Rockoholic

by Skuse, C. J.

  “Better than dying at home, withering away in his bed like some old plant, don’t you think?”

  “I played ‘Bedlam’ at his wake,” I tell him.

  “You did?”

  “Not me personally, but I put it on the stereo and . . . had a bit of a food fight. It was such a miserable day and they were playing such shit music. He liked that song. It just seemed right.”

  “That’s so cool,” says Jackson. “He sounds like a cool guy.”

  Suddenly, it is funny. After all this time, all the horrible stuff written about Grandad’s accident in the local papers, all my stressing about it being my fault because I didn’t notice he’d taken the brake off his wheelchair, it’s really funny. We laugh together, like friends, not kidnapper and hostage. He sits up and returns to my sketchbook to finish looking at it. He turns to one of Mac with his full Rocky Horror makeup on. “I love that movie. When does Mac’s version open?”

  “Friday night. The audience dresses up and everything. I’ve ordered this well slaggy outfit from the costume shop. Maybe you could come and see it?”

  “Maybe,” he says, rubbing his key necklace.

  I sleep with Jackson that night. Not sleep sleep, just sleep in the same room as him, on the feathers. We stay up for ages, talking about everything under the moon and stars. Childhood. Work. Parents and the lack of them. Politics, kind of. Climate change. It’s so bargain. Such a nice time. And it’s the first time I don’t want to leave him. It’s Jackson without the stink, without the drugs, without the fame, without the fear. I have fantasized about a night like this for so long. This is what I need. He is what I need.

  It’s Monday. “Halley’s back later,” says Mum brightly when I go through the façade of walking into the kitchen yawning like I’ve just come from upstairs where I’ve supposedly been all night. I see something white out of the corner of my eye — a duck feather. I pluck it from my hair.

  There’s nothing to say. I know Halley’s coming back from her Duke of Edinburgh training hike this afternoon. It’s on the calendar. I know this. So I don’t say anything.

  “It’ll be nice to have her back,” Mum says. There’s a definite spring in her walk, probably due to the fact that all those bills mounting up on the kitchen counter can now be shoved right up the funeral director’s or the credit card company’s or the gas man’s arse. Maybe also due to the fact that she’s got a whole new wardrobe. All thanks to Grandad. I’m glad. But I’m not glad that Halley’s back. I’d been nursing the hope that her group might lose their compass and get lost on the Quantocks, just for a few more days. Maybe it’ll be nice to have her back, it’ll be nice for Mum, anyway, but it makes life a bit trickier for me. Hopefully Mum’ll drum the whole personal space thing into her and I won’t have to worry about her sniffing around the garage. I mean, my “art studio.” That reminds me, I must get some art out there soon.

  “Have we got any milk?” I say, pulling open the fridge door.

  “No, I’m going to go grocery shopping on my lunch break. We seem to be getting through food like nobody’s business at the moment.” Mum says this a lot, usually as a hint that I must have the “munchies” from all the pot I must be smoking. “Don’t stand there with the door open, Jode. You’ll let all the cold out.” I shut the fridge and start rearranging the magnets instead. “You back to work today?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I say. Oh, barnacles, it’s Monday. Work hasn’t even floated across my mind. I’ve had my “sympathy week” off (holiday, as far as Mum knows) and now I’m due back. I grab a piece of toast that Mum has done for herself and scuttle upstairs to find a work shirt.

  I leave the house via the backyard so I can look in on Jackson in the garage. He’s asleep, so I leave some orange juice by his head and close the door quietly behind me.

  As usual I don’t want to go to work, but today it’s for the newest of reasons. I can’t stop thinking about Mac. He’s been on my mind all night, but I still can’t unravel it all. What if Jackson’s right? How do I feel? I don’t know. Mac’s my friend. He’s been my friend for the past two years. What would he be like as a boyfriend? Why would he want me, anyway? It did cross my mind once, me and him being together. I’ve tried testing the gay theory, too. I left a magazine ad open on the breakfast bar, a perfume ad showing this half-naked man, just to look for a reaction. Mac was helping my mum fold laundry at the time. He put a pile of socks right down on it.

