Rockoholic (11 page)

“Shit,” I say, scrabbling around for my gray hoodie in my rucksack and pulling it on. Then I crawl about on the floor, looking for my white DMs. They’ve gone. Mac gets up really slowly, like Frankenstein’s monster just after reanimation.

“My Docs are gone,” I tell him. He sits on the bed and starts putting on his Nikes. “Mac?”

“What?” he croaks.

“He’s taken my boots. Where do you think he’s gone?” I rub a grain of sleep from the corner of my eye, amazed it had enough time to form there in the first place.

“Bloody knew this would happen,” he says eventually. “I’ll get Alfie.”

“Why? What’s Alfie going to do?”

“He’s an ex-police dog. He’ll track him. We’ll need something for him to get the scent.” He sneers as I pick the pissy underpants bag out of the bin and offer him that. “Stunning,” he says.

Tish and Teddy are in the bar talking to a couple of policemen when we appear downstairs. Mac’s had to loan me a pair of his high-top Nikes, which I’ve secretly had my eye on for a while, anyway. I’m expecting carnage when we arrive in the main bar, like smashed glasses and an open register and stuff, but I can’t see anything different. Teddy sums up exactly what’s different.

“Well, the bastard had the munchies,” he says, picking up two empty potato chip bags and a Curly Wurly wrapper from the counter. “These weren’t here when I locked up. There’s half a bottle of Smirnoff gone ’n’ all.”

“You’re sure that’s all?” says one of the policemen, who has a thick black mustache. He looks familiar. I think I recognize him from last Christmas. I’d just had a row with Mum and I tried to strip the holiday lights off the town tree to protest commercialization.

“Yeah, definitely,” says Teddy.

With Cree still snuggled asleep in her arms, Tish pipes up in his defense. “Ted always leaves the bar spotless last thing at night,” she says. “I can vouch for that.”

“You told our operator they’d left a trail of destruction?” says the other policeman, who has a big nose and ginger hair. “Apart from two empty potato chip bags and a chocolate wrapper . . .”

“And what about me vodka, Steve? Eh? And all this?” Teddy points to an upturned ashtray on the floor and some pork rinds on the counter. The window looking out onto the street is wide open.

“Was there a lock on that window?”

“Yeah.”

The policeman raises an eyebrow like it’s on a wire.

“No. Not on that one, no. When they tried to get in once before, it was through the gents’, cos that window overlooks the parking lot, see? So we had locks put on them.”

“But not the ones in the main bar?”

“No.”

“Alarm system?”

“No, we had it taken out. Kept going off whenever Alfie walked across the sensor. We haven’t got around to having it put back in.”

“And the dog didn’t bark or anything . . . ?”

“No,” says Tish. “We’d have heard.”

The mustachioed policeman’s eyebrows rise. “Well, your cigarette machine and your cash register haven’t been touched and there’s no sign of forced entry.”

“There must be. The bugger got out.”

“But he didn’t get in,” says Mustachio. He has a long white face, like a strip of stretched dough. “They may have been inside when you locked up.”

“No, I checked,” Teddy says, rubbing his chin. “I checked all around the place, there wasn’t a soul here except me and me wife and the littl’un and they were asleep upstairs.”

Ginger looks at me, then at Mac. I can feel my heart galloping up my windpipe. “And what about you two?”

“They came in about twelve-ish, didn’t you?” says Tish.

“All right?” says Mustachio, looking right at me.

“Yeah,” I say, looking so sheepish you could knit a sweater from me.

“They’d been to a concert. Mackenzie and his friend Jody,” Tish explains. “Jody’s staying here for a while.”
Don’t say where the concert was, please don’t say where the concert was, Tish
. If the cops know about the concert and that Jackson is missing, they might put two and two together. They might do an upstairs search. They might smell the underpants bag Mac’s holding behind his back. We might be arrested! But she doesn’t.

