Rockoholic (2 page)

“He’d have really hated this, Mac,” I sniff, pulling back from his shoulder. “Every second.”

“You’re right. You know what I can hear him saying? ‘Where’s my bloody sushi?’ ‘Why’d you let your mother pick Valium FM? You canny dance to that!’” he says in a near-perfect imitation of Grandad’s Scottish accent.

I smile, wiping my eyes. Some opera woman mourns over the buffet-room speakers. “I’m not going back in there. I swear, if one more hairy-lipped granny kisses me on the cheek and asks me how school’s going, they’re going to be booking the next wake here.”

Mac sits on the step beside me. “Well, it’s nearly over now, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. And I’ve done nothing toward it. I’ve done nothing to make it better for him.”

“Well, at the end of the day, your mum gave him a respectable send-off. She probably can’t afford to do more, Jode. It all went smoothly, didn’t it?”

And then it comes to me, like it’s been stapled to my forehead.

“That’s the problem, Mac,” I say, getting up off the stairs and taking up my vodka-kicked Coke. “It’s all gone way too smoothly.”

“Whoa there, what are you going to do?” he says as I glug the Coke down, wincing at the huge injection of vodka lurking at the bottom of the glass. “Where are you going?” he calls after me.

“I’m going to change that bloody music.”

Picture this: huddled groups of old people chatting over paper plates; the reek of lily of the valley and the rank smell of prawns. The tortured warbling of Katherine Jenkins comes to an abrupt end as I fix Mac’s iPod tothe docking station behind the bar, find “Bedlam” by The Regulators, and lock the volume control. Speakers crackle in all four corners of the room. The chattering stops.

Sunlight breaks through the metal-gray clouds outside and floods the room like honey. A guitar noise kicks in on the sound system.

Crank, crank
.

More guitars, louder than bombs.

Crank
. The loudest voice in the world screams . . .

“This is a warning, motherfuckers! You gotta deal . . .”

A huge grin splits my face. It’s Jackson’s voice.

“Surrender your weapons. It’s gonna get . . .”

Crank, crank, crank, crank, crank.

“Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal!”

Before I know what my own hand is doing, it’s sinking straight into a crystal bowl of pink Jell-O, grabbing a handful, and hoying a large rubbery splodge straight at the reverend’s face.

I see Mac heading toward me, all serious face. He’s coming to hold me back, talk me down, but I’m too hyped, I’m too riled, and some random kids (possibly the third cousins) are joining in.

Jackson’s screeching through the speakers that surround me. He’s cheering me on. One of the cousins lunges for the cherry pie and shoves a handful in my mouth. He laughs and I laugh and shower him with a plateful of mini lemon tarts, rubbing the custard into his hair. Another cousin grabs a fistful of chocolate mousse and flings it at an old lady in a green hat. More second and third cousins run in from the game room, squealing in delight and grabbing handfuls of sandwiches and puff pastries and hurling them at us and each other.

I catch sight of Mac, just outside the private party room. He’s given up trying to stop what’s happening. He’s standing beneath a pink-and-white floral umbrella.

The barman shouts and gets a face full of fish-paste sandwiches. Old women squawk and flap and wheel out of the way. The crabby old man from the post office gets a hunk of raspberry sponge cake smack in his mouth. A waitress skids on the mandarin jelly. Fondue splats against the walls. Quiche plasters the windows. Light fixtures drip with shredded lettuce. Multicolored squidgy lumps rain down as cheese balls pellet the air like machine-gun fire.

“Give me what you got, don’t hold back.”

The air is thick with egg mayonnaise, salmon sandwiches, mini kievs, and cupcakes; the floor is a battlefield of bodies felled by blueberry pie and ice cream, all crawling and ducking out of the firing line. It is not a funeral anymore. It is a buffet bloodbath.

“This is my war, this is my waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrr!”

With Jackson’s help, I destroy that room. It is five manic minutes of loud music, helpless laughing, screaming, shouting, mayhem, magic, and mess. By the time me and the cousins have come to our breathless truce, it is a no-man’s-land of sweet gunk and mangled pastry. I’m going to pay, we all are. My mum is going to go into rage overdrive with no shock absorbers and a double exhaust. But for these brief minutes, all is as it should be.

