one-hit wonder Read online

  “You’re messing with the wrong man‌—I’m a trained marksman.”

  “Ya mother,” said one.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Flint.

  “Ya mother.”

  “What?”

  “Ya mother ya mother ya mother.”

  “What about my mother?”

  The two boys fell silent for a moment and exchanged a confused glance.

  “Ya mother is a fanny rash,” said the small one, eventually, before both of them dissolved into hysterical stifled laughter and closed the window behind them.

  “Jesus,” he muttered under his breath, “Jesus Christ.” He took his cereal and his paper into the kitchen and finished his breakfast in there.

  Later on, he phoned his mother to tell her that she was a fanny rash, and she laughed so hard she nearly wet herself.

  “Where are you?” Ana shouted into the phone.

  “Drinking espresso in the sunshine, with only a scabby old bassplayer to spoil the view.” Lol’s voice was a tinny echo on the other end of the line.

  Ana could hear a man swearing in the background, and Lol started cackling. “Fuck off, soft lad. Go and find a car to nick or summat,” she cackled again. “So‌—talk to me, Ana. Tell me what’s happening. What’ve I missed?” ‘

  Ana filled her in on all the events of the previous day.

  “Jesus,” breathed Lol, “that’s unbelievable. You mean she’d been seeing that bloke for three years? But‌—when? How? I don’t understand.”

  They chatted for a while about Zander and the children’s home, too. And the obvious question soon arose. “Flint won’t accept the possibility that Zander might be Bee’s kid,” said Ana.

  “Well‌—I have to say that for once I agree with him. I mean‌—I know I spend a lot of time out of the country and everything, but even someone as dense as me would’ve noticed something like a pregnancy. So what are you going to do? What’s next?”

  “Well,” Ana began, “Flint’s coming over in an hour and we’re going to do some research on the Internet‌—see if we can find out what children’s home Zander lives in.”

  “Top idea,” said Lol, “good work. And how is Flint? Is he looking after you properly?”

  “Oh yes. Totally. He took me out last night. . . .”

  “Oh‌—he took you out, did he? And I sincerely hope he behaved himself. . . .”

  Ana blushed, in spite of the five hundred miles and body of water that separated her from Lol. “Of course he behaved himself,” she murmured, “I really don’t think he sees me like that, you know. I don’t really think I’m his type, you know. . . .”

  Lol made a strange Marge Simpson-esque noise into the phone, and Ana could hear that she had her lips tightly pursed. “Just be careful, that’s all. You’ve got enough on your plate right now without having to worry about old slinky-knickers Flint trying to schmooze you into bed.”

  Ana grunted and blushed even more.

  A voice called out something in the background. “Hmm,” said Lol, noisily slurping down her espresso, “I’ve gotta go. My golden tonsils are required in the studio. Phone me again tomorrow, won’t you? And look after yourself. Mwah.” She blew a kiss down the line, and then she was gone, leaving Ana standing there, wondering, with a strange sense of shame and excitement, why exactly old slinky-knickers Flint hadn’t tried to schmooze her into bed and what exactly was wrong with her.

  Flint got to Gill’s at twelve. On the way there he bought a box of little Portuguese cakes from the place by the bridge up on Golborne Road. As he handed the white cardboard box to Ana at the door of the house, he felt like Tony Soprano.

  “Hi,” she said. She was wearing the same jeans and top she’d been wearing last night, and all weekend, come to think of it. Flint had never before met a woman who appeared to have so little interest in clothes. Her feet were bare and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. It looked nice. Off her face. Gave her a sort of ballerina look.

  “Your hair looks nice,” he said, dropping his car keys into his pocket and following her into the living room. “It suits you‌—up like that.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Gill not here?” he said, looking around the empty room.

  “No,” she said, “she’s at the gym.”

  “Yup,” he said, “that sounds like our Gill.”

  “Do you . . . do you want a cup of tea or something?” Ana said, fiddling with her earlobe.

  “Yeah. Great. We can have the little cake things, too.”

  She nodded distractedly and padded into the kitchen, clutching the box tentatively like it was a dirty diaper.

