#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  And less of the fucking language, as my old man would say. I always did have a bit of a Parental Advisory sticker mouth. My English teacher, Ms Pruitt, wrote in my report that I had a flair for language but all of it was bad. When my old man read that he went thermonuclear and he had a flair for language that would have made Ms Pruitt’s ears melt. But I mean, sometimes nothing hits the spot like a true blue fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

  Beasley broke into Kilo’s excuses, holding his right index finger aloft, six inches from the end of my nose. ‘Is this going to be an issue? You’ve got to focus.’ He took some training from a hypnotist once and always used the same tricks to assert authority.

  ‘I’m focused, I’m focused, fuck’s sake, I’m fucking focused,’ I whined. ‘Why the fuck aren’t we moving?’

  My unflappable PR, Flavia Sharpe, had broken through the scrum and was rapping a bony knuckle on our tinted windows.

  ‘The world is watching,’ Beasley reminded me as he opened the door and flashes popped.

  And then the limo earned its stretch, filling up with people, my people, so many of my fucking people that I relented and waved Spooks McGrath and his crew in. The world was always fucking watching. That was the whole point. One of these days it was going to watch me taking a dump, get an anal probe and shove it up my sphincter, check out if there was any truth in the rumour that I had Penelope’s name tattooed on my liver.

  ‘Welcome to my humble abode,’ I declared, magnanimously. ‘There’s champagne on ice if anyone’s got the stomach – at this time of the morning. H2O for the wetwipes among us – I’ll have one of those, thank you…’ (At this point I had to fend off offers of mineral water, selecting a bottle proffered by a smiling woman I didn’t recognise, looking impishly dishevelled in a two-sizes-too-small dress topped off by a shock of unkempt hair dyed a near reflective blond) ‘…And in case you’ve missed breakfast, I think you will find I have been supplied with an excellent bunch of bananas, though I’ve no idea why.’

  ‘It’s on your rider,’ said Kilo, a touch sulkily, I thought, maybe because I didn’t take his water bottle.

  ‘I don’t even like bananas,’ I snorted.

  And everyone laughed. Like I said, your own employees are an easy crowd. Someone was quietly snapping pictures, and not my usual photographer, Cornelius, who had done the limo ride too many times to care, and was watching streets glide by with an air of ambient awareness, as if, should some particular juxtaposition of light, form and content manifest, he would suddenly spring into action, which, in fact, I had seen him do many times before. I liked having Cornelius around, cause he took pictures that made me look like the person I imagined myself to be, rather than the person I saw in the mirror. Not every photographer can do that, which is why this interloper, a small, leathery-skinned Latino with a stupid soul patch goatee and a fish eye lens was making me agitated. I hadn’t even seen his portfolio, for fuck’s sake.

  Sensing my displeasure (which was, after all, part of her job), Flavia affected introductions. A team from The Times was travelling with us to make sure our US invasion got covered back in the UK. The blonde was feature writer Kitty Queenan, who smiled demurely and said, ‘You won’t even notice we’re here.’ I doubted that, somehow. Her eyes were lasers. Her byline seemed familiar, which must have meant she once wrote something nasty about me.

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been cheaper for your parents just to buy a cat?’ I said, by way of making conversation.

  ‘Kitty is a common form of Katherine,’ said Flavia, instinctively smoothing away my habitual rudeness.

  Kitty herself was unperturbed, looking at me with sporting amusement, like a gladiator sizing up a lippy Christian, if you can imagine an overweight gladiator in an ill-fitting lacy dress. ‘It’s a pen name,’ she said. ‘My friends call me Pussy.’

  I knew who the enemy was now. Queen Bitch was her column; she specialised in hyperbolic put-downs and never let facts get in the way of a good pun. What the fuck was Flavia doing letting this monster loose behind the lines? She was scribbling in her notebook, which made me wonder what I had done that she found worthy of recording. I’d have to deal with her later. The photographer was Bruno Gil, a New Yorker stringer. As soon as Flavia mentioned the magic words ‘We have picture approval’, I lost interest. Snap away, buddy. If I didn’t like what I saw, I wouldn’t approve a single frame and The Times could make do with one of Cornelius’s iconic shots just like everyone else.

