Rockoholic (31 page)

“How do I know you ain’t bugged or summing?” he says, rearranging himself in his underpants and getting fairly out of breath in the process.

“I’m not, I swear! Believe me I don’t want to be here! I just need to get someone right out of the country as soon as possible and I’m willing to pay. So will you help or not?”

“I gotta check you ain’t bugged first. Take your top off.”

“Good-bye,” I snap and march straight back through the living-room door. I can hear him laughing. I want to run back in there and shove what’s left in that curry container right over his melon head. I want to tip up the coffee table and throw it against the wall. But I don’t. Because I need his help. And for some reason, I still think, even as I get to the top of the stairs, that he will help me. I’m two steps down and I hear his voice again.

“All right, all right, I was only having a laugh wiv ya, weren’t I?”
Hur, hur, hur.
“How much you got, then?”

I troop back in slowly. “Five thousand.” He barely raises an eyebrow. At this point, I take out the money. “I can give you two thousand five hundred for any customs documents he’ll need and the same again for travel costs and stuff.”

“Ain’t possible,” says Buzzey.

“I know for a fact your dad brought two women over from Romania for half that!” I shout. I’d looked it up on the Internet that morning.

“Yeah, well, that was a few years ago. We been through a little credit crunch since then, or hadn’t you noticed?”

“Yeah, I
had
noticed,” I say, still clutching the money, scanning the dank brown room heaving with junk, clutter, and dust. There’s a definite dark brown shadow in the far corner that could or could not be a cat turd.

“I been signed off sick,” he says, leaning back, yanking his trousers up over his spilled belly.

“Off skiving, more like,” I mumble.

“Uh?” he says. He’s helped himself to another mouthful of popadam dipped in cold, greasy curry. He itches the second of his three chins with a yellow-stained finger and reaches for the remote to change channels.

“Can you help me or not? Can you get him out quickly and quietly and never tell a soul about it or not? I haven’t got time to play games.”

I’ve never seen anyone flick through TV channels quite so fast, but he eventually settles on
60 Minute Makeover
and goes back to his popadam. He knows full well I’m on tenterhooks. He alternates between staring at me and the envelope.
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
“Where’ve you got five grand from, then?” he eventually says through a spray of crispy bits.

“My grandad. Charlie McGee. He died a couple of weeks ago. He left an inheritance.” I gesture to the envelope. “This is it.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. Took a bit of a tumble, din’t he?” I start out the door again. I don’t want to hear it if he starts on about Grandad. “That all he left ya?”

I turn back. “Yes,” I lie. I wasn’t about to tell him exactly how much he’d left me. He’d want all of it.

He leans forward in his chair. “You give me five, and I’ll see what I can do. And that’s a discount. I usually ask for ten. You caught me in a good mood.” He holds out his baby-leg fingers to take the envelope.

“No, half now, half later. Please.” I’m saying please so as to appeal to his better nature. He must have one, somewhere, beneath all the fat.

He holds up his filthy yellow hands. “That’s the deal. No half-arsed two thousand now, two thousand later crap. You give me five grand, I’ll get him into Europe without the pigs sniffing around him. I’ll do the whole lot.”

“What’s the lot?”

“Everything. I’ll get ’im out, get everything ready . . .”

“What, like a passport?”

He wipes the back of his hand across his nose. “Depends what I can sort out, dunnit? It’ll be professional and all that. International driver’s licenses, dummy credit cards, passports. Stamps for the passport so it’ll look used.”

“It will?” I say. “And you’ll get him as far away as possible, you won’t dump him in the middle of the North Sea or . . .”

“I’ll get him as far into Europe as he wants to go. Well, my associates will.”

“Your associates?”

“Well, yeah. I’m just the organ grinder, I got monkeys for things like that.”

“What if I don’t . . . really trust you?”

He shrugs. “Ain’t my problem.” He shovels another scoop of curry on a crisp of popadam into his gob. “You can’t have that many options if you’ve come to me. So are we in business for five grand, then, or what?”

