one-hit wonder Read online

  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, 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 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.

  “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 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 f
ramed 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? I am not her friend. I am not her lover. I am 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 cleaning crew are arriving at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. By that time all extraneous matter is 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 about 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 lock on the door and then she stood for a moment or two and stared around her.

  So. This was Bee’s flat. It wasn’t what she’d imagined. She’d imagined brightly painted walls and huge scarlet sofas, Warhol-type prints of Bee on the walls, lava lamps, mirror balls, and lots of generally eclectic, groovy, colorful funkiness. She’d imagined that Bee’s flat would be an extension of her and her outrageous personality. But mainly, when she’d thought of Bee’s flat, she’d imagined it full of people. And, more specifically, she’d imagined it with Bee in it‌—her red lips parting every few seconds to uncover those big white teeth; her smile carving dimples into her cheeks; her bobbed black hair swinging glossily back and forth. Talking too much. Smoking too much. Laughing like a drain. Being the center of attention.

  Alive.

  What surrounded her, instead, was the somewhat dreary, beigy, dusty flat of an elderly widowed gentleman. The walls were papered with a faded but expensive-looking embossed floral design. The furniture was reproduction in dark mahogany and teak. In one corner stood an ornate bird cage filled with junk. The net curtains were yellowing.

  She began slowly to walk around. The flat was huge. The ceilings were at least ten feet tall, the rooms extremely large. But in spite of so much space it seemed oppressive. The buzz of city life floated in through the open windows but was somehow muted, as if the volume had been turned down.

  Nailed to the wall in the hallway was a gold disc in a heavy glass frame. Ana squinted to read the inscription:

  “GROOVIN’ FOR LONDON” BY BEE BEARHORN:

  ELECTROGRAM RECORDS © 1985

  PRESENTED TO BEE BEARHORN IN RECOGNITION OF SALES OF 750,000 DISCS

  A door on Ana’s right was open, revealing the bathroom. The suite was a pale, minty green with heavy deco taps of chrome. The floor was gray linoleum, the window dimpled and opaque, surrounding a cobwebbed windmill vent creaking slowly around and around, as if someone had only just left the room. Ana shivered.

  Farther down the hallway was a closed door with a large cartoon bumblebee pinned onto it. It had a bubble, attached by a wire, coming from its mouth that said “Bzzzzzzz.” Bee’s bedroom.

  Ana put her hands to the door and felt chilled suddenly, almost as if Bee’s body would still be lying there on her bed, where she’d been found three weeks ago, as if the floor would be littered with pills and capsules, the room buzzing with flies. She pushed the door open slowly, her breathing suspended momentarily. The curtains in the room were closed but for a tiny gap of an inch or two letting in a bright slice of daylight that fell across the huge double bed and the wooden floor, dividing the room in two. Shapes loomed out of the overcast shadows at Ana, and there was an odd smell in the room. She put her hand over her mouth and nose and glanced around the room again before reaching around the corner of the door and feeling for a light switch.

  She hit the switch, looked around the room, and then released a bloodcurdling yell when she saw a small woman with a black bob and red lipstick standing in the corner of the room.

  It was a cardboard cutout. Of Bee. Ana put her hand to her galloping heart and slumped against the wall with relief. It was a stupid life-size cardboard cutout, a promotional thing for “Groovin’ for London.” She remembered seeing one in Woolworth’s back in 1985 when she was only ten years old and the single had just come out, and wishing that she could have one to take home with her. Bee was wearing a black leather minidress with a huge silver belt draped around her waist and big platform shoes. She had her arms folded across her waist and one finger touching her mouth, and was staring at the camera as if she’d just shagged it. She looked quite ridiculous, and Ana couldn’t help thinking that Bee was probably the only person she knew (apart from her mother) who would have felt comfortable sleeping in the same room as a giant cardboard cutout of themselves.

  Ana thought back to that afternoon in Woolworth’s all those years ago, when she’d first seen the cutout and had realized, probably for the first time, just exactly how famous her sister actually was. She’d blushed when she’d seen it and looked around her to see if anyone had noticed, and she’d had to bite her lip to stop herself shouting out to anyone who’d listen, “That’s my sister‌—that’s my sister!”

