Rockoholic (9 page)

“What do you mean this is
my
fault, how the hell is this
my
fault?”

“It was your Curly Wurly.”

“Oh my God,” he says, scrunching his eyes. “I can almost hear the soap dropping in the shower. Do you realize people will be out looking for him? Police? His manager? The press? They’ll hunt us down. They’ll search the Saxo. They’ll find fibers!”

“No they won’t. It’s OK. I’ll clean the car. I’ll eat the evidence. Ow, my head hurts.”

He laughs sarcastically. I feel I should speak, or at least make some noise. I hate that laugh. That’s the “Jody, you are something else” laugh and it makes me feel stupid. Fat and ugly and freckled and embarrassed and stupid.

“I just wanted more,” I tell him. “I wanted to meet him properly. To spend more than just thirty seconds with him. More than just a handshake. He came with me quite willingly. . . .”

“Because he thought you were going to stab him, you stupid cow!”

I flinch like he’s pricked me with a pin. He calls me a cow all the time and I never get offended. But when he says it now, I don’t like it. “I only got to see three songs, Mac. . . .”

“That does
not
entitle you to take home the lead singer, Jody.”

“I know.”

“Most people settle for a T-shirt or a poster. Not Jody. Jody wants actual
band
members.”

There’s an odd shuffling and clanking noise behind the car and all of a sudden there’s a light knock on the back window next to Jackson’s head. I scream and Mac jumps about two feet in the air. This is it, I think, it’s the police. I’m beyond busted. A figure shuffles along to Mac’s window and knocks again. But it’s not the police, it’s a sketchy old woman pushing a supermarket cart stuffed with trash bags. Mac catches his breath and goes to roll the window down.

“Don’t!” I cry out. “She could have an ax or hairy hands or something,” I urge him, instinctively clinging on to Jackson, like she might try and take him away.

He ignores me and rolls the window down an inch. She must be about eighty, and she’s wearing a wool hat, long brown coat, and a Hello Kitty nightgown. Her face looks like a mashed-up envelope and she obviously has no teeth because her jaw seems to be chewing itself.

“Spare change?” she sniffs, holding her hand up to the crack in the driver’s window.

“Uh no, not tonight,” says Mac.

She peers into the car. “Who else you got in there with you, then?”

“No one,” he says, and rolls his window back up.

“Have they got any change?” she asks again, more muffled through the window. We both watch her as she shuffles back around to Jackson’s window, tries to clear the glass and have a good beak in at him. He has his face completely against the window so she must see him. She disappears around the back of the car and out of sight.

My heart is going like fist blows to a punching bag. “Do you think she saw him?” I whisper.

“I don’t give a shit. In fact, I hope she did see him and I hope she
does
recognize his face when it’s plastered all over the tabloids tomorrow.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

“You’ve kidnapped a celebrity, Jody. All right, he’s not Princess Kate or the president or anything, but he’s still famous. He’s still in all the gossip mags. Once it gets out he’s gone missing, presumed
kidnapped
from a concert, you’re a ghost on toast.”

“I don’t care what you say, he was miserable in that room. When his manager was saying those things to him, all he wanted to do was to get out —”

“— and don’t think you’re bringing him back to the pub, either, no way,” Mac interrupts.

I forgot. I no longer have a home, do I? I’m a house-guest at the pub. I can hardly bring home some other waif and stray to stay, can I? “Please, Mac, can he just stay at yours —?”

“No way.”

“Well, what am I going to do, then?”

“I don’t know. This is your problem, not mine.”

“Where are we going, dudes?” a voice next to me pipes up. Oh, it’s the rock star I kidnapped. He’s pulling my pukey black fleece around him and he’s shivering.

Mac snorts. “Oh nice, Ozzy Osbourne’s back with us.”

“Uh . . . to a pub,” I tell Jackson.

“I need a burger,” he mumbles, and falls back to sleep.

“OK,” I say and I point to the Burger King across the parking lot. “They sell veggie burgers or cheesy somethings over there, don’t they?” Mac throws me a filthy look. “I’ll pay.”

“Oh, I know you will.” He starts the engine again, heading toward the drive-through ramp.

