Carnage Boxset

by Jones, Lesley

  I can’t even hold on to Cam as he comes. I feel him throb, pulse, and explode inside me, but I can’t move my arms to hold him to me like I want to.

  He eventually still his movements. The only sound in the room is our heavy breathing as he rests his forehead against mine.

  “I love you, Kitten. Please, don’t ever be in any doubt about that. Not even for a second.”

  He holds onto my arse cheeks and rolls over onto his back, bringing me to lie on top of him.

  Without another word, we go to sleep.

  Chapter Nine

  Georgia

  The week that followed the best make-up sex ever had by anyone in the history of the world was a pretty good one.

  The kids are busy but behaving. Now that Cam has all of his security issues sorted out at the clubs, he is happier and not on the phone as much. This means that he has time to help me with a few of the arrangements for this year’s Triple M concert. The event has grown too big for his London club and now, we now hold it in a football stadium instead. KLUB still hosts the Sydney event, and Cam supplies the venue and all of the staff to us free of charge.

  I really do have the best husband.

  Who, coincidentally, just left this morning for a golfing weekend with my brothers, so Jimmie and Ash were coming over to stay. My twins are away on a four-day residential in the New Forest with the school and both the boys have sleepovers tonight.

  I’ve managed to separate a pile of lyrics from all of Sean’s stuff for my brother to go through when the boys got back on Sunday afternoon. Some are whole songs, some a few verses, some just a line but there could be something amongst it all that Marley can use.

  I’ve put Sean’s diaries into a separate box to look at another time. I just don’t have it in me right now to read them. Maybe I never will. His letters are hard enough, the thoughts and feelings that he wanted me to know. I’m not sure that I’ll ever want to know or read the ones that are private and were never meant for me or anyone else to see. His private thoughts should probably remain that, private.

  On my desk sits the last pile of letters addressed to me, a pile of miscellaneous stuff that I’ve yet to sort through and a few video tapes, one of which I was now about to start watching.

  Marian has loaned us an ancient portable television that must’ve been about twenty years old. It has a video player built into it and I’ve just pressed play when Harry knocks, then walks into the room.

  He leans over my shoulder and looks at the screen, which is still just displaying white noise.

  “What is that?”

  I pause the tape. I have no clue what’s on it and don’t want anything inappropriate popping up and surprising me.

  “It’s a video clip of Carnage.”

  “No, I meant that, the telly. Why’s it so big?”

  I laugh. Harry’s generation only know flat screens, curved screens, 3D, LCD and plasma. They would have no concept of the huge back part televisions used to have on them or of having to actually get up and turn it over.

  “That’s a little one, a portable that you would have in the bedroom or kitchen,” I explain.

  “Why’s it blue?”

  I look over the very nineties bluey silver colour of the telly.

  “I’ve no clue. You could get them in all colours to suit your room, back in the day.”

  I watch him as he walks across the room to get the spare chair that’s sitting in the corner. He moves exactly like his dad. Long confident strides. He pushes the front of his dark hair back before lifting the chair with ease and putting it down next to mine. He picks up a Polaroid photo that I’d found amongst everything else. It was of a hot and sweaty Sean and Marley. Their guitar straps pulled tight across their chests, their guitars resting across their backs. They each have a beer in their hands and Marley’s arm is slung over Sean’s shoulders. They’d obviously just finished a show somewhere.

  They look so young. Twenty at the most. So it was probably at a time that we weren’t together. I’d kept it out to give to Marley. I have a couple of photos of the pair of them in my office, and I even keep a photo of me and Sean in here. It was my favourite one of the two of us that was taken on my birthday. I’m around five or six months pregnant with Beau, Sean has his hand on my pregnant belly, my hand is on top of his. Both of us were looking down at our hands at the moment the image was captured.

  I fail to blink back tears and swipe at them discreetly from under my eyes.

  “Do you miss him?” Harry asks from beside me.

  I take a deep breath while I think about how to word my answer.

  Our kids are aware of the basics when it comes to the story of Sean and me.

  There’s lots of information, some true, some complete bullshit, out there on the internet to be found, so we’ve raised them with a policy of, if they ask, we won’t lie, we’ll give them an answer that’s as age appropriate and as near to the truth as we can.

  “Yeah, I miss him. He was my best friend as well as my husband. We grew up together. I’d known him since I was eleven years old.”

  “How did you meet, at school?” Harry asks, still looking at the photo.

  “No, Marley brought him to our house. He’d just moved to our area and been recruited by the band. It was the summer holidays. Jimmie and I were hanging upside down on the monkey bars when they walked up the garden at Nan and Pops old house.”

  He turns his attention from the photo to my face as I talk. I wonder how much I should tell him. I wonder what’s appropriate for a fifteen-year-old having a conversation like this with his mum. Are there even guidelines for a conversation like this?

  “Then what?”

  “Marley told me to stop flashing my knickers.”

  Harry laughs. “Sounds like Marls.”

  I won’t mention that Sean asked me to show him my tits.

  “And then what?”

  I let out a long breath and decide to be totally honest with my son.

  “I fell in love. I was eleven years old, but I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I loved him.”

