BELINDA OCTAVIA BEARHORN
1964–2000
BELOVED DAUGHTER & SISTER
SHE BROUGHT JOY TO MILLIONS WITH HER BEAUTY,
HER TALENT AND HER JOIE DE VIVRE
SHE WILL BE MISSED FOREVER MORE
‘Joie de vivre’?thought Ana. Wasn’t ‘joie de vivre’a rather odd thing to put on a headstone? A small bunch of loosely tied pink roses rested on her grave.
‘Who d’you think left those?’ said Ana.
Lol shrugged.
Ana placed her flowers next to the roses and dusted some dirt off the plaque. She felt strange. She knew she should be thinking about Bee right now, but she wasn’t. She was thinking about her father. She was thinking about rushing to Bideford General from her flat in Exeter with Hugh when the phonecall came, and getting there just in time to say goodbye, just in time to tell him she loved him, to squeeze his liver-spotted hands while they were still warm. She was thinking about going to the Co-Op with her mother and picking out the oyster-coloured marble with the pink veins, the gold-leaf lettering, the wording. Identical to Bee’s. Cut from the same stone, engraved with the same lettering. Her mother’s choice.Her mother’s taste. Ana’s mother had impeccable taste. She knew how she liked things.
Tears started tickling at the back of her throat. Lol squeezed her shoulder. ‘D’you want me to leave you?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Ana gulped. ‘Just for a minute.’
‘I’ll see you back at the car.’
Ana listened to Lol’s footsteps receding across the crunchy gravel and bowed her head. And then her shoulders started trembling and shaking as tears erupted from the very pit of her stomach. The tears she hadn’t cried at her father’s funeral. The tears she hadn’t been allowed to cry because her father’s funeral had been all about her mother.
He’d keeled over in the garden while digging up hyacinth bulbs – it was ironic that he should have been preparing so vigilantly for the next season when he wasn’t to last the day. He’d been taken by ambulance to Barnstaple General Hospital but had died two hours later while waiting for an emergency heart bypass. He had been eighty-two years old. It had been a quick and relatively painless death, exactly the death that Bill had always said he wanted. He’d never been a burden to anyone, never inadvertently hurt anyone, never forgotten himself, humiliated himself or let himself down.
During the last few years of his life, Bill had started to stoop, and Ana had forgotten how tall her father actually was. As she watched his long coffin being slipped from the hearse on to the shoulders of six strong men, she’d felt strangely proud of his stature and, for the first time in her life, she’d felt proud of her own gangling body, long hands and large feet, which echoed those of her father.
Ana had always known that her father would die while she was relatively young, that he wouldn’t be there to see weddings and grandchildren, but when it came it was still a massive shock which, combined with her already self-obsessed mother’s rapid descent into an almost psychotic state of self-indulgence, had forced Ana rudely off the path to adulthood she been successfully following. Well – successful-ish. A going-nowhere job at Tony’s Tin Pan Alley selling drum kits and synthesizers to spotty sixteen-year-olds, a damp flat with a shared bathroom and a six-year relationship with Hugh, the highly intelligent but occasionally overbearing guy she’d lost her virginity to. But since she’d lost her going-nowhere job, her damp flat, her overbearing boyfriend and her father, all within the space of three months, she’d done nothing to get her life back on track. Instead of finding someone to look after her mother, getting herself a new flat and looking for a new job, she’d spent all her time in her bedroom writing songs – trite, sentimental, self-indulgent songs. Terrible songs. She had boxes of them under her bed. Dozens and dozens. They were so bad that she couldn’t even bear to look at them.
When she wasn’t writing appalling songs, she was reading books – voraciously, two or three a week, from the local library. She could have fooled herself into believing that she was improving herself, expanding her mind, but the only books she ever read were crime novels. Patricia Cornwell. Ruth Rendell. P. D. James. Agatha Christie. And books about serial killers, too. Jeffrey Dahmer. Dennis Nielsen. Charles Manson. Ted Bundy. Ed Gein. Her mother called her a ‘ghoul’, but Ana was just compulsivelyfascinated by the workings of minds and souls darker than hers.
Ana had never been a particularly gregarious or fun-loving girl. Her school reports had told of a bright, sweet-natured girl with an amazing talent for music-writing, singing and playing – but suggested that her social skills could be improved upon. People had always described her as ‘shy’, ‘quiet’, ‘studious’, ‘creative’. Since her father died, though, these adjectives had transmuted, subtly, to ‘strange’, ‘odd’, ‘peculiar’ and ‘weird’.
