‘Oh, well, maybe …’
‘I can sort it out,’ he said eagerly, ‘I’ve got a solicitor. He administers my trust. He’ll be able to find out if it’s binding or not. And if it is – if Iamgetting everything, then I’d really like to, you know, make sure you get something.’
Ana shook her head. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, ‘Bee wanted you to have everything. For your future. You know.’
‘Ana,’ he said, ‘I don’t need Bee’s money. I’mloaded.’
‘Are you?’
‘Uh-huh – I’m worth half a million or something.’
‘What!’
‘Yeah. One of the advantages of being the only surviving member of a resolutely middle-class, professional family with fully paid-up life insurance policies. It’s all in trust till I’m twenty-one, but I really don’t need Bee’s money.’
‘Well,’ said Ana, feeling uncomfortable with the nature of this conversation, ‘I mean. Whatever you want to do. But really, I don’t …’
Flint revved the car.
‘Sorry,’ she said, smiling at Zander.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ he said, ‘you need to get going. The traffic’ll be starting to build up now.’
Ana nodded and smiled and wound up her window. She and Flint waved and smiled at a beaming Zander, who waved them off from his wheelchair.
38
Flint and Ana drove together in a kind of numb silence. Of all the places that the rollercoaster journey of the past few days could have taken them, this was the last one either of them could have possibly expected. Ana’s brain boggled at the immensity of Bee’s confession, at the size of the secret that she’d been hauling around with her for fifteen years. It was unthinkable.
Flint put a hand on her knee and squeezed it. She looked across at him and smiled tightly. She felt like she was in another country, on another planet, in anotheruniverse.Poor Bee. Her life in stasis. Never being able to move on. Never being able to develop. Never being able to get close to anyone. What must it have been like? Waking up every morning and knowing that there was no way forward. Fifteen years of hopelessness. And not even being able to indulge her hopelessness. Not being able to get drunk and moan about her life with her friends, not being able to go to counselling or buy a self-help book or watch people on chatshows talking about having the same problem as you. No sympathy, no empathy, no outlet for her guilt. Not being able to share it, with anyone.
It was a wonder she’d lasted as long as she had.
‘D’you want to come driving with me? Tonight?’
Ana looked at Flint and felt herself melt inside with gratitude. She nodded. ‘Yes, please. I really don’t think Icould handle being on my own tonight with all this stuff in my head.’
‘I know exactly what you mean. You can stay at mine, too. If you want. Nothinguntoward,you know. Just for the company.’
She nodded again, thinking that it was what she wanted more than anything. The way she was feeling right now, she never wanted to leave Flint’s side again. And then another thought occurred to her. It was done. It was over. They’d found out why Bee killed herself. There was no reason for her to be in London any more. And the ties that had bound her to Flint for the past few days had disappeared. What happened now? She felt her heart miss a beat with anxiety. She swallowed and put the thought to the back of her mind. She was with him now. She was with him tonight. That was enough for now.
Flint put on some music and Ana retreated into her own thoughts. She fantasized about a world in which her mother had never gone to Gregor’s funeral and Bee had never kicked her out and her own relationship with Bee had developed and they’d eventually become friends. And in her fantasy, she and Bee would get very drunk one night and start talking about life and regrets and the past, and Bee would suddenly start crying and Ana would ask her what was the matter. Bee would refuse to tell her, but after a lot of patient coaxing would finally open up and tell her all about what had happened on that road in France. And the two of them would hold each other and cry together – for Zander, for his family, for Gregor and for Bee. And maybe then Bee could have started to move on. Maybe just knowing that someone knew her secretwould have made it easier to bear, even if she never told another soul. Maybe then she’d have gone on with her life, resumed her music career, kept her friends, had relationships, found someone to spend her life with, had children, been happy …
And then Ana felt herself deflate as she admitted to herself that her fantasy was a load of old cobblers and that nothing in the world could have helped Bee to deal with the guilt of having wiped out an entire family and crippled a baby. Absolutely nothing.
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: ‘Trailertrash.com’, ‘Chazbaps.com’, ‘Asian-babe.com’, ‘Hotsex.com’.
Ana smiled at the predictability of it. The woman wasobsessed.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.Virtualsex. 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’smillionsof 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 ownway 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.