#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  ‘What’s the problem, officer?’ I shouted over to him.

  The trooper put down his hailer and came towards me. ‘What the heck are you doin’ out this way?’ he said, vigorously shaking my hand. ‘My girlfriend, Jenny, she is not gonna believe this. She’s got us tickets for your show in Washington DC. How about that? I’m more of a country man, myself, but Jenny is such a fan.’ He was only a few years older than me, all starched and proper in his uniform, but smiling ear to ear, pumping my hand as he shook it. Still, the holstered gun and utility belt bristling with batons and handcuffs was making me nervous. I could feel Karnivor’s deathray stare lasering into us.

  ‘Well, maybe we could invite you and Jenny to come and say hello backstage,’ I suggested.

  ‘I hope you are not trying to unduly influence an officer of the law,’ said the trooper, and for a moment I thought I might have blown it. But his eagerness to impress his girlfriend overcame any scruples. ‘But that would be very nice. Jenny would be so pleased. She’s such a sweet girl. Real pretty too. You’ll like her.’

  ‘I’m sure I will,’ I agreed. I called my manager Brian out, and though I could tell the trooper was surprised to be greeted by a six-foot-two dreadlocked black man with gold teeth, he took it in his stride. SinnerMan suited this role, pumped up but polite, power personified, clapping me on the shoulder, shaking the trooper’s hand, asking what he could do to help, officer. Azure was summoned to take the trooper’s details.

  ‘My personal assistant,’ nodded SinnerMan, smugly. In the absence of a pen, she gamely tapped into her mobile, asking him how to spell his fiancée’s name. I saw the trooper cast a curious eye over the denizens of the limo.

  ‘Bodyguards,’ I explained.

  ‘I imagine you need them,’ nodded the trooper.

  SinnerMan explained that we were on our way to shoot a video in Charleston, and the trooper helpfully informed us we had taken a wrong turn and would have to back up many miles and get on I-79. ‘I thought it was funny seeing a limo up here in these mountain roads,’ he laughed. ‘We don’t get too many big stars in West Virginia.’ There was a brief, sticky moment when he explained that we had been travelling nearly twenty miles over the speed limit and he was going to have to cite us.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘We don’t have a speed limit in Ireland.’

  ‘I heard that,’ nodded the trooper, thoughtfully. ‘I myself am one sixteenth Irish.’

  ‘Is that so?’ I have never been sure how Americans work these fractions out. All I knew was that I was some kind of fucked-up mongrel hound dog genetic mutation that was surely never meant to occur in nature, a carrot-topped Irishman cross-fertilised with some mysterious race of brown-skinned natives from another continent. How did that happen? ‘I could tell you were Irish,’ I lied. ‘You’ve got the gift of the gab.’

  ‘Gee, I don’t know about that,’ said the trooper. ‘But we are trained to talk to the public.’

  We were nearly home and dry. But then he had to walk up to the passenger door, look inside and sniff the smoky air thoughtfully. I could pick up the aroma of crack and weed from where I was standing. He turned to look at me. Behind him, Karnivor reached stealthily into his waistband. God no, please, not that, I shuddered. We were all going to wind up bleeding to death on a roadside in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘Rock ‘n’ roll?’ said the trooper, knowingly raising an eyebrow. I could have kissed him. Instead we posed for a selfie on the trooper’s mobile. ‘Jenny is just not gonna believe this,’ he grinned.

  A roar came echoing down the road. Two beams of light were fast approaching through the blackness. We all stood and watched as the noise grew louder, bouncing around the hills. Then the red Mitsubishi tore past, Evildoer at the wheel, ripping it up like Formula One.

  ‘You see that?’ boomed SinnerMan, in tones of mortal outrage. ‘He musta been doin’ a hundred and twenty.’

  ‘I gotta go,’ snapped the trooper. ‘Duty calls.’ And he ran towards his car. ‘See you in DC,’ he shouted, jumping in. His siren wailed as he screeched off into the night.

