Rockoholic (10 page)

We eventually roll into the parking lot at the back of Mac’s pub around 1:45
A.M.
Mac turns off the engine and gets out, pulling his seat forward and crouching down to talk to Jackson.

“We need to get you inside, OK?” he says to him, shaking his shoulder with the very tips of his fingers.

“Mmurgh?” Jackson garbles.

“You’re going to stay here tonight and then we’ll see about getting you home tomorrow, OK?” He snatches a look at me, then looks back at Jackson.

Jackson levers himself up, and then slips back down, trembling uncontrollably. “No. I’m not going back, I’m not going back there,” he mumbles.

“He doesn’t want to, Mac,” I say, but Mac’s just concentrating on Jackson. He grabs him under his arms and heaves him out and there is an awkward moment when his coat (my pukey black fleece) flies open and I can’t help but look at his underpants. I glance away, but I’ve seen all I need to. They’re really wet. And the wetness is still coming, trickling down his leg. He’s peeing himself. His head’s lolling around like a balloon and he’s peeing himself. He doesn’t even
know
. O-M-F-G.

Mac doesn’t notice the pee stream, which is good because if he sees that he’ll have even more of a fit, especially if there’s piss in his car. I look down onto the backseat. It’s too dark to see a stain, just bits of shredded lettuce and squished mozzarella ball. I reach through the seats and gently press my hand against it. Feels a bit damp. I click my seat belt and get out. I go around and take Jackson’s weight by putting his left arm around me as Mac locks up the car.

Chink, chink, chink, chink.

This sound is coming from the pavement alongside the parking lot. I look up to see old George Milne, one of the regulars, walking his sheepdog past the pub. We’re in the full glare of the security light above the pub sign, and I smile nervously over at him. He doesn’t respond.
Chink, chink.
I hope to God he’s deep in thought and hasn’t even seen us but that’s probably too much to ask.

Together we help Jackson down the steps, through the back entrance of the pub.

There are three internal doors at the back of the Pack Horse, and Mac has keys for all three of them, but it just means that every five seconds as we’re through one door, he has to stop, lean his side of Jackson up against the wall, unlock a door, prop it open, and come back and help me carry him. I feel like Chunk in
The Goonies
when he’s locked in the freezer with the corpse. Jackson’s heavy weight is against me, his head dangling over my shoulder. Mumbling to himself.

“Ssh,” I whisper as I wait for Mac to open another internal door. His mumbling gets louder. “Please ssh!”

He starts crying then.

“What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”

“Everything. Everything’s wrong! I don’t want it, I’m not doing it. I’m not doing it anymore.”

“Doing what? What are you talking about?”

Someday when I’m not so tired or confused or worried about being quiet or worried about what Mac’s going to say when he opens his car tomorrow morning and smells the festering piss and chips, I’ll look back on all this and laugh my head off.

Up the back stairs we go, and I’m taking Jackson’s full weight as he has completely lost the use of his legs. We manage to get him as far as the landing outside the back bedrooms when —

“Kenz? ’S that you?” His mum’s voice.

Mac claps a hand over Jackson’s crying mouth to quiet him. “Yeah,” he calls back.

“D’you lock it all up properly?”

“Yeah.”

“Nighty night.”

“Night, Mum.”

Once through the back bedroom door, all three of us collapse onto my nice clean double bed, except now it has a rock star, covered in piss and vomit, sprawled out in the middle of it.

“I’ll get the sleeping bag out of the attic,” says Mac, panting. “He can sleep on that and I’ll take the bed. You can sleep in my room.”

“No, I want to stay with him.”

“Jody, we don’t know this guy, all right? He’s a complete stranger.”

“He’s not to me.”

“Yes, he is! What we’ve seen in the past hour or so should have told you that.”

“He’s not a stranger. You’ve seen him in all my magazines, in my DVDs.”

“Yeah, and so have you. And that’s all you’ve seen him in. You’ve also seen what he’s like in the flesh. Tonight, remember?”

“He’s just taken something he shouldn’t have tonight. He might have had a bad aspirin, my grandad couldn’t get on with aspirin. Once he —”

“Your grandad got a rash when he took aspirin. He didn’t try and throw himself off a bridge.”

I actually harrumphed. And I didn’t even know I
could
harrumph. “He’ll be OK tomorrow. I want to stay with him. What if he’s sick again? Are you going to come and wake me up?”

“You’re not staying in here with him alone. End of.”

