The Last Days of Jack Sparks (25 page)

‘Jack!’ comes the cry from back across Sunset. ‘Jack?’

I didn’t walk away to make Bex follow me. I did it because walking away is what I do. There was a time in my life when I managed to stop doing this – while tracking down and interviewing gang members for a book, for instance, and having guns and knives pulled on me – but it was only really for my benefit. Big social issues to make me look bigger and more important. I’ve never cared about gangs. Or, for that matter, about magicians being set on fire in the Dominican Republic, people blaming homosexuality on demons, anorexic Filipino girls being killed by botched exorcisms or any of that stuff I mentioned.

I’ve never cared about anyone who isn’t Jack Sparks.

There’s a smoking pit where my empathy should be.

Last summer, my life took a turn. Ever since, I’ve been at odds with myself, because the system I built no longer offers what I need. I knew the only way I could kick drugs would be to write
Jack Sparks on the Supernatural
.

You don’t understand and I can’t expect you to. I haven’t explained myself properly, not yet.

By the time Bex catches up, I’ve locked myself in our hotel room’s bathroom.

She sounds equal parts pissed off and confused. ‘Since when do you go off on me like that? You back on the powder, or what?’

‘Yes, I am,’ I say, pulling the two-gram wrap from its zipped partition in my wallet. ‘And I’m going to do a shitload more.’

‘God, so all that rehab was for nothing? I only said I quite liked that guy – what’s it got to do with you anyway?’

I use my Amex to separate a bump of coke from the rest, then chop it up beside the sink.

I slice lines as Bex questions me through the door. Her voice fades, even as it rises in pitch. I just focus on the powder. It’s really good to focus. These days, my thoughts are so conflicted that I’m coming apart. I want to fire my brain into orbit and leave everything else at ground level.

Two snowbound airport runways await my attention on the porcelain. I tug a dollar bill from the wallet and roll it up.

Bex’s yell manages to register. ‘Jack!
What exactly is your problem?
’

I growl and sling the dollar tube in the sink. Leaving the coke behind, I unlatch the door and fling it open in one motion. Bex takes a few steps back, tense, ready for anything. When I see her fear, it neutralises the verbal burns I wanted to inflict. I hold the door frame and fumble for words, for the right accusation.

‘You don’t even remember what happened last night, do you?’ I say. Off her reaction, which looks disturbed and uncertain, I add, ‘Or are you just so bloody ashamed?’

At first Bex seems to rack her brains for what I’m talking about. But that’s not it. She’s assessing the situation and girding herself.

I must suddenly look as vulnerable as I feel, because she walks to me. I flinch as she places both hands on my hips. Such human contact feels strange. Nice strange. Great strange. Her hands stay in place as her eyes meet mine.

‘I thought
you
forgot,’ she says.

And then we’re kissing. Deep, unleashed.

Hands on buttons and zips.

A blitzkrieg of the senses.

I’m not going to describe anything else that happens tonight. As a member of the YouPorn generation, you can imagine it yourself. But most importantly, my work has already exploited this woman enough.

Yes, let me get the truth about Bex down. I’m far beyond caring what Erubis Books thinks about me saying this.

I’ve never been in love with Bex.

Lust, yes, love, no.

From the moment five years ago when we met and she moved in, my balls have done the thinking. But I knew it would make a better story if I loved her too. I also thought it would be better if she was a fitness instructor rather than . . . oh God . . . rather than whatever it is she actually does.

I knew I was an egotistical prick. I also knew that people might tolerate me more if I showed a softer side, even if it didn’t exist. So I wrote my fake unrequited love for Bex into
Jack Sparks on a Pogo Stick
and people responded well. Almost too well. Most of the Amazon reviews ignored all the sweat and the painfully compacted vertebrae I’d suffered for that dumb road trip, and wrote instead about me and Bex. About how they wanted to see if we’d ever get it together. People lapped that stuff right up, even if they didn’t normally buy the kind of books I wrote. At book signings, guys asked if I’d shagged her. Girls asked if they could be her friend.

