Rockoholic (19 page)

As the week goes on, things take a turn for the better, as does Jackson’s behavior. This is probably why I’m having this strange feeling of happiness. I’ve missed happiness, it’s nice to feel it again. What makes the week that much more enjoyable is the fact that my sister, Halley, is still away on her school outward-bound training thing in the Quantocks with her Duke of Edinburgh herd, which means I’ve only got Mum to keep an eye on, but Mum seems to have a new focus in her life — shopping. She’s never liked shopping before, probably because she’s never had the money to like shopping before, but since the will-reading, it’s like she’s found a new hobby. Can’t say I’m not worried, though. When Dad found a new hobby, casino investment, we ended up having to sell our house. But looking on the bright side, Mum’s (1) much better with money than Dad and (2) out of the house a lot, which means less stress for me that she’s going to find Jackson in the garage and go giraffe on me.

When he’s not looking after Cree or rehearsing or working, Mac helps me watch over Jackson. We’re like a couple of emo Florence Nightingales. Jackson doesn’t really get up in the night, but during the day his behavior is changeable to say the least. One minute he’ll be in one of his comas, the next he’s a whole box of fireworks going off. During his hulk-outs, which last from anywhere between ten minutes to an hour, we lock the garage door and leave him to it.

The day after his bath, Jackson shreds my cushions. I bring him some lunch and can’t help laughing. He’s sitting in the middle of the floor, bollock-naked, surrounded by feathers, doing his extremely pissed chick impression.

“Aren’t you angry with me?” he says, not looking up.

And quick as a flash, I return, “Nope. It was
your
bed. So you can lie in it,” and I dump his sandwich and Doritos down beside his head. And that’s that.

Most of the time, Jackson lies on the feathers shaking or just staring into space or reading the books that I post through the slot. Some books he shreds and posts back to me
—
some he actually reads and then shreds and posts back to me. I decide not to give him any more of my books to tear up and buy some in the thrift shop in town —
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Brontë,
An A Level Guide to Catch 22
, the fifth Harry Potter book, and two very dog-eared Stephen Kings, a book of short novellas called
Different Seasons
and one called
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

“I don’t want these ones,” he yells through the cat flap.

“You’ve got nothing else to do, have you? Unless you want to leave?” I call back. He says nothing. I wait for a second and watch him through the cat flap when he thinks I’ve gone. He reaches for the Brontë book and opens it up. I’m feeling rather proud that I finally have him dancing around my little finger.

The day after the cushion-shredding I decide I’ll learn how to use the smoothie maker Mum gave me last Christmas and spend the morning buying all the ingredients I need to make Jackson some power cleansing juices to build his strength back up — acai berries, soy milk, echinacea, wheatgrass. Costs me a fortune. The first attempt isn’t exactly a success — I forget to put the lid on and get the full blast of blueberry and banana power pulp right in my face.

After two more days, when I’m sure it is safe to open the drum-room door, I take him in a chess set and set it up on the carpet. We attempt a game. Jackson loses and knocks over the board, of course. My grandad used to do the same thing during his final weeks, saying the chemo had sapped his brainpower. Jackson has no such excuse — he’s just being a dick.

The day after that it’s sunny so I leave the door of the drum room open and lie on the sun lounge chair in the garden with my MP3 player on. Jackson comes out as far as the doorstep, and sits down to do some writing in the notebook I’d given him. Noises of trash bins clattering about in the wind and kids kicking a ball around on the gravel path at the back of the house keep freaking him out so he scuttles back into the garage pretty soon. It’s to be expected, I suppose.

Over the week, awful days turn into bad days, turn into OK days, turn into good days. On Thursday I put a yoga mat in the drum room and buy one of those exercise balls for him so he can get rid of his excess energy.

“What do you think I am, a fucking hamster?” he shouts and the ball comes bouncing back toward me but on the last bounce it gets wedged in the door frame. I kick it hard back at him and it pings off his head. He looks at me, struck by my lightning reflex. Ha.

“Sorry,” he says. And he doesn’t look at me, so I can tell he means it.

I’m learning and so is he — treat Jackson like a rock god, get a flying object in the face. Treat Jackson like a spoiled human being, get an apology. It’s becoming easier.

