#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  SinnerMan turned to me. ‘Listen up, cuz, I gotta make a delivery. My uncle waiting on me. How about we ride together? Take the limo, travel in style, you know what I’m saying? It’ll take a while but you will see things that will blow your nigga mind. You think this is a party? They got a party going on down there like no Irish motherfucker ever witnessed. There’s a cat so old, he can remember the blues from when they was still green.’

  ‘That’s what I’m sayin’,’ agreed Assassin.

  ‘He one scary old motherfucker,’ concurred Evildoer.

  ‘This cat came over on the boats with our grandcestors. You can see the scars where motherfucker broke his slave chains. You want some philosophy? You want some history? Come meet my man, he’ll show you where the hip-hop was born, make you feel like you still a jellybaby in Mama’s belly. Play you blues so old and cold it’ll make your blood freeze.’

  ‘Where is this place?’ I asked.

  ‘South,’ said SinnerMan.

  ‘South’s good,’ I agreed.

  12

  We loaded up on supplies at a petrol station, restocking a booze cabinet cleaned out by party jackers and laying in an impressive stash of emergency snacks and junk food, while Hard Head, who nominated himself chauffeur, gassed the limo. I paid for it all with my Amex Black, the inevitable staff hysteria and selfie requests dampened by SinnerMan glowering with lethal intent. ‘We go dark,’ he warned his posse. ‘No text, no tweet, no selfie, no damn Fakebook Live with the talent here or we gonna have the whole damn country up in our business and not just the po-po. You feeling me, Hard Head?’

  Hard Head looked up sheepishly from where he was tapping into his phone. ‘Aww, I wuz just updating my Insta profile, Sinner,’ he grumbled. ‘You know how many followers our boy got on there?’

  ‘You want to be followed, dope, give your name to the feds,’ growled SinnerMan.

  ‘I tol’ you before, motherfucker, I see any pictures of me in there, I’m a delete your account. Permanently,’ snarled Karnivor.

  ‘I ain’t take pictures of you, cause I don’t want to crack my lens,’ scowled Hard Head, reluctantly tucking his phone away.

  By ten o’clock we were on the road to God Knows Where, the back of the limo degenerating into a rolling den of iniquity, sound system pounding out R’n’B and hip-hop, in-car flatscreen displaying some generic action blockbuster with the sound turned down, SinnerMan blowing clouds of reefer smoke so blue and smoggy you could get high on secondary inhalation while Assassin passed round a crack pipe fashioned from a glass tube and Brillo pad. Karnivor shaped what was left of my coke into a large spiral, chopping and scraping with compulsive intensity and unable to disguise his irritation whenever anyone snorted a section of his elaborate design. Evildoer, despite his protests, was assigned the task of following in the Mitsubishi. I was so wasted, all I could do was lay back and look at the girls, hand selected by SinnerMan from a dozen volunteers. Bountiful and her equally stacked homie Azure were pressed up against each other, asses shuffling on the leather seats, grooving mock-lasciviously to the beats like a low-rent lesbian floorshow at a mobile lap-dancing club. Their scrawny, doe-eyed friend Ella-X curled up against me, false white nails idly scratching my thigh while she asked endless questions, apparently not even expecting answers, just excited to be touching the hem of someone who had breathed the same air as her celebrity sheet pin-ups: ‘So what’s Cristal like? Have you really met Premier Cru? How about D’Bonair? He’s so hot …’ Names of stars tripped off her tongue and I grunted whenever I recognised one, which was enough to keep her happy.

  SinnerMan leaned in and handed the spliff to me. My senses were so scrambled I kept alighting on one thing after another, sucked into a bass beat and blown out the other side by a snatch of conversation, honing in on Bountiful’s bouncing breasts then free-falling into the TV screen where the action mixed with the music and guns fired slo-mo bullets rippling across the limo and into my skull, till I snatched myself back with a shudder, took the spliff and inhaled deeply, because I didn’t want to appear weak in front of the gangstas, the kind of street hoodlums I dreamed of hanging with as a kid. I sucked my craving for approval deep into my lungs and let it course through my bloodstream, breaking out of my skin in a prickly sweat.

  ‘Everybody just tryin’ to be on top of that pedestal, that’s all it is,’ SinnerMan was saying as I tuned into his low, rumbling monologue. ‘But there ain’t no top. Cause once you get there somebody’s comin’ up behind you. Just get your money and keep movin’, that’s my truth. It don’t mean nothin’, cuz, don’t mean nothin’.’

