#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  I took the rolled-up note from Kilo’s hand and snorted greedily. ‘That’s what I’m talking about,’ I groaned, leaning against a sink while spots danced before my eyes. ‘Do you really think that went all right?’

  ‘It was wonderful,’ Kilo gaily reassured me, rolled-up note applied to one nostril. ‘Live TV’s always more exciting when things don’t go to plan. You were in your element.’

  ‘What about the Penelope thing?’

  ‘What Penelope thing?’

  ‘That bitch Mindy was going on about Penelope.’

  ‘She asked, like, one question.’

  ‘You didn’t see the thing with the raised eyebrow?’

  ‘You’re reading way too much into it.’

  That’s not how it felt when I was out there alone, in the cameras, under the lights, with only my wits for weapons. It felt like they were probing for weakness, forked tongues and talons scratching about in the soft underbelly of my secret life, closing in on an exposed nerve, jabbing it, waiting for a reaction, licking their lips.

  ‘Penelope’s a goddess,’ Kilo was saying in that happy-crappy sing-song, where every sentence ends on an uplift, perpetually suspended between sarcasm and delight. ‘You’re engaged, you’ve made a film together … it’s bound to come up.’

  ‘You really think I’m being oversensitive?’

  ‘Just a touch.’

  ‘So get Penelope on the phone.’

  ‘I’ll keep trying.’

  Oh, he almost had me there. Almost. ‘You can’t get her on the phone?’

  ‘I’m on the case, trust me.’

  ‘What the fuck is going on? Get Flavia in here.’

  ‘It’s the men’s toilets.’

  ‘Yeah? Well what the fuck are you doing in here, then? Get Flavia.’

  Look, I’m not proud of it, but there you go. These people were supposed to work for me.

  My publicity rep looked a little nonplussed to be summoned for an audience among urinals. ‘I wonder what our friend from The Times is going to make of you turning a gentlemen’s facility into your office?’

  ‘It’s the only place I can fucking talk without her scribbling everything down in that fucking notebook,’ I snapped. ‘Whose bright idea was it to invite Queen Bitch along for the ride? Didn’t she write that “Nothing From Nothing Leaves Zero” piece?’

  I told you, I never forget a bad review.

  ‘Which is precisely why she is perfect for this,’ insisted Flavia. ‘Katherine’s opinion swings from one extreme to the other, that is her entire rationale: there is nothing she likes better than contradicting herself. We’re giving her the opportunity to perform another of her infamous reversals. She’s around for one day, she’s susceptible to flattery and, apparently like every other woman in the Western world, she thinks you are the hottest thing on two legs. So be nice. You’ll charm her, she’ll write something extremely clever and funny, it’ll get a big splash in the paper with a handsome colour photo, and you will never need to think about her again.’ We stood in silence for a moment, Flavia wrinkling her nose at the odour of disinfectant. ‘Can we go now? I believe they’re waiting for us at MTV.’

  But I hadn’t dragged her into the toilets to discuss some hack from a British rag. ‘What is going on with Penelope and Troy Anthony?’ I asked, nervously.

  Flavia contemplated me with a steady, even gaze, as if weighing up what it was safe to tell me. In which case I must have looked truly pathetic, because something approaching sympathy actually crossed her poker face. ‘There are pictures circulating of Penelope and Troy embracing. I believe they are stills from the film they are shooting, which our friends, the gossipmongers, are deliberately misrepresenting. It goes with the territory, as you should know by now. It would be a mistake to make too much of it. Just keep batting it back. You’re handling it fine.’

  My heart was pounding so hard I thought I could hear it echo off the tiles. Maybe it was just the coke.

  ‘Wipe your nose,’ Flavia instructed. I did as I was told, removing powdery leftovers. ‘Shall we go?’ she asked.

  ‘Ladies first,’ I replied.

  The phalanx formed and we rolled on out, but not before Mindy caught up with me in the corridor during a commercial break. The way she said she hoped to see me later at the Generator awards, suddenly she didn’t seem so scary. And she did have great tits, even if they were fake. I didn’t really care. Reality had no place in the world we inhabited.

  I did a quick phoner in the car but the deflector shield was fully operational now.

  ‘Penelope’s a goddess, I’ve been watching her make out with movie stars since I learned to operate a remote control.’

