Chapter 3 #3
Ana had occasionally wondered about her sister, looked for her blunt black bob and red-lipsticked mouth in the celebrity pictures in her mother’s trashy magazines.
Gay had invited Bee to Bill’s funeral and Ana had stood at his graveside, her grief tempered by a sense of trepidation that at any moment her mysterious sister might appear from behind a tree.
But she hadn’t come and Ana had chalked it up as yet another disappointing moment in her life.
Bee did send Ana a card, however, with a photograph of a lily on the front.
It didn’t say much – just ‘My thoughts are with you, all love, Bee.’ It was nice, but it was coolly polite, and Ana had meant to write back to say thank you and how are you and what’ve you been up to, but the bond between the two sisters was so slight and so flimsy that she’d just never got around to it.
Ana always thought that she’d meet up with Bee again, one day, maybe go up to London for a weekend, hang out together.
The age gap between them would have been less of an issue as Ana hit her twenties, and she was sure that Bee would have calmed down a bit, maybe got a proper job, maybe married, maybe even had a child or two.
She imagined Bee meeting her at the station awash with perfume and Gucci, taking her to be pampered at a health spa and then to dinner at a posh restaurant run by Gordon Ramsay or that other chef bloke with the curly hair and the double-barrelled surname, and maybe taking her out to Bond Street the following day and insisting on buying her something disgustingly expensive from a designer clothes shop.
It would have been a pleasant weekend, and Ana would have enjoyed the diversion, but when it came to an end the two women would have hugged and smiled kindly but sadly at each other, because they’d both know there was no friendship to be had, no bond to be formed, and that they’d probably not bother seeing each other again.
Because, really, they’d have nothing in common.
But now even that sad little scenario was impossible. Because Bee had made the ultimate dramatic exit. She’d gone and died. At the age of thirty-six.
The police had paid a visit nearly three weeks ago to Gay’s handsome Devon townhouse.
Bee’s body had been found on Tuesday afternoon by a Mr Whitman, the building’s porter, who’d let himself into the flat after a bad smell had been reported by the neighbours.
He’d called Bee’s landlord, who’d called the police.
Apparently she’d been wearing a silk dressing-gown and a diamond necklace.
The police had been unable to find a contact number for Gay at first, but after two days they’d finally managed to get through to Bee’s solicitor, who’d given it to them.
Bee’s body had been formally identified by a Mrs Tilly-Loubelle, the next-door neighbour, who claimed to be on ‘quite friendly terms’ with her.
Her body had been taken to St Mary’s Hospital, somewhere in central London, and was currently subject to an investigative autopsy, the results of which would not be made available for a few weeks.
‘How come it took so long for anyone to find her body?’ Ana had asked.
Gay had sniffed and shrugged. ‘It’s unthinkable, Anabella. That’s London for you, though. A heartless, uncaring city. It happens all the time. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.’
‘But four days, mum. And over a weekend, too. Bee always had so many friends, she always had so many people around her. I don’t understand.’ There’d been a moment’s silence while Ana arranged the words of her next question in her head.
‘Did she – did she kill herself? D’you think?’
‘Of course not,’ Gay had snapped.
‘So then – what happened?’
‘That,’ her mother replied abruptly, ‘remains to be seen.’ Gay had sniffed again and nodded sadly.
And Ana had looked at her, at her tiny, pretty, doll-like little mother, with her tumble-down hair and her over-kohled eyes, a snotty tissue scrunched up between her bony old-lady fingers and, suddenly, for possibly the first time in her life, felt desperately sorry for her.
She’d had such dreams for her life and it had come to this.
Being trapped by her own insecurities and neuroses in this house, with two husbands dead and buried and the only thing in life she’d always been able to rely on, her good looks, rapidly letting her down.
Her life was one big disappointment and the only light that had shone upon her dashed dreams had been the memory of her exotic eldest daughter.
And now she was gone, too. Gay suddenly looked very small and very old, and for one bizarre moment Ana was overcome by a desire to hold her.
She put out a tentative hand and brushed it against the satin of Gay’s blouse.
But as her fingers made contact with the fabric she felt her mother’s body tense up and Gay’s bony hand leapt from her lap to slap Ana’s hand away, so hard it stung. She turned and eyed Ana angrily.
‘It should have been you!’ she spat. ‘You should be dead. Not her. Not my Belinda. She had everything to live for – looks, money, personality, talent. And you have nothing. You – you sit in your room all day with your big, dangly body and your lank hair and you play your horrible music and pick your spots and bite your nails. You’ve got no friends and no boyfriend, no job, nothing.
There is no point to you. You are pointless, Anabella – pointless.
And yet – you’re alive! You’re alive and Belinda’s dead!
Ha! Something’s gone wrong – something’s gone wrong – up there,’ – she pointed at the ceiling – ‘with Him. Up there. He’s made a mistake.
That’s what is it. Why else would he take away everyone – Gregor, Bill, Belinda – and leave you? Why would he leave you, Anabella?
‘God,’ she said, addressing the ceiling, her voice quavering like the Shakespearean actress she’d always dreamed of being, ‘God – you have fucked up. You have fucked up …’ She held out her hands in exasperation as she boomed at the Creator, and then pulled herself from the sofa and stalked from the room, stifling a sob as she went.
Ana had overlooked this tirade – it was nothing new – and instead she’d concocted filmic, romantic vignettes of Bee, draped all over a well-lit bed, her pale, bloodless arms trailing on to the floor, her green eyes staring glassily at the ceiling, a puddle of pills next to the bed.
She’d prodded at her subconscious for some emotion, a sense of grief, but it wasn’t there. She’d felt shocked, but not sad.
It was ludicrous, Bee being dead. People like Bee didn’t die.
Glamorous, beautiful, successful, rich, popular people didn’t take a load of drugs and die alone and not get found until four days later.
That was what happened to sad losers, to people with nothing and no one, to people like Ana, in fact.
How could Bee be dead? Why would a woman who had everything throw it all away? It made no sense at all.
Ana spent the rest of the evening going through all the possible explanations in her head, trying to give her sister’s death some sort of structure, but it wasn’t until a couple of hours later, lying in bed listening to the unnerving sounds of her mother downstairs being her mother and coping with her grief in ways at which Ana could only guess, that a sense of loss finally hit her.
She was never going to see Bee again.
She may not have seen Bee for the last twelve years, but she’d always sat on the emotional nest-egg of the knowledge that she could if she wanted to.
That she could go to the train station, buy a ticket to London and see Bee.
Whenever she wanted. But she never had wanted to.
And although Bee was practically a stranger to Ana, she was still her sibling, the only person in the whole world who could ever have possibly understood the things that Ana went through living with her mother, and now she was gone and Ana was totally alone.
It took a long time for Ana to get to sleep that night and when she finally did, her dreams were sad and hollow.