Please Don't Stop The Music

by Jane Lovering

  An indrawn breath. ‘Okay, guess I asked for that one.’

  ‘I’ve – known people who’ve lost a lot more than their hearing. And if going deaf is what it took to get you off the drugs then that’s a fair trade from where I’m standing.’

  Ben’s eyes burned through me. ‘You want to tell me?’

  ‘No.’ I looked around at the dark streaming windows, the ribbons of water dragging down the panes. ‘Wow. This place is way, way too gothic.’

  He laughed. ‘I like it that the weather has a sense of the dramatic.’

  In my jeans my pocket began to vibrate. I snatched at my mobile. ‘And now I know why you never call,’ I said. ‘I thought you were just being a typical bloke.’

  ‘Hey, I was.’ Ben stood up, straightening his legs slowly and stretching. He looked taller and the stretch went on forever. I tried not to look at the way the muscles in his thighs were working under his jeans.

  ‘It’s Rosie.’ I flipped open the phone. ‘Hello, Rosie.’

  ‘Jemima,’ Rosie sounded slightly out of breath. ‘Have you found him? Ben, is he with you?’

  ‘Yes to both questions.’

  I heard Rosie relaying this information to someone else and then heard Jason’s yell of ‘ice cubes!’ before she came back on.

  ‘It’s important. Can you put him on?’

  I glanced over at Ben lip reading my half of the conversation. ‘Er, he’s – he’s upstairs at the moment. Tell me and I’ll pass it on.’ Black eyes regarded me steadily. ‘He’s busy,’ I added in case Rosie was about to insist.

  Ben gave a slow, sad smile.

  ‘Okay. But this is important, Jem. Tell him there’s been a fire. At the shop. Saskia just rang, apparently the fire engines are out and everything. He might want to get over there.’

  ‘Saskia rang?’

  ‘Yeah. Apparently the whole of the street came to a standstill so she sent Mairi out to find out what was going on.’

  ‘What, passing up the chance to ogle a fireman?’

  ‘Maybe she thought Mairi’s need was greater. Anyway, tell him, Jem, will you?’ And she rang off.

  I relayed Rosie’s half of the conversation to Ben, leaving out Jason’s comment about the ice cubes. Ben grabbed a jacket from its hanging position at the base of the bannisters.

  ‘Come on.’ And before I could protest about Jason’s car being left half in a hedge, Ben had dragged me out, shoved me in his passenger seat and we were heading at an unwise speed for town.

  * * *

  Ben stared at the steaming timbers of the shopfront. ‘There’s not much left is there?’

  He’d dealt with the firemen while I’d prowled around the site trying to see what had become of my buckles, and now we stood alone in the middle of the tiny square watching ash fall into puddles. Being wooden, most of the outside of the shop had crumbled, leaving the inner plastered walls still standing, fragile and thin, dripping with water. Within the remains, twisted shapes which had once been guitars were tangled on the floor with soaking paper, all swept into one corner by the force of the hoses which had been played on them.

  ‘Oh, Ben.’ The air was acrid. ‘All your lovely guitars.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He sounded tired. Emotionally wrung-out. ‘The firemen said there was a lighter and a pile of old newspapers at the top of the steps, looks like kids had been mucking about and then legged it when the place started to go up.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ I’d seen the remains of one of my buckles. It lay just inside the doorway between a splintered guitar and spills of brightly coloured paper which had once been Zafe’s posters. The heat had warped it out of shape and melted the glue so that it looked like an encrusted metal fist. I went to collect it but Ben grabbed me.

  ‘Don’t go in. Insurance people will be all over this place in about an hour, we don’t want to have to explain why your footprints are going in and out.’ He sighed. ‘What a crap day.’

  I shuffled through piles of powdery wood where the firemen had heaped anything they’d rescued from the flames, bending here and there to sieve things between my fingers. Well, at least now I didn’t have to worry about leaving any of my jewellery behind when I went.

  Ben pressed a finger into a wall support which sagged alarmingly at his touch. ‘Insurance are going to have a field day.’ A momentary flash in his eyes. ‘I hate dealing with bureaucracy. Paperwork’s okay but the telephone calls are a bitch.’

