#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  Yeah, Beasley is still in the picture. He and Homer are inching towards an arrangement where Homer protects my interests and Beasley continues to guide the musical operation. I think they’ll work something out, especially since I hear Beasley introduced Homer to Andrew Lloyd Webber and they’ve started discussions about whether they can turn my odyssey into a Broadway musical. Anyway, if I’m going to stay in this business, better to have the devil working for me than against me.

  And what else am I going to do? Music is the only thing I know. But I want to do it properly, I want to do it for the right reasons, and I want to do some good. I want to make my mother proud.

  There was a lot to think about, but a besieged hotel in Kilrock probably wasn’t the place to do it. Bono had offered to lend me his house in the South of France to continue recuperating and I was ready to take him up on it. But first I wanted to say goodbye to my ma.

  So one evening, under cover of darkness, Paddy smuggled me out in a catering van and we drove up to Kilrock cemetery. The gates were locked but we bunked over the wall, and made our way to the graveside with a bunch of roses and a guitar. Paddy led the way, his torch beam flashing over broken gravestones, plastic flowers and overgrown plots, till he stopped and said, ‘Here we are.’

  It wasn’t much to look at, a square white marble stone that was starting to look a bit weathered. There was an engraving of the Virgin Mary in one corner, eyes closed in beatific repose. And a simple inscription: In loving memory of Maria Beatriz Noone, Taken from us before her time. 12.11.2004, aged 32. Watch over us from heaven. Love never dies.

  I sighed. I didn’t remember burying her. It was strange to think that whatever was left of her was somewhere beneath my feet, fading into the Irish soil, thousands of miles from her Colombian mountains. And there she would lie forevermore, with a view of an old Irish church, and the wet hills of Kilrock.

  It was a clear, cloudless night. There was a full moon overhead and a sprinkling of stars. We stood there in the dark, coats zipped up against the cold. ‘The grave’s been kept nice,’ I said, for want of something to say.

  ‘I come here when I can, you know, buy a few flowers and that,’ said Paddy.

  ‘I don’t even remember being here before,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, well, Da didn’t like to come up here. I don’t think he liked to remember. He took down all the pictures, he acted like she’d never been there at all. Everybody’s got their own way of dealing with things and that was his. But I liked to think about her, so I used to come here on my own.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ I said. ‘You remember her.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘She was lovely. She was a lovely ma.’

  And we both stood and contemplated the stone. ‘Do you want to be alone?’ asked Paddy.

  ‘Yeah, just give me ten minutes,’ I said.

  He headed back to the van. When he was out of sight, I considered my options. I decided I was done with beating my breast and wrenching my hair and stamping the earth and howling at the moon. So I said, ‘I’ve written a song for you, Ma,’ and sat down on the grass, and picked it out on acoustic guitar.

  On the darkest day

  Curtainfall

  At the end of the play

  Heads laid on the block

  The ticking of the clocks

  Keys turn in the lock

  The flashing of a blade

  Don’t be afraid

  In the midnight hour

  Waves crash

  Neath your ivory tower

  A ship is on the rocks

  Your captain’s in the docks

  His last card’s been played

  His last prayer’s been prayed

  Don’t be afraid

  Cause where we go, we all go together

  It’s a river that runs on forever

  And never has strayed

  Don’t be afraid

  And everybody feels

  Everybody’s pain

  And everything that’s been

  Will be and be again

  We’ve got stardust in our veins

  It shines to light our way

  To where all things are made

  Don’t be afraid

  Cause where we go, we all go together

  It’s a river that runs on forever

  And never has strayed

  Don’t be afraid

  I waited for some sign that she had heard me but there was nothing but the wind rustling in the trees. ‘Ah well,’ I said, ‘it’s just a work in progress.’ I lay down on the grass and stuck my fingers into the earth. If I could have, I would have shed a tear for all the days we never had together, and never would have. But I was all cried out. So I told her I was sorry for ever thinking she had abandoned me and that I knew she’d never leave me again.

  The wind whistled emptily through the trees. A dark cloud passed across the night sky, blotting out stars and almost extinguishing the light of the moon, till all I could see was a silver shadow up above, and then nothing, as the night plunged into pitch black. I heard an owl hoot its hollow call but the sound was suddenly distant and muffled, as if I had been cut off from the world. Then the cloud shifted, and the moonlight fell upon me, and that’s when I saw her.

  As I lay on my back, she rose up over me, like a giant getting slowly to her feet, until she was towering overhead. And her body was in the trees, and her face was the moon, and her hair reached out its tendrils to the stars. And she was all around me in the night and the wind and the rustling leaves. ‘Make me proud,’ she whispered.

  Then she was gone.

  When I got back to the car, my brother was on his phone. I had the urge to tell him what I had seen, or felt, but I knew how it would sound, and I didn’t want to go back to the clinic. Anyway, I felt good, light-headed, almost … happy. So I carefully placed my guitar on the back seat and slid in next to him. ‘Where to now?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s one more stop we’ve got to make,’ he said.

