one-hit wonder (7 page)

spout of one

In Freezer

1x 2 kg. bag Party Ice

open

1x large rump steak

Tesco’s brand strawberry shortcake
one scoop
1x ice cream

missing

1x bottle of Jose Cuervo

unopened

Bee, it seemed, had liked to drink. These bottles and shakers didn’t look like the type that sat around waiting for special occasions or important guests. They appeared to have been in everyday use. Ana thought back to the fancy green, blue, and pink things in odd-shaped glasses sporting parasols and sticky cherries that Bee used to drink when she and her parents went to see her all those years ago. She wondered briefly whether Bee might have had a drinking problem, whether that might have had something to do with her death. But, thought Ana, ideas going off in her head like fireworks, surely someone with a drinking problem wouldn’t go to all the effort of making cocktails every time they wanted a drink. No, thought Ana, Bee just liked a drink; she didn’t have a drinking
problem.

Ana headed toward the living room and stopped on the way to open a small door set into the corridor wall. It was a linen closet, which contained, in addition to the traditional piles of folded towels and bedsheets, a used ashtray, a dirty mug, and a black evening jacket. The label inside the jacket read VIVIENNE WESTWOOD. It was heavy with sequins and smelled of strong perfume. She examined the label. It was a size ten.

She searched it for pockets and found a small one located in the lining. Inside the pocket was a ring—a silver ring set with three large diamonds. Ana took it to the window in the living room and held it to the light. The sunlight glittered and gleamed off the stones, and the metal had a sheen about it that suggested something more valuable than silver—

platinum, or white gold. She slipped the ring onto her finger and thought for a moment how ridiculous it looked on her skinny, scuffed fingers with their bitten, uneven nails, but she kept it there anyway, enjoying the heaviness of it and the way it caught the light.

The living room really was shockingly bare. There was no sense of “living” about it at all. No ornaments, no lamps, no mirrors, no paintings on the walls—just lots of ugly furniture, and books and records piled up around the place in a way that suggested they had been put there temporarily and never been moved. A motley crew of assorted soft toys and animals sat staring at Ana from the mantelpiece and, resting against the wall at the farthest side of the room, she caught sight of something quite heartbreaking—two of the saddest-looking guitars she’d ever seen, one acoustic, one electric, both broken, both missing strings, both covered in a fine layer of dust. For Ana this was equivalent to finding two abused, abandoned puppies in a cardboard box. How could people be so cruel? She picked up the acoustic. It was—had been—a beautiful instrument. There was a hole gouged out of the back panel and a massive chip in the head. It looked like it had taken a few beatings. She managed to extract a few discordant chords from the poor, unloved creature and then stroked it gently before wrapping it up in a pair of bath towels and nesting it gently into a cardboard box.

Ana wondered when Bee had learned to play guitar. Who’d taught her? Had she been any good? A person had to get pretty low to treat their guitars like that, Ana thought sadly to herself.

Glancing around the room, she decided to abandon her mental inventory—she was losing hope of finding anything even vaguely enlightening in this dump. She was throwing things rapidly into the boxes now, slowing down only to leaf through Bee’s CDs, books, and videos and coming quickly to the astounding realization that Bee had pretty good taste. And not just the sort of good taste you could buy by the pound, the sort of stuff that Sunday supplements told you to enjoy, but intelligent good taste, wide-ranging, eclectic, thoughtful, and, most suprisingly, unpretentious. Her music collection contained everything from David Bowie to Barry Manilow, the Candyskins to the Cocteau Twins, Paul Westerberg to the Pretenders, and Janis Joplin to Janet Jackson. Her videos ranged from
Mary Poppins
to Bill Hicks and from
Gregory’s
Girl
to—Ana was hugely impressed to note—
L.A.

Confidential,
her favorite film of the last few years. Among her dog-eared and well-thumbed books were titles by writers as diverse as Noam Chomsky, Stephen King, and Roald Dahl and biographies of people from wildly disparate walks of life like Alan Clark, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Adolf Hitler.

Ana had always thought disparagingly and, she supposed, superciliously, of Bee as a woman with bubble-gum tastes in popular culture, and felt slightly ashamed and saddened to find so many similarities between her own tastes and those of her sister.

