Chapter 2
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-per-cent-sister. Other times she felt as if Bee was a dream, someone that Ana had made up.
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 theatre, 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 cosy state of mild, middle-class bohemia.
And then Gay got pregnant and everything started to go wrong.
Gay suffered six long months of terrible post-natal 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 first-born and became neurotic, bitter and miserable.
Consequently, Bee became a rebel, and her husband ran away to London to pursue his acting career and a younger man called Joe.
Even in their small Devon town, nobody had been particularly surprised by the news.
The colourful, 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 good innings 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 got 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 pushbike, 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 up to the max – she was only happy if there was at least one person miserably in love with her.
She was charm personified. A bit scatty – yes.
A bit odd sometimes – undeniably. But such a beautiful, charming, engaging woman.
Really. An angel. A delight. To everyone.
Except her children.
‘Really, Anabella,’ she would often sigh in exasperation, ‘how a girl as awkward as you could possibly have come from my body, I have no idea. That’s the risk one takes when one mixes one’s genes with a man’s, I suppose. You never know what’s going to emerge.’
Gay didn’t say things like this intentionally to upset Ana – she genuinely didn’t see that there was anything wrong with what she was saying.
As far as she was concerned, it was just a statement of fact.
Gay was far too wrapped up in the Wonderful World of Gay Wills to realize the implications or consequences of her comments.
She had much more important things to worry about than her daughter’s feelings – things like picking leaves off the lawn in their back garden by hand, one by one, or embroidering cushions with Turner landscapes, or obsessively counting every last calorie she consumed in a day to ensure that her intake never exceeded 1,500.
As well as her basic agoraphobia, which had set in shortly after Gregor’s funeral in 1988, Gay seemed to develop a new neurosis every day and now refused to answer the phone, answer the doorbell unless she was expecting a visit, eat red meat, drink tap water, take off her shoes except to go to bed, touch anyone she didn’t know, allow any animals in the house, use the Hoover, the dishwasher, the microwave or the tumble-drier (though she did still use the washing-machine) or comb her hair with anything other than the old horsehair brush that used to belong to her grandmother and smelled disgusting.
She also had some strange little rituals, like having to walk across the living room with the same amount of footsteps each time, having to water the houseplants in exactly the same order every day and wearing the same seven cardigans in weekly rotation; and the slightest interruption to any of these practices could send her over the edge into a momentary hysteria.
Ana had moved back home last year, shortly after Bill’s funeral, and she’d soon become accustomed to these ‘quirks’ in her mother’s behaviour, mainly because they really didn’t impinge on her very much.
She wasn’t expected to do anything more than let Gay get on with it and not disturb her more than necessary.
All Gay asked from Ana was that she drive into Bideford once a week to do the big shop, that she pick up odds and ends from town occasionally and that she answer the telephone when it rang.
As long as Ana did this, then Gay really couldn’t have cared less about her, about what she was up to, what she was thinking, who she was seeing or where her life was going.
She’d sometimes look startled to see Ana in the house, almost as if she’d forgotten that she lived there, and Ana couldn’t really blame her for this as she herself often wondered whether or not she actually existed …
Ana’s memories of Bee were all very fuzzy and imbued with a kind of Technicolored, high-octane aura of dimples-hair-and-boobs, turning-a-drama-into-a-crisis, look-at-me-look-at-me-type behaviour.
When Bee was a teenager, she was all fingerless gloves, pink hair, cigarettes and boys.
After she left home and moved to London she was all studied cool, avant-garde make-up and raw, gauche ambition.
And from the day she became famous, in 1985, she was all rush-rush-rush, coffee-fag-coffee, this-flight-that-interview-the-other-TV-show, excuse-me-do-I-know-you-oh-you’re-my-mother-I-thought-I-recognized-you-and-who-is-this-strange-skinny-tall-person-oh-yes-that’s-right-you’re-my-sister disregard.
Ana’s feelings towards Bee had always been enormously ambivalent.
On the one hand she found her quite fascinating.
Bee was a mesmerizing person who could make your day complete by smiling at you.
When Bee was in a room, nobody else existed.
She was captivatingly beautiful and could be extremely amusing if the mood took her.
But on the other hand, Ana had always found Bee frustratingly shallow and occasionally downright cruel.
Her nickname for Ana when she was a child was ‘the Twiglet’, a reference to her knobbly knees and bony arms, and after her sudden growth-spurt at twelve, Bee started calling her ‘the Towering Twiglet’.
Some people might think that was cute – funny, even – Gay certainly appeared to, and Bee thought it was hysterical.
But not Ana. Ana spent her whole life trying not to draw attention to her height, and it took just one ‘Towering Twiglet’ comment from Bee for Ana to feel a complete freak.
Bee had always refused to come home to Devon after she’d left, not even for Christmas or birthdays, claiming that the mere thought of the place brought her close to a panic attack, while Gay, conversely, had a fervent hatred for London, which had been brewing and bubbling ever since Gregor had left her for the temptations of the big city.
She talked of London disparagingly, as if it were some great brassy harlot with badly dyed hair and a whiff of fish about it.
So, as some kind of desperate compromise, Ana and her family would traipse all the way to Bath or Bristol to meet Bee for rushed meetings in smoky bars, when the conversation would be invariably tense and occasionally fractious, particularly at their very last meeting, in the summer of’ 88.
Ana hadn’t known at the time that it was going to be the last time she saw her sister, and maybe if she had, she’d have appreciated the experience a little more than she did.
Because within three weeks, Gregor was dead, and Gay and Bee had fallen out completely and irretrievably.