  The posse whooped it up as we continued our journey, Assassin retelling the incident in ever more dramatic detail, as if we hadn’t all been witness to it, claiming credit for calling in Evildoer on his mobile, SinnerMan chuckling and congratulating me on being a stand-up soldier, Karnivor suggesting it would have been easier to just pop the cracker cop and roll him off a mountain. I sat subdued and shell-shocked, waves of sharp white fear coursing from my burning brain to the tips of my frazzled toes, making my skin feel electrified with sensitivity. To top off the celebrations, the stash was intact and Assassin struck up another crack pipe, while SinnerMan hauled out a sports holdall I hadn’t even noticed and from it pulled a large plastic zip bag stuffed with weed, and another fat with powder. ‘You smoke some’a’ this, you be chill, cuz,’ he assured me. The holdall was bulging with plastic bags. Now I understood what kind of delivery we were making. It wasn’t pizza. I kept seeing the trooper’s face, with the smile wiped off and blood pooling around him. How would his Jenny have felt identifying the body? And would I have been left beside him, full of holes, or hauled up in court as an accomplice? I wondered if I could get hold of one of their mobiles, call Beasley to come and get me. They could send out a chopper. I could still make rehearsals.

  ‘What’s a matter, thug, never been in a bust before?’ sneered Karnivor, twisting the thug, spitting it like an insult. ‘Shit, this is real reality right here, no pussy-ass mediaised MTV version. So what you got, gangsta? You gonna show me some showbusiness?’

  But I had seen the panic in Karnivor’s face, and fear in Assassin’s eyes. I recognised it for what it was, because if there was one thing you learned in showbusiness it was how to put on a mask.

  ‘Why’n’t you leave Zero alone,’ piped up Ella-X. ‘He saved yo’ nigga ass.’

  ‘Shut the fuck up, ho, you wanna suck my dick too?’ Karnivor snapped back.

  ‘Cops don’t carry guns in Ireland, ain’t that so, Zero?’ Ella-X bravely continued. ‘I seen it on TV. It was beautiful, all green and shit. Everybody friendly. I want to live in Ireland one day.’

  I smiled at her, wishing I could step right into her pipe dream.

  ‘You believe everything you see on TV, bitch?’ sneered Karnivor.

  ‘It was on National Geographic,’ insisted Ella-X, defiantly.

  ‘They got animals in Irishland?’ pondered SinnerMan, striking up a spliff.

  ‘Some,’ I said. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Tigers and lions?’ speculated SinnerMan. ‘I always wanted to live somewhere they got lions.’

  We cruised on through the looking-glass night in our mobile wonderland, so many lost children, armed to the teeth and stoned to the eyeballs. The limo crept like a white ghost through a sprawling town, wide roads empty and silent, down streets of shuttered stores, boarded fronts and vacant windows. And we rolled out the other side, easing through silent suburbs of clapboard houses. And on till the street lights tailed off and habitations became fewer, further apart and ever more isolated, winding our way into the black mountains, bumping down twisting lanes, past ill-lit shotgun shacks. Then at last we turned into the yard of a sprawling, ramshackle flat-top bungalow, pulling up alongside Evildoer’s Mitsubishi. Lights of red and blue and yellow flickered and flared inside. Bodies milled about on the porch, chattering merrily, swigging and smoking. From the house came a deep vibration, a boom-boom-boom that made the windows rattle. The car clock blinked 04:09.

  A shadow peeled away from the rickety porch. The passenger door opened. A wiry old black man stood there in a crumpled suit and stained wifebeater vest, face like a burned peach, white hair shaved tight to his scalp, cigarette dangling between his lips. When he opened his mouth, a single precious stone glinted in his teeth.

  ‘Unka Jimmy,’ beamed SinnerMan.

  ‘Get your blues on, boys,’ Uncle Jimmy announced in a sandpaper croak. ‘Party’s started without you.’


  13

  The building might have been standing for a century, slowly spreading out in a forest clearing, acquiring extensions with passing decades, each more loosely assembled than the last. Some kind of fake brick veneer peeled from the walls, mossy grass grew on the roof and ivy twisted and dangled in spidery limbs that lent it the look of a shaggy dog. A rough, hand-painted sign hanging over the porch read C U BURNSIDE, decorated with childlike images of a guitar and bottles.

  Uncle Jimmy led us past drink-sodden outdoor revellers into a tatty parlour dominated by an industrial refrigerator, chain and padlock securing its door. From a big, battered vat on a table covered in a vinyl sheet, he poured misty liquid into disposable plastic cups. ‘It’s on the house. I have ridden high, now I’m goin’ down slow!’ Uncle Jimmy declared, tossing his drink back.

