by Lesley Jones
I keep my brave face on all through dinner. I enjoy kisses and cuddles from my nieces and nephews, and when we light the candles on my cake the second time for the children to have their turn, as we always do at family birthdays, I take comfort from the fact that Beau was there with his cousins, blowing them out, too.
Chapter Three
I tilt my face up to the early morning sun and let its heat warm me. The water’s not freezing, but it’s cold enough to make the sun feel good. I squint my eyes and look out across the Pacific Ocean; there is a pod of dolphins swimming in the water nearby, appearing then disappearing every few seconds. The scene is surreal, tranquil and as far removed from the mayhem I left behind in England as you could get. I’m suddenly overcome by a surge of complete and utter loneliness. I just so desperately wish Sean was here with me to witness all this.
My tears are instant and overwhelm me.
Some days are just so hard, so fucking hard.
It’s November 2001, and I’ve been in Australia for four weeks; four weeks in which I’ve done nothing but surf, ride horses, help out at Worldies—my aunt Kath and Uncle John’s bar—and occasionally on the bookings desk of my cousin’s surf lesson and boat charter office.
I let out a deep sigh and start to paddle in towards the shore where my cousin, Jackson, is already stripping out of his surf skins. He turns and watches me as I walk up the beach towards him.
“You did good out there, George. You’re getting better every day, darl.” He looks me over with blue eyes that are so much like my own; his mum and mine are sisters. We both inherited our mothers’ eyes, but he had gotten his hair colour from his dad. It’s almost white where it has been bleached by the sun, and he looks every bit the Aussie surfer poster boy; tall, tanned, blue eyed and blond. He was a good-looking bloke, and he had looked after me like his life depended on it these last few weeks I’ve been in Australia.
He tilts his head to the side as he watches me. “Tough day?”
I squint as I look at him and try to swallow down the sob desperately trying to escape my throat.
I fail.
The sob wins and forces its way out. I drop my board and fall to my knees on the sand.
“Shit, George, stupid question, sorry.”
He sits on the sand next to me.
“Look, I know every day is still a tough day. Fuck, every day will probably always be a tough day after what you’ve been through.” I watch as he picks up a fistful of sand and lets it slide through his fingers as he stares out across the ocean. I wipe my tears and my snotty nose across the sleeve of my skins as I listen to him.
“But it does get easier to bear, George. It never goes away, but you do learn to live with it.” He wipes away his own tears and looks down at me. “You’re doing great. Some days will always be shittier than others, but you’re doing just great.” He drapes his arm over my shoulder and kisses the top of my head.
Jax knows all about loss. When he was eighteen, he had stupidly piled into a car with seven of his mates, including his then girlfriend, Melanie. They were drunk and stoned, and the driver managed to wrap the car around a tree on the five-kilometre journey back into town. Only Jackson and one other boy had survived. He was a grown man of thirty-five now and had a hard time dealing with survivor’s guilt. He’d been in trouble with the police for fighting, drinking and drugs and had ended up in prison for three months, followed by a six-week stint in rehab. By the time he was twenty-five, he had turned his life around. He now ran his own surf school and boat charter company, and worked as a volunteer counsellor at a drop-in centre that helped young people in danger of going off the rails. He had finally settled down with the beautiful Emily. I hope and pray that one day I will find the peace he has.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper and let out a long breath. “I’m sorry if me being here has stirred up horrible memories for you, Jax.” He tightens his grip around my shoulder.
“George, the horrible memories are with me every day. I just hope that in some tiny way, you coming here and being able to talk to me about what happened has helped you, even if you don’t realise it yet.”
I stay quiet. I don’t know yet if I feel better, but I certainly don’t feel any worse than I did leaving England under the horrible circumstances that were surrounding me.
I survived my first birthday without Sean, thanks to his flowers and the beautiful letter he had sent me, but by the following weekend, my world had come crashing down again.
