Rockoholic (22 page)

Anyway, Mac figures we didn’t need to send off the pictures to every single website and newspaper in the world — just a couple of sources will do. So we choose the
National Sunday Press
, the one tabloid that my mum gets because she likes the word quiz, and Loose Lucy.

“We’ll e-mail them the photos now. That way it’ll be on Loose Lucy’s site ASAP, and hopefully we can catch tomorrow’s edition of the
Sunday Press
,” says Mac.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t send it to more places, though?” I ask him.

“No, it’s big enough. Trust me. Only takes one match . . .”

“What?”

“Like that song.” He then proceeds to sing it.
“Only takes one tree to make a thousand matches, takes one match to burn a thousand trees!”

Mac keeps singing at full voice but I still don’t get what he’s on about. And I don’t actually need to. By midnight, not only does the
National Sunday Press
website have our pictures, but Chaos Theory, and its whip-cracker Captain Chaos, is all over it.
MISSING ROCK STAR LIVING LA DOLCE VITA!

By 2:16
A.M.
, it’s on the news crawl on the BBC.
MISSING SINGER SEEN IN ITALY.
By 2:39
A.M.
, it’s on CNN in America.
ROCK STAR JACKSON GATLIN SIGHTED. PHOTO EVIDENCE.
Everyone is going with the same story.

“I can’t believe it!” screeches Mac as we scroll through each website in turn in his dressing room at the Playhouse later that morning. Jackson’s in Italy. It’s official. Probably.

10:14
A.M.
— message board of the official Regulators site —
GATLIN IN AUSTRIA.

10:29
A.M.
— message board of Chaos Theory —
GATLIN GOES GREEK
.

10:31
A.M.
— message board of The Regulators’ Facebook fan page —
IS THIS JACKSON ON THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA?

10:46
A.M.
— a scratchy phone video of Jackson on YouTube, running away down a street with a brown-haired girl. The comments below the clip are all asking where it was taken and the video sneak is saying it’s in the West Country but, much to my delight, no one believes it. They’re all calling the video a fake. Bargain! “You can’t possibly tell it’s him,” says Mac, swigging back a lukewarm mug of honey water. “At least on our photos there’s no denying it
is
definitely him.”

“But the more theories, the less people will believe he’s still in England. He can lay low.”

“No he can’t, Jode,” says Mac. “He can’t stay in your garage forever now that he’s clean.”

I stare at him. His eyes are still and furiously blue like Jackson’s. “He’s only
just
clean, Mac. It’s not safe yet. If he goes now, he’ll be a sitting duck. Grohman sounds like a monster.”

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know,” I snap, getting up and pacing Mac’s dressing room. I go to his clothes rail and run my hand along the sleeve of his black velvet costume.

“You want him to stay, don’t you? You’ve got used to him being here and you’re hoping for cozy little chats about art and all that,” says Mac, actually reading my brain.

There’s a knock on the door. A short, bald man in red trousers, yellow blazer, and bow tie pokes his head round. Geoffrey, director of NAOS.

“Mac, come on, son, we need another run-through while we’ve got Ann here. She’s got to be back at her job by two for the afternoon shift.” He disappears again, slamming the door.

“Why’s he so antsy?” I ask Mac, who snaps down the lid of his laptop and marches over to his costume rail to rummage for his Nikes, puffing flames. “Sorry. I’ll get out of your way.”

“No, it’s not you. Got to do my bloody scene with Ann Rackham now.”

“Don’t you like her?”

“She’s OK. But her mustache doesn’t half itch.”

• • •

At home, Mum’s ironing in front of an omnibus episode of
Jeremy Kyle
entitled “He Dumped Me During Sex and Now I Want My Kidney Back.” After a brief conversation where I reinforce the fact Mum doesn’t need to scrape the meat out of the chicken and mushroom pie she’s bought for dinner, I tell her I’m going out to the garage for a bit.

“You’re spending a lot of time out there lately,” she says as I’m going out the door.

I stop dead. Oh. She’s noticed. Of course she has. I guess I was hoping that between working, shopping, and dealing with Grandad’s will stuff she wouldn’t have. She does still live here after all and I am always out there — even in the middle of the night. She must hear. It’s not that big a house. I look at her.

She folds over Halley’s school shirt on the ironing board and does the other side. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I’m not snooping.”

