CHAPTER 22
AUGUST 1999
Sean and I were sat at a little café in Chapel Street Melbourne, Australia; we had just enjoyed an enormous fry up and were now sipping on our coffees and watching the very interesting sights and sounds of this part of Australia. It was an absolutely freezing cold, but a bright and sunny day; we had no idea when we arrived eight months ago, on a stinking hot thirty eight degree day that Australia could get so cold. We’d been travelling all around the country since our arrival, and had seen waterfalls in Kakadu, and watched the sun set and rise again over Ayers Rock. We’d dived with sharks, inside a shark cage in Western Australia, and we’d surfed at Bondi, spent New Year’s Eve on a yacht in Sydney Harbour, driven along the Great Ocean Road, surfed again at Bells Beach and sat freezing on a beach on Phillip Island watching a colony of Fairy Penguins coming back to dry land after a day out at sea fishing. We spent the last three weeks discovering the city of Melbourne and its surrounding areas.
We’d fallen in love with Australia when Carnage had toured here almost two years ago and we vowed to come back and have a look at the whole country, not just Sydney and Melbourne where the band had played. The people were so friendly, the country and the scenery were stunningly beautiful and vaster than you could ever imagine. Victoria was the smallest state and yet you could fit the whole of Great Britain inside it.
Sean and I had been away from England and our families for almost a year now, we’d decided to take a year out, leaving the madness of Carnage and the fame that came with it behind us while we travelled, before coming back to England and trying for a baby.
After Sean had proposed to me, we kept our news secret until after Jimmie and Lennon’s wedding as we didn’t want to take any of the attention away from them or attract any more attention to ourselves. The press intrusion had been relentless, sometimes the stories they printed about us were half-truths, but mostly they were complete fabrication and often very hurtful. We mostly ignored them or had a good laugh over them. We’d been split up, according to the press on an almost weekly basis. Sean had had numerous affairs, quoted as being in places with different women, when he was in fact, at home, or even on a different continent with me. The best story was that the reason we hadn’t had children yet was because our marriage was a sham and Sean was gay; that was the one that we laughed most about and the one that had caused Sean to have the most piss taken out of him amongst the band, my brothers and our friends.
The real reason we had in fact held off having children, is that we were simply enjoying life too much. We loved travelling; being on tour with the band was hard enough without adding children to the equation. We’d seen this first hand with my brother’s kids.
Jimmie and Lennon had produced a son within a year of being married, and in keeping with Layton tradition, his name had a musical link. When little Jimmy was born, everyone assumed he was named after his Mum, until his little sister was born eighteen months later and named Paige, then along came Ziggy, named after Ziggy Stardust, not Marley but both worked, then last year Harley was born, named after one of my Dad’s favourite singers Steve Harley.
Marley and Ash had stayed together, although their relationship was nowhere near as happy and settled as Jim and Len’s. They’d split up and reconciled so many times over the last ten years I’d lost count, although they seemed much happier of late as the band were touring less and the press attention wasn’t as intrusive. They’d never married, but had three children a boy called Joe, after Joe Strummer from The Clash and two girls, Connie after my Mum’s favourite singer Connie Francis and Annie after Annie Lennox. Add to this Tom and Billy’s kids, there were times that there’d been a total of ten children in tow whilst the band toured, most of whom I have to say, behaved better than the band members. Witnessing first-hand the stress of travelling with the kids and the limitations it put on what you could and couldn’t do, the places you could and couldn’t visit. We had just decided to wait, the same as we ended up doing with our wedding, which eventually happened in October of 1999. The band had just ended their American tour and the whole lot of us, all of my family, including my parents, Bailey and his new girlfriend Sam, Billy, Tom and their families, headed down to Florida for a much needed holiday, where we decided on the spur of the moment to get married.
Everyone we wanted to be there was in the same place at the same time for a change, so, we got in touch with a Justice Of The Peace, got ourselves a licence and were married just as the sun set on St’ Pete’s beach on Saturday the 27thof October. It was a simple service, we wrote our own vows, each of us struggling to get our words out with the emotion of the day bearing down on us. Sean being the lyrical genius out of the two of us had every one in tears in an instant.
