Please Don't Stop The Music (17 page)

‘
Jase? You’ve been to more gigs than me.’ Carrying a
still-sleepy Harry I cornered Jason as he tried to stuff a
dead-man’s handle on top of a pile of other things on the back
seat.

‘
Jem, there’s
nuns
been to more gigs than you.
What about it?’ He straightened up to look at me.

‘
If
a band was playing a song but someone made a mistake, what would
happen?’

Jason stared at me, leaning his long body
against the car. ‘
What
? You mean, like, got the lyrics wrong or hit a bum note,
that kinda thing? Nothing. Half the time your audience is so pissed
that they don’t care if you plays “God Save the Queen”, they just
likes to look atcha.’

‘
I
mean seriously. Would there be any repercussions?’

‘
That’s like the drums, innit?’

I
gave him a hard stare. ‘You know perfectly well what I mean.’ Harry
snuffled into my shoulder and Jason switched his
attention.

‘
Yeah. It happens. If a band don’t practise or if they’re
playing a set for the first time, someone cocks up. Who cares? ’S
all part of the experience.’

‘
Not
a big deal then?’

‘
Not
really.’ Jason stroked Harry’s head. ‘This still about your man, is
it? He’s bleeding bonkers he is. Nice guy an’ all but really –’ He
thrust his pelvis suggestively. ‘Crackers.’

‘
Yes, Jason.’ I sighed and took Harry off in search of
Rosie.

* *
*

19th
May

I
did it. Okay, here I’m going to claim all the credit and you can
look at me over those shitty half-glasses all you want (they are
really crappy, man, make you look like a grandad). Between her
telling me I should get a life, and me feeling guilty about how I
behaved at that party, and you telling me to come to terms with the
life I’d made for myself … somewhere, between all that, I started
to think, you know?

Seeing her with those big eyes looking so … fragile, so
scared of what I might say or do … And I was feeling so sorry for
myself, so dead inside, and all because of what fear had brought me
to. Scared to talk, scared not to. So much to say, so much pain,
all going round and round in my head, no way of letting it
out.

Scored some coke last week off a backstreet
hustler who couldn’t look me in the face, then I sat in the shop
all day and just stared at it lying there. All innocent,
pure-looking. And I knew,
knew
that it would make everything feel better, even
if only for a while, but a while was all I wanted, to make this
screaming confusion and the self-hate go away. Some peace, you
know? And I was going to, I was really going to. After all, being
clean, where has it got me?

Truth again? I wanted to be dead. In that second I wanted
out. It’s never been as bad as that before, even in the early
days.

Jemima walked in. I’d forgotten she was coming, forgotten I
had an appointment, forgotten everything except the choice that I
had. All she said was ‘you okay?’ or something banal like that,
didn’t even sound like she cared, it was just something to say,
something to banish that sick kind of quiet that was hanging round
us. And in that second I knew I’d never do it. I flushed eighty
quid’s worth of snow, and came to see you.

So
yeah. A life. I can do it, I can make something out of this
shitpile that I’ve found myself in, something that isn’t dependent
on what I used to have, what I used to do. I can’t be what I was,
but I can be something else, something true to who I am. So, I’m
starting. Starting to rebuild what I can from the ruins, getting
out there, being someone again.

I
don’t know how far I can take it yet. I want to find out what it is
that Jem is hiding from. Why sometimes she looks at me as if she
wants me naked and other times she avoids looking at me at all. I’m
still too scared to tell her anything, too afraid that she’ll get
that look, the one that women get when they meet someone who’s
disabled, or frail; the same one they use for puppies that have
been beaten or kittens thrown in the river. That look that
dehumanises you, that says you’re not a man any more but something
soft, something lesser. But I know that, if I want her to talk to
me, then I have to talk to her.

I
want to pretend just a little longer. But I know its
coming.

Chapter Twelve

Half
way through my attempts to tame my hair into something sleek, the
phone rang. ‘I’ve got it!’ Rosie shouted up the stairs.