“Well, you stay with us, then.”

Mac sighs, hands on hips, then hand through hair. He looks like he might fall asleep standing up. “I’ll get the sleeping bag.”

“Mac?” He turns around. “He needs some clothes. Underpants. He’s kind of . . .”

Mac holds his hand up to stop me. “That’s where I draw the line.”

I’m not exactly relishing the thought of changing my idol’s pissy undercrackers, but I have to, so it’s OK. Jackson’s my responsibility, my hero, no one else’s. “I’ll do it, it’s fine,” I tell him. “I change the kids in day care all the time when they’ve had accidents.”

“Yeah, but he’s one big adult accident, Jody,” says Mac as he leaves the room.

I look at Jackson, lying legs akimbo on the bed, covered in everything. Thrillsville.

“OK, Jackson, I’m going to turn you over,” I whisper in his ear, not that he can hear me at all. His face is smushed into the bed — he might as well be in a coma. I heave him over onto his back. I go around to the other side of the bed and delicately begin removing my black fleece from around him, just like I would a sleeping baby if I thought it was too hot in his cot. I see his burning-rose tattoo on his upper arm. I’ve only ever seen that in a poster. Wow. I run my fingers over it. It’s even more beautiful in real life. I’m going to draw it again. I tried a few months ago but it went wrong. It didn’t look like a rose. Looked more like a blossom.

Anyway, so I’m there, undressing him, and I begin to peel off his soaking underpants. I’m trying very hard not to look at his thing. I’ve never seen
that
before, not even in a poster. I try doing it with one hand so I can put my other hand over my eyes as a guard, and this seems to work. I turn to grab an empty plastic bag stuffed between the back of the wardrobe and the wall and I shove the underpants in there, trying not to let the smell register. I tie the bag, dropping it in the trash bin in the corner of the room. And then I can’t help myself. I look.

“Whoa.”

Jackson Gatlin, lead singer of The Regulators, lies totally naked on my bed. Everything on display. I can’t stop seeing him at the MTV Video Music Awards a couple of months ago when they won Best Rock Video. If I knew then what I can see now when I was rewinding his acceptance speech, watching every single movement in his walk, the cute little scratch of his temple, the little smile to the camera as he picked up the award. Wow. Look at that. God. I can’t stop looking at his thing! My eyes keep flicking to it. A little voice in my head keeps saying,
Go on, look again, just quickly, just a quick squizz.
It’s not the most beautiful sight in the world, but these things never are, I guess. Even so, it’s Jackson Gatlin’s you-know-what. I can’t even say the word. Every time I think the word I start going red as roses. I realize I need to cover his middle section up if I’m going to clean him up cos I’m just not getting anything done so I root through Cree’s toy boxes along the wall and eventually pull out a
Three Little Pigs
pop-up book and open it up in the center, placing that over his thing.

I must be insane.

I have several recurring fantasies about Jackson and this current image of him spread-eagled on a bed occurs in one of them. Except he’s not in a coma and there isn’t a Big Bad Wolf springing out from his crotch. Other more innocent ones include me and him on the
Ellen
show, me and him on a gondola in Venice, me and him shopping for baby furniture in IKEA, and me and him sitting on the sofa watching TV while I stroke his face. And now here he is. I have in front of me the living fantasy of millions of girls worldwide, including myself. Before tonight, he only ever existed on my TV. On a poster on my wall. In my sketchbook. On my MP3. And now he’s here. But it’s not at all like I imagined. I don’t feel like I thought I would — contented, in love, fulfilled. I feel like that Greek-myth bloke who caught the wild bull. I can’t stop shaking, and the smell of him is making me wretch. I make for the bathroom but as soon as I get in there, I see the packet of Cree’s wet wipes on the back of the toilet. I rip out a handful and quickly return to Jackson to swab him down over his legs where the pee ran and then, carefully, underneath the book.

His eyes snap open and he levers up his head and it drops back down again heavily. Then again. “Mwagh . . . wh . . . what are you whez my . . . ooh that’s nice . . . my backbez . . . I need my blackbez. . . .”

“Stay still,” I tell him. He’s still jibbering on and I can’t help smiling at his helplessness. He sounds like Cree does when she’s coloring and she’s having a babbling little conversation to herself, evidently making perfect sense in her own head, but to others sounding like she’s talking in fast-forward.