“Georgia Rae, I love ya, I’ve loved ya since the day I saw you hanging upside down on the monkey bars, flashing me your pink knickers, you were eleven years old and you stole my heart from my chest and the breath from my lungs. I only ever feel complete when you're near, you own me Gia, heart, mind, body and soul, completely. I love you like the stars above and I will love you till I die, but these words, all that I tell you today, all that I declare before our friends and family today, they still aren’t enough, because like I’ve told you before, the words haven’t been invented yet to describe what you mean to me, what I feel for you. There’s no one else, there never was, it’s still only ever you and I will spend every minute of every day, loving you, worshiping you and doing my best to make you happy, doing my best to be the Husband you deserve. I love ya Georgia Rae, please be my Wife?”
He stopped twice to regain his composure, watching Sean cry as he declared his love for me in front of our friends and our family almost floored me, I pointlessly fought so hard not to cry. For me, the most amazing thing was, we hadn’t read or even discuss our vows and was amazed at how we had thought along the same lines, mine sounded like a shortened version of Sean’s, I spoke between sobs.
“Sean, from that very first day I set eyes on you, I’ve known you were my one true love, you own my heart, my mind, my body and soul and I will love you till I die. I’ll spend each and every day trying to be the Wife you deserve. You make me a better person, and without you I’m lost, incomplete. Please, will you be my Husband because there’s no one else, there never was, it’s still only ever you, I love you Sean McCarthy, please marry me.”
“What’s up G, what ya thinking?” Sean looks across the table at me; he has the hood of his leather jacket pulled up. He shaved his beautiful hair off when we got here and amazingly, he had hardly been recognised the whole trip. In fact, on one occasion, it was me that was recognised and not him. I ended up signing autographs and having my photo taken with Sean’s fans while he hid in a tourist shop on Sydney’s Circular Quay, but he had let it grow since May now and we had started to garner the odd second glance from passers-by so Sean had taken to either wearing a hat or keeping the hood of his jacket up.
Sean’s skin is so dark from all of the sun we’ve been exposed to, he almost looks Arabic, the way his hood drapes over his hair, framing his dark skin and eyes, my belly does a few forward rolls as I digest the fact that this stunningly beautiful man, who’s adored, loved and lusted after by millions of both men and women around the world, is in fact, my Husband. And I’m under absolutely no illusion as to how much he loves me. We’ve spent almost a year in near isolation from anyone else, just Sean and Georgia, Georgia and Sean, as it should be and I can’t help but smile.
“I was thinking about our wedding.” His face lights up.
“The day or the night?” I shake my head at him, he’s just turned thirty two and still such a boy.
“Our vows.” He moves his chair closer to mine and puts his arm around me.
“I meant every one of them,” he says, I give him a broad smile.
“I know you did and you’ve lived up to each and every one of them.”
“And so have you, I couldn’t be happier, could you?” I think about it for a few seconds, apparently a few seconds too long, my Husband can read me like a book and now his smile has vanished, his eyebrows pulled together in a look of concern. I have a confession to make and I’m not sure how he’s going to take the news, it’s something we have discussed, but as yet have made no firm decision on.
“What G, what is it?”
“I ran out of pills.”
“Pills, what pills, you got a headache?” I laugh.
“No, contraceptive pills.” His eyes widen.
“Ahh shit, right, well we can just get you in to see a doctor here and get you a prescription. I can’t see that it’ll be any hassle, if it is, I’ll make some calls and get some Fed Ex’ed over.”
“In June,” I add and wait for his reaction, he looks totally confused.
“What, you don’t need them till June?” I smile at him, I’m as nervous as shit at what I’m about to tell him.
“I ran out of pills in June, we’ve been having unprotected sex since June.” He looks at me blankly for a split second, then his face lights up, his eyes spark with, everything that I hoped to see in them.
“You wanna make a baby?” Oh God that sounded so sexy that all I can do is nod and smile stupidly. He stands up, throws twenty dollars on the table, grabs my hand and pulls me out to the side of the road as he hails a taxi.
