I stood staring at the boy with my brother, the new love of my life. Forget Adam Ant, he had nothing on the boy standing in front of me now, this boy who was so very obviously looking at my boobs.

“Sean, this is my sister George and her mate Jimmie,” Marley introduces us.

Sean laughed before speaking, “I thought I was gonna meet some more brothers when you said let’s go and see George and Jimmie not a pair of girls with red and pink knickers on.”

“My names Jamie and hers is Georgia, but everyone calls us Jimmie and George.”

Jimmie states confidently to the new kid, my future husband.

I fold my arms across my chest, which was entirely the wrong move as it just made my boobs look bigger and drew Sean’s eyes straight back to them.

“Show us your tits.” He gestured with his chin toward me. It’s a wonder I didn’t disappear in a puff of smoke, I was so embarrassed, even my hair felt like it was blushing.

“Fuck off Maca, she’s my little sister, she’s only eleven.”

I wanted to punch Marley at that moment. I might only be eleven in years but as far as my brain was concerned I knew it all, I was already a woman, I had boobs and periods, I was a grown up. Oh how little did I know.

“Well you’re the best looking Jimmie and George I’ve ever met.” He smiled a lazy lop-sided grin as he spoke, not taking his eyes off my chest the whole time.

It rained that afternoon so we all ended up in the summer house my Dad had his blokes build us at the end of our garden. I was never exactly sure what my Dad did for a living when I was younger, I’m even less sure now. He has a construction firm, it’s bigger than your average small building firm, he employs about a hundred people at any one time, on top of this he has three car show rooms, selling high end, second hand cars, Mercs, Beamers, Audis and the like, he also owns some properties in East London and Essex that he rents out. Whenever I used to ask him as a kid he used to tell me he was an entrepreneur, but I had no idea what that meant. What I did know is that we had a nice house, I had nice clothes, my Mum and Dad drove nice cars and so did Bailey now that he’d passed his test. We went on nice holidays, either to our own villas in Marbella in Spain or Albufeira in Portugal or to our caravan in Clacton On Sea on the Essex coast. I didn’t think too much about any of this when I was younger but as I got older it began to dawn on me that we had more than most.

My Dad had the summer house built so the boys had somewhere to practice their music. The place was built from bricks and sound proofed, then clad with timber so it looked like a timber summer house. Bailey didn’t play so much anymore, Lennon played bass guitar and had a pretty good voice but Marley was the star, he too played bass as well as drums and had a great voice. I could play acoustic guitar but I wasn’t great, my voice was okay but very average compared to my brothers. Marley had his own band and told me that afternoon that Sean was to be the new lead guitarist and singer; Ritchie, their old front man had moved to Wales with his family at the beginning of the summer holidays. My Dad was a massive music fan and had paid for Marley and his band to advertise for a new singer, they had held auditions a few weeks back at the local church hall and Sean had been their first choice, the fact that he could play lead guitar and the piano was a bonus.

Later I sat curled into the corner of the big old chesterfield sofa we have in the summer house, I had spent half hour trying to crack the Rubik’s cube but I’ve never really been known for my patience so I soon grew frustrated and tossed that on the floor and instead was flicking through the latest copy of My Guy magazine but even that wasn’t holding my interest today; Sean came over and sat on the arm of the sofa and asked about my name.

“So how come after having three boys and giving them really weird names, your Mum and Dad finally get a girl and give her a boy’s name?”

I looked up at his brown eyes and noticed the tiny flecks of amber he had floating in them, all framed by the longest of dark brown lashes. Answer George. Stop blushing, stop looking into his eyes and answer the question. I swallow and try to wet my lips before speaking.

“My Dad is a massive fan of music, all music, any music… Bailey is named after some bloke who made guitars back in the sixties, my Dad met him or heard about him and liked his name, which I think was actually his surname, not his first name but anyway, my Dad liked it, remembered it and decided to give it to Bailey as his first name, Lennon, is obviously named after John Lennon, Marley after Bob… And me? Well I’m named after my Dad’s favourite song – Georgia on my mind by Ray Charles. So I got the name, Georgia Rae but living in a house full of boys, it got shortened to George.”

I’ve told this story so many times to so many different people that I could repeat it in my sleep. Sean listens to my answer and nods his head slowly.

“Well Georgia Rae. I think you’re far too pretty to be called an old blokes name. So I’ll call you… ” He tilts his head to the side as he thinks about what he’s going to call me, beautiful, his girlfriend? I don’t mind either. “Gia?” he states.

Gia, he wants to call me Gia? No one has called me Gia, its Georgia by my teachers, G or George by my friends and family but never, no one has ever called me Gia. I love it, and it’ll be special, just our thing, special, just between us.

“So… is that all right then, if I call you Gia?”

I nod; it’s all I can manage. The pop rock is exploding in my stomach again, and once more it’s blocking the signal between my brain and my mouth.

CHAPTER 2

The rest of the summer of 1980 is spent watching Marley and Sean practice with Billy and Tommy who make up the rest of Marley’s band Carnage.

In September Jimmie and I start high school. School was easy for me, I was in top sets for everything, without really having to put in much effort, I wasn’t stunningly beautiful but I was at an age now where I knew my ranking in the ‘prettiness’ order and I was up there. My parents were both of Irish descent, but looked totally different to each other, my Dad was tall, over six feet, he was broad and he was dark, dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin. My Mum on the other hand was short, about five feet four and very petit, even after having us four kids she was still only a size eight and was pale, skin like porcelain, she had the most beautiful dark auburn hair and the bluest of eyes. My Dad was handsome, all of my mates told me so and my Mum was stunningly beautiful and I wished so much that I looked like her, but I didn’t. Where my brothers all looked exactly like my Dad, I was a weird combination of both my parents. I had always been tall for my age, I was way too skinny for my liking, my hair was a dark chestnut colour, when the sun shone through it you could see the reds I’d inherited from my Mum but mainly it looked brown, my skin was darker than my Mum’s but nowhere near as dark as my Dad’s and my brothers and my eyes were blue, not pale china blue like my Mum’s but a very dark blue. Whenever I got a tan in the summer they’d pop right out of my face, they didn’t match my dark skin and dark lashes and always drew comments, so by the age of eleven, I knew I wasn’t stunningly beautiful like my Mum but I knew I was pretty. Prettier than most of the other girl’s in my class, prettier than most other girl’s in my year and quite possibly the school. I don’t mean to sound flash or like a show off, it’s just how it was, girls just know these things.

Love us or hate us, Jimmie and I were the popular girls but that wasn’t always a good thing, especially at secondary school; within days of starting as first years, we were attracting the attention of the older boys as well as a few bitchy comments from the older girls. We’d been Queen Bees at primary school; secondary school though, was a whole new thing and introduced us to a whole new level of bitch. On just the third day there I was stopped in the corridor and asked if I wanted to go to a party that weekend by a boy called Dale who was a fifth year. I said “No”, as I knew there was no way that my brothers would allow it. Regardless of this, I had some tall skinny blonde girl screaming at me in the lunch hall later that she was going to be waiting at the school gates that night and was going to kick the shit out of me for flirting with her boyfriend, I’d never been so happy to see Marley appear over her shoulder as he came barrelling toward us.