  Flavia was running through my itinerary. It wasn’t good, my day parcelled into fifteen-minute blocks covering six A4 pages, each and every block filling me with silent dread. Flavia was a stick insect styled like Dracula’s lawyer (sleek, tailored black with non-specific religious trimmings) but she exuded imperturbability, which is what Beasley liked in the people he hired, the sense that no matter how wild the hurricane was blowing, with enough hairspray everything would stay in place. She was usually surrounded by a coven of midget witches, all, in fact, frighteningly competent PR girls for Sharpe Practice, adept in the dark arts of media manipulation. I wanted to ask Flavia what the gossip sites were saying about Penelope and Troy in the jungle. She would give it to me straight, or at least make it sound palatable in her silken English tones. But I couldn’t raise the topic in front of the vulture from The Times, still scratching away at her notebook, as if a ten-minute limo ride was the stuff of War and Peace. So I listened to Flavia’s midget assistants recite their litany of evil, complete with radio station call signs, genre specifications and time allotments: ‘WRDW in Philly, top forty station, ten minutes with Joe and Steph, we’ve spoken to them before, they’re easy’; ‘WFLC in Miami, adult hot, five minutes with the T2 girls, Julie and Tamara, flirty and fun’; ‘WNYU, New York college radio, up to fifteen minutes with Tyrone Adamski, he’s going to want to talk about music…’

  ‘Not music, God forbid!’ I snorted.

  They smiled indulgently and continued churning out press-conference arrangements, one-on-one interviews, TV slots. I stared out the window, craning my neck to quietly marvel at this towering metropolis glittering in the morning sun, a dizzying spectacle that always set my country heart aflutter. New York’s skyline spun me all the way back to the cliffs of Moher, day trips by the Irish seaside. I was momentarily overloaded by the vertical rush and horizontal buzz, a stream of bodies rising from subways, dodging traffic, snatching cigarettes, yelling into phones, grabbing coffee and pastries and newspapers with stories about me and Penelope and fucking Troy fucking Anthony. I tried to let it all wash over me.

  ‘Donut asked if we can absolutely ring-fence rehearsal time,’ interjected Eugenie Arrowsmith, Beasley’s personal assistant. Duncan ‘Donut’ McCann, my perpetually stressed tour manager, was given to complaining I spent more time talking about music than making it, which, of course, was true. With days to go before showtime, we still hadn’t managed a full dress rehearsal of the whole set. Actually, that’s not fair, I am sure the band and crew had been through it dozens of times without me.

  ‘I thought we could bring some international press over for that, give them a bit of colour,’ suggested Flavia.

  ‘Donut really wants Zero’s undivided attention,’ said Eugenie.

  ‘Everybody wants Zero’s undivided attention,’ retorted Flavia.

  That’s right, talk about me as if I’m not here.

  We had only got as far as page two of my schedule when the limo pulled up at FNY studios, where the sidewalk was cordoned off for photographers and Zeromaniacs. They had probably hot-footed it over the few blocks from the hotel, New York being quicker by foot than limo. Not that I was ever allowed to walk the streets for fear of spontaneous outbreaks of civil insurrection or something that wasn’t covered by insurance.

  An FNY news crew was on hand to shoot my arrival, so we gave it the full service, stony-faced security clearing a path as I ran the gauntlet, touched some hands, scribbled on scraps of paper and allowed myself to be whisked through revolving doors into a vast atrium of air
-conditioned sanctuary. I paused in the filtered light to look back at the hysteria unfolding soundlessly on the other side of reinforced glass. For one brief moment, it felt like they were the monkeys in a cage, not me. Then a door exploded open as one tearful Zeromaniac broke the cordon, eluded a uniformed doorman and came screaming across the polished floor. One of my security grunts, moving quicker than I would have credited, took her down. It was not a fair contest. She was a girl not much younger than me, suddenly embarrassed and scared to find herself pinned beneath a creature the size of a sumo wrestler. She stretched out a hand to try and catch her spectacles as they skittered across the tiles.