Mustachio seems more preoccupied then with asking Mac about
Rocky Horror
and how rehearsals are going. I gauge from the conversation that his son and Mac used to take ballet together when they were kids and I can tell Teddy is awkward. He coughs, bringing Mustachio back to the matter at hand. “You didn’t see or hear anything suspicious when you came in during the early hours of this morning?” the policeman says, turning to me. I shake my head.

“No,” Mac says as Alfie wanders over and sits beside him, looking up at the policemen with utter contempt. “I’m surprised the dog didn’t bark or something and let us know if someone was down here.” He pats Alfie’s head. Alfie yawns.

“I’m not,” scoffs Teddy, his flabby jowls shaking in anger. “Bloody dog’s useless. The inmates of Alcatraz could skip through here singing ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and he wouldn’t hear it. You sure you locked everything up, Kenz?”

“Yes,” Mac snaps. “God, you’ve talked me through it enough times, Dad.”

“Yeah, well, your head’s been all over the place with this bloody play, one minute you’re here, next you’re not. . . .”

“It’s not a play, it’s a musical, and I have to rehearse, don’t I?”

“Prance about, more like.”

“How would you know, anyway? It’s not like you ever come and watch.”

“I’m busy, aren’t I? Trying to run this place. Trying to keep a roof over our heads. That’s when someone isn’t leaving the bloody door unlocked at three in the morn—”

“I didn’t leave it unlocked, Dad!”

Cree yawns on Tish’s shoulder. “Mumma?”

“It’s all right, baby,” says Tish, “go back to sleepies.”

“Want my daddy,” she says croakily and Tish goes to hand her over to Teddy, who’s far too worried about the Curly Wurly thief to take her.

“Stay with Mum, there’s a good girl,” he tells her, and Cree turns her face over on Tish’s shoulder and tries to go back to sleepies.

Mustachio turns to me and thins his eyes. “Didn’t stop for a little drink down here when you came in late or anything, kids?” I shake my head.

“No,” says Mac. Mustachio nods, then so does Ginger, like he’s set him off. They both look us right up, then right down. Mac grabs Alfie’s collar and beckons him to come along as we turn back toward the beaded curtain at exactly the same time.

“Where you two going?” asks Teddy.

“What do you care?” he snaps back at him.

“Kenz, don’t be like that,” says Tish.

“Taking the dog out,” he says, and leaves the bar without turning back.

There’s this weird
Exorcist
mist in the road as we step outside. Going for a walk through Nuffing town center on an evilly cold March morning is not normally my idea of fun. Going for a walk through Nuffing town center on an evilly cold
Thursday
morning is even less fun, knowing that I’m supposed to go to work today. And going for a walk through Nuffing town center on an evilly cold March morning, on a Thursday, with a plastic bag of pissy underpants and an even pissier best friend, looking for “a famous junkie wearing my old pajamas and your shoes” as Mac puts it, is just about the worst thing I can imagine.

Mac is ignoring me again as Alfie leads the way, and it’s not just because he’s tired. Even when Mac’s tired he’ll manage a song or at the very least a hum as we walk along. But not now. I wish he would smile, just for a second, for any reason at all. I hate seeing him cross or sad or serious in any way. It just isn’t his nature. And he has the best smile. Even when I’m at my most horrible, he can cheer me up with his smile.

“I’ll take Alfie for a bit,” I offer, gesturing for Mac to hand me the dog leash as we lope down the hill.

“No, ’sfine,” he says, marching on. “You won’t be able to hold him.” He does look as though he is straining to hold on, which is good because it means Alfie has Jackson’s scent, but up until now he has only led us up one blind alley after another. First he takes us up the hill past the Torrance Lodge and down toward the railway station. Perhaps Jackson got on a train back to Cardiff? I put this to Mac.

“How the bloody hell would he have done that?” he laughs, but it’s not a happy laugh. It’s one of his “Jody, you’re thick” laughs.

The cold wind claws my face like a winter wolf. “It’s possible, though.”

“No it’s not, Jody.”

“Oh. You think he wouldn’t understand the train timetables? I don’t understand train timetables, either. Maybe you’re right.”

Mac sighs. “Not because he wouldn’t understand the . . . because he’s got no money, he’s wearing pajamas, and he probably has no idea where he is, let alone where he needs to go.”

