I wanted to punch Marley at that moment. I might have been only eleven in years, but as far as my brain was concerned, I knew it all. I already was a woman. I had boobs and periods, so I was a grown-up. Oh, how little did I understand how much growing up I still had to do.
“Well, you’re the best looking Jimmie and George I’ve ever met.” He smiled a lazy lopsided grin as he spoke, not taking his eyes off my chest the whole time.
It rained that afternoon, so we all ended up in the summerhouse my dad had his blokes build us down at the end of our garden. I was never exactly sure what my dad did for a living when I was younger, and I’m even less sure of what all of his business dealings entail now. He had a construction firm. It was bigger than an average small building firm was, and he employed about a hundred people at any one time. On top of this, he had three car showrooms, selling high end, second-hand cars, Mercs, Beamers, Audis, and the like. He also owned some properties in East London and Essex that he rented out. Whenever I asked him, he would tell me he was an entrepreneur, but I had no idea what that meant. What I did know was that we had a beautiful house and I had nice clothes. My mum and dad drove new cars, and when Baily passed his test, so did he. We went on abroad for our holidays either to one of our own villas in Marbella in Spain or Albufeira in Portugal or, if we did stay in England, to our caravan in Clacton On Sea on the Essex coast. I didn’t think too much about any of this when I was younger, but as I got older it began to dawn on me that we had more than most.
My dad had the summerhouse built, so the boys had somewhere to practise their music. The place was constructed from bricks, soundproofed, and clad with timber so it looked like a traditional, timber summerhouse. Bailey didn’t play so much anymore. Lennon played guitar and had a pretty good voice, but Marley was the star. He played guitar as well as drums, and he had a great voice. I could play acoustic guitar, but I wasn’t great. My voice was okay, but it was very average compared to my brother’s voice. Marley had his own band and told me that afternoon that Sean was to be their new lead singer and guitarist. Ritchie, their old frontman, had moved to Wales with his family at the beginning of the summer holiday. My dad was a massive music fan and paid to advertise for a new singer for Marley’s band. They held auditions at the local church hall, and Sean had been their first choice. The fact that he could play the guitar and the piano was just a bonus.
Later, I sat curled in the corner of the big old Chesterfield sofa we had in the summerhouse. I’d spent a half hour trying to crack the Rubik’s cube I was playing with, but I wasn’t really known for my patience. So, I soon grew frustrated and tossed that on the floor and instead flicked through the latest copy of My Guy magazine, but even that wasn’t holding my interest. Sean came over, sat on the arm of the sofa, and asked about my name.
“So, how come after having three boys and giving them really weird names, your mum and dad finally have a girl and give her a boy’s name?”
I looked up at his brown eyes and noticed the tiny flecks of gold he had floating in them, all framed by the longest of dark brown lashes.
Answer George!
Stop blushing!
Stop looking into his eyes and answer the question.
I swallowed and tried to wet my lips before speaking, “My dad’s a massive fan of music, any and all music. Bailey is named after some bloke who made guitars back in the sixties. My dad met him or heard about him and liked his name, which I think was actually his surname, not his first name. Anyway, my dad liked it, remembered it, and decided to give it to Bailey as his first name. Lennon is obviously named after John Lennon. Marley after Bob… And me? Well, I’m named after my dad’s favourite song, “Georgia On My Mind” by Ray Charles. So, I got the name Georgia Rae, but living in a house full of boys, it got shortened to George.”
I’d told this story so many times to so many different people I could repeat it in my sleep. Sean listened and nodded his head slowly.
“Well, Georgia Rae. I think you’re far too pretty to be called an old bloke’s name. So I’ll call you…” He tilted his head to the side as he thought about what he was going to call me… beautiful, his girlfriend? I didn’t mind either. “Gia?” he stated.
Gia, he wants to call me Gia?
No one has ever called me Gia. It was Georgia by my teachers. G, or George, by my friends and family, but never has anyone ever called me Gia. I loved it, and it would be special. Just our thing… special, between us.