  Tiny Tony began to move me away from the action but I was transfixed. What forces were at work that could detach a girl from her ordinary inhibitions, her sense of herself in the world, and turn her into a quivering hysteric? Was I responsible for this illusion or just part of it, equally in thrall to the music and marketing, the lights and smoke and mirrors, the power of suggestion, the demands of role play? Don’t you people know by now that the famous are just like you, they shit like you, spit like you, piss like you, and lie in bed at night wishing they were someone else, like you?

  She was a pretty girl, someone I might have been too shy to ask for a dance just a few years ago but maybe, if we had got to talking, she would have let me walk her to the bus stop, and we would have discovered what books we both read and what music we loved and where we dreamed life might take us, and who knows, who knows? She reminded me of Eileen, just a little. But there she was, spreadeagled, making whimpering noises and blushing furiously. I was the one who should have been embarrassed. I broke free to pick up her glasses, then waving away the grunt, bent down and helped her to her feet, walking her back to the entrance while she wept uncontrollably.

  The FNY TV crew caught the whole thing, and it was swiftly edited together to provide a dramatic clip to introduce me on air. ‘I bet that kind of thing happens to you all the time?’ winked our host, Gordy, the perma-tanned, blow-dried, silver-haired anchorman of the top-rated East Coast breakfast show.

  ‘Only when I come here,’ I twinkled back. ‘She was looking for you. She wanted me to ask for your autograph.’

  He laughed but I could see the idea appealed. He was seated on an excessively bright orange couch, next to his new sidekick Mindy (Gordy got through co-anchors quicker than I got through personal assistants, and probably for the same reason: an inability to keep his dick in his pants).

  With big hair, dimples and lively smile, Mindy was a weather girl riding the updraft, an impression compounded by newly installed breast enhancements. Mindy played not-quite-as-dumb-as-I-look blonde to Gordy’s statesman-about-the-house, tossing jokey remarks and laughing in all the right places, but there was a raptness beneath the make-up. She was making me nervous as we faced each other across a small potted plant and MacBook perched on a modernist glass table, items intended to symbolise the show’s unreliable mix of hard news and cosy chit-chat. Only a glass wall separated the studio from the busy news floor. By some trick of lighting it glowed white and opaque until a story broke, when it would gradually become transparent, revealing a vast room full of journalists frowning into computers and gesturing at rolling footage on flatscreens.

  Gordy famously made his name in the thick of the action, donning flak jacket and helmet to file reports from war zones. But in his new domestic niche, he was savvy enough to understand that it was early, guests were doing him a favour turning up at this hour and viewers were only half awake. He asked the kind of questions you could answer with a bashful grin and well-honed anecdote. Softball, they call it. Mindy was a loose cannon, though. I could tell she was dying to ask about Penelope and it wasn’t long before she lobbed one in. ‘With girls throwing themselves at you wherever you go, that must put pressure on maintaining a relationship.’

  ‘I have my security guards to keep them at bay,’ I smiled back.

  ‘As we’ve just seen,’ grinned Gordy, who felt it necessary to underline gags in case they went over the sleepy heads and low IQs of his target audience.

  ‘And what about Penelope, does she need security?’ smiled Mindy.

  ‘Penelope can look after herself,’ I smiled back.

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ said Mindy, raising one eyebrow knowingly, a look she must have practised for fucking hours in the mirror. Fuck them, fuck them all, grinning at you while they toss grenades. I noticed Gordy didn’t bother underlining that one. I wanted to kick over the fucking table and dump the ridiculous potted plant on Mindy’s head. I wanted to let out a banshee howl that would shatter the glass wall and carry on the wind all the way from New York to the Amazon jungle, where Penelope and Troy fucking Anthony would look up to see the burning eyes of monkeys gathering in the trees and know, with a chill in their filthy hearts, that I was on to them. But instead I winked at Mindy and said, ‘Do you think you could make it past my security? You look like you’ve got a few moves.’