  He had taken off his jacket and shirt, and was sitting in a vest that revealed a thick, muscular body going to fat, covered in black etched tattoos of winding snakes, snarling tigers and roaring lions. ‘One plus one is two in any language,’ he continued. ‘That’s what truth is. It’s the same wherever you go. The truth is indisputable. The truth is universal. And the truest truth is unspoken, it’s just lived out, you know what I’m sayin’?’ The animals moved with the ripples of his biceps, and as I stared the voice seemed to be coming from the mouth of the lion. ‘A superior being is known as something that’s survived, and it’s smart, inventive and attuned to the planet,’ quoth the beast. ‘Cause if you losing touch with the planet you thinking you better than the planet itself, which is impossible, you was brought from this planet right here and you can’t defeat the laws of nature.’

  ‘Have you met Chastity Lock?’ wondered Ella-X.

  ‘I kissed Chastity,’ I grunted.

  ‘No way! That’s all-the-way hot,’ gasped Ella-X, whose false nails were raking across my crotch.

  ‘Man kissed Chastity Lock,’ yelped Assassin, who was attempting to pour champagne down the front of Bountiful’s shirt.

  ‘Fuck you, nigga,’ screeched Bountiful.

  ‘Lick it up, bitch,’ sniggered Assassin, nudging at Azure, who pressed her face in Bountiful’s cleavage till the car took a bounce and they slipped off the seat and collapsed giggling on the floor.

  ‘The black man is the original people of this planet,’ continued SinnerMan, rolling on his own sweet way as if assured everyone was paying attention. ‘If you don’t believe it, you go through your history. Lock yourself in a library and you will find out the hard way.’ Smoke billowed from his nostrils and mouth as he spoke, making fantastic twisted shapes. ‘I ain’t saying we superior, I’m not prejudiced. You can take superiority through force, or you can take superiority through nature. Everybody’s dominated in certain ways. But we are the original people. Before us there was nothin’ but—’

  ‘Zero!’ roared the black ink lion.

  ‘What?’ I snapped, jerking awake. Where had I been? I could feel a pulsing in my loins and looked down to see Ella-X’s head buried in my crotch, soft lips and tongue working hard. She looked up with big eager-to-please eyes to see if she was doing the right thing. What age was she, I wondered? I hoped she was legal. I wanted to tell her to stop, I wasn’t worth her adoration, but I felt as powerless as a sleepwalker, unable to scratch the surface of conscious volition. Further up the limo, about a million miles away, her friends were squatting around the crack pipe, greedily sucking their own poison. Bountiful had divested herself of her wet shirt and Assassin pawed her breasts.

  ‘The Chinese the only people who kep’ they culture,’ Karnivor was saying. SinnerMan nodded, eyes closed, in a cloud of dreams. But Karnivor wasn’t talking to him. His eyes were locked on mine. ‘They dint get Americanised, they dint get Irishinised, they dint get Britishised, they stuck with they culture. They dint get stripped of nothing, they jus’ kept it. Mos’ peoples has been manipulated outta they culture. Look at you, fake-ass Irish nigga, where’s you culture? I don’t see no whiskey and potato, all I see is US penny candy, you nothin’ but glucose, fructose and corn syrup. You artificial colouring, faggot. Glazed shit. Agent orange. Sugar and poison, makin’ all the kids hyper and stupid.’

  I was flat on my back, under att
ack. It had been a while since I had been exposed to such naked hostility. These days, I assumed people mostly bitched behind my back. What was making it particularly confusing was the warm sensation surging through my loins. I felt like I was about to explode and disintegrate. ‘Fucking culture bullshit fuck,’ I croaked, struggling to string a response together. ‘The whole fucking planet is carpet-bombed with American shit, fucking cowboys in Iraq and Mickey Mouse in your precious China. Fuck. I grew up eating Big Macs with Bart Simpson, are you saying I can’t take a piece of that great big fat apple pie and eat it? Oh Jesus.’ I had reached escape velocity. ‘We’re all fucking Americans now.’ And I came in Ella-X’s mouth, brain fizzing and shattering.

  ‘That’s the truth, right there, cuz,’ growled SinnerMan. ‘My culture was stripped. My grandcestors was brought to America hundreds of years ago, we was slaves, we was stripped of language, we was stripped of everything. Now we just trying to get what’s coming, grasp the things that we is owed.’

  Ella-X looked up and wiped her lips.

