one-hit wonder (16 page)

“Oh—
Flint’s
driving you, is he?” she said. “You’d better keep an eye out for him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Flint’s a very naughty boy. Don’t let that gentle-hearted-giant act fool you. OK?”

Ana nodded uncertainly.

“OK, then. I’ll see you tomorrow. Have fun!” she tinkled before bounding out of the door with her gym bag.

Ana finished her juice and poured herself another glass.

Gill was right. It was delicious. Then she helped herself to a gorgeous warm bagel. It was all gooey with cream cheese and salty with smoked salmon, the crust a perfect chewy shell, the inside soft and glutinous. She wolfed it down and then had another one. Ana could hardly remember the last time food had tasted so good. She pushed open the kitchen door and felt the early sun rays already burning her skin. It was going to be another scorcher.

She took her juice upstairs to her bedroom and started to pack for this peculiar day trip, panicking as she suddenly realized that she’d run out of knickers and cursing herself as she pulled the little silver camera she’d found in Bee’s suitcase from the bottom of her tartan suitcase.

“Fuck,” she muttered to herself. She’d forgotten all about it.

She went to the hallway and phoned Lol.

“Look,” said Lol, “don’t worry about it. There’s one of those one-hour places at the bottom of your street. Toss it in there now and we can collect it later. There was something I wanted to do before we set off, anyway.”

“What’s that, then?”

“Never you mind,” said Lol, “we’ll be round in about twenty minutes. Flint’s just gotten here.”

“So, what’s this Flint like, then?”

“He’s very tall, he’s very quiet, and he’s got a very big car.

Let’s leave it at that, shall we? See you soon.” Ana found the photo shop and also, much to her joy, a pound shop, where she picked up ten pairs of cotton knickers for five pounds. She was halfway through a third bagel and another glass of Gill’s juice, when a horn sounded on the street outside. She grabbed her bag and rushed to the door, and stopped in her tracks when she clapped eyes on the most massive Mercedes she’d ever seen in her life. It was dark blue with tinted windows and a sort of stretched bit in the middle. It was very shiny and disgustingly ostentatious.

Lol unfurled herself from the back, lifting a huge pair of black sunglasses from her nose and grinning at Ana. She had a big sunflower in her hair. “Darling,” she drawled in a mock-posh accent, “how are you? You look simply divine. Mwah.

Mwah. Do get in.”

Ana threw her bag in first and climbed in after Lol. “Oh.

Wow. Fuck,” she exclaimed, looking around her at the mahogany-trimmed interior, the discreet lighting, the buttons and the knobs. “Are we really going there in this?”

“Uh-huh. Better get used to it.”

“Wow.” She ran a hand over the soft leather upholstery.

“Wow.”

“That’s three wows, Lennard. Did you get that?” Lol knocked on the glass partition with a chunky diamond ring.

“Three wows.
You
might be losing it, but your car can still do it for you.”

“Ha. Ha. Ha.”

Ana watched as the tinted glass partition slid down and the back of a man’s head was revealed. It was a large square head set on a wide neck and supported by vast shoulders. It was covered in short, thick, dirty-blond hair peppered with a smattering of gray.

“Flint,” said Lol, moving closer to the partition, “this here is the world-famous Ana. Ana—this here is the—er—well—

this is Flint.”

“Nice to meet you at last,” said Flint, turning around stiffly to flash a quick smile at Ana. His voice was deep and coarse.

And he was beautiful. Ana gulped.

“Nice to meet you, too.”

“I’m really, really sorry about Bee,” he said.

Ana shrugged and smiled tightly. “Me, too.”

“Flint was Bee’s driver back in the eighties, when she was famous,” said Lol.

“Aaah,” said Ana. She stared at Flint’s ears. They were surprisingly delicate for such a burly man.

“Anyway,” said Flint, leaning forward to find a button on his dashboard, “it’s too early for conversation for me, so I’ll leave you two girls to it. Keep your heels off the upholstery.

Keep your hands off the champagne. Ashtrays are in the armrests. And give us a shout if you need a pit stop.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Flint,” said Lol, and then the partition slid back across the car and it was almost as if Flint had never existed.

Lol turned to Ana. “Oh, bloody Nora,” she said, a smile creeping across her face, “hark at the color of you. You look like a fucking beetroot. But just forget about it, all right. That bloke might look like butter wouldn’t melt, but he’s a sly old bugger. Don’t fall for the act. OK?”

