Rockoholic (21 page)

“For God’s sake, shut him up, will you? What’s the matter with him?” Mac barks at me.

“I don’t know, do I? Jackson,” I call through the door, “it’s OK, we’re here, it’s OK.”

“Get it away, get it away from me!” he yells back.

I peer through the window. “He’s trying to climb up the wall. I think she’s scaring him.”

Cree’s screaming her head off, and Mac’s talking to her really calmly, gently easing her head back through the little square hole. “There we go, easy, easy, easy . . . there you are.”

And she’s out. He lifts her up and cuddles her in, looking at the thin red line around her hairline. She clings on and wails into his shoulder. “Kenzie’s got you. Shit that was close, Jode,” he says. “What if we had to call the fire brigade?”

“Oh God, it doesn’t bear thinking about,” I say. “Is she OK?”

He nods, kissing her forehead. “All gone, Creep. All gone now.”

She sobs on his shoulder, looking at me as we enter the garage. “My hurt my ned,” she says.

“I know. All gone now,” I say.

Jackson’s nervous to say the least when we approach him. He’s huddled in a corner on his feathers like the last chick that won’t leave the nest, eyeing Cree like she’s got a forked tail.

“I just saw this head, c-c-coming through the door,” he cries. “Scared the shit out of me. Thought I was seeing things. I wasn’t, was I? I wasn’t seeing shit again?”

“No, it’s OK. It was Cree, Mac’s little sister,” I say, gesturing toward her. “Jackson, we’ve come to take you out of here for a little while. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” I start to tell him about my plan about the market, and he shuffles away from me.

“No, I don’t want to. Someone will recognize me.”

“No they won’t. And it won’t take very long,” I explain. “You can put on a baseball cap and we’ll just take a couple of photos of you reading an Italian newspaper under an Italian awning and then you can come back here again. It’s just to throw the papers off the scent.”

“But if the South West of England is hunting for him, isn’t he going to be spotted in a crowd full of people?” says Mac. Cree looks up from Mac’s shoulder and stares at Jackson. Jackson is looking back at her and I’m waiting for him to make the sign of the cross.

“Don’t think so,” I say. “Who’s really going to think he’s here of all places? If you thought you saw Brad Pitt walking along the seafront at Weston, would you think it actually
was
him or just a look-alike?”

“Yes, if it’s Brad Pitt, it’s Brad Pitt. He might be doing a movie here. Or adopting someone.”

“Well, I think it’s worth the risk,” I say, turning to Jackson again. “Come on, try it. If we get to the market and you freak out, we’ll just come back.”

“I’m not going,” he mumbles. “Do it in here.”

“We can’t. A picture of you reading an Italian news-paper inside a feather-strewn garage is going to look like a hostage situation.”

He shakes his head, scraping his fingers through his straggly brown hair. “No. Someone’ll see me and it will get back to Grohman. He’ll have his guys looking for me everywhere. He thinks he owns me . . . maybe he does. If he finds me, he’ll make damn sure I never get to walk away from him again.”

“Jeez, you’re only in a band, you’re not going back into some torture chamber,” says Mac, but Jackson looks at him through dead eyes and I can tell that’s exactly how he sees it all — the tour bus, the gigs, the hiding from the paparazzi, having every little thing you do photographed and put in the papers.
That’s
his torture chamber.

Cree wriggles for Mac to put her down, still snuffling from her cat-flap trauma. She toddles over to Jackson and crouches down with her hands on her knees. “Come on, Man,” she huffs and garbles, “you hold my nand.” This is what Mac always says to her when she’s afraid of something.

Jackson looks at Cree, his eyes hardening. Mac steps forward, as though fearing at any moment Jackson will drop-kick his baby sister through the open door. But I hold him back. She knows what she’s doing. For a two-year-old, Cree has perfect people skills. Comes from living in a pub, I suppose. She knows Jackson’s afraid. She knows he needs someone to take his hand. Mac tries to teach her what to be afraid of and what not. Strangers — be afraid. Spiders — don’t be afraid. Cree still hasn’t quite got the hang of the stranger thing, though, and for some reason she’s taken a deep interest in this one. Amazingly, Jackson lets her take his hand and stands up, dwarfing her, as she tugs him toward the door.

“Now put your soosies on,” she says.

