Rockoholic (30 page)

“Oh, OK, we better crack on, then. My story’s going to print tonight so . . .”

“Did you not hear the news? About Jackson Gatlin?” I mumble. “They found his body. In the River Severn.”

“No, they found his clothes,” she corrects me, flapping her hand. “Red herring. Now . . .”

Mac interrupts by shoving his hand underneath her nose. “Mackenzie Lawless.” She shakes it warily. “I don’t think you fully recognized me earlier. I think you were only at my school a year before you left. Just before your A level exams, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” That’s all she says. “Jody, if we could make a start?” She checks her watch.

But Mac’s not done. “Nuffing’s a really small town. Everybody knows everybody, like you knew Salvo the pizza man from our pictures. Small minds. Long memories.”

“Oh, so you’re the friend in Italy? Right, well, if we could begin . . .”

“Yeah, I think I might know a little about you,” says Mac. “Didn’t one of the substitute teachers get you pregnant or something?”

“That was
not
me!” she snaps. Her whole face changes color. It’s no longer pale with the slightest hint of rose to her cheeks. It’s red. Angry red.

“Oh, why did you leave so suddenly, then? Was it something to do with the lesbian PE teacher and her daily knicker checks?”

“Oh my goodness, look, I haven’t come here to —”

“— what, sell Viagra to seventeen-year-olds? Come on,
one
of them must be you.”

“I don’t have time for this. Jody, can we go somewhere more private, please?”

But I let Mac carry on. I don’t know what he’s doing or where all these allegations are coming from, but they’re working. Dinkley’s getting well twitchy. “See, I’ve done a bit of digging of my own,” he says, “and I know for a fact you used to edit our school magazine. And it was
you
who made up all those stories. People hung for it, though. Four students were expelled for that Viagra story. Miss Chambers the PE teacher got the sack. But did you own up and say you’d made it all up to fill pages? Noooo. Just as long as you made the headlines, that’s all you cared about, wasn’t it?”

“You can’t prove any of this.”

“And you can’t prove Jackson Gatlin isn’t floating down the River Severn, can you? Now I suggest you take what little evidence you’ve already got, hop on your glittery pink broomstick, and bugger off back to Bristol, all right?”

“You can’t stop me from running whatever story I like. I have my own column.”

“No, I can’t. I can’t stop you writing yet another false story in a whole sea of false stories. And when Jackson Gatlin’s body
does
wash up, which it will, you’re going to be very embarrassed indeed. I’ve got a blog. Two thousand followers so far. And I’ll be blogging about this until the cows come home.”

They stare each other down for a little while. Dinkley gets up. “His body won’t wash up. He’s alive, I know he is. But for how long, who knows? Believe me, if you
are
covering for him, I’m going to be the very least of your worries.”

“What are you talking about?” I slur. I’m actually slurring now. Crying, no. But slurring? Check.

“I’m talking about a roadie who was found beaten to a pulp after the same concert in Cardiff where Gatlin went missing. I’m talking about a St. John Ambulance member having her face rearranged in the sick bay of said concert where Gatlin went missing. I’m talking about the bass player, Pash Fredericks, having his nose and three fingers on his left hand broken on the night of the same concert in Cardiff where Gatlin went missing. Spotting a pattern yet?”

I hold my breath. That’s what Jackson’s been trying to say; no wonder he doesn’t want to be found.

But Mac just looks at her, as cool as an iceberg. He shrugs. “Rock concerts are dangerous places. People get hurt all the time.”

Dinkley’s equally as cool. “I’ve been researching into Frank Grohman, the manager of The Regulators. Very shady. He has ways of getting information. If Jackson Gatlin
has
gone AWOL, I’m sure Frank Grohman would give anything to know where his star performer is right now, probably more than I would.” She turns around and begins to walk away. She turns back. “You’re both hiding something. I know you are. And by the time my story’s made the rounds tomorrow, everyone else will know, too. Including Frank Grohman.”