Unusually for me, I’d slept in. When I turned in my bed and looked at the time on my phone, it was almost ten in the morning, then my bedroom door opened. Marley walked in, and I realised it was the sound of someone knocking that had woken me.
“Big brother Marley, this had better be good.” I knew as soon as my eyes met his that it wasn’t. “What’s wrong?” I croaked with my raspy morning voice.
Marls raked both of his hands through his short, spiky hair; he walked over, kicked off his boots and lay on the bed beside me. I could tell by the frown he was wearing and the creases in his forehead that he wasn’t happy, and I needed to know why.
“You’re scaring me, Marls. What’s wrong?” He pulled me to him, resting my head on his chest. I could hear his heart beating rapidly, and I started to get pins and needles in the tips of my fingers and toes, something that happened when I was getting nervous. Marley kissed the top of my head.
“Some bird’s gone to the papers, saying she has Maca’s kid.” My eyelids suddenly felt heavy and I wanted to go to sleep. My stomach roiled and I swallowed a couple of times to keep the bile rising in my throat from escaping. My tears were instant; I didn’t cry, but they were there anyway. They just appeared. Was that still crying? I laid there and wondered to myself: if you didn’t cry but your eyes still leaked, did that count as crying?
“George?”
“Yes, I heard you, Marley,” I snapped, taking in a big gulp of air and trying to steady my breathing before I attempted speech. “Who is she, what’s she saying?” I looked up at him from where my head rested on his chest; he looked down at me and shook his head.
“Her name’s Amanda Jones. She lives just outside of Manchester, and the boy’s almost five.” I sat up and shook my head; now I cried
“No, no Marley; why, why would she do that?”
“I don’t know, George; I don’t fuckin’ know, babe.”
My bedroom door flew open and Jimmie walked in, followed by Lennon.
“She’s a lying fucker, George. I don’t believe a word from either of them.” She threw herself on the bed next to me and gave me a cuddle.
“Please, don’t get yourself in a state over this, G. It’s complete bullshit. Len’s got the solicitors onto them.” I pulled my neck back so I could look from her to Lennon.
“Them?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. “The girl and the newspaper?” Lennon shook his head and sighed.
“No, both the girls. There’s another one crawled out of the woodwork after this morning’s headlines got out.”
I didn’t want to cry, but I did.
“Why don’t they just get in touch with me? If it’s true, why don’t they contact me? Why don’t they come to me privately? If these children are Sean’s like they claim, then why the need to go to the papers, why would you put your own child up for scrutiny like that?”
I looked between all of them, but no one seemed to have an answer.
“I would make sure they were properly looked after. If they are Sean’s children, I wouldn’t keep his money from them.” I looked around the room again; my parents were now standing in the doorway and my mum was crying along with me. I breathed in through my nose and blew out through my mouth as I tried to calm myself down. “Why do they hate me; why do they despise me so much that they would do this? Don’t they get how hard it is? Don’t they get how fucking hard I’m trying to hang on here, to keep going?” Jimmie let out a loud sob from beside me.
“They’ve gone to the papers, babe, because it’s not t
rue. They won’t come to you, because they know they will have to come up with evidence and they don’t have any. There’s no truth in any of this. They’re just a pair of scheming, conniving bitches who don’t take anyone’s thoughts or feelings into consideration, not even their own kids.” She held my face between her hands and made me look at her. “These stories are a load of crap, George. Let Len and the solicitors take care of it. Don’t let any of this set you back. You are the bravest person I know, strong and brave, and we won’t let these fuckers bring you down.”
“But why do they want to hurt me like this, Jim? What the fuck did I ever do to them?” Lennon came and knelt in front of me and held both of my hands; from where I was sitting on the side of the bed, he looked me square in the eye.
“It’s not personal, George. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about Sean. They’re just selfish people out to try and make a quick quid.” He wiped my tears from my face, something my big brother hadn’t done since I was a little girl. “The lawyers are all over this, all over these women and all over the piece-of-crap newspaper that’s run the story. We’ve got this, Porge; it’ll be old news by tomorrow.” He stood and kissed the top of my head.
