Chapter 15
It only took about half an hour to find Bee’s cottage once they got to Broadstairs.
The estate agent’s particulars described it as being ‘in a secluded location about half a mile from the charming, Dickensian seafront.’ They stopped a few times and shoved the particulars under people’s noses until finally someone said, ‘Oh yes, I recognize the place,’ and pointed them in the right direction.
And they knew for sure they’d found the right place when they pulled up outside the cottage and saw Bee’s huge Honda sitting in the driveway, wearing its canvas overcoat.
‘What the fuck is that doing here?’ said Flint, climbing from the driver’s seat and walking towards the bike.
The canvas was covered in grime and dead insects.
Flint brushed them off and started pulling the cover away from the bike.
Ana watched him with interest. It was the first time she’d seen him standing up, and Lol hadn’t been exaggerating.
He was absolutely enormous. He was wearing knee-length khaki combat shorts, a grey V-neck T-shirt and a pair of Velcro sandals.
His calves were the size of cantaloupes and his shoulders reminded Ana of those old Kenny Everett sketches with the US military man in the tank.
She felt a sudden overwhelming urge to go and stand next to him, so she could feel for the first time what it might be like to be petite.
His face was handsome but craggy, the face of a fine-featured young man who’d lived a little too much.
His eyes were the murky blue of a newborn baby’s and he had a small scar near the corner of his mouth which pulled his cheek into an unintentional puckered dimple.
He was incredibly good-looking.
If you liked that sort of thing.
‘Have you got the keys, Ana?’ he said, turning to her and making her blush.
Again. Damn. She dipped her head quickly into her rucksack to conceal her embarrassment and rifled around clumsily for the clink of keys.
‘Here.’ She waved them at him and started grinning inanely.
This man really was obscenely sexual. He oozed it.
He stank of it. He may as well have been walking around with a twenty-inch erection growing out of his forehead.
‘OK, let’s go.’
‘Look,’ Lol was saying from where she stood near the front door, ‘what the bloody hell’s this – isn’t it a wheelchair ramp?’
They all looked down at it. ‘Hmm. Dunno.’
‘Looks like one.’
‘Could be.’
Ana slid the Yale into the lock and they all breathed a sigh of relief when the door slipped open without an alarm going off.
The three of them started wandering around the cottage.
‘Wow,’ said Lol, ‘this is so lovely.’ And it was.
About a million times nicer than the grim old flat in Baker Street.
The walls were painted in warm shades of cranberry and plum, the floors were cream-carpeted, the furniture was cartoonish – fat lipstick-pink sofas and a distressed mahogany dining-table laden with three-foot gothic candlesticks.
The ceiling had been painted with a trompe l’?il sky and clouds, and a Tuscan sunset glimpsed through straggling vines was painted on to a rough-hewn wall on the far side, decorated with bunches of bloomy plastic grapes.
Enormous paintings depicting just a single, lushly painted piece of fruit hung from the walls – a three-foot pomegranate, a huge misshapen apple with mottled red and green skin, the lime-green, pip-speckled insides of a hairy kiwi.
One wall was draped with a real tiger skin, decapitated and spreadeagled across the wall.
Candelabras sprouted from plaster. Junk-shop chandeliers hung from the ceiling.
‘This is Gregor’s furniture,’ muttered Flint.
‘What?’
‘All this stuff – these sofas, the paintings, chandeliers – all Gregor’s old stuff, from his place in Kensington. Old stage props and bits of scenery, most of it – look’ – he picked up an enormous gothic candlestick and waved it around airily – ‘tin.’
‘Shit. You’re right,’ said Lol, glancing around, ‘I thought she’d left all this behind on her travels or put it in storage or something.
Good grief,’ she said, pointing at a metal contraption by the stairs, ‘will you look at this – a bloody lift. Bee had a bloody lift in her house. What d’you reckon she used that for, then?
When she’d had a few too many? God – that’s so Bee to have a lift.
I can just imagine her, looking at the stairs and thinking, “I don’t wish to walk, I shall glide … ” ’
Ana was in the kitchen now, looking at all the strange fixtures, the adjustable work surfaces and the two sinks at differing levels.
A pile of glossy cookbooks sat on a big wooden table.
The cupboards were full of condiments. Soy.