He is getting better, or getting calmer at any rate. His hallucinations of spiders the size of cats and a sparrow hovering outside the window and calling him a moron are still happening but not nearly so much, and all his screeching and whining becomes like feedback in my ears — an annoying noise but ultimately just that. Noise.

Friday, and it’s breakthrough day. I’m washing up the breakfast things when I see him come out of the drum room, close the door behind him, and walk across the lawn to the back door of the house. I wait. He knocks.

He stands there awkwardly as I open the door. His hair looks like a blackbird hitting a windshield, but at least he’s wearing clothes. Grandad’s tuxedo, now almost unrecognizably skanky and torn.

“I want to take a shower. Please.”

“OK,” I say, trying to hide my surprise, not least because he’s said please for the first time. He hasn’t said thank you yet, but I’m trying not to think about that. “The bathroom’s at the top of the stairs. There’s towels in the wicker drawers.”

He nods and walks past me. I can’t concentrate on anything while he’s in the house. I hear the water running. There’s a really bad minute when I think about the Gillette razors in the medicine cabinet and when I hear a loud thump from above, I imagine he’s up there, slumped on the tiles in a pool of wrist blood. Seconds later I hear the bathroom lock go and within a minute, he’s back in front of me in the kitchen — wrists clean and wrapped in my grandad’s navy bathrobe.

“OK?” I ask him.

He nods and gestures to the robe. “I found this in one of the drawers.”

“It’s OK,” I say. Another item of Grandad’s that missed Mum’s cull. I’m amazed. I point toward the breakfast bar, where Mum’s homemade carrot cake sits on a patterned plate. “Do you want some?”

“Does it have lumps in it? I don’t do lumps.”

“No, there’s no lumps in it.”

He slinks up on a stool. His shower hasn’t done much to bring him back to life. His face is still china white and clammy and his lank, soggy hair still looks dirty. I can smell it. It still smells of cigarettes, just damp cigarettes now. He eats the carrot cake.

“It’s good,” he says, not looking at me. After a silence, where I can only hear the mushy chomping inside his mouth and his swallowing throat, he pulls out a small stack of papers from the bathrobe pocket. “I found all this stuff.” I look at the papers. I know instantly what they are. I take them from him.

I sift through them. “Little games me and my grandad used to play. In the night, when neither of us could sleep. Sometimes we’d come in here and make hot chocolates and play games. Consequences. Hangman. Scattergories. He was pretty ill by then, though.”

“I didn’t ask what they were,” he says, finishing his cake.

I shuffle the little notelets neatly and put them in my back pocket. He doesn’t say anything else for a long time, just presses his finger down on his plate crumbs and then sucks it. I guess I have to make the next move, so I do. “We have to think about getting you back.”

“Yeah. I’ll just eat this. I’m real tired.”

“No, not back to the garage. Back to your band. Back to The Regulators.”

He shakes his head. “I’m not going back.” He stares into the middle distance, like he’s just seen a spider moving across the counter. His brilliant blue eyes don’t seem to twinkle so much anymore and the whites of them are speckled red. “I’d rather die.”

“You don’t mean that.” I smile but I know he’s not joking. I just don’t want to believe it.

“I mean it. If you kick me out, I’ll . . . I’ll, you don’t know what I’m capable of, Josie. . . .”

I don’t even correct him straightaway on the name thing as I notice his hand shaking on the tabletop, so much that his crumby plate is rattling. I put my hand out to place on his, but at the last moment, I reach for the plate instead and carry it to the sink.

“Must be all over the news,” he mumbles.

“No,” I lie. “It hasn’t been mentioned.” Immediately his hand stops shaking. “I won’t kick you out. If you really want to stay. But . . . don’t treat me like shit. I don’t deserve it. And while I’m at it, my name’s Jody, with a ‘d.’”

He nods very faintly and goes back out to the garage, where he stays for the rest of the day.

• • •

Saturday, and it’s just over a week since the concert. Jackson seems content with reading and sleeping, so I give myself the day off rock star–sitting and go and spend it with Mac at the Italian Market in town. I wait for him to join me outside in the pub beer garden, looking skyward. A wood pigeon is hooting away in the hazel tree above the swing, the one that’s always there when Mac and I sit out. Ordinarily it would be annoying the arse off me, but today I don’t even care.

