Chapter 5 #2
Ana thought of Hugh – was a boyfriend still a boyfriend when you hadn’t seen him for six months? – and shook her head.
‘And you’re back to Devon tomorrow, are you?’
She nodded.
‘Well – you should get yourself out tonight, see what you can find. There are some very beautiful young men in this city, you know.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh yes. I see them all the time. Every day. Everywhere I look. Beautiful young men and so well-dressed these days. Men seem to be paying much more attention to their grooming and their appearance, more like they used to in my day. Still – I must stop talking like this. I’ll get myself all excited, and there’s nothing much an old woman like me can do about it when they get themselves into that state.
’ She winked at Ana and Ana nearly fainted.
‘Anyway,’ Amy said, picking up her snoring dog and rearranging her fluffy gown, ‘it’s been very nice to meet you, Ana, but it’s way past my bedtime, and if I don’t get going now I shall fall asleep here on the sofa and you’ll be stuck with me!
But thank you so much for inviting me in.
People don’t tend to do that in London these days, you know.
They don’t invite you in. I think they’re all too scared you’ll never leave.
’ She laughed, sadly. ‘And I’m sorry we had to meet under such dreadful circumstances.
Your sister was a true original, Ana. A one-off. I miss her very much.’
Ana led Amy towards the front door, wishing that she wouldn’t leave, but knowing that she had to. ‘Can I ask you one more question?’ she began with one hand on the door, ‘about Bee?’
‘Certainly.’
‘You know – you know on the Tuesday? You know when you had to go to the hospital and – you know – identify her. Well, what, er … what did she look like? I mean – did she look peaceful, or …?’
Amy put a hand on Ana’s arm and smiled at her.
‘Ana,’ she said, her blue eyes twinkling, ‘she was smiling. I swear on Freddie’s life.
Bee was smiling. She looked tired, but she looked beautiful and she was smiling.
She didn’t look like a woman ravaged by life and disappointment, a woman so unimpressed by all the world had to offer that she decided to take her own life.
She looked like a small girl who’d just been told a wondrous bedtime story and drifted into a sweet, untainted slumber. ’
‘Thank you –’ Ana smiled with a strange sense of relief – ‘thank you very much.’
And then Amy Tilly-Loubelle gave Ana’s arm one more squeeze, before letting herself into her flat next door, and fastening about twelve different locks and chains against the world.
Ana flopped on to the sofa, poured herself yet another glass of champagne and forced her drunk mind to try to make sense of everything she’d just discovered:
A Bee was away most weekends and lied about where she was going
B She generally had no visitors to her flat
C She had a cat called John whose whereabouts were unknown
D She’d gone out at nine o’clock on the night she died
E There was a vague possibility that she might have been a lesbian
Ana got to her feet and marched back into Bee’s bedroom.
It was now nine-thirty. She wasn’t going to bed until she’d discovered something significant.
She threw things desperately into cardboard boxes, reading them for clues, but they told Ana very little other than that her sister was a woman who looked after her clothes, her skin and her hair much better than she looked after her health or her home, that she dressed in a bold and theatrical style and appeared to have shunned entirely the casual/sporty look so fashionable for the past few years. She didn’t even own a pair of trainers.
It appeared that Bee smoked, ate, drank, read and watched TV in bed.
It was likely that she spent most of her time in this room, evidenced by her tentative attempts to ‘decorate’ it with colourful chiffon throws/fairy lights, etc.
And it was possible, by the sound of it and by the look of it, that towards the end of her life, Bee spent rather too much time in this room …
However, Ana did manage to uncover a couple of slightly more interesting things:
1x crash helmet
1x suitcase with Virgin Atlantic tag, unopened but still full
1x small silk-covered notepad
It seemed that Bee either owned a motorbike or knew someone who did and knew them well enough to have her own helmet. One of the five keys from the bunch she’d found in Bee’s handbag might well belong to a bike, but Ana wouldn’t recognize an ignition key for a motorbike if it poked her in the eye.
She fiddled with a catnip mouse she’d found under the sofa and wondered about this cat called John. Where was he? Who had him?