  ‘So you’re not even a little bit jealous?’ asked the disembodied radio host on the other end of the line.

  ‘You should ask Troy’s boyfriend how he feels.’

  Kitty Queenan snorted quietly, scribbling in her notebook. She was going to be bored of hearing that line by the end of the day.

  The thing about Penelope was, I didn’t even know why I was so upset. It was Hollywood rules. It didn’t really matter if we stayed together or split, expressed eternal fidelity or fucked around, either way we got headlines. The more trouble, the more publicity, I understood that. Why else get engaged except to make mischief? It’s so fucking old-fashioned, from an era of lace curtains and roses, when courting couples were still necking in the back seat of somebody else’s car, back in the mists of time, when my own folks were wide-eyed and innocent, if they ever were, which doesn’t bear thinking about. Penelope was practically primeval. I was half her age and had a whole life of sex and drugs and rock and roll in front of me.

  We met on the film set, a classic location romance. My trailer or yours? You know the plot, #1 With A Bullet, basically a reverse-gender sci-fi Star is Born with kung fu and explosions. It wasn’t even my idea to cast her. I thought Madonna would be perfect for the part of the fading pop queen who sacrifices herself for a young gun but she refused to play a woman her own age. Penelope stepped into the thigh-high black leather boots and my fate was sealed.

  I can’t explain the effect she had on me. It wasn’t just fantasy fulfilment, a desire to notch one up on the bedpost. In the flesh, she was sexy and wise, her womanliness enveloping me in a way that was so emotionally overwhelming I couldn’t get through rehearsing a scene without a hard-on. Which, as it turned out, never proved much of a problem. But I wanted to talk to her even while I was inside her, I wanted to thrust right into the heart of everything she knew, because it was like she knew everything about me, as if she could see all the secrets pulsating beneath my skin, all the things I kept hidden, even from myself. And for reasons I never understood, she found that exciting. She wasn’t turned off by my youth and naivety, any more than she was turned on by my celebrity. Fame was meaningless to someone as famous as Penelope Nazareth. She called me ‘l’enfant sauvage’, her very own wild child, and we did get wild, we got carried off in a torrent. And so we announced our engagement to the press in a storm of emotions, pledging our troth on a gambling trip to Las Vegas after consuming a dozen Es. Since which time I had hardly seen her. In six months, our schedules had coincided for a few weeks at most, days snatched here and there, transatlantic flights for a night of passion interspersed with lots of phone sex, dirty texts and soul-to-soul conversation. But you can’t touch someone on Facetime. I longed to talk to her. I wanted to see her. I needed to feel her. And the thought that someone else might be doing all of that was making me sick to my stomach.

  We ran the gauntlet at MTV, where New York City’s finest had erected barriers to stop the crowd from shutting down traffic on Times Square. We were filming news clips, guest spots and sound bites for an online special, since even MTV wasn’t commercially suicidal enough to actually put music on TV these days. But they still liked to pretend they cared, so it was all wisecracks and japes with reality nonentities, frippery and tomfoolery, quips and chit-chat, stuff and nonsense (well, I was Stuff and th
ey were Nonsense), a scene so shallow I almost started enjoying myself. I gamely introduced some of my videos (which I could never actually bring myself to watch), led competition winners in a singalong of ‘Never Young’ (music is a universal gift, I truly believe that, but God save us all from overconfident screechers who wouldn’t know what a key was if you used it to lock them up for life) and subjected myself to an interrogation about as probing as a skin polish with a feather duster. ‘Where do you get all your brilliant ideas for songs?’ Oh ask me another one, ask me another one, ask me another one, do. Some interviews are like being strapped to a chair in Guantanamo Bay and having your teeth pulled out through your sphincter by a sadistic marine armed only with pliers and a jar of K-Y. But mostly it’s just toothless sycophants trying to gum you to death. Sure, Penelope’s name came up but it was friendly fire and I was on my game now, fuck ’em all. Whenever things were getting dull, I could stroll over to the panoramic windows and stir some hysteria on the sidewalk. I couldn’t actually hear the screaming through the reinforced glass, just see open mouths and tears. The background static in my brain was fading, perhaps aided by the sheet of codeine pills Kilo slipped me to take the edge off the coke. He said take two, but what good has moderation ever done anyone?

