Page 49 of Secrets at the Little Music Shop

‘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.’

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