So I kept the thread going through the books that followed. If I was dating someone else, I struck it from the record. Even if we had slept together, I wouldn’t have said so in my books. Because then the whole will-they-won’t-they appeal would die. We journalists eliminate whatever dilutes our chosen story, while keeping – or adding – what makes it pure. When Bex dated other guys, I became Yearning Jack in the pages of
Jack Sparks on Gangs
, then Heartbroken Jack in
Jack Sparks on Drugs
. Most readers believed Bex was the cause of my drug rampage, which was a great way for me to cover up the real reason.

There’s no question that I
should
have been in love with Bex. And I always loved her as a person and as a friend. But my overriding urge has been to fuck her brains out. The more unobtainable she was, the more she became an achievement I wanted to unlock. A VIP lounge I could never access. Yeah, grim. I used her as a character in my work to cast me in a more favourable light. Because if someone as funny and cool as Bex gave me the time of day, even to the extent of living with me, then how bad could I be? Thank God Bex didn’t read those books, or she might have been creeped out by this flatmate who seemed so smitten.

I’ve never felt capable of love, or really understood it. My dad laid down the template: never look back. Move on, cold as Christmas. Don’t get tied down, don’t even think about what you’re leaving behind.

In the cavernous archives of my mind, my dad is the faintest presence. Barely a shadow. Sometimes I catch an evocative smell or feel a resonance I suspect is linked to him, because I can’t place it anywhere else. Or I’ll detect negative character traits in myself that I can’t ascribe to Mum. But that’s it.

Oh, he tolerated having one kid – especially a golden boy like Alistair. But when the second screaming bag of shit and piss popped out, I was the straw that broke his back. Rationally, I may now suspect that’s not the whole truth, but emotionally it’s too late. I’m programmed. You can rationalise a baseball bat, but it still drastically changes the shape of your head.

Three years, eight months and seventeen days after I was born, Dad stole off towards the sunset, never to be seen again, at least not by us. Mum burned all photos of him on the garden barbecue when I was four. I still remember how that smoke smelt and what it did to the back of your throat.

I swear my first memory is the noise our mum made the day she realised her husband wasn’t coming back. She locked herself in their bedroom and made these slaughter noises. The sound of animals being carved up alive.

Alistair and I were in the living room, hearing all this. I was too young to understand what was going on, but I clearly remember him giving me this
look
before he went off to knock on the door and see if Mum was okay.

Oh God, that look.

Hear that?
it said.
Do you hear our mother howling her head off? You made that happen. You’re the reason our dad left.

This baseball bat is my earliest memory.

Family life only rode downhill after that. There were some good times, but mostly Alistair resented me, and I suppose I resented the extra time he’d had with Dad. One night, when Mum had sunk a bottle of red, she yelled through my bedroom door, saying how she wished she’d never had me. I was seven.

I could barely remember Dad’s face, but apparently I didn’t need to. All I had to do was look in the mirror. Naturally, out of me and Alistair, I had to be the one who resembled him.

And my mother could barely look at me.

I was all those barbecued photographs made flesh, back to haunt her.

Inside this howling body tube, this roaring tunnel of moulded white plastic, there’s far too much peace. Way too much alone time.

Can nothing be done to make an MRI scanner less of a coffin?

Last night, I didn’t have the Maria dream. I didn’t wake until the morning, with Bex’s bare heat curled around me. Happiness has been a stranger for some time, but this morning he and I were on nodding terms.

Those fat lines of coke called my name from the bathroom sink. With one sweep of my hand and a spin of the tap, I washed them down the plughole. Straight away I felt the addict’s pangs of regret, but I’m determined to straighten up. To gain true perspective on everything. It’s time to stop taking the easy way out.

So here I am. Doing what the doctor ordered, with a rubber panic-bulb in one hand. Wanting, needing to rule out the possibility that something’s wrong with my brain. But a full-body scanner is a tough place for a man who likes to forget. All I can think about in here, in the grip of cocaine withdrawal, are bad memories and death. Guilt and shame.

Last summer. Alistair becoming more terse with each new voicemail.

‘Jack, I really think you should come back to me.’

‘Jack, I don’t know what you’re doing, but we need to talk.’

‘Jack, what the hell’s wrong with you?’

