Chapter 18
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
ASHLEY
My heart beats so hard in my chest, I’m sure everyone sitting on the sofa can feel its vibration.
I’ve always hated things like this: interviews, anything to do with the press or publicity.
The only time I ever spoke was if we were walking a red carpet and someone shoved a mic or camera in my face, asking who I was wearing.
I always gave a shout-out to the designer, always.
But aside from a smile, that’s all they got from me.
Years ago, when I first got with Marley, a tabloid had done an ‘exclusive exposé’ on my family. It was truly fucking awful.
Marley knew my past, my family’s history, and so did the rest of the Laytons.
I’ve never hidden who I am or where I came from.
Good job I had been upfront, because multiple newspapers and magazines had run with the stories about my parent being drug addicts, that my dad acted as first my mum’s then later my brother’s pimp when he prostituted them out to fund their habit.
Thankfully, they didn’t know that I was destined for the same path until my brother saved me, but Marley did. Marley knows everything.
With very little empathy, sympathy, or tact, they also reported on my brother’s death.
Despite Marley and me helping him as much as we could, paying for rehab, and counselling, Ryan couldn’t beat the demons that haunted him day and night.
Eventually, he took his own life while serving one of his many prison sentences at the age of just thirty-two.
“So, you came into the Layton family after Paris, after the Georgia and Sean break-up drama?” Lost in my own head, I realise Daniel’s question is aimed at me a few beats after he asks it.
I nod, my mouth dry.
Marley—knowing full well my fear of the cameras, has now moved from the floor to sit next to me—gives my hand a reassuring squeeze at Daniel’s question.
“Yeah, that’s not to say I didn’t know about it. As Georgia mentioned earlier, we all went to school together, so everyone knew who the Laytons were. Everyone got to know who Sean McCarthy was, and everyone got to know all about Carnage.”
“But you weren’t friends with them?” Daniel asks.
This time, I shake my head slowly, wondering how I should answer.
“I said earlier that George and Jimmie were the pretty girls in the clever clique, but it wasn’t just that. If your researchers have done their jobs, then you’ll know my background, where I’m from…”
“Babe,” Marley says quietly beside me, giving my hand another squeeze.
“It’s okay. I’m okay.” I meet his eyes and say with what I hope is a convincing nod. “They came from money; I did not. We went to the same school but ran in entirely different circles. I’ll be totally honest, I thought the pair of them were a bit up their own arses.”
“Cheers, babe,” Jimmie says from the other side of Georgia, and through the snorts of laughter coming from all around us.
“Rude,” Georgia adds.
“Sorry, bitches. I know now I was wrong, obviously.” I tilt my head and look between my besties and shrug.
They both shake their heads and smile back at me.
“That all kind of changed when Jimmie found me bawling my eyes out in the toilets at school. I’d had some shit going on at home and had packed a bag and left, with no idea where I was gonna go. Without asking too many questions, Jim let me stay at hers while I got myself sorted out.”
I give Daniel the very briefest of recaps of the time I was homeless, and Jamie Emmanuel, who I barely knew, gave me a bed at her house for a few nights.
“I think I was a little bit shocked when I heard Jimmie was with Lennon, because like everyone else, we all just assumed her and Marley had a thing. But I was also like, you go, girl. I mean, Len was gorgeous, as are all the Laytons, but I honestly didn’t think she had it in her to be a rule breaker. ”
“Then, you obviously don’t know my wife.” Lennon looks up from where he’s sitting on the floor and says.
“Oh, I do now, and I’m well aware she’s definitely not the Miss Goody Two-Shoes I thought she was back then. Anyway, I’m going off track. You all need to shut up and let me concentrate, else I’ll forget where I was going. I’m not like you lot. I don’t do this shit.”
The room quietens, allowing me to continue.
“When everything happened in Paris and it was on the news, in the papers, and all the magazines, my first thought was of Georgia. We were all about to leave school, and I couldn’t remember a time from when we started there at eleven when her and Maca weren’t a thing.
But I wasn’t expecting the level of sadness I saw in her when we started college that September.
” I tilt my head as I take in the beautiful, vibrant woman beside me, looking nothing like the girl I became friends with back then.
