“Sorry,” Tone said as he shut the door behind himself, then locked it and put the chain across.
“Nothing to be sorry for.”
Tone ambled into the kitchen and pointedly sniffed. “Did you make toast?”
Stan grinned. “Ben did.”
“Ben ate something?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Good. That’s good.”
“Do you want some toast, Tone?”
“Ooh, yes please.”
Stan laughed under his breath and unfolded himself from the chair, stretching his arms above his head before going to the fridge and slotting four slices of toast into the toaster. Tone ate more than Ben.
“I spoke to him, earlier,” Stan said, leaning back against the counter and folding his arms over his chest.
“Bloody hell. Getting him to talk, getting him to eat… we should have called you sooner.”
Stan shrugged. “I’m not a threat to him.”
That seemed to stop Tone short. He nodded slowly, as if just realising Stan’s words were true.
“Did you have a nice time tonight?” Stan asked.
“Yeah. Went to Buck Shot.”
“They let you in?” Stan teased.
“Hey, I wasn’t the one who got barred.”
“That was Geordie?”
Tone rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Dickhead. Quiet in there tonight, so I could sit at the bar and have a decent conversation with someone.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It was, yeah.”
The toaster popped, and Stan turned away to fix Tone’s late-night snack.
“Are you alright for work and everything?” Tone asked. “You left New York quickly.”
“It’s not too bad,” Stan said. “I’ve rearranged a couple of meetings to do them by video call instead. And my intern is going to go to a few events for me and report back so I can do the write-ups. Everything else can be done from here.”
“How long are we staying here?”
Stan took the plate over to the table, pointedly making Tone eat there instead of standing at the kitchen counter.
“I don’t know, Tone. You all seem to think I’ve got some grand plan. I really don’t.”
“You’re doing better than the rest of us put together. You made more progress with him in a day than we have in months.”
Stan sighed and flicked his hair back behind his shoulder. “Los Angeles wasn’t working, so I told him I thought we could try somewhere else. Sometimes a change of pace, or a change of location… it helps with a change of mindset.”
“That makes sense.”
“I don’t know if it does.”
“I spoke to Summer earlier,” Tone offered. “She’s keeping the boys in line, trying to get them from blowing up. They spent most of the night and half the day going through what we already have for the album. I’ve already laid down all the drums, so that’s done, and they’re further along with keys and guitars than we realised. This might come as a shock to you, young Stan, but we have a tendency to fuck around in a recording studio.”
“I refuse to believe that.”
“It’s true,” Tone said with a wink.
“You have peanut butter in your beard.”
Tone wiped his face with the back of his hand, then licked it clean. “Anyway, the point is, they have a lot of material they can work with over the next couple of weeks, and then we can make a plan to fill the gaps. Ben already wrote all of the lyrics for the tracks we’ve been working on. He just hasn’t recorded any of them yet.”
“You said you can record in London.”
“We can,” Tone said. “If Ben wants to. That’s the big million-pound question right now. If he decides to leave the band, then there’s a whole lot of things we need to do to separate him from what’s already been done. He could argue that he owns those lyrics, and we don’t necessarily want to get into that debate. It could take years for lawyers to figure it out. And do we want to release an album with his influence all over it?”
“I could see why you wouldn’t.”
“Right. If Ben goes, then we either continue on as the four of us, which I think is most likely, or find someone else. Ben writes most of our lyrics, though, so even if we don’t bring in someone else, we need to find a lyricist for this album. Or, we scrap the past six months of work and start again.”
“What a mess,” Stan said.
“Right. We’ve got, what, thirty tracks so far for this album?”
“And you’ll pick your favourites when you’re done recording, is that it?”
Tone nodded. “That’s usually how it works, yeah. Part of the problem in the past few weeks is that the others have been putting Ben under a huge amount of pressure to get his shit together so we can finish the album. The record label set us a deadline, which was last weekend.”
“You missed the deadline already?”
“Yeah. And that’s not good. They’re breathing down our necks, wanting to see progress, and we can’t give it to them because Ben went off the deep end. Summer’s a mess, Jez is pissed off, Geordie washed his hands of the whole thing because he can’t handle Ben when he’s high… which leaves me.”
“You’re his best friend,” Stan said gently. “He listens to you even when he doesn’t listen to anyone else.”
“Yeah, well, he’s not fucking listening to me any more,” Tone muttered. “The only way I could even get him to let me in his room was to offer him a joint. Then we got high and forgot whatever it was they wanted us to talk about.”
Stan couldn’t help it; he laughed. Some things would never change. “Oh, Tone.”
“I know.”
“How are they all now?”
“I think things are better since we made a plan. We can tell Melissa the plan—she’s our manager—and she can relay it back to the label. Musicians are fucking temperamental by nature. They’re not expecting us to be Boy Scouts. We could still get it finished and released by Christmas.”
“But you don’t know what Ben’s doing.”
“No. He’s still the wild card. I want him to stay, I want him to keep recording and touring with us, but it’s killing him, Stan. How can I tell him I want him to stay when staying is killing him?”
“I don’t know,” Stan murmured.
“Me either. I said to Summer earlier—I would prefer for Ben to go than for him to die. I don’t think she’d been looking at it like that up until now.”
“He’s not going to die.” Stan looked Tone in the eye, wanting him to know how much he meant it. “He saved my life once. Maybe now I have to save his.”
Tone tried to insist that Stan take the bedroom, but Stan held firm. He had purposefully bought a nice pull-out sofa that was actually comfortable to sleep on, and besides, Tone was a guest. The flat really wasn’t big enough for them all to be living on top of one another, but it would do, for now.
Despite the comfy sofa, Stan didn’t sleep well. The pressure to “fix” Ben and get him back on track was all on his shoulders now, with an internationally famous, Grammy-winning, platinum-selling band looking to him to get Ben in a position where he could keep going. The thing was, Stan wasn’t sure if convincing Ben to keep going was the right thing. Tone was right: this lifestyle was killing him.