by Lisa Jewell
And then he left, the only sign that he’d ever been there the dense fog of aftershave lingering in the living room.
seven
Bee’s lawyer worked from a very small office in a very large office building in Holborn and he looked like neither a lawyer nor someone who would be called Mr. Arnott Brown. He was wearing a T-shirt for a start. It wasn’t exactly a Megadeth T-shirt or anything—it was just plain and red—but it was still a T-shirt. (“I do apologize for my appearance, Miss Wills,” he’d said when he greeted her at the lift, “we’ve just introduced a dress-down Friday policy. I can’t say I’m awfully comfortable with it myself.”) And he looked extraordinarily young. The sun streaming through his office window sat on his smooth pink skin and clearly picked out the sparse, almost prepubescent tufts of hair poking from his chin. He wore a wedding band and on his desk sat photographs of an equally young-looking wife and a pair of photogenic toddlers.
He was very shy and appeared to be having trouble maintaining eye contact with Ana through his spectacles. “Yes,” he was saying almost in a whisper, “your sister kept her financial affairs very much in order. Well, perhaps not your sister, exactly. I’ve always had the feeling that she’d have kept all of her money under her mattress if it had been up to her. But she had a good accountant and everything is as it should be. No debts, no tax bills, no overdrafts. Unfortunately she didn’t make a will. It was something I’d been trying to persuade her to do for a long time, but she thought it was a, aaah, silly idea. So. All her assets will go to her next of kin, who I believe is her, aaah, mother.” He looked up from his paperwork and directly into Ana’s eyes until she nodded, and then he looked abruptly away again.
“Yes,” said Ana, “she is, but she’s agoraphobic, you see, she can’t leave the house, so I’m here on her behalf.”
“I see. I see.” He began leafing through his paperwork again and pulling out various sheets. “Yes—Bee inherited a very large sum of money in 1988. Her father’s apartment in South Kensington, which she sold for 210,000 pounds and a small cottage in the Dordogne which she sold for a further 12,000 pounds. She also had a large sum of money she’d made from a music publishing deal back in 1985. Around 80,000 pounds.”
Ana held her breath.
“However, Bee appears to have had an expensive lifestyle. Her monthly outgoings were substantial and seem to have eaten into a large chunk of her inheritance. And then”—he swiveled a large document toward her—“she purchased this in, aaah, 1997.”
On top of the document was a real estate agent’s particulars—a chocolate-box cottage, painted fondant pink, covered in Albertine roses: 125,000 pounds.
“She paid cash for it. It was the only property she ever bought. She preferred to rent . . .”
Ana stared at the cottage in disbelief. The writing above the picture named the location as Broadstairs, Kent.
“. . . I think it may have been purchased on a whim, to be frank. As far as I’m aware, she never visited it. Shame—it’s awfully pretty, don’t you think?” He turned it toward himself to appraise it, and Ana could almost see what was in his head: the image of him, his young wife, and their two children enjoying lovely weekends away together at the seaside.
“Can I keep this?” she asked, staring in wonder at the particulars of the cottage.
“Well, I, aah, I don’t see why not. I have no need of it.” He slid it across the desk toward her and she slipped it into her bag. “So,” he said, “all in all, including the cottage, your sister’s estate has a net value of around 148,000 pounds. Plus, there are still some active royalty accounts that bring in another 1,000-2,000 pounds per annum. Also, there was one other, slightly smaller matter. Your sister had a cat. He was called, aaah, John, I believe.”
Ana sat up straight.
“She was unable to keep him in her new flat, due to the tenancy agreement. In fact, that was the last time I spoke to her—her landlord was threatening to evict her if she didn’t rehouse her cat, and she wanted my advice. And I’m afraid that the only advice I could reasonably give her was that the cat would have to go. So she took him to her friend. A Miss Tate. I have an address if you’d like to contact her. She acted as Bee’s witness on a number of occasions, you see. . . .” He flipped through a pile of papers and transcribed an address from the file onto a piece of paper and handed it to Ana. “You may want to contact Miss Tate to find out how she’d like the matter to be dealt with. As far as she was aware, it was going to be only a temporary measure—just until Bee found herself a new flat.” He wiped away some sweat from his brow. The small room was un-airconditioned and disgustingly hot.