She looked at her watch and was surprised to see that it was nearly eight o’clock. The day was beginning to fade away and Ana had been so absorbed by what she was doing that she’d hardly noticed the time passing. It was dinnertime and her stomach was rumbling slightly, the chicken salad sandwich now a distant memory. She headed for the kitchen and pulled open Bee’s fridge. The interior light cast a glow over the darkened room and gave the solitary items within a spotlit, Hollywood quality. A bottle of Perrier Jouet and the box of chocolates smiled seductively at her, Mae West-style.

Why not? thought Ana. Why not? She plucked them from the fridge, pulled a glass from a cupboard, and headed back toward the bedroom.

It was nearly dark in there now and Ana felt a little spooked. This building was full of strange noises, bangs and creaks and clunks, and the sounds of city life floating through the windows were angry and disturbing compared to the clean silence of Torrington on a Friday night. Ana found the switch for the lights that framed the windows and flicked them on. On the other side of the room was an old table-lamp covered with a claret chiffon throw. She switched that on, too, and then looked around her. She shivered. It was lonely and empty and cold in there. It was spooky. Music: That’s what this room needed.

She retrieved a CD from next door—
Blondie’s Greatest
Hits
—and put it in the tiny CD player next to Bee’s bed. And as the first bars of “Heart of Glass” filled the room and music pulsed through her feet, she felt herself being lifted out of herself and into the body of someone much more interesting.

Some groovy bohemian woman who lived alone in a Baker Street apartment. Some decadent, beautiful creature who drank champagne on her own and ate expensive Belgian truffles with wild abandon. She popped the champagne, poured out a glass, and helped herself to a pistachio truffle.

The fridge-cold crust of the chocolate shattered and the creamy center got stuck to her teeth. The ice-cold champagne bubbles fizzed over her tongue and down her throat. She found herself smiling.

She danced across the room in time with Blondie and pulled open Bee’s wardrobe, knowing even before she did that the essence of Bee would be contained behind those doors. Bee was all image and no substance, and her image was mainly about her clothes.

But even Ana’s greatest imaginings couldn’t have prepared her for the magical, fairy-tale dressing-up box that was Bee’s wardrobe. Sequins. Satin. Silk. Beads. Crystals. Frogging. Fur.

Chiffon. Organza. Golds. Scarlets. Purples. Paisley. Polka dots.

All arranged in a color spectrum from black, through ink blue, purple, and oxblood red to palest pink, faded lime, and snowy white, all glittering and gleaming. In the bottom of the wardrobe sat Bee’s shoes, all with towering heels, all bearing the expensive wooden shoetrees that wealthy men with loads of handmade shoes from Jermyn Street use. Hanging from the doors were feather boas and scarves and diamanté belts, tasseled shawls and furry things—and handbags, dozens of them. What use would one woman have for so many bags?

Tiny ones, vast ones, chain mail, Lurex, marabou, embroidered, patent leather, floppy patchworked suede.

Ana pulled on a pair of grape-colored crushed-velvet gloves that covered her elbows, and admired them in the muted light. Very elegant. She knocked back the rest of her champagne and poured herself another glass, holding the stem genteelly between velvet fingertips. She threw a boa around her neck, a particularly fat one in deepest red, and twirled it around herself a couple of times. She headed for the full-length mirror at the other side of the room and strutted around a bit with her champagne and her hair, when Bee’s dressing table suddenly caught her eye.

Here was a dressing table designed for the delight of six-year-old girls everywhere. It was piled high with cosmetics—not just smeared tubes of liquid foundation and crusty old mascaras, but proper old 1930s-style cosmetics.

Powder puffs and compacts, wooden hairbrushes, resin sets with trays and pots, jars of glitter, false eyelashes, eyelash curlers, brightly colored powders, rows of silvercased lipsticks. Expensive-looking bottles of perfume—Vivienne Westwood, Thierry Mugler, Jean-Paul Gaultier. Even Bee’s tissues were kept in an engraved box and her cotton balls popped out of a shiny metal dispenser, piece by piece.

