one-hit wonder (2 page)

Bee smiled to herself at the old lady’s closing blast of modern lingo, and then the lift creaked and clanked and began its snail’s-pace journey back down to the lobby. She walked down the corridor toward number twenty-seven—

her new flat.

Mr. Arif was sitting on the sofa, going through some paperwork, but stood up abruptly and let his papers fall to the floor when he saw her walk in.

“Oh, no no no no, madam. No no no.” He was crossing his hands in front of his chest and shaking his head quite violently. “This is simply not allowed. This animal. It must go. Now.” He pointed at John as if he were a sewer rat.

“But—he’s my cat.”

“Madam. I do not care if he is the cat of the Queen. No animals, of any description, allowed in any of my properties.

It must go—now.”

“But he’s an indoor cat. He’s never been outdoors. He’s fully housebroken, he’s quiet, and he doesn’t even molt and—”

“Madam. I have no interest in the personal characteristics of your animal. All I know is this—it must leave. Now.” Bee wanted to cry. She wanted to hit Mr. Arif. Really hard.

In fact, the way she was feeling right now, after the events of last night, she’d really quite like to kill him. With her bare hands. Put her hands around his big squishy neck and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until he went purple and his eyes started bulging and then . . .

“Miss Bearhorn. Please. Remove this animal. I cannot give you the keys until this animal is gone.” He’s not an animal, she wanted to scream, he’s a human being. Bee could feel her temper building, a pounding in her temples, a painful lump in the back of her throat. She took a deep breath.

“Please. Mr. Arif.” She perched herself on the edge of the sofa. “I need time to think. I need . . .”

“Madam. There is no time to think. These keys remain in my pocket until I can no longer see your animal.” Bee lost her battle to control her anger. “OK. OK, fine!” She leapt to her feet and grabbed John’s carrier by its handle.

“Fine. Forget it, then. Forget this flat. I don’t like it anyway. I want my money back. Take me to your office and give me my money back.”

Mr. Arif smiled at her indulgently. “May I draw some points to your attention at this moment, most charming Miss Bearhorn. First of all, the contract is signed and your money is on its way to the bank. It is too late for any form of is on its way to the bank. It is too late for any form of cancellation. And second of all, are you really wanting to take away all of your possessions, when you have just this minute carried them up here? Possibly it would be easier to leave your animal with a friend or family?” Bee looked around her at the piles of boxes and decided that although she’d be more than happy to sacrifice every penny of the cash she’d given Mr. Arif in exchange for a place where John would be welcome, she really couldn’t stomach the thought of lugging this stuff all the way back downstairs, with Mr. Arif watching her with his smug little raisin eyes, and then having to find another rental agency and look at another flat and go through this rigmarole all over again. She took a deep breath and decided to lie.

“OK,” she said, “no problem, Mr. Arif. None at all. You’re absolutely right. I’ll just make a call and find an alternative home for my—er—animal.”

She pulled her cell phone from her bag and dialed in a made-up number.

“Hi!” she said breezily to a rapid beeping, “it’s Bee. Are you around? Cool. I need you to do me a favor. Can I leave John with you? I don’t know. For a while. Three months at least.

Really? You don’t mind? God—thank you. That’s brilliant.

You’re a star. I’ll be around in about ten minutes. OK. See you then.”

“All is arranged?”

“Yes,” she beamed, tucking her cell phone back into her handbag, “all is arranged.”

Outside the building, she agreed to meet Mr. Arif at his office later to pick up the keys and then watched his huge ass swinging its way back down the street toward his office on Chiltern Street. She gave his receding back the finger and stuck out her tongue. “Fucking wankhead assknob shitbag
cunt
,” she murmured under her breath before leaning toward the cabdriver, who was waiting impatiently for her to unload her last few boxes and pay her fare.

“Hi!” she said, switching on the charm. “There’s been a slight change of plan. I need you drive around the block a bit with my cat.”

“You what?” The fat cabdriver looked at her in horror.

“You heard me,” she hissed, “just take the cat and drive around a bit. I’ll meet you back here in half an hour.” The driver’s expression softened when Bee forced three tenners into his sweaty hand. “There’ll be more where that came from when you bring him back. OK?”

“Whatever.” He shrugged, folding up his copy of the racing form. “Whatever.”

She slipped John’s box onto the passenger seat and tickled him under the chin. “You be a good boy,” she whispered into his ear, “I’ll see you in half an hour. Be good.” And then she closed the door and felt tears tickling the back of her throat as she watched the car pull away and her beloved cat disappear into the early evening London traffic.

She sighed and made her way to a Starbucks, where she sat for a few moments sipping an Earl Grey tea and taking stock of what had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Her life, as she knew it, was over. And all she had to show for it was as much as she could fit into the back of a station wagon. She had no idea why she’d left her flat, no idea what she was doing moving into this one. It was just a gut reaction, really, to what had happened last night. And in a strange way it felt sort of . . . preordained.

After ten minutes she picked up her bag and headed for Mr. Arif’s office. He looked thrilled to see her
sans
cat and handed over the keys with what seemed to be unbridled joy.

“And may I wish you many, many,
many
years 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.

one

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 gotten on at Exeter, the train on which she’d gotten 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 gotten all the good luck in her family and left none for her. If that had been Bee sitting on the train just then, 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 heat wave, 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 have been 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 checkerboard onto 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 center 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 center, somewhere in the vicinity of Oxford Street. But that was as far as her knowledge went. She needed an
A-Z.

She spotted a W. H. Smith’s and walked self-consciously across the marble on her newborn-foal legs. That was the thing with being nearly six feet 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 of
stretched
when 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, inches in the space of a year, leaving her with the lankiest, knobbliest limbs ever seen in Devon. People kept telling 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, curtainlike hair swinging forward to cover her face, and a way of dressing—muted colors 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 newscasters, or talk show hosts, like the sort of women you only ever normally saw on the telly. Their hair was all shiny and dyed interesting shades of blond and mahogany. They wore tight trousers and strappy dresses and shoes with heels. They had full makeup 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 somehow
finished.
There were women of all colors and all nationalities, and they all looked fantastically glamorous.

And there were breasts absolutely everywhere—hoisted high in push-up 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 white deodorant patches under the arms, nubby old black cardigan 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 ten.

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 . . .
dirty lesbian
.”

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
A-Z
informed her that it was only two stops to the Baker 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 street filled with faintly menacing redbrick apartment buildings, seven stories 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 dos—drop down a notch or two, proportionately.

She perched herself on the stairs in front of the house and nibbled her fingernails nervously, watching the world go by.

Tourists, businesspeople, girls in trendy pantsuits, messengers on huge motorbikes. Not an old person in sight.

Not like Bideford, where the elderly 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 toward her. She shook it. It was a bit clammy and felt like a damp shammy.

“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 humor, 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 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 gate to let Ana out. He gestured expansively at the apartment doors as they walked down a broad, dimly lit corridor that smelled faintly of gravy and old mops.