“But you just can’t prove it, can you?” sighs Mac. “It’s sad, really. You’ll run that story, nothing will come of it, and that will be that. Just more bullshit. You’re so hungry for attention it’s quite depressing.” He smiles. “I mean come on, Sally, a world-famous rock star, hiding away in the tiny West Country town of Nuffing-on-the-Wold? Who the hell is going to believe that?”

“Mac, don’t,” I mutter.

“It’s all right, it’s fine,” says Sally. “You’re obviously threatened because you know I’m close to something. Give it another day. Something will come out of the woodwork. Or someone. I will find out, you just mark my words.”

Dinkley marches back up the parking lot to her little pink bubble and heads back to the Torrance and Mac doesn’t say one more word until she’s on the road.

“That was a close one. Didn’t think we’d turn that around.”

I turn to him. “We didn’t. She’s still going to run her story.”

“Yeah but it won’t mean a thing. It’ll just be talk.”

I tip my empty wine glass upside down and rest my chin on it. “You don’t have a blog, you liar, let alone two thousand followers.”

He grins. “And she doesn’t have a shred of actual proof that Jackson’s in Nuffing, does she? So it looks as though we’re both running false stories.”

And all of a sudden I remember the endings of all those films
. Harry and the Hendersons. Splash. E.T.
I remember what happened to the alien, the Bigfoot, the mermaid at the end.

They were set free.

And that’s what I
have
to do for Jackson, or else he’s going to be all over the papers. Hounded. Hunted. A freak show. He won’t be able to handle it. He won’t be able to escape from Grohman. He’ll hurt him. It’s up to me to help him. It’s the only way he’s going to be able to get on with whatever life he wants to have. My nose starts to flare like Cree’s does when she’s about to cry and, before I know it, there are tears in my eyes.

“Wine kicking in, is it?” says Mac. His arm encircles me. “Come on, it’s OK, it’s OK.”

It’s going to be hard to let him go, as much as I wanted to be rid of him in the beginning. Because he’s Jackson. He’s my hero. And he’s become this weird kind of garage-dwelling, pee-stinking, constantly hungover friend. But it’s what I have to do, I know that now.

“She won’t leave. She’ll find him. I’ve got to set him free, Mac.”

Maybe
that’s
what “
Don’t Dream It, Be It
” meant. Maybe Grandad wasn’t talking about me at all. Maybe he meant that for Jackson. Getting him a new life abroad. Getting him away from his torture chamber. But how am I going to do that? I can’t get him out of my
garage
without being seen, let alone the
country
. I know I can’t do it. And I know Mac can’t help me.

But I know a man who can.

Halley makes me breakfast — toast and jam and cornflakes in the bowl we always fight over, the free one we got with the Rice Krispies. She did this the morning after Grandad’s death, too. Today she’s done it because she’s read Dinkley’s article and knows how I feel about The Regulators. It’s in the morning paper. Front page. Dinkley has written everything she said she’d write about — Pash getting beaten up, Frank Grohman’s unsavory past, the St. John Ambulance woman’s plastic surgery, everything. It’s time for drastics. I eat the breakfast, just to please Halley, and shove the paper through the garage cat flap on my way into town.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have a tendency to do stupid things. In my short sixteen years, I have inadvertently caused two fires, been cut free from a toy car, been arrested for damaging public property, and caused a semi-serious road accident while in the process of liberating fifty farm turkeys. But this is probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

I’m first in the queue when the bank opens. I take out the full amount I’m going to offer the BFD, but I only take half of it around to his place that morning. I stuff the other half under my mattress. My dad always used to tell me that in poker games he would always start low with his stake until he knew “the lay of the land” or, rather, knew how good the other players were. So that’s what I’m doing. Though in my case, I’m lowering my stake until I know exactly how dodgy the BFD is.

