Etc Etc Amen (Extract)
By Howard Male
September 2022
PROLOGUE
When Zachary C noticed his audiences were no longer beguiled by his best Zachary B smile, he had his char-grilled-sweetcorn teeth replaced by a mouthful of ultraviolet-sensitive acrylic. A week later on his way to the Kings Theatre, Portsmouth, shop windows, car windscreens – even a puddle he clumsily sidestepped – all threw back at him a grin of searchlight intensity and limitless confidence. As a result he was feeling uncharacteristically buoyant when he sat down next to his backing vocalist wife Fountain, who was immersed in her reflection in the dressing room mirror.
‘Perfect,’ he said, baring his new teeth.
He waited for Fountain’s agreement – or even just some acknowledgement he’d spoken – but she was far too busy assembling her own stage persona to indulge him.
He flashed his fluorescents a second time. ‘Well?’
Again she ignored him, lifting her chin a fraction to better inspect her shimmering lids – the application of turquoise eyeshadow required her full attention.
Fountain Penn’s tragedy (apart from Ma and Pa Penn’s African-American predilection for inventing extravagant sounding Christian names) was that she had once sung backing vocals for Zachary B, but was now singing backing vocals for Zachary C. Yes, for fifteen months this Detroit girl from the projects had sung with Zachary B. She’d even endured the infamous Trafalgar Square concert.
‘Well?’ he persisted.
Finally she relented and granted him an audience. But with her smile on the edge of laughter it was unfortunately a comedy club audience.
Crestfallen he said, ‘It’s the teeth isn’t it?’
‘No, the teeth are great.’
‘So what is it then?’
‘OK, it’s the teeth.’
‘But you just said the teeth were great!’
‘You’re not going to let this go are you. The teeth are great. It’s just that they’re . . .’ Fountain strained for the gentlest way to put it. ‘It’s just that they’re not you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t sulk, baby.’
‘So whose bloody teeth are they then – Brad Pitt’s?’
The empathy Fountain had found hard to muster in the first place immediately turned into a bluntness more in keeping with her personality. ‘Well, you did ask. I’m sorry sweetheart but they’re just not working.’ Eye shadow was returned to her bag, lipstick unsheathed. ‘They’re just . . . creepy. They do have different hues, you know. Now can I get on?’
‘Different what?’
‘Hues. Shades. Like with paint. Ivory white, apple white, dove white, you name it. Anything’s got to be better than goddamn Nuclear Flash White.’
‘OK, OK. I get it. Jesus.’ Zachary C closed his mouth.
‘Phew, that’s better,’ risked Fountain.
Poor Zachary, she thought. How much longer could he go on doing this for? She’d answered the ad in Melody Maker back in . . . ’95 was it? He’d recognised her as soon as she’d stepped into the rehearsal studio – and no one had recognised her in years. ‘You’re in!’ he’d proclaimed, before she’d even sung a note. And of course the fans loved seeing a living breathing member of the Now, in the New Now.
When Fountain went to the loo, Zachary C treated himself to another quick examination of his teeth. What was her problem with them? Next on the list was his hair: he wasn’t balding exactly, it was the thickness. Although he dyed it (coal black, cat black, black-bloody-hole black) it had become as insubstantial as candy floss. One day the wind machine was going to send it flying off into the audience like a tumbleweed on a mission.
But hey, otherwise he was in good health. He did all the right things: he ate the right food; he’d cut back on the booze; he exercised regularly. Yet several nights a week on stage trying to be Zachary B was causing gravity to press down on him more mercilessly with each passing day, manifesting itself in a dull ache here, a sharp twinge there. Of course the great man himself had been saved from the undignified task of performing his own sexually-charged music as a sixty-year-old, by dint of the fact that he was dead. Why did all trains of thought eventually lead Zachary C back to this cold hard fact, which in turn led him back to the crime scene photos he’d made the big mistake of googling a few years ago? Memory is wilfully perverse, so while countless childhood daytrips to the seaside remained tantalisingly just out of reach, those chilling photos were always springing up unbidden in his mind’s eye, making him dizzy with nausea.
Despite all that KUU mumbo-jumbo he’d thought Zachary B was the business. He remembered the LSD-induced insight he’d had at the Rainbow show in 1972: that just as slack-jawed cavemen had once believed the wind was created by agitated trees waving their branches about, he had believed – at least for one delightfully vertiginous moment – that it was in fact Zachary B who radiated the light the greedy spotlights then vacuumed up.
Howard Male’s debut novel Etc Etc Amen (2010) is available from Amazon. You can buy signed copies of the entire KUU quartet – including The Glitch, Gifted and The Unholy Fool – direct from the author.
