The Art of Keeping Faith (14 page)

Simple, but very true. I know he won’t wake up for hours but at least it will be there when he does.

What did I do to celebrate our first ‘could have been together’ anniversary?

I sulked and stropped about what could have been.

Well done, Delilah.

Fifteen minutes later

“Oh just call me an old romantic,” Baz announces with a resounding boom as he enters the shop and starts to negotiate a path through the cream coloured roses to the counter.

“Did you put all these in here?”

Baz gives a shrug. “Well I opened the door so the flower lady could get in. I think that counts for something doesn’t it.”

I lean over and give him a tight squeeze.

“Yes, it does.”

“I’ve got something else too,” he smirks.

“There is no room left, so I am guessing it’s small?”

“Maybe?” he teases, but he does not leave me hanging long.

I think he might actually be more excited than I am. He leans down and presses play on the stereo under the counter and I recognise the sound coming through the speakers straight away. Ben. Ben and the Gibson.

I start to cry but also laugh at the same time which results in a bit of an odd donkey noise but I ignore it and listen to the song Ben has sent for me.

It is just my Ben and his guitar and it is frickin’ perfect.

”Are you going to cry all day?” Baz asks after a good ten minutes. Luckily we don’t have any customers for me to scare off with my crazy mascara.

“No.”

Maybe.

“Thank fuck for that, I was about to crack open the vodka myself.”

Ooh, vodka.

“Fancy one?” I ask. “It would be rude not to. It is National Lilah Vodka Day.”

He chuckles which makes his huge frame shake. “Yeah, sod it. Why not.”

“Excellent.”

2.00 p.m.

The phone is ringing. Baz just stares at me.

“What?”

“Answer the phone, Lilah. Surely I pay you for something!”

I don’t bother responding. I just pull a face as I walk over to the phone, which is still ringing with an annoying insistence.

“I saw that,” he tells me.

I do it again for good measure.

“Hello, Miserable Musicians R’Us,” I singsong using my most out of tune voice into the handset.

“Lilah?”

“Ben?”

“Has the shop changed its name?”

“No, but it probably should.”

He chuckles a little down the line as my brain switches onto the fact that he is calling me long distance at work and I am standing in a room full of flowers he arranged for me after listening to a song he wrote for me.

“Thank you for my flowers. They’re beautiful,” I whisper, my voice tight in my throat.

“You’re so welcome. I just didn’t want you to think I had forgotten.”

I giggle a little.
“I’m getting a strong feeling that you have not forgotten.”

“Never will. I’m still sorry.”

“Don’t say sorry again.”

“Well, I always will be.”

“Thank you for my song.”

“You are welcome again.” It is his turn to chuckle and I physically ache at the sound. I want him to be here so bad.

“I wish you were here.”

“So do I, it’s not long now, just a couple more weeks.”

“So was that a new Sound Box song?” I ask to change the subject from the heavy ache radiating from my chest and down to my extremities.

“No that was a new Ben Chambers song, a Ben for Lilah song.”

“Well I loved it. It’s got number one written all over it.”

“Well I don’t know about that.”

“Believe me I am a pro, I work in a music shop.”

“Sold anything today?”

“Nah, Baz and I are drinking the vodka.”

He laughs down the line and I visualise the blues twinkling and the freckles crinkling. My mouth goes very dry, very suddenly.

“I can’t talk long, Lilah.”

“I know. Will you be able to call tonight?”

“You’re busy tonight.”

I run through my very important agenda of sweet-fuck-all in my head. “Uh, no I don’t think so.”

“Well you never know. I love you, Lilah, I will speak to you tomorrow okay?”

“Okay. I love you, have a good gig tonight.”

“No gig tonight, we are going to do some publicity or something instead.”

“Sounds very important, have fun.”

“Will do. Love you.”

“Bye, Ben.”

And then he is gone again.

I put the phone down and look at Baz. “Am I doing something tonight?”

“I don’t know, are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fancy another vodka while you wait to find out?”

“Oh yes.”

5.30 p.m.

We are just tidying up, well we are pretending to. Baz may be a little merry and I am most definitely squiffy when the door chimes. Turning from my flower arranging come dusting, I watch Meredith walk into the shop closely followed by Tristan who is in turn followed by Beth and Jayne.

“What you guys doing here?”

“Taking you out for an anniversary dinner,” Meredith tells me as she picks up the bottle of vodka and peers at the bottom, tilting it and checking for remains. There isn’t. Not a drop.

“Okay,” I say a little unsurely.

The shop full of flowers was one thing. The song was another. The mid-afternoon phone call was a highlight, but recruiting my friends and family to take me out for dinner so I am not sitting at home like a sad fuck by myself, may be pushing it a little too far.

“Guys, I’m not completely useless and don’t need babysitting all evening. If I had to be honest I had no idea that Ben was going to make such a fuss of today, it was kind of off my radar.” I give a little shrug along with my lie.

Saying that, I am rather hungry.

“Where were you thinking?” I ask.

It is Tristan who answers. So far he has been skulking around the shop eyeing up the roses. Tristan does not look overly happy with Ben’s romantic notion.

“Chinese.” Tristan does a double eyebrow wiggle.

My mouth pops open. “Are we going for a Chinese?” I question my voice a pitch higher with excitement.

“Oh yes,” confirms Tristan.

“My favourite Chinese that I haven’t been to for a year?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I get to have Ho Fun again?”

“Yes, yes. Are we bloody going or what?”

“Whose idea was that?” I probably don’t need to ask.

“Ben’s,” everyone groans at once and I start to make donkey noises again.