  • • •

  Work is awful. I’m late for a start, which isn’t unusual, but it means I get a nice fat bollocking from my supervisor, Ashley, who chews me up and spits me out all over the linoleum in our classroom. We have a diarrhea outbreak, about our third so far this year, which means all morning I’m heaving small people onto changing mats and peeling off shitty Baby Gap jeans.

  I’m on floor play over lunchtime, playing with those kids who don’t sleep and haven’t been sent home with the runs. The two kids who are awake are stabbing each other with wooden spoons from the holistic play tub. I do some crayoning on the craft table but neither of them is interested in joining me. I’m so frustrated I could scream. I don’t want to be here. I decide I’ll ask to leave early when the supervisors come back from lunch.

  And then the sun comes out.

  “Dody!” Cree has come in for an afternoon session. Cree’s on flexi-time, which means when Mac can’t look after her, she comes in to day care. He’s obviously busy today, as Tish is looking stressed. I do love it when Cree’s in, though, cos it at least means I’ve got someone to talk to. She has her black-and-white dungarees on and her new white sandals. She runs into my arms and I lift her up for a squidge.

  “Where did you been?” she frowns, plucking on my earlobes.

  “I’ve been here, waiting for you,” I say to her.

  “Why you not been to my house?”

  “Uh, well, I’ve had a lot to do.”

  “Looking after the Man?”

  “Uh y-yeah,” I stutter.

  “Can I come back to Dody’s house and help with the Man?”

  “Uh . . . hi, Tish.”

  “Hi, Jode,” her mum smiles as she strokes Cree’s ponytail and plonks down a little SpongeBob rucksack and the toy doctor case on a nearby chair. “She keeps on about this man at your house. She’s drawn him pictures and keeps going on about showing him her snail. Your mum got a new fella?”

  “God no,” I laugh, more of a stalling tactic while I think what to say. “Unless she’s got someone tied up in the garage I don’t know about!”

  We both laugh, though it’s a little awkward, because of the whole not-a-million-miles-away-from-the-truth thing, and because I’ve just suggested my mum is a sex offender. “She must mean the man in the moon. We were talking to him the other night, weren’t we, Cree?”

  “Man in Dody’s garage,” Cree tells her mum. “Man’s my fend.”

  Tish laughs. “He’s your friend is he, sweetheart?” I laugh. It’s too nonsensical for further questions and luckily Tish just puts it down as one of those kids-say-the-stupidest-things moments and says no more about it.

  “I’ll be back about five if that’s all right. I’ve got to do a grocery store run and a few other bits and pieces, so can she have her dinner as well?”

  “Tish, I could take Cree home with me and give her something to eat, if you want. I’m going to ask to leave about three o’clock, anyway. You won’t have to pay for her, then.”

  “Oh, that’s kind of you, Jody. Yeah, if you don’t mind, thanks. I’ll send Mac over when he’s finished rehearsals at six,” she says.

  “My Kenzie pick me up,” nods Cree.

  “Sure that’s all right?” asks Tish.

  “Yeah, that’s fine. We’ll have fun, won’t we?” I say to Cree and she nods with all her might.

  “We go and see Man!” she smiles at her mum and leans out of my arms to kiss her good-bye and give her a brief “I love you but go away now” hug.

  Cree clings to me like a barnacle all lunchtime.
We play with the matching pairs of cards and do some coloring and she jabbers like she usually does, in her own little language, and for a while I just watch her, wishing my biggest challenge in life was getting the color inside the lines.

  We lie down on the reading cushions and she bandages up my head and listens to my “bump bumps” with her stethoscope. The time flies, thank Cobain, cos I’m usually glazing ready for sleep by the time the others breeze back in from lunch at two o’clock. When they finally do come back, I take a deep breath and ask Ashley, or “Asslay” as Cree calls her, if I can leave early.

  “No,” she says, just like that, scraping her hair extensions off her face with a fake-nailed claw. “We haven’t got enough staff to cover you. We’re one child over.”

