#Zero. Neil McCormick

These days I always get the best suite on the top floor of the finest establishments but chocolates on my pillow don’t move me. A hotel is a hotel is a hotel.

      ‘Where are we?’ I asked Kilo.

      ‘New York, New York, so good they named it twice: once for the night before and once for the morning after!’ he replied in a sing-song that made everything sound as if it’s supposed to be a joke.

      ‘What time is it?’ These are questions I increasingly found myself starting my day with.

      ‘Six o’clock, so grab your cock!’ he said, making a song-and-dance routine of drawing back the curtains. ‘You’ve got a couple of quick phoners with Dublin and London then we’ll get you fresh and funky for Breakfast in America over at FNY and back to MTV for the launch of Weekend Zero,’ he trilled, as if this dreary round of publicity appearances should have me bouncing out of bed with a song in my heart and my dick in my hand.

      Six o’fucking-clock. You’re probably as sick as I am of celebrities moaning about their hard fucking lives but it really is a long day with no breaks. It was barely light outside. Surely the whole point of fame and fucking fortune was being able to sleep late? My old man used to have to practically drag me out of bed to get ready for school. We both understood it to be the natural order of things, the eternal struggle between parent and child, heaven and earth, moon and sun, old and new, played out daily in a rank teenage bedroom. The dust settled on that battleground when I left home, breaking out on my own for what exactly? So that an over-animated drama queen could waltz into my room without so much as a how-do-you-do and prance around my bed trilling wakey-wakey? I was actually beginning to get upset. Kilo had the curtains open now, infusing the air with fuzzy shafts and shadows of sunrise. ‘Ta ra!’ he flounced, waving his arms like a magician’s assistant proclaiming her master’s latest wonder.

      And there I was, outside the window, a hundred metres high, staring back at myself with deep, penetrating eyes. I was sort of impressed, despite myself. I stumbled out of bed and stood naked in the middle of the room, basking in the glory of my own personal Times Square electronic billboard. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

      My giant reflection was naked too, shot from torso up, lean and mean, a brown-skinned, red-headed, blue-eyed idol. The eyes followed wherever you moved with a laser-targeted gaze. YEAR ZERO said the legend, shimmering above my scrawny chest.

      Cornelius, my photographer, had worked wonders as usual but I’ve never got it myself, not really, if I am going to be honest, and I want to be honest otherwise what is the point? I can fill myself up, puff my chest out, square my shoulders and walk the walk but when I look in the mirror I don’t see The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (American Vague), Top of the Hotties (Teanmeat), Pop’s Sexiest Idol (Virus) or even the Irish Elvis (Rolling Stoned). I see the same skinny, fish-lip, ginger half-breed who’s been staring me down in mirrors since self-consciousness erupted in my teenage brain like volcanic acne. I see a walking freakshow, a bully magnet, the playground weirdo still longing for eyes to look on me with something other than curiosity or revulsion. Any eyes. Even my own.

      Oh, what I would have given for girls to look at me the way they look at me now, when it doesn’t mean anything, when all they see is an idea of me, a shining reflection of their own desire. I was so fucking angry back then, most girls I knew were probably afraid of me. All except for Eileen, of course, lovely Eileen. I tried not to think about her any more, cause just a glimpse of an out-of-focus photograph of us together in some tatty fan book made me want to sink to my knees and prostrate myself in shame. The only girl who ever loved me for myself and I dropped her like a stone, walked away without looking back, mesmerised by a future of silicone groupies with collagen chops. Gave her up for a thousand cheap lays and a shot at Penelope Nazareth.

      And, with that, the wave of nausea broke inside me, and I just about made it into the pristine bathroom suite to chuck my guts up.

      ‘You overcooked it last night,’ said Kilo, not sounding remotely worried that his wake-up line may have tipped the scales. We had gone through variations of this scene too many times before. Kilo was an expert in the art of chemical balance, a man who had a compound for every occasion.

      ‘I’m feeling better already,’ I groaned.

      Two little black rabbit pellets rolled onto the gleaming surface next to me. ‘These’ll clear your head,’ said Kilo, ‘but wait till you’ve finished heaving.’

      Sound advice. I retched again. ‘Did I do anything I’m going to regret?’ I asked.

      ‘You were magnificent,’ said Kilo, almost as if he meant it.

      ‘Was there something with a coat-check girl?’ Maybe it was just another bad dream. I would hate anything like that getting back to Penelope, my so-called soulmate, dearly beloved bride-to-be, who I hadn’t seen for over two months and she couldn’t even take the weekend off to come to my launch. So she was shooting some fucking Inca epic halfway up the Amazon in a location so remote they couldn’t even get a satellite signal, but what kind of excuse was that?

      ‘Beasley took care of it,’ said Kilo. ‘All she wanted were tickets to the show.’

      And the moral of that story is: if you are going to fuck around, you’re much better off with a civilian than a stripper, model or groupie. Strippers always go to the press.

      I hauled myself to my feet, well, almost all the way to my feet, popped the pills and gratefully accepted the miniature bottle of hotel-branded mineral water that Kilo was holding out. It was coming back to me now. We rode in on a gunship, some fuck-off military helicopter with my tag on the side, ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ booming out of front-mounted speakers as we buzzed the Manhattan skyline, trailing plumes of coloured smoke, descending like the wrath of God on the roof of the Illium Tower at twilight in a stroboscopic blaze of paparazzi flash. That was Beasley’s idea, an apocalyptic vibe to tie in with the whole Year Zero branding: doomed youth, the beginning of the end of the world as we know it, everybody sing along now: ‘We were never young / We were born into a world you had already destroyed.’ Don’t try and act like you don’t know it, biggest fucking hit of the 21st Century, number one in thirty-four territories, most streamed track of all time. ‘Life has just begun / It’s the beginning of the end for all the girls and boys.’

      My idea, which was a much better idea, was to buy a battleship (I found one for sale on eBay), get the hottest graffiti artists to tag it top to bottom then sail it up the mouth of the Hudson, come in under the Statue of Liberty, dock it at Ground Zero and throw the launch party on the boat. What a fucking photo op that would have been. But, you know, budget, blah blah, permission to dock, blah blah, and this was the clincher: what are we going to do with the boat when the campaign is over, turn it into a floating museum of pop memorabilia? So the chopper was a compromise and not some stroke of genius from my so-called manager, if you really want the truth. But I guess it meant I didn’t have to set sail a week before from Southampton which, anyway, would have spoiled the surprise.

      Plus, I get seasick.

      2

      By the time my skinny body had been thoroughly pummelled by the high-pressure shower, I was starting to feel almost human. Either that or Kilo’s drugs were kicking in. But my chemically assisted mood kept being hampered by flashbacks from the party, lo-rez mental body shots that made my sphincter clench. Like a bulb popping in my skull, I saw myself posing for a cheesy snap with the wicked witch from The Scum, the self-styled ‘celebrity’s friend’ shoving fake tits in my face like we were literally bosom buddies. And after what she said about my movie debut and I quote: ‘The CGI effects may be amazing but there’s no supercomputer in the world smart enough to animate Zero’s face.’ I never forget an insult. I should have head butted the two-faced bitch but I went into performing monkey mode as per fucking usual, flirting with the girls, throwing shapes for the boys, singing for my supper.

      When The Zero Sums first set sail it was take no prisoners, kiss no ass. But that was before I met Beasley and started to listen to his hypnotic spiel about world domination, that husky whisper echoing