“So the flat in Bickenhall Street was just short-term?”
Mr. Arnott Brown nodded. “Yes, very much so. I know she had been looking at alternative properties to rent in the weeks before the, aah, incident.”
“When was the last time you saw Bee, Mr. Arnott Brown?”
He pulled off his glasses and absentmindedly wiped the lenses with a soft cloth. “Well, aaah, I saw her very rarely, very rarely. Let’s see. Hmmm—the last time I saw her was”—he consulted his desk diary, leafing clumsily through the pages with sweaty fingers—“there. Yes. It was in January. Just after she moved into the new flat. She lodged some paperwork with me. Tenancy agreements and such.”
“And how did she seem?”
“Seem? Well, aaah, like she always seemed, I suppose. You know . . .”
“No. I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since I was thirteen.”
“Oh. Oh, I see. That’s aah, that’s, hmmmm. Well—Bee was always very exotically dressed. Very theatrical, you might say. And somewhat—mercurial.”
“What do you mean?”
“One could never quite predict what sort of mood she might be in. Some days she was exuberant and other days she would be rather withdrawn—easily distracted. And she would always insist on smoking in here, although it’s absolutely forbidden, you know, and awfully dangerous. My wife always knew when I’d had a meeting with Bee because I’d return home reeking like an old ashtray.” He did a strange, snorty thing into his fist. “She was very open, which could prove somewhat disconcerting. She would think nothing, for example, of using very, aaah, strong language and asking somewhat—personal—questions.”
“But that day. In January. The last time you saw her. How was she then? How was her mood?”
“I’m afraid, Miss Wills, that I really do not recollect. But if you’re asking me if she appeared to be on the brink of, aaah, taking her own life, then I would have to say, no. Most definitely not.”
A nasal voice on Mr. Arnott Brown’s intercom informed him that his next client had arrived. He smiled apologetically at Ana. “I’m afraid we’ll have to call it a day now, Miss Wills. I’ll get all this paperwork to your mother’s lawyer. If you could just sign these release papers, to authorize everything. Here. And—here. Super. Thank you.” He unfurled himself from his desk and saw Ana to the door. He grasped her hand in his and shook it warmly. “And may I just take this opportunity to say, Miss Wills, how terribly, terribly sorry I was to learn of Bee’s death. She was a very unusual character, but I have to confess to having been awfully fond of her. She had a way of making one feel very, aaah, special. Do you know what I mean?”
Ana nodded, shook his hand again, and left his office, thinking sadly to herself that, no, actually, she had no idea what he meant, as she’d barely known her and how much she was starting to wish that she had.
eight
At the other end of a cobbled alleyway around the corner from Mr. Arnott Brown’s office was a pretty Georgian square. Ana took a right and found herself on a quiet residential street lined with diminutive Victorian city housing with tiny balconies entwined with ivy and passion flowers. Children played in a small playground fronted by a sign declaring ADULTS PERMITTED ONLY IF ACCOMPANIED BY A CHILD. The sun had come out again, and Ana pulled off her cardigan.
As she walk
ed, a delicious smell suddenly wafted toward her: fresh bread. She hadn’t eaten anything at all that day, and her hangover was giving her a most impressive appetite. She followed the smell into an art gallery housed in an old Methodist chapel and found herself in a peaceful, almost monastic courtyard, lined with wooden sculptures and large potted trees. There was a small kitchen at the back of the courtyard, serving a limited menu of healthy-sounding things, and there was hardly anybody there.
Ana ordered a pasta and wild-mushroom bake, and as she waited for her food to arrive, she looked around her and began to feel overcome by a sense of her surroundings. She was in London. She was in the city where Bee had gone when Ana was four years old. The city that had broken her mother’s heart—twice. And Ana was on her own—and it wasn’t that scary. Ana had always thought of London as this mysterious place that swallowed people up like a big black hole, that took away their values and their emotional depth, dressed them up in stupid clothes, hooked them on alcohol and drugs, infected them with viruses that didn’t even exist in Devon and then, when there was nothing left of the person they’d once been, spat them out the other end. That’s what London had done to Gregor, according to Gay. And that’s what London had now done to Bee, too. But try as she might, Ana couldn’t hate the city for it, not like her mother did. In fact, there was something fascinating about this huge, unruly place of which she’d seen only a fraction.
