Carnage Boxset

by Jones, Lesley

  I spot a bloke of about thirty, holding up a card with my name on it and looking right at me. I do my best to keep my name out of the papers as much as possible, but he obviously recognises me. Giving him a small tilt of my chin in acknowledgment, I head around the barrier, dragging my suitcase behind me.

  I could use the company’s private jet to travel, but it seems like such a waste for just one person, so I fly first class instead. No hardship there.

  “Mr King, let me take that for you, sir,” my driver says as I reach him. “My name’s Parker, sir. I’ll be your driver tonight.” I give him another nod and let him take my case as I contemplate cracking a joke and asking him to call me Lady Penelope, seeing as his name is Parker. Like I said, though, it’s two in the morning, and I am not particularly cheerful right now.

  “If you’d like to follow me, sir, we’ll get you settled in the car and home in no time.”

  I remain silent and follow him to the jag that is gonna get me home. Home to my Kitten and my kids. I hate being away and rarely make trips without Georgia, but this one was too important for me not to attend. We have one club in Australia, one in Asia, and four clubs throughout Europe now, and this week I had to meet with the heads of security for each one. Gone are the days of trying to stop underage kids with fake IDs, hidden miniature bottles of alcohol, or drugs in shoes. Now, the staff are searching for guns and suicide bombers. The world is a scary place and nightclubs are not immune to terrorists or rampaging idiots with guns. Our clubs are all upmarket and frequented by celebrities, as well as average clubbers, and I want each and every one of them to feel safe. The meetings over the last two weeks were about upgrading all of our systems and brainstorming the best practices. It was far from exciting but very necessary. On any given weekend, my clubs are filled with other people’s children, and I have a duty of care to each and every one of them. One day, my kids would be off out clubbing, well, not until they are at least thirty, of course, for my daughters it may be never! But anyway, when that time comes, I want the standards of club security to be at a lot higher level than they were when I first started out.

  My kids.

  I couldn’t even think the words without smiling.

  Two boys and two girls.

  Those four little people and their mother are my world. One I never thought I would have with anyone, let alone their mother. My Kitten. The absolute love of my life

  We’d taken a long and winding road, with unimaginable loss and heartbreak along the way, to get to each other, but we got here. Middle-aged and the happiest and most content we’d ever been in our lives.

  We have been beyond fortunate to have brought four beautiful babies into this world as a bonus. Four little people that grow every day into young adults. Harry, who is fifteen now, is all legs, exactly the way I was when I was his age. We got lucky with that kid. As sad as it is to say, I’m relieved he has none of Tamara’s personality traits. H is generally the mediator amongst the kids. He’s pretty calm and easy going and no one would guess he is only a few months older than the rest of the kids, since he acts like an adult already. He is in the year above them at school and made sure everyone knew not to even think about breathing in the direction of his sisters, let alone looking at them when they joined him at secondary school they all attend. He steps in between their fights, which are frequent, and he helps them with their homework. He rarely argues with his brother or gives us any lip. He knows his background and that Georgia isn’t his birth mother. She’s the only mum he’s ever known, and since the day he came to live with us, that’s all he’s ever called her. I’ll admit that I was a little worried that her feelings might changes towards Harry when George and the twins arrived. That never happened, and the older he gets, the closer they seem to become. He goes to his mum for everything, and I mean everything. Hair product, girl advice, what T-shirt to wear to the shopping centre, all Georgia. The little shit never asks my advice on anything, his usual response to anything I say, is, “Get with it, old man”. He even sends her pictures of things before he buys them. I mean seriously, if you can’t dress yourself by the age of fifteen, then what fucking hope is there for the kids of today?

  I watch the lights of the A13 pass by as we head away from City Airport and back towards Essex, to my home, my wife, my children, my world.

  * * *

  By the time I walk through my front door, it’s almost four in the morning. I need to be inside my wife. One week is far too long to go without feeling her skin against mine. I’ve gone beyond tiredness by this stage, so I head straight through the house towards the kitchen. I’ll have a coffee and some toast and then go wake my wife up with coffee with my extra special cream and a kiss … from my dick.

  I take my shoes off so they don’t make noise on the hardwood floor. I’m home a day and a half early, and I don’t wanna be scaring the crap outta Georgia.

  Walking down the hallway towards our family room, I pass my office first and then Georgia’s. We tried sharing, but I find her too untidy and distracting. Every time she leant forward or bent over, I’d end up fucking her and neither of us ever got any work done. I ended up moving the gym out to the pool house and turning the extra room into a separate office for Georgia. I had it soundproofed, too. Georgia likes to listen to music when she works, I like silence.

  I stop in my tracks and take a step back as I see a light shining from the slightly open door to my wife’s office. Still holding my shoes in my hand, I push the door open slowly and take a look inside.

  Georgia’s office is the complete opposite of mine. Where I have a huge wooden desk facing the door, Georgia has a deep ledge against the window that she works from with her back to the door. My walls have a couple of pieces of art I’ve collected over the years by Peter Granville Edmunds and my bookshelves have pictures of Georgia, myself, and the kids on them.

