Chapter 6 #3
“I warned him to keep his hands to himself. I know he probably didn’t.” Marls side-eyes me.
I shrug in response. “We were mostly good. Dad gave him the ‘touch her and die’ speech multiple times. Mum told him she’d make sure Sean was sent to prison and threatened me with institutionalisation or something similar that they did to what she called ‘loose women’ in Ireland.
Which, in light of what the world now knows about what happened to some of those poor women and girls and their babies, was a pretty horrific thing to threaten your child with. ”
“I got that, too, and you were in your thirties by then,” Cam calls out, causing laughter in the room. “Even you paid me a visit, Marls,” he adds.
“Yeah, must’ve been high that day, mate, cos what the actual fuck was I thinking?”
“No clue. No fucking clue,” Cam responds.
A few more pictures from that holiday in Portugal pass across the screen before they land on another of Jimmie and me, this time with Lennon between us.
Like me, Jim was almost fourteen, Len had just turned eighteen, and as I look at that photo—really look at it, the way Len’s head is thrown back as he laughs at something I’m assuming I’m saying, because my mouth is wide open, the way Jimmie’s turned slightly into Len, the way she’s looking up at him—how did we not see it?
“So, Jimmie and Lennon?” Daniel starts.
“That’s their story to tell, mate. If they wanna talk, they will.
If they don’t, then you won’t be hearing anything from anyone else.
All I will say is that the photo’s over forty years old, and those two are as happy and in love now as they were about to be back then.
Len just hadn’t realised what was about to hit him up the side of the head when that picture was taken,” Marley states.
“You were the only one left single. How did that make you feel?” Dan asks my brother.
“Like shit,” Marls admits. “I thought, assumed, Jimmie was mine. Nothing apart from a few pecks on the lips and a lot of flirting ever happened between us, but to me, it just made sense for us to be together.”
“And when you found out it was your brother she was into?”
“I threw a tantrum of Georgia proportions.”
“Seriously? I’m still the gauge for this family’s meltdowns?” I question.
“Yes!” voices call out from around the room.
I hold up my two middle fingers. “Fuck you all.”
“So, you weren’t happy?” Daniel questions Marley.
“No, I fucking wasn’t,” he declares. “I behaved like a brat.”
“That night was a shitshow.” I recall how the events of that night would eventually lead to the course of my life being changed forever.
“We talking about it?” Marley asks me.
“Should we?” I question.
“It’s covered in the film,” he says with a shrug.
“Me? Or are you gonna tell it?”
“You’ll tell it better.” Marley winks.
I draw in a breath and recall the night so long ago that none of us knew would bring such ramifications.
“It was Christmas—Christmas Eve, I think. The boys were playing at a pub in Romford somewhere. The Bitter End, maybe. We were there early. The boys were doing a soundcheck, and because the hall was still empty, it was cold. I went out the back to get my jacket from wherever I’d left it, and I saw Jimmie and Lennon together.
I won’t go into details here, but with Jim and Len’s permission, it’s all in the film.
Anyway, it threw me. I felt…” I blow air out from between my pursed lips as my heart rate picks up.
“Betrayed, hurt, angry, and so confused. She was my best friend, and she hadn’t told me.
And what about Marley? In my young and still very naive head, we’d have a double wedding, I would marry Sean, and my best friend would marry my brother. ”
“Bitch, what am I, then?” Ash calls out, and I smile.
“Which, as we now know, did happen. Not the double wedding, but each of my best mates married my brothers. But back then, on that night… yeah, I was angry. I made some noise, so they’d hear me coming to collect my jacket, then I grabbed it and went back inside the pub.
We were fifteen by then, the boys a couple of years older, so they’d buy us a drink whenever they got a round in, but that night, I hit it a bit too hard.
Len had given a toast to the band, to the coming year, to fame and fortune, a recording deal, something along those lines, and after, Sean had said something I’ve never forgotten, and it completely threw me. ”
“What?” Dan questions. “What did he say?”
The room has fallen totally silent, and I can feel everyone’s eyes on me.
“He said, ‘I’ll love you forever, G, wherever I am in the world, whatever I’m doing.
It’ll always be you. For as long as you want me.
For as long as I’m good for you, I’m all yours.
’ I questioned what he meant by that, and he explained that he didn’t feel worthy, that he felt my parents would prefer me to settle down with a banker, not a wanna be rock star. ”
“Or a nightclub owner,” Cam calls. “Your parents were right: anything but a rock star.”
I roll my eyes, but don’t turn to look at him.
“Anyway, him saying that put me on edge, too, but the venue quickly became packed. The band were insane, so good, and I remember I had this feeling that everything was changing or about to change. Jimmie was secretly with Lennon, not Marley, the band were playing in bigger venues to bigger audiences, and Sean felt he wasn’t good enough for me while getting more and more attention from women in the crowd.
All of that combined with the alcohol had me feeling…
” I pause again, trying to recall exactly how I did feel that night while trying to find a word that can adequately describe it.
“I felt like everything was out of my control. Things were changing, and I had no say in them. Then, when the boys took a break, Sean stepped off the stage, and this girl, this… thing I’d seen around at a few of their shows, stepped forward, threw her arms around Sean’s neck, and she tried to kiss him.
