Rockoholic (25 page)

“No, it’s OK,” she says. “We’ve got loads of girls wanting part-time work. Just see out the week, OK? It’s a shame, though, Jody. The children love you and you’re very good with them. When you turn up for work, that is.”

I attempt a laugh. “Sorry.”

The conversation comes to an abrupt halt when Ashley comes out of the room, butting in to ask if she can have tomorrow morning off for her wedding dress fitting. Cree holds her arms up to be lifted. “We go and see Man, Dody?”

“Yeah, let’s go and see the Man.”

• • •

We get to the gravel path that leads along the side of my house and I immediately see the door to the garage is open. The back door of our house is wide open, too. I squeeze Cree tightly, wondering if Jackson’s going to be in a state again. Suddenly I don’t want her with me. I want her somewhere safe, but she’s two and a half. There
is
nowhere safe. She’s in my care.
I
have to keep her safe.

I put her down and we walk through the back door and there’s no sign of Jackson.

“Hello?” I call out.

“Man?” Cree calls out. A tinkling in the distance. I hold her hand and we walk through the kitchen to the hallway and stop at the living-room door. I peer inside. And there it is, all over the floor. Millions of china pieces. My mum’s bay window full of tacky ornaments is now my mum’s
bare
window that
used
to be full of tacky ornaments. Smashed into billions of pieces on the carpet. My sister’s hockey stick lies snapped in two on the sofa.

I reverse back out of the living room and shut the door before Cree can see what’s happened. I can feel myself sweating as I maneuver her to the bottom of the stairs and grip her hand tightly.

“Hello?” I call out again. My heart thrums like a White Stripes bass line.

“Man?” calls Cree. She looks up at me and I put my finger to my lips. We creep up the staircase, hearing more and more noises as we go. In the bathroom. Something smashes in the sink. Something
boings
against the side of the bath.

Jackson stands before our empty medicine cabinet, glugging down an entire bottle of my mum’s Night Nurse. Bottles and packets lie all over the floor and roll about inside the bathtub.

“What are you doing?” is all I can think to say. He’s guzzling Night Nurse cough syrup is what he’s doing, I can see that. Even Cree can see that. But he’s still doing it. He turns to me, dark circles around his stormy eyes in the harsh white light of the bathroom. He drops the empty bottle.

“I needed something,” he sniffs. “Something to knock me out. I can’t sleep.”

“But you’re always asleep,” I say.

“I woke up!” he cries. “I went in the house. Someone rang the doorbell. I heard it. A woman. She . . . she came around the back. She was calling my name. I need something, just to help me sleep, please . . .”

“No, this is what withdrawal is, Jackson. Mac says you’re probably going to get these hallucinations for a while. I saw it in a film. You need to ride it out. Look at this place! What did you do?”

“Ride it out? I can’t ride it out, I can’t. She was here, goddamn it, I swear she was here!”

“Who?”

“She was blonde and she was wearing a yellow jacket and blue jeans and these ugly shoes. I swear to God she was here, Jody. She said she was from some newspaper. She knows I’m here. I need to sleep! I wanna sleep!”

“Dody,” says Cree, behind my leg. That’s when he notices her.

“OK, you need to calm down, you’re freaking Cree out,” I tell him as she hides behind me. “She doesn’t understand it and to be honest, neither do I. You were fine last night. You didn’t need anything to help you sleep then.”

He slumps down beside the bath, as the curved side
boing-cracks
behind him. The little vanity mirror floats in the sink, water sloshing over the edge. “I didn’t see her there,” he says to me. He starts to cry.

“Why Man crying?” Cree whispers up to me.

“He’s not very well,” I tell her.

“Man poorly?” she whispers.

“Yeah, Man feels sick.”

“Dody make him better,” she nods.

I shake my head. I’m just watching him fall apart before my eyes. All over the sight of some journalist. If that wasn’t just a hallucination or something.

“Poorly,” says Cree, staring at Jackson. I’m amazed it’s not bothering her more because he looks like a zombie. But without another word, she puts her dolly case down on the bathroom floor and gets out her Baby All Better Now instruments and sets them out on the floor — a pink thermometer, medicine spoon (with disappearing medicine), nasal aspirator, stethoscope, and bandages.

Jackson looks up at me. “What’s she doing?”