  I kept my hand closed around the object I’d picked up and stared over the smouldering remnants. Ben laid his hand on my arm. The warmth came through my shirt and I found myself very aware of how close he was standing. I shifted my weight and he moved too, a little closer.

  ‘You’re shivering.’

  ‘I think I’m in shock.’ I looked again at the twisted remains of my buckles in the ruins. ‘God. Who’s going to stock my stuff now?’

  ‘Is it really that bad?’ Carefully, slowly, as though he thought I was going to take offence, Ben slid his jacket off and wrapped it around my shoulders. The warmth was lovely.

  I shrugged. There was no way I could tell him. No way. I trembled again, feeling trapped.

  Ben rubbed a soot-streaked hand over his face, transferring a lot of the soot to his cheeks. ‘Times like these I wish I hadn’t quit drugs,’ he said ruefully.

  I punched him on the arm. Quite hard. ‘Things are never that bad.’ I said. ‘So your shop’s burned down, so what? You’re loaded and it’s not like the place was exactly heaving with customers, was it?’

  ‘Right, okay, so I’ll resign myself to spending my days in some kind of home, shall I, where they can teach me to make ornaments out of raffia to sell to people who haven’t carelessly lost their hearing? The shop wasn’t there to sell things. It was to give me some point of contact with the human race.’

  I glared at him. ‘If you’re going to come over all self-pitying I am really going to clock you one.’

  ‘Ooh, look who’s talking. Little Miss “Nobody wants to buy my things”.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m broke!’

  ‘At least you can make money. Deafness doesn’t go away.’

  ‘You’re alive. You got into drugs, you got out with no damage other than your wallet took a big hit. Maybe a few synapses fried – you hardly need a brain to play indie rock, do you?’

  In the very back of my head, where no-one could see, I was suddenly aware that this skinny ex-guitarist was so far under my skin that he was inhabiting a region dangerously close to my heart.

  Ben made a very rude noise. ‘Come on, bitch,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back to mine, have a drink. Oh, I’m sorry, we have to go to mine because you don’t have your own place. Sweet.’ He turned around and headed for the alleyway, pausing to add, ‘And don’t think that because I can’t see you I don’t know you’re muttering under your breath.’

  This time Ben took me into the kitchen. It was huge, all Moben and Miele, gleaming chrome and nifty little hanging units. He poured me a glass of wine and watched me clamber up onto one of the tall stools, nudging the wine bottle closer to me. ‘So tell me, what am I going to do about those phone calls that the insurers are just going to love making?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell them you’re deaf?’

  ‘Yeah, right, because none of them will know who I am or that I used to be in Willow Down, and absolutely none of them will be straight on to the press.’

  ‘Whoo-hoo, welcome to Mr Arrogance.’

  We glowered at each other for a moment, then Ben’s face cleared into a smile so gorgeous that I found I was smiling back. He still had the sooty streaks all over his cheeks but his eyes had lost that guarded expression; he looked more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. Also very, very attractive, as though somehow his scruffy bony-ness had grown on me and in an awful lapse of taste I was being drawn to men whose hair points in several directions at once and who look like a well-dressed piece of string.

  ‘You’re staring,’ he said.

  ‘And you’re very c
heerful for a man whose shop just burned down.’ My eyes were quartering his face, taking in the straight brows, the dark lashes, the way his cheeks looked as though someone had detonated a stubble-bomb under his chin and the fallout had fortuitously highlighted his excellent bone structure.

  ‘You liking what you see?’ He dropped his eyes from mine but kept watching my mouth.

  ‘Ben, you said it before, we’re friends. That’s all.’

  ‘Why?’ He leaned back on his stool, resting his back against one of the immaculate cupboards and tilting so that the front legs of the stool rose off the ground. ‘Why is that all? What are you so afraid of?’

  I looked him in the eye. ‘You’ve fought your demons, got everything off your chest and now you’re ready for something else. Well, Mr Davies –’ I leaned forward and he let the stool rock back to earth to meet me eye-to-eye over the table. ‘Not everyone’s demons are so easily subdued.’

  Somewhere in the house a phone rang.

  ‘Do you want me to get that?’

