Chapter 21 #5
Then the camera’s on me walking from the back of the venue, down the steps, towards the stage. I’m wearing the tightest, skinny leather jeans, black ankle boots, a white tee, and a black leather jacket. My makeup is minimal, except for my red lips, and my hair has been straightened.
The camera stays on me for a while as I—probably very self-consciously—navigate those horrible one-and-a-half width steps you always get in concert venues.
“Wow,” I hear Cam say, making me both blush and smile.
I hear a wolf whistle, but I’m not sure if it’s Cam, George, or Harry since they all sound so alike.
“Muuuuuummaaaaaa,” Kiki says. “You are such a baddie. Just look at you.”
I say nothing; my eyes fixed on the screen. The camera pans out to take in Sean looking at me, and the words from a letter he once wrote me instantly fight their way to be heard in my head.
He’s the only man I’ve seen look at you in the exact same way I look at you.
When he looks at you, he only sees you, and you know what that tells me?
If anything ever happened to me, to us, for whatever reason we couldn’t be together, or I couldn’t be with you, and he steps up, steps in, and offers to love you, then let it be him, because I know he’d love you the way I do. He’d look after you if I ever couldn’t.
And he was right, so right, because the way Sean is looking at me up on that screen is exactly the look Kenzie captured in her photo of Cam looking at me last week.
I almost forget to breathe as I process all of this, but then Sean moves towards the mic, and what he’s playing on his guitar changes to something I don’t recognise.
Then he starts to sing, and I’m there, in that venue, somewhere in Germany.
I’d stayed back at the hotel to help Jimmie and Ash out with the kids because they’d wanted to swim in the pool.
Later, I’d caught a cab to the venue to watch the boys soundcheck, and to make sure Sean ate before the show.
I can smell it: old carpet, sweat, stale beer, cigarettes.
Then I hear the words of the song.
“Take a look at my girlfriend…” I pause on the stairs.
Marley joins Sean on guitar, Billy goes to the piano, while Tom quietly comes in on drums. It’s Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America”, and when Sean sings about his girlfriend not being much to look at, I grin and flip him off with both middle fingers.
When I reach the stage, he reaches down and lifts me up.
I wrap my legs around his waist as he shouts, “We’ll be back in a bit! ” before he carries me off stage.
Thankfully, the camera cuts, and my husband and kids don’t have to see what we did in that green room.
The next clip has the boys in a recording studio.
Marley, Tom, and Billy are sitting in the production room.
Sean’s in the booth with his headset on and mouth up to the mic.
I don’t know who’s recording, but there’s a man and a woman at the mixing desk, and a girl standing at the back of the room watching Sean.
She’s a little petite thing, probably a foot shorter than me, and she has short, spiky, candy floss-coloured hair.
She has the kind of face that could get away with having no hair, thanks to those cute little pixie-like features, and I know that she, the girl I’m watching on screen watching Sean, is Carla.
Ash shifts beside me, Len’s hand twitches as it covers mine, and then Sean starts to sing.
“Don’t want your love anymore…”
I instantly recognise it as one of my dad’s favourites by The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”. Except when Sean gets to the chorus, he changes Cathy to Georgia.
“What the fuck?” I kinda whisper, but kinda don’t.
“He told me once,” Marley starts, and the video is paused.
“When you were split up, he told me he switched from not knowing how he was going to go on living his life without you, because he loved and missed you so much, to actually hating you for cutting him out of your life without giving him a chance to explain what had happened. That was obviously one of his hating you days.”
“Harsh,” George says.
“Excuse me, but wasn’t he the one who snorted lines off a groupie’s tit while Georgia waited at home, planning a wedding?” Tallulah asks in my defence.
“You can call me Mum,” I joke, attempting to lighten the mood, because I know right now that Cam will be fighting with himself not to come over here and check that I’m okay.
“Talk about going off someone really fast,” Kiki says. “Double standard wanker. What the fuck did he expect you to do?”
“Kiki!” Cam admonishes quietly in his usual low rumble. “Language.”
“Well, does it not make you want to swear?” she asks him.
“It makes me want to break things if you wanna know the truth,” Cam says, and I just know that was said through gritted teeth.
“Spicy,” Ash says beside me.