Living alone with her mother had a lot to do with it. She and her mother were so diametrically opposed in every way – physically, socially, sartorially, intellectually – that they could find no common ground whatsoever. Bill had always acted as a kind of buffer between the two women – he’d understood so well what made each of them tick – but without him there, the house on Main Street was a cold and unhappy place.
‘Oh God, Dad,’ Ana whispered to herself, ‘I miss you so much, Dad, I miss youso much.’Ana was convulsing now, her stomach feeling bruised by contractions as tears that she hadn’t cried when she’d needed to came erupting to the surface. She choked and coughed on them and her whole body shook. For ten months she’d sat on these feelings, kept them to herself. She’d wanted to break down a long time ago, but Hugh had told her to be strong, told her that now was a perfect opportunity to grow, to become adult. When all she’d wanted to do was curl up in a ball in his arms and let him hold her like a baby, he’d forced her to restrain herself. And to prove to him that she could be strong, that she could be a woman, she’d done as he said.And denied her own grief. And then Gay had started going downhill, and she’d moved home, and there was no room for anyone’s emotions other than her mother’s in that house. Ana wasn’t allowed tofeel –all she could do was keep her head down and try not to antagonize her mother. This was the first time, Ana realized, since her father had died, that she’d been in a position just to … just to … ‘Oh God, Dad,’ she sobbed, ‘what am I supposed to do without you – I don’t understand – how am I supposed to be able to live without you?’
Ana stayed like that, her shoulders heaving, her stomach aching, her head bowed and her knees bent, for another ten minutes, as she emptied her soul of all its pain, until she heard footsteps on the gravel behind her and pulled herself together. She took a deep breath and wiped the tears from her cheeks and pulled her hair away from her face.
And as her tears began to subside and her vision cleared, she glanced down once more at the slab at her feet and felt suddenly gripped by the greatest, most overwhelming sense of loss – not of someone she’d known and loved, but of someone sheshouldhave known and loved, and she found herself whispering to Bee, one single and entirely unexpected word: ‘Sorry.’
13
Flint screwed the empty crisp-packet into a tiny ball and squeezed it into the ashtray next to a scrunched-up Twix wrapper and a few pellets of greying, hardened chewing-gum. He searched his pocket for a toothpick and foundone, using it to investigate the crisp-retaining crevices between his teeth. Lol was in the back of the car, and Ana was walking back towards them. Fuck, she was tall. Very tall. Taller than Lol, because she was wearing flat lace-ups and Lol always wore those bloody great skyscraper heels. And she was nothing like Bee. In fact, if someone had given you a picture of Bee and asked you to come up with a woman who was the complete opposite of Bee in every way, Ana would have been the result. Not his type. Not his type at all. But quite interesting. Interesting the way her nose protruded from her face almost like a spout, like a beautiful but functional spout. And her eyes were a fascinating shape – like soft little triangles, resting on their sides. And such an amazing shade of hazel. Almost yellow. Long thick eyelashes. And not a scrap of make-up. Flint admired that in a woman. She was quiet, too, had a sort of dignity about her. Not like Loud-Mouth Lol and Gibbering Gill. Flint liked quiet women – you never knew what was going on in their minds. That was the trouble with most women – they just wanted to tell you what they were thinking all the fucking time.
As Ana got nearer Flint noticed that her eyes were red and raw and felt a flash of empathy as tears started to stab at his own eyes. He cleared his throat abruptly. He’d cried more in the last three weeks than he’d ever cried in his life before. Enough crying. More than enough. He slid open the partition and glanced backwards. ‘Are we ready?’ They nodded and he put the car into gear and pulled away. He was feeling strangely intrigued by Ana, this awkward-looking sister who Bee claimed to have spent every weekend with for the last ten years but who hadn’t actually seen Bee since she was thirteen, but he wasn’t much of a one for making small talk, so he switched on the intercom, unwrapped himself a stick of Wrigley’s, folded it into his mouth and listened, instead.
‘You all right?’
Sniffing from Ana. ‘Yeah. Sorry. I’m fine.’
Sound of nose being blown.
‘What was it like, Lol? Bee’s funeral?’