  His brown eyes, Cam’s eyes, look over my face.

  “So how old was you when you met Dad?”

  “Nineteen, almost twenty I think.”

  “But he was still alive then, Maca?”

  “Yeah, we split up when I was sixteen, got back together again when I was twenty …” I trail off. Would he ask?

  “But you were with Dad then?”

  Of course he asks, he is Cam’s son.

  “We split up. Sean and I got back together, eventually got married, and were together for fifteen years before he was killed.”

  “And then what? You got back with Dad? I never knew that. I thought you met Dad at his club in Sydney.”

  I nod my head. “We met back up in Sydney. I was there to escape the press and the public on the first anniversary of Sean’s death. I had no clue your dad owned the club. We bumped into each other and started seeing each other when we got back to England. We’ve been together ever since.”

  He picks the photo up and looks at it again.

  “So, if he hadn’t died, you and Dad wouldn’t be together and my brother and sisters wouldn’t have been born.” It’s a statement, not a question. I don’t even attempt an answer.

  “I don’t wanna be glad he died, Mum, because I’ve seen how upset you still get about things, but I’m glad you and Dad met and got back together.”

  I have to wait a few seconds before I can speak, and even then, my voice wobbles.

  “You don’t wish things had worked out differently with your …” I can’t call her his mum, she’s not his mum. I am.

  “Tamara?” he offers up. I love this kid so bloody much.

  He tilts his head to the side and smiles at me, knowing full well I’m struggling. “With Tamara?” I continue.

  He shakes his head no. “If they’d have sorted their shi— Themselves out, then where would that leave you? What about the twins and George? Without Da
d, they wouldn’t be who they are. They might not even exist.”

  He’s expressing all of my own inner turmoils, and I’m kinda glad. It makes me feel like my thoughts are normal. It also makes me wonder about Cam and Chantelle. Before me, and even before Tamara, there was Chantelle, Cam’s first wife.

  My stomach lurches. It’s as if H is reading my thoughts.

  “Strange really, that Dad’s first wife died, then your husband, then Tamara killed herself, and you two end up together after both going through all of that.”

  I nod my head, agreeing with him.

  “Life’s strange sometimes, mate, that’s just the way it is. Sometimes it can be very wicked, too.”

  “And lucky. You both had bad luck, but then you had good luck when you bumped into each other in Australia. You had good luck again when Jimmie and Ash had the twins and George for you. We were all lucky Dad didn’t die when Tamara shot him. That is all good luck and none of that is wicked.”

  This kid is so bloody perceptive. I reach out to ruffle his hair, but he ducks out of the way.

  “What ya doing? Don’t touch the hair, I’m going out in a minute.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Westfield’s with George and Ollie.”

  As if on cue, George comes through the door.

  “Here you are. Don’t you answer your messages?”

  H sends me a sideways look. George’s voice has broken over the past few months and is deeper than both his and Cam’s right now.

  I nudge Harry, silently telling him not to make fun of his brother, but George catches it.

  “What?” He looks between the both of us, wiping his hand over his face, paranoid that he has something on his chin.

  “Nothing,” we both laugh and say at the same time.

  “Does this look all right?” George asks us.

  He’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt, which is buttoned up to the neck, and a pair of skinny jeans that have an extra low crotch so they don’t split when he tries to walk in them. Cam hates the things and is constantly telling the boys to pull their trousers up when they slide down and expose their boxers underneath.

  “Yeah, you look nice. You both do.”

  Harry is wearing a similar outfit, except with shorts in the same style as George’s jeans.

  They are handsome boys, and I am noticing more and more that girl’s heads turn when we are all out together.

  I sort of got used to it with Sean. He was public property and it went with the job. I didn’t like it, but I got used to it, to a degree. I don’t like it when it happens with Cam, and it does, often. When it does, I politely explain to women in bars and restaurants that it’s highly disrespectful to look at my husband like they want to ride home, on his face. But when it happens with my boys, whoa. I will glare back at the little slutetts that stare like they want to eat them with a look that says, “You’re fourteen, sweetheart. Fuck off home and do some colouring, play with Barbie, put on your My Little Pony jarmies, wipe those big black scary eyebrows off your face, and go to bed.”

  Then Cam reminds me what I was doing at fourteen.

  I tell him to shut up and mind his own business.

  He laughs.

  I don’t.

  “You got money?” I ask them.

  “Yeah, Dad transferred my allowance a week early. I saw a pair of football boots I wanna get, and he said he’d go half with me,” George replies.

  “Dad transferred you money? How?”

  “Online,” they reply in unison.

  “How? Dad don’t know how to do online banking.”

  “Yeah he does. H put the app on his phone, and we showed him how to use it yesterday. His practice go was sending me my allowance.”

  Well, wonders would never cease. My husband is finally getting with it.

  “I showed him how to send photos in a text as well. I told him he should get Facey coz it’s cheaper, but he just said fu— No. He said no, he didn’t need it.”

  Yeah, I could well imagine what Cam would have to say about getting a Facebook account. It would’ve been far more than no.

