Page 111 of The Interview
Len pauses, reaches for his drink that’s set down beside him, and takes a sip.
“It was 3:42 in the afternoon when I got the call from Milo. The first chance he got, he called.”
I sit back and curl into Cam. Not that he can protect me from my brother’s words, but he can give me comfort with his presence as I hear them.
“I’d just pulled up on the drive to collect Jimmie, so we could go together and pick the kids up from school. Jim hates driving in snow, so I’d left the office early to do it. The kids wanted to be able to walk in it for a bit and have snowball fights with their mates, so it was already ten minutes after they finished, but we knew their route, which wasn’t safe to walk once the footpaths ended, and they had to walk in the road. Especially in that weather.” Lens rambling like I was, overexplaining like I do, and I smile at the similarities in our personalities.
“Anyway, Jim’s just getting in the car when the call comes through. I’d just got a new BMW, and it was fitted out with Bluetooth for hands-free calling. Marley had one, too. Maca’s was on backorder. He’d hummed and harred about ordering one because he loved his Land Rover. We had to have these special phones to go with the car because…. Anyway, the call came fromMilo to say that George and Maca had been in an accident. It was bad, and they were taking them to The Royal Free. I sat there for a few seconds, processing what he said. ‘How bad?’ I asked him, and he said…”
I hear the break in my brother’s voice, the fight I’m all too familiar with.
“He said, ‘Mate, it’s bad, and you need to get there’. I was frozen. I just couldn’t move.”
“I told him we needed to get to the school and get the kids, then we would go to the hospital,” Jimmie interjects. “I don’t know how I remained calm, I just knew that one of us had to, and right then, it wasn’t Len. I offered to drive, but he wouldn’t let me, so I called Dave, told him what had happened, and asked him to meet us at our place so he could have the kids. We picked the kids up, told them there had been an accident and that we were going to the hospital. We dropped them home, told Dave to take them to Marley’s and that we’d update him once we had some news. We had a conversation about who to call next. We wanted to go to Bern and Franks and tell them ourselves, but we also wanted to get to the hospital, so Len called them.”
“I was cleaning my clubs, ready to play golf with the boys the next morning,” my dad says, reminding me of something I’d totally forgotten.
Sean, my dad, and my brothers were all supposed to play golf on the Saturday morning. I loved that they did that together. Sean always came home knackered, a little bit drunk, and totally chilled out. When my dad’s in the country, he and my brothers still play golf, and they now include Cam, who comes home much the same way Sean used to.
“I hated having one of them bloody mobile phones—still do. Always losing the poxy thing. Bern makes me keep it in me pocket all the time. That’s where it was that day. Frightened the fucking life out of me when me arse started buzzing. Only Bernand the kids had me number because there’s no other fucker I wanna talk to, so I knew it was one of them.”
I smile because nothing’s changed with my dad. The only numbers in his phones are the family’s. And I say phones because I currently have seventeen active numbers stored under his name because he loses and then finds his phones so often.
“It was Len. Ya know what? No matter how old your kids get, when they say, ‘Dad’ in a certain tone, you just know in your gut there’s something wrong. Soon as he said it, I asked what was wrong. He just said George and Maca had been in an accident, they were at The Royal Free. Didn’t say anything about helicopters or airlifting or anything like that because he didn’t wanna worry us too much I s’pose, and that he was sending a car to take us there. Told me not to panic and he’d explain everything when we got there. Course, then I had to go and tell Bern.”
I lean around Len and Jimmie to see my parents. My dad has his arm around my mum, who’s crying into the tissues held against her face.
“I can’t,” she says with a head shake. “I just can’t.”
“It’s all right, girl. You’re all right.” My dad kisses the top of her head.
“It’s okay, Mum. It’s fine,” I call out to reassure her.
“I’m so sorry, Georgia.”
“Mum, it’s honestly okay.”
“Want me to make you a nice cuppa, Bern?” Ash asks her.
“No, I bloody don’t, but you can get me another drop of that Prosecco,” she says, making us all laugh and lifting some of the heaviness in the room.
“The car came and got us,” my dad continues, “and by the time we got to the hospital, it was absolute pandemonium. Our driver had been on the phone to someone, and there were coppers, a geezer who worked for Len, and the boys there tomeet us. Then Jimmie appeared with Bailey and told us Marley and Ash had just got there. That’s… that’s when I knew we were in trouble. If Len had called all of us to be there, this wasn’t gonna be good.”
“How did you find out?” Daniel asks Marley when my dad pauses.
“Len called. I was just leaving Joe’s football training. They’d moved it inside because of the weather, meaning they only trained for an hour instead of two.”
“After I called the ol’ man, I managed to get through to someone at the hospital,” Len explains. “They wouldn’t give me any information on their condition over the phone. They just said…. They advised we call all immediate family to get to the hospital as soon as possible. So, while I called Marls, Jim called Ash.” Len lets out a long sigh. “After that, I called Bailey, then sent Jimmie down to wait for them and show them to the room they’d put us in, not realising that, by that time, there was a shitshow going on outside. Thankfully, Milo and Jimmie had made calls, and we managed to get our PR team from the label together, as well as extra security.”
“It had obviously made the news by then, because there were reporters, television crews, fans, just chaos everywhere when we pulled up,” Marley says.
“Some young copper came up and told him to move the car,” Ashley adds. “He threw him the keys and said something like, ‘Tow it, keep it, burn it, I don’t fucking care,’ and we just kept walking.”
“One of the girls from the office—Lisa, I think her name is—showed us to the room we’d been allocated. As soon as I saw Len’s face, I knew it was bad.” I watch Marley, who’s right now staring into his glass, shrug and shake his head. “I knew it was bad, but then he told us to sit down.”
“They came in and updated me while I was on my own,” Len says. “I don’t know if that was worse or better. I needed Jim. I just wanted her there. I wanted to go home and be with my kids.” Lens voice is thick with emotion, the tremble of his jaw and lips as he speaks apparent. “Instead, I was processing that Mac was on life support and a decision had to be made on what we did about that. My little sister had lost her baby and was now in surgery, fighting for her life. And I had to tell all this to my mum and dad, and my brothers. Add in that George was Maca’s next of kin, so it had to be her call if he was kept on life support, but what if she didn’t make it? Who would? Where was Georgia’s phone, or Mac’s, because it would probably be Ritchie, his dad, and I wasn’t sure if we had his number.”
My brother, Lennon the organiser. Even then, during one of the worst moments of his life.
