one-hit wonder (3 page)

“These, all my flats—all short-term—but all fully rented—

365 days a year. Here. Here and here. Famous London stage actress, here. Here—a lord. There—an MP.” Ana didn’t really have any idea what he was talking about, but she nodded politely anyway.

Mr. Arif slipped a key from a very large bunch into the lock of flat number twenty-seven, swung open the door, and flicked on the light switch.

“Here all day with the police and such and who knows what on the day that we found her. A bad day. A very bad day.

Four days she’d been here. In this heat. You can still smell it.” He twitched his nostrils and his large moustache quivered.

“Breathe in deep like so, and the stench—it is still there.” He jabbed at his throat with the side of his hand to demonstrate exactly where the stench was and began heaving open grimy windows at the other end of the room, holding a monogrammed handkerchief over his mouth.

“How is this, that a woman as beautiful”—he pointed at a framed poster of Bee on the wall—“could be dead and nobody be knowing this thing? How is it that I, her landlord, come to be the one to be finding her?
I
am not her friend.
I
am not her lover.
I
am not her family. I am her landlord.

This—this is not right.”

He shook his head from side to side for a good twenty seconds, allowing time for the not-rightness of the situation to be fully absorbed, his body language implicitly informing her that in his culture this sort of thing would not be allowed to happen. Ana gently placed her bag on the floor and stared in wonder at the photo of Bee on the wall, realizing with a jolt that she’d almost forgotten what her sister looked like.

“So.” He clapped his hands together and then rubbed them, his flesh squishing together like bread dough. “The cleaning crew are arriving at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. By that time all extraneous matter is to be removed. I have famous royal ballerina moving in on Saturday morning. All has to be perfect. Your beautiful sister has not left you a very great task. Your beautiful sister has not very many possessions.” He laughed again, that pantomime laugh, and then stopped abruptly. “Here is the inventory. You will be needing this so you are not taking away the property of the—er—property.

Unfortunately, Madam, I am not able to leave you with a key, but if you are needing to go outside, the porter knows you are here and will allow you to move about freely. And now I leave.” And he did, shaking her once more briskly and damply by the hand and clip-clopping away down the long corridor in two-tone slip-on shoes.

Ana pulled the door closed behind her and breathed a sigh of relief. She turned and flicked the lock on the door and of relief. She turned and flicked the lock on the door and then she stood for a moment or two and stared around her.

So. This was Bee’s flat. It wasn’t what she’d imagined. She’d imagined brightly painted walls and huge scarlet sofas, Warhol-type prints of Bee on the walls, lava lamps, mirror balls, and lots of generally eclectic, groovy, colorful funkiness. She’d imagined that Bee’s flat would be an extension of her and her outrageous personality. But mainly, when she’d thought of Bee’s flat, she’d imagined it full of people. And, more specifically, she’d imagined it with Bee in it—her red lips parting every few seconds to uncover those big white teeth; her smile carving dimples into her cheeks; her bobbed black hair swinging glossily back and forth.

Talking too much. Smoking too much. Laughing like a drain.

Being the center of attention.

Alive.

What surrounded her, instead, was the somewhat dreary, beigy, dusty flat of an elderly widowed gentleman. The walls were papered with a faded but expensive-looking embossed floral design. The furniture was reproduction in dark mahogany and teak. In one corner stood an ornate bird cage filled with junk. The net curtains were yellowing.

She began slowly to walk around. The flat was huge. The ceilings were at least ten feet tall, the rooms extremely large. But in spite of so much space it seemed oppressive.

The buzz of city life floated in through the open windows but was somehow muted, as if the volume had been turned down.

Nailed to the wall in the hallway was a gold disc in a heavy glass frame. Ana squinted to read the inscription:

“GROOVIN’ FOR LONDON” BY BEE BEARHORN:

ELECTROGRAM RECORDS © 1985

PRESENTED TO BEE BEARHORN IN RECOGNITION OF SALES OF 750,000 DISCS

A door on Ana’s right was open, revealing the bathroom.

The suite was a pale, minty green with heavy deco taps of chrome. The floor was gray linoleum, the window dimpled and opaque, surrounding a cobwebbed windmill vent creaking slowly around and around, as if someone had only just left the room. Ana shivered.

Farther down the hallway was a closed door with a large cartoon bumblebee pinned onto it. It had a bubble, attached by a wire, coming from its mouth that said “Bzzzzzzz.” Bee’s bedroom.

