Carnage: Book #1 The Story Of Us (Volume 1)(157)

I felt sick, I could feel my cheeks burn and my mouth was so dry I was incapable of speech, which was a good thing anyway as my brain was incapable of forming a sentence.

“Aw Mac, she was bloody lucky to have TDH there last night, calmed the whore down and stopped her from getting the Ol’ Bill involved, G was only saying thank you to the bloke.” Sean looks past me to Ashley.

“TDH?” Shit!

“Tall Dark and Handsome, come on Maca, you might be a bloke but you’ve gotta admit, he’s a f*cking good looking bastard, even for an old bloke.” Jesus, Ashley digs me out, then drops me right back into an even bigger pile of shit every time she opens her mouth. I don’t know whether to kiss her or slap her.

“That true?” Sean asks.

“What bit?”

“Did he stop her from calling the Police?” I nod.

“I had no idea he owned the place, I haven’t seen him for years, he probably wanted to avoid the Police getting involved as much as I did.” My heart is pounding so hard in my chest, I worry that Sean will hear it, but he says no more.

We all eventually shower and dress and make our way over to my parents’ house for a Sunday BBQ in the sun, they have babysat all seven grandchildren all night but don’t look in the least bit phased when we eventually arrive. Bailey and his new girlfriend Samantha, a glamour model, join us. It’s the August bank holiday weekend in England and none of us have to be anywhere on the Monday as it’s a public holiday so we all end up staying up, laughing and talking, drinking and getting stoned until the sun comes up, enjoying our first time all together as a family in over a year.

I spend the next three weeks like a cat on hot bricks as I wait for my period to arrive. Carnage are getting ready to record a new album so the boys are in the studio at the end of our garden from about lunchtime every day, sometimes finishing up at four, sometimes not till nine and even then Sean is usually off in his own little world, working on lyrics. I feel a little bit lost, it seems like ages since I’ve had this much spare time and each day seems to drag as I wait for my period to arrive and having so much time to think, brings me to a few conclusions.

I love our house in Hampstead, you would never know that we were so close to the city but I’d decided that when we did finally have a baby, I wanted to be closer to my Mum and the rest of my family, who all lived within a five mile radius of each other. So I had started to look for houses for sale in the Essex countryside near where my parents lived. I had left my number with a few agents with a list of specifications on what we were looking for. Sean’s success had meant that we had homes in several countries. We were lucky, we didn’t really live a lavish lifestyle but we had the money to do anything we really wanted to in life, so telling an estate agent that we had no limit on our budget for a new home had them calling me almost daily.

“Hello.” I picked the phone up as I stood deciding what to where and what to do with my day on this boring wet Wednesday.

“Good morning, may I please speak to Mrs McCarthy?” I was always wary when answering the phone. We’d been caught out before by journalists looking for a story and by crazy fans that had somehow gotten hold of our home number.

“Who’s calling?” I asked.

“It’s Vera White, from Blackthorn White and Co Real Estate.” I liked Vera, she was very proper but swore like a trooper, she was in her fifties and had made me laugh from our very first meeting when she told me that I was a lucky bitch and that despite being happily married, she would gladly jump my Husband’s bones if he ever decided he needed some attention from an older woman. She was also one of the few agents who’d actually shown me through the houses that had ticked most of our boxes. Although, as yet, we still hadn’t found ‘The One’. Like our home in Hampstead, I knew that I’d just know when we found the right house.