#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  Grover laughed some more. ‘Consuela don’t approve of the drug trade, do you, darlin’?’ I caught the drift of her reply. Something about vampiros, blood and Colombian babies.

  Grover still had an unlit cigarette poking from his lips. ‘Are you ever going to smoke that thing?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t smoke no more,’ he retorted. ‘Filthy habit. Gave up under the influence of a good woman.’

  ‘So why have you always got one stuck in your mouth?’

  ‘In case of emergencies,’ he winked. ‘You want one?’

  ‘It’s never been my vice.’

  ‘Clean-living boy, huh? Consuela would approve.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, exactly,’ I muttered. ‘So what’s Consuela got against … you know?’

  ‘Ah, You Know. I ain’t heard that one before. YeYo, I believe the kids call it these days. The White Lady, the Snow Queen. Consuela lost two young brothers to the coke wars that drove her whole country loco for a while back there. Baby assassins, younger than you. They used to say a kid from the comunas was an old man at twelve, cause he’s got so little life left ahead of him. In the bad old good old days, you could get shot in the head for singing “My Way” out of tune in a karaoke bar. Seen that one myself and goddamnit if the motherfucker didn’t deserve it. But mostly it was drug deals, and most of the killing was done by bambinos. Yeah, everybody scrapping tooth and nail for the right to supply Devil’s Dandruff to stars of stage and screen. But you wouldn’t know nothing about that, now, would you, boy? Clean-living young pop star, like you.’

  ‘So if it’s so fucking bad, why do you do this?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m just the ferryman, crossing a river of death,’ sang Grover, who seemed to be enjoying himself. He had visibly unwound almost as soon as the wheels had lifted off the strip. ‘We don’t sully our nostrils, do we, Consuela, my love? Don’t get high on your own supply, first rule of business. Wasn’t always that way, freely admit it, though not in any court of law, but I’m a reformed man since I met my lady love here. You don’t mind if I tell the kid how fate brought us together, do you, sweetpea?’

  Taking silence as consent, Grover began to tell me about the bad old good old days, when coke barons were more powerful than the government, drug-smuggling was the only local industry that mattered, and MedellÍn was renowned as the most dangerous hell hole on Planet Earth, world capital of kidnappings and homicide, practically the private fiefdom of the late Pablo Escobar.

  ‘Espero que arde en el infierno,’ came the voice from the back.

  ‘Indeed, sweetness, I am sure he is rotting in hell,’ agreed Grover. ‘If he hasn’t taken over the place by now.’

  ‘Doesn’t she speak English?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, she speaks the lingo pretty good, when she has to,’ said Grover. ‘Consuela chooses to converse only in her native tongue, as is her patriotic right. And why not? It’s a beautiful tongue. You know what the great Colombian poet, Fernando Vallejo, said about his beloved country? Para los ladrones no hay mejor reino en el mundo y no hay otro mundo más allá de éste. “For thieves, there’s no better kingdom in the world, and there’s no other world beyond this one.”’

  Consuela’s family were from the impoverished lowlands, a village down south in the Amazon basin, but, like so many before, they moved to the city for the chance of a better life, which would be funny if it wasn’t so sad, in Grover’s opinion, leaving the most fertile region on the planet to earn less than minimum wage halfway up a mountain in the Capital City of Death. But everybody’s got a right to sanitation and television, don’t they? Plus there was a civil war and all kinds of revolutionaries and bandits to contend with, so life wasn’t exactly a bowl of bananas down there in the jungle.