I rub the moon rock in my hoodie pocket, waiting for the voice in my head to tell me what to do. I try to listen to my heart; that’s what people say in movies, don’t they, when they’re not sure about something. But my heart’s just doing its usual beat thing and I don’t understand what that means. However, my head is telling me not to trust this guy with a Monopoly note, let alone five thousand of my grandad’s money. I have to be sensible about this. I have to be Mackenzie about this. So I say no.

“No. I can’t give you five thousand pounds just like that. Two thousand five hundred now, for the documents, same again when I hear from him when he gets to Europe.”

“I ain’t buggering about with all that.”

“Fine, let’s forget it, then,” I say finally, stuffing the money back in my pocket and turning to leave again, this time for good. My head is a whole mosh pit of new worries. I am completely out of ideas as to how to get Jackson out of the country. I wasn’t too pleased with my idea of approaching the BFD, anyway, but now even this option is out, due to his total unwillingness to strike a deal. I guess I’m not one of his usual teenage boys who’d sell their own feet for a tenth of weed.

I reach the fourth step down this time and I hear his voice call out.

“Oi!”

I don’t move. He wants this, he’s got to waddle and get it. I keep walking, slowly down the staircase. I am standing on the bottom step when the voice comes again, at the top.

“I can have the papers by tomorrow.” I turn. I look up at him. “I’ll need three passport pictures of him by tonight. And a name.” I nod. “I can have it all in place by Friday.”

“The quicker, the better.”

He picks at his teeth. “It’ll take as long as it takes, darlin’. These new biometric passport chips make it well ’ard to clone. And you can’t just shove a new photo in ’em, you gotta have it digitally imaged. It ain’t a walk in the park.”

“I don’t care. Just get it done, OK?”

“It’ll be done, don’t fret your little head. Just get me three pictures of your mate, the one who’s ‘not a criminal,’ all his details and his new name. I’ll set everything up first. You breathe a word to anyone that I’m helping ya, no more Big Friendly Duncan.”

I pull the money bundle out my jeans for the last time and hold it at arm’s length to him. “Half now, half when I get the papers?”

He nods and his pudgy, yellow-nailed hand reaches out and takes it.

And then I’m down the stairs and out the door and I don’t look back. I keep walking until I turn the corner of the street into an alleyway, which leads into the High Street, and it’s here that I break down. I clamp my hand to my mouth and sob. The cry is in place of the fear I had to suck up walking into Buzzey’s flat. It’s losing my grandad’s money on the longest long shot in history. It’s five thousand pounds going toward a drug industry that’s put Jackson in this hideous situation in the first place. And it’s for Jackson himself. Because I know, if only Duncan can pull this off, I’ll never ever see Jackson again.

Jackson’s sitting on his feathers reading when I get back.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
, which I haven’t read yet but it’s apparently about this girl who gets lost in the woods and starts to believe her hero, this baseball star called Tom Gordon, is watching over her, kind of protecting her.

My own hero is more angry than happy when I tell him about my visit to the BFD to get him out of the country.

“You didn’t go on your own, did you? Mac went with you or something?”

“No,” I say. “He thought the whole BFD thing was a very bad idea. He doesn’t know and he’s not going to know, OK?” Jackson scrapes his palm over his shaven head, just like Mac does when he’s annoyed with me. Except Mac’s got hair and gel and stuff on his head so it takes a bit longer. “I knew you wouldn’t let me do it, anyway.”

“Damn right. What the hell were you thinking?”

“You said you wanted to get out of the country. The BFD is one of those guys who know how to get you things. He’s going to get you a passport and a car to get you across. . . .”

“Hmm,” he says.

“You do still want to go, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he says, but there’s a little note in it that indicates otherwise.

“I’ve just paid Buzzey to get you across to Europe on Friday, Jackson. You better not be chickening out on me.”

“You paid him already?”

“Yeah.”

“How much?”

“Two and a half thousand.”

