by Skuse, C. J.
“No one’s in there.”
“He is, isn’t he?” She knocks on the door. “It’s OK, you’re amongst friends.”
“Sally, please . . . no one’s in there, OK?”
“Jackson, come on, what are you so afraid of? I’m on your side.”
My throat constricts, but I still find enough air to shout, “It’s not who you think. Get away from the door!”
Dinkley looks at me. “Jody, I’m not going to hurt him. I just want to see him. Look, I’m not the Big Bad Wolf here. . . .”
“No, you’re just a pig!” I shout, and with all my strength I push her backward and she totters clip, clip, clip, clip, bam, slamming hard against the hand dryer and sending it into a drying frenzy. I can barely hear my own breath wheezing in and out of me as she slumps to the floor. She lies beneath the furious dryer, her blonde hair dancing all around her head on the hot air, and yet she’s out cold.
“Oh shit. What have I done?” I crouch down to feel the place on her neck where Mac showed me. There’s an awful wait. And then I feel the bump bumps.
The dryer stops. A door creaks behind me. Jackson comes out of the stall, his hood up over his hat. He stares at Sally’s unconscious face. He opens his mouth to speak but I speak first.
“She’s not dead, it’s OK. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t know how to stop her opening the door. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. She was going to find you. . . .”
He places his hand on my shoulder. “I wasn’t going to lecture you. I was going to say, we need to tie her up. She’s obviously here to cause problems. You gotta do something with her, just until I’m gone. OK?”
I fumble for the right words to say, my hand angry with pain, my fingers aching as I stretch them out. “Yeah, I suppose. What am I going to tie her up with, though?”
• • •
It takes ages to bind up and gag Sally with my feather boa and the gaffer tape I’ve used to hold up my stockings. We eventually get her into the end toilet stall. I keep checking her breathing, like a good first aider, and try to leave her on the floor in the recovery position as best I can, which isn’t easy when her legs are halfway up the stall wall. We can’t risk sticking around in case she wakes up, which means I’m not going to see the second half of the show. We’ve missed most of it trying to tie her up, anyway. “Don’t Dream It, Be It” is playing quietly on the speakers in the lobby as we leave, and the words run round and round my head as we make our way down to the library to meet the white car.
It’s colder outside, or maybe it’s just the same as it was before, only I’m noticing it more now because my neck is bare. Or perhaps it’s because as Jackson and I are walking in step along the pavement, I’m realizing this is the last time I’ll walk beside him. The last time I’ll see him in the flesh again. I just can’t think about it, so I’m concentrating on how cold I am. The icy night air slaps against my throat. I check my watch: 10:16 P.M.
“Are you really going to go through with this?” I ask him as we scurry along the pavement.
“Yeah,” he says. “You think I’m chicken?”
“No. It’s just such a . . . change. You’re stripping all your life away.”
“Yeah, I am. I’m shedding my skin. For the first time in a long time, I’m clean. It’s a good thing, Jody. This is a good thing.”
The town is pretty much deserted. A few take-out places glow with life and at the pub on the corner opposite Mac’s pub, a cluster of smokers stands beneath a lamppost with their cigarettes. I want to reach out and hold Jackson’s hand as we walk, but I resist. He’s walking too quickly, so much so I have to skip every so often to keep up. Finally, we reach the post office and the walkway across the river, opposite the bridge where I pushed him off two weeks ago. I gesture toward it as we cross the walkway, but he doesn’t seem to understand the joke.
There is no white car at the taxi stand. We sit on the bench outside the library, watching and waiting. We both sit right on the edge, as the bench is wet from where it’s been raining earlier. I feel so stupid in my Rocky Horror outfit. I want to wipe off all my makeup right there, so I look plain and inconspicuous like Jackson. So I look like I’m waiting for a taxi with Jackson. I want to get in the taxi with Jackson. We still have a few minutes before the car’s due.
“I could come with you,” I say suddenly, to the paving stones beneath my feet more than to him. “I don’t think I belong here anymore. Mac hates me. Grandad’s gone and he’s the only one who ever understood me apart from Mac. There’s no point in me being here. Let me come with you.”