I imagine I’m just at work and swabbing down a baby who’s wet the bed. Jackson passes out again. I’m just about finished washing him all over with the baby wipes, including the now crusty sick tidemark around his chin, when Mac returns and chucks a rolled-up sleeping bag onto the carpet below the window and a pile of his clothes on the bed. He frowns when he sees the book covering Jackson’s knob.

“Oh God, I’m going to wake up in a minute,” says Mac, rubbing his eyes with one hand and passing me a white T-shirt and some black underpants with the other. I set about dressing Jackson. Mac’s found some old checkered pajama pants, too, and I put them on him as well. Then, me at one end, Mac at the other, we 1-2-3-lift him off the bed and down onto the sleeping bag. I look at Jackson’s sleeping face. Apart from his straggly, greasy black hair and the stink of his breath when he exhales, he looks like an angel. I can’t wait to see his beautiful blue eyes in the light of day.

“Oh int he gaw-juss,” Mac sneers, slicing straight through my thoughts like an ax. He throws a blanket down on Jackson and starts stripping off the top layer of my bed, chucking it all in the corner. He flicks off the light. Apart from taking our shoes off, neither of us gets undressed, despite the fact my clothes, particularly my eBay shirt, are ten types of stinky. He lies down on the bare bed and I lie down next to him, like we’ve done a thousand times laughing, and a couple of times drunk. Except this time, we’re not laughing and we’re not drunk and we’re joined by a comatose rock star. We’re both listening to Jackson’s rasping snores and lying side by side like two bedridden vampires.

“What are you going to do with him in the morning?” he says into the darkness.

“He says he doesn’t want to go back.”

“He’ll feel differently in the morning.”

“It
is
the morning.”

“You know what I mean. You’ve got to take him back.” I say nothing. “Jody, he’s not some stray animal. He’s not that rabbit you found in the park last Easter. He’s a human being. You can’t keep him in the garage like Skellig. I don’t know what’s going on in your head at the moment, if you’ve taken something or . . .”

“I haven’t taken anything,” I say. “I really haven’t, Mac, you know I wouldn’t.”

“All right, but you can see how I might be thinking that, can’t you? This is beyond . . . It’s just beyond, Jode. It’s because you do things like this that your mum thinks you’re a pothead. This is . . . it’s . . . like . . . you have to take him back.”

“I know, I know. I just want to get to know him first, that’s all. Just for one day. That’s all I want. Please don’t tell anyone he’s here yet, Mac. You know he’s my kindred . . . thingy.”

“Grow up,” says Mac. “You need to get real, fast. We are in the middle of a nightmare and I don’t know how the hell we got here.” I can feel myself beginning to cry. Mac hears my sniff. “Jody, don’t.”

“I can’t help it,” I huff. “I don’t want to let go of him, Mac. You don’t understand it, I know you don’t, but I need him.”

The only sound in the room is me crying for a little while, until I feel something on my hand in the darkness. Mac’s hand. “We’ll sort it out.”

We lie like that for a while. I need to feel him closer so I wriggle over to him and snuggle into his armpit. He doesn’t move away so we stay like that. He must be coming around to my way of thinking, he must. The alarm clock on the dressing table flicks over to 2:35
A.M
.

“Are you tired?” I say.

“Knackered,” he yawns. “But I doubt I’ll sleep.”

But both of us must nod off, because within seconds, it seems, the lamp flicks on. Someone is waking us up. It’s Tish, Mac’s mum.

“Mum? What is it?”

“Ssh,” she says. She’s got a black baseball bat in the crook of one arm and a fast-asleep Cree in the other. “We’ve been burgled, loves. Your dad’s downstairs talking to Brian and Steve.”

I fling myself upright to look beneath the window. Jackson is gone. “Oh shit.” Mac sits up, his hair all sticky-uppy and his eyes still sewn shut with sleep.

Tish comes around to my side of the bed. She strokes my head and kisses Cree’s head at the same time. “The police are here, don’t worry, all right?” She frowns. “What’s that smell?”

She can smell the bag of pissy underpants. Oh God, what’ll I say? I’m going to have to say I peed myself. But just as I open my mouth, Teddy’s voice calls up the back stairs. “Tish?”

Without another thought, she takes Cree and scurries out in the direction of Teddy’s voice.

Mac turns to me. I get up off the bed and go to the window, which looks out over the parking lot at the back of the pub. Mac’s car’s still there and the sky looks a bit lighter than it did when we went to bed. It’s quarter past six on the alarm clock. We’ve slept about three hours.