Rockoholic

  Frontispiece

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ONE

  F-unreal

  TWO

  Smells Like Teen Bullshit

  THREE

  Get There Early, Curly Wurly

  FOUR

  Too Posh to Mosh

  FIVE

  Stealing the Limelight

  SIX

  Jackson, Too: Fully Loaded

  SEVEN

  Urine for a Treat

  EIGHT

  Softly, Softly, Catch a Junkie

  NINE

  Wacko Jacko

  TEN

  Please Don’t Feed the Diva

  ELEVEN

  Hot Legs, Cold Turkey

  TWELVE

  Dirty Little Secret

  THIRTEEN

  La Deviazione

  FOURTEEN

  The Tally Inn Job

  FIFTEEN

  I’m Just a Poor Boy, Nobody Loves Me. . . .

  SIXTEEN

  Something Comes to Nuffing

  SEVENTEEN

  99 Problems but the Snitch Ain’t One

  EIGHTEEN

  Jody Pothead and the Half-Assed Snail

  NINETEEN

  Dead and Gone

  TWENTY

  Must Hang Sally

  TWENTY-ONE

  The BFD

  TWENTY-TWO

  There Goes My Hero

  TWENTY-THREE

  Cree’s Pond Water Revival

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Between a Rock God and a Hard Place

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Last Famous Words

  EPILOGUE

  The Girl Who Loved

  Permissions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To our local newspaper, my grandad’s death was “a shocking accident that brought Bristol city centre to a standstill.” To my mum, it was humiliation beyond words and a week’s worth of whispers from her colleagues at the bank. To me, it was a sadness that could fill a dry sea.

  And now it’s the funeral and everything’s wrong. My grandad didn’t want people wearing black. He wanted his mourners to come in saris, or wet suits, or grass skirts and hula gear. He wanted a big lavish send-off, too, with female bodybuilders carrying his gold coffin and, to round off the day, cannons firing his ashes into the sky.

  “And I don’t want it called a funeral, either, Jody. Invite people to my Body Barbecue. That sounds much more fun.”

  My mum is all gray skirt-suits and polished shoes, and anything Grandad ever did embarrassed the hell out of her. The announcement in the paper just read, “Funeral of Charles Nathaniel McGee. Donations to Cancer Research UK, no flowers, please.” Everything had to be funereal. F-unreal. That’s how I’ve felt all day.

  And now we’re at the snooty Torrance Lodge for the wake, and Mum and my sister are mingling with Scottish relatives we haven’t seen for decades and trying desperately to find reasons for not being in touch. Several soap-smelling old women have delighted in telling me how I’ve grown up since the last time they saw me, which was probably before I was conceived, and now I’m hiding on the staircase, clutching my sketch pad, out of the way. I’ll let Halley take the brunt of it. She loves the attention. They all think she’s the superstar in the family, anyway, with all her sports medals andOlympic hopes and Duke of Edinburgh awards for community service. I’ve had enough of it. And as my grandad used to tell me . . .

  “If you can’t find anything useful to say, get the hell out of the way.”

  He’d once played drums in a band and had nipple rings and smoked weed and camped out in the mud at the Glastonbury Festival. He used to moon-bathe naked on the roof of his house, and he’d gone bungee jumping and skinny-dipped at the Great Barrier Reef. He loved Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and used to dance around the living room with the mannequin he’d nicked from a skip outside Debenhams department store. He’d wanted heavy metal music and sushi and chocolate fountains at his wake. Not Sarah Effin’ McLachlan and cheap frozen quiche.

  I huddle into the banister, iPod earbuds in, hood up, looking like a poster child for teen angst. I close my eyes and imagine Jackson is singing to me, like I do when I’m trying to get to sleep at night. I imagine he’s lying next to me, his breath on my face as he sings, that he’s stroking my hair. When I open my eyes, Mum’s throwing me one of her disapproving “Why don’t you join in?” glares from the private party room where everyone is chowing down on cheese and ice cream. In the bar next door, five kids, apparently my third cousins, roll balls up and down the snooker table.

  I just go back to sketching Jackson.

  Feet approach. Nike high-tops with blue swooshes. Black skinny jeans. Wallet chain. White graffiti T-shirt. And one of my grandad’s bluest waistcoats. I pluck the earphones out, and shove the sketch pad into my bag.

  “All right, Precious?” says Mac, settling a glass of Coke down next to me on the stairs. “Sorry, I got sidetracked by this old bloke telling me about his prostate. Here you go, Presh.”

  “S’OK, I had Jackson,” I say. He rolls his eyes. Mac’s more into show tunes and Lady Gaga than rock, but he knows The Regulators are the sound track to my life, so he keeps a few of their songs on his iPod, just for me. I don’t have my own iPod, and any cheapo MP3 players I buy usually get knackered or dropped down drains, so I borrow Mac’s. I wind the earbuds around it and hand it back to him.

  “Hang on to it for a bit,” he says. “There’s barely room for my arse in these jeans.”

  “Why d’you wear them, then?”

  “Because, because, because, because, because . . .” he sings. It really bugs me sometimes how he can’t give straight answers. I wonder if that’s a gay thing.

  “I’ve sexed up your Coke,” he says. “Thought you could do with a perk.”

  I shake my head. “I’m not drinking today.”

  “Why? Because of Jackson Gatlin?” he whines sarcastically. Mac doesn’t appreciate my obsession with Jackson. He calls him my “fictional fix.” Because he’s my hero. Because I choose to support Jackson’s newfound teetotalism. Because I spend nearly all my wages on Regulators T-shirts, CDs, and limited-edition DVD box sets of all their South American concerts. Because they’re my band, my sanctuary. Because, because, because, because, because . . .

  “You need something to get you through the day,” he says. “Might freshen you up a bit.”

  “I don’t want it. I want my grandad.” I take the moon rock from my hoodie pocket. I rub it, as though the grandad genie is going to plume out of it. But all I see is him in my head on that last day, sitting in his wheelchair.

  “Don’t Dream It, Be It,” he says. Then he’s gone. Down and down and down. The tray of drinks falls to the pavement. Our foot soles thump down the street. My screams. My fault.

  I feel the rush of tears coming, like water surging up a broken pipe, but Mac sees it, too, and kneels down before me, placing one black-fingernailed hand on my knee.

  “OK, maybe alcohol’s not the best idea,” he says in his serious voice. “It’s OK, come here.” I don’t like Mac’s serious voice. He sounds like a doctor or something. A doctor with spiky black hair with a shock of magpie blue flashed through one side. It smells like lemons, and hugging him is like hugging a warm summer tree.

  “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 d
ay-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.”