  MedellÍn was a thriving, colonial city, with palaces, treelined streets and modern tower blocks. But these weren’t the kind of places peasants from the lowlands were welcome. So they went higher up the mountains that towered over everything, and made their own homes out of whatever materials they could lay their hands on, which was always plenty in this kingdom of thieves. So MedellÍn became a city within a city, encircled by barrio after barrio of hovels, piled one on top of the other, brick, concrete, breezeblock, cardboard, tin, polythene and people, more and more people, pouring in from all over the country, playing their music too loud, cooking their stinky meals, shitting and pissing where there was no running water, drinking aguardiente and tinto, hundreds of thousands, maybe a million (who was counting?) hungry peasants trying to turn a buck, honestly if the city would let them, dishonestly if that was what it took, cause this was the kingdom of thieves after all, and there was no dishonour in taking what you could get from those who probably stole it in the first place. Still a third-world city’s not a city without its own shanty town, where life is hard but fair, the people poor but happy, and maybe it would have stayed that way, and Consuela and Grover would have gone through their lives blissfully unaware of one another’s existences, had not the good citizens of North America discovered disco music went better with coke, and proceeded to snort the soul out of Colombia, sucking it up both nostrils with a force that shook the Andes worse than the hurricanes that rampaged across the peaks. And Consuela’s little peasant family, padre and madre and beautiful hija and two angelic little hijos, found themselves resident in Comuna 13, the worst of the worst, the black heart of a narco empire.

  ‘Her brothers were probably a couple of little psychos,’ said Grover. ‘I don’t know, I never met them. Maybe they would have wound up whacking out monkeys and parrots down in the jungle. But they grew up in a barrio where the kids had more words for murder than eskimos have for snow, so they played with machetes and knives and killed their friends for fun, they killed over girls and insults and bravado, but mostly they’d kill who the grown-ups paid them to, buzzing about on mopeds, playing policias and narcos with real guns and bullets.’

  ‘They were not bad boys,’ said Consuela, in English, by which I understood she was addressing me.

  There was nothing special about her brothers’ story, according to Grover. Baby brother got sent to hit some local badass and wound up getting dropped himself – came up riding pillion on big brother’s moped, pulled out his pistol and got popped in the back of the head by some kid standing guard on the corner. He was nine years old. There were over five hundred murders in MedellÍn that month, which was no more or less than usual. The cops had given up investigating, ambulances had given up collecting bodies, corpses were given a number and tossed in mass graves, which is where Consuela’s little brother was probably rotting now, just another sad stat in the murder capital of the world. Only Consuela didn’t see it that way. She wanted revenge, which many Colombians consider more than just a right, it’s practically a sacred duty. But she wasn’t interested in her brother’s killer, who was only ten years old himself. She armed herself with a carving knife stolen from one of the rich homes she cleaned, and went after her brother’s boss, a local hoodlum and minor lieutenant in the MedellÍn Cartel who went by the name of Cesar. And who, as it happened, was also Grover’s contact for a little business in Comuna 13.

  ‘Of course, I didn’t know any of this,’ continued Grover. ‘I’d only met Cesar half an hour before, and we were hunkered down in a back room bar, sizing each other up over a couple of cervezas, when I saw some mad bitch with a kitchen knife making her way to our table. So, being a younger man yet to learn the virtues of thinking first and acting second, I jumped up to stop her. She gave me this for my troubles.’

  Grover ran a finger along the scar that split his face. I glanced back at Consuela. She stared me down with unapologetic defiance.

  ‘So what happened?’ I demanded.

  ‘Cesar’s gang disarmed her and dragged her out into the yard. She was screaming her head off, and there were chickens, I’ll never forget that, lots of damn chickens squawking, and what with blood all over the place, my blood, it looked like some kind of voodoo sacrifice. I asked if they were go
ing to kill her but Cesar said it would be a waste of a fine piece of ass, they’d gang bang her, and then kill her. Cesar invited me to go first, which was only polite after what she’d done to me, and what I’d done for him.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear the answer.

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t in the mood for love,’ said Grover. ‘I asked them to give her to me. I told them I was going to get the ultimate revenge, I was going to make her marry me, that way she’d suffer her whole life and not just a few hours. Ain’t that right, darling? What could the guy do? He didn’t like it, but I saved his life, so he gave Consuela to the gringo. And we lived happily ever after. Romantic, huh?’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, trying to take it all in. ‘I thought my family was fucked up.’

  ‘Yeah, everybody does,’ said Grover. ‘You want some coffee? Hey, Consuela, what kind of hostess are you? You got the thermos back there?’

  I drank hot black liquid with shaking hands, trying not to spill any on the control panel. Down below, a narrow strip of land cut through the vast blue sea, Panama maybe. Geography wasn’t my strong suit. ‘I thought you said there were two brothers?’ I asked, pondering Grover’s tale.

