin was aging, ugly and second-rate but he had respect. It was founded on a reputation for unpredictable nastiness, which he had worked hard to create. It was essential. It provided a force-field that kept the students at bay, like cattle before an electric fence. With Clive there was no force-field, no force, no fence. No limit. Clive had tried to be liked but had earned only contempt. The students bullied him as they bullied their own weaker members. Initially Bodkin had been tempted to intervene. But as he came to realise the extent to which the boy had engineered his own suffering, loathing overtook pity. Fraternisation was weakness. And Bodkin despised weakness.

Bodkin hated all of the young teachers. He despised their airs of pompous gravity and their absurd earnestness. It was they who would cluster around Rupert when he made one of his rare appearances below decks. In the staff room they discussed the prospects and qualities of their students, unsullied humanity oozing from the pious pores of their sweet skins. Bodkin despised them for their pandering, their collaboration, their naïveté, their youth and their hope. He despised them for their care and for the careless way in which they dispensed it to the unworthy. He despised those upon whom it was lavished and he despised those who had so much to waste. It was the product of their youth. This he knew, and he despised them for it also.

The next door chaos made him anxious. He placed his hands over his ears, held his breath until his temples pounded. Teaching was the worst job in the world. A zoo keeper for junior monsters. Monsterettes.

Once again the laughter shook the flimsy partition wall. It was almost 10am. Merideth-Smith, Bodkin decided, was not going to show. He seized his briefcase and scuttled down the stairs with the muffled voices of attempted tuition seeping through a dozen discoloured doors. A babble of useless instruction: maths and French melting into English and physics and breaking like a dirty wave over the blank faces of those incapable of distinguishing a fish from a tree.

*****

Simon waited in Casualty. He was glad that nobody else from the accident was there. The dead guy, he would obviously be somewhere else by now. As for the driver, that fucking maniac, and the people being treated for shock, maybe they were at another hospital. Maybe they were okay already and back on their way. He knew the guy was dead. The police said it had been a fatal incident. They said that they needed to take a statement but could wait until his wrist had been treated. Then they’d gone, leaving him to wait alone with his pain. It didn’t matter. He already had the story straight in his head. The car had been going too fast. The guy was driving like a lunatic. The car had braked too late. The lunatic wasn’t paying attention. Besides, the roar of acceleration had startled him as he waited to cross. It had made him stumble. The kerb stone may have been a little uneven, too, maybe a little loose. It was an accident waiting to happen. Maybe there would be compensation somewhere in all of this. A little compensation could help with his current liquidity problem.

The pain was insistent. They had strapped his wrist in the ambulance and given him an injection, but he needed something stronger. The pain had settled down, changing from electric agony to dull and regular monotony. Pain was like that. It liked to make a big splash on arrival. But later, when it had settled into the neighbourhood, it became a boring bastard. It didn’t stay jagged and unpredictable for long. It didn’t have the energy or the imagination. It always opted for a regular, rhythmical approach, nagging away on the boring side of intolerable. It plodded. It didn’t stop for rests. It didn’t need to because it rarely exerted itself, not after its first, showy entrance. Pain was like that, it always played safe—unless someone else was involved. On its own, pain was boring; it always needed a helping hand to liven it up. The Indian chick in the X-ray department, she’d livened it up alright. Before dodging behind her lead screen and throwing the switch, she’d wrestled his hand into a series of grotesque positions. Then she’d emerged and done it again, hit-and-run, back and fore like a bandit. She didn’t talk much, but boy she knew how to hurt a guy. Even before she had looked at the results she told him his wrist was broken. It would have to be plastered. That had been ninety minutes ago, but since then there’d been no action. He contemplated slipping out to the main entrance and skinning up again. But the last one had been absurdly hard to roll. One handed and surreptitious—that was some challenge.