Pepper. Olive oil. Lime juice. Pine nuts.
Ground cumin. Sundried tomatoes. And breakfast cereals – tons of it.
Variety packs and Frosties and Golden Nuggets.
The fridge was empty save for a packet of eggs and a squeezed tube of tomato puree.
And there wasn’t a cocktail shaker or a bottle of tequila anywhere in sight.
Everything about this house was diametrically different in every possible way to the flat in Baker Street.
She tried another one of the keys on her bunch in the back door and pushed her way out into the garden.
It was beautiful. Very compact and mature and well-tended.
In a shed at the farthest end Ana found a lawnmower and rows of tiny pots and trowels and quilty gardening gloves, secateurs, twine and compost. The garden shed of an active and enthusiastic gardener – it looked just like Gay’s garden shed at home.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Ana heard Lol’s ear-shattering tones behind her. ‘Could this girl be any more fucking mysterious. I mean – what is this?’ She held aloft a pair of boxer shorts, greying, flimsy and somewhat small. ‘There’s a whole fucking drawer of these upstairs. And you should see the bathroom.’
‘What?’
‘Just come and have a look, will you?’ Lol grabbed Ana’s hand and dragged her up the stairs.
‘Look. There’s a fucking door in the bath, Ana.
What’s that all about then? A door. In the bath.
And look at the size of the flush on that toilet.
And these railings, look. Here. And here.
And all these fucking buttons everywhere.
And have a look at this.’ Lol pulled Ana into a small bedroom at the other end of the corridor.
‘Look!’ The room was painted bright blue.
Posters of Radiohead and Teenage Fanclub, Buffy the Vampire-Slayer and the X-Files decorated the walls.
There was a TV and a sound system and an enormous chest of pine drawers with fat handles.
And a large, white and distinctly surgical-looking bed tucked into a bay window.
‘I mean – what the fuck is this, Ana? Was Bee shacked up with Christopher Reeves or summat?’
Flint walked in, looking more animated than Ana had seen him looking all day. ‘This is totally fucking weird. Look what I just found in Bee’s wardrobe.’
‘No way,’ gasped Lol.
Flint was holding aloft a pair of trainers. Trainers. ‘Uh-huh,’ he said, ‘and look at this.’ With his other hand he held out a sweatshirt. A grubby sweatshirt with mud on the front.
‘OK,’ said Lol, collapsing on to an armchair, ‘now I’m seriously spooked. We’ve entered the Twilight Zone, d’you realize that? We’re in Tales of the fucking Unexpected. My head hurts.’
The three of them fell silent.
‘This is Bee’s house, in’t it?’ said Lol.
Flint and Ana nodded.
‘Right,’ said Flint eventually, slapping his large-hock-of-Norfolk-ham thighs with his five-Cumberland-sausages-on-a-dinner-plate hands, ‘I think we should take a couple of rooms each and search them for anything out of the ordinary. Then in an hour or so we’ll meet downstairs and take a look at what we’ve found. OK?’
‘OK?’
Ana took the bedrooms, Flint took the living room and the garage and Lol took the bathroom, kitchen and garden shed.
For an hour no one spoke. Instead the cottage was filled with the sounds of floorboards creaking, the toilet being flushed every now and then and general industriousness.
It was a strange hour or so as Ana once again found herself sifting through Bee’s underwear, picking through her books and CDs, feeling her clothes and examining her toiletries.
But this was so different to clearing out the flat in Baker Street.
On Thursday her sister had been a stranger.
Apart from the moment when she’d stood and stared at Bee’s pubes in the bath, there’d been an unsettling numbness to her activities.
But things had changed, already, just three days later.
Ana herself felt unburdened, particularly after her tears at Bee’s grave, and now every object, every item felt imbued with some kind of magical, desperate poignancy.
And Bee was growing in her head moment by moment, turning from a two-dimensional cartoon character into a real human being.
She opened a bedside drawer and passed her hand over the contents.
Hairgrips, one with a black hair still attached, elastic hair-bands, sleeping pills, crumpled-up tissues, toenail clippers, a photo of Gregor.
In Bee’s wardrobe were more clothes, but simple clothes here – jeans, sweaters, a long denim skirt, walking boots, even some thermal underwear.