Bee clanked her cup down heavily on the bedside table. ‘But itisreal, Dad. It is so unbelievably real. It doesn’t get much more real than this.’
Gregor shrugged and picked the rose off the tray. He put it to his nose and sniffed it. His eyes closed and his face lit up with pleasure. ‘You know what, though, my sweet. It doesn’t feel real. It really doesn’t. And ‘I much prefer it that way’
He put the rose on her lap, smiled at her and quietly left the room.
36
Bee drove to the shops for her father that morning. He’d tried to dissuade her, especially after the fainting incident, but she wanted to get away. Sit somewhere and have a coffee on her own. She had so much to think about.
She eschewed the exotic and enticingboulangerie, boucherieandpatisseriefor thesupermarché,where she wouldn’t be required to use her excruciating, schoolgirl French. She picked up a mould-covered cured sausage in a strangulating net and a great hunk of stinky cheese, a jar of murky fish-stock and floury loaves of criss-crossed bread. At the till she pointed at a carton of Marlboros and bought a copy of the EnglishTimes.She loaded her groceries into the back of her car, took the papers and the cigarettes and found herself a seat in the front window of a small café.
‘Un café …’ she said, her face wrinkling when she realized she couldn’t even remember the word for please –por favor? Pourquoi?She smiled extra politely at the waiter, hoping that this would make up for not saying please and pulled the soft top from her cigarettes. She lit one up and stared through the window for a while. The town was bleakly pretty in the clear December sun. Street lamps were festooned with white Christmas lights, and a layer of glittery encrusted frost lay over everything. A week beforeChristmas. Her favourite time of year. Usually. She sighed and pulled the supplement from inside her newspaper. She flipped through it absent-mindedly, half-heartedly. The usual end-of-year line-up. Pages of moody black-and-white photojournalism. A picture of Challenger disintegrating over Cape Canaveral, heartbreaking portraits of Chernobyl victims, a joyful one of a jubilant Desmond Tutu. And then lists.
Who died.
What was hot.
What was not.
Trends. Stars. Films.
Music. The Hits. Aha. Madonna. The Communards. The Housemartens. The Misses. Starship. Nick Berry. The Worst of the Worst. The hits that made us scared to switch on the radio.
She smiled with a satisfyingschadenfreudeat pictures of Dr & the Medics and Nu Shooz and various other one-hit wonders, before turning the page.
And there she was. Oh God. She felt colour flood her face. A huge quarter-page picture of her, looking sulky in a black-satin puff-sleeved jacket with backcombed hair and a red pussybow tied around her neck. It was one of her most hated publicity pictures. The make-up artist had given her all this Siouxsie-Sioux eyeliner and cupid-bow lips, and she just looked … she looked like a complete cow, a horrible, hard-nosed bitch-cow. They’d obviously selected it on purpose.
What a difference a year makes [ran the text]. This timelast year Bee Bearhorn was being hailed as the face of new pop, Britain’s answer to Madonna, a star in the ascendant. ‘Groovin’ for London’ was a classic pop hit and Bee herself made a more than acceptable popstar. With her striking image and bolshie interview persona she was a pin-up for the boys and a heroine for the girls. And then came ‘Space Girl’. It was bad. It was very bad. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, along came ‘Honey Bee’. A lesson for upstart popstars everywhere. Just because you’re pretty and look good in black PVC, doesn’t mean you can write songs. Leave it to the professionals, eh? As for Bee – well, since she’s just been dropped by her label like the proverbial warm tuber, we can confidently look forward to seeing her in the ‘Whatever Happened To’s’ by the decade’s end.
Bee dropped the magazine on the tabletop and felt her eyes fill up with tears. This was too much. This was much, much too much. Her waiter returned with her coffee. She pulled out her purse and grabbed a handful of random coins, letting them drop noisily on to the saucer.The Times, she thought in horror. The most popular broadsheet in the country. Her friends read theTimes.Her fans read theTimes.Hermotherread theTimes.Everybody read the fuckingTimesand now everybody would know. As if it hadn’t been humiliating enough having two flop singles in the space of six months, being slagged off in the music press, Woolworths and Our Price sending back crates of 7-inches to Electrogram’s distribution centre, being the butt of company jokes. As if just failing in the firstplace hadn’t been bad enough, now this. In a national newspaper.
