Chapter 39
The following day Ana got back to Gill’s house early in the morning.
Gill was out, as usual, and Ana made herself a cup of tea and installed herself in front of Gill’s PC.
She clicked a switch and the machine whirred into life, and then she peered underneath the desk to find this ‘modem’ thingy.
There was a sort of black box-thing attached.
She felt around for a switch, and lots of little red lights started flashing when she pressed it.
She presumed that meant that it was on. Ana had used PCs at college, but really only for typing and research and she hadn’t so much as touched one since she left.
She had absolutely no idea how they functioned or what else they were capable of.
It took her another quarter of an hour to work out how to dial up the modem and get online.
She pressed a bar at the top of the screen, looking for a search box, and a big list of website addresses scrolled down in front of her.
She clicked on something, randomly, and the screen changed before her eyes.
Loud lurid graphics: ‘FULL PENETRATION’, ‘GIRL ON GIRL’, ‘ASIAN GIRLS’, ‘SCHOOLGIRLS’,.
‘WET’, ‘HARD’, ‘XXX-RATED’. Ana went back to the bar with the addresses on it and dropped it down again: ‘’, ‘’, ‘’, ‘’.
Ana smiled at the predictability of it. The woman was obsessed.
Ana had never met a woman before with such a male attitude towards sex.
And not even good male, but bad male. Sex without strings.
Sex with strangers. Sex only when you’re drunk.
Sex you can’t remember the next morning.
Sex on-screen. Virtual sex. It occurred to Ana that Gill really was a very unusual individual indeed.
Ana found the search box and typed in the name ‘Bee Bearhorn’.
A list appeared immediately and she whizzed through it.
Good God, she thought, there’s millions of them.
She clicked on a few and found herself in obscure Eighties-music sites which only mentioned Bee in passing.
But then finally she found it. The site that Zander had told her about.
It was still there. ‘The Unofficial Bee Bearhorn Website’.
The site was divided into several pages: biography; discography; trivia; photo gallery; guestbook.
She clicked on the photos page and then looked in wonder at pages and pages and pages of pictures of Bee.
Amazing, she thought. Bee had only been famous for about five minutes but seemed to have spent the entire time being photographed.
She clicked on one thumbnail picture and watched it enlarge on the screen.
And as it downloaded she looked into Bee’s eyes and tried to imagine what might have happened to her if she hadn’t been driving on the wrong side of the road that day in 1986, tried to imagine who she’d be and what she’d have done.
But there was a hardness behind those eyes, a glint of steel that reminded Ana of exactly the sort of person Bee’d been all those years ago.
A bitch. A hard-nosed bitch who got her own way by manipulating people.
A heartless woman who wanted only to be the centre of everybody else’s universes.
A woman just like her mother. And it occurred to Ana that Bee had been on the path to annihilation, in one way or another, ever since she’d first slipped out of the womb and set eyes on her mother.
She was never going to be fulfilled, never going to be happy, never going to be successful.
Because she’d been born with a self-destruct button implanted in her soul.
And Bee had known it, too, she thought, thinking back to her letter to Zander.
Even before she’d driven that family off the road, she’d known that she’d end up alone.
And dead. From the minute she came into the world, that flat in Baker Street had already been expecting her.
And looking into Bee’s eyes now, Ana knew that she’d known it, too.
Ana derived a strange sense of calm from the thought that when Bee went out for her last meal of sushi, when she swallowed those pills and alcohol on 28 July, she’d probably been feeling an inexplicable sense of resignation, a sense of inevitability and a sense of everything falling into its correct place.
She thought of others who’d died young, who’d self-destructed.
She thought of River Phoenix, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, Michael Hutchence.
And she thought about how, as the shock of these people’s deaths receded, one was left with the sense that they’d always been destined to die young.
It seemed almost obvious, in retrospect.
And then she realized that there was one huge difference between Bee’s death and the deaths of all those other shiny people: they’d been mourned.
Venerated in their deaths. Iconicized. Swollen by their tragic departures to beings twice their original sizes.
Whereas Bee had had nothing. An inch or two in the Times.
A funeral with three people. Her departure from this world had actually shrunk her, diminished her status.
Looking at the screen now, at this website set up in Bee’s honour by someone she’d never even met, it occurred to Ana that this Stuart Crosby, who’d sweated over his computer for hours painstakingly building this site, scanning in photographs, writing the text, probably had no idea whatsoever that his idol was dead.
And he should know. Bee deserved some grief.
She clicked on a line that said ‘contact’ and an e-mail form popped up.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard for a while as she tried to find the right words to express what she wanted to say. And then she started typing.
Dear Stuart,
My name is Ana Wills and I am Bee’e sister.
I’ve just been looking at your website and it’s really very impressive, particularly your photo gallery.
I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but my sister died recently.
On 28 July, to be precise. We’ve just found out that the official cause of death was suicide.
We’re all very, very upset. Bee was such a vibrant, exciting person, and I don’t think any of us were as close to her as we could have, or should have been.
But this was due to circumstance rather than a lack of affection or concern.
I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this.
I suppose it’s just that I remember Bee primarily as a star, as a glamorous famous popstar.
And so do you. I didn’t really know her as an adult, just as a child.
And it’s nice to think that there are still people out there who think fondly of Bee.
And in fact, what I’ve discovered during my time here in London, is that an awful lot of people in the world thought fondly of Bee.
Loyal people. people who managed to see the best in her no matter how hard she may sometimes have made it.
She was an extraordinary person but she died a rather ordinary death.
Her funeral’s already been and gone so unfortunately there’s no way now to celebrate her life.
Which is really quite tragic. Anyway – for some reason I just really thought that you should know since you’ve obviously taken such an interest in her over the years.
Maybe you could post the news on your website so that other fane might find out …
Please feel free to write back if you’d like.
Yours,
Ana Wills
She read through the e-mail and was about to press Send when another thought occurred to her. She quickly highlighted the last few lines of text, deleted them and then rewrote it:
… Her funeral’s already been and gone and only three people attended.
I wasn’t even there. No matter what mistakes a person makes in their life, I truly believe that they deserve a better send-off than that, particularly someone like Bee, who was always so happy to be in the limelight.
So I’ve decided that I’m going to organize a proper wake for Bee.
If you can have a wake after someone’s been buried for over a week, that is.
But anyway – I’m going to organize something worthy of Bee and I’m going to invite all the people who weren’t there three weeks ago.
And I’d really like it if you came. And anyone else you know who loved Bee.
Anyone who wants to celebrate her life. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet, but watch this space and I’ll let you know.
As Ana typed faster and faster her mind started buzzing with thoughts and ideas. She was going to throw a party Bee would have been proud of.