“So, is that all right then? If I call you Gia?”
I nodded. It was all I could manage. The pop rocks were exploding in my stomach again, and once more they were blocking the signal between my brain and my mouth.
Chapter Two
The rest of the summer of 1980 was spent watching Marley and Sean practise with Billy and Tommy, who made up the rest of Marley’s band, Carnage.
In September, Jimmie and I started high school. School was easy for me. I was in top sets for everything, without really having to put in much effort. I wasn’t stunningly beautiful, but I was at an age where I knew my ranking in the ‘”prettiness” order, and I knew I wasn’t ugly. My parents were both of Irish descent but looked totally different to each other. My dad was tall, well over six feet. He was broad, and he was dark, dark hair, dark eyes, and dark skin. My mum, on the other hand, was short, about five feet four and very petite. Even after having us four kids she was still only a size eight. She was pale with skin like porcelain and had the most beautiful dark auburn hair, and the bluest of eyes. My dad was handsome. All of my mates told me so, and my mum was stunningly beautiful.
I wished so much that I looked like her, but I didn’t. Where my brothers all looked exactly like my dad, I was a weird combination of both my parents. I was tall for my age and way too skinny for my liking. My hair was a dark chestnut colour. When the sun shone through it, you could see the reds that I’d inherited from my mum, but mainly it looked brown. My skin was darker than my mum’s but nowhere near as dark as my dad’s and my brothers. My eyes were blue, not pale, china blue like my mum’s, but a very dark blue. Whenever I got a tan in the summer, they’d pop right out of my face. They didn’t match my dark skin and dark lashes, and always drew comments.
By the age of eleven, I knew I wasn’t stunningly beautiful like my mum, but I knew I was pretty. Prettier than some of the other girls in my class but not as pretty as others. I didn’t mean to sound flash, or like an arsehole, it was just how it was, and although most won’t admit to it, girls just knew these things.
Love us or hate us, Jimmie and I were the popular girls, but that wasn’t always a good thing, especially at secondary school. Within days of starting as first years, we were attracting the attention of the older boys as well as a few bitchy comments from the older girls. We’d been Queen Bees at primary school. Secondary school, however, was completely different, and it introduced us to a whole new level of bitch.
On just the third day, a fifth-year boy named Dale stopped in the corridor and asked if I wanted to go to a party that weekend. I said no, as I knew there was no way my brothers would allow it. Despite that, later in the lunch hall, I had some tall, skinny blonde girl screaming at me that she was going to be waiting at the school gates that night to kick the shit out of me for flirting with her boyfriend. I’d never been as happy to see Marley appear, as I was when I saw him barrelling towards at that moment.
“Debra, fuck off and leave her alone! She’s a first year, you fucking bully. I’ve just spoken with Dale. She blew him off. He asked her to the party, she said no and didn’t flirt with him at all. You can tell him from me, if he comes near her again, Len or me will knock him the fuck out! Tell the rest of the fifth years the same thing. She’s eleven. They’re all a bunch of pervs.”
She folded her arms across her chest, looked him up and down, and then turned and looked me up and down. “She’s your sister, Marls?”
“Yeah, my baby sister.”
Sean was with him and moved around to stand next to me. Tak
ing me entirely by surprise, he pulled me into his side by my waist and kissed my temple, asking into my hair if I was okay? I nodded. This time, it wasn’t so much the effect he had on me. It was more the fact that I was shitting myself over possibly being beaten up after school by a grown woman for doing absolutely nothing wrong.
“What’s your name?” the girl/woman, Debra asked me.
“Georgia,” I replied.
“You’re a pretty girl, Georgia. You and your mate there are both very pretty. You’re ruffling feathers round here. You need to keep your head down and stay away from the older boys. Make sure everyone around here knows you’re a Layton and that Marley and Lennon are your brothers.”
She looked Sean up and down. He was tall and looked older than a third year. Sean was new, too. He’d j transferred from a different school and was in Marley’s class.
“And who are you? Not another gorgeous Layton that I didn’t know about?”
