#Zero. Neil McCormick

but blended together in harmony the effect was awe-inspiring, a cathedral of sound, climbing up to the chandeliers and beyond. Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing to watch and listen. Even me.

      Sometimes I feel like freedom is near

      Sometimes I feel like freedom is here

      Sometimes I feel like freedom is near

      But we a long way from home …

      ‘Are you all right?’ said Carlton, his face suddenly looming before mine, snapping me out of my reverie.

      ‘I’m fine,’ I said, then realised I wasn’t. My eyes were swimming. There were tears pouring down my cheeks. My whole face was wet. Carlton had stopped playing and the choir resumed chatting among themselves, as if nothing had happened. But I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t even know where the tears were coming from. Kilo was at my side now, Kelly was dabbing my face with a tissue, my people were closing around me, cutting me off from prying eyes. ‘I’m fine,’ I protested. ‘It’s just … the lights …’

      In the privacy of a washroom, Kilo warily chopped out another line. I felt the nostril burn, the neural explosion, the adrenalin shot to the heart, then I rubbed my tongue across the delicious numbness of my gums and clapped my hands together, filling the washroom with an explosion of sound. This was more like it. ‘What next?’ I grinned.

      Did I really need to ask? We had half an hour before an international press conference scheduled at the neighbouring Enlightenment Hotel, where an advance party were already setting things in motion. In the meantime, there were more radio calls and Bruno Gil, The Times photographer, was pestering Flavia for ten minutes to shoot a classic New York skyline photo on the hotel roof. She had turned him down flat but I was feeling munificent now, cocaine crashing through my blood, and what the fuck, I could talk on the phone, ride an elevator to the roof and pose for photographs at the same time. Hell, I could even chew gum.

      So that’s what we did, although the elevator only took us as far as the Pilgrim’s forty-fourth floor, then we had to walk up several steep flights. I took the stairs two at a time, laughing to see my so-called bodyguards hauling their sumo blubber after me. Bursting onto the roof terrace, the view was spectacular, a 360-degree looping vista of craggy towers poking into the blue. I ran whooping to the edge, while Flavia sternly admonished me to slow down and the sumos puffed to keep up, then I leaned over the balcony and spat my chewing gum out into the wind, imagining it flying through the air to attach itself to the head of one of the unwitting ants hustling across the streets below.

      Bruno Gil started shooting as soon as he got close. I threw my arms out against the balcony and leaned back like a Hollywood starlet, laughing with childish glee at this absurd moment of near freedom. ‘Top of the world, Ma!’ I shouted. ‘Top of the world!’

      ‘That’s nice, that’s nice,’ the photographer murmured, issuing a steady stream of come-ons, like he was seducing a model. My bodyguards stationed themselves far enough away not to intrude but close enough to intervene if Bruno should go psycho and try and tip me over the edge. Kelly and Linzi hovered discreetly, occasionally intervening to adjust a hair or tuck in a stray bit of clothing. Flavia and her midgets occupied Queen Bitch. Kilo was talking to a hotel manager. Spooks McGrath and his digiman recorded zero24seven footage while a late-arriving MTV crew set up to shoot the photo shoot. You are never alone with an entourage.

      ‘Where you from, man?’ asked Bruno. He was just keeping up the patter, I know, holding my attention, but it was a stupid question, everybody knows where I’m from, don’t they?

      ‘Ireland,’ I said.

      ‘You don’t look Irish.’

      Like I didn’t know that. I look like a fucking alien. ‘My mother was Colombian,’ I said.

      He seemed pretty excited by this. ‘Yeah? Mine too! What I mean is I’m Colombian – mother, father, the whole works, es un mundo pequeño, eh?’

      ‘I don’t speak the language,’ I admitted.

      ‘Really, why not?’

      ‘We spoke English at home.’

      ‘They speak English in Ireland?’

      ‘They speak English everywhere, don’t they?’ I snorted. ‘They probably speak English in fucking Colombia. You speak English pretty good.’

      ‘What part of Colombia she from?’ he persisted.

      ‘I don’t know.’ I was starting to regret granting him ten minutes.

      ‘You don’t know where your mama’s from?’

      ‘She’s dead.’ That was always a surefire conversation stopper. But not this time.

      ‘I’m sorry, man, I’m so sorry. My mama too, God rest her soul, before I came here. Life’s hard down there, siempre duro …’

      ‘La Esperanza,’ I said suddenly, surprising myself.

      ‘What’s that, man?’

      ‘That’s where she was from. La Esperanza.’

      ‘I don’t know it.’

      ‘I don’t even know how I know that.’

      ‘It’s in your blood, man. You got relatives?’

      ‘In Ireland.’

      ‘Colombia, man, your mama’s family?’

      ‘No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

      ‘You don’t know?’

      ‘I don’t know.’

      ‘You don’t know much, man.’

      Who the fuck was this guy? I tried to catch Flavia’s eye. It was time to wrap it up.

      ‘My family’s from MedellÍn,’ he continued. ‘It’s not good what’s happening down there, with the orphans.’

      ‘Yeah, I guess.’ I started clicking my fingers, trying to signal to someone to pull me out. Fucking people watch you like a hawk all day, then the moment you need them they are all cooing over the view.

      ‘People don’t protect their own kids, you know their soul is in trouble,’ said Bruno, snapping away. ‘The kids got nothing, they homeless, fucking death squads running around treating them like vermin. That country’s gone to shit, man. I never go back there, never. It’s good what you’re doing with the record, man, giving something back, I admire that …’

      How the fuck did he know about the charity record? Could nobody keep a secret round here?

      Kilo had finally woken up, and stepped in with a phone, saying I had to take a call, we had to keep moving. Bruno accepted his fate graciously. ‘Thanks, man, el Dios esté con usted,’ he said, putting the camera down.

      ‘Yeah, God be with you too,’ I said.

      ‘I thought you didn’t speak the language, man?’ Bruno grinned.

      ‘I don’t speak the language,’ I said.

      6

      We rode the people carrier all of a hundred metres to the back of the Enlightenment, pulling into the rear, where I was escorted through kitchens and corridors, all the time talking to some DJ on a West Coast radio show. ‘What’s the weather like in New York?’ he wanted to know. They always ask about the fucking weather, like it makes any fucking difference to me as I am transported by luxury vehicles from one air-conditioned room to another, from Timbuktu to Reykjavik.

      ‘It’s hot,’ I said, gazing at people in shorts and shirtsleeves. ‘It’s hot everywhere. That’s why they call it global warming. Here is the weather forecast for the next hundred years: hot and getting hotter.’

      ‘It’s snowing in LA,’ he said, cheerfully.