Rockoholic

by Skuse, C. J.

  “I’ve got it,” I say, taking the bag, picking up another by Mum’s feet, and taking them into the kitchen. Mum breezes in and dumps the bags on the breakfast bar.

  “How come you’re back so early?” I say, looking back out into the hallway where Mac attempts to move away from the coat closet. Jackson’s hand flops through the crack. Mac folds it back in and stands against the closet door.

  “I had to leave work early anyway so thought I’d do the food shopping. I went out to Lidl’s for a change. Can’t move for bloody baklava at Waitrose.” This is Mum Code for “we can no longer afford to shop at Waitrose.” “I’ve got to see the lawyer this afternoon. They’re reading your grandad’s will today.”

  “Oh,” I say. Another plunge of dread. If Grandad’s got debts, we could be out of a home. “Do you want . . . me to come?” Please no, please no.

  “No, don’t worry. It’s a foregone conclusion, I think. I hope.” She sighs wearily.

  I have to ask. Sometimes I need more than a sigh or a bit lip. I need confirmation. “Are you worried? About, like, losing the house and stuff?”

  She makes a little puff noise and starts unpacking the groceries onto the counter on top of a pile of mail. All bills. One from the funeral directors is on the top. “We’ll find out today, won’t we?”

  “At least the divorce is through. You won’t have to give anything to Dad.” This is my attempt at a bright side, but the “D” word is enough to shove her deeper into her mood. She grabs a carton of blood orange juice and some vegetarian sausages from one of the bags and makes for the fridge. I think about telling her not to bother buying veggie stuff anymore, as it’s like an extra two pounds a pack and I’m not vegetarian anymore, not since I found out Jackson was the most arrogant piece of meat that ever walked the Earth, but I daren’t. “What time have you got to be there?”

  “The appointment’s at half two. I wanted to take a shower and do my hair first, though.”

  “Well, I can put the shopping away if you want to go and shower. I don’t mind.”

  She looks at me like I’ve just sneezed in her face but I’m hoping she’ll soon come to the conclusion that I’m trying to build bridges. There I go with bridges again. But she takes the bait.

  “Yeah, OK. Might put a color on it,” she says, fluffing her hair at the back. “D’you think?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I think about adding, That nice auburn color really suited you when you put it on once before, but I don’t. For two reasons: (1) because Mum’s radar always beeps when it comes to me overdoing it with the bullshit and (2) because her hair always looks bloody awful when she home-dyes it. So I just leave it at the two yeahs.

  She touches me briefly on the shoulder and leaves the kitchen, passing Mac again in the hallway on the way up the stairs. I arrive to see him towering over her, smiling like a loon, and her looking up and giving him the dodgiest eye.

  “What’s that smell?” she says.

  “Kitchen trash,” I say, quick as a flash. “I’ve just put it out. They come today, don’t they?”

  “Oh thanks. I’d forgotten that. Can you do the others as well? I’m not going to have time.”

  I nod. Mac’s making a halfhearted attempt to undo the laces on his Converse. “Takes me ages to get these off,” he laughs nervously. “I’m all knotted up.”

  “You don’t have to take your shoes off to go in the kitchen, Mackenzie.” Mum smiles as she starts to go up the stairs. “It’s a tiled floor.”

  “Oh, hahahahaha,” he laughs again but stays put, still tugging at the laces. We both wait in the hallway and look at each other as we hear the noises that signal Mum’s arrival up the stairs and creaks across the landing. We hear the bathroom door open. This is her getting clean towels from the wicker drawers. Then into her bedroom. Then the door to her en suite bathroom shutting. The water going on . . . and eventually, the shower door closing.

  “Right, come on,” I say, pulling the door handle on the coat closet. Jackson spills out onto the hallway carpet and with him comes the fug of unwashedness and it only makes me even more determined to get him upstairs as quickly as possible.

  “Back outside, yeah?” says Mac as we pull him out.

  “No, bathroom,” I say.

  “What?” he screeches. “We can’t now your mum’s here. She’ll see him!”

  “She won’t,” I say. “She’s putting a color on her hair and then she’s going to the lawyer’s for Grandad’s will reading.”