He looked around him. The waiting room was like a war zone. Not a proper war, of course, more like some squalid urban insurrection. The walking wounded were there, people like him who’d begun the day with other plans but then copped a stray piece of shrapnel. It was a war zone, but it was a poverty zone too. Most of those waiting were poor as well as sick. This was their patch. It was a money-free zone. All around, the city was oozing money, you could feel it rising through the pores and smell its fresh, sweet breath. But not here. Here the poor were waiting with the practised patience of the poor. The mad were taking refuge too, conversing with the air, talking to the voices that waft through the invisible tunnels. And the sick, the injured and the infirm were waiting, waiting like Simon, waiting with their dull pain and their temporary dressings, waiting to be fixed up so that they could get back out there and carry on being poor.

He shouldn’t be here. This was turning out to be a shit day. There was vomit on his jeans that shouldn’t be there. His shirt was torn. His books were grazed and some bastard had stolen his briefcase. What sort of fucker does something like that? They see an accident but they don’t see casualties. No, what they see is opportunity—which for them amounts to stuff they can steal. Yeah, this was turning into a really shit day. It had been bad enough before the accident. He didn’t want to go back and re-sit his ‘A’ levels. He’d already failed them once, spectacularly. Once was enough. He didn’t want to be here, not in London, not any place where there were qualifications to get, careers to choose. It began with that shit and descended into mortgages, marriage, kids and pensions—all the stuff that slowed you down.

Travelling was an antidote. Travelling kept you light: so many people and places just waiting to be discovered. After the first great ‘A’ level débâcle his parents had given him a decent dollop, enough cash to roam Europe and the US for eighteen months before needing to return and reload. Of course, they’d puckered up when it came to serving seconds, but Simon had known what to do. He persuaded great grandpa, the legendary old Sir Henry, to fund a visit to Malaysia (or Malaya, as the old man would insist on). Simon took the money and went to Thailand. It was close enough. It had been the best two years of his life. That was where he met Sroy, and lost her too. And now he’d lost it all. He’d traded Paradise for this shit. Paradise was still out there, soft with sunshine and freighted smoke, but he was no longer in it. He was here with the poor and the mad.

He scanned a discarded newspaper. It was several days old and still heavy with the Cabinet reshuffle—the Iron Lady shoring up her government’s mid-term sag. A couple of pit props up the ass and some spit and polish and it would be good until the next election. Simon had not heard of the incomers, but then he had not heard of the discards either. Their faces were obscured beneath the shadow of the Lady. The changes had included the party, too. The new Tory leader, Norman Tebbit, was smiling cadaverously as he posed with his deputy, Jeffrey Archer. It was like Batman and Robin, with a Batman who’d been dead for a year or two. Simon studied their smiles. They shimmered with the shiny confidence of victors. The recession was long since over, inflation tamed, the Falklands recaptured, and the miners vanquished. Unemployment was still high, but that could be managed. It could even be useful. It didn’t matter, as long as those in work were getting richer. It didn’t even matter if they weren’t getting richer, just as long as they thought they were. Those smiles said that the war had been won. And it wasn’t some marginal, negotiated peace. It had been unconditional victory and now there were spoils to be had. Simon could smell money on the prevailing wind.

He flicked restlessly. There was a story about an airline pilot forced to alter course at 10,000 feet over the Channel to avoid a giant inflatable kangaroo, suspended from six large helium balloons. Inside the creature’s pouch was ‘dangerous-sports enthusiast’ Chuck Davis, who was subsequently fined for flying without a pilot’s licence. Over the page was an account of Royal Marine Sgt Rod Masters who had been reprimanded by a court martial for unauthorised punishment routines. He’d hit two recruits on the head with a mallet after they had refused to drink mugs of urine during an initiation party. Next to it was a feature on a woman from Barnstable, the self-styled Mystic Ysla, who claimed to have used her pyrite runes to discover the identity of the sniper who had been terrorising London for the last seven months. Ysla did not name the gunman, but hinted at his characteristics: a frustrated loner, alienated, marginalised and probably bald.