  Neither of them answered me. Grover was staring intently at his instrument dials. I looked back but Consuela was hanging her head, her face obscured by black hair. ‘So,’ I nudged. ‘What happened to Consuela’s other brother?’

  ‘Cesar had him killed as revenge,’ said Grover. I could hear another noise faintly coming over the headphones. It sounded a lot like weeping.

  ‘Don’t they say the violence is over now?’ I said, desperate to change the subject. ‘That’s what the news reports have been saying, “just when Colombia was becoming a tourist destination again, it gets hit by the forces of nature”, all that crap.’

  ‘Oh yeah, it’s a whole new country,’ said Grover. ‘El presidente cleaned it right up. Plan Colombia, fighting fire with even heavier fire – it takes a death squad to stop a death squad and if you violate some human rights, well, nothing comes for free, everybody knows that. The cartels have gone, or at least they’ve gone underground. The civil war’s pretty much over, cause they’ve bribed the factions to join the government, so now everybody’s got their nose in the trough, and the only things worth fighting over are kickbacks. They’ve been laying down roads in the comunas, and if they have to bulldoze a few neighbourhoods to do that, it’s all in the name of peace and progress. They’ve been doing a great job of papering over the cracks. Before the quake opened them all up, anyway.’

  I’d picked up something along these lines, probably sitting up at four in the morning watching CNN with my eyes pinned open by Colombian powder, while they showed disaster footage with my song as the soundtrack and Beasley rattling on about how we could never afford a video as spectacular as that, and the pair of us laughing like the whole thing was being staged for our benefit. With five hundred miles of tremors across the Andes, the Colombian government had its hands full coping with relief efforts, and had been accused of ignoring the poorest barrios. MedellÍn was the worst hit, with skyscrapers down and problems with the water supply. When a catastrophic mudslide buried some squatter camps there had been rioting and looting, with packs of near feral kids running wild. Scenes of the army shooting live ammunition at children rocked the world, there were rumours of vigilante groups treating the kids like rabid dogs, which is how come the whole Orphans of MedellÍn thing kicked off, just at the time my single was on the way to number one. I felt sick to think we’d actually had strategy meetings about that. Consuela tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at a brown and green landmass, rising from the blue ocean. ‘Colombia,’ she said. ‘Home.’

  I laid my head against the vibrating glass, and gazed at the spectacle of fields, scrub and forest speeding beneath us, the soil and rock from which my mother sprang spread out beneath my fingers like a papier-mâché model. It didn’t seem real, more like a child’s amusement, like the Nativity they used to put up in Kilrock town hall at Christmas and you’d walk around the glass case, eyes wide, pointing to tiny painted figures, calling out, ‘Look, Mama, sheep, cows, look, Mama, look, there’s a whole family in the house, waving at us …’

  And she looks. And she puts her soft hands on your shoulders. And you breathe in the smell of her, the most beautiful smell you’ve ever known, the only smell you’ve ever known, the warm clean smell of soap, the acrid hint of cleaning fluids, the rose petal perfume she dabs around her neck, the lemon smell of black hair that brushes against your cheek. She’s there with you, and you don’t even have to turn to see her. She’s always there.

  ‘Santísima Virgen María, Madre de Dios, nos guíe y nos proteja …’

  I don’t know how I fell asleep in that rattling crate but I woke with a start. A stream of Spanish prayers were steadily murmuring in my ear, mingling with the noise of the Baron, sporadically interrupted by a ‘Shut up, dammit, I’m trying to think!’ from Grover. We were descending through a mountain pass, a looming presence of rock falling behind and below, while the panorama of a metropolis opened in front. It was obvious something was wrong, that is, way more wrong than it should have been. There were pillars of smoke rising in the sky, towering black fingers billowing up from a desolation of rubble and wreckage. ‘They’ve been hit by another aftershock,’ yelled Grover. ‘The control tower’s down. Runway looks bad.’