“You’re just stressing because of that reporter. It’s all right. She won’t be able to prove —”
“I’m not worrying about her,” I tell him, remembering the pain in my right hand. “I don’t care about her at all. Once you’re gone, I’ll just bullshit her, it doesn’t matter. Let me go and get my stuff, and I’ll come with you.”
“No. There isn’t time.”
“There is. I’ll just get some clothes and my bankbooks and we can be off. Five minutes, just give me five minutes.” I can’t hold my tears in anymore. “Please don’t leave me. You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. I could just be, like, your sister?”
He pats me a couple of times on my knee, hard. “It’s all right. Just, stop crying.”
I look at his hand smacking my knee. “What are you doing?”
He looks at me. “I don’t know. You know I don’t go in for all that huggy shit.” A white car pulls up and joins the end of the line of taxis. Right on time. He stands up. “Car’s here,” he says, swinging the rucksack onto his shoulder. My rucksack.
I claw at him, begging him. “No, please don’t. . . .”
His hand is on my shoulder. “Let’s do this quickly, OK? Come on.”
“Don’t do that,” I say, shrugging him off. “Don’t hold my shoulder. That’s how my dad left me. That’s how my grandad left me.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what else . . . Look after yourself, OK? You knew how this was going to end.” The car engine revs at the back of the line. I can’t see the driver’s face.
“Please,” I beg. I grab hold of his hand. “If you go, I’ll have nothing, no one. You and the band, Grandad, Mac — you were the only things that made it better.”
Jackson shakes his head, then moves my hand up to his mouth and kisses it. “I’ll send your money back, once I know where I am.”
“No, I don’t want it back. I don’t want any of it back, you keep it. It’s yours.”
He smiles. “Thank you, Jody. For everything.”
He walks away from me and over to the white car. It’s turned around. Brake lights on, exhaust pipe chugging.
Dignity already hanging by its ankles, I sob like I’ve never sobbed before. I watch as he hitches up his gray hood over his head and opens the back door of the car, throws my rucksack inside, and steps in without another look back. The brake lights go off. The car moves away.
“It’s not fair,” I whisper to the starless sky. I shake my head. I rip my tiara out of my crimped mess of hair and sink to the ground. I crouch to my knees and cry like I’ll never stop. The next sound I hear is footsteps. Running footsteps. I look up. Jackson’s running back to me. The white car has stopped at the edge of the parking lot, brake lights on, back door wide open.
He’s running back to me. He’s coming back to me.
I stand up. He slams into my arms and squeezes me so tightly. He feels so strong, not like he was two weeks ago when he was limp and could barely stand up straight. He feels tight and full of pent-up energy just waiting to explode. I never ever want to let go. If I let go, that will be it. He’ll just be Thomas and I’ll just be Jody. And I’ll never see him again. I’m hugging him like I should have hugged Grandad before he left me forever.
“I don’t want to let you go,” I huff-huff in his ear. “Please don’t make me let go.” I squeeze harder onto him, breathing him in, trying to memorize every sense so I can draw it over and
over and over again, but images of Grandad flash through my mind and confuse me. I feel him crumble away from me, like a rock of sand in my fist. He came to me as Jackson James Gatlin, singer, born 3 September, beautiful, big blue eyes, messy brown hair, teetotaler, vegetarian, Stephen King–fanatic, broken-homed, bookish, bliss on legs. He’s leaving me as Thomas Gordon. And I don’t know anything else about him now.
He’s Mr. Nobody now. Just how he wants it.
He looks at me. He walks backward, turns, and runs to the white car and gets in.
I don’t know if the driver of the white car will get him across the English Channel. I don’t know if he’ll make it to Switzerland to get his money. To get where he needs to go. I don’t know. I know how those fans felt as they stood on that bridge and threw flowers into the muddy water. Those fans who are calling suicide helplines. Those fans who have rushed out and got tattoos so they don’t have to feel the inside pain anymore, so that they can feel some other kind of pain from the unbearable sense of loss I’m feeling now as I watch that white car drive away. I am just one of those fans, but I’ve been given so much more than they have. I’m the only one who knows he’s not dead. Kidnapping him did make the world of difference, but now it’s torturing me with a world of pain. My brain is an even tighter paper scrunch of sadness, and Grandad wheels fast into my mind. I stand sobbing — my mouth wide open, waiting to say something to a world that’s so empty and dark and awful to me now, I can’t see straight. Everything hurts so much. Grandad. Jackson. Mac. They all keep my world on its axis. Two of them have gone forever and one of them hates me. There’s nothing left. My world is rolling fast down the hill and there’s no one to hold it back.