  ‘Get what?’ Ben’s eyes were still flickering over my mouth.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Beethoven.’ I slithered off the stool and located the telephone in the big room with all the sofas. ‘Why do you have a phone, anyway?’

  Ben had followed me. ‘It was here when I moved in.’

  ‘D’ you know, I thought you had a mobile?’

  He thought for a second, then pulled from his pocket the slim plastic oblong that I’d seen before. ‘This what you mean? It’s my vibrator.’

  I paused with my hand on the receiver. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘For the door. When the bell goes, it vibrates. So that I know someone is out there. And, incidentally, giving me an exciting little buzz in the pocket region.’ He wiggled his eyebrows. ‘This baby is why I don’t hurry to the front door. And why are you looking at me like that?’

  I unpursed my lips. ‘I’m surprised you’ve got room in those jeans. Now, I’m going to answer this call, so please stop making me think about you vibrating in your own pocket.’

  He grinned. ‘Buzz, buzz. Think about it all you want, Jemima.’

  I held a brief conversation with the insurance agents, relaying to Ben. ‘I feel like a go-between,’ I complained when I finally replaced the receiver. He didn’t answer, he was staring at his hands, playing his fingers along the back of one of the white leather armchairs. ‘Ben?’

  Still nothing. But when he finally looked up his eyes were huge. ‘Arson,’ he said simply.

  ‘What? The fire brigade said it was an accident, kids playing –’

  ‘Don’t you ever read between the lines? What that insurance guy – it was a guy, wasn’t it? What he was saying about examining evidence, that means they think it was started deliberately.’

  ‘Ooh, good, it’ll be like CSI down there in a couple of days.’ I smacked my lips together. ‘Blokes in suits rubbing pencils up the walls and stuff.’

  ‘Aren’t you even a little bit concerned that someone’s burned down my shop on purpose?’ Ben began pacing up and down, his trainers making squeaky noises on the polished wood of the floor. ‘Who hates me enough to do that?’

  ‘Like I said, my heart refuses to bleed for someone who’s got as much cash as you have.’ I sat down on the squashy sofa. It was hideously comfortable.

  ‘What is it with you?’ Ben squealed his feet round to stand facing me. ‘What is your hang up with money? Yeah, okay, I get that you’re broke, well, don’t start grudging me my money ’cos I worked for it, babe. And I won’t have some chippy little cow telling me that I’ve got it easy, that I shouldn’t mind shit happening, just because I’ve got a few houses and a nice car!’ He slumped down on the sofa opposite me, curling his head down so I couldn’t see his face. ‘That place was my therapy, my salvation. If it hadn’t been for the shop, what do you think I would have done? Because I’ll tell you, Jemima, I’d have done what I was tempted to do when I realised my hearing had gone for good – headed downtown, scored a few grammes of best Colombian and not given a shit about anything. Buying the shop, setting up the stock, it all gave me something else to concentrate on while my head got round the facts of what was happening to me.’ A shiver crept its way down my spine. Ben met my eye. ‘But you know how that feels, don’t you?’

  My hands on the leather were suddenly sweating. ‘What are you talking about?’ I dug my nails into the seat.

  He shook his head. ‘Just – this feeling I’m getting from you. I’ve always been good at faces. Body language, that kind of thing. And you, Jemima, are giving “fuck-off” in clouds. Something bad happened to you, something that means you don’t trust, you don’t give in. That selling your jewellery is something to do to stop yourself thinking.’

  I stood up. ‘You spent all this time being a man of mystery, and suddenly there’s no shutting you up is there?’

  Another one of his sudden, beautiful smiles. ‘Better believe it.’

  Watching him sitting there, one ridiculously long leg folded over the other in his groin-challengingly tight jeans, I almost weakened. The urge to tell him everything, to let him know me properly, rushed over me. At that point I realised I was dangerously close to loving Ben Davies.

  ‘Can you lend me the money for a taxi so I can go and get Jason his car back?’

  ‘Are you changing the subject?’ His smile had faded and the tightness was back in his eyes.