She stumbled from the café and back to her car. She wanted to go back to her dad’s now. She wanted him to tell her that everything was all right. She didn’t want to be on her own. She reversed out of her chevron parking-space and started the drive homewards. Tears kept spilling down her cheeks as she drove, and her heart began to race again. She kept thinking of everyone at home, all those people who’d been taking her so seriously a year ago, laughing at her now. Laughing behind her back. Laughing at her spectacular lack of talent. And then she thought of Dave Donkin’s face. The way he tried to look like he cared. Like it broke his heart to let her go. Like if it had been down to him …
‘Bollocks,’ she shouted out loud to herself, wiping away tears with the back of her hand, ‘big hairy bollocks.’
Mucus trickled from her nostrils and over her lips. She wiped it away. She took deep breaths. Her heart raced and raced and raced. Everything was falling apart. It really was. Falling apart at the seams. And her heart, she thought. There was definitely something wrong with her heart. She put her hand on her chest. It was beating hard, irregularly. She couldn’t breathe. She was having a heart attack. She was. She knew it. A heart attack at the age of twenty-two. She was dying. She was going to die. Here. In France. In a Fiat Panda. Jesus. Jesus Christ. She had to get back. She had to get home. To her father. She put her foot on the accelerator and wound down her window. Fresh air. The road started to twist and turn as she drove through woodland. She heard her tyres squeaking against the tarmac.She had to get home. She couldn’t die here. Not here. Not in a car. All on her own.
She turned a corner, her wheels just gripping the slushy road. She turned another. And then – Jesus – Christ. What … a white van was hurtling towards her. A big white van. On the wrong side of the road. It was on thewrong side of the road.She hit her horn with the heel of her hand and turned the steering-wheel, violently, 90 degrees. The white van turned, too, and as it veered off the road she came to an abrupt stop about two inches from the trunk of a huge oak-tree. Her head bounced off the windscreen and her breath left her with a jolt as her breasts hit the steering wheel.
For a moment everything was eerily silent. She rubbed at her forehead and then at her ribs. But she was fine. And then, just as she was about to put the car back into gear and carry on, she heard a strange muted thud. And then another one. She twisted her head to look behind her. Clouds of dirt hung in the air. The white van was nowhere to be seen. The sides of the road fell away in a steep incline. No, she thought. No – it couldn’t have. She was sure. There would have been more noise. No, she decided, the van was fine, on its way into town. The van was fine.
She put the car into first, took a deep breath and began the journey back to her father’s. And it was only as she pulled back into the road and found herself automatically taking the left-hand lane that she realized that the vanhadn’tbeen driving on the wrong side of the road.
Shehad.
37
A chill ran down Ana’s spine and she let the newspaper cutting fall on to the bed.
‘Oh my God,’ she murmured.
‘Fuck,’ said Flint, sitting heavily on Zander’s bed. He ran his finger through his hair and exhaled loudly. Outside a child screamed with laughter.
Zander looked from Ana to Flint and to Ana again, his face alert with anticipation. But they remained silent, absorbing the full horror of what they’d just read.
‘I kept expecting her to call,’ said Zander, ‘I had it all planned, what I was going to say to her. How I was going to make her feel. I was going to destroy her. Because I knew exactly how to get to her, you know? We had this… connection –and I knew just how to hurt her. I was going to take what little hope she had left and annihilate it. I was going to tell her I hated her. That she was ugly. And old. That I wanted her to be dead …’ He petered out pensively. ‘But she didn’t phone. And after a while I just … It doesn’t read like a suicide note, does it?’ he said urgently. ‘I mean – there was no way of knowing from that that she was about to do something so terrible? And even if it had been more explicit, it would have been too late because it didn’t get here until the following Monday, so she must have posted itthat day,you know, that exact day, so …’
It fell silent again and Zander looked desperately from one to the other, waiting for some kind of response. But Flint and Ana were still too shocked to speak.
