Page 8 of Marley
That moment right there is when I should’ve shut things down.
He was young and horny, yet he was also unfocused, swaying on his feet, pumped full of drugs. But despite all that, he knew where his heart laid. He knew he loved Georgia, his English Rose, and as the song said,‘No bonds could ever tempt him from she.’
And I shit all over that. I took what they had, what he felt for my sister, and kicked it right in the gut. I kicked until it couldn’t breathe?until their love was a crumpled heap on the floor, gasping its last, dying breaths.
All I cared about was the band staying together and making it big. What Sean and Georgia had going on was inconsequential to me ... irrelevant. There were plenty of willing women out there, so why get stuck with just one?
“No Haley, I don’t,” he told her, opening his eyes and looking down at her.
“But ... I thought you might ...”
“Get your fucking hands off me.”
She stood up and turned from him to look first at me, then at Rocco, sitting on the bed.
“Well, you’re no fun, Sean McCarthy. Let’s see if some of what I have here loosens you up a bit.”
She unscrews the pink tube and just like Rocco did at the bar, she pulls out a small plastic bag full of charlie and shakes it in the air.
Rocco pressed play on the boom box and suddenly, Paul Hardcastle’s‘19’began blasting out the speakers.
“On your back, Haley. Serve it up properly, just like I showed you.”
Without a word, Haley was back on the coffee table, tipping the contents of the packet through her cleavage, as far down as her belly button and then over each of her nipples.
“Come and get it, boys,” she said with a giggle.
The music got louder as I looked across to Maca. He looked fucked, and I mean wasted.
“Last hit of the day,” I said.
He gave me a small nod before we both moved to either side of her and started snorting the coke from her tits, cleavage, and belly. I watched as she grabbed at Maca’s hair, trying to kiss him, but he pulled away and crawled over to the bed. She started asking me to fuck her, but I stuck my dick in her mouth and let her suck me off instead. I can’t even remember if I came.
Then she was gone. Maca was lying face down across my bed and Rocco was nowhere in sight. I could hear the Rah Band singing about clouds across the moon and I instantly thought of Georgia. She loved that song. Ever since we were little kids?whenever we went away, whether it be abroad, or just to my parents’ caravan in Clacton, G always had to have a holiday song?a song that would remind her of our time there, and that song had been played everywhere we went when she was with us that past week. G had loved it and declared it her holiday song, the song that would always remind her of Spain.
The image of my beautiful smiling sister punched into my heart like a fist wielding blade. What the fuck was I thinking? I sat on the end of the bed and held my head in my hands, letting the guilt wash over me. She could never know about Maca being in the same room with Haley, and she could never know that I instigated the whole thing.
I’m not sure what was in those last few lines we snorted, but it couldn’t have been cocaine. Maca had passed out cold, and I was starting to feel sleepy too. That drug usually had me going for hours, feeling like I could take on the world, not dizzy and disoriented like I was feeling then.
Sounds became fuzzy while images seemed to bend and look distorted. I looked up, thinking I I could hear screaming, but I wasn’t really sure; it could’ve been laughter, I didn’t know. Noises faded in and out, and all concept of time was lost to me.
There was movement all around us, but it was fractured and disjointed. My name was being said and my face was being slapped, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t focus.
The next thing I remember very clearly was throwing up in the foot well of a car and someone shouting in a foreign language. Not being able to move my arms was the only cognitive thought I could process before I drifted off again.
I had no sense of the time over which the following events played out. I later learnt it was only a period of just over 48 hours.
I woke up alone in a cell as a tray of food was slid through a hatch.
I shouted and screamed, asking for someone to tell me what the fuck was going on, but I was shouted back at in return, only in French.
I was taken to an interview room where I was told by a policeman wearing a very crumpled suit and about three days’ worth of stubble on his chin, that I had been accused of rape.
I was taken back to my cell where I tried to get my shit together. For the past six or so weeks, I’d taken some kind of drug, at least once a day. My body and my brain were reacting to the substance abuse it’d been enduring and the lack of its daily fix. I was hot, cold, and I couldn’t stop vomiting. The shaking and shivering was unbearable.
I wasn’t an addict, but my system has become somewhat used to its daily fix, and it was gonna take me at least a few days to get myself straight.
Lennon arrived with another bloke I later learnt was from the label.
