Please Don't Stop The Music (23 page)

‘
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 cheerful 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.’