‘I don’t even like bananas,’ I snorted.
And everyone laughed. Like I said, your own employees are an easy crowd. Someone was quietly snapping pictures, and not my usual photographer, Cornelius, who had done the limo ride too many times to care, and was watching streets glide by with an air of ambient awareness, as if, should some particular juxtaposition of light, form and content manifest, he would suddenly spring into action, which, in fact, I had seen him do many times before. I liked having Cornelius around, cause he took pictures that made me look like the person I imagined myself to be, rather than the person I saw in the mirror. Not every photographer can do that, which is why this interloper, a small, leathery-skinned Latino with a stupid soul patch goatee and a fish eye lens was making me agitated. I hadn’t even seen his portfolio, for fuck’s sake.
Sensing my displeasure (which was, after all, part of her job), Flavia affected introductions. A team from The Times was travelling with us to make sure our US invasion got covered back in the UK. The blonde was feature writer Kitty Queenan, who smiled demurely and said, ‘You won’t even notice we’re here.’ I doubted that, somehow. Her eyes were lasers. Her byline seemed familiar, which must have meant she once wrote something nasty about me.
‘Wouldn’t it have been cheaper for your parents just to buy a cat?’ I said, by way of making conversation.
‘Kitty is a common form of Katherine,’ said Flavia, instinctively smoothing away my habitual rudeness.
Kitty herself was unperturbed, looking at me with sporting amusement, like a gladiator sizing up a lippy Christian, if you can imagine an overweight gladiator in an ill-fitting lacy dress. ‘It’s a pen name,’ she said. ‘My friends call me Pussy.’
I knew who the enemy was now. Queen Bitch was her column; she specialised in hyperbolic put-downs and never let facts get in the way of a good pun. What the fuck was Flavia doing letting this monster loose behind the lines? She was scribbling in her notebook, which made me wonder what I had done that she found worthy of recording. I’d have to deal with her later. The photographer was Bruno Gil, a New Yorker stringer. As soon as Flavia mentioned the magic words ‘We have picture approval’, I lost interest. Snap away, buddy. If I didn’t like what I saw, I wouldn’t approve a single frame and The Times could make do with one of Cornelius’s iconic shots just like everyone else.
Flavia was running through my itinerary. It wasn’t good, my day parcelled into fifteen-minute blocks covering six A4 pages, each and every block filling me with silent dread. Flavia was a stick insect styled like Dracula’s lawyer (sleek, tailored black with non-specific religious trimmings) but she exuded imperturbability, which is what Beasley liked in the people he hired, the sense that no matter how wild the hurricane was blowing, with enough hairspray everything would stay in place. She was usually surrounded by a coven of midget witches, all, in fact, frighteningly competent PR girls for Sharpe Practice, adept in the dark arts of media manipulation. I wanted to ask Flavia what the gossip sites were saying about Penelope and Troy in the jungle. She would give it to me straight, or at least make it sound palatable in her silken English tones. But I couldn’t raise the topic in front of the vulture from The Times, still scratching away at her notebook, as if a ten-minute limo ride was the stuff of War and Peace. So I listened to Flavia’s midget assistants recite their litany of evil, complete with radio station call signs, genre specifications and time allotments: ‘WRDW in Philly, top forty station, ten minutes with Joe and Steph, we’ve spoken to them before, they’re easy’; ‘WFLC in Miami, adult hot, five minutes with the T2 girls, Julie and Tamara, flirty and fun’; ‘WNYU, New York college radio, up to fifteen minutes with Tyrone Adamski, he’s going to want to talk about music…’
‘Not music, God forbid!’ I snorted.
They smiled indulgently and continued churning out press-conference arrangements, one-on-one interviews, TV slots. I stared out the window, craning my neck to quietly marvel at this towering metropolis glittering in the morning sun, a dizzying spectacle that always set my country heart aflutter. New York’s skyline spun me all the way back to the cliffs of Moher, day trips by the Irish seaside. I was momentarily overloaded by the vertical rush and horizontal buzz, a stream of bodies rising from subways, dodging traffic, snatching cigarettes, yelling into phones, grabbing coffee and pastries and newspapers with stories about me and Penelope and fucking Troy fucking Anthony. I tried to let it all wash over me.
‘Donut asked if we can absolutely ring-fence rehearsal time,’ interjected Eugenie Arrowsmith, Beasley’s personal assistant. Duncan ‘Donut’ McCann, my perpetually stressed tour manager, was given to complaining I spent more time talking about music than making it, which, of course, was true. With days to go before showtime, we still hadn’t managed a full dress rehearsal of the whole set. Actually, that’s not fair, I am sure the band and crew had been through it dozens of times without me.
‘I thought we could bring some international press over for that, give them a bit of colour,’ suggested Flavia.
‘Donut really wants Zero’s undivided attention,’ said Eugenie.
‘Everybody wants Zero’s undivided attention,’ retorted Flavia.
That’s right, talk about me as if I’m not here.
We had only got as far as page two of my schedule when the limo pulled up at FNY studios, where the sidewalk was cordoned off for photographers and Zeromaniacs. They had probably hot-footed it over the few blocks from the hotel, New York being quicker by foot than limo. Not that I was ever allowed to walk the streets for fear of spontaneous outbreaks of civil insurrection or something that wasn’t covered by insurance.
An FNY news crew was on hand to shoot my arrival, so we gave it the full service, stony-faced security clearing a path as I ran the gauntlet, touched some hands, scribbled on scraps of paper and allowed myself to be whisked through revolving doors into a vast atrium of air-conditioned sanctuary. I paused in the filtered light to look back at the hysteria unfolding soundlessly on the other side of reinforced glass. For one brief moment, it felt like they were the monkeys in a cage, not me. Then a door exploded open as one tearful Zeromaniac broke the cordon, eluded a uniformed doorman and came screaming across the polished floor. One of my security grunts, moving quicker than I would have credited, took her down. It was not a fair contest. She was a girl not much younger than me, suddenly embarrassed and scared to find herself pinned beneath a creature the size of a sumo wrestler. She stretched out a hand to try and catch her spectacles as they skittered across the tiles.
Tiny Tony began to move me away from the action but I was transfixed. What forces were at work that could detach a girl from her ordinary inhibitions, her sense of herself in the world, and turn her into a quivering hysteric? Was I responsible for this illusion or just part of it, equally in thrall to the music and marketing, the lights and smoke and mirrors, the power of suggestion, the demands of role play? Don’t you people know by now that the famous are just like you, they shit like you, spit like you, piss like you, and lie in bed at night wishing they were someone else, like you?
She was a pretty girl, someone I might have been too shy to ask for a dance just a few years ago but maybe, if we had got to talking, she would have let me walk her to the bus stop, and we would have discovered what books we both read and what music we loved and where we dreamed life might take us, and who knows, who knows? She reminded me of Eileen, just a little. But there she was, spreadeagled, making whimpering noises and blushing furiously. I was the one who should have been embarrassed. I broke free to pick up her glasses, then waving away the grunt, bent down and helped her to her feet, walking her back to the entrance while she wept uncontrollably.
The FNY TV crew caught the whole thing, and it was swiftly edited together to provide a dramatic clip to introduce me on air. ‘I bet that kind of thing happens to you all the time?’ winked our host, Gordy, the perma-tanned, blow-dried, silver-haired anchorman of the top-rated East Coast breakfast show.
‘Only when I come here,’ I twinkled back. ‘She was looking for you. She wanted me to ask for your autograph.’
He laughed but I could see the idea appealed. He was seated on an excessively bright orange