  1985 was one of the most exciting years of Ana’s life‌—the year that Bee had become famous. She’d signed a huge record deal at the beginning of the year and was marketed heavily as the British answer to Madonna, but nobody could have been prepared for the ensuing phenomenon. “Groovin’ for London,” a virulently catchy dance song, went straight to the charts at number one and stayed there for five weeks, and suddenly Bee’s face was everywhere. For over a year Ana basked in Bee’s reflected glory. She was the most popular girl at school. Even the older kids knew exactly who she was. She was Bee Bearhorn’s sister. Like‌—how cool was that? When Bee’s second single failed to make an impact on the charts four months later, Ana’s status as Most Interesting Person in School started to look a bit shaky. And when her third single was released and greeted with critical derision‌—the general consensus was that it was the most abysmal record of the year‌—barely grazed the top fifty and then disappeared without a trace, Bee Bearhorn came to be seen as just another cheesy one-hit wonder of the eighties and Ana’s relationship to her became more of a hindrance than a social advantage. The crueler girls at her school used the disastrous‌—and very public‌—disintegration of Bee’s career as fuel to bully Ana, and for the rest of her schooldays Ana was commonly known as One-Hit-Wonder Wills.

  The bedroom Ana now found herself in was vast. It had two large sash windows and an enormous double bed that had been stripped of all its linen except for a large piece of what looked like cashmere in electric pink, folded at the foot of the bed. A lime-green feather boa was draped across the headboard and the windows were framed with little multicolored lights. The floorboards were painted sky blue. This was much more the sort of room Ana had expected Bee to have been living in. Ironic that it should be the room in which she died.

  Ana touched the naked mattress first, gently, with her fingertips, before sitting down on it. The bed was soft and saggy and made an odd twanging sound as she sat. She picked up the soft pink cashmere blanket and brought it to her nose. It smelled a bit musty, with undertones of some grapefruity, appley perfume.

  And there, perched on a pillow and much to Ana’s surprise, sat William. He was olde
r and more threadbare than Ana remembered him, but it was definitely him‌—a small, knitted rabbit in blue overalls, clutching a carrot between his front paws. She’d given him to Bee when she’d told her she was leaving home, age fifteen. Ana had been only four at the time, but she remembered the moment vividly, remembered Bee’s lacy, fingerless Madonna gloves and the smell of Anaïs Anaïs when Bee had held her in her arms and told her not to say a word to their mother. She remembered Bee trying to give him back to her, saying, “I can’t take William, he’s your favorite,” and herself forcing him back into Bee’s hands, as serious as anything. “No, Be-Be, you have William. I’ve got Mummy.”

  Ana picked him up and looked at him in wonder. Bee had kept William. For twenty years. And not only had she kept him, she’d kept him on her pillow. Where she slept. He’d been there when she died. He’d seen it all.

  “Here, William,” Ana whispered into his velvet-lined ear, “tell me‌—whatever happened to Bee Bearhorn?”

  two

  Although Bee was her half sister, Ana tended to think of her as more of a sixteenth sister, or a sixty-fourth sister, or even, to put it decimally, a nought-point-nought-nought-nought-one-percent sister. Other times she felt as if Bee were a dream, someone Ana had made up.

  In the age of the disintegration of the traditional family unit, Ana’s family had somehow managed to be even more complicated and unconventional than most. Ana’s mother, Gay, married Gregor Bearhorn in 1963 and had a baby, Belinda. Gregor gave into his long-repressed but ultimately uncontrollable homosexual urges and left Gay in 1971. Gay was married again, to Bill, a retired headmaster twenty-two years her senior, in 1974. A second daughter, Anabella‌—or Ana as she would later wish to be known‌—was born in 1975 (Anabella and Belinda‌—Ana occasionally thought that her mother would rather have given birth to a pair of bichon frises) and Bee left home four years later to join her father, Gregor, in London. He died in 1988. And so did Bill, in 1999.