Chapter 30 #2
‘I think it’s a bit late for that,’ he said, grinning and waving at the man who was now staring at them through the window.
He was short. That was the first thing that Flint noticed.
Not just shorter than Ana, but properly short.
And his head was a strange shape – kind of like someone had tied a belt around the middle of it, really tightly, when he was a baby.
And it was just a little too large for his tiny sloping shoulders.
His hair had a strange sort of kink to it, which he’d tried to tame by combing it down flat to within an inch of its life.
And he had a very high domed forehead with freckles all over it.
Also, as if God hadn’t given him enough to deal with on the physical front, he was horribly dressed.
He was wearing a sort of cagoule thing. In this weather.
It was red and white. And tight black jeans.
And chunky-looking lace-up shoes constructed from a kind of porous brown leathery stuff.
He had a small rucksack on his back and, oddly enough, he was wearing an earring in his left lobe that didn’t go with the rest of him.
Almost as if he was saying ‘Hey. I’m a cool dude – I just can’t be bothered to look like one, OK? ’
He was staring straight past Flint, and at Ana.
‘Oh God,’ she muttered, crossing her arms and going to the front door. Flint sat himself back down on the sofa and waited.
‘Hugh,’ he heard Ana saying, breathlessly, ‘what on earth are you doing here?’ And then Flint heard something that sounded like one of those pantomime dames talking – like a Monty Python woman. Flint put his hand over his mouth to stop himself laughing out loud.
‘Flint,’ said Ana, walking back into the room, crimson-faced, ‘this is Hugh. Hugh. This is Flint. Flint was Bee’s best friend.’
‘Nice to meet you.’ Hugh grinned at him with crooked, grey-coloured teeth. Was he putting that voice on? Was it a joke? Flint didn’t know whether or not he was supposed to be laughing. He decided not to.
‘Flint, did you say your name was?’ Hugh furrowed up his big, freckled brow and put a hand out towards him.
He had peculiarly hairy hands and a very strong handshake and didn’t seem at all fazed by the fact that Flint was nearly a foot taller than him.
There were two types of unattractive men in this world, Flint had noticed: those who were painfully aware of the fact and tried their hardest not to draw attention to it and those who walked around like George Clooney was their ugly younger brother or something.
And this guy – well – he definitely fell into the second category.
He had no idea he was so funny-looking. He had all the confidence and swagger of a handsome Italian playboy.
He thought he was fantastic. And good on him, thought Flint, smiling and giving his hand a good hard shake, good on him.
‘What are you doing here, Hugh?’ said Ana, flopping on to the sofa.
‘Well, your mother asked me to come, actually.’
Ana raised her eyebrows and tutted. ‘I should have guessed. Jesus.’
‘She’s worried about you, Ana. That’s all. She just asked me to pop in on you, see where you’re living. Find out what you’re doing. She’s just lost a daughter. I don’t think she particularly wants to lose another one just yet.’
‘She’s not losing me, for God’s sake. I’m trying to find out what happened to Bee.’
‘What do you mean? Bee’s dead. Isn’t that the end of the story?’
‘No,’ she snapped, ‘no – that’s far from the end of the story. Look,’ she said, sighing, ‘you must be knackered – d’you fancy a cup of tea or something?’
He threw her an incongruously flirty, fluttery smile. ‘I’d love one, Bellsie. Thank you.’
Ana shot Flint a look. He raised a quizzical eyebrow at her. Bellsie? She got to her feet. ‘Flint will fill you in on everything that’s been happening, won’t you, Flint?’
‘Yeah. Sure.’ Ana left the room and Flint ran through the bare bones of the story – the cottage, Zander, Ed – and Hugh maintained a high level of very intense eye contact with him throughout, rubbing his chin occasionally and saying ‘hmmmm’, as if he was Hercule bloody Poirot.
He seemed to think that Flint and Ana had just been sitting around waiting for him to turn up and sort everything out.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the first thing you should do is find out about the documentary this Ed chap said he was producing.’
‘Yup,’ said Flint, patiently, ‘we were working on that one.’
‘You could probably find everything you need on the Net.’
‘Uh-huh, yeah. That’s why I’m here today.’ He gestured towards Gill’s PC sitting in the corner.
‘Woah,’ said Hugh, getting to his feet, ‘look at that old dinosaur. Fantasti.’
‘Yeah,’ continued Flint, suddenly and inexplicably feeling the need to impress this self-assured and very young man. ‘We were going to look up TV-scheduling sites, you know, see if there was some kind of archive service or …’
Hugh was already shaking his head and taking a seat at the desk.
‘No no no,’ he said dismissively, hitting buttons in an infuriatingly confident manner, ‘waste of time. Even if there were such a thing, you’d never be able to find it.
You’re much better off running a search for this Ed chap’s company.
