Rockoholic

by Skuse, C. J.

  Signor Salvo’s has some wooden benches underneath large red umbrellas. People gather around the counter as the chefs toss dough and shovel pizzas from a small stone furnace. We watch the tables until a family leaves, and I shove Jackson until he sits down amid their scrunched up napkins and dirty plates.

  I hand him the paper. “Put your hat up a smidge. We need to see your face a bit.”

  “My have picture and Man?” says Cree.

  “No,” says Mac, “not this one.” Cree does her frustrated leg wiggle.

  “We’ll do another one in a minute,” I tell her, and this seems to calm her down, though her leg still wiggles a bit. Mac steps back a couple of paces and lines his phone up on its side to take the picture of Jackson. He waits for the image to appear on the screen. “No, we can’t see your face.”

  With some awkwardness, Jackson tips the baseball cap up slightly.

  “Good,” I say. “Look out toward the road. Go back a bit Mac, it’s too close. It has to be natural, like he doesn’t know we’re taking it.”

  So Mac takes the shot of Jackson reading the paper, and a couple more of him pretending to sip from an empty coffee cup and scratching his chin, fully showing his face to the camera. I hope to God his shaking hand won’t be blurry in the picture.

  “Yeah, these are good,” Mac says as he studies them on the screen. “Got the awning behind him, cover of the paper’s in there and there’s even an Italian pizza guy scratching his armpit with a spaghetti fork in the background, so that should be perfect.”

  “Bargs,” I say. “When can you load them on the computer?”

  “Whenever you want,” says Mac.

  “My have picture now?” Cree whines again and just for her, I sit her on Jackson’s lap and take Mac’s phone from him. She does her fakest little grin in preparation for the shot.

  “Jackson, smile for this one, OK?”

  “Say tees, Man,” says Cree.

  He makes a different kind of face than his usual painfully confused one, though I wouldn’t call it a smile. “Cheese,” he says, though for all the enthusiasm he puts into it, he might as well have said, “I have an inoperable lump.”

  “OK, all done,” I say.

  “I want to go back now,” Jackson mumbles, his face glazed with sweat.

  Cree walks up to him and takes his hand in hers again. “Come on, Man, let’s go home. Can Man come see Roly?” she asks Mac.

  “No,” says Mac, “he needs to go back to Jody’s garage now.” Like we have to fold him up and pack him away.

  “In a minute?” asks Cree, which is usually what people say to her when they don’t want to do something.

  “Yeah, in a minute,” says Mac.

  “What’s a roly?” asks Jackson, still shaking, his skin as pale as raw pork rind.

  “She’s got this pet snail,” Mac explains as we walk back through the market. “Mum won’t let her have a rabbit. It’s this tiny thing she keeps in a see-through tub at home. You can barely see it.”

  “Why does she want me to see it?”

  Mac sighs. “Because she likes you, I suppose.”

  Jackson moves his baseball cap slightly and looks down at Cree. “Maybe tomorrow, huh, kid?” Cree nods. She takes his thumb in her hand and he looks confused but lets her and they walk in front of us.

  We’re walking back through the market and something spooks Jackson. Something spooks me, too, but I pretend not to have heard it. But I hear it again, and this time Mac hears it, too.

  That’s so him.

  We’re being followed. Toward the end of the market, where the numbers of people start to thin out, it becomes even more obvious.

  Are you sure?

  Yeah, it so is. Him what’s been in all the papers.

  You’re having a laugh.

  A different voice. No it ain’t, that ain’t ’im. What would he be doing here?

  A gasp. It might be. It looks like him. Get a picture, quick.

  And then we’re running, following Jackson’s lead, pushing past people, sidestepping strollers and wheelchairs and bikes, and we’re running hard. And the voices are running, too, following us. Mac grabs Cree and shouts, “We’ll catch up with you later.”