  The ground was rising fast to meet us, buckled and riven by savage cracks, the broken shells of other aircraft, fires burning, a building of glass and steel leaning at an improbable angle. Something with a force you couldn’t even begin to imagine had ripped right through the airport. And I was suddenly aware of speed, the rush of engine noise and blood and prayers in my ears, the wind battering our flimsy shell of a toy plane. Shouldn’t we be slamming on the brakes about now? Or better yet, rising, rising above the distant mountains, rising above the clouds, turning back from this wasteland that had been trying to drag me to my doom, blocking our ears to the siren song, battling free of the magnetic field that had wrapped its coils around my heart and sucked me in from ten thousand miles away. ‘You can’t land here,’ I shouted.

  ‘I can’t NOT land here,’ Grover retorted. ‘The Baron’s bone dry, it’s a miracle I even got us this far.’

  ‘Dios te salve, Maria, llena eres de gracia …’

  ‘But you can’t land here!’ I screamed. ‘We’ll never make it. You’re gonna kill us!’

  ‘Don’t worry, kid, I could put this baby down on the side of a cliff,’ snorted Grover, grimly.

  The broken ground rushed up. I think I started to scream. And my world collapsed to a pinpoint of fear, a black hole at the wrong end of a telescope, and I could see my father in there, and I could see my brother, and I could see Beasley, and Penelope, and Eileen, and fucking Kilo and The Terranauts, but I couldn’t see my mother – where was my mother when I really needed her? She was nowhere, the place where we all go, the endless nothing, the big fat zero. And her soft bosom was just bare bone. And her smiling face a grinning skull. And she had left me. She left me. She abandoned me. And now she was taking me back.

  ‘Mama!’ I screamed.

  We bounced off the ground. The world was shaking. We tipped and spun. We bounced again. And there was dust billowing, brakes were screeching, propellers were beating, and beating, and beating slower, and slower. And we were coasting to a stop.

  ‘What’d I tell you, kid?’ said Grover. But he didn’t look triumphant. He looked as pale as a ghost, like he couldn’t quite believe that he was still alive.

  ‘Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores,’ sighed Consuela.

  If the Virgin Mary was listening to her prayers, she didn’t show it. She had tilted forward and was smiling beatifically at the floor.

  ‘I think I’ll have that cigarette now,’ said Grover, then realised it was no longer in his mouth. He started to grope around at his feet. I looked out through the tiny aircraft
window, through the dust and the chaos. I had arrived where I didn’t even know I wanted to go.

  I was home.

  I was in the land of my mother.

  19

  Grover told me to remain out of sight while he organised refuelling and Consuela located an aid worker to deal with their humanitarian offerings. ‘They’re going to need a little more than blankets and band aids,’ I said, gazing at the dust clouds rising over what was left of the city.

  ‘Just wait in the plane,’ snapped Grover. ‘Anyone approaches, act dumb. That should come natural. Get in back, keep your head down, and don’t answer to nobody but me.’

  It was probably good advice. It was possibly even well intentioned. But I was sitting jammed against the blankets, thinking about what lay outside, the country that gave me my brown skin, the secret nation of my genes, and it was groaning in pain, it was howling with sirens and grief, and I had to get out and see for myself. Even the fact that Grover, the paranoid bastard, had locked the rear and pilot doors couldn’t stop me. I used an emergency axe to hack the thick black polythene with which he had fashioned a temporary rear window, squeezed through and dropped to the ground. There were people nearby but none of them even looked my way, or if they did, they didn’t register anything unusual in the sight of a red-headed pop star climbing through an aircraft window. There was just too much to behold, more than the brain could comprehend, an enormous, mind-stunning vista of collapse and destruction everywhere the eye could see.

  Let’s start at the beginning. The closest point of devastation, the only thing I could focus on for now. Grover had taxied over to a hangar, or what had been a hangar, but was now broken-down walls and a ceiling only suspended from the ground by the planes crushed beneath it.

  It would have been the most enormous piece of wreckage I had ever seen. It should have been enough to take the breath away on its own. But next to it, pitched forward at an angle, listed a huge square building of concrete and glass, which must have housed the control tower, its big radar dish still spinning uselessly on top. Furniture had tipped through broken windows, so that office desks, chairs, sofas and filing cabinets littered the ground, glittering in a blanket of shattered glass. There were bodies under desks and spreadeagled across upturned tables, twitching and groaning, and others moving among them, helping them to their feet, shifting them out of the danger zone, in case the building regained its downward momentum.