Chapter 15 #2
A thorough search of Bee’s bedroom revealed nothing, so Ana moved along the corridor towards the blue bedroom.
There was a smell in here – a sort of stale smell.
Nothing gut-churning, just the whiff of bedclothes a couple of weeks past their wash-by date.
It smelled like the bedroom of a teenage boy.
It was the bedroom of a teenage boy. There were socks on the floor, trainers under the bed, CDs out of their cases, dirty mugs on the TV.
Ana pulled open drawers and found several more pairs of unsophisticated underpants plus various items of male clothing of the casual and unfashionable variety – old T-shirts, unbranded jeans, shapeless jumpers.
She fiddled with the bed a bit, pressing levers, until it suddenly boinged upright and scared her half to death.
‘Jesus,’ she muttered, clutching her heart.
The evidence was mounting up very rapidly.
The wheelchair ramp, the weird bath, the lift and the hydraulic bed – who lives in a house like this, indeed?
She sat down on the bed and went through the bedside drawer.
An empty spectacle case. A dead fly. A calculator.
A CD-Rom. There were books piled on top of the unit, books like Conspiracy Theories – Secrecy and Power in America, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must and Apollo 12: The NASA Mission Reports.
In the cabinet underneath were textbooks with titles like Elementary Linear Algebra with Applications, Schaum’s Mathematical Handbook of Formulas and Tables, and Applied Linear Statistical Models.
A few notebooks underneath were full of scribbled algebra, that looked too technical and complicated even to bother flicking through.
And there at the bottom sat a school exercise book with a typed label attached that nearly made Ana gasp out loud. ‘Zander Roper, Form 5L.’
Zander.
The same Zander Bee had written a song for.
He wasn’t a man at all. He was a child. She grasped the exercise book to her chest and ran downstairs.
All three of them sat blankly in the living room, surrounded by an assortment of disparate and eclectic objects. It felt like they were playing some very surreal, very sombre parlour game. Even Lol was quiet for once.
Lol had found some bird-spotting handbooks that had been well-thumbed, a pair of binoculars, a whole heap of prescription drugs, a pile of plastic sheets and another set of notebooks covered in algebra.
And Flint had collected some watercolours, painted directly into a pad of cartridge paper, watercolours of the garden, the view, the cottage and Bee.
Bee sunbathing on a deckchair, Bee at the kitchen table, Bee asleep in front of the fire.
‘Jesus,’ said Lol, picking one up, ‘these are just beautiful. Just absolutely beautiful.’
She let it drop to the floor and held her head in her hands, sighing loudly.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s all crystal-fucking-clear now, in’t it?
Bee spent every weekend for the last three years with a teenage, bird-watching mathematician called Zander who had a crush on Gillian Anderson and could paint like Michelangelo.
Oh – and she wrote a love song for him, too.
Of course. It all makes perfect fucking sense.
It’s as clear as the fucking North Circular in the rush hour … Jesus …’
‘D’you think …?’ began Ana, about to form the most obvious of all possible questions.
‘Don’t even go there, Ana,’ said Lol, using her hands to demonstrate her confusion.
‘I don’t even want to think about it. If this Zander kid was her son then it throws the last fifteen years of my life into complete mayhem.
If she had a kid and didn’t tell me, then nothing in the world makes sense any more … ’
Flint got to his feet and stretched. Bits of his huge body audibly cracked and Lol winced. ‘And where are you off to?’ Flint was reaching for his car keys.
‘The pub.’
Lol rolled her eyes. ‘Oh – that’s typical, that is. We’ve come all the way down to Broadstairs, we’ve found out that our best friend was living a secret bloody life, we’ve got all this stuff to do and you’re going to the fucking pub!’
Flint rolled his eyes back at Lol. ‘How about you just stop talking, just for a second and think. Just for once, Tate.’
‘All right, Lennard. I’ve stopped. I’m thinking. And er – sorry, but nowt’s come to me. Just the fact that you’re like a fucking dehydrated homing pigeon when it comes to the boozer.’
Flint sighed. ‘It’s a Sunday lunchtime. This is a small village. And what do people who live in small villages do on Sunday lunchtimes?’
Ana nodded and smiled. ‘They go to the pub.’
‘Exactly, Ana – they go to the pub. And what else do people who live in small villages do?’
‘Have sex with their sisters,’ sneered Lol.
‘Apart from that.’
