Carnage: Book #1 The Story Of Us (Volume 1)(22)

My stomach drops to my feet again, groupies, I hate that word; Jimmie and I have discussed them a few times but we haven’t really admitted to our fears, Lennon’s only their manager and he’s still getting girls throw themselves at him. He’s told her on the phone, Sean has told me no such thing, he knows how I’d react, I had already thought about running away from home and getting a flight to whatever country he was in I was jealous, it was the reason I had been unable to eat since he left, I trusted Sean, it was the women that I didn’t trust and that’s what some of them were, women, grown women, not sixteen year old school girls like me and I hated it. Again, this wasn’t something I was going to admit to my Mum, I wanted her to think that I had every faith in Sean and I did to a degree.

I stand in front of the mirror in the hotel room looking at myself, I’ve sent Sean down to the bar as I wanted to get dressed on my own, I’ve tried this outfit on three times before I left England but I still wasn’t confident enough to put it on in front of him. I’m wearing a black leather mini skirt, a black and red wide banded striped jumper that hangs off one shoulder, black fishnet stockings and red patent leather heels. My newly permed hair is big and I have a pair of big red hooped earrings in my ears and red and black bangles on my wrists. I spray myself once more with my new perfume ‘Cocoa’ which I had bought at the airport, pick up my black bag and throw it across my left shoulder and chest so it rests on my right hip and leave the room.

Sean has seen me naked numerous times, we’ve bathed and showered together, he’s kissed every square inch of my body but I had never felt more nervous than I did walking into that bar; that was the first time that I realised I could turn heads. A group of grown men that looked about thirty were all sitting around a table as I walked in and one by one they all looked up at me, one of them winked, which actually calmed me down a bit as I assumed it meant I looked okay.

“Hermosa,” I heard one of them say. I had no idea what it meant; I would ask the waiter later. I saw Sean and Lennon at the bar with their backs to me but it was Marley that spotted me first.

“Fuckin’ hell, look at George!” I think is what he says, I feel like everyone in the bar turns around and looks at me at once; Sean’s mouth drops wide open, I think me and my Mum have achieved the desired effect, his mouth closes and he swallows. Jimmie nudges him from the barstool she’s sitting on and he moves towards me, he stops right in front of me and very gently runs his fingertips over my jaw and up across my lips.

“You look beautiful G, like one of them supermodels they keep on about in the papers, except you’re more beautiful.”

I can’t speak, my mouth is so dry through nerves and now I feel like I’m going to cry so I say nothing and let him lead me by the hand to the bar. Marley pulls me in for a big hug, he looks terrible, skinny and gaunt, and his eyes look sunken into his head. Mum will go mental when she sees him. “Look at my baby sister, all grown up, we can’t be calling her Porge any more can we Len, can’t even call her George anymore really either, so what do we call you, now your all grown up?”

“Try Georgia that is my name,” I say to him.

He sounds like Marley but he doesn’t, he’s talking too fast and too much and he keeps sniffing and wiping his nose and for some reason I feel frightened and I’m not sure if it’s of him or for him. I say hello to Billy and Tom, their girlfriends aren’t here tonight, they’re flying in next weekend and staying for the last week, my Mum was working on my Dad to let me fly back for the end of the tour but I was keeping that to myself, I hadn’t even told Jim as I wanted it to be a surprise for Sean, if I was allowed.