A man wearing just a waistcoat and jeans sat above her on one of the fire escapes, twanging on a guitar, and some wind chimes tinkled from a fig tree: all very West Country, in fact—Ana felt almost at home. She settled herself at a wide wooden table in the shade and laid out Bee’s things again. Her address book, notebook, camera, the Rough Guide to Goa. She thought of the anomalies, the inconsistencies, the cottage, the weekends away, the missing cat, and then she picked up the piece of paper Mr. Arnott Brown had given her with the address of John the Cat’s foster mother on it: Miss L. Tate.
She looked at her watch: 1:20 P.M. She had three hours before her train went, and it suddenly occurred to her that it wouldn’t actually matter if she missed the four-thirty—she could get the five-thirty, the six-thirty, whatever. She should go and see this Miss L. Tate, this friend of Bee’s. She’d like to meet a friend of Bee’s. She might be able to shed some light on things. And she really wanted to see Bee’s cat, this creature whom she’d apparently loved so much.
She pulled her A-Z out of her handbag and looked up Bevington Road, W10, the current residence of John the Cat. She found a pay phone inside the chapel and dialed the number on the piece of paper. And then she remembered that it was the middle of the day, that Miss L. Tate was most probably at work, so she jumped a little when the phone was answered and a loud, raspy voice answered with an abrupt “yup.”
“Um, hello. Is this Miss L. Tate?”
“Who’s this?” said a suspicious-sounding voice.
“My name’s Ana. Ana Wills. I’m, er, I’m Bee’s sister.”
“Oh my God,” the voice screamed, “Bee’s sister! You really exist. I always thought Bee were making you up.” She had a very broad Leeds accent.
“Oh. Right. Yes. Well—I’m in London at the moment because I’ve been sorting out her stuff and I’m feeling a bit, er, confused . . . and I needed to talk to somebody—to somebody who knew her. And Bee’s lawyer gave me your number because you’re looking after her cat. And I wondered if I could meet with you. Maybe. Or I could pop over? I won’t stay long. Unless you’re busy, of course . . .”
“No. No, I’m not busy. I’m bored off my tits, actually. Why don’t you come round?”
Miss Tate lived just off Portobello Road. Ana didn’t know much about London, but she knew that Portobello was cool, and this was confirmed resoundingly as she turned a corner and found herself slap-bang in the middle of some of the most frighteningly trendy-looking people she’d ever seen in her life. Ana tried to bolster herself up but couldn’t fight the ridiculous paranoid fear that one of these horribly self-assured people, one of these I-know-exactly-who-I-am-where-I-am-and-what-I’m-doing-here type people was going to come up to her and make fun of her. But nobody even glanced at her—which was a strange sensation for Ana, because everywhere she went in Devon, she was stared at remorselessly. There were three boys in particular, from the development just outside Torrington, who tormented her every time she set foot out of the house. The ones with the ears and the red hair and the jewelry. Every time they saw her they would skid to a halt on their skateboards, scoop them up from under them, and then just stop and stare at her as she walked past. And as she passed them, the tallest one, the one with the reddest hair, would hiss something like “Freak!” or “Scarecrow!” or “Skinny bitch!” Nothing very creative, but effective nonetheless. Ana decided she liked the anonymity of London’s streets, where you could be tall or short, black or white, have pink hair or pierced cheeks and still nobody gave you so much as a second glance.
She followed Portobello to its northernmost point, past a few sad-looking stands selling what looked to her like stuff that even the least choosy of bag ladies would be embarrassed to possess, past a vegetarian restaurant with a queue outside, past record shops with Rasta colors in the windows, past a falafel restaurant, under a bridge, and past a bustling market square filled with yet more painfully trendy people. The sky overhead was darkening, and it looked like rain, but it was still humid and sweaty. She zigzagged through a couple of scruffy streets until she found herself on Bevington Road, a dinky little curve of brightly colored stucco houses facing a school yard.