  “OK!” I yell. “Shit!” We’re at the car jam at the entrance to the market. Jackson takes a running jump onto a Honda and runs all the way over the hood and roof, and down and up onto the next one and down and up onto the next one, and I follow. I’m running on car roofs! Thump thump bang bang thump thump bang go our feet on the metallic floors beneath us, Citroëns, Chryslers, Renault Clios, Puntos, a Merc, and each one we climb is followed by a watery thud onto the wet road as our shoe soles land on the other side. Alarm after alarm goes waa, waa, waa in our wake, and Jackson’s so wiry and fast I can barely keep up with him. I glance behind us. Our followers, the same teenage boys from the lad lot, are being told off by a tall bloke, probably for running on his car. Jackson slows so I can overtake him and guide us home. We sprint down Shepherd’s Lane, then take a left, then a right, and finally turn onto Chesil Lane and up the gravel path at the side of our house. Jackson makes it into the garage first and crashes down into the feathers.

  “Blimey, that was amazing,” I pant, slamming the door behind us. “I’ve nearly been run over before, but I’ve never run over a car!”

  “Neither have I,” says Jackson, puffing and panting almost as much as I am. “God, that felt good. Good to get my legs moving, you know?” Once we get our breaths, we start LOL-ing really badly. “Your face,” he says. “You looked so scared.”

  “Well, yeah,” I say, bending over to relieve my stitch. “But you started running first.”

  “I know.” He smiles. He tries to laugh again but it’s labored, like he’s trying not to be sick.

  “I hate to darken the mood. . . .” I say. Feathers flutter down between us.

  “I know,” he says, smile ghosting from his face. “I’ve been seen.”

  I nod. “Probably took pictures on their phones, too.”

  “What if they were spying for Grohman or something?”

  “No, they were just teenagers, local chavs.”

  “What’s a chav? Is that code for something, like the CIA?”

  “No, Jackson, they were just kids.”

  “Yeah, but they could be working for him!” he snaps, getting up and pacing over to the door. “It gets back to Grohman, he’ll find me. He’ll find me and he’ll kill me. ‘You try that again, Gatlin, you’re gonna wish you’d never been born.’ That’s what he said to me. He knows people. He knows serious, serious people. . . .”

  I go to laugh, because it sounds stupid and paranoid but Jackson’s face stops me. “He’s not going to kill you,” I say. “You’re his star.”

  He looks at me, points a shaking finger, and says, “You need to send those pictures. Now. Then you have to get me away from here.”

  Once a hot story takes, it takes like a flame to a sparkler. It threads its way steadily along until it either burns right out or explodes in someone’s face. Usually, on the official Regulators website, pictures from a gig will appear within ten minutes of being taken. I rely on it for all the latest photos and downloads. It’s the same with gossip websites, like Loose Lucy. She makes up all this stuff about whoever she wants and Photoshops pictures so people believe it. She’ll write things like JACKSON TO MARRY BRITNEY? and JACKSON SEX TAPE: ALL THE DEETS. Another website, Chaos Theory, bills itself as the “World’s Number One Celebrity Stalker Site,” advertising that “if a celeb farts in the Arctic, I’ll be tweeting it from Texas within ten minutes.” They’re two of the most fearsome gossip sites on the Net.

  Anyway, Mac figures we didn’t need to send off the pictures to every single website and newspaper in the world — just a couple of sources will do. So we choose the National Sunday Press, the one tabloid that my mum gets because she likes the word quiz, and Loose Lucy.

  “We’ll e-mail them the photos now. That way it’ll be on Loose Lucy’s site A
SAP, and hopefully we can catch tomorrow’s edition of the Sunday Press,” says Mac.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t send it to more places, though?” I ask him.

  “No, it’s big enough. Trust me. Only takes one match . . .”

  “What?”

  “Like that song.” He then proceeds to sing it. “Only takes one tree to make a thousand matches, takes one match to burn a thousand trees!”

  Mac keeps singing at full voice but I still don’t get what he’s on about. And I don’t actually need to. By midnight, not only does the National Sunday Press website have our pictures, but Chaos Theory, and its whip-cracker Captain Chaos, is all over it. MISSING ROCK STAR LIVING LA DOLCE VITA!

  By 2:16 A.M., it’s on the news crawl on the BBC. MISSING SINGER SEEN IN ITALY. By 2:39 A.M., it’s on CNN in America. ROCK STAR JACKSON GATLIN SIGHTED. PHOTO EVIDENCE. Everyone is going with the same story.