And I just know that somewhere in the universe my grandad is laughing his head off.

So my mum goes supernova insane over my funeral shenanigans. She’s convinced I’m either an alcoholic or a pothead, anyway, so it doesn’t exactly surprise her, it just appalls her. I know I’ve reached the summit of Mount Deep Shit with this one.

“Stupid, inconsiderate little cow!” she shouts at me. She’s managed a nice skid mark of chocolate mousse all up one side of her suit, and half her head is covered in whipped cream. Others mill about aimlessly behind her, like extras from
Dawn of the Dead
. There are lots of angry sighs from my mother in between frightful gasps at the mess and cries of “God knows how much all this is going to cost me.”

“I did it for Grandad,” I try to explain, shrimp cocktail dripping off me. “You wouldn’t give him the funeral he wanted, so . . .”

“He didn’t want a bloody funeral, he wanted a circus,” she snaps. “It was ridiculous what he was asking for. Do you know how hard today was for me, Jody?”

“Yes.”

Mum sighs angrily. Mum sighs angrily a lot. “Sighs angrily” is usually followed by “rubs eyes wearily” and “frowns exasperatedly.” She’s had a lot to sigh angrily about lately, I suppose. Money worries a-go-go. My alleged drug addiction. Dad gambling away our mortgage. My fourteen-year-old sister Halley’s Internet buddy Liam turning out to be
not
the boy from One Direction but a fifty-year-old truck driver named Sid.

“It was very hard.” She’s going to cry, I think. I can see the water pooling in her eyes. “First your father, then the accident, bloody local newspapers on our doorstep, and now this. How much more humiliation do you think I can take?”

“Probably not much more,” I say, before realizing that she probably didn’t expect an answer to that.

And then she starts crying. And I feel the deep twist of dread inside me.

“He’d have loved it, Mum. He would.”

She goes to step away from me, then steps back, but doesn’t look me in the eye.

“You go and apologize to Donna and Vic. Then you go home, you get the wet vac out of the utility room, you bring it here, and you clean this room from top to bottom. And don’t even think you’re going to that concert tomorrow. Don’t even think about it.” Every word looks like it hurts her to say it, and just as she turns away, a tear drops from her face and onto the carpet.

• • •

It’s late when I finally get back home from cleaning the Torrance. Me and Mum have another bust-up of egg-frying proportions and she goes all giraffe angry (i.e., when her neck gets all long and her eyes get all big) about me always siding with Grandad, never with her. And then I go and drop the f-bomb and tell her to f-off to her face. I don’t mean to, it just leaps out of my mouth.

She rips up my Regulators concert ticket and my life officially ends right there.

I can’t think straight. I can’t see straight. There’s a festival of frustration in my head and the unfairness of it all just blinds me. I decide to leave home. I pack my rucksack with essentials — clothes, some Stephen Kings, my current Jackson sketchbook, toothbrush, the eBay shirt released from its frame on the wall — and leave her a note on the hallway table. It just says “Gone to Mac’s. Bye.”

Mac’s waiting tables when I step through the main door of the Pack Horse, but he yells over to his mum that he’s “taking five” and helps me up to the back bedroom with my stuff. The room’s rarely used as a bedroom since it’s hidden away at the back of the pub’s living quarters, so Mac’s dad, Teddy, uses it to stash his massive collection of DVDs, and Mac’s two-year-old sister, Cree, uses it as her playroom.

Cree’s a proper cutie — blonde and blue-eyed, just like Mac before he went black-haired and blue-streaked on his seventeenth birthday. Some afternoons he brings her into the day-care center where I work and she’s usually all over me, but not today. She can tell I’ve been crying. For a while she just sits on Mac’s lap, eyeing me warily. Then Mac whispers in her ear and she crawls across the bed to where I’m sitting and gives me a hug. She even does a little
pat-pat
on my shoulder as if to say, “There, there.”

She’s ready for bed and has not long had her bath. Her hair smells like marzipan.

“Thanks, Cree,” I say, hugging her in.

She pulls back and looks up at me with her big blues. “Why you crying?”

“I’m just sad, that’s all.”

“Are you going to get dead?”

“No.”

“Why you crying?”