  As we drove away, I glanced back. I thought I saw the black shape of an owl rise above the trees. But it was dark and I couldn’t be sure.

  I was lost in my own thoughts as we drove through Kilrock, through streets unchanged since my childhood, turned into a lane and pulled up outside a house I knew almost as well as my own.

  ‘The Haleys?’ I said.

  ‘Eileen’s come up from Dublin,’ said Paddy. ‘She’s agreed to see you.’

  ‘Fuck.’ I was suddenly afraid to get out. ‘Are you going to come in?’

  ‘No, you’re all right, I think I’ll sit this one out,’ said Paddy.

  ‘Are her ma and da gonna be there? Mr Haley always looked like he wanted to cut my dirty fingers off for touching his daughter. I may never get out alive.’

  ‘You’ve got to face the music sometime,’ said Paddy, unhelpfully.

  He told me to call later when I needed to be picked up. He’d go and have a quiet pint in the local. And left me standing at the gate, wondering what I was letting myself in for. I was so nervous, I had to just stand there shaking for a few minutes, building my confidence. I thought I saw a curtain twitch, and the idea that it might be Eileen in there, looking out, wondering what was keeping me after all these years, finally stirred me. I walked up and knocked on the door.

  The light went on in the porch. Mrs Haley answered, thank God. She was a big woman with a broad, serious face I remembered so very well. ‘Pedro, it’s nice to see you.’

  ‘It’s nice to see you too, Mrs Haley,’ I said, and it was true. I remembered the warmth with which that woman always treated me, the stray orphan her daughter brought home, because if Eileen had seen something worthwhile in me, that was good enough for her.

  ‘Give me a hug, boy,’ she said, wrapping her big arms around me and pulling me into her house. ‘Jaysus, you gave me a fright calling from prison that night. We were all so worried about you. They said prayers in the church, did you hear about that? I don’t suppose so. I’m sure they were praying for y
ou all over the world. Well, Eileen’s waiting for you in the living room. Would you like a nice cup of tea? I’d offer you something stronger now that you’re all grown up, but I read in the paper that you’re an addict, is that right? You’re in Alcoholics Anonymous, is it?’

  ‘A cup of tea would be lovely, Mrs Haley,’ I said.

  ‘Well, go on then,’ she said. ‘You know the way.’

  ‘Is Mr Haley in?’ I said, warily.

  ‘He’s upstairs with his grandson,’ she said, and winked. ‘Don’t worry, he’s got his hands full! The lad’s a little rascal. It’s time you went and said hello.’ I was starting to think this had maybe been a bad idea. She left me standing at the threshold, outside the door of the living room, where Eileen and I had sat so many times, necking in the dark after everybody had gone to bed. I slowly opened the door.

  She was sitting alone on the sofa. She looked just the same, only better.

  ‘Eileen,’ I said, weakly.

  ‘Pedro,’ she said.

  And she stood, and we moved together, awkwardly at first, not knowing what the form was for such a reunion, but we hugged and it was good to feel her in my arms, just like I remembered her, just the right size and shape – we knew just how to hold each other because we had done it so many times before. But then the moment passed, and we broke away and sat opposite each other. I looked at her dark eyes, her pale, oval face, the small nose with the sprinkle of freckles, and I tried to take in what had changed about her. But, of course, everything had changed. She’d had her heart cruelly broken by her childhood sweetheart, she had left home, she had lived and loved and had a child of her own to take care of. She wasn’t a girl any more. She was a woman, and the sea blue of her eyes was as calm as it was deep.

  I don’t know how long I sat there staring into those eyes, so familiar yet so unexpected, while she smiled at me the way you might smile patiently at a slow child. It may have only been a minute but time had become elastic, it was being stretched so far that night I half expected it to snap and send us plummeting back into the past, back to the days before I had fucked everything up. But then Mrs Haley brought the tea in on a tray, and apologised for her living room being a bit of a mess but there had been kids running rampage all day, it’s not often she even sees Eileen up in Kilrock any more, cause she was living in Dublin now and she had got a good job and—

  ‘Ma!’ said Eileen.

  ‘Sorry, sweet,’ said her mother. ‘But it’s so nice to see you two together—’

  ‘Ma!’

  ‘Oh yes, well, sorry, I’ll go and check on the baby,’ she said. Eileen rolled her eyes as her mother left.

  ‘So you’ve a kid now?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, warily.

  ‘How old is it?’ I said, then felt like an idiot. ‘I don’t mean “it”, like that, I mean, babies, you know …’ I was like a tongue-tied fourteen-year-old, trying to make small talk.

  ‘Paddy says you’ve got something you need to say to me,’ said Eileen.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Is that it?’ she laughed. She actually laughed, and my heart leaped. ‘Christ, Pedro, you can do better than that.’