He looks blankly at her. “Susies? Who’s Susie?”

She grabs one of my white DMs by the door and brings it over to him. She starts trying to force it on before his foot’s left the floor.

• • •

Jackson’s in a sort of catatonia as we wander through the town. He has on one of my old black hoodies and one of Mac’s baseball caps forced so far down over his forehead his eyes are slits in his face. But I can tell he’s watching every single person that passes. His head keeps darting from face to face, noise to noise, looking for signs of recognition, nudges in backs, pointing fingers. But no one’s looking at him. They’re all too busy trying to snatch the last free pieces of cheese or cups of wine. We make it to the far end, Cree pulling him all the way through the litter of market flyers and plastic cups on the ground. “Come on, Man,” she keeps saying, dragging him all the while.

When we reach the herb stall, the ancient hangy-face woman is serving a customer. The Italian newspaper lies on the table behind her.

Mac does the honors. “Hello,” he says, stretching his hand out to shake hers. She shakes it but her long face is wary. “Yeah, can you tell me how fresh your herbs are? I mean, what’s the story? What’s the process of them getting here?” He insists on talking about the carbon footprint and smelling her specimens. I lean as discreetly as possible into the canvas wall and sneak my hand underneath to grab the newspaper. I slide it along the table, off onto the floor, and out. The old woman hasn’t noticed and Mac has bought some basil and a pot of sage, which he carries in a brown paper bag rolled up at the top.

“OK,” I say as I rejoin him and Cree, looking over people’s heads for signs of somewhere Jackson can sit. I see the perfect spot. “Over there.”

Signor Salvo’s has some wooden benches underneath large red umbrellas. People gather around the counter as the chefs toss dough and shovel pizzas from a small stone furnace. We watch the tables until a family leaves, and I shove Jackson until he sits down amid their scrunched up napkins and dirty plates.

I hand him the paper. “Put your hat up a smidge. We need to see your face a bit.”

“My have picture and Man?” says Cree.

“No,” says Mac, “not this one.” Cree does her frustrated leg wiggle.

“We’ll do another one in a minute,” I tell her, and this seems to calm her down, though her leg still wiggles a bit. Mac steps back a couple of paces and lines his phone up on its side to take the picture of Jackson. He waits for the image to appear on the screen. “No, we can’t see your face.”

With some awkwardness, Jackson tips the baseball cap up slightly.

“Good,” I say. “Look out toward the road. Go back a bit Mac, it’s too close. It has to be natural, like he doesn’t know we’re taking it.”

So Mac takes the shot of Jackson reading the paper, and a couple more of him pretending to sip from an empty coffee cup and scratching his chin, fully showing his face to the camera. I hope to God his shaking hand won’t be blurry in the picture.

“Yeah, these are good,” Mac says as he studies them on the screen. “Got the awning behind him, cover of the paper’s in there and there’s even an Italian pizza guy scratching his armpit with a spaghetti fork in the background, so that should be perfect.”

“Bargs,” I say. “When can you load them on the computer?”

“Whenever you want,” says Mac.

“My have picture now?” Cree whines again and just for her, I sit her on Jackson’s lap and take Mac’s phone from him. She does her fakest little grin in preparation for the shot.

“Jackson, smile for this one, OK?”

“Say tees, Man,” says Cree.

He makes a different kind of face than his usual painfully confused one, though I wouldn’t call it a smile. “Cheese,” he says, though for all the enthusiasm he puts into it, he might as well have said, “I have an inoperable lump.”

“OK, all done,” I say.

“I want to go back now,” Jackson mumbles, his face glazed with sweat.

Cree walks up to him and takes his hand in hers again. “Come on, Man, let’s go home. Can Man come see Roly?” she asks Mac.

“No,” says Mac, “he needs to go back to Jody’s garage now.” Like we have to fold him up and pack him away.

“In a minute?” asks Cree, which is usually what people say to her when they don’t want to do something.

“Yeah, in a minute,” says Mac.

“What’s a roly?” asks Jackson, still shaking, his skin as pale as raw pork rind.

“She’s got this pet snail,” Mac explains as we walk back through the market. “Mum won’t let her have a rabbit. It’s this tiny thing she keeps in a see-through tub at home. You can barely see it.”

