‘And may I wish you many, many,manyyears of contentment in your beautiful new home, most charming Miss Bearhorn. I am sure you will be most happy there.’
Bee took the keys and headed wearily for Bickenhall Mansions, thinking that that was very unlikely indeed.
1
August 2000
Ana’s train finally arrived in London, an hour after it was due. She stepped from the train while it was still moving and strode out into the sunshine with relief. The train she’d got on at Exeter, the train on which she’d got a seat, the train in which she’d been perfectly happy, had broken down just outside Bristol. They’d had to walk a quarter of a mile then, to the next station, and the next train had already been full when it arrived, so she’d had to stand the whole way from Bristol to London, with her feet trapped between three very large pieces of somebody else’s luggage, while the wind whistled through a stuck window, making tangles of her hair.
Ana sometimes wondered if she was cursed. And then she’d wonder, more seriously, if Bee had got all the good luck in her family and left none for her. If that had been Bee sitting on the train just now, everyone would have fallen over themselves to come to her rescue. That was no exaggeration – men and women alike. If Bee had had to get off a train and trudge for a quarter of a mile through the countryside in a heatwave, someone would have offered to carry her bags. Actually, someone would probably have offered to charter a helicopter for her. But really and truly, the thing about Bee was that she wouldn’t havebeen on a defective train in the first place – she’d have been on a train that worked. That was the bottom line.
Ana stood briefly in the middle of the concourse at Paddington while she considered her next move. The midday sun fell in glittering columns through the glass roof, casting a hot chequerboard on to the marble floor. People walked unnaturally fast, as if they’d been put on the wrong setting. Everyone knew where they were going, what they were doing. Except her. She felt like she’d been sucked into the centre of a huge, swirling vortex. There was a line of sweat rolling down between her breasts.
Ana had no idea how she was going to find Bee’s flat. She’d never been to London before and had no mental map to work from. She knew it was divided into north, south, east and west and that a river ran through it. She knew that Bee’s flat was somewhere near the centre, somewhere in the vicinity of Oxford Street. But that was as far as her knowledge went. She needed a map.
She spotted a W. H. Smith’s and walked self-consciously across the marble on her new-born-foal legs. That was the thing with being nearly six foot tall: you ended up looking like one of those fashion illustrations – and it was all very well to look like a fashion illustration if you were just a drawing, but it didn’t look nearly so good when you were an actual human being. It looked plain freakish. Ana had suddenly sort ofstretchedwhen she was twelve, quite dramatically. It had been like a special effect in a horror film – you could almost hear the muscles twanging and the bones creaking as her skinny little girl’s body shot up six inches in the space of a year, leaving her with the lankiest, knobbliest limbs ever seen in Devon. People kepttelling her that she’d ‘fill out’ – but she never did. Instead she developed a special way of holding herself, her shoulders hunched forward, her head bowed, curtain-like hair swinging forward to cover her face and a way of dressing – muted colours and flat shoes – in an effort to disguise her height.
Ana looked around her as she walked and realized that women in London looked like newsreaders, or TV presenters, like the sort of women you only ever normally saw on the telly. Their hair was all shiny and dyed interesting shades of blonde and mahogany. They wore tight trousers and strappy dresses and shoes with heels. They had full make-up and all-over tans. Their handbags matched their shoes, their nails were all the same length. They smelled expensive. Even the younger women, the ones in their teens and early twenties, looked somehowfinished.There were women of all colours and all nationalities, and they all looked fantastically glamorous.
And there were breasts absolutely everywhere – hoisted high in balcony bras, tamed and contoured under tight tops in T-shirt bras, firm and unfettered inside tiny dresses. And nearly all paired up with minuscule bottoms and tiny, taut waists. My God, thought Ana, was having a fabulous pair of breasts a prerequisite in this city? Did they hand them out at Oxford Circus? Ana peered down at the contents of her Lycra top and felt a burn of inadequacy. And then she caught sight of her reflection in the front window of Smith’s. Her long, black hair was dirty and tangled, and because she’d left home in such a hurry, the clothes she was wearing had come straight off her bedroom floor – faded black jeans, khaki Lycra top with whitedeodorant patches under the arms, nubby old black cardi she’d had since she was a teenager and scuffed brown Hush Puppies – the only pair of shoes she owned, because it was next to impossible to get decent shoes in a size eight.
She thought of her mother’s parting words to her as she saw her off at the door that morning: ‘If you get any spare time at all while you’re in London, go shopping, for God’s sake, get yourself some decent clothes. You look like a –’ she’d searched around for a sufficiently disparaging description, her face crumpled with the effort ‘– you look like a …beggar.’
Her mother might have had a point, Ana conceded. Maybe she should make more of an effort with her appearance. She looked around the concourse and became aware that the only person who seemed to have made less of an effort to look good than she had was a guy sitting cross-legged against the wall with a sandy-coloured dog and a cardboard sign that said ‘I Nead Money. Thank You.’
