Rockoholic (32 page)

“The passport, then? His papers?” I eventually splutter out. “You did get the photos? And his new name and . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, Tom Gordon . . .”

“Thomas Gordon.”

Buzzey pulls his gray elastic-waisted sweatpants up from where they have slipped down. “Everything’s in hand. Have ‘Mr. Gordon’ waitin’ at the cab stand outside the library at ten thirty tomorrow night. There’ll be an unmarked white Rover waiting.”

I stammer. “Wh-what do you mean? You said you’d have his papers ready today. You’ve got five thousand quid of my money. . . .”

“Nah, I said it depends what I can sort out, din’t I?”

“You liar, we agreed!”

“Ah, ah, ah,” he says, pointing a finger up to the ceiling. “We never signed nuffin’, did we, darlin’? Now I’ve sorted out the transport side of things, so you’ve paid for that. You get ’im there, to the taxi stand for dead on half ten tomorrow night and Mr. Gordon’ll get his papers from the driver. Right? That’ll get him out of Blighty. Then it’s up to ’im.”

I breathe in, getting the full force of the musty, tangy room smell in my nostrils. “But —”

“Don’t mess me about, sweetheart. You really don’t wanna mess me about.” He leans forward in his chair and spoons in a mouthful of chocolatey water from the bowl. There’s a long wet mark all down the front of his Republic of Ireland shirt. “I’m many things, sweetheart, but I ain’t a liar.”

I’m so frustrated I could chew the arm of his armchair clean off, but I just stand there and do something I haven’t done for years — I stamp my foot. All that money and
NOTHING
to show for it. I remember my dad saying the same thing once or twice before.

• • •

The morning at the BFD’s flat is a long, dark train tunnel, but the afternoon feels like the breakout. It’s definitely a Queen day. In the car going to Weston Park, we blare out “Bohemian Rhapsody” and we all join in singing, with Cree doing the “Scaramouche” bits in her own little way. The day is so much better now it’s almost as though it’s a totally different one, like we’re in a different universe. The sun has painted the sky gold and we sit with our shoes off on the vast green lawn in front of a yellow stone building called the Orangery, rolling a ball for Cree to toddle off and fetch. Every single time one of us rolls it, she squeals and trips and stumbles after it and brings it back, first to Jackson, then to me, then to Mac. But mostly Jackson.

“You all right?” says Mac to me, out of nowhere.

“Yeah,” I say, in that quivery way people do when they’re so not all right.

“You’ve been really quiet.”

“Just thinking about Jackson and stuff. What’s going to happen and stuff. Just stuff.”

“It’ll be all right. We’ll work something out. I’ll learn to sail if I have to and we’ll sail him to some island somewhere.” He laughs.

“You can’t bloody wait to get rid of him, can you?”

His smile drops. “I didn’t mean it like that. . . .”

Cree flops down onto Jackson’s chest as he lies back on the grass, and when he
oomphs
in pretend pain, she giggles and does it again. Today she’s insisted on wearing her pink flower-fairy tutu, her Halloween pajama bottoms, and white sandals. She wouldn’t win any beautiful baby competitions in it, but I wouldn’t want her to, anyway. Jackson, meanwhile, is spending his first day in his black contact lenses, which Cree has just about got used to. He’s wearing all Mac’s last season castoffs — Levi’s, long-sleeve Calvin Klein T-shirt, and a black biker jacket Mac found at the back of his dad’s closet. Styled by Mac, he looks like he’s about to mince down a runway.

Cree is sprawled on Jackson’s chest like a beached jellyfish. He goes to say something to her but she interrupts. “I’m a mickle baby, I am.”

“A what?” he asks, turning his head toward Mac.

“That’s what Mum and Dad call her,” he says. “They didn’t think they could have any more kids. Then one day Mum was serving in the bar, had a pain, and about half an hour later, out popped Creedence.”

Jackson laughs. “Don’t tell me. Creedence Clearwater Revival was playing on the jukebox?”

“Yeah,” says Mac, leaning on his elbows so his white T-shirt is taut across his chest. “‘Green River.’ My dad plays it all the time. And they tell her she’s this miracle baby.”

“Oh, a
miracle
baby. That actually sounds as though it might be true,” says Jackson, looking into Cree’s eyes as she fiddles with a button on his shirt.

She rests her head on his chest. “My can hear the bump-bumps, Dody,” she tells me.

