The Letters (Carnage #4)(3)
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 to 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, when 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 f*ck 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.