  “This is insane,” says Mac as we roll Jackson onto his back and pick up where we left off, maneuvering him around the corner and up the stairs, Mac going first at the head. Each step is like a small mountain and we lump up so slowly I could scream. Halfway up, we get the giggles.

  “Come on!” I try and say. “Keep going. Mac, stop laughing!”

  Mac’s in hysterics.

  “Brilliant, just brilliant. Mac, come on, will you?!”

  But once we finally regain our composure and begin moving up the stairs again, Mac trips on his trailing lace, loses his footing, and drops Jackson, so I take the full weight of him and we both fall gadoink, gadoink, gadoink down the few steps we’ve just climbed. Miraculously, Jackson doesn’t wake up. I break his fall. Mac is poised like a waxwork on the fourth step up. We’re both waiting for my mum to appear and wonder why I’m flat on my back at the bottom with a missing rock star on top of me.

  “Are you OK?” Mac whispers down to me after a while.

  “Yes. Just get him off me,” I whisper back. He runs down and grabs Jackson under the shoulders.

  Finally, once we’re up, we take him into the bathroom, plonk him down on the floor, and close the door. I put the plug in the tub and start running the water. I pour in a shitload of ylang-ylang and crushed-diamond bath cream to get a foam started. I didn’t know crushed diamonds even had a smell, but it’s well nice. Mac starts to peel off Jackson’s clothes, looking like he’s pecking through a rancid trash can for a lost five pound note. I root about in the medicine cabinet for something to de-fuzz him. There’s some Nair cream, but it smells like chemotherapy in a tube. I find one of my grandad’s razors.

  “I’ll find him some towels,” says Mac, rummaging through the wicker drawers before I can ask him to help me remove Jackson’s pants. I hear Mum’s shower whirring distantly.

  “I can’t lift him into the bath on my own, Mac,” I whisper. “Just help me get him in.”

  Mac drops the two large white towels he’s holding. I peel off Jackson’s pants and fling them on the pile in the corner, draping a damp washcloth over Jackson’s lap to spare his dignity.

  Mac barges past me to take Jackson under his arms. “I’ll get this end.”

  I step across Jackson and take his legs. On three, we hoist him up and into the bath. He slips down under the bubbles and I pull him back up. Mac watches as I soap up a sponge and begin swabbing Jackson all over his chest. I lift up his key necklace and swab under there, not daring to take it off as I know how presh he is about it. So here I am, sponging a female lust object, my ultimate hero, all over with soap suds. Water dripping out of the sponge onto his bare pink skin. My hands all over him, pulling him forward to wash his back. His back side. Wet. Skin to skin.

  But it’s not in the least bit erotic. It’s like bathing a pig. A hundred-sixty-pound comatose pig, who might very well drown me if he wakes up. But he’s showing no signs of waking up and I can’t quite believe it because I’m giving him a fairly thorough scrub. And then he does wake up, sort of.

  “Wha . . . s’whe . . . not . . . sez . . .”

  And then his eyes close again and his face goes headstone still and his mouth drops open. I breathe out and hoick him back up where he has slipped down under the water. His hair smells like an old man’s toolshed — his breath like a drain. So it’s all a bit too smelly and awkward to be erotic. I squeeze out some Wash & Go and start scrubbing his head.

  “You could help. We’d get it done a lot quicker,” I say to Mac, half tur
ning my head in his direction.

  He pokes his head out the bathroom door and pulls it closed again. “I can’t hear your mum’s shower going. I think she’s finished.”

  “So? She’s not going to disturb us in here, is she? Lock the door. I’ll say I’m having a bath.”

  “Where am I supposed to be?” says Mac.

  “I’ll say you’ve gone home.” I reach underneath Jackson to wipe him down below. Mac can barely watch. He stands there with his arms folded, studying the cobweb in the corner. “Go and get him some clean clothes, then. In my grandad’s room, in the wardrobe.”

  Mac leaves the room like a cop in a shoot-out, his back sliding against the wall in case Mum pops out from somewhere. I prop Jackson up in the bath and take one of the razors out of its protective guard. I spray a blob of shaving foam on my hands and lather it all over his face. I nick him a couple of times but he still doesn’t wake up. I then moisturize him using Halley’s Nivea.