  Georgia’s office furniture is made from what looks like drift wood, she has one wall painted with a pop art looking piece. It’s black and white and divided into squares. Each square is a continuation of the picture in the adjoining square. In the centre is a re-joined image of us kissing, around the edges are pictures of the kids. It sounds like a complicated mess, but the impact knocks my breath away every time I step into the room. On the opposite wall, she has the kid’s heights marked out, starting from the time they could stand. The rest of the wall is covered in ours and the kid’s handprints, and each one has something written in the palm: Love. Trust. Live. Family. Laugh. Be kind. Be honest to yourself. I love you all are just some of the words and phrases that jump out at me. Every time I look at this wall it gives me a lump in my throat. On the walls on either side of the door are the gold, silver, and platinum awards Carnage has won over the years, and on the shelves on either side of the window where her desk sits are the awards she’s won for all of her charity work, framed photos of us and the kids, and drawings the kids have made for her. Her office is all family, mine more professional-looking, which sometimes makes me feel like a bit of an old fart.

  Georgia’s office is never tidy, but right now, the mess is off the charts. There’s what looks like an old tea chest, or packing crate sitting in the corner and piles of documents and books on every surface. I look at the floor, and my heart rate speeds up when I see her.

  Kitten.

  She’s lying flat on the floor in a pair of shorts and an old Carnage T-shirt. Her hair is piled on top of her head, and she has her pink Beats covering her ears.

  She has a piece of paper pressed against her chest, and she’s crying. She makes no sound, there are no facial expressions, just tears. They track from the corners of her eyes, into her ears, around her neck, and into her hairline.

  I fight the urge to go to her, to sweep her up and hold her tightly in my arms. To rock her and tell her to hush, that everything will be all right, because it won’t.

  She’s crying for him. Her lost love.

  She’s crying for them. Her lost babies.

  And there’s no
thing I can do or say to make it better.

  There was a time when I would have gladly taken their places. When I would’ve given my life for theirs just to bring the light back into her eyes, but not now. Now, I’m a dad. Sacrificing myself for them would mean my, our children, wouldn’t exist. So, now I say nothing when she has her bad days. I just reassure her that she’s not a bad person.

  Does it hurt? Of course it fucking does. I’m only human.

  I’m always aware of when Georgia is having her bad days. I know that there’s a part of her that will forever mourn Sean and the babies they lost. I know my girl, though, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that even when she cries for them, she loves me with everything she has.

  I’d be a fucking liar if I say I don’t feel just a little stab of jealousy when she has her meltdown moments and cries for the loss of another man—a man she loved with all her heart until she met me and gave me a piece of it too. A man she left me for and went on to marry. A man she cheated on with me when she let me fuck her senseless against my office door. A man she refused to leave so we could be together. I learnt a long time ago that being jealous of a dead bloke is futile and a complete waste of energy.

  I know Georgia struggles with her guilt, and I understood that. Yet, neither of us could change the tragic events that afflict our pasts; twisted, bent, and moulded our futures; and then ultimately led us back to each other. What I can do is hold her when she cries and reassure her it is okay to let the tears flow. She loved him for most of her life and it is okay to still love him now to cry for her loss.

  I knew when I married her there would always be a piece of her heart I could never mend. A piece that will always belong to them, but it’s part of what makes her Georgia, and I wouldn’t change her for the world. We both had to kick, bite, and claw our ways from the deepest depths of hell to find what we have now. It was hard, but we did it—against the odds, we fucking did it

  My wife turns onto her side and pulls her knees up to her chest as she gives out a sob. I don’t know what she’s listening to, as the music is being Bluetoothed from her laptop to her ear phones, but I would bet my arse it’s either one of his songs or something that reminds her of him.

  I contemplate just leaving her to it and not interrupting what should have been a private moment. She’s not expecting me until tomorrow lunch time and will be mortified to know I saw her like this.

  I hear a door creek upstairs and turn my attention towards it. The last thing I want is for one of the kids to come down and find her in this state. I take the stairs two at a time and see Kiki heading into my room.

  “Kiks?” I call her name quietly, not wanting to wake the other three.

  She turns and looks at me over her shoulder and her face lights up.

  “You all right, Treacle?” I ask her as she steps into my open arms.

  “I thought you weren’t coming home till tomorrow? We missed you,” she tells me, whilst wrapping her arms around my waist.

  I breathe in the scent of her hair, long and deep. She smells like home. I kiss the top of her head and then tilt it so she’s looking at me.

  “What you doing up?”

  “I had a bad dream,” she tells me, not meeting my eyes.

  “The same one?”

  She nods her head.

  Before Harry started at secondary school, we sat him down and told him what happened to his mum. He was eleven and had access to the internet, so we thought we needed to do it before some little arsehole at school got in before we did. There was a fair bit of publicity around Tamara’s suicide, mainly because she tried to take me out with her and that only made the news because of my relationship with Georgia. To this day, the press and the public seem to have a fascination with my wife. We’ve managed to protect the kids from it, but they are fully aware I was shot and that their mum was married someone famous before me. They know the circumstances of his death and about the two babies Georgia lost.