“Get the bacon on, Ma. I’m starving,” Marley said from beside me on the bed. He cuffed his nose on his sleeve. “We’ve got this, Porge. We’ll sue the shit out of these fuckers, I swear. For you, for Beau and for my best mate, we’ll get this shut down.” He kissed me hard on the forehead. “I love you, little sister, Georgia. Clean your teeth. You’ve got morning breath.”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t old news the next day. More vile individuals crawled out of their holes and made ridiculous claims about my husband and some made claims about me. It would seem that around nine months is the acceptable grieving time to give women who have lost their husbands and unborn children; then apparently, they were seen as fair game by the press and the public. That was the point at which Jackson contacted me and asked me to come over to Australia for a while and get away from it all. So I accepted, and here I am.
The bar my Aunt and Uncle owns also serves food and is open from six in the morning to serve breakfast, or brekkie, as the Aussies call it, until late, which basically means when the last person either leaves of their own accord or is thrown out.
I’ve been eased in gently since I arrived; my Uncle John had warned me, though, that I would receive no special privileges. “I don’t give a rat’s arse how rich and famous you are in London or LA, George; you come and stay with us, then you’ll pull your weight. Brooke and Kathy will teach ya what ya need to know for the bar, and Jax will show ya the ropes for his gig, but I just want ya to know, we don’t pander to princesses around here.”
I nodded, feeling like I was a child being told off. Over the next few weeks, I swept floors, wiped tables, chopped veg and salad, and peeled God only knows how many potatoes. Between all of that, I’d taken surf lessons from Jackson and had ridden horses with my cousin, Brooke, who I also worked with at the bar. She is twenty-eight and absolutely wild; she reminds me a lot of Jimmie, Ash and myself when we were younger. Watching her in action makes me realise what a wild bunch we were; Brooke’s twenty-eight and we were up to these kind of things when we were fifteen—fifteen and so indestructible, our lives all planned out. The only difference between us and Brooke was that we never slept around; well, apart from my mad six months before Cam, my ‘BC days’ as I refer to them in my head.
Brooke has a man’s attitude towards sex: straight sex, no strings. If they were good, she kept them around for a while; if not, she kicked them out of bed in the morning and didn’t invite them back for the return ride. She begged and pleaded with me the past few weekends to go with her into Sydney, but I just wasn’t ready and I was terrified of being recognised. So far, not one person has commented on who I am since my arrival; all they know is I’m Kathy’s niece from England. They laugh at my accent, want to talk about cricket and tell me how much I look like Kath and are generally genuinely nice people.
Despite the fact it is only early November and still out of season, the bar is pretty busy and all of this means I’m fairly exhausted by the time I fall into bed at night. I’m staying in the apartment above the bar with Brooke, so on the weekends when she goes down to Sydney to stay with her sister, my other cousin, Jodie, I have the place to myself and I love it.
Jodie is thirty-three, just a year older than me, and works for a big promotions company. She is currently heading the setup of a new mega-club in Sydney; on completion, it will be the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. She had flown up to see me the first weekend after I arrived and we had talked, laughed and cried together. Sean and I had stayed with her in Sydney when we took our year out. Jackson was living with her then and we had really gotten along well, but I I’m just not ready to go back there yet, maybe not ever. She told me all about the project she is working on. The club is laid out over four levels and will house a venue for live bands, an ice bar, and three different nightclubs, all catering to different types of music. The fourth floor is a nightclub, VIP area and restaurant, all with a rooftop terrace and infinity pool, from where there are panoramic views across Sydney, the harbour and bridge with just a glimpse of the roof of the opera house. It is due to open on December the first, and I promised her I will travel down for the opening. She hasn’t realised the significance of the date, and I really don’t want to be the one to bring up the fact that the first of December was the day life dealt me the worst kind of blow; one from which I will never fully recover.