  “I can’t believe it!” screeches Mac as we scroll through each website in turn in his dressing room at the Playhouse later that morning. Jackson’s in Italy. It’s official. Probably.

  10:14 A.M. — message board of the official Regulators site — GATLIN IN AUSTRIA.

  10:29 A.M. — message board of Chaos Theory — GATLIN GOES GREEK.

  10:31 A.M. — message board of The Regulators’ Facebook fan page — IS THIS JACKSON ON THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA?

  10:46 A.M. — a scratchy phone video of Jackson on YouTube, running away down a street with a brown-haired girl. The comments below the clip are all asking where it was taken and the video sneak is saying it’s in the West Country but, much to my delight, no one believes it. They’re all calling the video a fake. Bargain! “You can’t possibly tell it’s him,” says Mac, swigging back a lukewarm mug of honey water. “At least on our photos there’s no denying it is definitely him.”

  “But the more theories, the less people will believe he’s still in England. He can lay low.”

  “No he can’t, Jode,” says Mac. “He can’t stay in your garage forever now that he’s clean.”

  I stare at him. His eyes are still and furiously blue like Jackson’s. “He’s only just clean, Mac. It’s not safe yet. If he goes now, he’ll be a sitting duck. Grohman sounds like a monster.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know,” I snap, getting up and pacing Mac’s dressing room. I go to his clothes rail and run my hand along the sleeve of his black velvet costume.

  “You want him to stay, don’t you? You’ve got used to him being here and you’re hoping for cozy little chats about art and all that,” says Mac, actually reading my brain.

  There’s a knock on the door. A short, bald man in red trousers, yellow blazer, and bow tie pokes his head round. Geoffrey, director of NAOS.

  “Mac, come on, son, we need another run-through while we’ve got Ann here. She’s got to be back at her job by two for the afternoon shift.” He disappears again, slamming the door.

  “Why’s he so antsy?” I ask Mac, who snaps down the lid of his laptop and marches over to his costume rail to rummage for his Nikes, puffing flames. “Sorry. I’ll get out of your way.”

  “No, it’s not you. Got to do my bloody scene with Ann Rackham now.”

  “Don’t you like her?”

  “She’s OK. But her mustache doesn’t half itch.”

  • • •

  At home, Mum’s ironing in front of an omnibus episode of Jeremy Kyle entitled “He Dumped Me During Sex and Now I Want My Kidney Back.” After a brief conversation where I reinforce the fact Mum doesn’t need to scrape the meat out of the chicken and mushroom pie she’s bought for dinner, I tell her I’m going out to the garage for a bit.

  “You’re spending a lot of time out there lately,” she says as I’m going out the door.

  I stop dead. Oh. She’s noticed. Of course she has. I guess I was hoping that between working, shopping, and dealing with Grandad’s will stuff she wouldn’t have. She does still live here after all and I am always out there — even in the middle of the night. She must hear. It’s not that big a house. I look at her.

  She folds over Halley’s school shirt on the ironing board and does the other side. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I’m not snooping.”

  “Painting,” I say, without thinking at all about it. “I’ve . . . turned it into an art studio.” Where did that come from? Sometimes the best excuses just pop right out, like really ripe zits.

  “Oh,” she says, settling the iron down. “Right.”

  “Grandad suggested it ages ago. Do you mind?” I feel I should ask.

  She shakes her head and folds the shirt over again to do the collar. “No, I think that’s a lovely idea. Glad you’re making use of it.”

  “Thanks,” I say, making to leave again, but again, she stops me with a statement.

  “That’ll be your space. I’ll make sure Halley keeps out as well. We won’t go in there.”

  And I know she means it. “OK. Thanks, Mum.” I better do some art and get it out there soon, attempt to decorate my lie at least.

  In the kitchen, I’m waylaid by the fridge, where I grab Jackson one of Mum’s homemade pasties, some cooked sausages from the fridge, and an apple juice. He’s asleep when I get in the garage. I shake his shoulder.

  “Mmugh?” he mumbles.

  “I’ve got some news,” I say, kneeling down next to him.

  “Oh yeah?” He wakes up a bit more and levers himself onto his elbows.

  I place the pasty and the plate of sausages on the carpet beside his head. “The story took.”

