#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  ‘That’s one bad motherfucker,’ whispered SinnerMan.

  ‘Watch your mouth,’ said Uncle Jimmy.

  ‘My mother died and left me reckless, my daddy died and left me wild,’ Honeyboy called out. ‘You gotta treat me better, or it be your funeral, and my trial.’

  Honeyboy’s arrival onstage caused a commotion. Everything was bent out of shape, everyone seemed crazier and drunker, and that included me. Hands grabbed at my coat, spinning me about, voices blurred around me. Hey, Zero. Zero. Zero motherfucker. Seems I’d been rumbled. I found myself in the centre of the room, propped up by complete strangers, directly in front of Honeyboy, who was seated at the microphone, guitar across his lap. The band were poised and ready. A hush descended, electric with anticipation. ‘This is for all my children,’ croaked Honeyboy, staring right at me. ‘Wherever they may be.’ Then the ancient bluesman let out a raw-throated, blood-curdling, death-rattling, spirit-summoning hoodoo howl that ripped right through me. The crowd erupted in a body-crashing frenzy as the dirty riff took hold. ‘Come here little fella, come sit on Daddy’s knee,’ he roared. I was being buffeted about but Honeyboy kept me in the range of his evil eye. ‘I tell you the truth, cause truth will set you free.’ I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear Honeyboy’s truth but I was powerless to stop him. ‘Somebody’s gonna get hurt and it won’t be me.’ And he howled like a werewolf racked with bloodlust. The room was spinning but everywhere I looked there was Honeyboy’s eye. It was staring out of the walls and the ceiling. It was glaring up from the floor. It was scowling at me from the single light bulb.

  Took care of your brother Billy, took care of sister Mary too,

  Took care of your cheatin’ mama, you know I did what I had to do,

  Now somebody’s gonna get hurt and it might be you.

  I lurched and staggered, barely staying upright. Hands pushed me away. Teeth bared in feral grimaces.

  Why d’you come down here, why’n’tcha let me be?

  You ought to lock that door, you better throw away the key

  Somebody’s gonna get hurt and it won’t be me.

  I tried to make my way to the door but someone held onto me tight. ‘I’m’a like that coat, Irish,’ Karnivor whispered in my ear, tugging at the arms of my frock coat till it worked off my shoulders. I stumbled to the floor as he slipped the $5000-dollar garment onto himself. ‘You won’t need this where you’re goin’, clown.’ The music raged like a storm around the dance floor, a gale force blast picking everybody up and tossing them about.

  There’s a black ghost rising, there’s a ship sailing with no captain or crew,

  There’s just you and me and the devil and the old deep blue,

  Well, somebody’s gonna get hurt and it might be you.

  I lurched across the pitching floor, clawing my way to the exit. Hands grabbed me and spun me around. By the time I got my bearings, my coat was vanishing through the front door. I threw myself after Karnivor, snatching at the hem and tumbling over the porch, till I was kneeling outside in the dirt, looking up into a small circular black hole. I blinked as the barrel of Karnivor’s gun came into focus.

  ‘Might be you got SinnerMan fooled but I ain’t gonna be your fuckin’ bitch,’ he screamed. ‘You must think we all dumbass niggas fucked up on rock so little wigga can play gangsta. Where you be without the streets, MTV? Never Young, motherfucker? You ain’t never gonna get old.’

  My mouth was a desert. My heart was a volcano. A tsunami of blood crashed through my veins. The world shrank to a single thought: what a stupid way to die. I closed my eyes.

  I felt the ground open up beneath me. I was tumbling through the universe, stars beneath my feet, galaxies unfolding, supernovas exploding, my whole being separating into cosmic dust and the last thing I saw … the very last thing I saw … was a distant constellation coalescing into a face, so familiar, so strange, so beautiful …

  ‘Mother?’ I whimpered.

  But the stars faded. I opened my eyes. I was kneeling in front of the house. Karnivor was standing in my coat by the limo, next to SinnerMan. The lights were on and the passenger door open.

  ‘Should have stayed where you was safe, MTV,’ laughed Karnivor.