  ‘What’s in this?’ I asked, sniffing suspiciously. I looked over at SinnerMan for guidance. His cup was already empty. I took a breath and drained mine in one.

  It seized the back of my throat like an acid snake and burned its evil way down my gullet. I knew the sensation. My old man used to keep a bottle of poteen hidden at the back of his wardrobe. I had made myself sick as a mangy dog on that Irish moonshine many times, topping the bottle up with water to disguise my incursions. Which worked fine till he took a tipple himself. I don’t know what was worse, the toxic hangovers or the beating that followed.

  ‘Skull cracker, stumphole, cat daddy, ruckus juice, it go by many name but the outcome is the same,’ chortled Uncle Jimmy.

  ‘Tell me you didn’t drink that, cuz?’ SinnerMan whispered. ‘I tossed mine. That stuff’ll kill you slower than a bullet to the head but just as dead.’

  I was experiencing aftershocks, shuddering lurches into new levels of insobriety. Even at that time of the morning, the room was hot and chokingly close, a single slow-moving fan stirring clouds of cigarette smoke. Extension cords stretched across the ceiling in every direction. Blinking Christmas lights were strung around cracked signs for Budweiser, Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola. Walls were covered with newspapers, varnished to a hard sheen. I looked at the spread closest to me. ‘Miners Trapped; Chances Slim.’ It was dated October 24 1958.

  Our entrance had created barely a stir among the few chattering denizens, who were either too old to recognise a superstar in their midst, or too drunk to care. I wondered how Beasley would feel to learn there were still outposts of rural America resisting ubiquity. One loose-limbed younger man in dungarees and bandana unpeeled himself from the makeshift bar and fist-bumped SinnerMan, calling him cousin (SinnerMan called everyone cuz but I gathered this one might actually be related) before staring into my face. ‘Do I know you?’ he slurred but I was already moving away, irresistibly drawn towards the music.

  It was coming from an adjoining room, a booming blues thump that made the whole place vibrate. I followed a slip-sliding middle-aged woman in a canary-yellow dress as she negotiated the crowded doorway. It was a big, dark space, stifling and fetid, jammed with bodies, elbows sticking out, feet shuffling, everyone in the grip of a communal sway. The raw beat seemed to be sweating from the walls. I forced my way further in, Bountiful and her girls sticking close by my side. At the far end, through the throng, I could make out a band on the floor, comprising a tall man hunchbacked over an upright piano and a toady guitarist wrapped around a battered semi-acoustic plugged into a tiny amp. The sound was so distorted it was as if the strings were rusty and the speaker cones bashed in. The guitarist was seated on a square bass box, pounding out the beat with the heel of his right shoe. There was a fiddler too, ancient and white-bearded, whose frenzied playing was abetted by a tiny young girl in a flowery print dress, standing on a chair behind him and whacking the strings with a pair of knitting needles.

  The music sparked lightning in my amplified senses, as free and fine and wild and weird as anything I had ever heard. A sinewy arm reached out and grabbed hold of Bountiful as an old man in vest and trilby hove into view. ‘Damn, you a fine-looking woman,’ he cheerfully leered. ‘Come and make Daddy happy.’ And he pulled her into the groove, to which she uncertainly surrendered. Other men snatched at Ella-X and Azure, and soon they too were dancing.

  I was jostled from behind and turned to find Karnivor sneering. ‘You think that shit’s tight, gangsta? Slave music, that’s all. These country fools never gonna lose they chains. Rotgut and rhythm, that’s all they got to be free.’

  I shrugged him off. I had thought blues was dead man’s music, just scales to be practised by rote. I couldn’t wait to get past them when I was learning to play, eager for melodic adventures. Shows you how much I knew. I was free-falling into another dimension, where decades of crusty reverence fell away and the music burst into life, broken, bleeding and true. Ebony faces and limbs swam around me, it was the blackest throng of human beings I had ever been in. I felt pale and alien, just an Irish boy with a tan, but I kept moving towards the players, focusing on the irresistible lure of a row of harmonicas on top of the piano.