  “The Italy thing?”

  “Yep. Most of the gossip websites have got hold of it, and the news channels. They all say you’re in Italy. They’re all showing the photo. They had to believe it, didn’t they?”

  “Yeah.” He seems shocked. He sits up fully, blinks his eyes wider, and leans against the wall. His eyes are droopy and shadowed. He looks in pain.

  “This is good news, Jackson. It means the journalists will stop poking around England. For now, anyway.”

  “They won’t stop,” he says croakily and clears his throat. “This’ll just invite more theories, more sightings.” He closes his eyes and rubs them. “I’m just so sick of it all. I’ll be like some ghost who people will keep saying they’ve seen. Like Elvis or Cobain. People will be trying to contact me on Ouija boards.”

  “Well you don’t have to answer them, do you? Why worry about it? Besides, you’re not exactly Elvis or Kurt Cobain. . . .” I stop myself. OMG, he’s going to throw the sausages at me. “I mean, they’re legends and you’re . . .” He’s going to stick them in my ears.

  He looks at me. “I didn’t mean I’m like them. Who is, for God’s sake? I just meant, when people don’t get a satisfactory answer to something, they make shit up. They’ll still write fiction about me. Where I am, what I’m doing. And who even cares, right? Who the hell am I?”

  “You’re Jackson Gatlin,” I say. And then I realize he was probably being rhetorical. Mac had to explain this to me once as I kept giving him answers to questions he didn’t want answering and he got all annoyed and told me he was “being rhetorical.”

  “Yeah and who’s Jackson Gatlin, huh? That wasted singer who can’t go onstage unless he’s had X amount of pills and X amount of compliments.”

  “No. That’s not you. You’ve forgotten who you are, that’s all.”

  “Oh, that’s all? I know who I am, Jody. You reminded me when you called me an asshole and poured the coffee in my face. . . .” He rubs the back of his head. “Ah, shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Did I bang my head?”

  “Uh, yeah. We dropped you down the stairs. We were taking you for a bath last week.”

  “You gave me a bath?” He laughs. “Why don’t I remember that? Jeez, I remember other stuff. The river and the coffee. And breaking the drums. You should have let me rot, Jody. You should have pushed me in that river and l
et it be.”

  I get up and walk to the door.

  “Where are you . . . ?”

  I’m already halfway up the yard, heading into the kitchen and up the stairs. In my room, I root through drawers for my finished sketch pad and then run back downstairs, as quietly as I can.

  Jackson looks up as I reenter the drum room. “Jody, what happened then? Why did you . . . ?”

  I sit down cross-legged and present him with the page of my sketchbook I was trying to find. “You’ve just forgotten who you are. Maybe this will jog your memory.” The sketch is copied from an article about The Regs’ debut album, Needful Things. The original picture was of Jackson and the band sitting beneath this beautiful pink tree, all wearing checkered shirts and boots with no laces. My sketch is just of Jackson, but closer up. He takes it from me and studies it.

  “You did this?”

  “Yeah. I never thought you’d be the first person I’d show it to.”

  “You trace it or something?”

  “No, well, I copied it. It’s from the —”

  “The Rolling Stone picture? Yeah, I know. It’s unbelievable.”

  I feel my cheeks burn. “I only copied it. I just really love that picture. You look happy.”

  “I was happy. The band was just starting out. It was all so new. That tree’s a sakura.”

  “A saka-what-a?”

  “Cherry blossom tree. We went to this signing in Sukagawa, Japan. Rolling Stone was there and they wanted to do this interview underneath it. The whole angle of the piece was this kind of ‘we’re a new band just starting out’ thing. This tree was one of like a thousand that had been donated by a neighboring country they’d forged trade links with. It was its first flowering. Kind of a ‘new band growing, new tree growing’ kinda thing.”

  “Oh, right,” I say, just about getting the link.

  “I sat under that tree every night, wrote some lyrics under it. I had nothing but that tree for company at the end of every day, every single day. It felt like this strange, sheltering friend.”

  His words “strange, sheltering friend” circle around my head. I love the way he puts things. Strange, sheltering friend. Like me, I suppose. “Why didn’t you hang out with the band?” I ask.