Sean returned the look up and down, but instead of looking at her lustfully as she had done to him, he looked at her with complete and utter contempt. I beamed. Shit, I almost ignited—inwardly of course—because the last thing I wanted to do was piss the bitch off again.
“No, love. I’m not a Layton. I’m Sean. Sean McCarthy. I’m Marley’s mate and Georgia’s boyfriend. So, make sure all your pervy, fifth-year mates know to stay the fuck away from her.”
What?
He’s my boyfriend?
Well shit!
My jaw hit the floor. Well, that was how it felt anyway. Sean squeezed my hand as he spoke, and as I looked around the dining hall, I couldn’t help but notice that we had attracted quite a crowd. Events from that lunchtime soon spread. Everyone assumed I was Sean’s girlfriend and in turn thought that Jimmie was with Marley. The fact that they walked with us to and from school most days helped to solidify the story, and I was over the moon. All of this quickly inserted us as the most popular girls in the first year and made our journey into secondary school life so much easier.
I spent a lot of time with Sean that year, just hanging out as friends. There was lots of flirting, or what I considered flirting, but nothing else. I was still too young, and Sean seemed to respect that. He wasn’t a saint though. I would often catch him looking at my ever-growing boobs, and I even heard Marls tell him on more than one occasion to stop looking at my arse. We never discussed what he’d said to Debra Smith in the dining hall that day. He never asked me to be his girlfriend, and I was, for the most part, completely confused regarding what exactly I was to him. He had kissed my cheek a couple of times, and he had held my hand when he thought no one was looking. When we looked at each other, though, we knew that something was going on between us.
Even then, at just eleven years old, we knew.
He was at our house all the time. After school, weekends, and school holidays, he even started coming with us on our overseas holidays. Due to the amount of time the boys spent practising with the band or doing homework at our house, they very rarely went anywhere else. Meaning, there was little chance of him meeting any other girls outside of school, but of course, everyone there already thought he was my boyfriend, and I couldn’t have been happier about that fact.
* * *
In the summer of 1982, everything changed. Jimmie and Sean came with us to Portugal. My body had altered so much that year. My boobs had grown to a generous D cup, and I’d acquired a pair of hips that balanced them out perfectly and stopped me from looking so top heavy. That, combined with the extra two inches in height I’d grown, often got me mistaken for a sixteen or even an eighteen-year-old. The problem was, looking eighteen was one thing, trying to act it when you were only almost fourteen would only eventually lead to a fall.
The first day around the pool, all Jimmie and I wanted to do was get our bodies out in the sun. The boys didn’t make an appearance until after lunch. They’d stayed up drinking beer with my dad and Lennon until late and were probably suffering a little for it. My dad and Len had been up and out very early that morning to play golf. My mum had gone shopping with a girlfriend who lived over in Portugal permanently and was meeting Dad later for dinner.
Kidding ourselves we were grown-ups, Jim and I drank a bottle of wine before the boys had even got up. Thanks to the wine, I was feeling fearless as I floated on the lilo in the pool, watching Sean walk across the patio towards a sun lounger. I’d already decided this holiday was going to be it. I was sick of playing games. I was hearing rumours that Sean had kissed girls at parties and him and Marley were always talking about girls they fancied, even in front of Jimmie and me. It left me hurt, angry, and confused. Boys could be such arseholes sometimes. All of this led me to the decision to take matters into my own hands. I was going to be fourteen in September and was about to go into the third year of secondary school. In my head, I was an adult. In my head, I was totally ready for a grown-up relationship. In reality, I had no clue. I was a little girl that thought she knew it all, with no clue about the harsh realities and heartbreak being a grown-up would bring.
The boys would be going into their fifth year of secondary school when we back in September. The band was doing well and was being booked to play at birthday parties of the kids from school, bringing them lots female attention. Some of the parties Jim and I were allowed to go with them. But others, like the eighteenth and twenty-first birthday parties, we were forced to stay home, and it was killing me. I felt like I was being treated like a child. When we were alone,, Sean acted as though we were together, but as soon as we were around other people, he kept his distance, and I was over it.
