Zero Red - An Eddie Zero Novel E-Book

Francis Young

• Herausgeber: Grosvenor House Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 167

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Sold out Rock Concerts in Rome, Amsterdam and London. A spell in Wormwood Scrubs jail. A potential Indian arranged marriage. The back streets of Rome. London buses. A random ventriloquist. The occasional drug addict. Plenty of cricket, and, of course, a lot of of beautiful women. A steam train. Yellow tailed monkeys. Brazilian pirates, Ecuadoran asylum seekers. A helicopter co-pilot called Pontius. Building a hotel in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Welcome again to the world's most unusual drummer. The Mozart, cricket and blonde loving, Eddie Zero. "I cried, nearly as much as I laughed" said a preview reader

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Copyright

Dedications

My son Edward, The other Eddie.

The ladies in my life:

A, J, J, M, K, N, P and S

You know who you are. Thank you

CHAPTER 1

Mick, surprisingly for a world class partier, hadn’t felt like a party since Berlin. He had woken up in his suite at the Kempinski Hotel with the lovely Esperanza. He had a filthy hangover and was drinking Evian, interspersed with sniffs of his favourite hangover cure – pure lanolin in a little bottle he had obtained from a slightly, slightly? dodgy chemist in Marseilles.

“That will be four hundred Euros. A credit card will do nicely”

“Shit” was his instant reply. She was a “Tom”, cockney-speak for being “on the game”. She was a bloody prostitute. He hoped that she was worth it. He couldn’t remember anything past an 80’s reunion event at a Schloss just outside the city. He could remember that there were a lot of people dressed as ABBA and The Bay City Rollers. A group of very strange people had arrived all dressed as David Hasselhof in Knight Rider. They insisted in talking to a non-existent character called KITT all evening. They insisted on instructing KITT to unlock and turn on the engine – all said with a strong almost, incomprehensible, Bavarian accent.

“I make it a rule not to add credit card commission” Esperanza was showing some canny marketing as Mick got out his Diners Card. The other surprise. After Mick had paid, it turned out that Esperanza actually had the same make up of chromosomes as Mick and was a “Tom” in more ways than one.

This became a lot more obvious as Esperanza pulled on his/her tight YSL underwear.

“Fancy a repeat for a special offer of 200 Euros?”

His reply of

“Bugger off, now”

was met with a coy

“I was only asking”

Mick started worrying that his night with Esperanza might have given him some form of sexually transmitted disease. He spent the morning at the Breninkmeyer clinic with a selection of equally embarrassed men.

Eventually he was called through to meet the nurse She looked like Rosa Klebb from the Bond movies.

“We haf no STD’s in Berlin. Absolute cleanliness and the Russians are the answer. You should try it in London.” The Russian presence in the British capital was certainly increasing rapidly but I don’t think that STD control was on their shopping list.

“Hey, it’s my fiftieth birthday” announced Mick. (and the rest – I don’t remember any children at University)

“Let’s party. My flat in London, Thursday” said the email to the band, and friends

Many phone calls from Antonio and I, failed to get hold of Esperanza to leap out of a cake with a

“Surprise, surprise!” It didn’t hold us back on literally “taking the Mick” though.

CHAPTER 2

When Mick and I formed the band back at Luton University, it was called the Luton Rhythm Boys. If we had kept that name, although Mick’s Dad loved it, I would probably be a Chiropodist and Mick a dentist.. Perfect jobs for philosophers. We decided to think big, well at least bigger. Starting point was Mick as lead guitar and me as drummer.

Mick and I were both philosophy students. Although neither of us had much truck with sitting in a lecture hall when there were girls and beer waiting, we decided to call the band ETHOS. Very cutting edge, very cool, very philosophy. Downside was that the girls mostly didn’t know what it meant. For them we should have probably stuck with the Rhythm Boys. It may have put off the catholic girls – discuss.

At that time, rock bands were made up of five. We duly took on James as Saxophonist, Antonio on Organ and Joseph as vocals. Joseph didn’t like the name Joseph, so he had a series of nicknames all somehow associated with his very serious drug habit. He was often Happy and Sleepy ,very occasionally Bashful and often in need of the Doc for taking some below quality coke. In the end he spent six months as Happy and perhaps longer as Dopey – which came naturally. He also had moments of being Sneezy. The only constant in Dopey’s life was a fellow addict-Snow White.