  ‘Shit, you swallow that, bitch?’ sniggered Assassin. ‘Why dint you tell me you a meat-eater?’ This cracked him up.

  ‘I eat nothin’ that is dead,’ intoned SinnerMan, eyes shut, head rocking back and forth. ‘No dead birds, no dead cows, no dead flesh.’

  ‘You eat dead vegetables,’ Bountiful piped up.

  ‘Vegetables don’t die, woman,’ growled SinnerMan.

  ‘You eat eggs,’ said Azure, who was wrapping her fingers through SinnerMan’s dreadlocks.

  ‘I don’t eat fertilised eggs. I told you I don’t eat dead flesh. What you tryin’ to test me for?’

  ‘This is not a test,’ I mumbled to myself. Lying back, looking up through a passenger window, I could see an ocean of stars in a black sky. I was slipping into another world. Where did I come from, I wondered? I was staring down the wrong end of a telescope, everything was tiny and faraway. The past just wasn’t talked about in my house. There were no photos. No stories. No gay remembrances of happy families. It was strange now that I thought about it. I was self-invented, an orphan adopted by Elvis and Marilyn. Before that, there’s nothing. And after that, nothing but trouble. That’s when things came into focus, just when you might wish they would blur. The ripe beery smell of my old man’s breath when he’d been drinking, rambling on talking to himself, conversation zig-zagging from one point to another until no one can follow him but he doesn’t care, he just keeps right on jabbering away. Not that he was drunk very often but when he was, watch out. Cathal Kelly, that fucking schoolyard bully, I can still see his leering swagger in every threatening stranger, feel his rough knuckles rubbing on my scalp, hear his sing-song taunts, ‘You gonna run home crying to Mammy now? Oh, I forgot, you don’t have one, smelly brown shit.’ Smelly! Oh, the fucking shame. That pungent pile of clothes I used to pluck my school uniform out of, searching for a pair of socks and pants I hadn’t worn too many times before cause somehow the laundry never got done in our house, the dishes didn’t get washed, the sheets didn’t get changed, everything reeked of disinterest and neglect, of boys’ sweat and my old man’s fags. That endless chain of roll-your-owns that he would sit and patiently assemble, spitting on his fingers and licking at the papers, picking at the strands of tobacco, too fucking trashed after a day scraping and bowing to do anything but slump vacantly in front of the TV and chain-smoke. ‘You boys go out and have some fun, Daddy’s tired.’ Daddy was always tired.

  Like I could go out anyway without getting more aggro, fucking gangs of little racists chasing me down tenement alleys and across fields, tossing dried dog shit and puerile invective, the same fuckers who turned up at The Zero Sums homecoming gig, wanting me to sign their girlfriends’ posters. ‘Ah, those were the days, Zero, when we all used to play round the back of the estate, eh?’ Those were the fucking days. I wanted to bite off their noses, piss in their eyes and fuck their girlfriends in front of them, but, of course, I signed the memorabilia and thanked them for coming.

  I got Cathal Kelly, though, in geography class, in front of everybody. I’d had my eye on the paperweight globe for a while. I liked the heft of it, I sensed it could do some damage. There was a map of South America tacked on the board and stiff old Mr Burns was looking right at me as he talked about the geological history of the region, as if I might have some special inside knowledge of plate movements in the Andes. I was waiting for Cathal to open his smart mouth and when he did, I grabbed that thing and swung it, cracked his fucking skull with a noise you could have sampled for a snare drum. I can still see the mottled skin of Mr Burns, that sanctimonious old prick, ashen-faced as I ran riot in his classroom, kicking over tables and chairs, screaming who cares, who cares where anyone comes from, we’re all stuck in this shithole together. And the hushed voices in the head’s office as they looked over at me then turned to gather in a huddle, like I didn’t know what they were saying: the poor boy hasn’t got over his loss. What fucking loss? How can you lose something you never even knew you had?

  Paddy was called in to take me home that day. My big brother, Patrick Jesus Noone. Neither of us had much luck when it came to names. He was three years older than me … and still is. He might be a hotel proprietor now while I am a world fucking superstar who made joint number one with Cristal in Spacebook’s poll of the Sexiest People on the Planet but, when it is just us together, he is Big Brother and I know my place. I remember asking Paddy about our mother and he would look at me and say, ‘Daddy doesn’t want to talk about her.’

  ‘I’m not asking Daddy, I’m asking you,’ I whined.