Oh God,’ he muttered, ‘she hasn’t got her modem switched on.
Any idea where it is, Flint?’ he said, wheeling his chair backwards and looking under the desk.
Flint didn’t even know what a modem was. ‘Er, no,’ he said, ‘no idea. Ana!’ he called.
‘What?’ Ana emerged from the kitchen with a mug of tea.
‘Any idea where Gill keeps her modem?’
‘Her what?’ she said, looking at Flint.
He shrugged, behind Hugh’s back.
‘A modem,’ said Hugh in a pompously patient tone of voice, ‘it’s the hardware that connects your PC to the Internet. It’s like a box. It’s … aaaah …’ He found something under the desk and reached underneath to fiddle with it, ‘excellent. OK. We’re all ready to go.’
Flint and Ana stood hovering above him clutching their mugs of tea as Hugh bashed away at the keyboard.
Flint stared at the top of Hugh’s huge head and tried to imagine Ana and Hugh writhing around in bed together, Ana’s beautiful tendrilly fingers running through the thatch of brittle brown straw that passed for Hugh’s hair.
He imagined Hugh’s little falsetto voice cooing ‘Bellsie, Bellsie’ as he exploded inside of her and he suddenly and violently wanted to be sick.
Jesus, he thought, surely Ana could do better than this.
‘Okie dokie,’ said Hugh, ‘Ed Tewkesbury Productions – here we are.’ Hugh hit a button on a side panel and a list of productions came up. ‘Hmm,’ sneered Hugh, ‘classy.’
Ed’s company, it seemed, made a speciality of producing programmes about drunken English people embarrassing the nation in various corners of the globe, and programmes about people with really boring jobs being followed around all day by cameras, and programmes about stag nights and hen nights and people with bizarre sexual preferences living in Berkhamsted.
‘That must be it,’ said Ana, pointing excitedly at a section entitled ‘High Cedars’.
‘High Cedars,’ it went on to say, ‘was first broadcast on BBC 1 in the summer of 1997. This seminal documentary, filmed over twelve weeks at High Cedars Residential Home for Children in Ashford, Kent, kept the nation emotionally gripped for the entire season with daily viewing figures averaging 3.3 million and set the standard for every human-interest docusoap to follow.’
‘Well,’ said Hugh, with a ring of self-satisfaction in his voice, ‘that’s that then. You’ve got your children’s home. Let’s run a search for it, shall we?’
He tapped the name of the home into a box and then clicked on a site on a list. A crested logo came up and a heading saying ‘High Cedars’.
‘There it is,’ he said smugly, ‘it’s all yours.’
The site gave a phone number.
‘So,’ said Ana, turning to look at Flint.
He shrugged and looked over at the phone.
‘What am I going to say?’
Flint puffed. ‘Ask to speak to Zander, I guess.’
Ana made a cute little face at him, turning her mouth downwards and widening her eyes nervously.
‘I don’t mind doing it,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, and he saw her take a deep breath, ‘no. I’ll do it. OK. And what if he’s not there? I mean, what if I can’t talk to him? What shall I say?’
Flint saw Hugh open his mouth to say something and quickly cut in. ‘Make an appointment,’ he said, ‘or something.’ He set his jaw defiantly and out of the corner of his eye, saw Hugh raising an eyebrow.
‘OK,’ said Ana, ‘OK.’ She walked over to the phone, and the room became completely silent as the two men watched her dialling the number. Flint held his breath. This could be it. Ana might be about to talk to Zander.
‘Oh,’ she began, ‘hi. I wondered if I could talk to Zander Roper. Please.’ She turned and hit Flint with a big grin that instantly warmed his heart.
‘Erm – yes, that’s the one. Yes. Who’s calling?’ She turned and made a panicked face at Flint. ‘Oh it’s er’ – she gestured madly at Flint for him to come up with an identity for her – ‘it’s er …’
‘Aunt,’ he mouthed at her.
‘Aunt,’ she said, ‘I’m Zander’s aunt. Yes.
Mrs Wills. That’s right. I’m Mrs Wills.’ She threw an oh-my-God-I’m-free-wheeling-like-a-motherfucker-somebody-please-help-me face at Flint and he smiled at her and gave her the thumbs-up.
‘Oh,’ he heard her say, ‘right. I see. OK. And why is that, exactly? I see. I understand. No. No. That’s fine.
OK. And thank you so much for your help. Yeah. Bye.’
‘What?’ said Flint, unable to control his curiosity, ‘what did she say?’
Ana flopped down on the sofa and fanned her blazing cheeks. ‘He’s not taking phonecalls from Mrs Wills.’
‘What?’
Ana shrugged. ‘I dunno. That’s all she said. Zander has requested that phone calls from Mrs Wills not be put through to him.’