The outside of Duncan Buzzey’s flat is about as skeezy as skeezy gets. It’s right at the end of Albert Lane, which looks like Knockturn Alley on a bad day, and the door looks like it’s been kicked in. Mac would go ballistic if he knew what I was doing, if he knew I’d been within ten feet of this place. But here I stand, pressing the intercom, admiring the “F” and “C” words scored into the brickwork. There’s Coke cans and condoms jammed up the gutter, it’s cold and pissing with rain, and somewhere in one of the flats opposite I can hear a baby screaming at the top of its lungs — it’s that kind of vibe. I’m sick with nerves. Buzzey’s a lout. He’s done time for theft and drug dealing. He’s everything I hate about the human race kneaded into one fat, flatulent lump.

“Murgh?” comes the scratchy response from the intercom.

“I need to speak to Duncan Buzzey,” I say, very slowly.

“What
scratchy
want?” His voice sounds like he’s eating something crunchy.

“I need to speak to Duncan. It’s urgent.”

“Nah, fumph off.”

The receiver clicks down. I look back up the lane to check no one’s around. I grab hold of the moon rock in my jacket pocket with one hand and press the button hard again until it stops buzzing.
Come on, Buzzey, I’m buzzing you
.
I’m not going to stop buzzing you, Buzzey. . . . buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
. . .

“Whaaat?!”

I exhale. “I’ve got money.”

A scratchy silence follows. The receiver goes down.
Buzzzzzzzzz
. The door clicks open.

I push through the door, and pick my way through a stack of unopened boxes and packets. The stair carpet is greeny-gray and thick with clumps of mud and tiny bits of gravel. A cluster of mismatched sneakers lies in the corner of the first-floor stairwell, worn down at the heels and holey at the toes. I start slowly up. The walls on either side of the stairs are orange. There is no banister.

At the top of the stairs, the walls turn the same color as the stair carpet, gray-green, and I can see a TV flickering in a room to the right. I’m stupid to have come here on my own, I know I am. I know, I know, I know. But it’s the only plan I’ve got.

“Who are you?” says the garbled phone voice, clearer now. The TV is loud but I can just about hear him. He’s sitting in a moldy brown armchair facing
Car Booty
. I move across into his line of vision, seeing as he makes no effort to look around at me. He’s a huge, hulking boy-man in a stained green T-shirt. He has a tray on his lap with three foil containers on it — one for rice, one for curry, one for a cracked-up popadam.

“Hello, Duncan.”

Duncan looks at me again, for a longer time, up and then down. I only went to Nuffing Comp for my last year of school, so I didn’t know that much about him. All I knew was what Mac had told me. Despite this, he still recognizes me. “You used to go to Nuffing Comp, din’t ya?”

“Yeah. Someone told me you could help me out with something.”

He looks me right up, then right down again. “Oh yeah?”

“Your dad,” I say, my mouth dry.

“I ain’t nothing to do with my dad. If you’ve come here from the
Chronicle
or summing, I ain’t saying nuffin’.”

“No, I’m not from the paper. It’s not about your dad . . . as such. But it’s about what he did.”

“I don’t know anything about it, darlin’.”

“You must.”

“Nah, them immigrants, that was all me dad, all me dad, that was.” He sniffs and moves the tray onto the coffee table in front of him. There’s a bald patch amid his otherwise thick, greasy ginger hair and for a second I think I see something scuttle across it. I hope to God it’s my mind playing tricks. “What’s it to you, anyway? You want a pet Romanian or summing?”

His arm moves to the back of his chair and he crosses his legs in a proper bloke-crossing-legs pose.

“No, I don’t want to bring someone into the country, I want to get someone
out
.”

“Who?”

“A friend.”

“What’s he done?”

“Nothing. He’s not a criminal or anything, he just needs to leave. I can’t tell you any more.”

“Bad, is it? Done someone in?” He leans over to the right for the lager by his chair, his fat fingers like baby legs. He knocks back the dregs of the can, then half-crushes it and throws it toward a trash bin by the TV, already over-flowing with half-crushed lager cans. There’s newspapers all over the floor, too. I double-check for signs of Jackson, but they’re old newspapers by the looks of them.

The massive wodge of money in my jeans pocket may as well be a hot coal, I’m so aware of it. “I can’t tell you,” I reply, getting irritated. “Can you arrange it or not?”