  ‘Oh, I used to be a cheerleader, I’ve definitely got moves,’ she flirted, moving Gordy to interject with a jocular, ‘Come on, you kids, this is a family show.’

  ‘“Come On, You Kids”,’ I said. ‘That’s genius. That’s gonna be the title of my next song.’ And I started to sing, ‘Come on, you kids, let’s rock and roll, but keep it clean, it’s a family show,’ while Gordy and Mindy laughed indulgently and we were best of friends again, filling airtime until, at a prearranged signal, Gordy invited me to perform my latest single.

  ‘I actually didn’t know Zero played piano,’ wittered Mindy, just to say something while I crossed the studio floor, as if she had only just noticed the fucking great instrument set up by my advance crew. Oh this fatuous fucking showbiz universe, this brain-numbing entertainment game.

  ‘I’m not just a pretty face,’ I said, sitting down and laying my fingers on the keys, making the studio resonate with a deep, satisfying C chord. Nine million units of my debut solo album shifted worldwide, I played every fucking instrument on there, and still I got this crap. Didn’t these people ever read the credits?

  ‘He’s a very talented young man,’ said Gordy, as if he actually had the faintest idea what he was talking about. Gordy, who looked like he still listened to Andy Williams, maybe a little Neil Diamond if he was in the mood to get racy. Gordy, born middle-aged and proud of it.

  ‘This one’s for you, Gordy,’ I said, and ripped into ‘Never Young’, attacking it like the piano was a weapon of mass destruction, like the song could annihilate the world and rebuild it in its own image, right every wrong, end every war, cure cancer. Sometimes it happens. You lose yourself. And you know that is as good as it gets, you might never sing that song so well again. But as I hurled myself into the second chorus, I looked up to see Gordy staring into the middle distance, finger to his earpiece, mouthing something to his invisible controllers. Then the white glass wall slowly became translucent, revealing industrious figures in the newsroom. The floor manager was waving for me to wind up. I just kept playing, they could turn me down in the mix, the fuckers.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to interrupt Zero for news from Colombia,’ announced Gordy, putting on his gravest face as he stared into his autocue. ‘Reports are coming in of a second earthquake in the region, dealing a severe blow to aid efforts for the orphans whose plight has touched the world.’

  Next to him, Mindy had taken on the demeanour of a saint in torment. ‘Those poor children,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s go to our man at the MedellÍn orphan camp …’

  Those poor fucking children. I executed a dramatic descent back to the C and closed the lid of the piano. I hate leaving a piece of music unresolved.

  4

  ‘That went well, I think,’ said Flavia. ‘It hit all the spots. Great opening footage. You were charming, sexy – did you catch Mindy blushing, poor dear – it was a little bit edgy and you wrapped it up with a splendid performance of your song—’

  ‘Half a fucking song,’ I snapp
ed.

  ‘Half a song is more than enough at this time of morning,’ said Flavia, who had Beasley’s attention. ‘It is not a music show, it’s short-attention-span chat, and the biggest sin is to give viewers an excuse to go and make a cup of tea. The MedellÍn thing was great, really. Newsy and dramatic, people will remember it. A number of stations have been cutting “Never Young” with disaster footage and something like this will drive that connection home, give the whole thing the zeitgeist factor.’

  Beasley, who had just got through threatening a hapless TV producer with a lawsuit, looked thoughtful. ‘You could be onto something,’ he murmured, whereupon the minions all started falling over themselves to second that motion.

  It wasn’t the fucking orphans that bothered me, though. I waved Kilo towards the toilets, stationing a meathead outside with strict instructions not to let anyone else in. Even superstars are entitled to privacy when they take a piss.

  ‘Rack up a line,’ I instructed Kilo. ‘Make it a high-speed railway line. Make it the fucking Tokyo bullet train.’

  I was never sure how much Beasley knew about the full extent of services Kilo provided, but not much got past His Satanic Majesty, so it was perfectly possible narcotic provision was part of the job description. I asked Beasley once why we had hired a Hindu homo from Hoxton and he said it was because I kept screwing all my female assistants and then requiring Beasley to replace them. Which was fair enough.