“I’m just sad, that’s all.”

“Dody be sad?”

“Yeah.”

“I got a doctor case.”

“Go and get it, then, and we’ll play doctors.”

She scooches straight off the bed and runs down the corridor.

“You don’t have to play with her,” says Mac. “I can say there’s a ghost in the wardrobe or something.”

“It’s OK,” I say, picking at a loose thread on the top sheet. “I like being in Cree’s little world. Anything not to be in mine at the moment.”

“You did what you thought Charlie would have wanted. OK, it was insane and stupid and you’ve probably caused hundreds of quids’ worth of damage but that’s just what you do, isn’t it?”

Mac’s talking from experience. He’s been there more than once when I’ve done something stupid and caused hundreds of quids’ worth of damage, and he’s usually the one to either apologize on my behalf, mop up, or carry me home. He’s more like my social worker than my best friend. If it weren’t for him, I’d either be paraplegic, pregnant, or dead by now.

“Mum hates me even more now,” I mumble.

“She doesn’t hate you. She just . . . doesn’t get you. She didn’t really get Charlie, either, did she? She wasn’t like you two peas in a pencil case.”

I nod. “The day after he died, she boxed up all his stuff. His books, his bongs, his clothes. Boxed it all up for the thrift shop.”

“You never told me that.”

“I got up in the middle of the night, took most of it back out again, and hid it in the garage. That’s still his stuff. She just wants to forget he was there. Bloody china ornaments on the windowsill where his bongs used to be. Bloody paint samples on the mantelpiece,
two
days after.
Peach
. Halley’s going to help her paint the living room. Mummy and golden baby together. Won’t that be peachy? I don’t even get a vote.”

Mac flops back on the bed so the hem of his white waiter’s shirt rides up a little on his stomach. He reaches his hand out and gives mine a quick squeeze. This would have been weird if we were in a soap opera and would have probably led to a momentous kiss, but Mac’s not into me, not like that. I think he’s gay but we never talk about it. He’s still in the closet.

We hear whining out in the corridor. Alfie the Alsatian saunters past the open door with a pink plastic stethoscope in his jaws. Cree’s running after him with her pink plastic doctor case.

“Alfie tooked it! Alfie tooked it!” she shrieks at us.

“Alf! Drop it!” Mac shouts and the dog immediately drops the stethoscope. Cree grabs it and comes back in to set up her little hospital on my bed. “Let’s talk about tomorrow. Big day. What time do you want to leave for Cardiff?”

“I can’t go now, can I?”

“What? I thought death itself wasn’t going to stop you from going to that concert. You’re not going to let your mum stop you going, are you?”

“No choice. She tore up my ticket. I’ve been on a diet for that concert and everything. Now I just want to eat until I puke.”

“I’m sick of saying it — you don’t need to diet.”

“I do. I’m way too big for —”

“For what? Do
not
say for Jackass Gatlin.”

“Well, he went out with that model, didn’t he, and she’s tiny. I should have stopped eating about four hundred pounds ago.” I can see Mac’s mouth grow wider and his eyes bulge like he’s just seen an apparition walk through the wall behind me. He can’t believe what I’m saying. A few months ago,
I
wouldn’t have believed it, either. But ever since I saw Jackson with that twinkly model, and read that article about his “type” of woman, I knew it would never be someone like me. I wasn’t size two. I wasn’t blonde. I wasn’t twinkly. But I could be. For Jackson. I would do anything for Jackson.

“What are you talking about? You. Are. Not. Fat. I just don’t get it. So what, you think if you stick your fingers down your throat, Jackson’s gonna fall totally in luurve with you, is he?”

“Maybe. Nobody as good-looking as Jackson would date anyone above a size minus zero.”

I help Cree into her little white doctor’s coat. Mac hates it when I’m down on myself, which is pretty much all the time. It doesn’t matter how many times he tells me I’m not fat, or how many times he shoves me into a dressing room in Topshop and urges me into clothes that aren’t black to “bring out my inner goddess,” I still think he’s kidding himself. When I see the same face and lank brown hair and freckles in the mirror, I just want to smash it. Since Grandad died, it’s got worse. He used to say my freckles were “an extra sprinkle of sweetness.” But they’re not. They’re just not.