Page 18 of The Interview
The room has fallen totally silent, and I can feel everyone’s eyes on me.
“He said, ‘I’ll love you forever, G, wherever I am in the world, whatever I’m doing. It’ll always be you. For as long as you want me. For as long as I’m good for you, I’m all yours.’ I questioned what he meant by that, and he explained that he didn’t feel worthy, that he felt my parents would prefer me to settle down with a banker, not a wanna be rock star.”
“Or a nightclub owner,” Cam calls. “Your parents were right: anything but a rock star.”
I roll my eyes, but don’t turn to look at him.
“Anyway, him saying that put me on edge, too, but the venue quickly became packed. The band were insane, so good, and I remember I had this feeling that everything was changing or about to change. Jimmie was secretly with Lennon, not Marley, the band were playing in bigger venues to bigger audiences, and Sean felt he wasn’t good enough for me while getting more and more attention from women in the crowd. All of that combined with the alcohol had me feeling…” I pause again, trying to recall exactly how I did feel that night while trying to find a wordthat can adequately describe it. “I felt like everything was out of my control. Things were changing, and I had no say in them. Then, when the boys took a break, Sean stepped off the stage, and this girl, this… thing I’d seen around at a few of their shows, stepped forward, threw her arms around Sean’s neck, and she tried to kiss him. He turned away and shook his head. Eventually, his eyes found mine, and he gave me a shrug and an apologetic smile, but while he was looking at me, this little—for legal reasons, let’s call her a person—person, licks his face. She fucking licked him.”
“And George lost it,” Marley states.
“I did. The rage, my God, the rage came up from my boots and just overtook me.”
“Go, Mum!” Lu calls.
“I’ve never seen her move so fast,” Marley says. “She flew at this girl, smacked her right in the face so hard she took her off her feet. Once she was down, she jumped on top of her and started lifting her head by the hair and smashing it into the floor?—”
“Okay, it wasn’t that…”
“Yeah, you were vicious, and rightly so,” Marley interrupts me before I can finish interrupting him. “There was blood and hair flying. It took three of us to pull her off the girl.”
“Everyone was grabbing me, telling me to calm down, and I felt like I was being attacked, like I was the problem. It’s definitely not my proudest moment, but when I got dragged off to one of the back rooms, I lashed out at everyone and told the whole room that I’d seen Jimmie with Len, and it went off. Right in the interval of one of the biggest nights of the band’s history, we were all in the back room of the pub fighting each other.”
“Did you go back on stage?” Dan asks Marls.
“We did. A label rep happened to be watching us, and we signed our first recording contract just a couple of months later,” he replies with a grin.
“And the girl? What happened to her? Was she hurt? Did she press charges?”
“She did something much worse. She accused my husband and brother of rape.”
Once again, the silence that fills the room is deafening.
Marley squeezes my hand while I stare at Daniel.
I wait.
We all wait.
“My plan originally was for you to tell us these events chronologically, so as much as I would love to jump straight to Paris and everything that went down, can we just cover what led to the band being there? Especially as we have Marley here to give us his perspective, too.”
I feel my brother shift beside me. He’s still holding my hand, and his grip tightens. I watch him, waiting for his tell. It happens after just a few seconds. His free hand rises to his mouth before he pinches his bottom lip between his index finger and thumb, and he tugs on it. It’s what my brother does when he’s nervous, and what happened in Paris is definitely a topic that makes my brother nervous. So nervous that, despite how close we are, how our lives have always been and remain so intertwined, Paris is a subject we’ve never discussed. It’s something that’s sat there, like the crater left after the big bang, a gaping, ragged pit of destruction, with Marley on one side, me on the other. We’ve lived our entire lives since it happened, making out it didn’t. Like the seismic shift that blew all our worlds apart never occurred. Every one of our interactions has been a carefully orchestrated dance, our steps taking us around the chasm of despair like it doesn’t exist.
Ithink, and I think he probably does, too, that if we acknowledge it, look into it, discuss its contents, we’d be sucked into something we might never escape from.
What’s the opposite of a void?
Instead of a black hole full of nothing, we’d be tossed and turned, drowned in guilt, regret, anger, betrayal, and so many what fucking ifs.
Which is why, for over forty years, we’ve coexisted with it. We couldn’t block it out completely. It was too big of an event, left too big of a hole, but we’ve coexisted by ignoring it and just living our lives.
When we started working with the screenwriters, I was asked if we wanted the events covered, and I told them to talk to Marley and our legal team. It was probably a cowardly thing to do, but, although it was something that changed my life, I wasn’t there. There are only four people who know the truth, and only one of them is still alive.
So, call me a coward, but that’s what I chose to do. I passed the buck to my brother. It’s Marley who has a wife and kids he may want to protect, not Sean. Sean only left me, and I don’t think anything could hurt me as much as losing him twice.
When I was told Marley was—I’ll use the term loosely—‘happy’ for the events in Paris to be included, I knew the time had come for us to have that conversation. I just hadn’t considered it might be instigated by and included in the interview I’m doing with Daniel Milliano, which will possibly be broadcast to millions around the world. The scariest thing of all is that I don’t know if this nameless, nondescript dance my brother and I have been performing for years will evolve into something like “The Gentle Waltz” by Oscar Peterson, as passionate as “The Black Swan Pas De Deux” from Tchaikovsky’sSwan Lake, or if we’ll end up rolling around in the mosh pit,spitting at each other like we’re at a Sex Pistols concert and “God Save The Queen” is blasting out.
Either way, shit’s about to go down!
