'Carbon'

‘CARBON’

A SHORT STORY

BY TIM ROBERTS

Tom walked into the filthy mid-terrace student digs he shared with a handful of fellow ne-er-do-well students. He was tired from his train journey; tired from trying and failing to read the copy of ‘Ulysses’ he had to plough through for a Monday seminar; and tired and emotionally drained from the weekend he had just spent with his family. His pretentious leather waistcoat hung to his hungry bones for dear life as he entered the living room to find his housemates scattered around on sofas and beanbags, surrounded by empty beer bottles and ashtrays brimming with tab-ends. His friend Matty lolled in a threadbare armchair like she was Queen of the Drop-Outs, commandeering the three bar fire which hissed a shushing at Tom not to disturb her as she flopped, dead to the world, a spent spliff nodding in her yellowed fingers.

Tom put down his badge-infested shoulder bag and sat tentatively opposite Matty. He threw a cushion at her to wake her up. She looked about groggily, nursing the cushion.

“Alright?” Tom asked.

“Tom.” Matty wiped the drool from her lips. “When did you get back?”

“Just now.” Tom nodded at the pathetic gas fire. “Nice fire.” he said sarcastically, “Roaring.” He looked about at the desolation around him. “Great welcome home. What the Hell’s wrong with everybody?”

“We’re just all a bit monged, mate.” Matty told him. “Gordon scored some extra strength Skunk from his mates in MethSoc.”

“Jesus. They do know that ‘MethSoc’ is meant to be short for ‘Methodist’, not ‘Methodone Society’, don’t they?” Tom asked.

“You know Gordon’s religion – ‘more ‘Crystal MethSoc’ with a bit of happy clapping thrown in.” Matty got out her rollie tin and started prodding at the contents with her jaundiced fingers. “There’s some left, if you want some?”

“Get thee behind me, Matty.” Tom reminded her. “When are you gonna give up being my serpent?”

“The day you take the apple, dude.” She passed him a beer instead. “Have a more socially acceptable drug in liquid form, then.”

Tom thanked her and drank from the bottle. Matty looked at her mate, judging his mood before asking him how his Christmas was in ‘Merrie England’. He told her it was equally as stressful as New Year in ‘Whiney Wales’ was going to be.

“‘Nan still knackered?” Matty asked him sympathetically.

“Nan knackered. Mum and Dad on the brink of divorce. Finals looming. And now Claire’s gone and dumped me to top it all off.”

“Shit mate, that sucks.” Matty sat up and leaned forward to indicate her concern, holding aloft a bifta to confirm the concern. “How about some Forbidden Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge to make it all go away?”

Tom looked at the reefer. He put down his beer and reached out. Matty grinned and lit the spliff as it crackled and Tom took a huge drag.

“We have touch down!” Matty celebrated Tom’s long-awaited giving in to peer pressure. “Be warned though – this is strong stuff.”

“Will it make me paranoid?” Tom worried.

“No, that’ll be your personality.” She smiled proprietorially at him as he smoked the stuff he said he’d never smoke. “When did you get the boot, then?” she asked with all the sensitivity of a friend who had just initiated Tom into the drugs fraternity.

“Last night.” Tom gasped, handing back the spliff. “Told me to “fuck off” over a fried egg sandwich.”

“Harsh.” Matty took a deep breath as she smoked. “Cheer up, though, plenty more pebbles on the beach. Plenty more fish in the sea.”

“Since when were you so full of clichés?” Tom asked her.

“Not clichés mate. Scientific facts.” Matty was a Physics student but dressed like a ‘Megadeth’ roadie. She forced the cannabis into his hand again and he smoked it. “‘Clichés in the mouths of your Arty Farty mates on your Drama course. But I’m a Physicist, dude. It is a true fact of Natural Science that there are more pebbles on the beach and fish in the sea and leaves on the tree and slugs in the garden and…”

“…Women on the Earth?” Tom put a stop to her drug-fuelled rambling.

“Who needs metaphors?” Matty grinned back at him. “I’m just saying : we’re all just carbon-based life forms when it comes down to it. The Earth’s biomass is 50% carbon and the human body is 18% carbon – second only to Oxygen…”

“Oh, here we go.”

Matty took back the spliff like it was a conversational baton. “Listen – I’m stoned and your mind will be expanded beyond anything you’ve ever experienced when this baby kicks in, so let’s just go with it.”

“But why do we have to debate the Meaning of Life every time you get stoned?” Tom complained. He preferred it that time Matty giggled for hours about Monkey Puzzle Trees.

“Of course we’ve got to discuss the Meaning of Life when stoned.” Matty informed him. “It’s what being a student’s all about.”

“Everyone knows it’s 42 anyway. The Frood says so.”

“Ah, but do you know why it’s 42?”

“Because that’s the age when you stop worrying about the Meaning of Life and just crack on?”

“No – because 42 is a pronic number. Aristotle said so.”

So, Tom thought, he quotes Douglas Adams and Matty comes back at him with Aristotle. Might as well throw the towel in now. And he told her as much with a “Let’s call the whole thing off!”

“No – let’s engage!” she contradicted him. “You never know when it might be the last time.

“But we just go round and round in circles.” he retaliated.

“Take your Nan.”