  When I’m done with the razor, I rinse his hair with the plastic jug and attempt to brush his teeth.

  Return of the Mac. He lies the two bath towels on the floor and helps me heave Jackson out onto them so we can dry and dress him. He looks as good as new. Better. More like Shiny Smiley Magazine Jackson, not Post-Concert Sweaty Jackson, which is the only Jackson I’ve seen up until now.

  “OK, here’s what we’ve got. . . .” says Mac. He holds up a black-and-white tuxedo.

  I didn’t know Mum had kept that. I take the hanger and smile. A tiny piece of evidence that Grandad did once dress like a normal guy. “A little over-the-top maybe?”

  “I thought it might bring back happy memories for Jackson of his Grammy-night paparazzi punch-up.” I’m just about to argue when there’s a knock on the door.

  We freeze. Jackson’s still spark out between us on the bath towels at our feet.

  “Jode? I’m off to the lawyer’s,” Mum calls out.

  “OK,” I call back.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Uh, having a bath.”

  “Oh. Halley’s staying at Nina’s house tonight because they’re catching the bus early in the morning, so are you OK to make your own dinner?”

  Catching the bus? Oh yeah, she’s going on an outward-bound thing. Mac flings me a hand towel and I quickly wrap it around my head so it looks like my hair’s wet. I open the door a crack and poke my head out. “Yeah, OK.”

  Mum’s at the top of the stairs with her power suit on. She starts to call out “bye” and then sees me. “Oh, there you are. See you later.”

  “Good luck.”

  She frowns. “You’re all right, aren’t you? I’m not asking any questions,” she says defensively. “I just want to know.” She comes to the bathroom door.

  “I’m fine, Mum.” She’s looking at my nostrils. She always does this to check for white powder traces. She’ll try to look behind me for bongs. Check to see if the toilet seat’s down with traces of white powder on top of it. She saw it on CSI: Miami.

  “Where’s Mac?” she asks.

  “Gone home,” I say, closing the door slightly. “I need to wash my conditioner off now.”

  “Jode . . .”

  “Sorry. See you later, bye.”

  I shut the door and flick the lock over. She’s not convinced. I wouldn’t be either. Mac looks at me and we both stop breathing until we hear footsteps down the stairs and the front door closing.

  Once in a clean tuxedo, Jackson is carried back out to the drum room where we lie him down on the cushions and I move his limbs into the recovery position: on his side, chin up, arms laced to keep him in place, top knee bent at a right angle. Now he can continue his coma in comfort and I don’t have to stress about him choking to death if he throws up again. It’s one of the few things I actually remember from the first-aid course I had to complete for work. How to put someone in the recovery position and to always assess the situation before you act. Pity I couldn’t remember where to look for a pulse, but still, I can only take in so much.

  And the current situation is that Mac and I are both knackered, but there’s no time to waste. It’s garbage pickup day. I can hear the clattering garbage truck a couple of streets away. With a bit of luck we can clean up the room and have the trash taken away without anyone knowing. So we get to work.

  It’s not the pukey smell that’s bothering me as we bag up all the rubbish. It’s not the torn boxes, the dirty walls, the dented skirting boards. It’s the fact that I have to say good-bye to my grandad’s things. Things I saved from the charity donation — clothes, reading glasses, books. The mannequin he nicked from Debenhams (now headless). Two multicolored glass bongs that used to sit on the windowsill in the lounge (now smashed). Ornaments he brought back from his travels — a plastic Taj Mahal (now snapped), a tiny snow globe of the Great Barrier Reef (now not so great), and a little Statue of Liberty on a brass base (now baseless).

  “You OK?” Mac asks as each ruined item is thrown into the bin.

  “Yeah,” I say, and say no more. It hurts but there’s nothing I can do. Everything’s ruined. We clear the room completely, save for the coverless duck-feather cushions and the bucket. We then go through the house and empty the rest of the bins like Mum asked me to — anything to stop her from getting suspicious. Our trash bin is already full so we start to load up Jackson’s hidey bin.

