‘What about before that? Before her father died?’
‘Flings. Here and there. Nothing important. I don’t think Bee ever had a proper, grown-up, full-on relationship in her life.’
They sat together in silence for a while, absorbing this sad little fact. A thin cat tiptoed swiftly across the back fence, silhouetted by the sinking sun. A light was switched on in an upstairs flat, flooding the garden with a sudden, unkind light. The temperature had started to drop and Ana shivered in her sleeveless cotton top.
‘Shall we get out of here?’ said Flint, ‘I could do with a change of scenery.’
Ana nodded.
‘D’you want me to lend you a jacket? – you’re going to freeze in that top.’
Flint threw her a blue fleece as they passed his bedroom and she wrapped it around herself. It was huge and very soft. When he turned away she lifted the sleeve to her nose and sniffed it. It smelled of him, exactly how he’d smelled on Bee’s bike yesterday. She put a hand into a pocket and pulled out an old bus ticket and a purple disposable lighter.
Flint sighed and picked it off Ana’s palm. ‘Ha,’ he began, ‘you know, I’ve never smoked a fag in my life, but I always kept a light on me – for Lady Bee. She always used matches, but sometimes, towards the end of the evening, when she was a bit – you know – the worse for wear, you wouldn’t want her going anywhere near fire, if you know what I mean. She nearly set her fringe alight once. So I used to carry these around – for her.’ He bounced the lighter up and down in his hands for a few seconds, staring at it intently and then he pulled her hand towards him, peeled apart her fingers, dropped the lighter on to her palm and closed her fist back up again, like he was rewrapping a present.
‘Don’t you want it?’
‘Nah,’ said Flint, ‘nah. I’ll be finding them all over the place, those fucking lighters, you wait and see …’
Ana brushed his bare arm with her hand and Flint gave her a tight, brave-little-soldier smile and then they left and headed for the main road.
28
‘So,’ said Flint, as they strode briskly up the road, ‘how tall are you, exactly?’
‘Five foot eleven and a half.’
‘Blimey.’
Flint’s local was an ugly old Victorian boozer called the Freemasons Arms. It was the sort of pub that Ana would usually avoid, with curtained windows and a bar lined with silent, red-faced men in threadbare sweaters and old shoes. Flint bought them a pair of pints and whisky chasers and led them through the quiet bar to a room at the back, where a few younger men played pool and talked to each other instead of staring into space. And Ana wondered at which point a man went from drinking at the pubwithhis mates, to just drinking in the same pub as his mates.
A solitary woman sat alone in the corner filing very long fingernails and drinking Smirnoff Ice from the bottle. She gave Ana an exaggerated double-take as she walked in and then eyed her slowly up and down.
Flint became surrounded, momentarily, by men who patted him on the back and shook him by the hand and asked him where the fuck he’d been. ‘Just keeping my head down, mate, you know …’ he said, smiling at each of them. He introduced Ana to everyone and they all nodded and said ‘All right?’ and Ana felt flattered that Flint hadn’t felt the need to justify her presence by introducing her as Bee’s sister, that he was obviously happy to let his mates think that he was ‘with’ her.
He ushered her to the table furthest from the pool table with his hand on her elbow, reminding Ana of those tabloid pictures of Madonna’s boyfriend steering her about the place as if she was a slightly doddery old woman who might just go walking into a wall without him there to guide her, instead of the feistiest woman in the world. But every time Flint touched her, Ana found a small loop of film replaying in her head – an image of her, unpopping the buttons on Flint’s fly, one by one, and sliding her long fingers inside and …
‘I’ve got a suggestion,’ he said, letting his emptied shot glass bang heavily on to the table.
Ana jumped. ‘Oh yes.’
‘It’s quite radical.’
‘Right.’
‘How’s about – and just tell me if you think this is ridiculous – but how’s about, you and I, tonight, getting very, very, very drunk, and how’s about you and I, tonight, not talking about Bee? You know. Just having normal conversations. About normal things.’
‘Like what?’
‘God. I dunno. Like the telly. The news. Celebrities. D’you like talking about celebrities?’
Ana shook her head.
‘Shame – I’m very up on celebrity gossip. Women tell me that my encyclopaedic knowledge of celebrity trivia is one of the most attractive things about me. I was hoping you might want to test me.’
‘Sorry,’ shrugged Ana, apologetically. She could feelherself reddening and thrust her face into her pint glass. Was that flirting just then? Was he flirting with her? Why else would he say that he wanted her to test his trivia knowledge, having already informed her that his trivia knowledge was something that women found attractive about him? It was almost equivalent to him saying, Women find my enormous dick very attractive – would you like to have a look at it? Almost.
But no. No way. There was no way that a man like Flint would be flirting with her. Of course he wouldn’t. Flint was a man. A real man. A man with needs and desires that someone like Ana would never be able to satisfy. Ana tried for a moment to imagine the type of woman that might be able to satisfy Flint and came up with a picture of someone so entirely different to her that it made her feel like crying.