“Mozarella bites or something?” I say, turning toward Jackson.

“Burger,” he mumbles, drool oozing from his mouth. He slurps it back up to speak. “I want meat. Bacon. Meat.”

He eats
MEAT
?! And I went through months of eating rabbit food just for him!

“Ha!” Mac flicks on the mirror light and reaches over the back of his seat to lift up one of Jackson’s eyelids. “Clean-living vegetarian, is he? Don’t make me wet myself, Jody.”

“He’s just hungry. They did a long set tonight.” That must be it.

“I know. I waited outside for most of it. Look at him. Any normal lead singer would be amped having ten thousand people calling his name. He should be bouncing off the walls. Look at him!”

So I do. I look at him.

“He’s a rock star, Jody. It comes with the job.”

The guy appears at the first window and Mac places the order for a Whopper with fries, mozzarella balls for me, and two Diet Cokes. Mac says he’s not hungry. Big surprise. I hate his poor martyr act at times like this, not that we’ve ever had a time like this before, but he always does this. Goes without so I’ll feel sorry for him. I don’t feel sorry for him, not anymore. He can nail up his own cross. I’m not helping.

“He’s not like all the others. Jackson’s different,” I tell him, getting my emergency £20 from my sock and handing it over.

Mac gets the change and flings it back at me, moving the Saxo along to the second window to pick up our food. “The only thing different about
him
,” he says, “is that he hasn’t choked to death on his own vomit yet. He’s just as screwed up, just as miserable, just as fake.”

And this is the point where I have had enough of his barbed little comments. “OK, fine, whatever, he lied. He lied on the
Behind the Scenes
DVD, he lied in that interview, Wikipedia lies, everyone lies, he’s a drug user, he’s not really a vegetarian, he’s not really into zebras. I don’t care, OK? I want him with me. And you are going to take us back to the pub, right now, me
and
Jackson, or I’m going to do something really, really, really . . .” And then I lose my nerve a bit and I stumble over my words and I can’t think of a single thing that I would do if Mac didn’t drive us back to our shitty little town. Back to Nuffing. Nuffing-on-the-sodding-Wold. So I just end the sentence on the third really.

And Mac says, “Really what?”

I’ve had a little more time, so I’ve thought of something. “I hope you never find out.”

Mac twists back in his seat, does a few more sighs. Then he mumbles about the windshield being too steamed up and whacks the heat up full blast.

“Well, if you stopped sighing it might clear a bit quicker,” I snap. He throws the straws and paper napkins back at me, followed by Jackson’s burger and my mozzarella balls in turn. We hit the road again. For a second, I think that he’s going to go back around the traffic circle and head back to Cardiff and that, if he does, I will never ever
EVER
speak to him again. But he heads for the South West. He heads back toward the Severn Bridge. Back to Nuffing-on-the-Wold.

“Thank you,” I say and he holds his hand up to shush me, then puts it back on the steering wheel where it grips hard. I slurp half of my Diet Coke — I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was until now — and place Jackson’s burger box on his chest with his fries. I eat my mozzarella balls in total silence, watching him. There’s no stereo on. It’s just the car bobbing along the deserted motorway toward the bridge, jolting over the odd speed bump and whipping past the tall orange streetlamps as the rain lashes down upon the metal roof. I’m usually ravenous for anything fried but this time I can taste every globule of fat, feel every artery snap shut, and pretty soon I have indigestion.

“Stop it,” says Mac in the silence.

“What?”

“Looking at him, all cow eyes. You’re not keeping him.”

I haven’t even realized I’m doing it. I’m just staring at Jackson. The car is so quiet and this is well odd, because when me and Mac usually go out in his car, he has the radio blaring and we’re singing our lungs out to classic rock or doing Gaga impressions to make Cree laugh. But not tonight.

Every so often Mac sighs, or Jackson gargles or coughs, but apart from that, it’s just road noise and the occasional other car overtaking us. I can’t look at Jackson so I watch the pine tree air freshner and the jelly dolphin charm swinging together under the rearview mirror. It isn’t until we’re on the bridge, right in the middle of the bridge, that the silence is cracked by a sharp intake of breath and a deafening yell.