I wanted him to be my boyfriend—whatever that entailed when you’re fourteen— or, I wanted to be allowed to tell everyone at school that thought we were together, that we were over so I could have a chance at finding a different boyfriend. I actually didn’t want the latter at all. I wanted him and nobody else would do.
Boyfriends, boyfriends, boyfriends. I was obviously obsessed. I wonder now, why I was in such a rush to grow up.
I decided to climb out of the pool and attempt a Bond girl moment. I pushed myself up from the side and stood, then tilted my head to the sky and shook my hair, squeezing the excess water out of it. As I looked down, Sean was sitting on the end of a sun lounger watching me. Marley jumped straight into the water and began terrorising Jimmie. I put my hands on my hips and stared into Sean’s beautiful, chocolate eyes, displaying a confidence I didn’t really have.
“Come here.” He beckoned me with his finger.
Wearing my favourite teeny tiny red bikini, I walked towards him as sexily as I could. At fourteen, I didn’t really know what walking sexily entailed exactly, but I gave it my all. I stopped and stood between his legs while he looked up at me with the cheekiest of smiles. My heart beating a tattoo in my chest.
“You do know we’re in Europe, Gia? Everyone here goes topless, and I’m a bit disappointed to see you’re not up with the times.” He looked up at me and said while squinting from the glare of the sun.
“Well, that’s what happens when you lie in bed for half the day. You miss out on the best parts. We were topless all morning, and I didn’t want my nipples to burn, so I put my top back on.”
I didn’t. I wasn’t topless at any time in public ever in my life, but he didn’t know that and I couldn’t believe that I’d just said the word ‘niples’ in front of him, to him. I cringed inside.
He smiled at me in a way that stole my breath and said quietly, “Well, I’ll be sure to set my alarm and be up early tomorrow morning, so I don’t miss anything.”
Emboldened by the wine, I kept up my cocky façade.
“Well, you’ll be shit out of luck then. My dad will be here tomorrow, and there’s no way that I’ll be going topless in front of him.”
He let out a long breath and looked beyond me out across the pool. I could hear Jimmie and my brother giggling and splashing.
“You, Gia, are a flirt. But one day… when you’re old enough, one day it wi
ll be our turn. Our time.”
My heart dropped like a stone into my stomach.
What?
“Why? Why do we have to wait for it to be our time? I’m fourteen in September. Everyone thinks you’re my boyfriend anyway?”
I sounded needy and whiny like a child, and I didn’t want to be a child. I wanted to be a woman. I was a woman.
“Gia… you have no idea, do you? Your dad and your brothers would kill me. They’d fucking kill me, and I respect them all too much to start something with you before you’re ready. But don’t think for a minute that I don’t want to. I know it sounds wrong, but right from that very first day when I saw your pink knickers, there’s been something, I’m not sure what, but since the first day I laid eyes on you, there’s been something.”
I wanted to cry. I was sick of waiting.
All my friends had boyfriends, and all I had was a lie that just kept every other boy away from me.
It was so unfair!
Sean reached out and touched my hand. The thirteen-year-old girl I still was, wanted to pull away, but I didn’t want him to see me as a thirteen-year-old. I wanted him to see that I was old enough to be his girlfriend, that I was ready for a relationship. I was so confused. My stomach was twisting itself into knots, and my heart was hurting my ribs it beat so hard. Added to all of that turmoil was the fact that his touch did something to me that I didn’t understand and it all combined to piss me off.
“You told everyone that day in the dining hall that you were my boyfriend, and everyone still thinks it’s true. Either tell them that we’ve broken up so I can find someone else, or be my boyfriend for real. I’m fed up with waiting.”
I couldn’t believe I’d actually said it. Maybe I should drink wine more often… or maybe not, because Sean now looked really pissed off.
What if he says no? What if he doesn’t want me? Not now, not ever.
I would die.
Carnage Boxset Page 2