Ana sat down and switched on the—almost predictable—

lightbulbs that framed the mirror and examined her reflection in the harsh light: terrible—she looked appalling, and her skin was particularly pallid next to the rich redness of the feather boa. She began examining the pots and jars, picking them up, reading the labels, sniffing them, sticking her fingers in them, putting them down again. And then her eye was caught again by a box on a shelf next to the dressing table—a huge wooden box. She lifted the heavy lid and gasped at the contents: piles and piles of jewelry. Costume jewelry. Heavy, glittery, antique, most of it. Bits of deco mother-of-pearl. Garnets. Amethysts. Aquamarine. Diamanté.

Huge earrings. She picked out a pair of delicate Victorian crystal drops and looped them through the holes in her ears.

And then her eye moved to a semicircle of glittering diamonds—a tiara, a bloody tiara. Only Bee, she thought, only Bee could own a bloody tiara . . . She really was the ultimate princess, and the tiara just proved it. But it
was
gorgeous, Ana thought, picking it up and examining it—filigree and spilling over with hundreds of tiny little diamonds. She couldn’t help herself. She tucked it into her hair and felt something happening to her the moment she looked in the mirror.

Something like vanity, like pleasure, like excitement. Sod it, she thought, downing her second glass of champagne and pouring herself a third, I’m going to be a princess, too.

She walked to the CD player, turned it up full blast so that

“Atomic” filled the room to the exclusion of any other noises, and headed for Bee’s wardrobe.

Half an hour later, Ana was transformed. Her lips were red, her eyes were lashed, her hair was big, and she was wearing a floor-length fuchsia dress in duchesse satin with a fake fur stole. And she was literally dripping with diamonds, from the top of her head to her lobes to her wrists.

She eyed herself in the full-length mirror and burst into fits of hysterical laughter. She looked ridiculous. She’d been trying for the Madonna-in-the-“Material-Girl”-video look but had ended up looking like a drag queen on Oscar night. And the dress had quite obviously been designed for someone with breasts, as it gaped open sadly at the top, revealing Ana’s razor-sharp collarbones and little else. But Ana didn’t care now, she was having fun. She was pissed. For the first time in ages she was actually enjoying herself. For the first time in nearly a year, since the morning her father had collapsed while gardening for his precious Gay. For the first time since she’d watched his coffin, custom made for his gangling frame, being lowered into the ground. For the first time since she’d moved back into her mother’s house ten months ago and left Hugh, her job, her flat, and her life in Exeter behind her.

Ana toasted herself in the mirror with her fourth—or was it her fifth?—glass of champagne and leapt in the air with a whoop of excitement when “Union City Blues,” her favorite Blondie song, came on. She slid across the room in her socked feet (she hadn’t even attempted to squeeze her feet into any of Bee’s ludicrously small shoes) and sang into the empty champagne bottle, in a tribute to Tom Cruise in
Risky
Business.
She twirled her stole around and flicked her hair.

She strutted and sang her heart out. She hadn’t realized until that moment how long it had been since she’d last sung out loud and how much she’d missed it. And then, as the closing bars faded away and she took her final bow, breathless and euphoric and full of adrenaline, the room fell silent and the doorbell rang.

five

Ana panicked. A million thoughts landed in her head at once.

Mr. Arif? Police? Drug-crazed rapist with chain saw? Can’t open door. Tiara. Lipstick. Silly hair. Pink dress. Pissed. Very pissed. Shit. Fuck. What to do? What to do?

She ripped off the tiara and threw down the stole and tucked her bouffant hair behind her ears in an attempt to tame it, then tiptoed across the hall and toward the front door in her socked feet, barely allowing herself to breathe.

She put her eye to the peephole and peered out into the corridor, thinking immediately of that weird Oasis video as the fish-eyed view came into focus. And
there
was a surreal image if Ana had ever seen one: a tiny, over-rouged old lady with strangely curled white hair under a hairnet, wearing a pink, fluffy dressing gown with matching slippers and clutching a small sausage dog wearing a pink knitted vest to her bosom. She was looking extremely concerned, in that way only vulnerable and lonely old people can. Ana picked up her cardigan from where it lay on the sofa, threw it on over her dress, and made her way back to the front door.

“Just coming,” she called, flattening her hair down again and wiping off her lipstick with the back of her hand, “just coming.”

“Oh,” said the old lady, recoiling slightly as the door opened and putting one tiny, crepey hand to her chest.

“Hello,” said Ana, attempting to smile normally but failing quite miserably judging by the worried look on the old lady’s face.