Rockoholic (15 page)

“NO, NO, NO!” he protests, his free arm grasping at the door frame.

“YES, YES, YES!” I shout. I pull. I heave. And when I’ve pulled and heaved him out onto the grass, I push him away from me. He stumbles and lands facedown on the gravel path, but doesn’t stay there long. Before I know it, he’s scrambled back up the step into the garage.

He’s hunched up against the back wall when I get back in there. I stand watching him, trying to catch my breath. He doesn’t look at me.

“I don’t know what I was thinking.” I laugh like a maniac through my tears. “All I know is I’m tired and I don’t want to be around you anymore. I thought you’d make everything . . . I don’t know, better. I thought I could look after you, thought we could have talks about books and stuff but I know now how stupid I’ve been so . . . just go. Go back to your band. I’ll give you some money for a train and clothes and stuff.”

“I can’t,” he says. He doesn’t get up. He doesn’t go out. He slouches back against the wall. “I can’t go back.”

“Yes, you can. I shouldn’t have taken you in the first place. The door’s open. You can go and phone the police and tell them where you are and —”

“No, I’m not going back.”

I sigh and fling the door shut. “Right. So . . . what, then?”

“Sorry,” he blurts out, just like that.

I’ve no idea what to say. What would I do at work, with a kid? I’d make them clean up their mess and I’d take myself out of the situation until they’d learned their lesson, that’s what I’d do. “Right, well. I’m going upstairs and I’m going to take a nap. A long nap. You can clean all of this up. I’ll get you sponges and stuff. And if you don’t . . . I will call your manager.”

“I’ll . . . do that,” he says. “I’ll clean.”

I’m nodding manically, like Mum does when she’s angry with me. “Yes you will,” I say as I leave and slam the door behind me. I go back minutes later with a bucket of soapy water, rubber gloves, and a sponge, and plonk it all down before him. I flounce out again on the sounds of him scrubbing frantically.

Upstairs, I’m lying on my bed but I can’t lose myself. I’m thinking about Mum and Halley coming back later and Mum pegging out the washing and hearing him in the garage or Halley laying out her camping gear on the grass and seeing Jackson through the window. I’m thinking about Mac and why he hasn’t come around to help me with Jackson yet. And most of all, I’m thinking about all those magazine articles about Jackson that I’ve bought because he was on the cover but never really read. I cut the pictures out but shoved the rest of the magazines in an empty box at the bottom of my wardrobe. I tried so hard not to read them because I didn’t want to know what they said. Mac read them and delighted in telling me. About the models and actresses Jackson’s been out with. The tantrums he’s had. The photographers he’s punched. The panic room he’s had built on their tour bus when the rest of the band have to make do with their bunks. His paranoia about stalkers. Rehab. The hotel elevators his entourage are supposed to have emptied before he’d set foot inside them.

If all this and his performance in the garage is the real Jackson Gatlin then fame hasn’t just gone to his head. It’s blown his brains out.

I never believed a word of it. Even when Mac went on and on about it.
Did you see him hit that photographer? It’s all over YouTube, I’ll download it.
“Jackson’s not like that,” I’d said. “They’re making it up to paint him in a bad light.”
Did you get your Google alert about Jackass Gatlin today? Fancy him getting that air hostess pregnant.
“Jackson’s not like that,” I’d said.
Fancy him shagging that airhead actress. Thought you said he went for brainy women?
Other stars might act like this, but not Jackson. I never let the articles see the light of day, but now I’m fishing them out of the wardrobe and poring over each one.

And it’s all there. The two million dollars he spent on a Vegas hotel suite before trashing it and using these priceless vases as bowling pins. The Grammy-night hotel orgy in Los Angeles. The high-stake, drug-fuelled poker game in Atlantic City. The maid he summoned to his room to turn his boiled egg up the right way. Without another thought, I swipe the zebra ornaments off my shelf with one
thwack
, and step up onto my bed to tear down the big poster from the wall.
Skritch
. Down comes another poster.
Skritch, skritch, skritch
go the individual months of my Regulators calendar. My band. My hero. My sanctuary. My mistake.