“Jesus,” said Ana, “that’s exactly what Gill just said, too.

What is he? A serial killer?”

“No,” said Lol, “not a serial killer. He’s a serial
shit
.”

“Well, anyway. He’s not my type, I can assure you.”

“Good,” said Lol as she folded her long legs up under her and started fiddling with a pop-out tray in the inside door.

“OK, then. What have we here?” She ran a fingertip across the surface of the mahogany-topped table and held it toward Ana. “A-ha! Colombia’s finest.” A film of white powder clung to her skin. “Without fail,” she said, wiping it off on

added “on”#> her jeans, “every time I get in this car. God, I
hate
this stuff, I really do. I mean—is there such a thing as a celebrity who doesn’t do coke?”

“Celebrities?”

“Yup. That’s what Mr. Flint there does for a living. Drives celebrities around.”

“Really!”

“Don’t sound so excited. He doesn’t even get to see them half the time. Just has to clear up all their coke and spunk and puke after they’ve gone.”

“Ooh,” grimaced Ana.

“Exactly,” said Lol, turning to face the window. “Oh. Look.

We’re here already.”

Ana looked out of her window. They’d pulled up on the side of a grimy main road lined with electrical repair shops, taxi offices and West Indian bakeries, and were parked next to a large flower stand.

“Where are we?” asked Ana.

Lol indicated a sign just behind her with her eyes. It was painted with the words WEST LONDON CREMATORIUM.

“Is this where . . . ?”

“Uh-huh,” said Lol, “thought you might like to say hello.

And good-bye.”

Ana nodded slowly. She was going to see Bee’s grave. She hadn’t even
thought
about seeing Bee’s grave.

She bought a bunch of orange gladioli and then wondered if they were quite suitable. For a dead sister. Or for a dead pop star, for that matter. Did anyone leave gladioli for Diana?

She’d never seen gladioli tied to railings or on the side of the road, either, come to think of it. Maybe they were all wrong.

A floral faux pas. “They’re beautiful,” said Lol, “orange was Bee’s favorite color.”

“Was it?” said Ana. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Lol nodded. “Well. One of them, anyway.” The two women began walking. “Isn’t Flint coming?” whispered Ana.

“No. Flint likes to do things like this alone. You know?” Ana didn’t really know but nodded anyway. They were heading down a meandering gravel driveway flanked by plane trees and cypresses. The sunlight dappled onto lush green grass. A few other people were here, too, clutching flowers. The graveyard stretched out in front of them for miles.

A crunching on the gravel behind them warned of an approaching car. They moved onto the grass and looked behind them. A funeral cortège. A coffin piled high with red roses and a large floral structure that spelled out the word

“mum” lay in the back of the leading hearse. Lol put her hand to her heart and cast her eyes downward, standing still until the entire procession of cars had passed them by. When Ana looked at her again her eyes were damp with tears. “Sorry,” she sniffed, wiping them away, “I’m an emotional old bugger sometimes.”

Bee’s grave was to the west, in the shade of a sycamore.

She lay between her father and a man called Maurice Gumm who’d been born in Tobago in 1931. Her grave was a flat marble plaque, flush to the grass, engraved with the wording that Ana’s mother had chosen:

BELINDA OCTAVIA

BEARHORN

1964-2000

BELOVED DAUGHTER & SISTER

SHE BROUGHT JOY TO MILLIONS WITH HER BEAUTY, HER TALENT, AND HER JOIE DE VIVRE

SHE WILL BE MISSED FOREVERMORE

“
Joie de vivre
”? thought Ana. Wasn’t “
joie de vivre
” a rather odd thing to put on a headstone? A small bunch of loosely tied pink roses rested on her grave.

“Who d’you think left those?” said Ana.

Lol shrugged.

Ana placed her flowers next to the roses and dusted some dirt off the plaque. She felt strange. She knew she should be thinking about Bee right now, but she wasn’t. She was thinking about her father. She was thinking about rushing to Bideford General from her flat in Exeter with Hugh when the phone call came, and getting there just in time to say good-bye, just in time to tell him she loved him, to squeeze good-bye, just in time to tell him she loved him, to squeeze his liver-spotted hands while they were still warm. She was thinking about going to the co-op with her mother and picking out the oyster-colored marble with the pink veins, the gold-leaf lettering, the wording. Identical to Bee’s. Cut from the same stone, engraved with the same lettering. Her mother’s choice. Her mother’s taste. Ana’s mother had impeccable taste. She knew how she liked things.