  I looked helplessly at SinnerMan. He shrugged and climbed into the limo, which was already occupied by his posse. Karnivor shut the door behind them and the vehicle gently eased off, Hard Head behind the wheel.

  ‘Hey!’ I yelled, jumping to my feet. The fuckers were stealing my car. I started to run after it but I was caught in a blinding flare of bright white light as the Mitsubishi came roaring towards me. Evildoer spun the wheel at the last possible moment, dirt and gravel flying in my face, the wind of the speeding car gusting across me.

  And then I was alone beneath the stars.

  ‘Fuck,’ I sighed. I stood in my jeans and T-shirt looking at Uncle Jimmy’s juke joint, twinkling with fairy lights and vibrating to the blues, wondering what I was supposed to do now. I didn’t want to go back into Honeyboy’s malignant orbit. But where else was I supposed to go? I looked down the dark road, stretching to an infinity of blackness. I guess I’d have to walk.

  As I wearily turned to leave, a voice called out. ‘Yo, don’t move, motherfucker.’

  Stoneface was standing on the porch. ‘We got unfinished business.’

  I contemplated a dash for the trees. I might just be able to make the cover of darkness before Stoneface caught me but I was so drunk and tired, I didn’t even have the will to save myself. The grim-faced drug dealer came striding towards me, hand reaching into his jacket. Here we go, I thought. People were queuing up to kill me today. That’s the price of popularity. My stomach clenched involuntarily, as if all those gym-toned muscles would help me now.

  Stoneface pulled out a pen and shoved a beer mat into my hand. ‘You weren’t gonna split without signing something for my daughter, were you? Her name’s Jewel. Make it nice and personal.’

  My hand was shaking as I scrawled, ‘To Jewel, it’s been a pleasure doing business with your daddy. Love, Zippo.’

  ‘All right,’ said Stoneface, approvingly. ‘Nice doing business with you, too.’

  We shook hands awkwardly. He turned back to the house and I started walking down the road.

  14

  I walked into the town of Siren Creek, Pop. 643, at thirteen minutes past seven by my Patek Philippe Rose Gold Nautilus watch, the luminous dial of which was all I had to light my way for the first pitch-black hour of my hike. The temperature had dropped, the road kept rising, I was cold and tired and frightened and locked into frenzied mental ping-pong, cursing my stupidity and fantasising alternative endings, the same wretched thoughts bouncing back and forth and back and forth until my mind had run me ragged. Shame, shame, shame, sang the evil chorus line. How long have you been shooting blanks, bad boy? All those gangsta dance moves, all that CGI martial artistry, all the fame and all the applause, and just one look down the barrel of a gun and you turn into a little bitty baby boy crying for his mummy. You fake. You loser. You … know how it goes.

  But somehow, as a fuzz of dancing particles began to fracture the darkness, and the faint outlines of trees and mountains appeared out of the gloom, my spirits lifted incrementally, at least far enough to be thankful I had made it through the night in one piece. Pretty soon pastel hues of pink and cyan brightened the sky and the Blue Ridge Mountains filled out in all their craggy glory. And you know what? They really are blue. A bird chirruped overhead, the smell of pine was sweet and heavy, the road dipped into a river valley, the incline easing my aching limbs, and by the time I reached Siren Creek, with the climbing sun starting to radiate some faint heat, the thing foremost on my mind was where to get something to eat.