I turn to face the bridge. To face the river. The river I pushed Jackson into when he first arrived. Where he was so horrible to me. I wish he’d been horrible to me just now. I wish he hadn’t hugged me. It made it worse. It wasn’t as warm as one of Mac’s hugs, but it still reminded me of him. He’s the only other person who hugs me like that, wrapping me up completely in such a hard, safe lock like that. I wish I wasn’t alive. I want to jump off the bridge. I want to feel the pain of that cold water again. I don’t care how shallow it is. I want to drown.
But I can’t see the bridge. There’s too many tears in my eyes. It’s too dark. And there’s a transvestite in my way. Just standing there.
I stare at Mac’s face for the longest time. He stares back.
“Wh-what are you . . . you should be onstage. You’ll miss your encore.”
“I’ve already missed it,” he says. He’s got tears in his eyes, but he’s trying not to release them. He’s dabbing his eye at the corner with one of his black fingernails. “My makeup’s running.”
“You’ll miss your enc-core,” I say again, overwhelmed by another surge of tears.
He steps toward me. He’s even taller than usual in his high heels. He hitches one leg up and undoes the strap, then the other one, and he throws his shoes behind him onto the ground. “I thought I’d missed you. I thought you’d gone, Jode.”
I shake my head. “I just said all that to make you jealous.” I’m huffing on every word. “You were jealous, weren’t you?” He nods. “Why? I’m a disaster area, Mac. You’d be better off without me.”
He shakes his head. Water drips down from both his eyes. “No I wouldn’t.”
And though I don’t see it coming, he moves closer toward me and we face-smash into the longest kiss ever — the saddest, wettest, messiest kiss I’ve ever had. And we’re both soaked and we’re both sobbing. And our makeup smears together so it’s all over our faces.
I pull back, but he holds my face in his hands. “I would have gone, if it wasn’t for you,” I say. “When we argued, I thought you hated me. I thought I should go, then.”
“But you didn’t,” he says, all serious voice, and kisses me again and it’s like a thousand strobe lights and the loudest, dirtiest guitar chord smacking me in the face.
And it’s better than all of that. Because he’s real. Rock steady before me.
And it’s because it’s Mac. “I love you, Jody,” he whispers.
And because it’s really mine.
Three Months Later
“Jody, can you nip down to Waitrose and get some more hot dogs?”
“Yeah, in a minute,” I call back. Me and Mac are sitting on the sofa, holding hands and watching TV. The latest boy band, FOS, are on MTV Newbies talking about their latest single and there’s like a million girls outside the TV studio screaming for them and holding up placards.
“We’re just so blessed to have such great fans,” says one of them and waves through the glass window behind at all the fans lined up outside the building screaming and tearing their faces off, but they can’t hear him. The others turn around and make stupid faces at them every so often and lift up their shirts to show their washboard stomachs. The girls are in meltdown but can get no closer.
“It’s such a big joke to them,” I say. “And before you say ‘don’t take it so personally,’ I can say that because I have been there. I do know what I’m talking about, as you well know. Can I look at the picture again, just once more, then you can delete it.”
He shifts over and removes his phone from his back pocket and rubs the screen to find the picture. Then he hands it to me. I stare at it, the picture of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named — that’s what we call him now — with Cree on his lap at the Italian Market. Cree’s beaming, as cute as a little apricot, but I can barely see his face under his baseball cap. I still like looking at it.
“You can delete it now.”
“Sure?”
“No. But you probably should.”
“I’ll keep it, it’s fine. It’s a nice one of Cree.”
Mac lies himself down with his head on my lap, his feet dangling over the edge of the sofa. “You’re my groupie now, aren’t you?”