  Flint sat down. Something wasn’t right. With Ana. She seemed awkward. Well, she always seemed awkward, actually, that was nothing new. But she seemed extra awkward.

  She came out with a tray with a couple of mugs on it and the cakes arranged on a plate.

  “So‌—how are you getting along here with Gill. You happy?”

  She shrugged. “Haven’t really been here enough to form an opinion. But it seems all right. Gill’s . . . nice.”

  “Yeah.” Flint leaned forward and helped himself to a cake. “I like Gill, too. She’s as mad as a hatter, but I like her.”

  He bit into his cake and the room fell silent. He couldn’t think of a thing to say to her. “Are you all right?” he managed eventually.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I’m good. I’m great.”

  He looked across at her and felt a sudden wave of warmth and compassion for her. Poor girl. One minute she’d been living her funny little half life in Devon, thinking her sister hated her, and the next she’d been uprooted and transplanted to one of the biggest, noisiest cities in the world, was living with strangers and discovering that her sister’s entire life was a lie.

  He put down his cake and walked over to where she was sitting on a low cushion thing. He crouched down and put an arm around her shoulder. She flinched. He put another hand on her knee and squeezed it. She stiffened.

  “Are you missing home?” he asked.

  She jumped slightly and looked him straight in the eye. “God. No,” she said, “not even a tiny bit. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  He removed his hand from her knee and looked her in the eye. “Look,” he said, “I know this must all have been quite hard going for you. And I just want you to know that I’m here. If you need me. If you want to talk. Or cry. Or anything. OK?”

  She didn’t look him in the eye this time, just sort of shrugged and nodded. And then, before he had a chance to push it any further, the doorbell rang. Ana looked at him and then at the door.

  “Expecting anyone?” said Flint, getting to his feet and going to peer through the window.

  She shook her head. “Who is it?” she said.

  “I dunno,” said Flint, “some weird-looking bloke.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Kind of geeky. Skinny. And he’s wearing really weird clothes.”

  Ana got to her feet and walked toward the window. She peeled back the curtain and looked through the glass and suddenly jumped and flattened herself against the wall. “Oh my God,” she whispered, “it’s Hugh!”

  “Hugh who?” said Flint, peering out again.

  “You know‌—Hugh Hugh.”

  “Ah. Right. That Hugh. Your Hugh. Yoo-hoo, Hugh,” he tinkled campily, pretending to wave at him.

  “Don’t!” said Ana, slapping his hand away from the window. “And don’t answer the door,” she said. “Please. I don’t want to see him.”

  “I think it’s a bit late for that,” he said, grinning and waving at the man who was now staring at them through the window. He was short. That was the first thing Flint noticed. Not just shorter than Ana, but properly short. And his head was a strange shape‌—kind of like someone had tied a belt around the middle of it, really tightly, when he was a baby. And it was just a little too large for his tiny, sloping shoulders. His hair had a strange sort of kink to it, which he�
�d tried to tame by combing it down flat to within an inch of its life. And he had a very high domed forehead with freckles all over it.

  Also, as if God hadn’t given him enough to deal with on the physical front, he was horribly dressed. He was wearing a sort of windbreaker thing. In this weather. It was red and white. And tight black jeans. And chunky-looking lace-up shoes constructed from a kind of porous brown leathery stuff. He had a small knapsack on his back and, oddly enough, he was wearing an earring in his left lobe that didn’t go with the rest of him. Almost as if he were saying “Hey. I’m a cool dude‌—I just can’t be bothered to look like one, OK?”

  He was staring straight past Flint, and at Ana.

  “Oh God,” she muttered, crossing her arms and going to the front door. Flint sat himself back down on the sofa and waited.

  “Hugh,” he heard Ana saying breathlessly, “what on earth are you doing here?” And then Flint heard something that sounded like one of those pantomime dames talking‌—like a Monty Python woman. Flint put his hand over his mouth to stop himself laughing out loud.

  “Flint,” said Ana, walking back into the room, crimson-faced, “this is Hugh. Hugh. This is Flint. Flint was Bee’s best friend.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Hugh grinned at him with crooked, gray-colored teeth. Was he putting that voice on? Was it a joke? Flint didn’t know whether or not he was supposed to be laughing. He decided not to.