“I think she’s trying to make you better,” I say, scratching my head at quite how he’s going to take it. Cree goes over to him with the instruments. I’m on my guard as I always am when she goes up to strangers, especially if that stranger is a detoxing drug addict. He even
breathes
on her wrong and I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her safe, I know I will. But it’s OK. She puts her little hand on his greasy forehead and he just looks at her.

“Is he hot?” I ask her. She looks up at me and nods. “Does he need medicine?”

“Yeah. My got medicine,” she says and bends down to take the toy medicine spoon and puts it up to Jackson’s closed lips. He looks at me, then looks at Cree and opens his mouth. She presses a button on the end of the spoon and the medicine disappears.

“There you go,” she says, picking up her plastic wipe-clean doctor pad and scribbling down what in her mind is a note for antibiotics.

A tear falls down from his right eye, and then from his left, and his head dips onto his knees.

“Cree,” I say and she comes back to me and takes my hand. Jackson’s sobbing, really sobbing fat wet tears onto Grandad’s never-worn track pants. I bend down beside him. “You made a real mess downstairs.” He nods again. “You smashed all my mum’s china ornaments.” He nods again. “My mum’s ugly china ornaments.” He looks at me. “Thank you.”

He looks so tired. “You do believe me, about the woman who was here?”

“Yeah,” I say, wavering. I don’t really know that I believe him but I daren’t tell him that.

“I was wide-awake. And I saw her. I went in to use the toilet and she was ringing the doorbell for a long time. I went back outside and locked myself in the garage but she came into the yard. I could hear her through the cat flap. She was calling out her name, saying she was from a newspaper.” He rubs away a trail of water from his nose. “Please believe me.”

“All right, OK. I believe you.” I lean in toward him and envelop him in my arms as much as I can, like I’m trying to gather up a big pile of wood shavings, but he falls apart in my arms. He doesn’t hug me back
—
Jackson still doesn’t do hugs, whether he’s terrified or not.

“Please, get me away from here. I don’t care how you do it. I need to go somewhere where nobody knows me.”

“Where’s that?”

“I don’t know!” he shouts.

“OK, OK. I’ll figure it out, don’t worry.”

OK, let’s assume for a second that Jackson’s not lying, not hallucinating or dreaming.
Who
is this yellow-coated woman,
why
was she calling out his name, and
what
was she doing in my yard? What if he had been in the yard? She could have
spoken
to him. He could have run off again or, at worst, she could have blown this whole thing wide open and Jackson would have to be Jackson again, not plain old Man.

• • •

I’m in the kitchen making grilled cheese and Cree’s drawing on the kitchen tiles with the chalk from Mum’s shopping board. And I’m thinking things over. Thinking about Jackson and how hard he pleaded with me to get him away.
I don’t care how you do it
, he said. He’ll take anything. He’s desperate. So that makes me desperate. And already the cogs are turning.

Bang. Clatter.
The front door slams. I look at the clock. Oh shit. It’s four already. Halley’s home. I hear the tin mugs on her rucksack clanging against the wall in the hallway.

I turn off the grill and get the cheese sandwich out and leave it on the side. I bend down to Cree’s height. “Shall we go and get my tin?” I ask her. She nods and reaches her arms up for me to pick her up. I have an old cookie tin filled with Hello Kitty trinkets and cutesy little knickknacks and novelty pencil tops and smelly erasers that I’ve collected over the years. Cree thinks it’s the most magical thing in the world. It’s guaranteed to keep her busy for a little while.

I hear a gasp in the living room as we reach the hall. I grab the cookie tin from under the stairs and hand it to Cree, who runs into the kitchen and sits down on the floor with it. In the living room, the bits of broken ornament lie untouched, Halley stands looking at it all in her tracksuit, her face as pale as the hideous china bell that lies smashed at her feet. She jumps as she sees me.

“Oh my God, Jody. We’ve been burgled!” she cries.

“No we haven’t,” I say, turning and going back into the kitchen to get the dustpan and brush from the cupboard under the sink.

She’s still crying when I return to the living room. “Look at it,” she sobs. “All Mum’s ornaments. And . . . my hockey stick.”

“I did it,” I say, kneeling down carefully on the carpet and picking up the larger shards of china. I take yesterday’s paper from the magazine rack and start wrapping it all up.

“What?”