‘
Good! Because if I have to stop now I’m going to look like an
explosion in a wig shop.’ I carried on straightening my hair.
Thanks to an afternoon in the bathroom with a bottle of peroxide my
roots were now back to their usual blonde and I was battling my
ever-present, but hardly ever seen, curls. Harry was in bed, Rosie
was glammed up to the eyeballs, and we were both starving. Ben had
better be a whizz in the kitchen because if he produced three
cheese omelettes we might just eat each other.

‘
Who
is it?’ I went onto the landing but Rosie had taken the phone to
the extent of its cord into the living room. ‘It’s not Ben
cancelling, is it?’

Ben’s new-found perkiness made me suspicious. Why had he
suddenly taken it upon himself to start cooking meals for women? It
all seemed to be some kind of backlash to his self-imposed exile
and the one thing I know about backlashes is, sometimes they lash
right back to the beginning again. I wouldn’t have been surprised
to hear that Ben was hiding in his basement with a cushion over his
head.

Rosie called back something I couldn’t hear and appeared at
the bottom of the stairs. ‘Can you apologise to Ben for me?’ She
was pulling on a jacket. ‘Something’s come up. I’ll be back in a
bit but … there’s something I have to do first.’

‘
Rosie?’ I started down the stairs but she was already on her
way out of the front door, calling over her shoulder, ‘Harry
shouldn’t wake up, if he does there’s a bottle in the fridge all
made up. Thanks, Jem!’

‘
Like I have a choice,’ I muttered mutinously. The door
slammed. ‘I presume the wicked Saskia is behind this,’ I said to
the straighteners. ‘Probably wants to open a sweat-shop.’ There was
an ominous smell of singeing. My hair got more and more resistant
to being straightened every week. Added to the all-pervading
lingering peroxide, I smelled like some kind of chemical reaction.
I gave a couple of squirts of perfume to offset it and hoped that
Ben wouldn’t think I smelled nice just for him.

God
I was hungry. Could I get away with a cheese sandwich before he
arrived? I’d got the loaf out and had a furtive gnaw at the crust
when I heard a car pull up. ‘Hello?’

I
went outside to be greeted by the sight of Ben loaded down with
boxes of pots and pans and ingredients. ‘Blimey. Looks like Jamie
Oliver’s tour bus,’ I said, peering into the car. ‘What the hell
are you making, a seven-course banquet?’

‘
I
can do.’ Ben carried several crates through into the kitchen. ‘Are
you going to help?’

‘
I
thought this was a relaxing evening where you did all the work and
I sat around?’

‘
Ha!
Come on, you can whisk egg-whites. Where’s Rosie?’

‘
She’s just popped out for a little while.’

‘
Damn. I had her down for sauce-making duties. Never mind we
can cover. Now, wash your hands.’ Ben bounced into the middle of
our tiny kitchen and began to sort through his boxes. ‘Pans,
butter, eggs, cream. I’ll get the rest from the car as I need
it.’

I
watched him as he began measuring by eye. There was something
different about him, something sparky and energetic. ‘So. Bit of a
turnaround for you, isn’t it?’

There was a momentary pause before he tipped butter into a
pan. ‘Yeah. I’m sorry, Jem. Life got a bit out of perspective for a
while. I need to get my head around the fact that just because I’ll
never play guitar again doesn’t mean –’

‘
Who
says you’ll never play guitar again? You haven’t lost the use of
your hands, have you?’

The
pause was longer this time. ‘No. But I just can’t.’

I
had my back to him as I began separating the eggs. ‘So, why not?’ I
tried to sound casual. There was no answer. Ben had his head down,
putting a pan on the stove and concentrating on its contents. ‘Is
it something to do with what happened in Philadelphia?’

His
head jerked up suddenly. ‘Where are you from, Jemima?’

As a
diversionary tactic it worked. ‘It – I – lots of places, you
know.’

‘
No,
I don’t know.’ His eyes were on my face. ‘I returned your favour
yesterday. Googled you. I thought you’d have a website.’

‘
I
have!’

‘
Yeah. I found it. Jemima Hutton Jewellery. What puzzled me
about it was the date it was set up.’

My
heart was beating fast and my palms were too slippery to hold the
whisk. ‘What?’

‘
You’ve only had the website for eighteen months. Before that,
nothing.’

Adrenaline flooded through me like a dam had burst. ‘Well,
that’s all there is. The website, for marketing and
selling.’