“Jesus H . . .”

“It’s halvsies. Halvsies now and halvsies when he’s got your documents and everything.”

“. . . Christ . . . and everything? You don’t even know what he’s gonna do to get me out of here! He’ll stiff you with some forged crap and you won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.”

“No he won’t.”

“How do you know? Look, I’ll get your two and a half grand back somehow. Just forget about giving him any more.”

“I can’t forget it, can I? There’s no other way. We either take a chance on Buzzey or we stay here and you get found by Sally Dinkley or, even worse, Grohman, and shoved back on that tour bus . . . or shoved out of it in the middle of a desert or something.”

He shakes his head. “You’re gonna lose your money. You’ll lose your money and I’ll still be here and she’ll find me.”

“We’re desperate, OK? You read her article that I posted through your door this morning, didn’t you? Pash has a broken nose and three broken fingers. That roadie’s on life support. That St. John Ambulance woman needs plastic surgery. You said yourself Grohman’s never going to let up until he’s cemented you into a pillar on the motorway or something. I’m not letting anything happen to you. Not when I could stop it, no way.”

He dips his head.

“They’ll never leave you alone, Jackson.”

He thinks about this. He nods.

I get to my feet. “I’m going to find Mum’s camera. I think Halley borrowed it on her outward-bound trip. We need to take some photos of you. OK? Against that wall will be perfect.”

He picks up
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
again. “I musta read this story a dozen times. I’m glad you got me this one. It’s my favorite of his.”

Another day, another bullshit headline.

I SAW SUICIDAL ROCK STAR ON BRIDGE

Some bloke is claiming he saw a man matching Jackson’s description, in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, on the Severn Bridge, where he was “staring out to sea and thinking things over.” Usually I would be infuriated by such a lie, but it’s actually OK. It’s helping us. We need the distraction. We need people to believe he is dead. Yeah, he went to the Severn Bridge. Yeah, he was suicidal. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But there are slightly more pressing issues at hand today. It’s Thursday. I dropped the photos through the BFD’s letter box last night, pretending I was visiting Mac at rehearsal. I also gave him Jackson’s new name. I’m wondering if Buzzey will have found them or whether they’re hidden under all the packages and pizza leaflets in his stairwell. I wonder if he recognized Jackson from the photos.

Halley’s hanging around me as I separate my and Jackson’s laundry. She’s trying to get a conversation going, swinging the microwave door backward and forward.

“Aren’t you going to be late for school?” I ask her.

“I s’pose.” The microwave door bangs shut. “What are you doing in the drum room?”

“What?”

“You go out there a lot.”

“Yeah, I just . . . like it out there. Reminds me of Grandad.”

“Oh,” she says and we leave it at that.

Jackson has worked up the nerve to give his disguise a test drive, so we arrange to go to Weston Park in the afternoon with Mackenzie and Cree as soon as Mac gets off from work. And as soon as I have collected Jackson’s new passport and stuff and given the rest of the money to the BFD.

So it’s back I go to Knockturn Alley, where I heave myself once again up the filthy staircase, the second wodge of cash safely tucked in a sealed white envelope in the zipped pocket of my messenger bag. The BFD’s sitting there like before in his armchair, watching a rerun of
Supermarket Sweep
on cable, eating a bowl of what looks like rabbit poo in water.

I fumble about in my bag to find the envelope and stand there with it in both hands, waiting for a sign of recognition. Eventually, the audience bursts into applause, signaling a commercial break, and Duncan settles the bowl down on the coffee table and looks at me. He holds out his hand and for a split second I think he’s going to shake it, but he’s looking at the envelope. I hand it to him. He opens it and starts counting the money. He looks up at me when he’s done. “Cool. Cheers for that.”

I stand expectantly, watching a large drooping cobweb swaying in the corner of the room, waiting for him to pluck out a crisp new red passport from behind his chair, or a large envelope carrying details of Jackson’s new persona. But he remains sitting there, just looking at me.