one-hit wonder (35 page)

“Yeah,” she replied.

“Do you believe it now?” he said.

“Believe what?”

“That you’re beautiful?”

“Oh,” she scoffed, “fabulous is one thing. Beautiful is another. And anyway—she was talking about the jacket. Not me.” But even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t strictly true.

Because suddenly, and for the very first time in her life, she actually felt like she might be beautiful. She really might be.

Well, maybe not beautiful exactly, but, you know—not bad-looking. She smiled and turned her head to the window, watching the hordes of early evening commuters scuttling around grayly, and felt positively serene.

They parked in a side street around the back of Leicester Square, picked up some KFC and devoured it in the front seat of the car, watching the world go by. After the premiere they drove Liberty, her “no one,” and a few other beautiful, sad-looking people to a club in Soho for the post-premiere party. As Liberty emerged from the back of the car, she knocked on Ana’s window.

“Hi,” she beamed, “take this.” She handed Ana a sliver of white card. “My friend Rosa’s a scout for Models One. Give her a ring. I think she’d really like to see you. Yah?”

“Me?” said Ana, touching her chest with her palm. “But I’m not . . . I mean . . . I’m . . .
my nose
,” she blustered.

“Yah. That’s cool. They’re looking for, you know, what’s the word, er . . .
edgy
—that’s it—edgy girls. You know.

Unusual. You’ve got a great look. She’ll love you. Phone her.

Yah?”

“Oh. God. Yeah. Well. Yeah. Thank you.” She took the card and stared at it for a while. When she looked up again, Liberty and her friends were all halfway up the steps to the club, where a red velvet rope was instantly unclipped for them to pass through.

“Yeah,” said Flint, one elbow resting against the window ledge, eyeing Ana skeptically, “it wasn’t you. It was the jacket.

Right.” He rubbed the top of Ana’s head with the palm of his hand. “Well, well, well,” he laughed hoarsely before steering the car deftly away from the front of the club and pulling out toward Piccadilly. “Well, well, well.”

“So,” said Ana, feeling suffused with some ridiculous feeling of complete and perfect joy, “where are we going now?” It was eleven-thirty.

“D’you fancy getting in the back?”

“I beg your pardon?” teased Ana.

“Get in the back,” said Flint, “I’ll drive you around for a while. It’s the best way to see London.”

“OK,” Ana grinned.

She sat smack in the middle of the black leather seat and spread herself out a bit, running her hands over the leather pleasurably.

“Sit back, have a glass of champagne, listen to the music, and just watch the world,” said Flint, “just watch and feel. . . .” She opened the side cabinet and pulled out a half-drunk bottle of champagne. She poured herself a glass and then rubbed her fingertip across the mahogany tabletop. There it was, she thought, examining the white film: the ultimate urban experience. She put her fingertip to her lips and tasted it with her tongue, like she’d seen them do in films about a million times. It tasted bitter, salty. The end of her tongue went numb. She took a sip of half-flat champagne and turned her attention to the world outside. It really was very insulating in here, she thought, with these muted little lights and black upholstery and tinted windows.

They drove along a wide street lined with imposing office buildings, past a big gothic church with a modern extension attached, past Woolworth’s head office, Madame Tussaud’s, the Planetarium. And then they turned right past rows of immaculately tended white houses. Lights twinkled in huge, uncurtained windows. Ana saw a cocktail party, a woman in a white dress tipping back her head and laughing uproariously at something an old man wearing a monocle had just said, and then circling her finger around the rim of a wineglass.

They passed the BBC building—she recognized it from pictures—and then turned into a side road and zigzagged around for a while. They passed fashion shops and fabric suppliers and canopied restaurants where people sat at sidewalk tables. She saw a man with black hair kiss the back of the hand of a girl wearing a blue and white dress. She smiled and put a chip in his mouth. He chewed it up and showed it to her on his tongue. She laughed.

A group of girls with highlighted hair strolled down the street, arms linked together, singing “Tragedy” at the tops of their voices and then doubling over with laughter. One of them was wearing a diamond chain around her bare midriff, which sparkled in the orange streetlights. An African man wearing a jellabah and an embroidered cap hailed a cab and climbed in after his veiled wife. Ahead of her, Ana could see the Post Office Tower.