“That’s what I mean. Timetables.”

Back up the hill again we go, past the Torrance, down toward the flank of shut-up shops waiting for nine o’clock — Nuffing is a market town, but between the seventeenth-century yarn market and houses signed
The Old Forge
and
The Dovecote
, they’ve still managed to crowbar in the odd New Look clothing boutique and Boots drugstore. Nuffing’s just somewhere nice to drive through on the way to the Glastonbury Festival, really, there’s no real reason to stop unless you live here. Alfie lingers in a doorway to smell a furry hood that’s fallen off someone’s coat, but it comes to nothing. We’ve been walking for an hour. I’m fed up, groggy, filthy, tired, and terrified all in one sullen lump. We give Alfie another whiff of underpants and
schoom
! Off he goes again, back up the street a little ways and through the alleyway leading to the back of the Playhouse Theater and some dumpsters. Mac still ignores me, and apart from checking the spelling on all the
Rocky Horror
posters in the theater window, he just carries on walking the dog and huffing. I check the dumpsters. No sign of Jackson at all.

“So what are you going to do with him,
if
we find him?” says Mac as we round the corner and head down into the center of town. Alfie sniffs right around the base of a post box outside Fancy That, the costume shop.

“I don’t know,” I say, which I know is the wrong answer as soon as it leaves my cold steamy mouth. Mac rolls his eyes as if to say, “Should have known,” and lingers with Alfie by the doorway of the British Heart Foundation. “I should have stayed awake with him. I should have looked after him better. He needs looking after. He must have been scared to wake up in a strange place.”

“No, I mean you have to call someone, Jody. This is going to be all over the news in a couple of hours, if it isn’t already, you do know that?”

“Not the national news,” I say.

“Yeah, the national news. And not just those nice-suited and booted BBC-type news bulletins, either. Paparazzi sites. Those nasty, money-grabbing, Princess Di–chasing wankers in dirty raincoats with a blood lust for down-on-their-luck celebs. And he’s a major celebrity, Jody. ‘
Rock Star Kidnapped’
is going to make headlines,
world
headlines, no matter how many people know who he is.”

“Nobody knows he was kidnapped,” I say, watching as Alfie loops around the wire catalog basket outside the Argos store.

“They
will
know. That tramp woman from the rest stop saw him.”

“She wouldn’t have known it was him.”

“Those cars that beeped at us on the motorway coming home? George Milne walking his bloody sheepdog past the pub last night? They all saw him.”

I shake my head. “They didn’t. The cars beeped for the sake of it. They didn’t see him.”

“George Milne definitely saw us. He definitely saw Jackson.”

My voice is getting higher and higher with all my protesting. “He saw you, he saw me, and some drunk guy being helped out of a car. That’s not suspicious. And George is about eighty and half-blind. He’s not going to look at some breaking news flash on TV and immediately think, ‘
Ooh, I wonder if that was the bloke I saw outside the pub last night.
’”

“Think what you like but this is a small town, Jody, with even smaller-minded people living in it. Someone’s bound to make the connection between a dark-haired girl leaving Cardiff Arena last night with a figure shrouded in a black coat and a missing rock star from said venue.”

I sigh, my breath a great spreading cloud before me, and I pull the sleeves of my hoodie down over my freezing white fists. Alfie is still buzzing around every little nook and cranny in the town, his nose on the brink of discovery at every turn by the look of it, but every stop he makes is just another false hope. More faded dog piss. Another dropped potato chip.

Alfie lingers outside the post office. Then he stops altogether and sits down, panting and looking up at Mac. I look at Mac.

“What is it? What is it, Alf? What did you find?”

The dog dips his nose and then looks up again at Mac, panting, his tongue hanging out of his smiling mouth as if to say, “I told you I was onto something.”

But there’s nothing there. No sign of anyone or anything. Just some scraps of litter. Balled-up receipts. A couple of plastic bottle tops. A ring pull from a can.

No, not a ring pull. A key. A silver key attached to a long black string.