Dopey and Snow White lived on a different, parallel planet to the rest of the world. At Mick’s party they had spent three hours discussing whether the crisp that they were sharing was indeed the REAL McCoy or did that live somewhere else and the crisps that they were discussing were simply clones or, worse still, mutants – don’t discuss..

Dopey’s saving grace, and the source of his drug funds, was the fact that he had a wonderful, unforgettable, (although he sometimes forgot the lyrics) bluesy raspy voice – a cross between Jo Cocker and Rod Stewart..

Mick was more complex. He had grown up, if he ever did, in Blackpool. His father had a ventriloquists act. His assistant, never the dummy, was called Mr Bunny Carew.. The highlight of his act was when Bunny sang “It’s a long way to Tipperary” while Mick’s dad was drinking a pint of Boddington’s Beer. Ventriloquists in general have a problem with “b’s” and “p’’s” and a huge cheer used to go up in the theatre, usually the South Pier, when “Tickerary” was mentioned. Mick’s father used to spend hours trying to find a song that Bunny could sing without those killer consonants’ spending most waking hours with Bunny and Boddington’s. Mick once plucked up the courage to ask his father why he had named his assistant with a name beginning with “b”

“None of your f.. king business”

“And It’s MISTER Carew to you son”, chipped in Bunny. No more was ever said.

After about a certain age, Mick’s Dad started losing the plot big time and would only communicate through Bunny. Even to his wife Rose.

Mick’s mum, Rose, had been a girl dancer, a soubrette, and they lived in a house near to the North Promenade.

Mick was an only child, apart from Colin that is, who was his imaginary friend. Imaginary Colin lived under the North Pier and Mick would always talk to him, sometimes at length, on his way to and from school in Bispham,. Colin liked parsnips so there were always extra for tea.

“Gruddy Garsnips again.” Mick would smuggle a couple down to Colin. In reality a shrewd seagull had sussed this routine and was usually to be seen awaiting his parsnip supper – not in front of Mick, of course.

In the later days there was simply not enough money in “Venting”. To support Mick going to University, Rose took in two “lodgers” They stayed alternative weeks. One night, when Rose, unusually, had made a mistake with the days, both stayed.. Bunny burst into her room and upon seeing his wife in bed with two lorry drivers from Solihull pronounced “Gloody gitch” and carried on as normal going back to his Boddingtons..

James had always been the easiest, some may even have been rude enough to say boring, member of the band. He did two acts of rebelliousness in his life. He called himself Jamie and he played tenor saxophone. We all reckon that, if there was in a fire, he would rescue his Yamaha YTS62. Sax first. Certainly mother-in-law would be a lot further down the list. After reading Philosophy, he actually used to show up for lectures, he married Charlotte. Charlotte’s mother insisted on calling him James.

“James sounds like a king, Jamie like a footballer or a small dog. I don’t tell my friends at the bridge club that you are in a skiffle band.”

What Charlotte’s mother hated absolutely, was that James earned over twenty times in his “skiffle band” as he would in the LSO.

He trained as a chartered surveyor, had a nice house and two lovely children - Isolde and Tristram. His heart however was with the YTS62 on stage, even performing standards like Jerry Rafferty’s Baker Street.

Antonio was certainly not boring. He came from Palmerston North in New Zealand. He had met his, now , civil partner while performing on a swingers cruise ship out out of Cancun,. Antonio used to play at one of the clothes-optional hotels in Mexico. It was lust at first sight. They were now very fond of each other even though Bill regularly used to say the he was the only thing that came between Antonio and his organ, causing much merriment from committed heteros such as Mick and me. This whole set up was way out of Charlotte’s comfort zone.

CHAPTER 3

Thus it was down to Mick’s faithful three to help him celebrate his birthday.

Georgia -May from Brisbane had come over to work in a bar in Wapping. She worked out daily with swimming and pilates. Maggie was not so energetic. The extent of her physical activity extended to raising a needle to her arm. Daphne was also a chemical specialist. Mick invited them to his party to “road test” his new leopard skin circular water bed. Classy? Er no.

Daphne didn’t believe that it was a water bed and stubbed out her joint on the bed. The Swedish couple in the flat underneath called the landlord. They would have done better with Noah and his ark.