  ‘No, I meant sorry for asking about the kid,’ I tried to explain. ‘I mean, it’s great that you have a kid, you always wanted one, I know, and …’ I stopped and took a deep breath. And I saw our teenage years together ripple before me, all those years of near unspoken communion, when we were just in it for each other, joined at hip and heart, and at the very same time I saw her crying outside a clinic in London, and crying in my bedroom when I turned her out, and looking back at me from the street below with such a look of sad reproach, and I thought how strange it was for me to have gone halfway across the world and to have ended up back here, and I thought, you can’t run away from yourself. You really can’t. And that’s what I tried to tell her, nearly five years too late.

  ‘Eileen, I want to say sorry because I hurt you, and I hurt myself at the same time, and I didn’t even know it. You are the most important girl in the world to me. You gave me the confidence to be who I am, and you are the person I have loved most in the whole world, only I didn’t know it until recently, and I’m really sorry for treating you like shit. I’m sorry for breaking your heart, I’m sorry for dumping you as soon as things started to happen for me, I’m sorry for making you have an abortion in London, when I know you didn’t want to, and for being selfish, and thoughtless, and for never getting in touch again, and … I’m just …’ I tried to find the exact right word to convey the abject and sincere depth of my contrition but nothing was forthcoming.

  ‘Sorry?’ she suggested.

  ‘Yeah, I’m about as sorry as a boy can be,’ I admitted.

  ‘Ah well, we were young,’ she said.

  Is that it? I thought. Was I forgiven, just like that? And I felt a little upset at the same time. An apology like that deserved more than just a shrugged dismissal. I think I would have felt better if she had screamed and wept and called me an ungrateful, immature shit and got her dad downstairs to kick me out the house. But that obviously wasn’t going to happen. She was just looking at me, with a kind of sad curiosity. ‘Was it everything you dreamed it was going to be, Pedro?’ she asked.

  ‘You mean, after I left you?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Did you get everything you wanted?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I said.

  ‘I’m glad,’ she said, and sounded sincere.

  ‘Only it wasn’t what I wanted,’ I added quickly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘For what? You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.’

  It was that innocuous remark that finally seemed to draw her out. ‘How would you know?’ she said, with just a bit of an edge, a shadow of meaning I couldn’t quite place.

  ‘You’re right,’ I agreed. ‘How would I know anything about you? No one will tell me a thing. I don’t know if you’re married, I don’t know what you do for a living, I don’t know how many kids you’ve got. You probably know everything about me now, and I don’t know a thing about you, and I think about you a lot—’

  ‘I’m sorry for not staying in touch,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. Right. Well. You’re forgiven then,’ I said.

  She laughed. A lovely chime of delight, I knew that laugh so well. There was something about this situation I wasn’t reading right. ‘It’s nice to see you, Pedro,’ she said. ‘Really. Of course, we see you on the TV all the time.’

  ‘We?’ I ventured carefully. ‘Is that your husband? Or your boyfriend? Or your girlfriend, or whatever?’

  She laughed again. ‘Do you want to meet him?’

  ‘Your boyfriend? Not really, to be honest.’

  ‘No, silly,’ she laughed. ‘My son.’

  ‘Is he not sleeping?’ I said, not sure where this was going.

  ‘I wish. He refuses to go to sleep until he meets you. He’s always singing your songs. I couldn’t get away from you even if I wanted to.’

  I snatched at that one like a lifeline. ‘Does that mean you don’t want to?’

  ‘It just means he likes your music,’ she said, firmly.

  ‘What age is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Four,’ she said. ‘Ma!’ she called up the stairs. ‘Can you bring Peter down now to say hello?’

  ‘Four?’ I repeated, doing the math.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you, Pedro,’ she said, seriously.

  I looked at her curiously. Eileen. My Eileen. She was trembling.

  The door opened, and a little boy appeared.

  And I knew him.

  ‘I never did go …’ she was saying, ‘… in London … the clinic. I mean, I went in, but I couldn’t go through with it.’

  I knew the moment I laid eyes on him. It wasn’t just the red hair and the dark skin. It was the way he moved, it was his whole being. We fixed eyes on each other, and it was a lightning bolt across the room.

  And he ran stra
ight to me, and jumped into my arms.

  And I knew him.

  My son.

  I sank back into the chair, and held his little body in my arms. I could feel the bones in his back, the softness of his skin, the fragility of his existence. And I looked into his eyes, and felt I was staring into the onrushing headlights of the future. I started to panic. What did I know about parenthood? An abandoned son with an abandoned son of his own? What was I supposed to do now? How could I run away from this? Where was the door? But I felt Eileen’s hand on my shoulder and started to calm down. Whatever happened next, I was going to do the right thing. I was going to make my mother proud. Maybe my father too.

  I remembered what my old man said about parenthood, and it suddenly sounded more like wisdom than an excuse. We’re all just making it up as we go along.

  ‘Zero,’ said my little boy, putting his tiny hands on my face as if to make sure I was real.

  I laughed. ‘Zero plus one,’ I said.

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