by Skuse, C. J.
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 bef
riends 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-clops 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.
“Oh, OK, we better crack on, then. My story’s going to print tonight so . . .”
“Did you not hear the news? About Jackson Gatlin?” I mumble. “They found his body. In the River Severn.”
“No, they found his clothes,” she corrects me, flapping her hand. “Red herring. Now . . .”
Mac interrupts by shoving his hand underneath her nose. “Mackenzie Lawless.” She shakes it warily. “I don’t think you fully recognized me earlier. I think you were only at my school a year before you left. Just before your A level exams, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” That’s all she says. “Jody, if we could make a start?” She checks her watch.
But Mac’s not done. “Nuffing’s a really small town. Everybody knows everybody, like you knew Salvo the pizza man from our pictures. Small minds. Long memories.”
“Oh, so you’re the friend in Italy? Right, well, if we could begin . . .”
“Yeah, I think I might know a little about you,” says Mac. “Didn’t one of the substitute teachers get you pregnant or something?”
“That was not me!” she snaps. Her whole face changes color. It’s no longer pale with the slightest hint of rose to her cheeks. It’s red. Angry red.
“Oh, why did you leave so suddenly, then? Was it something to do with the lesbian PE teacher and her daily knicker checks?”
“Oh my goodness, look, I haven’t come here to —”
“— what, sell Viagra to seventeen-year-olds? Come on, one of them must be you.”
“I don’t have time for this. Jody, can we go somewhere more private, please?”
But I let Mac carry on. I don’t know what he’s doing or where all these allegations are coming from, but they’re working. Dinkley’s getting well twitchy. “See, I’ve done a bit of digging of my own,” he says, “and I know for a fact you used to edit our school magazine. And it was you who made up all those stories. People hung for it, though. Four students were expelled for that Viagra story. Miss Chambers the PE teacher got the sack. But did you own up and say you’d made it all up to fill pages? Noooo. Just as long as you made the headlines, that’s all you cared about, wasn’t it?”
“You can’t prove any of this.”
“And you can’t prove Jackson Gatlin isn’t floating down the River Severn, can you? Now I suggest you take what little evidence you’ve already got, hop on your glittery pink broomstick, and bugger off back to Bristol, all right?”
“You can’t stop me from running whatever story I like. I have my own column.”
“No, I can’t. I can’t stop you writing yet another false story in a whole sea of false stories. And when Jackson Gatlin’s body does wash up, which it will, you’re going to be very embarrassed indeed. I’ve got a blog. Two thousand followers so far. And I’ll be blogging about this until the cows come home.”
They stare each other down for a little while. Dinkley gets up. “His body won’t wash up. He’s alive, I know he is. But for how long, who knows? Believe me, if you are covering for him, I’m going to be the very least of your worries.”
“What are you talking about?” I slur. I’m actually slurring now. Crying, no. But slurring? Check.
“I’m talking about a roadie who was found beaten to a pulp after the same concert in Cardiff where Gatlin went missing. I’m talking about a St. John Ambulance member having her face rearranged in the sick bay of said concert where Gatlin went missing. I’m talking about the bass player, Pash Fredericks, having his nose and three fingers on his left hand broken on the night of the same concert in Cardiff where Gatlin went missing. Spotting a pattern yet?”
I hold my breath. That’s what Jackson’s been trying to say; no wonder he doesn’t want to be found.
But Mac just looks at her, as cool as an iceberg. He shrugs. “Rock concerts are dangerous places. People get hurt all the time.”
Dinkley’s equally as cool. “I’ve been researching into Frank Grohman, the manager of The Regulators. Very shady. He has ways of getting information. If Jackson Gatlin has gone AWOL, I’m sure Frank Grohman would give anything to know where his star performer is right now, probably more than I would.” She turns around and begins to walk away. She turns back. “You’re both hiding something. I know you are. And by the time my story’s made the rounds tomorrow, everyone else will know, too. Including Frank Grohman.”
“But you just can’t prove it, can you?” sighs Mac. “It’s sad, really. You’ll run that story, nothing will come of it, and that will be that. Just more bullshit. You’re so hungry for attention it’s quite depressing.” He smiles. “I mean come on, Sally, a world-famous rock star, hiding away in the tiny West Country town of Nuffing-on-the-Wold? Who the hell is going to believe that?”
“Mac, don’t,” I mutter.
“It’s all right, it’s fine,” says Sally. “You’re obviously threatened because you know I’m close to something. Give it another day. Something will come out of the woodwork. Or someone. I will find out, you just mark my words.”
Dinkley marches back up the parking lot to her little pink bubble and heads back to the Torrance and Mac doesn’t say one more word until she’s on the road.
“That was a close one. Didn’t think we’d turn that around.”
I turn to him. “We didn’t. She’s still going to run her story.”
“Yeah but it won’t mean a thing. It’ll just be talk.”
I tip my empty wine glass upside down and rest my chin on it. “You don’t have a blog, you liar, let alone two thousand followers.”
He grins. “And she doesn’t have a shred of actual proof that Jackson’s in Nuffing, does she? So it looks as though we’re both running false stories.”
And all of a sudden I remember the endings of all those films. Harry and the Hendersons. Splash. E.T. I remember what happened to the alien, the Bigfoot, the mermaid at the end.
They were set free.
And that’s what I have to do for Jackson, or else he’s going to be all over the papers. Hounded. Hunted. A freak show. He won’t be able to handle it. He won’t be able to escape from Grohman. He’ll hurt him. It’s up to me to help him. It’s the only way he’s going to be able to get on with whatever life he wants to have. My nose starts to flare like Cree’s does when she’s about to cry and, before I know it, there are tears in my eyes.
“Wine kicking in, is it?” says Mac. His arm encircles me. “Come on, it’s OK, it’s OK.”
It’s going to be hard to let him go, as much as I wanted to be rid of him in the beginning. Because he’s Jackson. He’s my hero. And he’s become this weird kind of garage-dwelling, pee-stinking, constantly hungover friend. But it’s what I have to do, I know that now.
“She won’t leave. She’ll find him. I’ve got to set him free, Mac.”
Maybe that’s what “Don’t Dream It, Be It” meant. Maybe Grandad wasn’t talking about me at all. Maybe he meant that for Jackson. Getting him a new life abroad. Getting him away from his torture chamber. But how am I going to do that? I can’t get him out of my garage without being seen, let alone the country. I know I can’t do it. And I know Mac can’t help me.
But I know a man who can.
Halley makes me breakfast — toast and jam and cornflakes in the bowl we always fight over, the free one we got with the Rice Krispies. She did this the morning after Grandad’s death, too. Today she’s done it because she’s read Dinkley’s article and knows how I feel about The Regulators. It’s in the morning paper. Front page. Dinkley has written everything she said she’d write about — Pash getting beaten up, Frank Grohman’s unsavory past, the St. John Ambulance woman’s plastic surgery, everything. It’s time for drastics. I eat the breakfast, just to please Halley, and shove the paper through the garage cat flap on my way into town.