Rockoholic (29 page)

“Jackson . . .”

“Yeah.”

I come around to face him. “What are you going to do once you’re disguised?”

“Disappear.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“What if . . .” It seems like the right thing to say. Maybe it’s too much, though. I mean, I’ve only been thinking about it for about five seconds but . . . “What if I gave you some money to . . . get out of the country properly.”

“Still wouldn’t be enough for a jet pack.”

“It would. Five thousand pounds would be more than enough to get you somewhere.”

“Five thousand pounds?” he shrieks. “Where the hell did you get that kind of money?”

“My grandad left it to me in his will. I can go to the BFD and say I have five thousand pounds if he can get you out of the country.”

“Uh, no way. No. Way. I’m not taking any money from you. You’re a kid. And taking your grandfather’s inheritance, Jesus, that’s just way outta line. I may be an asshole but I ain’t a bastard.”

I click the clippers on.
Buzzzzzzzz.
“I want you to have it,” I say. “The money. Grandad told me to do something. ‘Don’t Dream It, Be It.’ That’s the last thing he said to me. . . .”

“That doesn’t mean giving your money away to the first loser who comes along,” says Jackson. Cree’s moved on to a thinner area of Doctor Dolly’s body to snip and has almost made it through one of her ankles.
Buzzzzzzzzz . . .
“Why is she doing that?” he asks.

“She’s a child. That’s what children do. It’s how they learn,” I tell him. “Jackson, please, it would make me feel better.”
Buzzz . . .
I turn the clippers off. “If you want, think of it as a loan. You can send the money back when you get settled. If you say no, you’ll be offending me. And you’ll be offending my grandad, too.”

Jackson looks to the kitchen tiles and the clumps of his hair at his feet. “Whoa, you’ve cut off a bunch!”

“You told me to do it,” I say. “And stop changing the subject.” I walk around to face him. “I want you to have my money.”

Without another word he takes the clippers out of my hand and glides them right down the center of his head.
Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

“Looks like I don’t have a choice, then.”

I feed Cree some spaghetti on toast and settle her in front of
SpongeBob
in the living room, which wild horses couldn’t tear her away from, while I go upstairs to the bathroom where the light’s better to finish off Jackson’s scalping. And we’re in the bathroom, looking at his hair, or rather head, in the mirror when the front doorbell rings. Oh. My. Effing. God. Mum. Halley.

But no. They have keys of course. I nip downstairs to answer it and turns out it’s Mac.

“How’s Tiny Temper?”

“She’s fine. She’s got
SpongeBob
. Come and look at this.”

I lead him upstairs to the bathroom where Jackson’s looking at his head in the mirror. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

“Oh,” says Mac, holding out his hand. Then he stops. He withdraws. He really looks at him. “Oh my God. I thought you were . . . shit, it’s not the same guy.”

“I know, ain’t it great?” Jackson grins. His eyes are watery. He keeps blinking the longer he looks in the mirror. His hands feel over his newly shaved head, again and again. He looks brutal. Hard. Not like my sweet-smiling Jackson of before, with the floppy brown hair and the electric blue eyes. Now his head is bare, his eyes sad. He’s a totally new man.

“Oh,” says Mac, as though something’s pricked him in the buttock. He removes something from his back pocket. “I nicked these from the makeup room at the Playhouse, for the disguise. Thought that would be a good start. But I guess you’re quite a bit ahead of me on that front.” He hands Jackson two little plastic packets.

“Contacts?”

“Yeah. They’re dark, so people won’t recognize your eyes. I wear some like it in the show.
Rocky Horror
’s being sponsored by the optician’s in town so we get them for free. Try them.”

Jackson peels off the foil on one of the packets. He’s worn lenses before. I’ve seen a few interviews where he’s had them in for effect — once with the stars and stripes across them, and one when the band dressed up as cats for an article in
Lungs
that was all about how much “pussy” they got on the road. Charming, I know. Another story I only scan-read at the time. He sticks his index finger in the packet and pulls it out again with the lens suckered on the tip. He moves it gently around until it lies cupped on the end of his finger. Before too long, his sea-blue eyes are black as night.