Simon scanned the foreign news. A new prime minister in Egypt, but the same old government. There was a freeze on foreign debt repayment and the adoption of a two-tier exchange system by South Africa. Christ, what did that even mean? There had been more Iraqi attacks on Iranian oil installations—more air strikes in a war that would never end. And in Kampuchea, Pol Pot had stood down as military commander of the Khmer Rouge. They had been driven from power more than half a decade earlier, but they were still fighting along the Thai border. Still armed; still killing.

There was an article on the Titanic. The wreck had been found at last. A Franco-American expedition had located it after trawling a camera for days above the ocean floor. Where others had failed they succeeded because, rather than look for the wreck itself, they had searched for the debris field. After days of surveying featureless mud, their camera had swooped over a massive iron boiler. This marked a clear trail, a half-mile highway of scattered artefacts, leading to the black carcass of the great ship. There she lay on the muddy ocean floor, 13,000 feet below the surface, waiting in the frigid darkness to be found. Look for the debris and it will always lead you back to the event.

There was a family connection to the world’s most famous maritime disaster. Three months earlier, while Simon was travelling in Asia at his great-grandfather’s expense, Sir Henry Merideth-Smith had died in his sleep in a Bournemouth nursing home, at the towering age of 102. That Sir Henry had lived so long was particularly remarkable, given that at the age of twenty-nine he had survived the sinking of Titanic. During his long life nobody had ever heard him refer to the events of that night, nor explain how he had survived when so many had perished. But his pathological loathing of cold water, one of a number of eccentricities, was generally perceived to be a direct consequence of his ordeal in 1912.

Simon found it hard to imagine his great-grandfather as a young man, floundering in the freezing Atlantic on that April night. He’d always been old, repellently old. But Simon had to hand it to him: he’d had great timing. Sir Henry had been among the first to see the commercial potential of introducing rubber trees into Malaya and had enjoyed the rewards. After thirty years of prosperous plantation life, he’d sold up and returned to the temperate damp of home. It was just before the outbreak of the War and thus he adroitly avoided native nationalists, Japanese invaders and communist insurgents, each of whom were, in turn, to inconvenience the fellow planters he left behind.

Within the dynasty of Sir Henry’s offspring, Simon’s privileged position had conferred advantages and irritations. The old man had always been ready, too ready, to offer advice to his favourite great-grandson. Always he wanted the boy to try harder, win more, become stronger—to be more like him, emulating the drive and thrust that had made the Merideth millions. Sir Henry believed in strength, and remained robust even into his final years. Though Simon remembered how, at their last meeting, his great-grandfather’s mind had wandered towards the East and he seemed once more bothered by heat and mosquitoes. Despite everything, Simon had admired him. But he was irritated at having to return to England for the funeral—for which he’d arrived a day too late. And his irritation was compounded by the news that the large sum which his great-grandfather had bequeathed was tied up in a series of trust funds that lay temporarily beyond his grasp. Sir Henry was reaching out from the grave, insisting that he resume the education he had abandoned five years earlier.

Simon winced with the dull throb of his wrist. He thought again of the Titanic wreck. For years experts had routinely predicted that the extreme cold and darkness of the water would have inhibited almost all decay. But now the reports suggested otherwise. The descent had been violent; she had broken in two as she went down, with much of her superstructure ripping away. The great boilers had torn free and crashed through the plated hull. She had plummeted into the mud, the impact recasting the contours of the sea bed. There, alone in the dark, she had gradually decayed; wood rotting and iron rusting in the black silence. Time was wearing her away. But now, after seventy-three years she had been found. The blurred underwater images were haunting a world that knew Titanic only from shuddering loops of newsreel; a maiden voyage that had come to represent human arrogance and impending calamity.

Someone was calling his name. About fucking time. A large West Indian nurse was calling his name. She was smiling with big, gentle eyes. She would do just fine. She would be soft and motherly. She’d make the pain go away.

*****

By late afternoon Bodkin had completed the weary