“Good girl.” Jackson frowns and looks over to me. “She can hear your heart,” I tell him.

“Oh,” he laughs. “So I
am
still alive, then.”

We follow rickety flagstone paths into terraced gardens scattered with flowerbeds that are so symmetrical there isn’t a blade of grass out of place. There are ten different gardens at Weston Park, like different rooms in a house. Different gardens to suit different whims or times of day, gardens to picnic in, sit in, read in, look at the hills in. It’s too quiet for me, really. I like noise and a bit more
wah wah
going on. So did Grandad, although the top pond at Weston Park was his favorite place to skinny dip.

“Cree, get down,” Mac calls. She’s trying to climb onto the fountain at the center of the terrace. She kicks off when Mac pulls her back. I wish I could still climb stuff sometimes — you know, trees and walls — like I did as a kid. But you can’t climb when you get to my age. It’s frowned upon. They put spikes on top of everything, anyway. I know this from experience.

We’ve all got things on our minds that afternoon as we sit around a table in the park’s courtyard tearoom. I’m thinking about the five thousand quid I’ve just chucked down the swanney, trying to fathom any possible way that it has gone to a good cause. Mac’s probably thinking about opening night at the Playhouse tomorrow and biting his black fingernails in between bites of scone. Jackson Gatlin, former lead singer of American rock outfit The Regulators, who nearly topped the Billboard chart one year ago with their second album
Strapped for Cash
, is sitting opposite me, delicately spreading clotted cream onto one half of a scone and feeding it to a two-year-old girl sitting on his lap. The last time I was here, sitting in these chairs in this same area of the courtyard, I was looking directly at Grandad and wondering exactly how long he had left with us. I look at Jackson and the same thought crosses my mind.

“It’s nice here,” says Jackson, removing a mushy strawberry from the top of his scone. “Ya know, in America, these are called biscuits. Not sweet ones with strawberries; plain ones. We have them with, like, chicken and gravy.”

“Urgh,” says Mac, swallowing down a large chunk of scone and looking pained.

“Nah, it’s good.” Cree leans forward and takes the spoon out of the jam and tries spreading some more onto her half of the scone. Most of the jam ends up on the tabletop. Jackson still looks awkward with her, but she’s sitting quite happily on his knee like it’s the safest place in the world. He looks at her eating the scone and frowns. “How come you keep missing your mouth, Cree?” he asks her. “She, like, totally keeps missing her mouth.”

“She’s two,” says Mac, scrunching up his napkin and reaching for her. “Come on, Creep, we need to change your diaper.” A full-on head-back tantrum because she wants Jackson to do it is narrowly avoided because Mac’s learned my tactic of immediate distraction. “Look, look, birdies!” he says, pointing up into the sky as they go off toward the toilets. Cree’s squinting skyward and wondering what the hell he’s talking about.

Jackson’s looking at Cree as Mac takes her. I’m looking at Mac’s jeans, wondering how he finds ones that fit his arse so well.

“Cree’s really taken to you,” I say.

“She’s a sweet kid,” he says. “Always thought I’d have a kid someday.”

“You did?”

He nods. “Well, doesn’t everybody when they’re young? You think that’s the way it’s gonna go. Marriage. Kids. It wasn’t meant to be. Never met anyone I really fell for and I can’t seem to give back what they give me.”

“You’re still young. Anyway, what about that model you went out with? That Cassandra . . .”

“God, no. That was a publicity stunt. I just went to the VMAs with her. Grohman
paid
her. The fans don’t actually want me to have a girlfriend, of course, but Frank sets me up with these models every now and again to save face. So I at least appear normal. Engineers a few pregnancy scare stories, just so the album sales don’t drop. Can’t disappoint the fan girls now, can we?”

“What do you mean, you can’t give back what they give you?”

“Love, I guess,” he sniffs. The sight of the mushy strawberry he’s put on the side of his plate is obviously offending him as he drapes his napkin over it, like it’s some dead body at the side of the road. “I don’t really feel love. My therapists all tell me it’s a childhood thing, I don’t know.”

So he hasn’t got attached to me at all. He hasn’t even thanked me for everything I’ve done for him. Not that I’m surprised, I suppose. I don’t think he was actually expecting to be kidnapped, or expecting to thank anyone for kidnapping him, never mind how many hot washes of his clothes I’ve done since he’s lived with me, or how many sandwiches I’ve made him. Or how many coffees I’ve brewed him. Nights I’ve stayed up talking to him. That hasn’t mattered at all.