“Oh my God! You look incredible!” I tell him.

“Not quite,” says Mac. “Why do you insist on dressing him in this never-ending succession of dodgy jogging pants?”

I frown at him. “Excuse me, these were my grandad’s clothes.”

“And he hated them, too, that’s why he never wore them. Your mum only bought them for him cos they were drawstring and he kept losing weight. I’ll dig out some of my last-season stuff from home. No point having a brand-new look if you’re still going to wear saggy castoffs.”

“Cool,” says Jackson. Mac almost smiles, and we’re then so busy deciding what clothes Jackson will need for his new image, we don’t even notice Cree bum-shuffling one at a time up the stairs to see what all the fuss is about. She stands in the bathroom doorway and looks at Jackson. Her nose flares, bottom lip disappears, and before we know it, she’s tipped her head back and started wailing.

Mac goes to pick her up. “What’s wrong?” She clings on to him like a crab, huffing and whimpering in his arms. She’s still looking at Jackson.

“Cree, it’s OK,” I tell her. “It’s Man.” Cree shakes her head, nose still flaring in and out.

I step forward and put my hand on her back. “She’s shaking. Cree, it’s Man. He just hasn’t got any hair. Take the lenses out, Jackson. They do make you look pretty evil.”

Jackson turns to the sink and takes his contact lenses out, putting them back in the packet. He turns to Cree. “That better?”

She sucks in another huff, then eventually lessens her grip on Mac and puts her arms out to Jackson.

“What does she want?” he asks me.

“Uh, duh? She wants you,” says Mac. Jackson’s clearly shocked at this but he reaches out and takes her from Mac anyway. She immediately snuggles into his chest, still huffing, and holds on tightly. She really didn’t recognize him.

“She loves you so much,” I say, more to myself than anyone else.

“Can’t think why,” he replies, looking at her like she’s a little leech and he’s watching her suck his blood for medicinal purposes.

“She probably thinks you’re Dad,” says Mac, going back through the door and downstairs.

Jackson holds Cree closely but he looks wrong with a child. She’s cuddling him but he’s not really cuddling her back, he’s just letting her. Letting her because she’s small. Unformed. Has potential to be a person he can trust, perhaps. Not like me. A fully formed, untrustworthy fan who just loves him for his manufactured image. Cree doesn’t know any better, like he didn’t when he was young and innocent and just starting out.

“How ’bout we go and play with Roly? In the yard?” he says to her in his best child-friendly voice. “Want to go and find him a girlfriend?” She nods against his shoulder, then lifts up her head to stare at him. She pats his skull.

He pats his head, too. “Do you like it?” He smiles at her.

She frowns. “What you done to your ned?”

I have good days and bad days and these can be best described by the kind of music I like to listen to. Black Keys days are good days. Nirvana days are doubtful days when I need to check my head. Queen days used to be the days I spent with Grandad when me and him and Mac and Cree would go out in the car, to Weston Park or Glastonbury, singing along, headbanging, and laughing — happy-beyond-belief days. And every day, The Regulators appear at least twice, including once to wake me up, and again to lull me to sleep. It occurs to me that I haven’t listened to any music for days. This is probably why my brain feels like a scrunched-up ball of paper — I need a drumbeat or a steady bass line to help iron it out sometimes.

Today started off so obviously as a Nirvana kind of day but now it’s changing into a Hole or Distillers day or some such other angry tampon rock. I’m frustrated and I’m petrified all in one bad-tempered bundle as we head off to the pub to see the Wicked Witch of the West Country. Cree’s falling asleep on Mac’s shoulder but she wakes up the minute we get into the main bar of the Pack Horse and puts her arms out for Teddy. He’s too busy serving pints behind the counter to take her, so Tish does instead, and heads upstairs to give Cree a bath.

Mac snags us a bottle of wine from the cellar and we go and sit in the restaurant’s garden to eat Curly Wurlys — although I don’t eat mine — and wait for Sally Dinkley. We can see the street snaking up the hill at the far end of the pub parking lot, so we’ll be able to see her car as she leaves the Torrance Lodge. No way a woman like her walks anywhere. I’m nervous. I guzzle a couple of gobfuls of wine to get going on the grief. We’re still talking about ways to throw her off the scent.