I lean over and kiss him on the mouth. He’s so warm to kiss, warm and soft. I could spend whole days kissing him. The only thing I used to kiss before him was the cold moon rock, for luck, or a wall poster. Both were always freezing cold. I ended up giving the moon rock to Halley. I had to. I kept losing it. It brought me nothing but trouble, but it made her so happy. She keeps it on a little stand on her windowsill. Every time I walk past her bedroom and see it, I remember Grandad as I should, and I remember how much he loved both of us, me and Halley. And how much we both still miss him. Halley bailed me out over Dinkley in the end, too, when Dinkley came to our house the day after Rocky Horror. She brought the police with her.
She beat me! She beat me and tied me up with her feather boa and she locked me in the toilet. And she had him with her, Jackson Gatlin. I’m telling you, she did! Why does no one believe me?! She kidnapped him. She must have!
Halley said I was with her the night of the show. She thought Dinkley was an old school enemy bearing a grudge and that I was nursing an injured duck in the garage. Turns out, she went in the garage on the night of Rocky Horror to take the duck some bread, but it had gone. She thought a fox had killed it so she tidied up the feathers to spare my feelings. The moment Dinkley presented the empty drum room to the policemen was priceless. It’ll stay with me forever, if I can fit it in. There are so many priceless memories in my head, I’m not sure there’ll be enough room.
I trace my fingers up and down the sides of Mac’s nose. He loves it when I do that.
“You look nice today,” he mumbles. “Lemon suits you.”
“Don’t you start. You’re worse than Mum. ‘Nice to see you in something other than black for a change,’” I say in my best whiney Mum voice.
Mac chuckles. “You always look gorgeous to me, Presh. Lemon, lime, candy-striped.”
I smile. “You’ve changed your tune. A few months ago you’d have done anything to Project Runway me into something fashionable.”
“Yeah, well, tunes change,” he says, leaning his face up toward mine for another kiss. “You all right today?”
“Yea
h,” I shrug, trying desperately to smile so he doesn’t think I’m having another depressive moment about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. I had a bad day yesterday, angsting endlessly over why he hasn’t been in touch. It really gets to me, the not knowing. Three months solid I’ve felt like this, on and off. More on than off. It hits me out of nowhere. Sometimes I get this chilling feeling, like I know he’s definitely dead. Like I’ve had a premonition and the next time I switch on the news there’ll be an announcement that they’ve found his body somewhere between here and God-knows-where. Or worse. That Frank Grohman’s tracked him down and got his minders to beat him to death. I even went back to the BFD and begged him to get in touch with his contact and let me know where he dropped him off, just to have some information. But he wouldn’t say a word. More than his life’s worth, blah, blah, blah. I can’t sleep for thinking about it. Wake up early, racing heart thinking about it. On the plus side, though, I’ve never done so much art in my life. Endless paintings. Capturing landscapes in my memory. Capturing moods. Capturing him.
I don’t want to know everything, even what continent he’s on. Just that he’s still around, that something hasn’t hurt him between here and there. I did get this strange certificate through the mail some weeks back from the Prostate Cancer Charity, thanking me for my very generous donation, telling me about all the screening equipment it will buy. And my mind ran wild, thinking that could have been him, donating on my behalf. I told him I didn’t want my five grand back, so what if he’d gone ahead and given it to them instead? I just didn’t know. I didn’t know a single thing for certain. And it hurt like death.
The boy band debut their latest single. It’s the usual soft, warbly crap. I long to hear some skin-stripping rock to clean my ears out, and direct the remote control through all the music channels to find some. They had a Regulators day on MTV recently but I couldn’t watch it. It kind of hurt. I’ve been dying to know what’s happened to the other members of the band since Jackson’s “death.” They aren’t even mentioned anywhere anymore, except in articles about Jackson. I know they broke up soon after. Lenny’s side project band pops up on MTV every now and again but The Regulators, as I knew them, are gone forever. There was a memorial service for Jackson on the Severn Bridge last month, when the band thanked all the fans who’d created a shrine to him there. The shrine’s still there. Tealights in saucers and rain-spattered flowers and damp, torn posters and lipstick-stained CD cases mark the spot where everyone thinks he jumped in. I’ve never been to see it, though, and I never will.