  When we weren’t on air, I was fielding phone calls, disembodied voices asking questions so old and overdone I only needed to tune into one or two key words to dial up the appropriate answer:

  Press one if you want to hear amusing tales about Zero’s tough childhood without a mother’s love in the barren hills of Ireland.

  Press two for how Zero came by his unusual name.

  Press three for the latest on the hot romance between Zero and movie legend Penelope Nazareth.

  Press four for the young philosopher king’s inanities on the power of music to heal the world.

  Press five for the hidden pain behind worldwide hits ‘In The Stars’, ‘Make It On My Own’, ‘Amnesty’ and ‘Never Young’.

  Press six to hear those anecdotes again.

  Ad fucking infinitum. You should never believe what you hear about me anyway, cause it’s all lies, and I should know, I tell them.

  There’s a Zeropedia which is supposed to collect every known piece of information about me from my first breath (one dirty morning on a table in the kitchen of Castlerea Hotel, or so I’m told) to my last known sighting (in the bathroom mirror, while taking a piss, half an hour ago, though I don’t think you’ll find that on the net, at least I hope not). I have been known to check the Zeropedia sometimes to find out what I am supposed to have done on such and such a date, and it usually leaves me feeling there must be another me out there living my so-called life in a parallel pop universe where Elvis is on the throne and all is well in his kingdom. And that is why you should never read your own press: the essential facts may be the same, significant dates coincide, but nothing rhymes. No bells start ringing. Events have been twisted back to front and had bits grafted on and you’re left with this kind of Frankenstein fiction lumbering around, made up of bits of you and bits of other people’s fantasies and bits of God knows what, space junk and landfill. Next thing you’re talking about yourself in third person. ‘That’s not the kind of thing Zero would say,’ I might say, and then immediately think, shit, who said that? Was it Zero, or was it me? What kind of name is Zero anyway? It says Pedro Ulysses Noone on my passport, which is also a fucking ridiculous name, but no one calls me Pedro any more, except close family and officers of the law.

  And while we are on the subject, we might as well get this name business over and done with cause I’ve heard a lot of stories about how I came to be Zero and told a few myself. The favourite fansite theory is based on my surname: Noone becomes No One, i.e. nothing, nada, zilch, zero. Like kids are that smart, well, maybe they are, but not where I grew up. I’ve been Zero since I was seven years old. It was just a basic racist insult, because I was the only brown-skinned boy anyone in Loserville, Roscommon had ever laid eyes on. Even my brother got my old man’s Irish pale face. I just got his ginger hair. All my life I had to answer to stupid Spanish nicknames. I’ve been Carlos, Cheech, Chong, Wah-Wah (as in Chihauha) and Torro (at first I thought that wasn’t so bad. But whenever I said anything, my tormentors would shout out ‘Bull-sheet!’ in a stupid accent). So when The Mask of Zorro popped up on Saturday morning kids’ TV, every pint-sized bigot in the playground started calling me Zero. It was only later, when I really started listening to hip-hop, I learned you can neutralise an insult by treating it as praise. Which is how come nigga became a term of endearment but only from one person of colour to another. I don’t recommend any honky hipsters using it out of context cause it’s still a millimetre away from starting a race riot. Anyway, as an authentic brown skin Paddy, Kilrock’s first and only nigga, I wore the name Zero as a badge of pride. But try explaining that in a five-minute phone call between traffic bulletins on a breakfast show. I usually stick with the lies.

  I was spinning more nonsense over the phone when Honey Pie came gambolling down the corridor, a burlesque teen beauty queen hemmed in by suits, minders and hangers-on. ‘Hey, Zero!’ she called out, with a camp, delighted chuckle, and blew me a theatrical kiss. She was too much of a pro to interrupt an interview but she made the universal ‘call me’ sign before moving on about her business. Which was nice. I had never met Honey before in my life, but we pop stars stick together. ‘Honey Pie just went by,’ I told my caller, inciting fake orgasmic excitement in the grey hinterland of Midwestern radioworld as the DJ stoked listener fantasies of celebrity nirvana, just out there, beyond the veil, over the rainbow, down the yellow brick road. ‘Breeze Black just arrived,’ I added, catching sight of a dark fury in a rainbow shock afro wig striding out of a lift with her own entourage. My announcement caused more squeals of incredulity down the line. Could life really be this glamorous? Then the pale, slender figure of movie star Gena Claudette emerged from a studio, looking dreamily distracted amid another welter of people although it was hard to tell whether they were her people or her rock-star husband Adam Monk’s people, or maybe they shared people in a happy marriage of entourages: Do you take these people to be your lawfully wedded people? We do. I couldn’t help but notice, with a twinge of irritation, that my people (who had professionally ignored Honey’s people and Breeze’s people) were starting to twitch about Gena’s people, exchanging discreet nods and smiles, probably wondering how cool it would be to work for a movie star. That’s the problem with people. No fucking loyalty.