“We could get a human arm, tattoo it with a burning rose, go to Cardiff, and chuck it in the River Severn,” I say, grabbing at any straw that floats across my brain.
Glug, glug.
“Maybe we could take Alfie and pretend we found it when we were walking him. She’d have to believe he was dead then.”

Mac bats his eyes. “I don’t think she’d believe it if she saw his whole corpse washed up, let alone some random arm. And where are we going to get an arm from, anyway?”

I shrug, sitting astride the bench seat, one leg on either side. “I dunno. The hospital or something? They sawed a guy’s feet off in
Shallow Grave
and took them to the hospital to be put in an incinerator. Maybe they have spares?”

Mac doesn’t respond this time, he just stares out across the parking lot. I swig at the wine. My glass is soon empty. “Tub her up,” I tell him.

“Slow down for God’s sake, Jody,” he says, topping my glass up regardless.

“You said I had to be grief-stricken.” I shrug. “I can only do that when someone dies or I’ve had too much wine.”

“Dinkley’s not stupid, despite appearances. She’s clever enough to have spotted the flaws in our Italian fiasco. You’re going to have to be convincingly grief-stricken if we’re to throw her off the scent, not just hammered.”

I’m not really taking in what he’s saying here. I’m thinking back to all of Teddy’s DVDs Mac and I have watched, where a journalist or just some well nosy person is trying to prove something exists when everyone else won’t believe it, like the scientists in
E.T.
And the creepy guy in that one where Tom Hanks finds a mermaid. And the bounty hunter in that one where the family befriends a Bigfoot. How did they all throw the nosey parkers off the scent?

But the pink bubble gum on wheels is a-coming, we can see it now, pulling out of the Torrance Lodge parking lot and along the street, blinker blinking when it gets to the pub. The car turns in, disappears for a little while, and appears moments later. Now we can see the blonde head and yellow jacket and the mincing walk of Sally Dinkley.

“Shit,” I say, my brain fogging as I try desperately to remember the ending of
Splash
.

“Shit,” says Mac. Dinkley presses her keys and the parked bubble-gum balloon blinks.

The wine’s beginning to kick in. I’m hazier now, but not quite grief-stricken yet. “I don’t know what to say, Mac, I don’t know what to say. My mind’s gone blank. It’s useless!”

He just looks at me. “Just deny everything. And if you can, cry.”

Harry and the Hendersons
, I keep thinking. What happened to Bigfoot? How did the kids get E.T. away from the government? How did the mermaid escape from the scientists? I just can’t remember.

Sally Dinkley runs down the length of the parking lot, as much as you
can
run in five-inch Louboutin heels. Fake Louboutin heels, Mac informs me. “No way a newbie hack on some local rag is going to afford kosher Louboutins.”

I’m too drunk to fathom what he’s talking about, or care about her footwear for that matter, as she
clip-clop
s toward us. I can already hear her making apologies
.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry! I know I’m late,
doink
.” She does that stupid hand-against-forehead thing again, which is starting to annoy me as much as anything’s ever annoyed me in my life. “Have you been waiting long?”

“No,” I say. We’ve been here about twenty-five minutes but I’m starting the whole “deny everything” order as instructed by Mac as I have absolutely zilch other options. I can’t summon any tears, so all I can do is look mournful. Elliot ran away with E.T. That’s what the whole bike scene was about. Maybe Jackson and I could run away? On bikes?

“So,” she says, sitting down next to Mac on his side of the bench, directly opposite me. “Ooh, sorry, can I get you both drinks?” She gets up again and pulls her handbag up her shoulder.

“We can’t stay long,” says Mac, getting up and moving around to my side of the bench. So now we’re both facing her as she sits back down and starts rooting around in her oversized red leather bag for a small laptop. She starts it up and roots around in the bag again, pulling out some stick, which she shoves in the side of it. I’m getting more and more panic-stricken by the second, desperately foraging around in my mind to remember what happened at the end of
Splash
.