Bill wasn’t alone in his adoration of his wife. Everyone in Torrington loved Gay Wills. Ruddy-cheeked gentlemen who remembered Gay as a young girl, the town beauty who looked like Elizabeth Taylor, with her hand-span waist, gleaming black hair and violet eyes. Before she’d become agoraphobic she’d been a familiar sight in Great Torrington, spinning around the town on her old black pushbike, a basket full of flowers draped artfully across the handlebars, embroidered skirt flapping about in the breeze, rising tantalizingly to mid-thigh every now and then. She was a woman who knew exactly the effect she had on men and played it up to the max – she was only happy if there was at least one person miserably in love with her. She was charm personified. A bit scatty – yes.A bit odd sometimes – undeniably. But such a beautiful, charming, engaging woman. Really. An angel. A delight. To everyone.
Except her children.
‘Really, Anabella,’ she would often sigh in exasperation, ‘how a girl as awkward as you could possibly have come from my body, I have no idea. That’s the risk one takes when one mixes one’s genes with a man’s, I suppose. You never knowwhat’sgoing to emerge.’
Gay didn’t say things like this intentionally to upset Ana – she genuinely didn’t see that there was anything wrong with what she was saying. As far as she was concerned, it was just a statement of fact. Gay was far too wrapped up in the Wonderful World of Gay Wills to realize the implications or consequences of her comments. She had much more important things to worry about than her daughter’s feelings – things like picking leaves off the lawn in their back garden by hand, one by one, or embroidering cushions with Turner landscapes, or obsessively counting every last calorie she consumed in a day to ensure that her intake never exceeded 1,500.
As well as her basic agoraphobia, which had set in shortly after Gregor’s funeral in 1988, Gay seemed to develop a new neurosis every day and now refused to answer the phone, answer the doorbell unless she was expecting a visit, eat red meat, drink tap water, take off her shoes except to go to bed, touch anyone she didn’t know, allow any animals in the house, use the Hoover, the dishwasher, the microwave or the tumble-drier (though she did still use the washing-machine) or comb her hair with anything other than the old horsehair brushthat used to belong to her grandmother and smelled disgusting. She also had some strange little rituals, like having to walk across the living room with the same amount of footsteps each time, having to water the houseplants in exactly the same order every day and wearing the same seven cardigans in weekly rotation; and the slightest interruption to any of these practices could send her over the edge into a momentary hysteria.
Ana had moved back home last year, shortly after Bill’s funeral, and she’d soon become accustomed to these ‘quirks’ in her mother’s behaviour, mainly because they really didn’t impinge on her very much. She wasn’t expected to do anything more than let Gay get on with it and not disturb her more than necessary. All Gay asked from Ana was that she drive into Bideford once a week to do the big shop, that she pick up odds and ends from town occasionally and that she answer the telephone when it rang. As long as Ana did this, then Gay really couldn’t have cared less about her, about what she was up to, what she was thinking, who she was seeing or where her life was going. She’d sometimes look startled to see Ana in the house, almost as if she’d forgotten that she lived there, and Ana couldn’t really blame her for this as she herself often wondered whether or not she actually existed …
Ana’s memories of Bee were all very fuzzy and imbued with a kind of Technicolored, high-octane aura of dimples-hair-and-boobs, turning-a-drama-into-a-crisis, look-at-me-look-at-me-type behaviour. When Bee was a teenager, she was all fingerless gloves, pink hair, cigarettes and boys. After she left home and moved to London she was all studied cool, avant-garde make-up and raw, gaucheambition. And from the day she became famous, in 1985, she was all rush-rush-rush, coffee-fag-coffee, this-flight-that-interview-the-other-TV-show, excuse-me-do-I-know-you-oh-you’re-my-mother-I-thought-I-recognized-you-and-who-is-this-strange-skinny-tall-person-oh-yes-that’s-right-you’re-my-sister disregard.
Ana’s feelings towards Bee had always been enormously ambivalent. On the one hand she found her quite fascinating. Bee was a mesmerizing person who could make your day complete by smiling at you. When Bee was in a room, nobody else existed. She was captivatingly beautiful and could be extremely amusing if the mood took her. But on the other hand, Ana had always found Bee frustratingly shallow and occasionally downright cruel. Her nickname for Ana when she was a child was ‘the Twiglet’, a reference to her knobbly knees and bony arms, and after her sudden growth-spurt at twelve, Bee started calling her ‘the Towering Twiglet’. Some people might think that was cute – funny, even – Gay certainly appeared to, and Bee thought it washysterical.But not Ana. Ana spent her whole life trying not to draw attention to her height, and it took just one ‘Towering Twiglet’ comment from Bee for Ana to feel a complete freak.
