Rockoholic (20 page)

“Bargain, well, that’s it, then.”

I squint up at him as the sun hits my eyes. “You coming? We could turn it into a holiday.”

“Yeah?” he asks brightly, his smile all dimpled. “What do you keep looking at?” he says, suddenly getting all stressio about my constant frowns toward his hairline.

“Your hair. I think your roots are coming through a bit.”

“What?!” he blurts out, instinctively doing his where’s-the-nearest-mirror freak-out.

“Only a bit,” I say. “But yeah, we could totally go away.” Then I remember. “Course, we might have to take Jackson with us.”

“What?”

“Well, I can’t leave him in our garage for a week, can I?”

Mac does his guppy mouth when he can’t think of the right thing to say. “But . . . no, no, he’ll be gone by then, surely. How long is he planning on staying here, for God’s sake?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do with him.”

“Oh bloody hell.”

The side door slams in the distance and Tish comes up the steps with Cree in her arms. Tish points toward us in the garden and Cree squirms to be put down. She toddles toward me faster than her legs can keep up, her little squeals filling the air. She’s in a red-and-white sundress and white dolly bar sandals I haven’t seen her wearing before.

“Hello, baby girl!” I call out and get up off the swing to greet her. She runs into my arms as she always does. “You got new soos!”

“Yeah, I got new soos,” she says as I scoop her up. She points her foot out to show me. “They white.”

“Yeah, they are white, good girl.”

“My Kenzie bought them for me.”

Mac and his mum are arguing. “You know we’ve got a bus of tourists booked in at one. . . .”

“And that’s my problem, is it?”

“No, course not. We’re letting you have the day off, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, to babysit.”

“Oh, stop acting so hard done by.”

“We going to the tally inn?” Cree asks me.

Mac’s getting the lecture from his mum about not letting go of Cree’s hand and making sure he checks her diaper every hour. He’s looking daggers at her but doesn’t say anything more. I’m trying to hear what she’s saying, but Cree’s patting my cheek and trying to turn my face toward her. “Dody.”

“Sorry, yeah, we’re going to the Italian Market, that OK?”

“Kee coming to the tally inn?” she says, rubbing my earlobes, her blonde hair flyaway around her face like sunshine.

“Yep, you’re coming, too.”

Mac’s face is stormy when his mum’s gone back inside. I follow him across the parking lot with Cree in my arms.

“I don’t mind if Cree comes with us,” I tell him, trying to turn his frown upside down, but it’s stuck solid.

“It’s not about Cree, it’s about them,” he snaps. “They always just expect me to look after her. It’s like they always just assume I’ll do it. There’s no choice or anything. Like, they cope when I’ve got a rehearsal or something, but Dad does
nothing
but work. And Cree
always
wants him.”

“Cree’s lucky to have you,” I tell him, rubbing his arm. His arm stiffens. He’s not just ranting — he’s really pissed off.

“My Kenzie sad?” says Cree.

“A little bit,” I whisper in her ear. She immediately shoots her arms out to him and he stops and takes her off me. She cuddles in and gives him the back pat. He sighs and closes his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Creepy Girl,” he sighs, kissing her hair. “It’s not your fault, is it?” She lifts her hand to his ear and twizzles his ear stud.

We walk up the side street and out onto the main drag for the market. The town center is closed off to traffic so people have parked their cars really stupidly two-deep in the road. I have to breathe in and sidestep past them through to the main market area.

“Solders,” says Cree and Mac lifts her up onto his shoulders so she can see what’s going on. Most of the town is out and about, along with a pulsing sunshine. There’s an endless line of food stalls decked in Italian flags.

The first stall we come to is the wines stall. Stella Flaws, a pub regular, in a gold halter-neck top and jeggings, is stumbling about on these really high wedges, holding a wine glass. She wears this really thick fake tan that we’re all supposed to think is natural. She always reminds me of a Cheeto I saw once on the floor of New Look.

Cree’s holding the tops of Mac’s ears and giddying him up like he’s a pony.

“Giddy up, Mackenzie,” I say to him, loud enough for Cree to hear.