Endless emails from him too, most of which I ignore. Some of which I read through slow ketamine eyes. Fast cocaine eyes. Heavy-lidded bong eyes, on the other side of the cosmos.

Delete, delete, delete.

The nurse’s soft voice mercifully interrupts. She speaks into my headphones from out there in the world of the living. ‘You’ll feel a scratch on the back of your hand. Just a little imaging solution, as we discussed.’

If there’s a hell, it’s full of people locked in coffins, alone with their thoughts and their worst memories.

My mother sitting at a slatted wooden garden table. Her hand shaking as she lights a cigarette.

Me, driving through rain, Alistair yelling abuse.

As a needle pricks my vein, I start to freak inside this cacophonous tomb. I want to squeeze the panic-bulb. I want the Zippo, but it’s in the jacket I was told to remove.

The nurse must spot my restless, twitching feet, because she returns to my ears: ‘Just another twenty minutes, Mr Sparks. Please, try to go to your happy place.’

I don’t think I have a happy place. This possibility makes me ache.

I try to imagine sitting on a beach. Which, given the noise levels, inevitably becomes a beach next to a construction site.

I change channel to sit in a noisy pub with unlimited free drinks and multiple lines of cocaine chopped out on the bar. I imagine being loaded, buzzed up, feeling like The Man.

That doesn’t do the job either. Which cranks my anxiety, until I realise a pub is not my happy place – it’s my escape route.

Bex’s face takes centre stage. No beach, no bar, just our Brighton flat. We’re on the big fat yellow sofa. She holds my hand and stares into my eyes, then tells me everything’s all right.

Through the year of
Drugs
and beyond, Rebecca Lawson has been my anchor. My flesh-and-blood cocaine.

But how I’ve used her. I’ve seen her, over the years, as a body to be conquered, as a crutch, as someone to manipulate.

I’m going to make it all up to her.

Hey, maybe this could be something solid, something secure.

Maybe, even if I can’t feel love, this could be an actual, proper relationship.

‘Thank you very much for coming in,’ says Roger Corman. I’m literally on the edge of my seat in his San Vicente Boulevard office, wondering what he’s about to tell me.

When I came out of the med centre, unsure how to feel about the three-day wait for results, I was surprised to find a voicemail from Corman’s PA, asking if I was available to meet. I phoned back fast. The octagenarian is a legend in independent film-making, having been responsible for over four hundred movies, which often tick the horror genre box, like
Piranha
(1978) and
Children of the Corn
(1984). He gave the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Jack Nicholson their first breaks. He’s also a marketing genius, hailing from that generation that really knew how to use trailers to sell a picture, regardless of whether everything in those trailers was in the finished article.

In person, he’s genial and dapper in a black suit and white shirt. His New Horizons Picture Corporation was one of the companies I’d emailed about the video, but the only one that has asked me in for a meet. Everyone else has now responded, on the phone, by email or in person, with variations of ‘No, we did not make the video, you gigantic freak.’

After all this searching, will it turn out that Roger Corman shot the damn thing?

‘I’d like to discuss this YouTube video with you,’ he says across his desk, voice soft. He’s writing notes on a yellow legal pad. Reading upside down, I can see the capitalised heading ‘GHOST VIDEO’.

I grip the arms of my chair as he says, ‘This thing has gained a great deal of hits on YouTube. It’s a very powerful piece of film-making, don’t you think?’

I can control myself no longer. ‘Did you make it?’

‘Oh,’ he says, with a chuckle. ‘Oh. I was about to ask you the same thing.’

What I feel here is a bizarre relief. ‘No, I kind of found it. Or it found me. Someone put it on my YouTube account.’

‘I see. So you don’t own the rights to it?’

‘No.’

We keep talking for a while, but I can tell that, from Corman’s point of view, the meeting has already served its purpose.

Reading that legal pad upside down, I see he’s written ‘PUBLIC DOMAIN???’

* * *

I stride into the Culver City experiment room with my head held high. Buoyed by a weird combination of sex, Roger Corman and the death of a recurring dream.

All the way here, I’ve pep-talked myself. I can’t control all the bad things I’ve done these last few years, but I can control what I do
now
.