Ana put her hands to the door and felt chilled suddenly, almost as if Bee’s body would still be lying there on her bed, where she’d been found three weeks ago, as if the floor would be littered with pills and capsules, the room buzzing with flies. She pushed the door open slowly, her breathing suspended momentarily. The curtains in the room were closed but for a tiny gap of an inch or two letting in a bright slice of daylight that fell across the huge double bed and the wooden floor, dividing the room in two. Shapes loomed out of the overcast shadows at Ana, and there was an odd smell in the room. She put her hand over her mouth and nose and glanced around the room again before reaching around the corner of the door and feeling for a light switch.

She hit the switch, looked around the room, and then released a bloodcurdling yell when she saw a small woman with a black bob and red lipstick standing in the corner of the room.

It was a cardboard cutout. Of Bee. Ana put her hand to her galloping heart and slumped against the wall with relief. It was a stupid life-size cardboard cutout, a promotional thing for “Groovin’ for London.” She remembered seeing one in Woolworth’s back in 1985 when she was only ten years old and the single had just come out, and wishing that she could have one to take home with her. Bee was wearing a black leather minidress with a huge silver belt draped around her waist and big platform shoes. She had her arms folded across her waist and one finger touching her mouth, and was staring at the camera as if she’d just shagged it. She looked quite ridiculous, and Ana couldn’t help thinking that Bee was probably the only person she knew (apart from her mother) who would have felt comfortable sleeping in the same room as a giant cardboard cutout of themselves.

Ana thought back to that afternoon in Woolworth’s all those years ago, when she’d first seen the cutout and had realized, probably for the first time, just exactly how famous her sister actually was. She’d blushed when she’d seen it and looked around her to see if anyone had noticed, and she’d had to bite her lip to stop herself shouting out to anyone who’d listen, “That’s my sister—
that’s my sister
!” 1985 was one of the most exciting years of Ana’s life—the year that Bee had become famous. She’d signed a huge record year that Bee had become famous. She’d signed a huge record deal at the beginning of the year and was marketed heavily as the British answer to Madonna, but nobody could have been prepared for the ensuing phenomenon. “Groovin’ for London,” a virulently catchy dance song, went straight to the charts at number one and stayed there for five weeks, and suddenly Bee’s face was everywhere. For over a year Ana basked in Bee’s reflected glory. She was the most popular girl at school. Even the older kids knew exactly who she was. She was Bee Bearhorn’s sister. Like—how cool was that? When Bee’s second single failed to make an impact on the charts four months later, Ana’s status as Most Interesting Person in School started to look a bit shaky. And when her third single was released and greeted with critical derision—the general consensus was that it was the most abysmal record of the year—barely grazed the top fifty and then disappeared without a trace, Bee Bearhorn came to be seen as just another cheesy one-hit wonder of the eighties and Ana’s relationship to her became more of a hindrance than a social advantage. The crueler girls at her school used the disastrous—and very public—disintegration of Bee’s career as fuel to bully Ana, and for the rest of her schooldays Ana was commonly known as One-Hit-Wonder Wills.

The bedroom Ana now found herself in was vast. It had two large sash windows and an enormous double bed that had been stripped of all its linen except for a large piece of what looked like cashmere in electric pink, folded at the foot of the bed. A lime-green feather boa was draped across the headboard and the windows were framed with little multicolored lights. The floorboards were painted sky blue.

This was much more the sort of room Ana had expected Bee to have been living in. Ironic that it should be the room in which she died.

Ana touched the naked mattress first, gently, with her fingertips, before sitting down on it. The bed was soft and saggy and made an odd twanging sound as she sat. She picked up the soft pink cashmere blanket and brought it to her nose.

It smelled a bit musty, with undertones of some grapefruity, appley perfume.

And there, perched on a pillow and much to Ana’s surprise, sat William. He was older and more threadbare than Ana remembered him, but it was definitely him—a small, knitted rabbit in blue overalls, clutching a carrot between his front paws. She’d given him to Bee when she’d told her she was leaving home, age fifteen. Ana had been only four at the time, but she remembered the moment vividly, remembered Bee’s lacy, fingerless Madonna gloves and the smell of Anaïs Anaïs when Bee had held her in her arms and told her not to say a word to their mother. She remembered Bee trying to give him back to her, saying, “I can’t take William, he’s your favorite,” and herself forcing him back into Bee’s hands, as serious as anything. “No, Be-Be, you have William. I’ve got Mummy.”