“No,
my
Kenzie,” she says defiantly, grabbing onto his forehead with both her hands.

Last summer Mac and I had been on a health kick and it had been Stella Flaws’s keep-fit DVD we had borrowed to get into shape. We sprained our thigh muscles attempting two hundred stretches with one leg on the back of his sofa. Stella had advised us both to do the watermelon washout, too. We had to eat nothing but watermelon for three days to clean out all our toxins. Mac was so adamant we would stick to it he made his mum buy a week’s supply of watermelon. We started one Saturday morning and by midday we were watching
Gorillas in the Mist
, practically inhaling ham, egg, and hash browns. I wonder if I should get some watermelons for Jackson and put him on a more intense detox for a few days.

Another woman, about three times Stella’s size, is standing alongside her, grasping a wine glass with sausagey fingers. She wears all black leather and from a distance she looks like a stack of tires. This is Ann Rackham. She cut off her ear for a bet a few years ago.

Next to Ann stands a figure. A tall, wide figure in a hooded jacket. Duncan Buzzey, the town freak. I always thought he permanently wore his hood up because he had some hideous facial scarring or something, but no, it’s just because he doesn’t want to talk to people. He makes his way slowly along the stalls, sniffing things, tasting things. A lumbering giant with a fuzzy ginger face. Mac told me Duncan was in his final year at Nuffing Comp when Mac was just ten and in those days he was known as the BFD or “Big Fat Duncan.” Nowadays, because of his expertise in selling weed to teenagers, he’s known as the Big Fat Dealer. Buzzey’s well sketchy. His eyes look like they’ve been poked right back into his skull and he’s got so many pockmarks all over his face he’s probably squeezed every zit that ever popped out of it.

“Look at Buzzey,” says Mac. “Nice to see him out and about. Beats looking down his underpants and naming his crabs.” Mac laughs at his own joke, trying to out-guffaw some lads cadging all the free chunks of pecorino from the cheese stall. I’m watching the BFD.

“I thought he was in prison,” I whisper to Mac.

“No, but he’s a bit of a hermit,” he says, removing his Gucci sunglasses from his belt loop and delicately placing them on his face. “Never comes in the pub anymore. That was his dad who went to prison.”

“What did he do?”

“Got caught bringing illegal immigrants over from Romania. He had like fifty of them working on his farm out in Carstowe. Got twelve years. Duncan said he had nothing to do with it.”

At that moment, Duncan snaps his head around in our direction but doesn’t look at us. He evidently heard his name, though. Time to move along.

“God, look at that lot,” Mac says, gesturing toward the group of lads nicking all the free cheese. “All with the same knockoff Kappas with the tongues pulled out. All got the gold chains. All got the gold rings. All laughing the same. All got bad teeth.”

“Yeah, and they’re all about to stab us if you talk about them any louder,” I say as Cree reaches her hand out to be got down, and we mosey over to the bread stall.

The sunshine beats down on us and I have to keep squinting every time I look up. I’m not a summer person really so I resent it when it’s this hot. I like it when I’m inside the house and I look out and see a blue sky, but being outside is a different story. I don’t exactly dress for the weather. I daren’t tell Mac I’m hot cos I know what he’ll say. “Well, if you’d show a bit more flesh once in a while it’d cool you right off. Let’s go shopping for summer tank tops!” Mac knows full well that for me to show more flesh, a nuclear fallout would have to blow my clothes off my back, so I just sweat in silence.

The lad lot is laughing like this,
hur, hur, hur,
and the guy behind the cheese stall is shooing them away. I tear off a piece of sundried focaccia and dip it in a complimentary bowl of olive oil.

“Kee have some,” says Cree. I hand her some dipped bread. She chomps, makes a disgusted face, and duly spits it out all over herself. “My don’t like,” she says, scraping it off her tongue.

Mac leaves us briefly to grab two small plastic cups of something he announces as
Trebbiano d’Abruzzo
and hands one to me. I pick up Cree and give him an expectant look. “I’m not drinking, I told you.”