“The first thing that struck me was how thin she was. The second was how incredibly sad she looked. Broken. Just… broken. She always had her head down and didn’t speak to anyone.
It was like she wanted to be invisible, turn up, blend in, go to her lessons, and go home.
Then, one day, I saw her sitting on her own in the cafeteria, so I went over. ”
“She started talking to me like she was picking up a conversation we’d had the night before. Like we were lifelong besties,” Georgia says.
I smile, trying to recall what I said.
“‘Fuck me, Anderson does my head in,’” G says, sounding very Essex, which I’m assuming is her impersonation of me. “She—Anderson—was one of the English teachers at our college. Ash was complaining about her, then goes straight into saying, ‘I’ve got some dank weed on me. Wanna come share a joint?’”
“You looked like you could do with a toke. I thought it might put some colour in your cheeks and light in your eyes.”
“Did you go?” Daniel asks.
“Of course, she fucking did,” I reply before my friend can deny it. “We got absolutely stoned, bunked lessons, then went to G’s mansion that she lived in on the posh side of town.”
“Mother!” one of Georgia’s girls says. If I had to guess, it’s probably Kiki.
“Oh, shut your mouth,” I respond. “She needed something to liven her up.”
“We didn’t live in a mansion.”
“Is that the only part you’re going to deny?” Tallulah calls out to G’s response.
This time, it’s G who tells one of her kids to shut their mouth.
“We lived in a typical 1930s detached place. My dad owned a building company, so he’d had a double extension added to one side and right across the back, which did then turn it into a pretty big house. But there were six of us, and we needed the room.”
“It was a mansion,” I talk over Georgia.
“It was a mansion with a mini wooden mansion in the garden. We spent the afternoon and most of the night on the sofa out there, talking shit, and we became mates. I realised she wasn’t the stuck-up cun—bird I thought she was, and we started hanging about together.
And when I say hanging about, I mean we went to college, we went maybe to the chippy, and we went to Georgia’s.
She also went to the gym, which I tried and decided wasn’t for me.
I used to beg her to come to the pub or wine bar, but she always said no.
I knew she was still nursing her broken heart, but she never spoke about him—Maca, I mean.
I was gagging to know what really happened, but had been in her company when random people would ask about the band, her brother, or Mac.
You could practically feel the force of her walls going up around her, so I never pushed it. ”
I pause as I realise Len’s looking up at me, and Marley, G, and Jim all have their heads tilted my way.
“What?” I ask them all. “Am I doing this wrong?” I look between each of them before settling on Daniel. “Is this not the stuff you wanna know?”
“No.”
My stomach hurts, and my cheeks burn as embarrassment washes over me.
“I mean, no, don’t stop. What you’re giving us is perfect, brilliant, an all-new perspective on what Georgia was going through at that time,” Daniel says.
I let out an exhale I’d been holding on to while thinking I’d fucked up.
“You’re doing fucking fantastic.” Marley leans in and kisses my cheek.
I turn away from him to look at G. “You okay with all this? Everything I’m saying?”
She shrugs. “It’s what we’re here for.”
I nod. “When her mum opened the shop, George offered me a job there, and I jumped at the chance. That’s when I really got to know her. Bernie as well, really.”
I pause as my throat constricts around the words I want to get out.
“I’d been judged my entire life,” I start.
“Brentwood’s an affluent area. Was back then, probably even more so now, with a lot of big houses, a lot of nice cars.
I didn’t come from that, but you know what.
Never once, from that first conversation in the college canteen, to this day, have George, Bern, Frank, any of the boys, and obviously not Marley, none of the Laytons—that includes you in that Jim—ever looked down on me or made me feel less than them. ”
Georgia squeezes the hand Marls isn’t already gripping. Jimmie twists where she’s sitting, reaches across, and covers G’s hand that’s holding mine.
“I’m not trying to sound like I’m blowing smoke up anyone’s arse with this, and this lot, the family I was being welcomed into, were definitely not the Brady Bunch.
What you see is what you get. The fame, all of their successes, the money, none of it has changed them or their dynamics.
You can probably see that from where you’ve been sitting these past couple of days. ”
“Very much so,” Daniel agrees.