  It may have been Weekend Zero but clearly I didn’t have the music station all to myself. The stars were in town for the Generator magazine tenth anniversary awards (only in America could entering double digits be viewed as a milestone achievement), which (in one big daisy chain of mutual media masturbation) all major networks would be covering, MTV would broadcast live online, and at which I would be performing, as well as picking up several richly deserved gongs for my outstanding contributions to music and culture and civilisation as we know it, to add to all my other gratefully and humbly accepted statuettes, which presumably my manager kept, though fuck knows where. At this stage he’d have to have a warehouse. I must have had at least one gong from every TV station, pop radio station, celebrity website and music magazine in the known universe, or at least in every territory where Beasley considered a prime-time appearance to be worth its weight in additional sales and endorsements. I could spend the year just travelling from one award show to another, and last year it felt as if I did just that, perfecting the act of surprise for whatever honour was being bestowed when I knew perfectly well I had won because otherwise why would I even turn up? Critics may have fulminated, panels debated, viewers, listeners and readers voted, but Beasley negotiated.

  ‘Hi,’ said Gena, who had been discreetly lingering till I finished my call. So I said hi right back, and we did some cheek-pecking, and I tried not to think about the see-through underwear she wore in the cyberpunk remake of Pride & Prejudice when she s
trips for Mr Darcy, which is the only bit of the film worth watching. YouTube it. ‘How’s Penelope?’ she asked and I reeled slightly until I remembered they did a movie together and were bonded for life in the sisterhood of the set.

  ‘She’s fine,’ I replied. Not how the fuck should I know, the bitch never calls. ‘She’s shooting with Troy in Brazil.’

  ‘That’s what I heard,’ sighed Gena. I was watching closely for telltale signs, in case she had actually heard anything. But if she had, she wasn’t giving it away. Fucking actresses.

  Then her husband appeared, bouncing around, all high-wire energy, eyes popping, clapping me on the shoulders. ‘Just the man I wanted to see. Hey, how are you, we need to talk, can we talk?’

  Much as I dug his band, Softzone, I had my suspicions about Adam Monk. He exuded the happy-clappy energy of a Born Again using the Holy Spirit to override shyness. I kept expecting him to break out in prayer or try to interest me in a copy of The Watchtower. Now he was propelling me away from the safe haven of my people, wheeling me down a corridor, babbling enthusiastically. ‘I love “Never Young”. It feels like a song the world needs right now.’ He broke into a snatch of chorus, as if I needed reminding: ‘We were never young, we were born into a world, you had already destroyed … Genius.’ Glancing back to see two sets of entourages trailing, with MTV’s cameras and my own zero24seven crew capturing this collision of heavenly objects for live transmission, he tried an adjacent door then, finding it locked, ushered me around a corner. What the fuck was this about? ‘You know what the world really needs? You know what we have to do?’ he continued, breathlessly.

  If he was a fan, my security would have had him pinioned to the floor with a truncheon rammed up his back passage, but because he was a fucking celebrity they didn’t seem in the least concerned. I wished I felt as confident. Where was Tiny Tony Mahoney’s taser when you needed it most? Adam opened another door onto a room occupied by MTV desk jockeys, all looking up from monitors to be confronted by superstars on walkabout. ‘Sorry!’ he sputtered, backing us out. The staffers broke into spontaneous applause. ‘Over here!’ Adam declared, pulling me through a door marked with the universal logo for men only. Another fucking washroom confab for Kitty Queenan to scribble about in her notepad. Before closing the door behind us, Adam showed the palm of his hand to the pursuing pack, which brought them to a shuffling halt. As ranking superstar, he was firmly in control.