She looked up, above the shop fronts and the restaurants, at the ornate floors above, the occasional stained glass window or gothic turret, chipped gargoyle or leaded bow window. She saw someone moving around in a high-ceilinged flat, talking to someone on the phone, smoking a cigarette. Living their life in the middle of a film set.

A mixed group of drunken youth tripped across Tottenham Court Road, still wearing their office clothes, their cheeks flushed with excitement and cheap wine. A girl in a sleeping bag sat in a store entrance, staring vacantly at the passersby, whose pace picked up as they passed her.

Inside a seventies-style Italian restaurant a group of friends all looked smilingly at their plump, aproned waiter as he illustrated a story with his arms and his eyebrows.

A doorman outside a hotel hailed a cab for a couple dressed in fluorescent slickers. She saw them mouthing

“Thank you very much” as he held the door open for them.

And then she saw the doorman’s face fall as he examined the tip they’d left in the palm of his hand.

The car headed back toward Soho, through deserted squares framed by enormous Georgian mansions. In a railinged square lit by a single streetlight, a man and a woman argued. Flint took them through the red-light district. The car slowed down to a near halt as pedestrians swarmed across the narrow roads and cars double-parked outside clubs and taxi offices. It was almost midnight on a Tuesday night, but it looked like every resident of London was out on the streets of Soho. A bulbous-eyed man with tattoos peered into the tinted windows of the car and waggled a large gray tongue at her. Ana flinched before remembering that he couldn’t see her.

She stared into the empty eyes of a dark girl perched cross-legged on a high stool in the entrance of a strip club and wondered how she’d ended up there, and then lost herself briefly in thoughts of destiny and cause-and-effect and how maybe if that girl wasn’t working in that bar, sitting on that stool at this very moment, maybe someone else on the other side of the planet would be unable to come up with a cure for cancer. Or something . . .

They flew back down Piccadilly and across Hyde Park, Knightsbridge, and Sloane Street. Chanel. Ralph Lauren.

Christian Dior. Versace. Names that were just the ads in between the articles in
Marie-Claire
to Ana. And there they were, in the flesh—shining, bright, untouchable, like film stars.

As they sailed down toward Sloane Street and down Kings Road, Ana felt herself being lifted out of herself again, like that night in Bee’s flat when she’d dressed up and drunk champagne and listened to Blondie. Nothing else existed—

just her thoughts, the music, and the moving scenery. But it wasn’t just scenery. It wasn’t just a mishmash of separate, unconnected activities and individuals. It was cohesive. It was life. All those buildings and cars and strangers. They were life. And they were magical.

They turned off Kings Road and headed for the river. The music changed again. “Perfect” by the Lightning Seeds. And as the river came into view, as she set eyes on Albert Bridge and gasped at its almost saccharine prettiness, at the ruffled reflections of tiny lights in the molasses-black water of the Thames, she sat back in the soft leather and let a smile play on her lips while the lyrics drifted into her consciousness and seemed suddenly to make sense of absolutely everything.

and seemed suddenly to make sense of absolutely everything.

Ana gulped as the song came to a close. There was a happiness welling up in her chest that brought tears to her eyes. She felt overcome by intense emotion. By intense love.

By an intense desire to feel that song, to live that song. Music had always conjured up a sense of another life for Ana, of other,
better
ways of feeling and existing and being. And now, for the first time in her life, she felt like she could take one of those songs and make it real.

“Flint,” she breathed into the intercom.

“Your ladyship?”

“Let’s go,” she heard herself saying in a stranger’s voice.

“Where?”

“Yours,” she said, “let’s go back to yours.”
thirty-three

He smelled her hair first. It was spread all over his pillow.

Black and long and in need of a shampoo. He picked up a strand between his fingers and rubbed it under his nose. It felt like satin knickers.