  “Shall I do it, so we catch the trashmen?” offers Mac as I tie up the last bag.

  “It’s OK,” I say. “It’s not too bad. Silly hanging on to it all, really. It’s not Grandad, is it?”

  Mac shakes his head. “It’s just stuff.”

  The trashmen are clattering nearer now. The truck beeps to signal their reversal into Chesil Lane. Two men in fluorescent orange jump out of the cab and start along the pavement, grabbing the handles of the green trash bins and flinging their contents up into the crusher. We leave the overflowing bins for the men and go back into the near-empty drum room.

  “What now?” I say to Mac, expecting him to give me one of his treelike hugs, but he doesn’t.

  “Dunno,” he says. “Fancy going shopping or something? I told Mum I’d be rehearsing nonstop so they had to put Cree in day care all day for once.”

  “What? No I meant what else can we do for Jackson?”

  “Oh we’re still on him, are we?” he sighs.

  “What do you expect? I can’t concentrate on anything else at the moment.”

  “How about getting a few DVDs out? Yeah, let’s get some DVDs, popcorn, Ben & Jerry’s, and make an afternoon of it. We can keep one eye on him and . . .”

  “I can’t,” I say, “it wouldn’t be right.”

  “OK, well, we’ll turn it into research,” he says decisively.

  We find just enough energy to troop down the street to the pub and sneak up to the back bedroom to swipe every relevant DVD in Teddy’s collection. Then we sneak back to my house, and all afternoon we watch them — The Basketball Diaries, Dazed and Confused, Drugstore Cowboy, Totally Baked: A Pot-U-Mentary, and, of course, Trainspotting. There isn’t time to watch all of them properly so we skim, looking for scenes where a character goes through cold turkey. When Trainspotting comes to a halt, Mac gets up to take it out and place it back in its box. It’s getting dark outside the living-room window. I reach up behind me and flick on the wall light.

  “He just has to ride it out, doesn’t he?” says Mac.

  “And we just have to . . . keep an eye on him?”

  “Yeah. A few days without his happy pills and his entourage might work wonders.”

  “What about the toilet?”

  Mac shrugs. “He’s got a bucket.”

  “Bit undignified, isn’t it?”

  “He could do with a bit of indignity. Remind him he’s a human being.”

  “What if he tries to commit suicide?”

  “How?” says Mac. “He’s only got pillow feathers and a bucket.”

  The news is on. Channel Three.

  Police are searc
hing areas of South Wales and the West Country in the hope of finding American rock star Jackson Gatlin, lead singer of The Regulators, who has not been seen for two days since he came offstage at Cardiff Arena.

  “Quick, turn it up,” says Mac, fumbling for the remote.

  Gatlin, aged 27, who has a history of depression, has not contacted his management or fellow band members since his disappearance on 23 March. Bandmates say his passport and all of his possessions remain untouched.

  Inquiries by detectives in London and Cardiff have drawn a blank, but revealed that he has not used his credit cards or contacted friends. The band have postponed a thirty-date concert tour of the US, due to start next Wednesday.

  Last year the band, whose guitar-based rock is said to give a voice to alienated American youth, played at the Big Fish Festival in New Zealand as a threesome while Gatlin recovered from exhaustion in a clinic.

  But a source close to the group said that since then the troubled musician, famed for his onstage antics, which include fire-breathing and backflips into the crowd, has steered clear of drink and drugs.

  Anyone who may have seen anything unusual near Cardiff Arena on the night of 23 March is asked to contact the missing-persons helpline. . .

  “Shit,” says Mac, but we don’t have a conversation about it, because just at that moment, his phone buzzes and it’s his mum, asking him to look after Cree for the evening so she can go down to work in the bar. “Keep him locked in and don’t feed him. It’ll only give him more energy.”

  “I can’t starve him. What about drink?”

  Mac marches into the kitchen and returns minutes later with the carton of blood orange juice. I follow as he marches out to the garden, kneels down in front of the drum-room door, and hastily shoves the juice through the cat flap.

  “OK, he’s got drink. Now just leave him to it.”