  As one blues ended another kicked off, gutbucket low and nasty. The guitarist pulled a stand towards him. The microphone lead was plugged into the same small, distorting amp as his guitar. He started to moan and groan, his voice crackling and fuzzed up. ‘Got up this mornin’, got up this mornin’, blues standin’ in my door, dog-gone-you,’ the toad wailed, flaps of his neck shaking, voice surprisingly high and sweet. ‘Woke up this mornin’, blues standin in my door.’ The groove uncoiled like a slithery viper. ‘Says, “I’ve come here to stay with you, ain’t gonna leave no more.”’ The rhythm of the room shifted into a slow, sexy groove.

  ‘I said, “Blues!” I said, “Blues why don’t you let me ’lone,” oh, Mama,

  I said, “Blues why don’t you let me alone,

  You been follerin’ me ever since the day I were born!”’

  The crooked pianist smiled quizzically as I stepped up, grabbed a G harp and started to blow. Oh, man. The harmonica was the very first instrument on which I learned how to chase the notes in my head and I wailed on that thing like a lost banshee crossing the wild blue yonder. The band picked up the pace. Bountiful, Azure and Ella X pushed up front, popping and gliding, dropping and spinning like a trio of hip-hop cheerleaders. Onlookers whooped and hollered. As the band settled into a railroad funk, I blew quivering, gasping, floating, shuddering, shrieking, moaning refrains till I was breathless and dizzy. At the song’s clattering conclusion, I slid to the floor. The guitarist gave an almost imperceptible nod. I beamed with helpless joy. And there was applause. Oh, how the monkey loves applause. It just wants to roll over on its back and let admirers tickle its stomach. Until I realised the applause wasn’t for me.

  An elderly woman was helped onto centre stage. Her skin was mottled like a two-tone palomino, she had a black do-rag wrapped tight to her head, thick spectacles, rheumy eyes, her sagging body encased in a shapeless, shiny brown dress buttoned to the neck. She seemed to have some difficulty walking and was breathless and still as the fiddler adjusted the microphone stand. A sense of anticipation swelled in the room.

  ‘You got it, Alberta?’ the guitarist gently enquired, picking out a low, stately blues.

  ‘Oh yeah!’ someone called out.

  The pianist joined in, playing resonant, harmonising chords. The fiddler stroked a long, tremulous, plaintive note then sat down on a fold-up chair. Rocking unsteadily on her heels, eyes closed, Alberta began to groan and whimper, a strange, unearthly sound rising from between her thin old lips. She was feeling the rhythm, waiting for the spirit to descend. I understood. Then she opened her eyes. Magnified by her glasses, they looked eerily large as she turned, stared right at me and began to sing.

  You broke your mother’s heart, Lord when you runned away,

  You broke your mother’s heart, Lord when you runned away,

  She said, ‘He’s a hard-headed child, I know you is gone astray.’

  A cold wind blew through me. ‘Sing it, Alberta,’ a voice yelled.
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br />   Mama said, ‘Son, oh son, way you carryin’ on is a low down dirty sin,’

  Mama said, ‘Son, way you carryin’ on is a low down sin,

  You done run away and left me, but you comin’ back home again.’

  Her voice was crushed velvet and whiskey, bittersweet and lived-in. Anybody can move notes around but some people open their mouths and you can hear every sin, every act of mercy, every victory, every regret, all the love and all the shame. That’s what it sounded like to me, anyway, winding through the alcoholic fog. How did she know my secret heart? Was she some kind of witch?

  I’m coming home Mother, please don’t cry when you see me,

  I’m coming home Mother, when you see me don’t you cry,

  I was a hard-headed boy, now your son’s coming home to die.

  I blew into the harp, soft and low and hurting. A mournful wheeze. A lonely sob of self-pity.

  Ooh Mother, oh Mother, remember I’m your child,

  Cryin’ Mother, oh Mother, remember that I’m your son,

  Mama, please forgive me, all the things that I have done.

  When Alberta made her exit, I couldn’t move, I was too drained, squeezed like a bitter lemon. The band picked up the beat but when I looked closer I realised this was a whole different set of players. People seemed to have stepped off the floor and taken over the instruments. The pianist was hollering out a call, and the crowd yelled the response. ‘My gal is red hot!’ ‘Your gal is doodly squat!’ ‘I said, my gal is RED HOT!’ ‘Your gal is doodly squat!’ I didn’t know much about the blues but I was pretty sure they didn’t belong in the Appalachian mountains. I needed to find Alberta. I wanted to ask what was going on. And I really wanted to find out where she learned to sing like that and if she could teach me.