And then she opened the little notepad and angled it towards the light. There was writing on only the front page and this is what it said:
A Song for Zander
When I think of you now
I can think of anything
Any place and any life and any happy ending
I can think of sunshine
Think of joy
I can think of summer
Think of you, my boy
One day when our time is up
We’ll meet
On a beach
And I’ll hold your hand, my boy
We’ll run on the sand, my boy
And you’ll understand, my boy
That I loved you more
Than my words can
And there it stopped. Whether the last line was complete or not, Ana couldn’t tell, although she was buggered if she could find a word rhyming with ‘more’ to close it.
‘Implore’? ‘Stand for’? No, thought Ana, those last two lines needed rewriting completely.
But the rest of the song – well, it was quite good.
Well, it certainly wasn’t bad as such. It suggested a rhythm.
Probably quite a soulful sound, building to a crescendo that had yet to be written.
Ana started working out chords in her head, absent-mindedly strumming on strings made out of thin air.
She found a pen and started jotting down music.
Ana’s mind had left the building.
This often happened to her when she started composing a song in her head.
She just forgot where she was entirely. A high-pitched police siren outside brought her back to reality and she jumped slightly, feeling almost surprised to find herself sitting cross-legged on Bee’s bedroom floor in a full-length evening dress with a cardi and socks.
She looked at Bee’s song again. Who was Zander?
A boyfriend? A secret lover? Maybe a married man?
In a flash of inspiration she picked up Bee’s address book and flicked to the back page. Zoe B … Zoe L … Zach … No Zander. And then she pulled the suitcase towards her. It was a huge holdall-style bag in black leather. It looked battered but expensive. Ana slowly unzipped it and peeled it open.
The first thing that got her was the smell – a rank, mouldy, stale smell.
She pulled a duty-free carrier bag from the top and immediately found the culprit – a white bikini that had been packed away wet and left to fester and was now green and brown with mould.
She scrunched the bag up tightly and threw it to the other side of the room.
And then she began pulling items from the bag, one by one: pink sarongs, orange sarongs, chiffon sarongs, silk sarongs, swimsuits, bikinis, beaded thong sandals, flowery flip-flops.
Sun cream, malaria pills, mosquito repellent.
There were things packaged in brittle brown paper, too – ethnic-looking bowls and textiles and boxes that smelled of cinnamon and asafoetida.
There were brass horses with tiny bells attached and elaborate pieces of jewellery, saris and tunics and baggy trousers in all sorts of vivid colours and luxurious fabrics.
And there, underneath, as if any more evidence was needed, was a Rough Guide to Goa.
My God, thought Ana, staring in amazement at the exotic, aromatic bazaar that was now spread out around her, Bee went to India.
Ana herself had been planning to go to India a couple of years ago, before her father died.
She and Hugh were going to pack in their jobs and go together.
They’d saved for it and everything. But the thought of Bee roughing it in Goa was every bit as unthinkable to Ana as the thought of Bee on the toilet.
And, in fact, the two were inextricably linked.
But then again, thought Ana, Princess Bee probably stayed at all the top hotels and went everywhere by cab.
But as she flicked through the Rough Guide, examining Bee’s little pencil marks and notes, it became apparent that she hadn’t done it in high style at all.
Two- and three-star hotels were marked, local restaurants and off-the-beaten track attractions.
Ana put the book down and dropped her head into her hands.
Who was this Bee person she was coming to know?
This person who lived in a scruffy, ill-furnished flat, who had no friends, who rode a motorbike, who had a cat, who had great taste in music and who could play guitar?
This person who dressed like a glamourpuss but lived like a student, who disappeared away somewhere every weekend, who befriended lonely old ladies and who went to Goa and stayed in hotels with dodgy plumbing?
This Bee was beginning to sound scarily like someone that Ana could have been friends with.
She rubbed her face, sighed a big sigh and carried on unpacking.
More ethnic artefacts, a John Updike novel, a mosquito net, an evening dress, embroidered slippers, and there, at the bottom – jackpot!
– a tiny silver camera with a half-used film in it.
Photographs. There were no photographs anywhere in this flat, except for some framed ones of Gregor on the walls.
She would have to get this developed, as soon as possible.