Spurt (25 page)

Sampson, meanwhile, was looking at Jack in complete awe of what had just happened. Not that Jack had long to savour it. Neville pushed past him and was hobbling out of the bungalow.

Reese reached after him. ‘Dude, are you sure you’re okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ he grumbled. ‘I fell off the ferris wheel at the opening of Sultana World World and lived to tell the tale. I think I can cope with a black eye. I’m a man.’ He drew himself as tall as he could. ‘A red-blooded, stout-hearted
man
.’

Vivi took out her phone. ‘We’ll call you a taxi.’

‘Yes please,’ whimpered Neville. He limped gingerly down the bungalow steps and headed down the side passage to the front of the house.

Jack and Vivi and the others followed after him.

‘Tidy work, stepping in to save Sampson’s bacon,’ Vivi whispered.

‘Yeah,’ said Jack. He glanced back at Sampson, who was dawdling behind them, looking sheepish. ‘I thought I’d finally found a way of making the “late bloomer” thing pay off. Your plan was better.’

Vivi shrugged. ‘Better. But not as brave. Anyway, he never would have pressed charges. Not unless he was willing to explain to the police what he was doing at your house.’

Reese leant over to Jack. ‘Dude.
Sexting
? Really?’

Jack nodded. ‘Being a weirdo pervert runs in the family, I guess.’

‘You’re not
that
much of a weirdo pervert,’ said Darylyn.

It was one of the nicest things anyone had said to Jack in a long time.

Philo frowned at his phone. ‘This stupid thing doesn’t even
have
a sexting button.’

Ahead of them, Neville paused briefly at the window to Jack’s old room. It was dark inside. Jack figured his mum and Hallie were still at the hospital, dealing with the fallout from Marlene’s hormonal rampage.

Vivi reached down and picked up the roses Jack had trodden on earlier. Jack picked up the smashed phone, then turned to the mayor. ‘Why
were
you sneaking around out here, anyway?’

Neville reached out for the crushed flowers, staring sadly at them for a moment. ‘Marlene and I were supposed to meet at the river for a moonlight picnic. We’ve been texting and talking for months, ever since I came and spoke at one of her retirees’ lunches. But she never arrived. She’s been so
unlike
herself lately. Typing her messages in capital letters, that kind of thing.’

Philo nodded. ‘It was probably the side effects. You know, from the tes–’

Jack was about to tackle Philo to the ground when the side passage was flooded with light as a car pulled into the driveway. The sound of the car engine rumbled away into silence and the headlights flicked off. Jack’s eyes adjusted to the darkness again.

It was his mum’s car. With his gran in the front passenger seat.

Jack and the others spilled out of the side passage and into the carport. Neville limped out after them.

‘Mum!’ said Jack. ‘Gran!’

‘Marlene!’ Neville cried.

Adele stepped out of the car, looking exhausted. Marlene sat frozen for a moment, a dressing on her forehead, her hair sticking out in all directions.

She looked like a lipsticked werewolf on the morning after a full moon.

‘Jack? Shouldn’t you be at the festival?’ Adele noticed the mayor standing next to Jack and the others. ‘Wait a minute, why is – ?’

But before Adele could say anything more, Marlene had burst out of the car like a freshly cuffed perp trying to make a break for it. She’d seen the mayor too – and was tearing straight towards him.

‘No!’ Jack cried.

Marlene pounced on Neville in what seemed to be a doomed attempt to wrap her legs around his waist. His legs instantly buckled underneath him and they both toppled backwards. Neville’s skull was about to hit the concrete for the second time that night when Sampson caught him under the arms and lifted the writhing mass of geriatric lust upright. Marlene snapped back to reality and clambered down from Neville again.

Adele looked on in shock. ‘Is someone going to explain why
the mayor
is at our house? And why my mother has just attempted to
grind
him?’

Another flood of headlights washed over them all as a bright-green hatchback pulled into the driveway. Nats and Hallie got out. Jack swallowed nervously. Here he was, face-to-face again with the girl he’d hoped to fool the world into thinking was his girlfriend.

‘Oh my god,’ said Hallie. ‘Is that
Mayor Perry-Moore
?’

Jack racked his brains, trying to think of a clever lie to tell his mum and Hallie about why the mayor had visited Gran – some innocent explanation that would spare Marlene and Neville from having to confess to their telephonic tryst. Because you weren’t supposed to be sexting at sixty. Just like you weren’t supposed to be pubeless at fourteen.

‘Things don’t always happen when they’re supposed to,’ said Jack, shrugging. He turned to Marlene and Neville. ‘You should tell her.’

‘I can’t deal with this,’ said Adele. ‘Whatever’s going on, I don’t want to know about it. I’ve just had to convince a taxi driver not to press charges against my mother for nearly breaking his arm.’

‘I thought he was attacking me.’

‘He was helping you into the taxi.’ Adele glanced at the roses Neville was holding. Her eyes grew wide. ‘Mum, have you been secretly
dating
the mayor?’

Neville put a hand on Marlene’s shoulder. Jack wasn’t sure if he was trying to lend her the strength to be honest, or just trying to keep himself steady after the onset of a mild concussion.