“Painting,” I say, without thinking at all about it. “I’ve . . . turned it into an art studio.” Where did
that
come from? Sometimes the best excuses just pop right out, like really ripe zits.

“Oh,” she says, settling the iron down. “Right.”

“Grandad suggested it ages ago. Do you mind?” I feel I should ask.

She shakes her head and folds the shirt over again to do the collar. “No, I think that’s a lovely idea. Glad you’re making use of it.”

“Thanks,” I say, making to leave again, but again, she stops me with a statement.

“That’ll be your space. I’ll make sure Halley keeps out as well. We won’t go in there.”

And I know she means it. “OK. Thanks, Mum.” I better do some art and get it out there soon, attempt to decorate my lie at least.

In the kitchen, I’m waylaid by the fridge, where I grab Jackson one of Mum’s homemade pasties, some cooked sausages from the fridge, and an apple juice. He’s asleep when I get in the garage. I shake his shoulder.

“Mmugh?” he mumbles.

“I’ve got some news,” I say, kneeling down next to him.

“Oh yeah?” He wakes up a bit more and levers himself onto his elbows.

I place the pasty and the plate of sausages on the carpet beside his head. “The story took.”

“The Italy thing?”

“Yep. Most of the gossip websites have got hold of it, and the news channels. They all say you’re in Italy. They’re all showing the photo. They
had
to believe it, didn’t they?”

“Yeah.” He seems shocked. He sits up fully, blinks his eyes wider, and leans against the wall. His eyes are droopy and shadowed. He looks in pain.

“This is good news, Jackson. It means the journalists will stop poking around England. For now, anyway.”

“They won’t stop,” he says croakily and clears his throat. “This’ll just invite more theories, more sightings.” He closes his eyes and rubs them. “I’m just so sick of it all. I’ll be like some ghost who people will keep saying they’ve seen. Like Elvis or Cobain. People will be trying to contact me on Ouija boards.”

“Well you don’t have to answer them, do you? Why worry about it? Besides, you’re not exactly Elvis or Kurt Cobain. . . .” I stop myself. OMG, he’s going to throw the sausages at me. “I mean, they’re legends and you’re . . .” He’s going to stick them in my ears.

He looks at me. “I didn’t mean I’m like them. Who is, for God’s sake? I just meant, when people don’t get a satisfactory answer to something, they make shit up. They’ll still write fiction about me. Where I am, what I’m doing. And who even cares, right? Who the hell am I?”

“You’re Jackson Gatlin,” I say. And then I realize he was probably being rhetorical. Mac had to explain this to me once as I kept giving him answers to questions he didn’t want answering and he got all annoyed and told me he was “being rhetorical.”

“Yeah and who’s Jackson Gatlin, huh? That wasted singer who can’t go onstage unless he’s had X amount of pills and X amount of compliments.”

“No. That’s not you. You’ve forgotten who you are, that’s all.”

“Oh, that’s all? I know who I am, Jody. You reminded me when you called me an asshole and poured the coffee in my face. . . .” He rubs the back of his head. “Ah, shit.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Did I bang my head?”

“Uh, yeah. We dropped you down the stairs. We were taking you for a bath last week.”

“You gave me a
bath
?” He laughs. “Why don’t I remember that? Jeez, I remember other stuff. The river and the coffee. And breaking the drums. You should have let me rot, Jody. You should have pushed me in that river and let it be.”

I get up and walk to the door.

“Where are you . . . ?”

I’m already halfway up the yard, heading into the kitchen and up the stairs. In my room, I root through drawers for my finished sketch pad and then run back downstairs, as quietly as I can.

Jackson looks up as I reenter the drum room. “Jody, what happened then? Why did you . . . ?”

I sit down cross-legged and present him with the page of my sketchbook I was trying to find. “You’ve just forgotten who you are. Maybe this will jog your memory.” The sketch is copied from an article about The Regs’ debut album,
Needful Things
. The original picture was of Jackson and the band sitting beneath this beautiful pink tree, all wearing checkered shirts and boots with no laces. My sketch is just of Jackson, but closer up. He takes it from me and studies it.

“You did this?”

“Yeah. I never thought you’d be the first person I’d show it to.”

“You trace it or something?”