“You look great for ninety” observed Snow White, looking at the cake from the wrong way up. Mick was blowing out the candles on his cake. Maths wasn’t exactly Snow White’s strong suit, even when the cake was facing towards her.

She and Dopey were trying to get their drug-addled brains around the concept of “Zero tolerance”

“Does this mean that you can never go to New York?” She asked me.

“Is it worth explaining?” I asked them both a bit cynically.

“Yeah, it’s really interesting and it’s scripture”. explained Snow White.

I unwrapped myself from a groupie who was well past her “sell by” date.

“Firstly Snowy, it’s history and not scripture” she complained.

“I don’t like being called Snowy. It sounds like Can-can’s dog.”

“Snowy was Tin-tin’s dog.” This could last all night.

“Whatever”

Snow White’s default answer to everything.

“Zero Tolerance means actually the reverse. In New York they tolerate everyone but criminals. Mayor Guiliani introduced it. New York is much safer and the drug culture has improved dramatically.” I explained.

“Does this mean that everyone can now get drugs?” Snow White asked

“Actually no” This was going nowhere.

“Whatever”

That’s when my mobile rang - Mozart’s Symphony no 41 in D major.

“I’m really glad that you don’t have Churchill’s speeches as your ring tone any more” Dopey chipped in.

“It gave me the willies. To hear “We will fight them on the beaches” coming out of the phone was very scary. I love Swanage, and the only fight I’ve ever seen on a beach was over some fish and chips by some seagulls”

“It’s for you” Everyone chorused to me.

It was my father. He was clearly distressed.

CHAPTER 4

“I think that I’m in Chiswick.” gasped my father I’m surrounded by, what appear to be Indian prostitutes. At least one of them seems dead. I am being garotted with cheese wire.” My father did sound a bit hoarse. Ironic for a man whose wife was obsessed with horses

I’d had a couple of drinks. There was some “Jack’s special Caribbean weed” left although, it was going down a bit quickly.

Ever the joker. I had to ask

“What type of Cheese, Dad?” He was quite an expert on cheese.

“Never mind the bloody cheese” he slurred.

“It was though, by the smell, a very agreeable Bleu d’Auvergne” he replied

“These bastards are going to kill me, or at least frighten me. They want to talk to you and, by the way, they get a full Len Goodman SEVEN for their skills at being frightening.”

“What’s the address, I’ll get a taxi over. Should I call the police?”

Drugs and alcohol meant that driving was out of the question.

“No police” was his croaky reply.

For my father, it had been a pretty agreeable day. A multi-millionaire Indian had spent much of the morning trying to buy ZERO Containers from him The gap between what the Indian magnate wanted to spend and what my father wanted to sell for was clearly unbridgeable. Part of him was pleased that someone was interested in buying the company. Another part of him felt that he had been screwed. The amount that he was being offered for his life’s work, he felt was derisory. He had conveniently forgotten that he had in fact inherited the company from Granddad and much of the value that he had added had been spent on the ladies, booze and mum’s very expensive horse habit.

He checked in to his hotel during the afternoon.

“Good afternoon, Mr Zero”

The sixty inch plasma TV behind reception had been switched to Test Match Cricket from Trent Bridge, in anticipation of his arrival.

“The Indian Team are not having a very good season”

Exactly what he wanted to hear.

Precisely four minutes after arrival in his room, a large Bombay Sapphire Gin and tonic appeared at the door.

Time for a nap. He was meeting his friend Horace for a drink at Balls Brothers at 5.30 pm.

“The sun will be setting on one of my ships somewhere in the world” was his often-used logic for a couple of drinks at 5.30 pm. He didn’t count the G and T in his room.

CHAPTER 5

After a few glasses at Balls Brothers, he and Horace then gently perambulated to a Livery dinner also being held in the City.

At the Hall, he was greeted by Baxter who, as usual, was on door duties. He remembered Baxter’s father. My father had been given to understand that a Baxter had held the post since the great fire of London in 1666.

“Good evening Mr Zero. Good evening Sir. Horace was not a member, just a guest. Therefore no name, just “Sir”

There was a twelve year waiting list before a prospective member might even be considered to be invited for interview. Horace still had five years to go. Lurid stories of initiations abounded. They included having to catch a greased piglet in a room with no lights. They were all apocryphal.