Tears started tickling at the back of her throat. Lol squeezed her shoulder. “D’you want me to leave you?”

“Uh-huh,” Ana gulped. “Just for a minute.”

“I’ll see you back at the car.”

Ana listened to Lol’s footsteps receding across the crunchy gravel and bowed her head. And then her shoulders started trembling and shaking as tears erupted from the very pit of her stomach. The tears she hadn’t cried at her father’s funeral. The tears she hadn’t been allowed to cry because her father’s funeral had been all about her mother.

He’d keeled over in the garden while digging up hyacinth bulbs—it was ironic that he should have been preparing so vigilantly for the next season when he wasn’t to last the day.

He’d been taken by ambulance to Barnstaple General Hospital but had died two hours later while waiting for an emergency heart bypass. He had been eighty-two years old. It had been a quick and relatively painless death, exactly the death that Bill had always said he wanted. He’d never been a burden to anyone, never inadvertently hurt anyone, never forgotten himself, humiliated himself, or soiled himself.

During the last few years of his life, Bill had started to stoop, and Ana had forgotten how tall her father actually was. As she watched his long coffin being slipped from the hearse onto the shoulders of six strong men, she’d felt strangely proud of his stature and, for the first time in her life, she’d felt proud of her own gangling body, long hands, and large feet, which echoed those of her father.

Ana had always known that her father would die while she was relatively young, that he wouldn’t be there to see weddings and grandchildren, but when it came it was still a massive shock which, combined with her already self-obsessed mother’s rapid descent into an almost psychotic state of self-indulgence, had forced Ana rudely off the path to adulthood she had been successfully following. Well—

successful-
ish
. A going-nowhere job at Tony’s Tin Pan Alley selling drum kits and synthesizers to pimply sixteen-year-olds, a damp flat with a shared bathroom and a six-year relationship with Hugh, the highly intelligent but occasionally overbearing guy she’d lost her virginity to. But since she’d lost her going-nowhere job, her damp flat, her overbearing boyfriend, and her father all within the space of three months, she’d done nothing to get her life back on track. Instead of finding someone to look after her mother, getting herself a new flat, and looking for a new job, she’d spent all her time in her bedroom writing songs—trite, sentimental, self-indulgent songs. Terrible songs. She had boxes of them under her bed. Dozens and dozens. They were so bad that she couldn’t even bear to look at them.

When she wasn’t writing appalling songs, she was reading books—voraciously, two or three a week, from the local library. She could have fooled herself into believing that she was improving herself, expanding her mind, but the only books she ever read were crime novels. Patricia Cornwell.

Ruth Rendell. P.D. James. Agatha Christie. And books about serial killers, too. Jeffrey Dahmer. Dennis Nielsen. Charles Manson. Ted Bundy. Ed Gein. Her mother called her a

“ghoul,” but Ana was just compulsively fascinated by the workings of minds and souls darker than hers.

Ana had never been a particularly gregarious or fun-loving girl. Her school reports had told of a bright, sweet-natured girl with an amazing talent for music writing, singing, and playing—but suggested that her social skills could be improved upon. People had always described her as “shy,”

“quiet,” “studious,” “creative.” Since her father died, though, these adjectives had transmuted, subtly, to “strange,” “odd,”

“peculiar,” and “weird.”

Living alone with her mother had a lot to do with it. She and her mother were so diametrically opposed in every way—physically, socially, sartorially, intellectually—they could find no common ground whatsoever. Bill had always acted as a kind of buffer between the two women—he’d understood so well what made each of them tick—but without him there, the house on Main Street was a cold and unhappy place.

“Oh God, Dad,” Ana whispered to herself, “I miss you so much, Dad, I miss you so
much
.” Ana was convulsing now, her stomach feeling bruised by contractions as tears that she hadn’t cried when she’d needed to came erupting to the surface. She choked and coughed on them and her whole body shook. For ten months she’d sat on these feelings, kept them to herself. She’d wanted to break down a long time ago, but Hugh had told her to be strong, told her that now was a perfect opportunity to grow, to become adult. When all she’d wanted to do was curl up in a ball in his arms and let him hold her like a baby, he’d forced her to restrain herself.