  If it were my call, I would’ve waited until they were older, but as my kids keep telling me, this is the twenty-first century. One click and the kids would’ve found out the truth, or a version of it, so we decided to be upfront and honest with them. We told H about his mum first and then we told the other three about Tamara and about Sean.

  They took it okay, well, sorta. Kiks cried because it was so sad Tamara chose to leave Harry in that way. Lu mumbled something about it being a good thing she had died, otherwise she would be hunting her down and shooting Tamara herself. George just asked me if it hurt.

  Unfortunately, since then, Kiki has had nightmares. They don’t happen often, but they’re always about the same thing: either someone is chasing her with a gun, or she’s involved in a car accident.

  We both feel guilty about this and still wonder if we’d made a bad call telling them all too soon. Then Lu got in a fight because some little darling said her mum told her that Georgia was in the papers for having a threesome with some rock stars when she was just thirteen, we knew we had made the right decision.

  Being a parent is tough, toughest job I’ve ever had. I do what I can to protect them, but at the same time I have to prepare them for the outside world. For our kids, it is always gonna be a little bit harder out there, both their mum and their uncle have lived their lives making headlines from a very young age. They have one cousin in an up-and-coming band and another whose face is plastered on billboards, the front of magazines, and sometimes on the telly. Even I have made the front pages a few times.

  They have laptops and smart phones. We didn’t allow them to have Facebook accounts until they got to secondary school, but now they have it all—Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, Snapchat, and Instagram. There are probably others I don’t even know about; the whole thing is beyond me. What ever happened to just knocking on your mate’s door and asking if they want to come out?

  We have a strict no phones at the dinner table rule, and the only time it gets broken is when they all start taking photos of their food before they start to eat. What the fuck is that all about? I’m glad Georgia is the one in charge of watching their online shit and not me.

  Georgia is all over the social media shit and she regularly checks the kids accounts to see what they’re looking at, but she’s warned me that it is gonna have to stop soon, especially with Harry. She trusts him and says he is entitled to his privacy. Yeah, we’ll see.

  I walk Kiks back to her bed and lie down with her for a little while. She’s the sensitive one out of all my kids. She always used to rescue lady birds and any other creature she found in the garden when she was younger. She cries if a sad story comes on the news, and she donates part of her allowance every month to the local animal shelter.

  “So, you missed me, did ya, Treacle?”

  She nods her head and yawns at the same time.

  “We all missed you. Mum’s been sad all week. We watched your wedding video the other night, and she cried all the way through.”

  My heart bangs so hard against my chest, it echoes in my ears. Most people don’t see the gentler side of Georgia. They see the smart business woman that runs a successful chain of fashion stores and an even more successful charity. They see a woman that overcame the very public loss of her first baby and then her husband and a second child. Georgia’s public persona is that of a tough-as-nails, smart-mouthed Essex girl. Me, our children, and her family know different. The kids laugh when she cried when Harry scored his first goal and when Kiki was an angel in the school’s Christmas play. They have no clue why she cries when she hears the national anthem sung before a football match or when certain songs come on the radio. They don’t understand why she cries when someone gets voted off X Factor, or why she bursts into tears when I come home with flowers for her, just because.

  But I know.

  I know Georgia inside out. From the twenty-year-old girl with sad eyes who walked into my wine bar almost thirty years ago, to the stunningly beautiful, mostly vibrant woman she is now, I know her like no other. E
very tear, gasp, and sigh. Every curve, bump, and crease. Every twitch of her lips and thought that crosses her mind, I know and can read them. We talk without words. I can look at her and know when someone is making her uncomfortable, when she’s had too much to drink and it’s time to go, or when someone’s pissing her off and it’s time to step in. I know all of this because we’re a team, united. There is so much more to her than the public could ever conceive.

  “Mum looked so beautiful in her wedding to you. I like that dress better than the one she wore to her other wedding.”

  “Me too, Treacle, me too.”

  “Hope I’m as beautiful as her when I grow up.” She yawns her way through her sentence. I kiss the top of her head again.

  “You already are. Don’t you worry about that. You, your sister, and your mum are the best looking girls in the world.”

  She nods her head, her eyes now closed.

  “Ollie Chalmers said that me and Lu were the fittest twins he’s ever known, but it’s not surprising coz our mum’s a MILF.”

  What the actual fuck?

  I’m paying six grand a term, per kid, to send my girls to a school where they get told shit like this? I’ll be on the phone with that stuck-up headmistress first thing Monday morning, and who the fuck is this Ollie kid anyway?

  “How old is this Ollie kid, Kiks? Do the boys know him?” I choke out because I’ve forgotten to breathe. She doesn’t answer, so I give her a nudge.

  “Whaaaat?” she whines.

  “This Ollie, how old?”

  “Same age as us, fourteen he’s in the same tutor group as George, and they play in the same football team.”