“I wish someone would.” Tom was still reeling from the bedside vigils that had spoilt his Christmas. “Like God, for instance.”

“Exactly! You’re doing what mankind has done time in memoriam…” Matty malapropped. “…Trying to make sense of the Universe with your Gods and Monsters.” She nodded across at the prostrate Gordon. “…Like Gordon over there…”

“He’s certainly scored some Monster skunk here.” Tom exhaled deeply. “Is it me or does this stuff give you a splitting headache?”

But Matty was still glazing over at Gordon, trying to make sense of her Christian housemate. “…He’s a sensible bloke. He’s gonna be a lawyer, for Dawkins’ sake – he’s not daft.” She tapped at her head with her yellow hands. “But he chooses to compartmentalise his mind with Law and Logic over here and with God and Faith over here. I’ve even seen Scientists do the same thing.” Matty changed tack – nodding across at Conrad on his beanbag. “…Then there’s Conrad. Body beautiful. Everything aesthetics. Corporeal. The material world.”

“Con’s a History student.” Tom reminded her.

“Even that : Cause and Effect.” she philosophised. “But there is none. It’s all just random. Atoms knocking about with no rhyme or reason. Chunks of carbon.” she paused, passing Tom the spliff as she eyed him coolly. “…And then there’s you.”

“We’re not going to do the Art versus Science bout again, are we?”

“Of course we are.”

Matty guessed right that he was already at it. Putting some narrative structure on his dying Nan. Reading things into things. Finding patterns where there aren’t any. She asked him loadedly how many poems he wrote about his Nan on the way back on the train, and he had to concede that he might have scribbled a sonnet or two.

“I knew it!” Matty laughed triumphantly. “Cramming eighty years into ten lines stuck waiting for your connection in Birmingham New Street.”

“Fourteen lines.” he corrected her knowledge of metre. “Ten syllables in each line.”

“That was an iambic pentameter.” Touche.

“Well noticed.” Tom smiled, sharing a high five with Matty along with the spliff that was having a noticeable effect by now. “But that’s Art and Maths together, isn’t it? Meter and rhyme; scansion and stanzas. It all overlaps. Art. Science. It’s all what sounds and looks good to the human eye and brain.”

“It’s all there in Nature if you look close enough. You don’t have to go mucking about with it. Chopping it up. Getting all meta. What’s more true and beautiful than the honeycomb? The human eye? The snowflake?”

“You hate Snowflakes.”

“I hate human Snowflakes.” She paused, changing argumentative gear. “Diamonds then – carbon again, you see?”

“Well that’s the ultimate irony, isn’t it? It’s like the Romantics turned their back on the Regency world with its Industrial Revolution and its mechanisation and its scientific and technological advancements – and what did they turn towards? Nature. But you’re saying there was as much Pythagoras in Blake’s ‘Sick Rose’ or Keats’ ‘Nightingale’ as there was in steam engines and gravity.”

“Gravity. There’s an example. When Isaac Newton discovered gravity what fell on his head? An apple. Not a Tungsten Carbide Drill. An apple. Nature’s first fruit.”

They were back to the Tree of Knowledge again here. ‘Forbidden Fruit’. And Tom had had enough of it. Just like the shared Skunk. He passed the spliff back to Matty. “Here – it’s making me feel woozy and sick. I’m gonna go and unpack.”

“But we haven’t covered the ultimate question yet : what happens to us after we die?” she cajoled him. “…When we shuffle off your mate Shakespeare’s mortal coil?”

Tom stood with his bag, head spinning, as he tried to engage with Matty through the fug in his brain and in the room. “Nothing. We go back to the earth – what says you. Carbon. Wormbait. Even Shakespeare knew enough Science to know that with his “noble dust stopping a bung-hole”.”

“But he still hedged his bets with all that “Undiscovered country” tosh, didn’t he? So that’s it, then? When we die we just stop? Not even any last minute limbo to lounge about and chew the fat with an old pal?”

Tom looked about at his other wasted housemates, distractedly. They still lay motionless in their slumped corners of the sickly sweet living room. “What did you say?” he managed to ask Matty.

“I’m just saying – there could be some kind of … overlap?” Matty hypothesised.

“They haven’t moved.” Tom crossed over to the bodies of Conrad and Gordon. “Conrad and Gordon – they haven’t moved a muscle all the time I’ve been back. Not even breathed.” Tom felt sobered enough to feel for the boys’ pulses. “No pulse. And cold. Matty – they’re dead.”

But there was no answer from Matty. Tom came round to her armchair. Matty was lying back again as before – when Tom came in to the thick living room – her mouth open. Tom felt her pulse. It was freezing. She had been dead for hours.

He sat, stunned. Dizzy. He tried to focus his mind on what might have killed her. Them. The Skunk, perhaps? His face glowed in the orange imitation fire light. He bleeped his mobile sleepily, still trying to work out what could have finished off his housemates. The Emergency Service voice was clipped and businesslike as he asked politely for an ambulance.

“…Yes, it’s my housemates. I think they’ve been … poisoned. Can you hurry? It’s just I think I might be…” Tom dropped the phone. His last thought as he passed out in the poisonous student accommodation, shushed to sleep by the hissing of the gas fire, was that he’d beaten his Nan to it. And how random it all was.

THE END.