“Why does she want me to see it?”

Mac sighs. “Because she likes you, I suppose.”

Jackson moves his baseball cap slightly and looks down at Cree. “Maybe tomorrow, huh, kid?” Cree nods. She takes his thumb in her hand and he looks confused but lets her and they walk in front of us.

We’re walking back through the market and something spooks Jackson. Something spooks me, too, but I pretend not to have heard it. But I hear it again, and this time Mac hears it, too.

That’s so him.

We’re being followed. Toward the end of the market, where the numbers of people start to thin out, it becomes even more obvious.

Are you sure?

Yeah, it so is. Him what’s been in all the papers.

You’re having a laugh.

A different voice.
No it ain’t, that ain’t ’im. What would he be doing here?

A gasp.
It might be. It looks like him. Get a picture, quick.

And then we’re running, following Jackson’s lead, pushing past people, sidestepping strollers and wheelchairs and bikes, and we’re running hard. And the voices are running, too, following us. Mac grabs Cree and shouts, “We’ll catch up with you later.”

“OK!” I yell. “Shit!” We’re at the car jam at the entrance to the market. Jackson takes a running jump onto a Honda and runs all the way over the hood and roof, and down and up onto the next one and down and up onto the next one, and I follow. I’m running on car roofs!
Thump thump bang bang thump thump bang
go our feet on the metallic floors beneath us, Citroëns, Chryslers, Renault Clios, Puntos, a Merc, and each one we climb is followed by a watery thud onto the wet road as our shoe soles land on the other side. Alarm after alarm goes
waa, waa, waa
in our wake, and Jackson’s so wiry and fast I can barely keep up with him. I glance behind us. Our followers, the same teenage boys from the lad lot, are being told off by a tall bloke, probably for running on his car. Jackson slows so I can overtake him and guide us home. We sprint down Shepherd’s Lane, then take a left, then a right, and finally turn onto Chesil Lane and up the gravel path at the side of our house. Jackson makes it into the garage first and crashes down into the feathers.

“Blimey, that was amazing,” I pant, slamming the door behind us. “I’ve nearly been run over before, but I’ve never run over a car!”

“Neither have I,” says Jackson, puffing and panting almost as much as I am. “God, that felt good. Good to get my legs moving, you know?” Once we get our breaths, we start LOL-ing really badly. “Your face,” he says. “You looked so scared.”

“Well, yeah,” I say, bending over to relieve my stitch. “But you started running first.”

“I know.” He smiles. He tries to laugh again but it’s labored, like he’s trying not to be sick.

“I hate to darken the mood. . . .” I say. Feathers flutter down between us.

“I know,” he says, smile ghosting from his face. “I’ve been seen.”

I nod. “Probably took pictures on their phones, too.”

“What if they were spying for Grohman or something?”

“No, they were just teenagers, local chavs.”

“What’s a chav? Is that code for something, like the CIA?”

“No, Jackson, they were just kids.”

“Yeah, but they could be working for him!” he snaps, getting up and pacing over to the door. “It gets back to Grohman, he’ll find me. He’ll find me and he’ll kill me. ‘You try that again, Gatlin, you’re gonna wish you’d never been born.’ That’s what he said to me. He knows people. He knows serious, serious people. . . .”

I go to laugh, because it sounds stupid and paranoid but Jackson’s face stops me. “He’s not going to kill you,” I say. “You’re his star.”

He looks at me, points a shaking finger, and says, “You need to send those pictures. Now. Then you have to get me away from here.”

Once a hot story takes, it takes like a flame to a sparkler. It threads its way steadily along until it either burns right out or explodes in someone’s face. Usually, on the official Regulators website, pictures from a gig will appear within ten minutes of being taken. I rely on it for all the latest photos and downloads. It’s the same with gossip websites, like Loose Lucy. She makes up all this stuff about whoever she wants and Photoshops pictures so people believe it. She’ll write things like
JACKSON TO MARRY BRITNEY?
and
JACKSON SEX TAPE: ALL THE DEETS
. Another website, Chaos Theory, bills itself as the “World’s Number One Celebrity Stalker Site,” advertising that “if a celeb farts in the Arctic, I’ll be tweeting it from Texas within ten minutes.” They’re two of the most fearsome gossip sites on the Net.