“I did it. I broke them all. And your hockey stick. I was angry about Mum getting rid of Grandad’s stuff and I was angry with you for just standing by and letting Mum do it and I just broke them all.” I turn around and look at her. “So go on, call Mum. Tell her what I’ve done. Then you can get another gold medal for snitching, can’t you?”

I go back to picking up the china bits, and a moment later, I hear her knees creak and she kneels down next to me and begins to help. “I won’t tell her,” she sniffs.

“You so will. You’ll have to tell her something, you won’t be able to resist.”

“We’ll make something up,” she says. I catch her eye, offering her some newspaper to lay the broken pieces on. “I didn’t want her to get rid of his stuff, either, but you know what she’s like. I wanted to keep that little rock he used to have. The one he said fell from the moon. I went to get it out of the bags the night before the collection but I couldn’t find it. Every time I asked Mum about it, she just snapped at me. She can’t even go in his bedroom. It’s like she just wants him gone from everywhere, even though this was his house.”

I say nothing. She’ll be hunting the moon rock down if she knows I’ve got it.

“I mean, most of his stuff was pretty rank, wasn’t it . . . but . . .”

“It wasn’t rank,” I snap.

“I didn’t mean rank, I just meant, like, well, stuff you wouldn’t want to hang on to. Like his bongs and his smelly old books and his weird clothes.”

I huff. “Whatever.”

“You must be so angry with Mum, Jody, to do all this. I didn’t realize.”

“Yeah. Well, now you do.”

“You’ve always been the favorite, for Mum and Grandad. Even Dad. You’re the Golden Child.”

“What? How am
I
the Golden Child?” I cry. “You were there when I opened my crap GCSE results. I’ve just walked out of a dead-end job. I’ve got a criminal record for disorderly conduct. And as for Dad, don’t you think he’d have been in touch in the last year if I was his favorite?”

She swallows. I think in some sadistic way, this has made her feel better. Her face relaxes, though the tears still rain from her eyes.

“It’s not because I’m some kind of favorite, Halley. It’s because I’m a walking disaster. I’m always something to be concerned about. Mum doesn’t have to worry about you with all your Duke of Edinburgh achievements and trophies. You’re the Golden Child for her.”

“What about Liam-slash-Sid, the truck driver?” she says.

“Oh, yeah. I forgot about Sid.” We both sort of smile.

Halley frowns, her head dipping. She shuffles up the carpet on her knees and takes the dustpan. She starts brushing away at the smashed china. “She made you a veggie burger both nights when you went to the pub, just in case you came back. And she cried in her sleep.”

We catch each other’s eye. Halley and I couldn’t reach an understanding if it was an inch away, that’s how I thought it would always be. But this little moment is good. I have a feeling a little fire has been put out.

“I’ll buy you a new hockey stick,” I say. “That Nike one you’ve had your eye on.”

She smiles. “You don’t have to. Get me a ticket for the next Regulators concert or something. We could go together.”

“Oh, yeah. Don’t know when that’s likely to be, though.”

“No, I suppose they’ll have to find him first, won’t they?” she chuckles, wiping her cheek.

I pause for a second, the weirdness of what she’s just said ringing in my head. She helps me finish clearing up the broken bits and even insists on devising a plan to get me off the hook with Mum. She takes the sample pots of peach paint off the mantelpiece and hands one to me. She then proceeds to paint over the bare wall. I follow her lead, filling in the gaps until we’ve painted the whole section. She goes to the window and opens it on both sides.

“And then a gust of wind came and . . . whoops! Sorry Mum,” she shrugs.

I laugh. “If I tell her that, there’s no
way
she’ll believe me.”

“She’ll believe me. I’ve got a clean record . . .”

“. . . apart from Sid.”

“Yeah, apart from Sid. But she won’t have a go at me nearly as much as she would you.”

Who’d have thought it? My own little cow bag of a sister, bailing me out. I have spent years thinking one of us was adopted because we don’t look or behave alike, and suddenly we’re like the two talking peas in the pod on that frozen vegetable commercial.

• • •

At 6:31
P.M.
precisely, while we’re enjoying our roast beef dinner for Halley’s homecoming, the doorbell
bing-bong
s. Mac has already come to get Cree, I think nervously, so it can’t be him. And there’s that plunge of dread again.