I step back down and grab hold of the magazines and the loose articles in one hand and I march back down the stairs. Out in the garage, Jackson’s made an attempt to clean up one of the puke puddles, but is lying down on the cushions looking tired again. At least he’s now wearing one of the T-shirts.

I brandish my proof. “If this is who you are then I don’t want you here. I don’t care that you don’t want to go back.” I throw the articles down in front of him. My head starts throbbing from where I fell down at the concert. That shiteous concert.

Jackson levers himself up on the cushions. He picks up the top two articles. “Gat’s Just Not Good Enough” screams the first headline. It’s about him throwing a wobbler at a restaurant because he was served a bruised peach. “Jack Attack” reviews the alleged meltdown he had after his requested humidifier and Pilates equipment weren’t in his dressing room at South by Southwest.

He dips his head, like a child I’ve just bollocked for crayoning on the wall. I stop short of saying, “That makes me very sad,” and plonking him in the time-out corner. He studies the articles before putting them back on the pile.

My tears drip constantly. “It’s all true, isn’t it?”

“Not all of it,” he sniffs. “I don’t do Pilates.”

Woe is me. Woe to the max.

I don’t know what to do. I’ve messed up, I know that. I need help. I need my grandad. He had a knack for always saying the perfect thing when I’d got myself in a hole and needed a rope. I need Mac like never before and, every time he crosses my mind, I get this horrible twinge of pain in my chest. He doesn’t always say the perfect thing. He usually calls me a stupid cow and tells me what I’ve done is mentally ill. I call him on the landline and his mum says he’s changing Cree’s diaper and, when I call back about ten minutes later, his mum says he’s taken Cree into town to get her new shoes. I keep thinking about him and Jackson on the Severn Bridge. He was so in control of him. He knew just what to do. I need him here. I can’t do this on my own. I don’t even know what it is I’m supposed to be doing, anyway. And even if he won’t help me, I just want to hear his voice. Chat on the phone like we do, for hours. We don’t even have to talk about the thing in my garage. We can talk about him and
Rocky Horror
. How rehearsals are going. When we’re next going for a day out with Cree.

Mac was right. I can’t look after Jackson. His mood is up and down all the miserable morning. He’s irritable, he’s shouty, when he’s not demanding certain types of food he keeps yanking on his key necklace and rubbing it from side to side, making his neck all red. This gives me the extra worry that he’s going to hang himself. I offer him the use of our shower, he chucks an apple at me. I post a cheese and cucumber sandwich through the cat flap, and within seconds the cucumber slices come flying back out at me like ninja death stars. As a last-ditch attempt to play the hostess, I post a note through saying if he wants to use the downstairs loo, I’ll leave the back door open but it has to be before four o’clock as this is when Halley comes home. And I leave it at that.

I get the laundry out of the machine to hang it out to dry, and as my fleece comes out, I see the zebra zip pull Mac bought me hanging off it. I’m amazed it survived the wash. It reminds me of Mac and I get that horrible stab of worry again.

“He’s a good boy, Mackenzie. He won’t put you wrong, darling. You stick with him, girl.”

“I will, Grandad.”

But I haven’t, have I? I haven’t stuck with Mac. I’ve gone completely against him and now I’m in a mess. No, mess isn’t enough to describe it. My
bedroom
is a mess. What I’m in is a landfill. I go upstairs to try sleeping cos my body is aching all over for it, but I don’t expect I’ll actually nod off. But after what I think has been half an hour, I open my eyes. Everything’s different. It’s dark outside my window. There are TV and metal noises downstairs and the clock by my bed says 7:32
a.m
. I sit bolt upright, all sticky and hot, and it isn’t until I get up that I realize I’m in pain all over. I turn on my light and lift up my T-shirt. In my mirror I see red marks and bruises beginning to form, I guess from the mosh pit. There’s bruising around my ear where I bumped my head, too. I haven’t felt a thing till now. My face is even more of a mess than usual — my hair is greasy and the white bits of my brown eyes are flecked with red. The second I set foot out of the door, Mum’s there in her bathrobe, toweling her wet hair.