  Oh, I got into a whole dumptruck of trouble as per usual. But one punishment blurs into another after a while, so I couldn’t tell you for sure if that was the time I got spanked, whacked, screamed and sworn at, stretched on a rack and hung, drawn and quartered or if it was just my old man sighing and giving me a look of complete and utter disappointment. That same old weary-eyed gaze that said, you’ve fucking let me down again just like I knew you would, you little shit, my cross, my burden, bane of my fucking life.

  As for Cathal Kelly, he was sent to hospital for an X-ray and returned with a bandaged head and black eyes. They said nothing was broken but he and I knew different.

  That’s right, Cathal, open your fucking wet mouth and say it again—

  ‘Jakes, fuck! Lose the stash.’

  I don’t know how long the home movies had been playing on the inside of my eyelids. I pulled groggily around. White light was flooding the car, which was cruising slowly to a halt. Ella-X had moved off, I noticed, somehow replaced in the crook of my arm by Bountiful.

  ‘How’m’I lose it? Ain’t nowhere to flush,’ Assassin was yelling. ‘Yo, yo, Zero, where’s the shitter in this fuckin’ zine?’ There was an air of wild panic. Assassin was pulling his trousers up while simultaneously trying to gather his crack pipe and bag of rocks. Ella-X was raising her head next to him, wiping her lips.

  ‘Out the window, nigga,’ growled SinnerMan, waving his arms in the blue clouds of smoke. ‘And kill the fuckin’ music.’

  ‘They ain’t blind, fuck, we busted, we busted,’ wailed Assassin.

  The limo stopped on the side of a dark road, black hills rising beyond us. Something was casting a pool of light all around the car. ‘Turn off the ignition and step out of the vehicle,’ crackled an electronic voice. Hard Head had the chauffeur screen pulled back. ‘Wha’m’I do?’

  ‘I ain’t goin’ back in da house,’ said Karnivor. He had something blunt and metallic in his hand. With a lurch of horror, I realised it was a gun.

  ‘What the fuck, guys?’ I yelped.

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ commanded SinnerMan, peering out the rear window of the limousine. ‘It’s police. This tinted, right, they can’t see in?’ He too had a gun in one hand.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ I said. Bountiful was scrabbling round on her hands and knees now, looking for her shirt.

  ‘It’s a state trooper. He’s on his own,’ noted SinnerMan
.

  ‘We gonna cap him?’ asked Assassin. He had a gun out too. ‘Shoot a cop, that’s federal, that’s the chair, right there, no plea.’ He looked rigid with fear. The girls all gathered at the front of the limo, huddling silently together.

  ‘Fuck right, I’ma cap him,’ snapped Karnivor. ‘No way I’ma goin’ down on this joyride.’

  ‘Driver, step out of the car, please,’ the state trooper ordered through his loud hailer.

  ‘Wha’m’I do?’ Hard Head bleated.

  ‘Get out the car and show him your paper. Don’t do nothin’ stupid,’ ordered SinnerMan.

  ‘I ain’t got no licence,’ whimpered Hard Head.

  ‘Put the guns away,’ I said. My heart was racing and my mouth was dry. I was supposed to be in my hotel bed right now, clutching a pile of gongs and dreaming of tomorrow’s schedule, not getting dragged into a gunfight with a posse of gangstas. What was I thinking of? But I had seen Beasley, Tiny Tony and Donut handle police checks before. The trick was to play it like any other meet ’n’ greet. ‘I can take care of this,’ I insisted, straightening my clothes.

  SinnerMan glanced around at his posse, then nodded.

  ‘Fuck us over and I’ma shoot yo fake ass first,’ snarled Karnivor.

  ‘Put it away,’ said SinnerMan, slipping his own gun in his trousers.

  ‘You’re my manager,’ I said to SinnerMan. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘You know my name, cuz,’ growled SinnerMan.

  ‘Your name, man, tell me your real name,’ I insisted.

  ‘Brian,’ said SinnerMan, with obvious reluctance. ‘Brian Sweeney.’

  ‘Fuck, man, you’re more Irish than me,’ I said, opening the limo door and stepping into the police lights.

  ‘Do NOT move, sir,’ insisted the trooper. ‘Raise your hands, please. Only the driver—’ There was a pause. I blinked into the white light. I could make out the police car, and an indistinct figure standing next to it. ‘Sir, could you step towards me, please?’ asked the trooper, his tone notably altered. ‘Heck …’ He started to laugh, a weird electronic sound amplified by the loudhailer.