#Zero. Neil McCormick

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 they 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