Ben
turned from the pan. In the little galley kitchen he was only a
breath away from me. I found I’d got my fingers around the milk-pan
in a defensive hold. ‘But you’ve been making the jewellery for
years, you told me so, when you gave me your spiel the first time
we met. How come you only just set up a website?’

I’d
had time to recover. ‘Eighteen months ago was the first time I
could afford to set one up.’ I made my tone light, amused. ‘We
don’t all have bank loads of cash sitting around, you
know.’

I felt as though his eyes were scanning me,
reading me. Like there was a barcode printed somewhere on my head.
‘Then how did you do your marketing? Where were you based? Most
people who have websites run at least a Facebook page. A blog
maybe. Or they’re registered on Friends Reunited, or have a piece
in the local paper – they show up
somewhere
. You there’s no trace of.’
He went back to unpacking food from a freezer box, but kept looking
at me. ‘So I’d guess you’ve got secrets, things you’d rather people
didn’t know about you. Like the fact you aren’t really Jemima
Hutton at all.’

I
dropped the whisk. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking
about.’

‘
Sorry?’ His eyes flicked over my face, quickly. Almost as if
I’d frightened him.

‘
Really, I don’t know what you mean.’

Ben
inclined his head. ‘Okay, maybe you don’t. I’m just guessing here.
All I’m saying is, you know what it’s like not to want people
pushing and prying into your life.’

I took a deep breath. ‘So keep out of
yours? Is that what all that was really about? You trying to warn
me off?
Blackmail?
’

The look Ben gave me was level and
steady.
Damn!
‘It
can’t be blackmail if there’s nothing to hide, can it?’ Then he’d
flipped away and was tying his hair back. ‘Right. Thought I’d start
with melon …’ He pulled an alarmingly green melon from the cold
box. ‘… with Parma ham. Then Lemon Sole in a Béarnaise sauce
followed by Baked Alaska.’

The
kitchen was too small. I felt suddenly huge, as though I was trying
to hide myself behind matchboxes, naked and exposed. ‘I – it all
sounds very – um.’

He turned to me and his expression was a
mixture of sympathy and warning. ‘This is how it feels to be me,
Jemima. Like – like I’m made of holes. People just want to keep
poking, see how deep they can get before I flinch. I’m sorry if
I’ve made you uncomfortable, but maybe now you can understand how
it is for me
every fucking
day
.’

‘
Then why don’t you open up?’ Was that a little sob there,
just at the end, as though my voice caught on my teeth?

‘
For the same reason you don’t.’ Ben weighed
the melon in his hand, fingers playing over its rough surface, as
though there was still a guitar lodged in his subconscious. ‘We’re
both scared shitless of what the world can do to us, so we never
talk.’ He took a step towards me. ‘I wish I could. I wish I could
get involved, fall in love, really … really
touch
someone because it’s pretty
lonely where I am.’ The hand not cradling the melon reached out,
twisted a strand of my hair. ‘But it’s like this wall, you know?
Between me and everyone else.’

‘
And
you daren’t let it down,’ I whispered. I was giving him ammunition.
I knew it but I didn’t care. Now, here, with the kitchen getting
hotter by the second, and not just because of the melting butter,
my guard was splitting infinitesimally.

‘
For
fear of what might come through,’ Ben finished, and kissed
me.

And,
oh God, I let him. Dropped the shields and pressed myself into him,
catching at his arms to balance myself, then winding my hands
around his neck to pull myself closer against his warmth. I closed
my eyes and felt the pressure of his tongue on my lips, opened my
mouth and relaxed as his guitar-player’s muscles took my weight and
rolled me so that I was squeezed between the corner cupboard and
him. It was a long, long way from that kiss he’d given me outside
his shop to avoid talking to his visitor. Now his kisses were so
hard that I couldn’t breathe, he kissed like a drowning man given a
Scuba mask. Like he literally couldn’t get enough. When I felt his
hands travel over my thighs, rucking my skirt until his fingers
touched skin, I touched his face. Ran my fingers over his
cheekbones, down his stubbled cheeks then on to his shoulders. His
belt buckle, ironically one of mine, dug into my stomach but even
with that distraction I could feel the rigidity of him.