  It was not promising. From a distance, the town looked pleasant enough, a few streets protruding from a central drag, set in the midst of scrappy plots of farmland and bisected by a small river. But up close it looked like Siren Creek was either shut or abandoned. The road surface was cracked a
nd weeds edged the pavement. I walked past a garage with a single lonely petrol pump, metallic paint flaking. Car wrecks in various states of decay lined the side of the building, many with FOR SALE painted inside their windscreens. There were a couple of stores, window frames warped and cracked, shelves almost entirely empty. A barber shop carried faded photographs of haircuts that had gone out of style before I was born. The post office was boarded up. It was so quiet, I could hear grass rustling and the distant bray of competing cockerels. But it was early, and the Sulphur Spring Tavern at least looked like it might have been freshly painted sometime this century, the lurid shade evidently chosen to match its enticing name. Directly opposite stood Rita May’s Stop N Shop, with a stars and stripes in the window and a confusing array of signs: ‘TOURISTS WELCOME’ and ‘PUBLIC RESTROOMS’ hanging alongside ‘NO LOITERING’ and ‘SPITTING PROHIBITED’. While I pondered whether waiting for a shop to open could be construed as loitering, a dented Ford the colour of burnt rust trundled up the street and stopped in front of a pink clapboard store. A skinny girl got out, spat on the dusty sidewalk in direct contravention of Rita May’s public ordinance, unlocked the front door and disappeared inside. I strolled over. The sign announced SIREN CREEK DINER, or would have if all the letters had been in place. Actually it said SIR REEK DIN R. But it was good enough for me.

  A bell announced my entrance. There were six Formica tables in a room cluttered with product signs and tacked posters, the largest featuring American icons Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Vanilla Ice, the original white rapper out of his league even in a rural diner. ‘We ain’t open,’ a lilting voice called from a kitchen hatch behind the counter. I sat in a corner contemplating a lurid oil painting which appeared to show a colourful feathered creature of indeterminate species sitting in a tree strumming a guitar, although the brushwork was so poor it could have been almost anything. If I squinted, it turned into a mermaid on a rock playing a lyre, an impression reinforced by the addition, in black magic marker, of two large breasts with prominent nipples, out of which emerged a speech bubble saying, ‘This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.’ I was so tired, I might have laid my head on the table and slept if my stomach wasn’t protesting so loudly. I picked up a red plastic tube and wondered what tomato sauce tasted like on its own.

  ‘I said we ain’t open,’ repeated the voice. ‘I only stopped by to let Jimmy in to fix the oven hood, damn thing keeps blowing when it’s supposed to be sucking, iffen you know what I mean. Course he’s late. Shit. I s’pose I could fix you a cup of coffee and maybe a sandwich but chef ain’t coming in today, not that that’s gonna make a whole lot of difference, he don’t come in till ten most mornings, iffen then. Says it’s so dead out there, no one will notice. Well, I notice and I ain’t no one.’

  I looked up to see the skinny girl, mousey hair tied back in a ponytail, her freckly, high-boned face almost exquisite if it hadn’t been for eyes that were small and wary, and tight lips that looked like they never smiled. In a crisp white shirt and tartan skirt, she looked an angel of mercy to me. ‘Coffee and a sandwich would be amazing,’ I said.

  ‘Omigod!’ she gasped. Then louder. ‘Oh my God!’

  There’s not much you can say to that.

  ‘You’re him,’ she screeched.

  ‘I am,’ I admitted.

  ‘Oh. My. God,’ she repeated, with dramatic pauses. ‘I saw you on TV last night. You was on an awards show but they said you run out. How d’you get here?’

  ‘I ran all the way,’ I said.

  ‘Shit. No way. You’re pulling my leg. Did my momma put you up to this?’ She prodded my hand, as if to make sure I was real. ‘Oh my God! Shit.’

  She could turn shit into a two-syllable word. There was something familiar about her Appalachian drawl and not just from countless cinema cowboys and country singers. Something about it reminded me of home. I liked her straight away. It took me a while to persuade her there were no secret cameras filming our encounter, but eventually she accepted that pop stars had to eat too, and retired to the kitchen to cobble together whatever she could find, although she couldn’t promise it would be up to much. There was a lot of clattering and the occasional ‘Omigod!’ and one almighty crash, but she returned in due course with some sandwiches of square white bread, butter, processed cheese, tomatoes and salad cream, augmented by a packet of crisps and a bottle of Coke – on account of the fact that she had dropped the coffee pot and smashed it. To me, it was a feast. While I tucked in, she pulled out a chair and sat opposite, furiously chain-smoking cigarettes and telling me random things about her life.