  Bitch. I flick her a V-sign when her back’s turned, niftily turning it into a head scratch when she turns back. She’d bloody well make sure there was enough staff if she had to go and arrange some more ushers or something for her wedding. So I slump down on the cushions in the book corner for the best part of an hour in a complete and utter sulk, reading to Cree. Ashley’s always hated me, ever since I got stuck in one of the toy cars in the playground and had to be cut free. She thinks I’m stupid. I am stupid. But at least I’m clever enough to see that her fake hair extensions make her look like a horse. Anyway, I’m mulling this over when I get an idea. I take Cree into the diaper-changing room and sit her on the mat.

  “Cree, we’re going to play a game, OK?”

  I can only do this with Cree because I know her so well and because she does pretty much anything I tell her to. She pulls her dungarees down and I take her diaper off. I take one of the diarrhea diapers out of the bin and get her to hold it right in the corner and go out to the classroom with it in her hand. I nip in the cot room next door to hide and watch through the window. She shuffles into the classroom doing her “I done a bad thing” face. She even delivers the line perfectly.

  “My done a runny poo, Asslay.”

  Luckily, Oscar is awake in his cot so I pretend I have gone in there to get him up and return to the diaper room, completely innocent, to see Ashley cleaning Cree up on the diaper mat, flicking her horsey hair away from her face. Ashley’s got her back to me as I walk in. Cree sees me and I put my finger to my lips and she smiles. I’m hoping Asslay is not going to twig that there’s no actual poo on Cree, just the nappy, but then that does sometimes happen with very watery diarrhea, I’ve discovered, it shoots right out. I don’t know much but I do know my shit.

  “Oh no, not Cree as well,” I sigh.

  “Yep,” says Ashley, huffing. “It’s a bad one. It’s just flown out of her. You’ll have to call her mum. You know her, don’t you?”

  “She’s out. She had to go straight to the grocery store. And her dad’s running the pub.”

  “Oh for God’s sake. If I’m ill for my bachelorette weekend . . .”

  “I could take her. Then I could leave early and you won’t be one child over. If you like?”

  Ashley thinks for a second, then turns back to Cree, lifts her up, and pulls up her dungarees over her clean diaper. She strips off her gloves and drops them in the dirty diaper bin. “OK, fine. I’ll sign her out for you. You’ll take her back to the pub, yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I hand over a sleepy Oscar to her and she disappears into the classroom. I hold out my arms to Cree and she jumps off the mat into my embrace. We collect up her doctor’s kit and rucksack and the pictures from her drawer and then we are out of there. Not so stupid now, Asslay.

  “You little star,” I whisper to Cree when we’re out in the hallway and I give her a little kiss on her ear. Just as I’m about to press the buzzer to be let out . . .

  “Are you all right now, Jody?”

  “Uh, yeah, fine thanks, Hazel. How are you?” I set Cree down beside me on the doormat. She immediately bends down to investigate a wood louse that’s crawled in.

  “Did you get your wallet back yet?” Hazel asks me.

  “What wallet?” And I’m busted. This little hesitation is enough to pull the plug on all my lies. I have completely forgotten why I told her I wouldn’t be in. I’d been thinking I’ve just been away for the week, but no, I was on sympathy leave, wasn’t I? For being mugged.

  There’s a really shiteous silence. I try and cover it up with a halfhearted joke about post-mugging amnesia, but Hazel’s having none of it. “You weren’t mugged, were you?”

  My cheeks go volcanic. Cree hugs my leg. She can so tell when I’m tense.

  I shake my head. “I . . . just don’t want to work here anymore.” It just comes out. I’ve been building up how to tell her for months, but I can never do it. And now I have. God knows why now, but I have. I’ve done it. I’ve told her.

  I’m expecting the bollocking with extra bollocks thrown in for good measure, but it doesn’t arrive. Hazel sighs and says, “I don’t think your heart’s been in it for a while, has it?” And she says it really softly, too. “Since your grandad . . .”

  “No,” I say. And I’m not lying this time. About the time Grandad got his results, that’s when I started giving up on everything. Work was just the thing that got in the way before I was allowed to come home and talk to Grandad or Mac, or listen to The Regulators again. There’s nothing else I want to do with my life, but I know I don’t want to do this. “Do you need me to work out my month’s notice?”

  “No, it’s OK,” she says. “We’ve got loads of girls wanting part-time work. Just see out the week, OK? It’s a shame, though, Jody. The children love you and you’re very good with them. When you turn up for work, that is.”