‘Their dogs?’
‘They gossip, Tate. They gossip. Someone’s bound to have seen something, to know something. So – are you coming?’
Lol sighed and got to her feet. ‘Yeah yeah. All right. Let’s do it.
But remember – we are going to get seriously stared at.
The whole pub will fall silent the minute we walk in, every person will turn around and fix us with an impassive gaze designed to scare us out of town, and the only sound we hear will be the ticking of the clock over the bar.
We are not only strangers, but we are three very, very tall strangers who are going to turn up in a stretch limo with tinted windows.
And one of us is black. They’re going to assume we’re gangsters and call out the sheriff. OK?’
Flint and Ana nodded.
‘OK, then. Let’s go.’
There were three pubs in the village, which threw them a bit.
Two of them were restaurant pubs, with full car parks and children running around in beer gardens, so they headed for the Bleak House, a small cream pub with curtained windows.
Flint pulled the Mercedes up on the pavement and a few passing villagers stopped and watched with interest. ‘See,’ hissed Lol, ‘and we haven’t even got out the pigging car yet.
Oh bugger, I wish I was wearing something else.
’ She fiddled with her thin cotton top, pulling it down over her midriff, and slid her sunglasses from her head to her nose.
Ana looked at her with surprise. She was nervous.
Fearless, loud-mouthed, extrovert Lol, was nervous.
She caught Ana looking at her. ‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ said Ana, ‘nothing. It’s just that I’ve never seen you look so – uncomfortable before. I didn’t think you were bothered what people thought of you.’
‘Yeah, well. I’m not. Not in London, anyhow. It’s small towns. I hate ’em.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘I dunno. I suppose it’s because I come from a small town.’
‘But I thought you were from Leeds?’
‘Yeah – from a small town just outside Leeds. It were bad enough being black there. But being black and skinny and nearly six-foot tall. It were hell.’
‘Really?’ asked Ana in wonder. She found it hard to imagine that Lol could ever have felt anything but confident and beautiful.
‘Oh aye. I got loads of shit.’
‘What sort of shit?’
‘Oh, you know. Kids. Comments. Being shouted at on the street. That sort of thing.’
Ana nodded. ‘I get it, too,’ she whispered. ‘Comments. Stares.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lol, ‘I could see that in you when I first met you. I could see me in you when I first met you.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Well – I wasn’t always so blinkin’ gorgeous, you know.
I mean – those contact lenses aren’t just for show – I’m half-blind wi’out them and when I first left home I used to wear these glasses like paperweights, and I had this flippin’ great Afro that I used to scrape back in a ponytail.
And make-up! You should have seen the state of me.
I used to go to Woollies and buy all that white-girl make-up, all blue eyeliner and that, trying to make myself look like Lady Di – and pink blusher!
Bright fucking pink, it was. I didn’t really know who the hell I was then.
And then I came down to London and I fitted in.
I could be whatever and whoever the hell I wanted to be.
That’s why I love London so much. In London I can be.
D’you see what I mean? I can look as freaky as I like and there’s always going to be someone looking freakier.
I can be as loud as I like and there’ll always be someone louder.
I can be tall as I like and there’ll always be someone taller.
On the other hand, there’ll always be someone richer, prettier, happier and nicer, too.
But nobody gives a shit anyway. The only true currency in London, Ana, is celebrity.
The only thing that makes one Londoner look at another Londoner with any interest, is celebrity.
And even then they try to pretend to be unimpressed.
Try to pretend they haven’t noticed them.
But out here’ – she turned and looked through the window – ‘anyone who’s different in any way is a sort of celebrity.
Gets talked about, stared at, bothered. And I hate it. I really hate it.’
‘Any chance of you two getting out of this car any time today?’ said Flint, his enormous head appearing at the window.
Lol took a deep breath and turned to Ana and smiled. ‘Pretend you’re Madonna – that’s what I always try to do – pretend to be Madonna, then it dun’t matter about the staring.’
Sure enough, everyone in the pub did stop talking when they walked in.
But then, there were only four people in there and it didn’t look like they’d been talking to each other anyway.
The barmaid, a young girl of about eighteen, looked up at them with interest as they approached.
Her expression told them that she didn’t see the three ‘strangers’ as a threat but as an opportunity for something unusual to happen.
And her face perked up even more when Flint opened up his mouth and flashed her one of his electric smiles.