I snort out a laugh
“Is that Carla?” I finally ask.
“Yeah,” Len replies.
“Carla?” Daniel questions, not missing a beat.
“She worked for us. Her hair was longer and a different colour by the time George was back on the scene,” Len lies, totally having my back.
I watch as she folds her arms across her chest, looking thoroughly pissed off at Sean’s choice of lyrics. Yeah, take that, pixie biatch!
A series of photos then pops up of different paparazzi images taken of us all around the world. Some are at events, some we’ve posed for, and some are from photo shoots we did, while others are candid when we had no idea there was a camera around.
We talk, almost amongst ourselves, about where we were and what we were doing in each image.
Some I remember, some I have zero recollection of.
Seeing them fills me with a familiar melancholy at losing him so young and all that he didn’t get to do.
But it’s mixed with a warmth at how much we did do and all the things we did experience. All the things he did achieve.
“You look so in love,” Daniel says as he pauses the screen again.
“We were,” I state. “Very much so.”
“But still, you waited for a wedding, babies.”
Again, I let out a long sigh. “I’ve explained this. Do you think there was more to it? Is that why you keep bringing it up?” I sound slightly pissed off because I am.
“I don’t think there was more, but like you said, there was so much speculation, I think even after your very honest and simple explanation, the public won’t be convinced.”
“Let me try and explain it another way, then.”
“You tell him, Mumma,” Lu calls out.
“On it, baby girl,” I reassure her.
And then I’m on it…
“I met Sean when I was eleven. We spent a lot of time together over the next, very formative, four years. By the time I was sixteen, I knew that boy inside out, and he knew me the same way. Even at sixteen and eighteen, we probably knew each other better than some married couples in their thirties do. Then we split up for four years. When we got back together, we were still only twenty and twenty-two. Most people haven’t even met the person they’re going to marry at twenty, yet I was reconnecting with my person, and he was doing the same.
We were doing it slowly, at our pace. Our young love had been almost manic, obsessive, like an addiction.
So, this time, we chose to take our time.
“You’ve just seen the photos. We lived a life.
An exceptionally busy, exciting life spent mostly on the road, and we loved it.
We actually started to plan our wedding in 1995, but couldn’t make it work.
Then, in ’98, the band finished a tour of the US, we rented a half dozen houses in a gated community, and all of the band had a holiday together in Florida.
I flew my parents and brother Bailey out, which meant all of the people we’d want at our wedding were finally in the same place at the same time.
We booked a celebrant, went down to City Hall or the council office, or whatever it’s called over there, got our licence, went to a hotel, and we asked if they could organise a wedding at short notice.
“They could. So, only a couple of days later, on a beach on the Gulf of Mexico—or is it America now? Well, anyway, it was Mexico then. With our family, the band, and our people like Milo and Dave and their families, some of the road crew who’d stayed on to holiday with us, I walked down the sandy wedding aisle to the sound of Paul Weller singing “You’re The Best Thing”—Sean’s choice—and we said our I dos and got married in the most laid back, chilled ceremony of wedding ceremonies. ”
“It was beautiful,” Jim says. “The kids were actually digging at Georgia’s feet and covering Sean’s with sand as they said I do. After everything they’d been through to get to that point, it was perfect.”
“And what made it even better? The only photos that got out there were what we gave the press, and a couple from someone who was passing by on the beach and recognised us. I hope they made thousands from them because the paps sure as fuck didn’t.”
“We’ve got some of those images to show you, as well as a few others some of your guests on that day have shared. You want to see them?” Daniel asks.
“Go for it,” I say, not really caring at this stage whether the public is going to believe our reasons or not.
Within seconds, there we both are, barefoot.
I’m wearing a cream-coloured, off-the-shoulder, lace and sheer fabric maxi dress.
Sean’s wearing long, tan cargo shorts and a white linen shirt.
My bouquet is made up of local white and cream flowers, with huge, tropical green leaves, and feathery plumes of pampas grass.
Our hands are joined and raised in the air as our guests, lined up on either side of us, stand to clap.
I remember the day so vividly, how happy we were, how full of hope.
I could sit here and cry, mourn what I lost. Instead, I let the warmth of those images wash over me and bathe in the knowledge that we had a love like no fucking other.