The man who served her in Smith’s didn’t make any eye contact with Ana, didn’t really acknowledge her in any way. In Bideford, in her nearest branch of Smith’s, there would have been an attempt at conversation, some inane commentary, a smile. In Bideford Ana would have been expected to give a little of herself back to the assistant, whether she liked it or not, just so as not to be thought rude. She found the lack of interaction pleasantly refreshing.
The Underground map on the back of her newly acquired map of London informed her that it was only two stops toBaker Street Tube station on the Circle line, and that she wouldn’t have to change lines, which came as a great relief to her. She sat, sweating damply on an almost empty Tube for what seemed like only a few seconds and then found her way easily to Bickenhall Street, a short road filled with faintly menacing red brick apartment blocks, seven storeys high.
Bickenhall Mansions came as a complete shock to her. When she’d looked at Bee’s address for the first time this morning and seen the word ‘mansion’, she’d thought, without surprise, that Bee must have been living in some great detached pile of a building, with security gates and a driveway. But these were just flats. She felt all her other expectations about Bee’s lifestyle – housekeepers, health spas and charity do’s – drop down a notch or two, proportionately.
She perched herself on the stairs in front of the block and nibbled her fingernails nervously, watching the world go by. Tourists; business people; girls in trendy trouser suits; couriers on huge motorbikes. Not an old person in sight. Not like Bideford, where the OAPs outnumbered the youthful by three to one.
‘Miss Wills.’ She jumped as someone loomed into view and boomed at her. A large hand with fat knuckles and a big gold ring was thrust towards her. She shook it. It was a bit clammy and felt like a squidged-up shammy leather.
‘Hello,’ she said, getting to her feet and picking up her bag. ‘Mr Arif ?’
‘Well, which other people do you know who might know you by your name in the middle of the street, young lady?’
He laughed, a pantomime laugh, amused by his own humour, and let them into the building. He was quite short and quite wide and had a very large behind. The fabric of his trousers was silky and thin and Ana could clearly see the outline of a pair of unappetizingly small briefs digging into his fleshy buttocks.
He was highly aromatic, and as the doors closed on the coffin-sized lift, Ana was enveloped in a rich and pungent cloud of perfume. The lift clunked loudly as it finally hit the third floor, and Mr Arif pulled open the brass grille to let Ana out. He gestured expansively at front doors as they walked down a broad, dimly lit corridor that smelled faintly of gravy and old mops.
‘These, all my flats – all short term – but all fully rented – 365 days a year. Here. Here and here. Famous London Stage Actress, here. Here – a lord. There – an MP.’
Ana didn’t really have any idea what he was talking about but she nodded politely anyway.
Mr Arif slipped a key from a very large bunch into the lock of flat number twenty-seven, swung open the door and flicked on the light switch.
‘Here all day with the police and such and who knows what on the day that we found her. A bad day. A very bad day. Four days she’d been here. In this heat. You can still smell it.’ He twitched his nostrils and his large moustache quivered. ‘Breathe in deep like so, and the stench – it is still there.’ He jabbed at his throat with the side of his hand to demonstrate exactly where the stench was and began heaving open grimy sash windows at the other end of the room, holding a monogrammed handkerchief over his mouth.
‘How is this, that a woman as beautiful’ – he pointed at a framed poster of Bee on the wall – ‘could be dead and nobody be knowing this thing? How is it that I, her landlord, come to be the one to be finding her?Iam not her friend.Iam not her lover.Iam not her family. I am her landlord. This – this is not right.’
He shook his head from side to side for a good twenty seconds, allowing time for the not-rightness of the situation to be fully absorbed, his body language implicitly informing her that in his culture this sort of thing would not be allowed to happen. Ana gently placed her bag on the floor, and stared in wonder at the photo of Bee on the wall, realizing with a jolt that she’d almost forgotten what her sister looked like.
‘So.’ He clapped his hands together and then rubbed them, his flesh squishing together like bread dough. ‘The cleaners are arriving at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. By this time all extraneous matter to be removed. I have famous Royal Ballerina moving in on Saturday morning. All has to be perfect. Your beautiful sister has not left you a very great task. Your beautiful sister has not very many possessions.’ He laughed again, that pantomime laugh, and then stopped abruptly. ‘Here is the inventory. You will be needing this so you are not taking away the property of the – er – property. Unfortunately, Madam, I am not able to leave you with a key, but if you are needing to go outside, the porter knows you are here and will allow you to move freely. And now I leave.’ And he did, shaking her once more briskly and damply by the hand and clip-clopping away down the long corridor in two-tone slip-on shoes.
Ana pulled the door closed behind her and breathed a sigh of relief. She turned and flicked the security lock on the front door and then she stood for a moment or two and stared around her.