Chapter 2 #2
“Carry on, children, don’t mind me,” Rocco said before moving over to one of the beds. He sat with his back against the headboard, in a prime position to watch whatever was about to unfold.
Haley sat up and faced Maca. Her legs were wide open and straddling the coffee table.
She pulled the capsule out of her cunt and stood to go towards Maca.
Dropping to her knees in front of him, she sucked the capsule into her mouth and started to work it in and out while stroking Maca’s obviously hard cock through his shorts.
“Want me to suck your dick, just like I suck this?” she asked him.
He looked at me, then back down to Haley.
“I-I don’t…” He laced his fingers together and pressed them to the top of his head. Closing his eyes, he swayed gently and swallowed hard.
That moment right there was when I should’ve shut things down.
He was young and horny, yet he was also unfocused, swaying on his feet, pumped full of drugs. But despite all that, he knew where his heart laid. He knew he loved Georgia, his English Rose, and as the song said, ‘No bonds could ever tempt him from she.’
And I shit all over that. I took what they had, what he felt for my sister, and kicked it right in the gut. I kicked until it couldn’t breathe―until their love was a crumpled heap on the floor, gasping its last, dying breaths.
All I cared about was the band staying together and making it big. What Sean and Georgia had going on was inconsequential to me … irrelevant. There were plenty of willing women out there, so why get stuck with just one?
“No Haley, I don’t,” he told her, opening his eyes and looking down at her.
“But … I thought you might—”
“Get your fucking hands off me.”
She stood up and turned from him to look first at me, then at Rocco, sitting on the bed.
“Well, you’re no fun, Sean McCarthy. Let’s see if some of what I have here loosens you up a bit.”
She unscrewed the pink tube and just like Rocco did at the bar, she pulled out a small plastic bag full of charlie and shook it in the air.
Rocco pressed play on the boom box and Paul Hardcastle’s ‘19’ began blasting out the speakers.
“On your back, Haley. Serve it up properly, just like I showed you.”
Without a word, Haley was back on the coffee table, tipping the contents of the packet through her cleavage, as far down as her belly button and then over each of her nipples.
“Come and get it, boys,” she said with a giggle.
The music got louder as I looked across to Maca. He looked fucked, and I mean wasted.
“Last hit of the day,” I said.
He gave me a small nod before we both moved to either side of her and started snorting the coke from her tits, cleavage, and belly.
I watched as she grabbed at Maca’s hair, trying to kiss him, but he pulled away and crawled over to the bed.
She started asking me to fuck her, but I stuck my dick in her mouth and let her suck me off instead. I can’t even remember if I came.
Then she was gone. Maca was lying face down across my bed and Rocco was nowhere in sight.
I could hear the Rah Band singing about clouds across the moon and I instantly thought of Georgia.
She loved that song. Ever since we were little kids―whenever we went away, whether it be abroad, or just to my parents’ caravan in Clacton, G always had to have a holiday song―a song that would remind her of our time there, and that song had been played everywhere we went when she was with us that past week.
G had loved it and declared it her holiday song, the song that would always remind her of Spain.
The image of my beautiful smiling sister punched into my heart like a fist-wielding blade.
What the fuck was I thinking? I sat on the end of the bed and held my head in my hands, letting the guilt wash over me.
She could never know about Maca being in the same room with Haley, and she could never know that I instigated the whole thing.
I’m not sure what was in those last few lines we snorted, but it couldn’t have been cocaine. Maca had passed out cold, and I was starting to feel sleepy too. That drug usually had me going for hours, feeling like I could take on the world, not dizzy and disoriented like I was feeling then.
Sounds became fuzzy while images seemed to bend and look distorted. I looked up, thinking I could hear screaming, but I wasn’t really sure; it could’ve been laughter, I didn’t know. Noises faded in and out, and all concept of time was lost to me.
There was movement all around us, but it was fractured and disjointed. My name was being said and my face was being slapped, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t focus.
The next thing I remember very clearly was throwing up in the foot well of a car and someone shouting in a foreign language. Not being able to move my arms was the only cognitive thought I could process before I drifted off again.
I had no sense of the time over which the following events played out. I later learnt it was only a period of just over 48 hours.
I woke up alone in a cell as a tray of food was slid through a hatch.
I shouted and screamed, asking for someone to tell me what the fuck was going on, but I was shouted back at in return, only in French.
I was taken to an interview room where I was told by a policeman wearing a very crumpled suit and about three days’ worth of stubble on his chin that I had been accused of rape.
I was taken back to my cell where I tried to get my shit together.
For the past six or so weeks, I’d taken some kind of drug at least once a day.
My body and my brain were reacting to the substance abuse it’d been enduring and the lack of its daily fix.
I was hot, cold, and I couldn’t stop vomiting.
The shaking and shivering was unbearable.
I wasn’t an addict, but my system had become somewhat used to its daily fix, and it was gonna take me at least a few days to get myself straight.
Lennon arrived with another bloke I later learnt was from the label.
I’d never seen Len so angry in my life. He punched me hard on the chin, but then he demanded that I have access to a doctor. I was hooked up to a drip and given another blanket, but once again, I was left alone to try and work out what the fuck had happened.
I slept for what felt like a very long time, finally waking to the sound of the drip bleeping because the bag of saline being pumped into me was empty.
Apparently, I’d been taken to a hospital. I had no recollection of how I got there or how long ago I’d been moved.
Len arrived with my dad and a lawyer, then everything was explained to me. Haley White had accused Maca and me of raping her. My first thought was of G.
What did I do … What the fuck did I do to her, to Maca, to the band?
I told the lawyer, who’d now been joined by the police, everything I could remember.
I wasn’t a good person. I wasn’t a good friend or brother, but I was not a fucking rapist.
Again, the concept of time was alien to me. I was allowed to leave the hospital. I didn’t go back to the hotel we were staying in because we’d been kicked out and had to go somewhere else.
Finally, I got my head around the fact that it was Friday.
I was silent in the car as my dad ranted and threatened all kinds of physical violence to me, Maca, Rocco, even Haley.
Lennon explained that the band would be practising for a few hours during the day and we’d be expected to perform that night and the next in Paris, as our shows were sell-outs. His tone told me he was pissed off and not to be argued with.
My dad and Len entered the hotel room in front of me and the instant my eyes met Maca’s, who was lying back on the bed with his hands behind his head, he flew from the bed, coming right for me.
Maca was one of life’s most laid back people.
He always looked for the good in everyone and found the positive in any negative situation.
He could fight, but he rarely did; it just wasn’t his nature.
He was the opposite of George and her fiery temper, but at that moment, he looked like he wanted to kill me.
“You cunt! What the fuck did you get us into?” My dad grabbed him, pinning both his arms to his sides.
“What did you do? Did you set me up for that?” He actually tried to fight my dad. Yeah, we laughed about that over the years a lot.
Maca, being the skinny fucker he was, wriggled his way out of my dad’s grip and made another move towards me. Lennon stepped between us, but he swung around him and landed a punch on the side of my head. My dad grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around, and lamped my dad on the chin.
The room fell silent. Maca just punched Frank Layton.
“Shit,” my Uncle Fin said. He was sitting, unnoticed by me, in an armchair in the corner.
“I’ll give you that one, son,” my dad said to Maca, “but I’m telling you now, you need to calm the fuck down.”
Sean’s breathing was heavy when he turned back around to me to say, “Get the fuck away from me. I can’t be near you right now.”
I didn’t say a word. I mean, what could I say? He didn’t even know the half of it, and yet he still knew I was to blame for what we’d been accused of.