It’s official. I have the best boyfriend in the entire world, and if I can’t celebrate that fact by having copious amounts of sex with said boyfriend, then I shall celebrate it with my urban family and support network of friends. Whilst downing countless bottles of Sake and tearing my way through a year’s worth of Ho Fun that I have missed out on.

10th November

I have ten take-away cartons of Ho-Fun safely stashed in the freezer! It was the major brain-wave I came up with at about midnight when the five bottles of Sake, two bottles of wine (shared between us all—I am not a complete alco), and two bottles of Chinese beer (these were all mine), mixed with the bottle of vodka I had already put away with Baz.

My thinking was that The Old Brompton Road, where the restaurant is situated, is too far from our house for me to get my favourite food often enough—it’s about three miles—however this is not the point. So I ordered in bulk, much to the restaurant manager’s delight.

What a clever girl I am! Now if I could only apply that level of determination to my studies I would be guaranteed a First and not the Third that I am optimistically aiming for.

10.30 a.m.

It’s the Armistice Day parade and unlike last year when I was completely shit faced on vodka and in near hysterics whilst watching it, this year we are all mooched out in the lounge together wearing our pyjama’s, drinking tea and eating toast.

What is going to be even more perfect is that I am actually going to see my Ben.

No. Not actually see him as in he is going to be here, but last night Jayne came up with such a ridiculously simple idea as a way for Ben and I to communicate that I cannot believe I did not think about it at all. I am telling myself that I would have done eventually, but due to the extreme pressure of the last couple of months my brain is not working quite right at the moment.

Skype.

That was Jayne’s idea.

“I just don’t see why you don’t Skype each other,” she slurred.

“Shwat the shfuck? Shwhy shdidshnt shy shthink of shat?”

So I am installing Skype on my phone, one eye dutifully watching the soldiers march passed the Cenotaph.

When I woke up this morning the first thing I did was to pick up my phone so I could text Ben and tell him to do the same when he woke up.

Apparently I had already done so before passing out face first, fully clothed, covered in Chinese grease.

I had a text message waiting for me. Typo much! Crazy girl. x

Crap
.

I scrolled to the message above and saw the one that I had sent him. There was not a single word that did not have a spelling mistake in it. In fact there were some words in it that I didn’t even recognise.

Drunk texting is so not cool. In fact there should be a law against it. They should take your phone away along with your car keys at the end of a heavy night.

Or even better, mobile phone’s should be sold with an inbuilt breathaliser that makes the handset shut down as soon as it detects a certain level of fumes.

I would have been way over.

I did not bother resending to Ben. The only word that did not have a spelling error was Skype.

11th November

Skype Call

“Hey gorgeous.”

This is Ben saying this to me. I have just woken up, my hair is doing something terrible and I have a sleep crease along my cheek.

Ben on the other hand looks so ridiculously hot it actually hurts to look at him.

And that is just his right eyebrow that the camera is currently trained on.

“Hey.” I may be looking through one eye.

“Where’s Kit? I need to officially see that he is alive.”

I move the camera around and show Kit stretched out on Ben’s pillow, the same place he sleeps every night when he is not standing on my chest patting my face with his paw.

“Is that my pillow?”

“Yep, I think he is going to make you sleep in the lounge.”

I turn the camera back around so I can look at Ben, but I am distracted by something else.

“Fucking hell, is that what I look like on camera?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look at my nose, it’s massive!”

“Lilah, seriously this is the first time we have seen each other face to face in weeks and you are worried about the size of your nose.”

“Well no, but seriously that is much bigger than it looks in the bathroom mirror.”

“Have you finished staring at yourself yet?”

I lower the camera and have a quick check over the rest of me.

Not too bad, although my boobs look a little flat. I move the camera up again and then give them a little lift in my vest top.

Much better.

Right then. Ben.

“Thank you for yesterday, it meant so much to me.”

He flashes me his killer smile, which even from thousands of miles away and slightly pixelated is still beautiful. His hair is much longer then it was before and his cheekbones seem to be slightly sharper.

“Are they not feeding you?” I ask before he has a chance to say anything to me.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s just a bit manic you know?”

Well no. Not really.

“Why don’t you tell me what it is like?”

“Do I have to talk about it? I would rather talk about you.”

“God no! You know what I do. I sleep in lectures, sleep in the library, then come home and drink too much wine.”

He gives a slow smile, “I miss that.”

I don’t have much to say to that.

“So come on tell me your average day,” I prompt.

“Well we normally travel in the mornings to wherever we are going, it is not necessarily a new city. Towns out here are massive so sometimes we just move across a city. Then we check into a new hotel and go and do our publicity stuff, local radio shows
etc.
We play a gig most nights. The others go on and party afterwards. Sometimes I join them for one or two but then I go home to sleep because I write best in the morning and I’m trying to come up with new material.”

“That sounds exciting.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” He does not seem overly excited; I am finding him a little hard to read.

“You okay, Ben?”

The blues stare into the camera for a moment and I can’t help but stare back. As I wait for his response, a silence settles between us.

Ben shakes his head and then gives me a half lip hitch.

“I’m just tired, Lilah, the others are having a great time, but you know, I would rather be home snuggled up with you.”

“Would you?”

“Yeah I would, I was gutted to miss out yesterday.” The smile flashes again. “From the looks of your text you had a good time.”

“I did, thank you for organising. We had way too much Sake.” I grimace a little. That stuff really did give me a killer headache.

“I only half-organised it, I was supposed to pay for it, but Tristan said he would pick it up, supposedly he owed you for something.”

“Oh, God, yes. All has not been perfect here in wedding planning paradise.”

“Oh, that doesn’t sound good.”

“Nah, they are cool now. At least I think they are,” I shrug.

“You can tell me all about it in a couple of weeks.”

“Yipee! I know!” I squeal.