Page 55 of Secrets at the Little Music Shop

‘What?’ His hand was warm, his fingers soft. Adrenaline was still burning its way through my synapses and leaving a bitter, dry taste in my mouth. ‘Ben?’

Pressure on my forearm until I turned, reluctantly. ‘Yeah. I thought so.’ Then a finger ran down my spine. ‘You’ve got a gang mark.’

How the hell did he know? ‘It’s just a tattoo,’ I said lightly. My skin prickled around the blue stain on my shoulder blade as though it was bursting through my flesh.

‘What? I can’t see your face.’ Ben spun me so that my bare back was pressed against the roughness of the wall. ‘Now. Say it again.’

‘It’s nothing. Just a pattern.’

‘Bugger that. You’ve been in a street gang. Where? Why didn’t you say? And what the hell happened to you?’

Adrenaline drained. I was flat, empty. Goosebumps broke out across my chest and shoulders and my skinned ribcage ached. ‘I . . . I don’t know . . . I . . .’

Ben let me go and raised both hands to rumple through his hair. ‘Jemima.’

And suddenly I wanted him to know. All of it. All of me. ‘Take me home,’ I said. ‘And I’ll tell you.’

A half-smile. ‘I bet you say that to all the boys.’

I met his eye steadily. ‘Only you, Ben. Only you.’

* * *

Ben’s house was silent and dark. As we went in he turned on lights, flipping switches like a man possessed, room by room until we reached a small study off the kitchen where he only turned on a lamp. There were bookcases against all the walls, a table and sofa, deep carpet on the floor. It was snug.

‘Okay.’ Ben slumped onto the sofa, reaching for a whisky bottle and glasses from the little side table. ‘Go on.’

I hovered uncertainly, finally settled for sitting on the floor in the corner furthest away from him. ‘First tell me how you knew.’

‘Hang on. You’re the one with the secrets and I’m the one answering the questions? What’s wrong with this picture?’ The mouth of the bottle jigged against the glasses as he poured us both a generous measure. ‘All right. Mark. Drummer in Willow Down.’

I took the glass but didn’t move closer to him. Just rested my back against the wall. ‘He was in a gang?’

‘No, you plank. He’s a sociologist.’

‘Your drummer is a sociologist?’

‘They’re not all two brain cells and seven pints of sweat. Anyhow. These tattoos were his idea.’ Ben rolled up the sleeve of his shirt, revealing his encircling tribal mark. ‘He took it from the street gangs where they use them to mark their own, to strengthen the group bond. We all had one, all four of us. Same tatt, same spot, to remind us we were all in it together.’ He rubbed the mark thoughtfully.

‘So you’re not going to believe I got drunk one night and picked it out of a tattoo parlour window?’

He smiled. Leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, slopping whisky unnoticed over the couch. ‘Nice try. But I’ve seen the textbooks.’

I took a deep breath. ‘All right. But listen up because this is a once-only story.’

‘I’m listening, Jemima.’ Then a little grin. ‘Figure of speech. But I’m here.’

Where to begin? As someone once said, at the beginning . . . With thoughts and memories I’d blocked and denied for so long that even I couldn’t be sure how accurate they were. Rewritten and reworked they might be, edited for all those snaggy moments of sibling rivalry and parental arguing, but they were all I had. It was time to own up to them. ‘I had a great life. A mum and dad who loved all three of us completely. A good school, nice house, I had riding lessons twice a week and the boys did rugby and . . . never mind. It was normal, you know?’

Ben didn’t move. Kept his eyes fixed on my face.

I lowered the barrier even further, until images came with the emotions, pictures of twisted metal, and I had to work not to let it all come screaming back in full technicolour. ‘When I was fifteen there was an accident. A stupid, stupid accident, something so random . . . Mum was driving Dad to work. She wanted the car because hers was in the garage or something, so she was going to drop him off. I had a competition to go to, show jumping I think, and she didn’t want me to miss out so she . . . And they crashed. No-one knows what happened, she just lost control and hit a bridge.’ I rubbed my chest, trying to ease an ache that would never heal.

Ben hadn’t even blinked. ‘And they both . . . ?’

‘Yes. We were told it was instantaneous but — you always wonder, don’t you? Anyway. There was no family to take us in. Randall was sixteen, but he was told he was too young to be allowed to take charge of us because Christian was only twelve. So they were going to split us up and put us in foster homes.’ I looked down at my hands, knitting my fingers in my lap. Only realised what I was doing when Ben reached across very gently and tipped my head back up so he could see my lips. ‘We ran away.’ A burp-like giggle escaped. ‘We were so naïve, you see. Stupid, middle-class kids who thought real life was like some kind of early-evening kids’ TV, living in an empty house, taking food from the supermarket to eat. But we were scared. We’d lost our parents, we didn’t want to lose each other too, and we thought we’d only have to wait until Ran was eighteen, and then he could adopt us and we’d get a flat and live together and . . . Too much TV, as I said.’

Ben sighed. It had a catch in it.

---