Mac returns with two Cokes, Curly Wurlys for both of us, and a copy of the
West Country Chronicle
tucked under his arm. I don’t ever want to see a Curly Wurly again but it’s sweet of him to get one for me anyway. He’s wearing a long-sleeved purple T-shirt and skinny blue jeans with DMs, his wallet chain swinging from his pocket. His black hair is two inches of straight-up fin on his head, held in place by extra-concrete styling wax, and his usual shock of blue. I’d kill to wear skinny jeans and DMs as well as he does but it’s just not a good look for me. I know my limitations.

“You seen this?” He places the drinks and chocolate on the grass beside the swing and holds up the paper.

IS MISSING STAR IN SOUTH WEST?

A cloud comes over my day. “Oh my God,” I gasp. “Oh my God. Why do they think that all of a sudden?”

He shrugs, opening up the paper. “They can’t check every corner of the South West, can they? They’re not talking about searching Nuffing and the surrounding Wolds yet, so until they are, he’s fine where he is.”

I chew my lip. “What about Mum? And Halley comes back in a day or so. One of them is bound to notice I’m spending so much time in the garage. One tells one, one tells another, someone snoops around. Someone’ll find him, Mac. Mum’s already suspicious with all the food that’s going missing.”

“She probably thinks you’re going through a bulimia phase or something. She usually jumps to the most obvious conclusion.”

I drag my feet on the ground so the swing comes to a halt and pick at the rust on the swing leg. “He told me he’ll kill himself if he has to leave.”

“He doesn’t mean it,” says Mac.

“He does, Mac.” I start swinging again. “And it’s not the drugs talking now. He’s clean.”

“All right, all right,” he sighs. “Can we talk about something else now? This is supposed to be our day out. I don’t want to talk about the thing in your garage.”

“You brought it up. You brought the paper out.”

“Only to show you . . .” The front leg of the swing keeps lifting up out of its bolt every time I swing backward. I stop and grab one of the Curly Wurlys on the grass, tearing it open and taking an almighty chomp out of it. I don’t know why I do it — the taste of it makes me feel sick.

Mac sips his Coke. “You hear any more about Charlie’s money? How much will you get?”

“Mum said she wants to spend a few grand getting the house sorted out. Pay off Dad’s debts. And he’s left ten grand for me and ten for Halley.”

“Wow. That’s great.”

“Yeah. That’s how Grandad wanted it, apparently. Mum’s set up savings accounts for us. We can get the money out whenever we want, she just wants us to be a bit responsible with it until we decide. She’s petrified I’m going to blow it all on Regulators DVDs and Coco Rocks.”

“What are you going to spend it on?”

“Dunno. Liposuction maybe. Some new Converse. I’d quite like a malamute.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like a husky. Where’s Cree?”

“Mum’s changing her. Sorry she’s tagging along. Yet again.”

“I don’t mind. I love Cree to bits, you know I do.”

“Yeah, I know.” Mac rests his head against the metal swing frame.

I touch the shark fin of hair sticking up on his head. Pretty solid. Work of art today. “You should tell your mum and dad if you don’t want to keep babysitting her. It’s not your fault your mum’s gone back to working full-time now.”

He shrugs. He doesn’t want to talk about it, I can tell, cos he immediately returns to the subject of my grandad’s money. “You could spend it on something Charlie would have wanted. You could . . . donate it to Bristol Museum or something, seeing as that’s where he last went . . . you know, when we saw the Banksy stuff. He loved all that.”

“What good would that do?”

“I dunno. Or you could put it toward community art projects or something. Charlie loved graffiti. Anarchy. Bedlam.”

I laugh. “Yeah. Maybe . . .”

“But maybe he wasn’t thinking straight that day,” Mac adds.

My grandad didn’t like thinking straight. Straight thinking was for boring people. Wobbly thinking was for trendsetters. Trailblazers. “He’d have wanted me to do something mad with it, like go to a rodeo or snorkel with great white sharks or something, probably while scattering his ashes.”

“Yeah, probably,” Mac laughs.

I study his hair again. “Perhaps I’ll go somewhere amazing and scatter them, then. Put the money toward that.” Mac nods. “Where’s amazing? I always wanted to go to Italy. Or Vegas, we could do Vegas?”

“Italy sounds good,” says Mac.

“He loved it when the Italian Market came to town. And he said he always wanted to see the Sistine Chapel.”