“No, well, I copied it. It’s from the —”

“The
Rolling Stone
picture? Yeah, I know. It’s unbelievable.”

I feel my cheeks burn. “I only copied it. I just really love that picture. You look happy.”

“I
was
happy. The band was just starting out. It was all so new. That tree’s a sakura.”

“A saka-what-a?”

“Cherry blossom tree. We went to this signing in Sukagawa, Japan.
Rolling Stone
was there and they wanted to do this interview underneath it. The whole angle of the piece was this kind of ‘we’re a new band just starting out’ thing. This tree was one of like a thousand that had been donated by a neighboring country they’d forged trade links with. It was its first flowering. Kind of a ‘new band growing, new tree growing’ kinda thing.”

“Oh, right,” I say, just about getting the link.

“I sat under that tree every night, wrote some lyrics under it. I had nothing but that tree for company at the end of every day, every single day. It felt like this strange, sheltering friend.”

His words “strange, sheltering friend” circle around my head. I love the way he puts things.
Strange, sheltering friend.
Like me, I suppose. “Why didn’t you hang out with the band?” I ask.

“I did, sometimes. I’ve lost a lot of weight since then.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Too much.”

“You liked me when I was fat?” he says, incredulous.

“I just don’t like seeing you unhappy. Even though it’s kind of comforting cos it reminds me I’m not alone.” My cheeks blaze. “Sorry.”

He smiles, flicking through the other sketches in the book — other ones of him. His face. His eyes. His burning-rose tattoo. “I always wanted to be famous. But now, ugh. I can’t turn it off. The other guys just seem to deal with it. Girls screaming in their faces until they throw up. Photographers climbing their fences. Breaking into their houses.”

“That’s awful. Why do they have to do things like that?”

“D’you buy the magazines with those pictures in them?”

“Yeah.”

His eyebrows flick up. “That’s why they do it. It comes with the job. I just don’t know how to love it.”

“You shouldn’t
have
to love
that
,” I say, all at sea for any other worthwhile comment.

“It’s in my contract to love it. I see ’em lining up for
American Idol
auditions in Chicago. They’d give their right arm to have my life. My fame. Well, they can have my fame and keep their right arm. All you see is fake. It’s Auto-Tuned, airbrushed acting. You don’t see all the crap that goes on in between. I’m told what to wear, how to speak, how to sing, where to sleep, who to be seen with. I’m even told what to eat — ‘Be a vegetarian today, Jackson. Be a vampire tonight, Jackson. The fan girls’ll love it.’ We don’t ever stop touring. I hate it. But I’m stuck in it.”

“Why don’t you leave?” I say, thinking maybe he hasn’t thought of it.

“Yeah, ’cause that’d be easy. Since Grohman took over, it’s been all about the money. Gotta do these shows, gotta sing these songs in this order. Sometimes I sing something I wanna sing. No music, just me and the crowd. Usually ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’”

“My grandad loved that song. I wish I’d heard you sing it in Cardiff.”

“I rock at it. It’s my favorite part of the show, because it’s my moment. No one tells me to do it. I just do it and the crowd loves it. Sometimes I do ‘I Want to Break Free.’ Royally pisses Grohman off. It’s all about The Regulators brand to him — he doesn’t care a dime about me, none of them do. In fact, it’s fine by him if I’m doped to the gills. Then I can’t answer back.”

“So what was all that diva stuff before, with me, then?” I say, pulling my knees up to my chest. “You were ordering me about left, right, and center. You seemed to enjoy that.”

He frowns and then breathes out, like the breath could fill a canyon between us. “I probably thought you were a runner. I’m used to ordering them around. Grohman employs them to hang off our coattails. Before you even say you’re thirsty, there’s a latte in front of you, that kind of thing.”

“Bargain,” I say. “I’d love that.”

He scratches his chin. I hear whiskers grinding against his nail. “It’s all over. Getting in the van, gigging, like we did when we first started, like we were doing when that article was written,
that’s
music.
That
was fun. When we were kids starting out. It was exciting. Now it’s all costumes and sales figures and security guards and what the record company wants. I’ll probably end up Paso Dobling against Chachi from
Happy Days
on
Dancing with the Stars
. . . .”

I chuckle. “You’ve got money, success. Millions of women adore you.”

He looks up at me. “Why? I mean, seriously, what is it about me you all love so much?”