Ana picked him up and looked at him in wonder. Bee had kept William. For twenty years. And not only had she kept him, she’d kept him on her pillow. Where she slept. He’d been there when she died. He’d seen it all.

“Here, William,” Ana whispered into his velvet-lined ear,

“tell me—whatever happened to Bee Bearhorn?”
two

Although Bee was her half sister, Ana tended to think of her as more of a sixteenth sister, or a sixty-fourth sister, or even, to put it decimally, a nought-point-nought-nought-nought-one-percent sister. Other times she felt as if Bee were a dream, someone Ana had made up.

In the age of the disintegration of the traditional family unit, Ana’s family had somehow managed to be even more complicated and unconventional than most. Ana’s mother, Gay, married Gregor Bearhorn in 1963 and had a baby, Belinda. Gregor gave into his long-repressed but ultimately uncontrollable homosexual urges and left Gay in 1971. Gay was married again, to Bill, a retired headmaster twenty-two years her senior, in 1974. A second daughter, Anabella—or Ana as she would later wish to be known—was born in 1975

(Anabella and Belinda—Ana occasionally thought that her mother would rather have given birth to a pair of bichon frises) and Bee left home four years later to join her father, Gregor, in London. He died in 1988. And so did Bill, in 1999.

As convoluted as this state of affairs had become, it had all started off in a fairly straightforward manner. Ana’s mother, a budding actress, had met Gregor, the burly young director at her local theater, when she was twenty-two. They married, they honeymooned on the Amalfi coast, they drove a racing-green Morgan, they had raucous parties, and they lived in a cozy state of mild, middle-class Bohemia. And then Gay got pregnant and everything started to go wrong.

Gay suffered six long months of terrible postnatal depression, brought about mainly by the physical horror of what pregnancy and childbirth had done to her previously immaculate little body, the shock of her sudden lack of independence, and the abrupt end to her dreams of being a famous stage actress. Gay failed to bond with her firstborn and became neurotic, bitter, and miserable. Consequently, Bee became a rebel, and her husband finally emerged from the closet and ran away to London to pursue his career and a young man called Joe.

Even in their small Devon town, nobody had been particularly surprised by the news. The colorful neckerchief-wearing giant of a man had always been suspected of being a little bit
that way inclined.
But Gay had been so distressed that she hadn’t left the house for a month and had dressed entirely in black for the rest of the year. She married Bill three years later, for reasons of practicality and companionship rather than romance, who’d known her since she was a child. Ana was born nine months later, when Gay was thirty-six and Bill was fifty-eight and the late-in-life arrival was the talk of the village.

Bill was eighty-two when he’d died of a heart attack ten months ago—a long life in most people’s books, but tragically young as far as Ana was concerned. She missed him so much that bits of her ached.

Gay maintained that she missed him, too. Every now and then her kohl-lined eyes would fill with tears and she’d look pensively into the distance and whisper her late husband’s name desperately, under her breath. “Bill,” she’d breathe, and then abruptly busy herself with something else. She’d been robbed—
robbed
—of the finest man in all the world. Her Bill.

Her wonderful, kind, loving Bill, who’d put her on a pedestal and denied her nothing—which was quite funny really, Ana thought, given the fact that she’d been a complete bitch to him while he’d been alive.

Gay had never really gotten over the departure of her glamorous, talented, and gruffly handsome first husband and had always seen Bill very much as a consolation prize. But as wonderful and unusual as Bill might have been, he was still just a man, and had loved his beautiful Gay to the point of spoiling her, shell-shocked until the end that he’d ever managed to persuade a woman like her to marry a “wrinkly old beanpole” like him.

Bill wasn’t alone in his adoration of his wife. Everyone in Torrington loved Gay Wills. Ruddy-cheeked gentlemen who remembered Gay as a young girl, the town beauty who looked like Elizabeth Taylor, with her hand-span waist, gleaming black hair, and violet eyes. Before she’d become agoraphobic she’d been a familiar sight in Great Torrington, spinning around the town on her old black bike, a basket full of flowers draped artfully across the handlebars, embroidered skirt flapping about in the breeze, rising tantalizingly to mid-thigh every now and then. She was a woman who knew exactly the effect she had on men and played it to the max—she was happy only if there was at least one person miserably in love with her. She was charm personified. A bit scatty—yes. A bit odd sometimes—