He maneuvered his body slowly onto its side and looked at her. She was fast asleep, her long lashes resting against her cheekbones, her lips slightly parted. He looked down at her bare breast. It was tiny. But it did everything that a breast was supposed to do. It had a neat nipple that was in proportion to the size of the breast and was a nice caramely color. The breast itself was round and firm and the nipple tipped ever so slightly upward, giving it just the right amount of perkiness. He cupped it with his hand and felt her heart beating underneath, a slow, resting beat in rhythm with the little puffs of breath that slipped between her lips.

Well, well, well, he thought to himself, smiling, I’m in bed with Bee’s sister. As Old Domehead had put it so eloquently yesterday—it’s a funny old world.

He took his hand from her breast and very quietly got out of the bed and headed toward the kitchen. It was eight-thirty.

The kids next door were already screaming and shouting. A wading pool had now been added to their artillery of annoying, noise-producing garden contraptions. He made two mugs of tea and padded back to the bedroom, where Ana was just stirring. He grinned at her while she rubbed her eyes.

“Hi,” he said, handing her her tea.

“Hi,” she said, taking it from him and pulling the duvet up around her armpits.

“Well,” he said, “this is something for the books, isn’t it?”

“Mmm,” murmured Ana, taking a slurp of tea.

“How you doing?”

“Er . . .”—she grinned and put her tea on the bedside table—“good. I’m good.” And then she beamed at him—a huge toothy, tonsily grin, and for the first time ever Flint could see something of Bee in her.

“That’s what I like to hear.”

“You know, Gill told me specifically not to do that.”

“What?”

“Have sex with you.”

Flint liked the fact that she said “have sex” and not “make love,” surely one of the vilest expressions known to man.

“And why’s that, exactly?”

“She told me you were an old tart. That you’d sleep with anything with a hole in it.”

“She said what?”

“She said that you weren’t as nice as you seemed. That you weren’t to be trusted.”

“And what exactly did she base that judgment on?”

“On the fact that you’ve slept with her. And Lol. And Cathy—whoever the hell Cathy is.”

Flint raised his eyebrows and groaned. “Oh,” he said, “for God’s sake. I can’t believe she told you that. That’s so unfair.”

“But true?”

“Yeah, it’s true. But that was fucking eons ago. We were all young. All in our twenties. Thought that sex was just a big game. And for a while, after I got back from Japan and I wasn’t even drinking anymore, it was the only vice I had. I slept around a lot when I was younger—a hell of a lot—it wasn’t like I made a point of sleeping only with people I knew.”

“And Bee?”

“What about Bee?”

“You slept with Bee, too . . .”

“Oh. God.” He let his head drop onto his fist. “Yes,” he sighed. “I slept with Bee. Once. About a week after we met.

And that was it.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you sleep with her only once?”

Flint thought about it for a moment. “Because it seemed wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Yeah. Not right. It was embarrassing. Awkward. A mistake.”

“And these days?”

“What?”

“Do you still—sleep around?”

He shrugged. “Nah,” he smiled, “not like I used to. I mean, I still have my moments, you know. But I’m an old man now—

it’s not my raison d’être anymore.”

“And when was the last . . . ?”

“About a month ago.”

“And she was . . . ?”

“She was Angela. She was twenty-nine. She’d hired the car for her hen night.”

“You know on Monday night, when I asked you about Bee?

About whether you’d ever been in love with her? And you said you’d never been in love with anyone? Did you really mean that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But—I don’t really understand. I mean—you’re thirty-six years old. How did you get to be so old without falling in love with anyone?”

“Ah, now. I said I’d never
been
in love. Not that I’d never
fallen
in love. I’ve fallen in love a few times.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, one is a process. The other is a state. I’ve been through the process but never found the state. At one stage in my life I persuaded myself that maybe the process was the state and I married her.”

“What!”

“Yup—it lasted fourteen months.”

“Who was she?”

“A client. Girl called Ciara. She was a dancer. Irish girl.”

“So what went wrong?”

“We didn’t like each other.”

Ana laughed. “That simple?”

“Yup. That simple. We just woke up one morning and both decided that we really couldn’t stand each other.”

“So—how do you differentiate between the process and the state?”

“You need to be able to differentiate between insanity and sanity. Because that’s the difference between falling in love and being in love. One is a state of total and utter madness, the other a state of pure clarity and peace. Or so I’ve been told.” He smirked.