Rockoholic (18 page)

“I can’t lift him into the bath on my own, Mac,” I whisper. “Just help me get him in.”

Mac drops the two large white towels he’s holding. I peel off Jackson’s pants and fling them on the pile in the corner, draping a damp washcloth over Jackson’s lap to spare his dignity.

Mac barges past me to take Jackson under his arms. “I’ll get this end.”

I step across Jackson and take his legs. On three, we hoist him up and into the bath. He slips down under the bubbles and I pull him back up. Mac watches as I soap up a sponge and begin swabbing Jackson all over his chest. I lift up his key necklace and swab under there, not daring to take it off as I know how presh he is about it. So here I am, sponging a female lust object,
my
ultimate hero, all over with soap suds. Water dripping out of the sponge onto his bare pink skin. My hands all over him, pulling him forward to wash his back. His back
side
. Wet. Skin to skin.

But it’s not in the least bit erotic. It’s like bathing a pig. A hundred-sixty-pound comatose pig, who might very well drown me if he wakes up. But he’s showing no signs of waking up and I can’t quite believe it because I’m giving him a fairly thorough scrub. And then he does wake up, sort of.

“Wha . . . s’whe . . . not . . . sez . . .”

And then his eyes close again and his face goes headstone still and his mouth drops open. I breathe out and hoick him back up where he has slipped down under the water. His hair smells like an old man’s toolshed — his breath like a drain. So it’s all a bit too smelly and awkward to be erotic. I squeeze out some Wash & Go and start scrubbing his head.

“You could help. We’d get it done a lot quicker,” I say to Mac, half turning my head in his direction.

He pokes his head out the bathroom door and pulls it closed again. “I can’t hear your mum’s shower going. I think she’s finished.”

“So? She’s not going to disturb us in here, is she? Lock the door. I’ll say I’m having a bath.”

“Where am I supposed to be?” says Mac.

“I’ll say you’ve gone home.” I reach underneath Jackson to wipe him down below. Mac can barely watch. He stands there with his arms folded, studying the cobweb in the corner. “Go and get him some clean clothes, then. In my grandad’s room, in the wardrobe.”

Mac leaves the room like a cop in a shoot-out, his back sliding against the wall in case Mum pops out from somewhere. I prop Jackson up in the bath and take one of the razors out of its protective guard. I spray a blob of shaving foam on my hands and lather it all over his face. I nick him a couple of times but he still doesn’t wake up. I then moisturize him using Halley’s Nivea.

When I’m done with the razor, I rinse his hair with the plastic jug and attempt to brush his teeth.

Return of the Mac. He lies the two bath towels on the floor and helps me heave Jackson out onto them so we can dry and dress him. He looks as good as new. Better. More like Shiny Smiley Magazine Jackson, not Post-Concert Sweaty Jackson, which is the only Jackson I’ve seen up until now.

“OK, here’s what we’ve got. . . .” says Mac. He holds up a black-and-white tuxedo.

I didn’t know Mum had kept that. I take the hanger and smile. A tiny piece of evidence that Grandad did once dress like a normal guy. “A little over-the-top maybe?”

“I thought it might bring back happy memories for Jackson of his Grammy-night paparazzi punch-up.” I’m just about to argue when there’s a knock on the door.

We freeze. Jackson’s still spark out between us on the bath towels at our feet.

“Jode? I’m off to the lawyer’s,” Mum calls out.

“OK,” I call back.

“What are you doing?”

“Uh, having a bath.”

“Oh. Halley’s staying at Nina’s house tonight because they’re catching the bus early in the morning, so are you OK to make your own dinner?”

Catching the bus? Oh yeah, she’s going on an outward-bound thing. Mac flings me a hand towel and I quickly wrap it around my head so it looks like my hair’s wet. I open the door a crack and poke my head out. “Yeah, OK.”

Mum’s at the top of the stairs with her power suit on. She starts to call out “bye” and then sees me. “Oh, there you are. See you later.”

“Good luck.”

She frowns. “You’re all right, aren’t you? I’m not asking any questions,” she says defensively. “I just want to know.” She comes to the bathroom door.

“I’m fine, Mum.” She’s looking at my nostrils. She always does this to check for white powder traces. She’ll try to look behind me for bongs. Check to see if the toilet seat’s down with traces of white powder on top of it. She saw it on
CSI: Miami
.

“Where’s Mac?” she asks.

“Gone home,” I say, closing the door slightly. “I need to wash my conditioner off now.”

“Jode . . .”

“Sorry. See you later, bye.”

I shut the door and flick the lock over. She’s not convinced. I wouldn’t be either. Mac looks at me and we both stop breathing until we hear footsteps down the stairs and the front door closing.

Once in a clean tuxedo, Jackson is carried back out to the drum room where we lie him down on the cushions and I move his limbs into the recovery position: on his side, chin up, arms laced to keep him in place, top knee bent at a right angle. Now he can continue his coma in comfort and I don’t have to stress about him choking to death if he throws up again. It’s one of the few things I actually remember from the first-aid course I had to complete for work. How to put someone in the recovery position and to always assess the situation before you act. Pity I couldn’t remember where to look for a pulse, but still, I can only take in so much.

And the current situation is that Mac and I are both knackered, but there’s no time to waste. It’s garbage pickup day. I can hear the clattering garbage truck a couple of streets away. With a bit of luck we can clean up the room and have the trash taken away without anyone knowing. So we get to work.