I haven’t decided when I will return to England yet, but it won’t be any time soon. Most of the stories about Sean and his supposed infidelities had been disproved, but there are still a few floating about. I don’t think they are true; I want to believe I knew my husband well enough to be sure of the fact he would never father a child and not tell me about it. But there is one thing stopping me from being totally convinced and that is my guilty conscience caused by my own infidelity. If I could do it, then why couldn’t he?
Chapter Four
I sit on my bed in the apartment above the bar and stare at the crate that was delivered by courier on Thursday; it’s now Sunday morning. I’ve gotten as far as undoing the top and that is it. I’ve approached it a total of eleven times these last two days, but I still can’t bring myself to look at the contents. I know what is in there; I’ve known what is in there for years. The contents had moved with us from Sean’s loft in Docklands to the house in Hampstead, to the farmhouse, then to my parents when the farm was packed up and sold, and never at any time have I had the courage to look at anything inside. Sean had told me many times to look; he wanted me to read the letters, cards, poems and songs. He wanted me to watch the videos. He wanted me to understand what he was going through when we were apart, but I never felt the need to open up old wounds. Now, with him gone, I want to know everything I can, every thought, every feeling. I had the box crated up and flown over from England, containing not only the letters and videos from our four years apart, but also Sean’s diaries come notebooks that he kept with him constantly. They weren’t diaries as such; they were where Sean wrote down thoughts, feelings, phrases, anything he thought he might use as part of his song writing. There were dozens of them and they were all sitting in the large crate, staring me in the face right now.
Getting up, I make myself a coffee and bring it back into the bedroom with me. I sit on the floor and stare some more, sipping on my coffee.
“What shall I do, baby? Can you tell me? D’ya want me to read them?” I say aloud. I know I sound like a weirdo, but I know he can hear me; don’t ask me how or why, it’s impossible to explain, much like the love that we shared. I couldn’t put the reasons into words. I just knew.
I sip on my coffee, wait for some divine intervention and nearly throw the contents of my mug over myself when my phone rings, blasting out Sean’s voice as he sings “With You”.
“Morning, Jim.”
“Hey, G,
how’s it going, babe?”
“Yeah, I’m doing okay. Just woke up and made a coffee. I have the whole day and night off.”
“Is that a good thing? Are you not better off keeping busy?”
“I will be busy; the crate arrived Thursday, and I’ve done nothing but sit and stare at it since.”
“Are you sure about this, G? You don’t think reading all that stuff is gonna set you back?” Jimmie had been the one to organise the shipping of the crate over, but she hadn’t been entirely convinced it was a good idea. I told her that now I was away from England, I felt stronger and more able to deal with the crate’s contents. It wasn’t entirely true and I don’t think she entirely believed me, but she sent it anyway.
“I think they will help me move on, Jim. I’m looking forward to reading his thoughts; it’ll be a new part of him, a part I’ve never had before.” My stomach churned just at the thought of reading Sean’s words, and I’m not sure if it is due to excitement, fear or the fact that I’m lying to myself.
“How’s everyone there?” I ask, wanting to change the subject.
“Yeah, okay. I’m missing you. It’s freezing cold. The kids are getting hyper about Christmas and blah, blah, blah, same ol’ same ol’.” This isn’t like Jim at all; she is always an upbeat girl and she sounds a little off.
“You okay, Jim? You sound a little down.”
“Just tired. Len’s been busy working on some new project with Marley and away a fair bit, and the kids have just got so much on between school and concerts, football, dancing and every other bloody thing they do. I swear, the kids have a better social life than me; you know how it is.” I know she didn’t mean anything by what she said, but I instantly have a lump in my throat. I would love to know what all of that feels like. I would love to know how it is. I would love to be rushed off my feet looking after my husband, running around after my kids, but I don’t. There is still a possibility that I won’t, not ever.