“Jeeeeeesus aaaarrgghh, oh my gaaaaaaaad, help me! Get it off me, get it off meee!!!!”

Jackson’s burger flies off his chest and it’s raining French fries as I’m pinned to the side of the car while Jackson flails and flips about in his seat, climbing across me to try and open the front passenger door. Luckily I’ve locked it. If I hadn’t, he would have leapt out of the speeding car.

“Wh-what, oh my God, what is it?” I keep saying, utterly at a loss for what to do.

“What’s he doing?” cries Mac, struggling to keep control of the car.

“Get it off me, get it off meeeeee!” he screams. Mac swerves and the car screeches onto the hard shoulder of the road and stops. Jackson crawls right across me, fumbles with the door locks and the handle until it almost snaps in his hand, and jumps through the seats and out of the car. Outside in the freezing night, he rips off his straitjacket and flings it upward. It lands. He grabs it again and flings it harder, high up and over the side of the bridge.

“Get off meeeeee! No, no get off, get off get off!”

He takes his boots off and flings them in the air, too, so he’s just standing there, screaming in his white jeans. He rips his jeans off, with some difficulty because they’re too tight and now wet from the rain that’s lashing down on him, and he stumbles and falls over himself. I can’t bear to watch. Cars zoom past and beep every so often. When everything has landed at his feet, he grabs each item in turn and hurls it over the side of the bridge and just stands there.

“Mac?” I say quietly. “What’s he doing?”

“I think he’s hallucinating,” he whispers. “I’ve seen it before.”

“Where have you seen it before?” I ask, my imagination running rampant.

“In the bar,” he says defensively. “Duncan Buzzey used to be off his face most of the time. Used to tell my dad they were epilepsy tablets so he wouldn’t kick him out, but I knew. He burned down the school science lab trying to make cotton candy. He was high on something then. And once he had a spaz attack in our parking lot cos he thought his clothes were infested with cockroaches.”

“Is he going to be OK?”

Mac says nothing, not taking his eyes off Jackson, who’s crouching in a ball. “Dunno, never comes in the pub anymore.”

“I mean Jackson,” I urge him.

“Oh no,” he suddenly says, and grabs my fleece, pegging it out of the car and over to Jackson, who’s now trying to climb over the side of the bridge. Mac covers him over with my coat and pulls him back, pinning him to the ground. Jackson doesn’t seem to be struggling much and Mac’s talking in his ear. They get up. Mac puts his arm around his shoulders and guides him back to the car.

“Get in the front,” Mac tells me. “We need to lie him down. He’s been sick.”

“Is he going to be OK?”

“Just let’s get him in the back, all right?” Mac’s helping me. Everything is going to be OK if he’s helping me. Working together, we get Jackson onto the backseat and Mac has a spare blanket in the trunk that he finds and tucks Jackson in. Jackson’s shivering and wet and I can see the puke chunks around his mouth. “You’re going to be fine,” Mac whispers. He plucks out a pack of Sticky Fingers wet wipes from the pocket behind the driver’s seat and tugs out two of them, handing them to me. “Wipe his mouth.”

“Don’t leave me on my own,” says Jackson shakily, tear tracks down both his cheeks.

“We won’t. We’ll look after you,” Mac says. I wipe over his face, and Mac gets back in the front seat.

I ride shotgun. Mac’s hair is soaking from the rain. The windshield wipers squeak manically as he starts up the engine again. “Is he going to be OK?”

“I don’t know, do I?”

“You said ‘
we’ll
’ look after you,” I point out.

“It’s just an expression, Jody,” he says, all serious voice.

As journeys go, it’s pretty awful. I have squeaky Diet Coke mouth and Jackson keeps shaking and slipping in and out of consciousness. He looks so pale and small. Kind of like Grandad when we saw him in the Chapel of Rest. White as marble and completely peaceful. At one point I reach back and stroke the side of his face. I can’t believe he’s here. With me. Then he starts snoring like an ogre, which cuts a nice jagged edge through the silence, tearing into Mac’s already fragile mood.