He smiles and dips his head. “Cree will forget me soon, anyway.”

“She’s not a goldfish. You must care a little bit. About her . . . about me?”

“I don’t miss stuff. I just don’t. I don’t have that thing inside me.”

“What, humanity?” I scoff.

Jackson’s human enough to get the hint that the subject should be changed. “Have you and Mac talked about your little attachment yet?”

I snap myself out of my daydream. He’s still going on about me and Mac and how we should be in a relationship. “Don’t mention it. He’ll be back any minute. You’ll embarrass him.”

Jackson looks around. “I don’t see any sign of him. Haven’t you at least thought about him that way before?”

“Of course I’ve thought about it.”

“Interesting,” he says, sipping his coffee and leaning back in his chair.

“What’s interesting?”

“I just think it’s kinda interesting. You say you don’t get along with your family. You’ve quit your job. No boyfriend. What’s to stay here for? So you could, if you wanted to, come with me. When I go away. Whenever that will be.”

I’m stuck for words. “Where did that come from?”

He shrugs. “You told me in the garage that night that you think of yourself as a lost soul. Like me. You couldn’t give me one thing in your life, now that your grandad’s gone, that makes it worth sticking around here for. You said yourself there’s no future with Mac because he’s gay. And neither he nor Cree is in your family.”

“Don’t rub it in, will you?

“So you want them to be? You love them both?”

“Of course I do . . .”

“You said the last few years have been all about The Regulators. About me, your dream guy. And now I’m giving you the chance to get away from here for good, start a whole new life with me, a whole new persona.”

“I —”

A waitress drops a stack of plates and cutlery, which smashes and crashes to the cobbles below. I jump. Jackson doesn’t even turn around. “Were you just full of it?”

“Full of what?” I reply, annoyed by the loud, over-apologetic clearing up of dropped cutlery and plate fragments.

“Full of shit.” He shrugs, all matter-of-factly, like he knows me better than I know myself. “You say I’m your guy and you’ve built your life around me. You say that concert was the best night of your life.”

“It wasn’t the best night of my life. It was probably one of the worst, actually.”

“Why?”

“Because it was horrible. I queued up all day, got puked on, spat at, crapped on, crushed, to see about three songs, and then my bloody moon rock went missing and you gave it back to me and . . . that was good . . . but then I got dragged off and stamped on and I fainted and hit my head . . . ugh, the whole day was hideous.” My voice gets louder and louder.

An old lady who’s sitting by a table next to us, all hunched over and grumpy like Winston Churchill, turns her wobbly head in our direction and tuts.

Jackson drops his voice to a whisper. “So why did you put yourself through it all?”

“Because I wanted to be at the front. To be close to you. I thought it would . . . I don’t know. Maybe you’d wink at me or something and I’d be more than just a face in the crowd. I did it because I loved you.”

“Loved me? As in past tense loved?”

“Yeah.”

“So when you look at me now, do you love me? Would you go through all that again for me? Would you kidnap me again?”

I’m stuck again, no words will come out, no words will even show up ready to be sent out of my mouth. There’s nothing waiting in the wings.

“No,” I eventually say. “I was hoping for the ‘Grandad and Jimi Hendrix experience.’” He frowns. “I just wanted to meet you. I thought you were going to make everything better.”

The truth was no, he hadn’t made everything better. But he had made things clearer. I know now that I don’t love him anymore. He’s just Jackson to me now. He’s important, but he’s just a guy. What’s that line in that Hugh Grant film where he’s a poor bookseller and she’s this famous actress? She’s just a girl, standing in front of a guy, asking him to love her? Well, I’m just a girl, sitting in front of a rock star, wondering why I bothered.

“It’ll be amazing. We’ll do so much, see so much of the world. It’ll be awesome.”

“I don’t want to come with you,” I say.

“Say again?” he says, leaning forward.

“No offense. But, I don’t want to come with you, when you go. I don’t know why, I just . . . I don’t belong with you.”

“That’s the difference between us. I don’t belong with anyone.”

But where
do
I belong? I wonder.

• • •

We buy some seeds in the shop where we meet up with Mac and Cree.

“You OK?” Mac asks me.

“Why do you keep asking me that?” I snap and then try and laugh it off. “Yes, I’m fine.” My chest squeezes.