  If it had been anyone but Ben then maybe everything would have come tumbling out, the whole sordid story. But it was Ben. And if I told him – he might not like me any more. But I owed it to him, didn’t I, to explain why I wouldn’t – couldn’t – get any closer than this? To tell him that I was leaving, maybe to tell him why. And suddenly the thought of being without him made my breathing faster, my palms sweatier. ‘No.’

  His face relaxed again. I began to realise how much it had cost him to confide in me. ‘That’s good.’ He unfolded himself and stood looking down at me. ‘Look, when you’re ready – hey, I can recommend telling someone. Telling me.’ He shook his head slightly. ‘Let’s go pick Jason up and I’ll drop you off at Rosie’s to get your stuff together.’ I made an old-fashioned face at him. ‘What? I need you here to field the phone calls! Where’s the problem?’

  Quickly I turned my face from him so he couldn’t read my expression. Move in here? With a man I … My mouth was dry. But then it would be easier to run from here, and Ben wouldn’t be quite so omnipresent as Rosie. I’d be able to pack and go without him suspecting a thing.

  ‘Just promise me if Jason says anything about ice cubes, blank him. Or you can hit him if you like.’

  ‘Ice cubes?’

  ‘Trust me, he’ll mention them.’ I took a deep breath. I could do this. I really could.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Just before he got into the car with Ben, Jason pulled me aside. ‘Jem, got something to tell ya.’

  ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ The drive over had contained a lot of silences. Ben was clearly waiting for me to talk, to share my soul with him as he’d shared his with me. What the hell was I going to do?

  ‘Nah. Why, you offering to impregnate me? ’Cos I’d give good money for that if I din’t think your Mr Davies would rip me head off and shove the mushy end up me shitter.’ Jase looked around. ‘Where’s Rosie?’

  ‘Giving Harry his tea. What is it?’

  Jason put his mouth to my ear. ‘Took a trip out to Harrogate today. Had a picture to deliver so I took the van –’ a head-jerk towards Jason’s horrible, fuel-guzzling Landrover. ‘Be glad to get the car back, I mean yeah the van’s useful, but bloody hell it don’t pull nothing but sheep. Anyhoo. While I was over there – yeah, awright mate! Keep yer wig on.’ This shouted across to Ben who was leaning his elbow on the horn of the little car and making hurry up motions with both hands. ‘Popped around to Saskia’s little shop, din’t I? And guess what I found? Round the back someone’s been having a great big bonfire. There was empty boxes piled all over
an’ a lovely big mess of burned-up paper.’ He arched an eyebrow. ‘Three guesses wot it was she’d bin burning? And two of ’em are a waste of time.’

  ‘Rosie’s cards?’

  ‘Got it in one, my love.’

  ‘And the staff let you see this?’

  Jason looked sideways under his hair. ‘Aw, come on. This is me you’re talking to! What kinda sex symbol would I be if I couldn’t charm a few little shop assistants? And, incidentally whilst taking a little peep out in the yard, getting one helluva shag off Saskia’s mate, Christine. Now there is one hungry lady. And, I may add, one who used to be an actress.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do we know anyone who might, possibly, have needed someone to pretend, just as a joke you understand, to be – oh, I dunno, a social worker, say? To pop round to someone’s house and tell them that their baby wasn’t being looked after proper?’

  I gawped at him. ‘What, and you got this out of her while you were screwing? Your sex talk needs a lot of work.’

  He waggled his eyebrows. ‘We got chatting, all right?’

  ‘Before or after?’

  ‘Hey, I don’t just love ’em and leave ’em, I put the hours in. And a few other things I could mention …’ He rubbed at his crotch.

  ‘I don’t know whether to admire you or despise you totally.’

  ‘Just don’t tell Rosie, thass all. Saskia’s still got her churning those cards out like there’s some kinda world shortage. You tell her it’s just so that Saskia can warm her chilly tits I reckon she might go into meltdown.’ And with a little skipping run Jason took off towards the Audi, where he and Ben could be seen greeting each other with blokey slaps.

  I went into the cottage to find Rosie spooning mush into Harry’s happily open mouth. ‘You look like a mother blackbird.’

  ‘Believe me, worms would be cheaper.’ Rosie put down the spoon and turned around. ‘But the health visitor said he’s such a hungry baby, weaning would be the best thing. Wow, Jem. You look – different.’