“Go on. Just one. You’re funny when you drink.” He starts jigging about on the spot, singing, “
We gonna party like it’s your birthday, we gonna sip Bacardi like it’s your birthday
. . .” but I still don’t want any.

“You know what I’m like when I drink. Anyway, knowing my luck I’ll probably get arrested for underage drinking.”

“They’re more relaxed about drinking in Italy.”

“We’re not in Italy, are we?”

“Yeah but the guy at the booth is proper Italian. I heard him say, came over on the ferry with all his gear. So when in Rome.” He swigs. “Oh, go on, just have a sip. You can do that poncey thing and spit it out again if you want. I’ll never ever forget that time you . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

Mac likes to remind me of my antics while under the influence: the time I attempted to climb a lamppost after just two alcopops; or when I puked peppermint schnapps all over the neighbor’s rose beds. But that’s the thing about friends (and mums, and sisters, come to think of it) — they tend to prick you with those memories you’d rather forget. Like when you were fat, or when you pulled down your pants and peed on the dance floor at your cousin’s wedding. Only being two at the time makes no difference, I still don’t want to talk about it.

Mustachio and Ginger, the two policemen who came to the pub the morning after the concert, are at the market in their normal clothes and they’ve got their wives and kids with them, too. Mac gets cornered by Mustachio and wife, who tell him they’re really looking forward to
Rocky Horror
. Ginger nods to me but doesn’t speak, thank Cobain. Why do I always feel guilty when I’m around policemen? Probably because I always
am
guilty around policemen.

I’m watching the BFD. He is scratching his ball sack and yawning at the same time. He should be in a glass case, swinging on a tire.

People wander past us with plates heaped high with cheeses, deep-fried oysters, triangles of pizza, and odd little alien vegetables on cocktail sticks. I make a mental note of all the sketchy things that I’m no wayski going to try — things at the cured meats and antipasti counter made from dried dolphin meat or pig’s trotters.

Opposite Signor Salvo’s outdoor pizza parlor a stall is selling every single shape of pasta. Mac buys a bag of
orecchiette
, which the man tells us (and we understand eventually) means “little ears.” We look in the clear bag and the shells do look like little ears. This amuses Cree no end and she insists on holding the bag for the rest of the time.

The last stall is covered with fresh garlic and herbs. We sniff. The old Italian woman behind the counter is sitting beside her cash box, reading a newspaper. Her face is so long it looks like she’s been hanging iron weights off her cheeks for centuries. Mac interrupts her reading to buy some mint for his mum. He tears off a leaf and hands it to Cree to sniff and she promptly eats it, then scrapes it off her tongue and onto his hand in disgust.

The old woman goes back to her newspaper. An Italian newspaper. I recognize the picture on the front page instantly. I see the headline. I tap Mac’s stomach.

DOVE SI TROVA JACKSON?

Now, I’m no Italian, but I’m pretty sure that headline is asking where Jackson is. So the story’s got as far as Italy, probably farther. Nobody in Europe knows where Jackson is. He could still be in England, in a garage, in the little market town of Nuffing-on-the-Wold. Or he could have got across the Channel. That would throw the local news-papers off the scent. If someone saw him in Italy. And then it hits me. If someone saw him
here
and took a picture and sent it to the papers saying they’d taken it in Italy, the media would
have
to admit he was nowhere near the South West. Wouldn’t they?

Mac’s singing to himself. I nudge him. “Have you got your camera on you?”

“Only on my phone. Why? Do you want to get a shot of you and the salami?” he laughs.

“No, I want to get one of Jackson reading that paper.”

Cree toddles on ahead of me and Mac and rounds the gravel path into our back garden. When we get there, all we can see is her headless body sticking out of the cat flap. There comes one almighty scream from inside the garage.

Mac lunges toward Cree to pull her back, but her head is stuck fast.

“Shit, Jode! She’s stuck.”

“She can’t be,” I say, joining him to try and ease Cree’s head back through the hole. At this point, Cree gets upset and starts panicking herself. Jackson is still screaming inside the garage.