After a couple of glasses of Champagne they were called for dinner. There were new caterers and the Champagne being at the right temperature was a good start.

“Your Royal Highness, My Lords, Gentlemen, dinner is served” the red-suited toastmaster then announced. Apart from a couple of waitresses – still frowned upon by some of the old boys – there was not a woman in sight.

Everyone was announced to the Master at the entrance to the Dining Hall..

“Member mister Sidney Zero and Guest.” announced the toastmaster. He found himself sitting next to a Norwegian diplomat and his new under-secretary. The secretary, doing the table plan thought that the owner of a shipping line and Norwegians would get on. My father couldn’t give a toss.

Dinner was surprisingly good. Whitstable Oysters, Consommé laced with Oloroso Sherry and Grouse served the traditional way with game chips and bread sauce. The grouse was a little underdone for his liking but had, apparently, been dispatched to meet its maker by the Master of the Company himself. The piece of shot that nearly dislodged a Zero filling certainly gave it authenticity. This was all washed down with an an excellent Meursault with the Oysters. A glass of Oloroso Sherry with the soup, and an outstanding Crozes Hermitage from the Master’s personal stock with the Grouse. It had been decanted during the afternoon, and was just right both in terms of oxygenation and temperature.

Pudding was an Eton Mess served with a Spatlese. He drank the Spatlese but didn’t touch the Eton Mess. Sweetness, unless it was a dessert wine was not part of his vocabulary. Horace wolfed down both lots of Eton Mess. No such reticence on sweet things there.

After a couple of glasses of wine, he announced that he would tell those who would listen his new joke. Encouraged by Horace, he started:

“So this frog hopped into Barclays Bank. He wanted a loan of £10,000 to buy a new lily pond.

“Good morning” said the cashier whose name tag said her name was Patricia Wack.

I would like to speak to the Manager. I would like to take out a loan.” An occasional Ribbett was added, much to Horace’s amusement.

“The Manager is away at a meeting and won’t be back until 2.00 pm. He deals with loans. The Cashier admitted”

“Could I have your name so that I can tell him you called.?”

“It is Kermit Jagger” replied the frog.

“I would be most grateful if you could leave this on his desk for him”. It was a beautifully made china dragon about two inches long.

“Thank you Mr Jagger, I will let him know”.

The Manager returned. The cashier explained what had happened. She admitted that she didn’t know what the dragon was.

The Manager went in to his office, reappearing a few minutes later with the dragon.

“It’s a knick-knack, Paddy Wack, give the frog a loan. His old man’s a Rolling Stone.”

Horace and another crony thought that it was hilarious. The Norwegian diplomat’s under secretary didn’t understand it at all.

His boss explained.

“England is famous for two lots of stones. Stonehenge and the Rolling Stones. This is about one of the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger.”

“Ah, and what has Barclays bank got to do with Stonehenge?”

“You have a lot to learn about the English sense of humour”

“I will try” replied the beleaguered under-secretary.

The Norwegian diplomat then started

“I believe very strongly in tradition. This is my joke. It will be not be as good as Mr Zero’s but here goes”

“This’ll be funny” muttered Horace

“Or as my granddaughter would say.

“Not.”

The under-secretary whispered to his boss.

“Dhiaga Tiarna” The Norwegian national anthem title

“And for the pride of the Norwegian people. Good Luck”

The diplomat started

“Mr and Mrs Dalek were having breakfast. Their son had already left for Dalek school.”

“When do the frog and the bank come in?” asked the under-secretary.

“I think that we all know that Daleks don’t have families.” Horace chortled. My father had nodded off.

“Have you got a busy day ahead of you?” enquired Mrs Dalek.

“It’s always busy being a Dalek, and I have started a “To do” list”.

“If it is not classified, may I ask what is on your “to do” list for today?” Mrs Dalek enquired timidly.

Mr Dalek replied

“The same three things as usual.”

“Exterminate, exterminate, exterminate.”

The under-secretary gave the impression that this was the funniest thing that he had ever heard.

“I love Merlin”

“Daleks are in Doctor Who not Merlin. You twit.”

Horace stifled a smile. My father continued sleeping.

CHAPTER 6