  George looks at his phone. “Ollie’s outside,” he announces.

  “You gonna be all right here on your own tonight?” Harry asks.

  “I won’t be on my own. I can call the dogs inside and Jimmie and Ash are coming over to stay. Paige might come over too if she’s not too jet-lagged.”

  “Paige?” they both enquire at once.

  “Is she bringing any of her mates?”

  Like father like sons. Paige had come over for a family BBQ when she was home one time last year and she’d brought a friend. A very pretty friend. As young as my boys were, they knew what they liked, and that day, it was Kitty Calder, the young Australian model that Paige had with her. Unfortunately for them, Kitty was twenty-three and didn’t even know they existed.

  “Unlucky boys, she’s on her own.”

  They shake their heads and slouch their shoulders in mock disappointment before kissing me goodbye and heading out the door.

  Harry was right, I was lucky, in so many ways.

  A few minutes later, I receive a text from Cam.

  TIGER: Wanna see a dick pic?

  ME: Depends whose dick the pic’s of?

  TIGER: My fuckin dick. Why, who the fuck else sends you dick pics?

  I don’t reply, and my phone rings thirty seconds later, and just for fun, I silence it, sending the call to my message bank.

  I laugh as I think about how much trouble I’m gonna be in later.

  * * *

  Last night was the scariest of my life. Even now, knowing that you’re safe, my hands still shake and my throat and chest still ache.

  Our baby’s gone, G. I only knew about him for a few short hours and then he was gone.

  I'll never forgive myself for staying down at the bar, G. I should've gone up to bed with you. You're my wife, you were carrying our child, and I stayed at the bar drinking and celebrating while you was alone and in pain in our room.

  I was so hungover yesterday morning, I didn't even realise how quiet and pale you were.

  As soon as Jimmie mentioned it, as soon as finally paid you some attention, I knew in an instant something was wrong.

  And then everything happened so fast. You were sick, and then when I held you in my arms you so cold and clammy. You just laid there, limp like a rag doll. I can’t begin to put into words the level of fear I felt during the few minutes it took us to get to the hospital.

  I knew it was bad when they gave you a bed straight away. I held you, Georgia. I held you so tight in my arms, but I couldn’t stop you from shaking. I didn’t wanna let you go, G. I was so fucking terrified that I would never get another chance, that it would be the last time I ever got to hold your soft warm body against mine, that I didn’t wanna let you go.

  But then the convulsions started. George, I lost it. I fucking lost it. Marley was holding me back when they wheeled you away. Fuck George, I knew the baby was gone. There was blood all over your jeans, and I knew what that meant, and my brain was sorta accepting that. But you, George? No, I couldn’t lose you. I wouldn’t survive, George. I wouldn’t fuckin’ want to.

  And then it was quite. After all the noise and chaos, they showed us to a waiting room and it was just nothing, silence.

  Two hours I spent, contemplating how I was going to end my life if they didn’t come back soon and tell me you were ok.

  You know I’m not religious, but I begged and I prayed to anyone that was out there listening, even the devil himself. Me for you George. That’s what I offered. My life for yours, but at the same time, I had to work out what I was gonna do if no one listened. I had two hours to work out exactly how things would go if you didn’t make it. I’d have to make sure you had a proper funeral, George. I’d be dying inside, but I’d get through it, knowing that soon enough, I’d be joining you too.

  So, I would give you the perfect funeral, and then I would join you and our baby, George
.

  Then the doctor came and explained everything. Ectopic, fallopian tubes, rupture. Apparently, we were lucky, we lost our baby, but we got to the hospital in time to save you. I don’t feel too lucky right now, but I’m so fucking grateful I still have you.

  I love you, Gia, my beautiful girl. I love you so fucking much. This next few months are gonna be hard. We’re gonna be sad, and we’re probably gonna fight and cry and blame each other. We just need to remember that when it all feels like it’s too hard or when it’s all too much, we’re Georgia and Sean. Sean and Georgia, and we’re meant to fucking be.

  Sleep soundly now. Tomorrow is a new day, and I will do my absolute best to make it a little brighter for you, because if your heart is as broken as mine right now, then I know just how much pain you will be feeling.

  I love you, Gia, my brave and beautiful girl. I love you Baby McCarthy, I’m so sorry that we never got to meet you, but rest assured, you will be remembered with every beat of my heart. xxx

  * * *

  My head hurts and my face stings with the salt from my tears.

  He hurt so bad after we lost baby M, and I was so selfishly wrapped up in my own grief that I never saw it. It was all about me. Never once in those first few weeks did I think about the fact that he had thought that he’d lost us both.

  Aside from the anguish he conveys in this letter, I can’t help but notice the irony in the similarity of the way we thought.

  He planned on getting through my funeral and then killing himself if I died. When he died, I attempted exactly that.

  “Oh, Sean, life was so unfair to us, babe. Can you see me now? Are you watching me? I hope you’re happy for me. I hope I’ve made you proud.”

  I pull a handful of tissues out of the box I have next to me and blow my nose.

  Back in the early days, after Sean died, I was convinced I could feel him around me, but that’s not happened in a long time now.