Meet Me In The Pit

Chapter Seven - It's Nice To See You, Too

Keira

Score: R.E.M. - Ariana Grande

"Nobody saw them come through, right?" I ask Jack, as we are beelining for the lifts on the mezzanine floor, where the kitchens are.

"Right, our plan worked perfectly," he retorts with a smirk.

While Jack was working on the logistics of getting the band to the hotel, while limiting their encounters with the paparazzi to minimum, I had come up with the craziest idea: As this is the first show of the European leg of the tour, and they are coming here directly from the airport, where, according to Twitter and TikTok thousands of fans and paps have been camping for three days, we'd need to be extra cautious when it comes to the band's safety and discretion. Their Spanish agent has, of course, already rented a tour bus, as the band has eight more shows in Spain, however, a mammoth of a bus with blackened windows and three security Land Cruisers isn't exactly...subtle. So, I had suggested that we transport the band and their manager with the Lavet Barcelona Manager's private van.

Ruis and his beautiful wife, Leia, have four children and a Great Dane, so, a van is of utmost necessity in their household. It's an all-electric Volkswagen ID Buzz van, and, according to me, it's the coolest thing ever. Also, the back windows on the right side of the van are covered by Frozen sunshades, much to Ruis's three daughters' delight, and the left one at the very back has a Spider-Man in mid-flight, staring with his big, black eyes at the people outside on the street from his own sunshade, which Ruis's son, Simon, had claimed from his older sisters, when he turned four.

I think this makes up for a decent level of privacy, without the intimidation of the slick, blackened windows of the tour bus.

There's still a security guard with the band, and a professional chauffeur's driving them around, but, at least, they can go a little more undercover.

If that isn't genius, I don't know what is.

"Perfect," I smile, as the lift doors chime open in front of us. We walk in and Jack swipes his keycard over the reader right above the pannel with the floor buttons and presses six.

By the time I reached the kitchens, the band had already been secured to the sixth floor, so I wasn't able to meet them in person. I try to shove the slight pang of disappointment out of my thoughts. I have a scheduled briefing with them in an hour. Even though my anticipation to finally meet them has been growing exponentially over the past couple of weeks, I have been too busy to let my excitement take a hold of me. Heck, I've been so busy I haven't really had the chance to do proper research on them yet.

The folders up in my room do not hold a ton of personal information on the guys, except from their favourite bottled water brands and workout schedules, so I had planned on digging into the nitty-gritty-none-pretty details online once I had a day to myself. I did a quick Google Search, though, and, thanks to Wikipedia, now I know the names of all four of them, at least.

As the name of the band suggests, there's more than one Benjamin in the group. There's Benjamin Fox, vocalist and base player, Benjamin Murray, singer and lead guitarist, Garry Vale, drums, and Josh Howard, keys. What Wikipedia has also kindly provided is that "The band's massive success and world-wide fame is partially attributed to the fact that Benjamin Fox's mother is the famous Australian actress and model Alice Fox."

When I has read that, I had suddenly felt really old, because, of course I know Alice Fox and her career very well, but, until a month ago, I had never heard of her son and his band. Which, I guess, is fair enough, given the fact that these guys are teen idols, and are really fucking young, with Benjamin Murray being the youngest at twenty-one, while the rest of the boys are twenty-two.