  By the time I finished eating, I had learned that her name was Devlin Perry, she was seventeen years old and had lived in Siren Creek all her life and dreamed practically every day of getting away; she wanted to be a singer but didn’t know if she was any good; she lived with her mother and aunt Velma, who sort of owned the diner, although it really belonged to her daddy who had run off with a schoolgirl from the neighbouring town of Scarsdale and even though it was only six miles away she almost never saw him again; she much preferred my early singles to my new one but she was gonna buy the album anyway, especially now that she had met me for herself; her granny died last year and left her a trailer up in the woods, where she stayed when she wanted to get away from everyone, which was more often than not; the town was dying on its feet especially since they built Walmart in Scarsdale; there really was a sulphur spring and the mayor (who also owned the tavern) had tried to turn it into a tourist attraction but it bubbled up green and let off an awful stink which had been kind of a hard sell; she wanted to turn the diner into an Internet café but Aunt Velma said all that men around here were interested in was tractors and porno, and she was damned if she was gonna run a farm sex emporium; and she wasn’t supposed to smoke at work but since we were the only two people there, what the fuck?

  ‘What the fuck,’ I agreed.

  ‘You want one?’ she said, proffering the pack. When I politely declined, she said, ‘I know you don’t smoke.’ She read all the celebrity magazines and knew practically everything there was to know about me, apparently. She had cried when I got engaged to Penelope, and wondered what did I see in an old woman like that anyway? The bitch was much better suited to Troy Anthony. Before I could thank her for the vote of confidence, Devlin solemnly informed me that she herself was single and open to offers but there were no boys worth dating in Siren Creek and anyway they all thought she was a lesbian just cause she was saving herself for someone special.

  I looked at my empty plate. I had dined in the finest restaurants in the world, but couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten so voraciously, and finished every last morsel. Was my break for freedom over now? Should I just find a phone and meekly surrender? I couldn’t see what else I was supposed to do, in the middle of nowhere, with no transport, no possessions and no idea what I was really trying to achieve. The glare of the sunlight dazzled my eyes. I was too tired to think. ‘How much do I owe you?’ I sighed, fishing out my Amex Black.

  ‘Do we look like we take credit cards?’ Devlin laughed, mirthlessly.

  ‘I don’t have any cash,’ I admitted.

  ‘Shit, it’s on the house. Shit. I can’t believe it’s you. Shit. It really is you.’

  ‘It really is,’ I agreed.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘You got a phone I could borrow, Devlin?’ I enquired. The question tasted of defeat in my mouth. But I was spared a reply by the bell ringing over the door. Devlin frantically stubbed out her cigarette as a bearded man in a blue work shirt and jeans entered. ‘You smoking, girl? Your momma catches you, you’ll get what for.’

  ‘I got a customer!’ said Devlin, jumping up, frantically indicating that the cigarettes were mine. I grabbed her hand, shifting so that she blocked me from the new arrival. I couldn’t face another scene.

  ‘Listen, Devlin,’ I whispered, pulling her towards me. ‘Please don’t tell anybody I’m here. I’m trying to lay low.’ />
  ‘Well, that’s gonna be a hard secret to keep. Shit. I don’t believe there’s ever been a famous person in Siren Creek, like, ever! They say Clint Eastwood was in Scarsdale once, so they say, he stopped for gas and said hi to everybody and signed autographs, but Momma says it was just a lookilike. You ain’t a lookilike are you?’

  I assured her I wasn’t.

  ‘I know you ain’t. I read the magazines. I’d recognise you anywhere.’ The bearded man had disappeared into the kitchen. ‘You don’t need to worry about Jimmy,’ she assured me. ‘The only magazines he reads are the ones with naked girls on motorbikes. I don’t think you’re in them magazines.’

  ‘You never know,’ I said. I was ubiquitous, after all.

  ‘What the hell you been doin’ back here, Devlin?’ called Jimmy.

  ‘Making a sandwich.’

  ‘What kinda sandwich would that be, girl? Broken glass and coffee grinds? Remind me never to ask you to cook for me.’

  ‘Listen, Devlin,’ I said. ‘I really need somewhere quiet to lay down and just get my head together. What about that place of your grandmother’s you told me about? Do you think I could rest up there?’

  ‘Shit. You wanna stay with me?’

  ‘Just for a little while.’

  ‘Shit. Well, all right then.’