He turned away and shook his head. Eventually, his eyes found mine, and he gave me a shrug and an apologetic smile, but while he was looking at me, this little—for legal reasons, let’s call her a person—person, licks his face. She fucking licked him.”
“And George lost it,” Marley states.
“I did. The rage, my God, the rage came up from my boots and just overtook me.”
“Go, Mum!” Lu calls.
“I’ve never seen her move so fast,” Marley says. “She flew at this girl, smacked her right in the face so hard she took her off her feet. Once she was down, she jumped on top of her and started lifting her head by the hair and smashing it into the floor—”
“Okay, it wasn’t that…”
“Yeah, you were vicious, and rightly so,” Marley interrupts me before I can finish interrupting him. “There was blood and hair flying. It took three of us to pull her off the girl.”
“Everyone was grabbing me, telling me to calm down, and I felt like I was being attacked, like I was the problem. It’s definitely not my proudest moment, but when I got dragged off to one of the back rooms, I lashed out at everyone and told the whole room that I’d seen Jimmie with Len, and it went off.
Right in the interval of one of the biggest nights of the band’s history, we were all in the back room of the pub fighting each other. ”
“Did you go back on stage?” Dan asks Marls.
“We did. A label rep happened to be watching us, and we signed our first recording contract just a couple of months later,” he replies with a grin.
“And the girl? What happened to her? Was she hurt? Did she press charges?”
“She did something much worse. She accused my husband and brother of rape.”
Once again, the silence that fills the room is deafening.
Marley squeezes my hand while I stare at Daniel.
I wait.
We all wait.
“My plan originally was for you to tell us these events chronologically, so as much as I would love to jump straight to Paris and everything that went down, can we just cover what led to the band being there? Especially as we have Marley here to give us his perspective, too.”
I feel my brother shift beside me. He’s still holding my hand, and his grip tightens.
I watch him, waiting for his tell. It happens after just a few seconds.
His free hand rises to his mouth before he pinches his bottom lip between his index finger and thumb, and he tugs on it.
It’s what my brother does when he’s nervous, and what happened in Paris is definitely a topic that makes my brother nervous.
So nervous that, despite how close we are, how our lives have always been and remain so intertwined, Paris is a subject we’ve never discussed.
It’s something that’s sat there, like the crater left after the big bang, a gaping, ragged pit of destruction, with Marley on one side, me on the other.
We’ve lived our entire lives since it happened, making out it didn’t.
Like the seismic shift that blew all our worlds apart never occurred.
Every one of our interactions has been a carefully orchestrated dance, our steps taking us around the chasm of despair like it doesn’t exist.
I think, and I think he probably does, too, that if we acknowledge it, look into it, discuss its contents, we’d be sucked into something we might never escape from.
What’s the opposite of a void?
Instead of a black hole full of nothing, we’d be tossed and turned, drowned in guilt, regret, anger, betrayal, and so many what fucking ifs.
Which is why, for over forty years, we’ve coexisted with it. We couldn’t block it out completely. It was too big of an event, left too big of a hole, but we’ve coexisted by ignoring it and just living our lives.
When we started working with the screenwriters, I was asked if we wanted the events covered, and I told them to talk to Marley and our legal team.
It was probably a cowardly thing to do, but, although it was something that changed my life, I wasn’t there.
There are only four people who know the truth, and only one of them is still alive.
So, call me a coward, but that’s what I chose to do. I passed the buck to my brother. It’s Marley who has a wife and kids he may want to protect, not Sean. Sean only left me, and I don’t think anything could hurt me as much as losing him twice.
When I was told Marley was—I’ll use the term loosely—‘happy’ for the events in Paris to be included, I knew the time had come for us to have that conversation.
I just hadn’t considered it might be instigated by and included in the interview I’m doing with Daniel Milliano, which will possibly be broadcast to millions around the world.
The scariest thing of all is that I don’t know if this nameless, nondescript dance my brother and I have been performing for years will evolve into something like “The Gentle Waltz” by Oscar Peterson, as passionate as “The Black Swan Pas De Deux” from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, or if we’ll end up rolling around in the mosh pit, spitting at each other like we’re at a Sex Pistols concert and “God Save The Queen” is blasting out.
Either way, shit’s about to go down!
“Shall we take a quick break before moving on?” Daniel asks.
“Fuck, yeah,” Marley replies, already standing and pulling off his mic without looking at me.
I watch him walk away, and as I do, I notice Makenzie Wild watching him, one hand on her cocked hip, the other hanging at her side, her camera dangling from it.
Her eyes are on his back as he walks straight into Ashley’s open arms before she glances my way.
I don’t look away. She may be a rock star princess, but for a lot of years, I was a rock star queen, so I’m not intimidated, more intrigued.
I watched a lot of women look at Sean in all kinds of different ways over the years.
If they realised I’d clocked them, they either looked away in embarrassment or defiantly stared.
Some even shrugged, the want, need, desire apparent in their eyes.
Makenzie has none of those things. She’s frowning and blinking rapidly as her eyes move from me then back to my brother.
Confusion? Fascination?
She looks down at her camera and starts pressing and swiping while staring at the viewing window screen thing.
A knot forms in my stomach, and I’ve no idea why.
Cam appears at my side, a Prosecco in his hand and a smile on his lips, despite his dark brows being pulled down into a slight frown.
“You ready for this?”
“The drink, yeah. What’s coming next? Probably not.”