“You were sound asleep when I came in last night. Thought you needed the rest so I left you be.”

Last night?! “Oh. Thanks,” I say, my eyes barely wide enough yet. I’ve been asleep since two o’clock yesterday afternoon? Was it a dream? Was it all just some not-so-beautiful nightmare?

“Mackenzie called for you,” she says, disappearing into her bedroom.

“Did he?”

“Yeah, a few times. Is your phone broken or something? He said he’s left you texts.”

“Oh. Yeah. My phone’s . . . off.” I look back in my room at my washing basket where I threw my soaking wet river-water clothes yesterday. Before I put them in the wash. My phone was in the pocket of my cargoes. My phone is dead. So it wasn’t a dream, then.

Mum appears again. “I’m not prying, love . . .” she starts to say, which means she’s going to pry. “But it must be bad for you to end up in a river. If he’s hurt you . . .”

“No way, Mac had nothing to do with me falling in the river. We had a row, I ran off, and I tripped and fell in. That’s all.”

She’s so obviously waiting for further explanation but I’m not going to give her one. “Sometimes we choose the wrong one, love. I’m sorry if he didn’t turn out to be what you think. I won’t say any more but I always did wonder about him. You know, with his singing and dancing.”

Oh how embarrassing. She thinks I made a pass at him and he told me he was gay. Well, that’ll have to do, I suppose. I can’t tell her the real reason.

“Anyway, he said he’s at the Playhouse this morning and he wants to see you.”

“Go along, to the Playhouse? To see him?”

“Yeah, I suppose,” she says, frowning at me. “Don’t you have work today?”

“Uh, I’ve got the day off.” I don’t have the day off. In fact, I don’t expect I’ll be allowed a day off ever again for failing to show up yesterday. I owe
them
a day if anything. But I need to see Mac — that’s way more important than work. So I dredge up some courage and when I hear the hairdryer going in Mum’s room, I call work.

“Hi, Hazel? It’s Jody.”

“Oh. Hello, Jody.” Hazel reminds me a bit of Kathy Bates in
Misery
, to give you a mental image. She’s short, brown-eyed, and smiley and she’s got a backside like a sack of squashy yams.

“I’m not feeling very well today. . . .”

“What about yesterday?”

“Uh. I wasn’t feeling very well yesterday, either.”

“I called you several times, at home and on your mobile.”

“Yeah, my mobile got stolen and . . . I couldn’t get out of bed.”

“Why, what’s wrong with you?”

“I . . . think I might have caught something. From the river.”

“What river?”

“The river by the library. I was . . . walking home the other night and I got mugged and . . . someone pushed me in the river.” I’m going straight to hell.

“Oh, Jody, I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m OK now, but I’m still a bit shaky, you know. . . .” Jody Flook, you lying cow.

“Of course, of course. Well, you take next week off, then, recover properly. We’ve got some of those students in from the college on internships so we’ll manage. Don’t worry, don’t worry at all. Bye, Jody, bye.”

Oh. My. God. As lies go, that was a humdinger. Mac always says,
If you’re going to lie, think about the trail of destruction it will leave. How it’ll get back to your mum, who it might hurt
. Typical Mac. He’s eighteen but thinks like an eighty-one-year-old. But I didn’t think about anything when I told my boss I’d been mugged. The start of the call and I’m full on for a bollocking, possibly my second warning of three before I’m sacked, and now I have the boss eating out of my hand
and
a week off.

I shower and put on my clean Nirvana T-shirt and the black cardigan of Mum’s twin set. I check on His Lordship through the cat flap. I can’t believe he’s still going to be there when I look in, thinking maybe he’s done another bunk in the night, but all is as it should be — he’s asleep and the room is a mini-bombsite. He doesn’t stir at all, so I head up the street to the Playhouse.

The old guy at the box office, George Milne, doesn’t want to let me in at first. I wonder if he remembers me from the other night in the parking lot. “Go round the back and put the code in if you’re with NAOS,” he barks, without looking up from his paper. He means Nuffing Amateur Operatic Society.