  I attempt a laugh. “Sorry.”

  The conversation comes to an abrupt halt when Ashley comes out of the room, butting in to ask if she can have tomorrow morning off for her wedding dress fitting. Cree holds her arms up to be lifted. “We go and see Man, Dody?”

  “Yeah, let’s go and see the Man.”

  • • •

  We get to the gravel path that leads along the side of my house and I immediately see the door to the garage is open. The back door of our house is wide open, too. I squeeze Cree tightly, wondering if Jackson’s going to be in a state again. Suddenly I don’t want her with me. I want her somewhere safe, but she’s two and a half. There is nowhere safe. She’s in my care. I have to keep her safe.

  I put her down and we walk through the back door and there’s no sign of Jackson.

  “Hello?” I call out.

  “Man?” Cree calls out. A tinkling in the distance. I hold her hand and we walk through the kitchen to the hallway and stop at the living-room door. I peer inside. And there it is, all over the floor. Millions of china pieces. My mum’s bay window full of tacky ornaments is now my mum’s bare window that used to be full of tacky ornaments. Smashed into billions of pieces on the carpet. My sister’s hockey stick lies snapped in two on the sofa.

  I reverse back out of the living room and shut the door before Cree can see what’s happened. I can feel myself sweating as I maneuver her to the bottom of the stairs and grip her hand tightly.

  “Hello?” I call out again. My heart thrums like a White Stripes bass line.

  “Man?” calls Cree. She looks up at me and I put my finger to my lips. We creep up the staircase, hearing more and more noises as we go. In the bathroom. Something smashes in the sink. Something boings against the side of the bath.

  Jackson stands before our empty medicine cabinet, glugging down an entire bottle of my mum’s Night Nurse. Bottles and packets lie all over the floor and roll about inside the bathtub.

  “What are you doing?” is all I can think to say. He’s guzzling Night Nurse cough syrup is what he’s doing, I can see that. Even Cree can see that. But he’s still doing it. He turns to me, dark circles around his stormy eyes in the harsh white light of the bathroom. He drops the empty bottle.

  “I needed something,” he sniffs. “Something to knock me out. I can’t sleep.”

  “But you’re always asleep,” I
say.

  “I woke up!” he cries. “I went in the house. Someone rang the doorbell. I heard it. A woman. She . . . she came around the back. She was calling my name. I need something, just to help me sleep, please . . .”

  “No, this is what withdrawal is, Jackson. Mac says you’re probably going to get these hallucinations for a while. I saw it in a film. You need to ride it out. Look at this place! What did you do?”

  “Ride it out? I can’t ride it out, I can’t. She was here, goddamn it, I swear she was here!”

  “Who?”

  “She was blonde and she was wearing a yellow jacket and blue jeans and these ugly shoes. I swear to God she was here, Jody. She said she was from some newspaper. She knows I’m here. I need to sleep! I wanna sleep!”

  “Dody,” says Cree, behind my leg. That’s when he notices her.

  “OK, you need to calm down, you’re freaking Cree out,” I tell him as she hides behind me. “She doesn’t understand it and to be honest, neither do I. You were fine last night. You didn’t need anything to help you sleep then.”

  He slumps down beside the bath, as the curved side boing-cracks behind him. The little vanity mirror floats in the sink, water sloshing over the edge. “I didn’t see her there,” he says to me. He starts to cry.

  “Why Man crying?” Cree whispers up to me.

  “He’s not very well,” I tell her.

  “Man poorly?” she whispers.

  “Yeah, Man feels sick.”

  “Dody make him better,” she nods.

  I shake my head. I’m just watching him fall apart before my eyes. All over the sight of some journalist. If that wasn’t just a hallucination or something.

  “Poorly,” says Cree, staring at Jackson. I’m amazed it’s not bothering her more because he looks like a zombie. But without another word, she puts her dolly case down on the bathroom floor and gets out her Baby All Better Now instruments and sets them out on the floor — a pink thermometer, medicine spoon (with disappearing medicine), nasal aspirator, stethoscope, and bandages.

  Jackson looks up at me. “What’s she doing?”