It’s not the pukey smell that’s bothering me as we bag up all the rubbish. It’s not the torn boxes, the dirty walls, the dented skirting boards. It’s the fact that I have to say good-bye to my grandad’s things. Things I saved from the charity donation — clothes, reading glasses, books. The mannequin he nicked from Debenhams (now headless). Two multicolored glass bongs that used to sit on the windowsill in the lounge (now smashed). Ornaments he brought back from his travels — a plastic Taj Mahal (now snapped), a tiny snow globe of the Great Barrier Reef (now not so great), and a little Statue of Liberty on a brass base (now baseless).

“You OK?” Mac asks as each ruined item is thrown into the bin.

“Yeah,” I say, and say no more. It hurts but there’s nothing I can do. Everything’s ruined. We clear the room completely, save for the coverless duck-feather cushions and the bucket. We then go through the house and empty the rest of the bins like Mum asked me to — anything to stop her from getting suspicious. Our trash bin is already full so we start to load up Jackson’s hidey bin.

“Shall I do it, so we catch the trashmen?” offers Mac as I tie up the last bag.

“It’s OK,” I say. “It’s not too bad. Silly hanging on to it all, really. It’s not Grandad, is it?”

Mac shakes his head. “It’s just stuff.”

The trashmen are clattering nearer now. The truck beeps to signal their reversal into Chesil Lane. Two men in fluorescent orange jump out of the cab and start along the pavement, grabbing the handles of the green trash bins and flinging their contents up into the crusher. We leave the overflowing bins for the men and go back into the near-empty drum room.

“What now?” I say to Mac, expecting him to give me one of his treelike hugs, but he doesn’t.

“Dunno,” he says. “Fancy going shopping or something? I told Mum I’d be rehearsing nonstop so they had to put Cree in day care all day for once.”

“What? No I meant what else can we do for Jackson?”

“Oh we’re still on him, are we?” he sighs.

“What do you expect? I can’t concentrate on anything else at the moment.”

“How about getting a few DVDs out? Yeah, let’s get some DVDs, popcorn, Ben & Jerry’s, and make an afternoon of it. We can keep one eye on him and . . .”

“I can’t,” I say, “it wouldn’t be right.”

“OK, well, we’ll turn it into research,” he says decisively.

We find just enough energy to troop down the street to the pub and sneak up to the back bedroom to swipe every relevant DVD in Teddy’s collection. Then we sneak back to my house, and all afternoon we watch them —
The Basketball Diaries
,
Dazed and Confused
,
Drugstore Cowboy
,
Totally Baked: A Pot-U-Mentary
, and, of course,
Trainspotting
. There isn’t time to watch all of them properly so we skim, looking for scenes where a character goes through cold turkey. When
Trainspotting
comes to a halt, Mac gets up to take it out and place it back in its box. It’s getting dark outside the living-room window. I reach up behind me and flick on the wall light.

“He just has to ride it out, doesn’t he?” says Mac.

“And we just have to . . . keep an eye on him?”

“Yeah. A few days without his happy pills and his entourage might work wonders.”

“What about the toilet?”

Mac shrugs. “He’s got a bucket.”

“Bit undignified, isn’t it?”

“He could do with a bit of indignity. Remind him he’s a human being.”

“What if he tries to commit suicide?”

“How?” says Mac. “He’s only got pillow feathers and a bucket.”

The news is on. Channel Three.

“Quick, turn it up,” says Mac, fumbling for the remote.

“Shit,” says Mac, but we don’t have a conversation about it, because just at that moment, his phone buzzes and it’s his mum, asking him to look after Cree for the evening so she can go down to work in the bar. “Keep him locked in and don’t feed him. It’ll only give him more energy.”

“I can’t starve him. What about drink?”

Mac marches into the kitchen and returns minutes later with the carton of blood orange juice. I follow as he marches out to the garden, kneels down in front of the drum-room door, and hastily shoves the juice through the cat flap.

“OK, he’s got drink. Now just leave him to it.”

“Mac, I can’t leave him. . . .”

“Yes, you can. Do not open that door, Jody, I mean it.” He’s got his serious voice on, like we’ve got a saber-toothed tiger in there or something.

When Mac’s gone, I go inside and pretend to watch some wanky medical drama, trying not to think about Jackson. Pretty soon, the front door clicks. Mum’s back from the lawyer’s. She flops the free newspaper onto the armrest of the sofa and glances at me. Her auburn rinse looks rough as always.

“How did it go? Did we get the house?”

She sits down on the two-seater sofa opposite, on the edge. “Yeah. We got the house.”

“Did he owe anything?”

She shakes her head. “No. He took care of it all. Can’t quite believe it but, no, no debts. He even paid off the mortgage.”

“So, is that the end of it, then? We get to stay here?”

“Yeah, we can stay here.”

I’m expecting bad news. I always expect bad news, probably because I only ever hear bad news. Waiting for my exam results — rubbish news. Waiting to hear what Mum and Dad wanted to talk to me and Halley about — divorce news. Waiting to find out Grandad’s test results — the worst news. But this, this is actually good news. No debts to worry about and we don’t have to move again.

“That’s not all, Jode,” she says, leaning forward so that both her hands are touching her mouth, like she can’t contain the words in there.

“What?” I say, preparing myself for the worst.
What? What? What? You’re dying, too, now? You’ve got to have a leg amputated? What?!

“Your grandad left us some money. You, me, and Hal. Quite a bit of money.”

“Oh. Right.” He said he was going to leave any money he had to the Rest Home for Elderly Break-dancers in Croyde. He’d been living off his pension for the last ten years so it can’t be much.

Mum takes a deep breath. There are tears in her eyes. “You remember that lottery win he had a bit back?”

“Yeah. But he spent it on the drum room.”

“No, he spent
some
of it on the drum room. Some of it he sent to elderly break-dancers. Adopted a couple of lemurs. But there was some left.”

“Oh. How much?”

“Give or take . . . about a hundred thousand pounds.”