Number fifteen was a lurid grass-green with mauve woodwork. She took the steps to the front door, rang the bell, and was buzzed in. The tiny stairwell took her to the top floor, where she was greeted by an open door and the sound of stampeding wildebeest.
“Hello,” she ventured.
The herd of wildebeest stopped stampeding for a second and then began again.
Ana glanced around nervously. “Hello.”
“Fuckcuntbollocks.”
Ana followed the rasping and stampeding through the tiniest, messiest living room in the world to an even smaller and messier bedroom, where objects were being thrown, seemingly at the hands of a poltergeist, here, there, and everywhere.
“I’ve lost my cunting choker.” The rasping was definitely coming from somewhere in the room. “It’s not even mine. It’s a Jade fucking Jagger. It’s worth about two million fucking quid and I’ve got to give it back tomorrow. Fuck.”
A head suddenly appeared from underneath the bed, and a black hand was extended toward her across the top of the unmade bed. Its fingers were tipped with the longest, whitest nails Ana had ever seen, like five magic wands.
“Ana! Hi! Lol.”
“Lol?” repeated Ana, remembering the inscription in the Nigella Lawson cookbook.
“That’s my name,” she croaked. She sounded like she was losing her voice. “Sorry about this. I’ve just done this live appearance on some kid’s TV show and the stylist lent me this fucking stupid choker, and I forgot to give it back to her, and now I’ve fucking lost it. And I’m gonna be dead, soooo dead. . . .” She grimaced.
Ana was too shell-shocked by the experience of meeting this dynamo of a woman and by the accompanying torrent of profanities to question what exactly it was she’d been doing on children’s TV.
As Lol talked she got to her feet. She had waist-length platinum extensions tied high in a ponytail, skin the color of butterscotch, a sapphire in her nostril, and matching bright-blue eyes, patently purchased from an optician and not formed in the womb. She was wearing a soft leather bustier exactly the same color as her skin, and matching leather jeans covered in rhinestones. And, most impressively to Ana, she was about six feet tall and thin as a stick of linguine.
“Oh. My. God!” Lol said, staring in amused shock at Ana. “You look like my fucking negative!” And then she started laughing. Louder than Ana had ever heard anyone laugh before.
&n
bsp; She strode around the clothes-strewn bed and grabbed Ana’s hand. “I have got to have a look at this,” she said, and pulled Ana toward a full-length mirror. They stood side by side, and there they were—perfect positive and negative versions of the same person—exactly the same height, exactly the same shape, black hair, white hair, white skin, black skin. For a second they both stared at the reflection with their mouths ajar—and then Lol started laughing again. She slapped her thighs. She wiped away tears with the sides of her long-nailed fingers. She bent herself double. She grabbed on to Ana’s arm and laughed a laugh so long and so silent and accompanied by so much painful arm-squeezing that Ana was beginning to worry that she was having some kind of a seizure.
Then she stood up straight again, pulled her face back into shape, shuffled around a bit, and eyed their reflections once more. Within two seconds she was bent double again, and this time Ana succumbed, too. It was one of the funniest things she’d ever seen, funny in the same way that seeing yourself distorted into a bulbous dwarf in a hall of mirrors was funny; funny in the way that wrapping elastic bands around your head was funny; funny in the way that blowing your cheeks up against a pane of glass was funny—just stupidly, childishly, unbelievably funny.
“Oh fuck—I’m going to wet meself,” wheezed Lol, now collapsed into a tangle of legs and arms on the floor. Ana was perched on the edge of the bed and had reached that convulsive, uncontrollable point when laughing stops being fun and starts to hurt. She looked down at Lol on the floor, at her abnormally long limbs and the bagginess about her tiny leather trousers, at the familiar impression made by her rib cage into her bustier and the lack of distinction between her calves and her thighs, and she suddenly thought, in the most overwhelming and entirely unexpected welling up of intense emotion that flickered around the sensitive lining of her belly like a feather duster, that she loved her, that she loved this girl who she’d known for less than five minutes, and with that shocking thought she felt the bruising in the back of her throat sort of catch and the tears in her eyes sort of tickle and suddenly she was crying. And the more she tried to stop crying, the more she cried. She had no idea where the tears were coming from, but they were thick and hard and they hurt.