Marlene looked up at Neville, then turned and reached out towards her daughter.

‘Adele,’ she said. ‘Love. We didn’t … I just didn’t think it was fair. For me to be happy. When you …’

Adele covered her mouth with her hand. ‘I am happy,’ she insisted.

Marlene shuffled forward and took Adele in her arms.

Jack relaxed. Everything was out in the open. Everyone could start behaving like grown-ups.

Or at least pretend to.

The next day of the 14th Annual Upland Hot-Air Balloon Festival dawned with a balloon flight over Lake Meridian. Four-wheel drives and minibuses were parked at the terminus of the access road, just beyond the shore. Half a dozen balloons were already in the air, ready to catch the first light of the new day.

Jack and the others had arrived earlier in near darkness, taking a shuttle bus together from the Bernadino Mall. As the dawn lightened, the spindly silhouettes of the scrub trees at the edge of the lake took form against the backdrop of a blue morning sky.

It had been Delilah’s idea to film the morning balloon ride to replace the failed balloon race of the night before. She said they could fudge the details and splice it into yesterday’s footage, and no-one would ever know the difference. But Jack and Sampson had refused to re-run the race for the cameras. They would ride in one balloon, together. Delilah had taken some convincing – it wasn’t the big ending she’d been expecting. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly the ending Jack had been expecting, either.

Sampson and Philo were the first to climb aboard the balloon. It was, Jack noted with relief, a balloon that sported the traditional reverse-teardrop shape, as opposed to looking like a pair of shrivelled grapes or an overblown rocket ship emblazoned with bulging avocados.

There seemed to be little danger of mistaking this balloon’s alternating light-green and dark-green stripes for the furrows and grooves of a giant scrotum.

Reese and Darylyn climbed in after Sampson and Philo. The balloon operator sent a few blasts of heated air up into the balloon.

Vivi turned to Jack. ‘You go first.’

Jack shook his head. ‘No. I’ve done too much cutting ahead lately. After you.’

‘I insist.’

‘So do I.’

Vivi sighed. ‘Look, let’s just get on board. Everyone else is in there already. Why are we arguing about this?’

In the end, Jack went last. He put his foot into the lowest of the zigzagged rungs cut into the side of the basket. Reese, Philo and Sampson helped him over the edge.

As the balloon pilot got ready for take-off, Jack glanced back to the shore. Delilah and her crew looked bleary-eyed and pasty-faced. This was the last piece of filming on their schedule before they flew out of Upland.

Delilah went to tap something into her phone, then screwed up her face in disgust, as though she couldn’t bring herself to even touch the screen.

Jack couldn’t help smirking to himself. Part of the reason Delilah was so reluctant about the ending to Jack’s
Bigwigs
story was that she was still mad about what had happened the evening before. When he’d stormed away from the balloon festival, Delilah’s first instinct had apparently been to go after Jack and chase the drama. But Vivi, Reese and Darylyn knew the score now. They knew Delilah had set Jack and Sampson up against each other. Why she’d done it, they weren’t sure. They’d just known that the last thing Jack needed at that moment was more
Bigwigs
.

Reese had acted first. Noticing that Todd was wearing a Twisted Antlers t-shirt, he managed to hold the crew up for at least ten minutes by launching into an intense discussion about Scandinavian death metal.

Then Vivi, up on the bandstand giving the launch speech, went off script and told everyone at the festival that Delilah and her crew were filming a documentary called ‘Fifteen Minutes of Me’. Anyone who wanted to be on camera could go up and talk about themselves for fifteen minutes.

A crowd circled the camera immediately, trapping Brett like a lone survivor in a zombie movie.

When Delilah took out her phone, apparently determined to get her footage any way she could, Philo whisked it out of her hand and – for reasons known only to Philo – dashed off into the crowd with the phone stuffed down the front of his pants.

Eventually, as the opening night wound down, Delilah had got her crew back. She’d got her phone back too – still operational despite the slightly-more-humid-than-recommended environment it had just been subjected to. Delilah threatened to follow Vivi and the others to Jack’s house when Darylyn whipped out a counter-threat: either Delilah backed down, or they’d all withdraw their consent from the filming that
Bigwigs
had done so far, leaving her with no footage at all.

After everything that had happened, Jack wasn’t sure he deserved to have everyone looking out for him like that. He’d been the opposite of loyal to Vivi, but still they hadn’t ditched him.

Maybe there’d never been any danger of that in the first place.

Jack had imagined the take-off would be a slow and steady rise into the sky, but it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like they were suddenly launched into the atmosphere, either, though. What seemed to happen was that one moment they could feel the ground beneath them, and the next it was gone. When it happened, it took Jack a second to realise they were even airborne.

Jack joined the others at the edge of the basket. Dozens more balloons had lifted off from the ground, all at different altitudes, all sharing the same lifting urge, the same surrender to the wind.

Jack forgot himself for a moment. He wasn’t Jack the Mayor for a Week, or Jack the Bigwig, or even Jack the pubeless weirdo freak-boy. The world suddenly seemed vast and full of possibility. He felt, for that moment at least, the freedom not to be anything or anyone at all.