Bee had always refused to come home to Devon after she’d left, not even for Christmas or birthdays, claiming that the mere thought of the place brought her close to a panic attack, while Gay, conversely, had a fervent hatred for London, which had been brewing and bubbling ever since Gregor had left her for the temptations of the big city. She talked of London disparagingly, as if it were somegreat brassy harlot with badly dyed hair and a whiff of fish about it.
So, as some kind of desperate compromise, Ana and her family would traipse all the way to Bath or Bristol to meet Bee for rushed meetings in smoky bars, when the conversation would be invariably tense and occasionally fractious, particularly at their very last meeting, in the summer of’ 88. Ana hadn’t known at the time that it was going to be the last time she saw her sister, and maybe if she had, she’d have appreciated the experience a little more than she did. Because within three weeks, Gregor was dead, and Gay and Bee had fallen out completely and irretrievably.
3
July 1988
The Catacomb was a Goth club in the centre of Bristol. Gay, Bill and Ana were here in the middle of the day – which was strange in itself, as it was a venue quite obviously not designed to be seen during daylight hours. Ana could imagine that at night the purple velvet pinned to the walls, the towering candelabras full of molten church candles and the fluorescent rubber bats stuck to the ceiling might have made for quite an eerie atmosphere. At two in the afternoon, however, the place looked scabby and naff.
‘Hi, Bill.’ Bee stretched on to her tiptoes and kissed Bill on the cheek, leaving a streak of oxblood lipstick on his cheek.
‘Hello there, Belinda – and don’t you look marvellous?’ He held her hands and appraised her. She was wearing a skin-tight Lycra panelled dress that came almost up to her crotch, towering Vivienne Westwood platforms fastened with ribbons, and her sleek hair was greased back off her face. She looked like one of the girls in the ‘Addicted to Love’ video.
‘Thank you,’ she smiled, giving him a little curtsey, ‘and you’re looking rather lovely yourself, if you don’t mind me saying.’
Bill scoffed pleasurably.
‘Twiglet!’ Bee exclaimed, noticing Ana skulking behind her father. ‘How’s my skinny-minny?’
Ana smiled reluctantly and leaned down to kiss her big sister. ‘I’m all right,’ she murmured, feeling a blush forming on her face and shoving her hands into the pockets of the sensible twill skirt her mother had bought her from Long Tall Sally.
‘Jesus, you are gettingso tall,’ she said, appraising Ana at arm’s length. ‘You’ll never find a boyfriend now, you know – menhatetall girls – they make them feel inadequate.’ She winked, to let Ana know that she was only joking, but it was too late – her words had already left a brand on Ana’s fragile soul. ‘Mum,’ she said, turning to Gay, who was waiting impatiently in line, wearing her new green suit, ‘how are you?’
Gay offered up her cheek for Bee to kiss. ‘Tired,’ she said, ‘exhausted. The traffic. Terrible. And this heat.’ She flapped at her face with her hand, and Bill immediately strode off to find a chair for her.
Gay sat down primly on the chair that Bill had brought her and looked round the club with undisguised disgust. ‘Andwhat,’ she began disdainfully, ‘could you possibly be doing in a place like this?’
‘Oh – don’t start, Mum. Please. I’ve had a bad week. Can’t we just have a nice time for once? This place belongs to a friend, OK? A very kind, very wonderful friend who has also lost someone toAIDS, who is about the only person who can make me smile at the moment and who I happen to be staying with tonight.
‘Bill,’ she said turning to her stepfather and clapping herhands together, ‘let me get you a drink. What would you like?’
‘Oh – just a soft drink for me, Belinda. I’m driving. A lemonade or something.’
‘Twiglet?’
Ana looked at her and shrugged. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said, forcing a smile, ‘anything.’
‘Er, right – OK.’ Bee grimaced at her sideways and Ana felt herself die a little inside. She never knew what to say to Bee. That was the trouble. She was always worried she was going to say something stupid or embarrassing. So she usually ended up saying nothing at all – which was just as bad, because then Bee just thought she was an illiterate cretin. And Bee was so beautiful, thought Ana. Look at her. Those huge eyes, framed by thick lashes. And her tiny little nose. Ana would have quite happily killed for that nose. Sometimes she’d play around in the mirror at home, trying to see what she’d look like with a little nose like Bee’s. She’d already decided she was going to get a part-time job the moment she turned fifteen and she was going to save up every penny and have a nose job. And when she did, she’d take in a picture of Bee and tell the surgeon, ‘I wantthatnose.’
And her breasts. Round and creamy, tucked into her tight Lycra dress. Why? thought Ana, staring at them with a gut-churning envy,why?Same mother. Same gene pool. Same chances of being petite and big-bosomed and pretty. But no, she thought, looking resentfully at her father, I get to look like Bill Wills.
Bee handed Ana a can of Coke with a straw in it and smiled at her. Ana smiled back tightly.