  “Flint, did you say your name was?” Hugh furrowed up his big, freckled brow and put a hand out toward him. He had peculiarly hairy hands and a very strong handshake and didn’t seem at all fazed by the fact that Flint was nearly a foot taller than him. There were two types of unattractive men in this world, Flint had noticed: those who were painfully aware of the fact and tried their hardest not to draw attention to it and those who walked around like George Clooney was their ugly younger brother or something. And this guy‌—well‌—he definitely fell into the second category. He had no idea he was ugly. He had all the confidence and swagger of a handsome Italian playboy. He thought he was fantastic. And good on him, thought Flint, smiling and giving his hand a good hard shake, good for him.

  “What are you doing here, Hugh?” said Ana, flopping onto the sofa.

  “Well, your mother asked me to come, actually.”

  Ana raised her eyebrows and tutted. “I should have guessed. Jesus.”

  “She’s worried about you, Ana. That’s all. She just asked me to pop in on you, see where you’re living. Find out what you’re doing. She’s just lost a daughter. I don’t think she particularly wants to lose another one just yet.”

  “She’s not losing me, for God’s sake. I’m trying to find out what happened to Bee.”

  “What do you mean? Bee’s dead. Isn’t that the end of the story?”

  “No,” she snapped, “no‌—that’s far from the end of the story. Look,” she said, sighing, “you must be knackered‌—d’you fancy a cup of tea or something?”

  He threw her an incongruously flirty, fluttery smile. “I’d love one, Bellsie. Thank you.”

  Ana shot Flint a look. He raised a quizzical eyebrow at her. Bellsie? She got to her feet. “Flint will fill you in on everything that’s been happening, won’t you, Flint?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Ana left the room and Flint ran through the bare bones of the story‌—the cottage, Zander, Ed‌—and Hugh maintained a high level of very intense eye contact with him throughout, rubbing his chin occasionally and saying “hmmmm,” as if he were Hercule bloody Poirot. He seemed to think that Flint and Ana had just been sitting around waiting for him to turn up and sort everything out.

  “Well,” he said, “the first thing you should do is find out about the documentary this Ed chap said he was producing.”

  “Yup,” said Flint patiently, “we were working on that one.”

  “You could probably find everything you need on the Net.”

  “Uh-huh, yeah. That’s why I’m here today.” He gestured toward Gill’s PC sitting in the corner.

  “Whoa,” said Hugh, getting to his feet, “look at that old dinosaur. Fantastic.”

  “Yeah,” continued Flint, suddenly and inexplicably feeling the need to impress this self-assured and very young man. “We were going to look up TV-scheduling sites, you know, see if there was some kind of archive service or . . .”

  Hugh was already shaking his head and taking a seat at the desk. “No no no,” he said dismissively, hitting buttons in an infuriatingly confident manner, “waste of time. Even if there were such a thing, you’d never be able to find it. You’re much better off running a search for this Ed chap’s company. Oh God,” he muttered, “she hasn’t got her modem switched on. Any idea where it is, Flint?” he said, wheeling his chair backward and looking under the desk.

  Flint didn’t even know what a modem was. “Er, no,” he said, “no idea. Ana!” he called.

  “What?” Ana emerged from the kitchen with a mug of tea.

  “Any idea where Gill keeps her modem?”

  “Her what?” she said, looking at Flint.

  He shrugged behind Hugh’s back.

  “A modem,” said Hugh in a pompously patient tone of voice, “it’s the hardware that connects your PC to the Internet. It’s like a box. It’s . . . aaaah . . .” He found something under the desk and reached underneath to fiddle with it, “Excellent. OK. We’re all ready to go.”

  Flint and Ana stood hovering above him, clutching their mugs of tea as Hugh bashed away at the keyboard. Flint stared at the top of Hugh’s huge head and tried to imagine Ana and Hugh writhing around in bed together. Ana’s beautiful tendrilly fingers running through the thatch of brittle brown straw that passed for Hugh’s hair. He imagined Hugh’s little falsetto voice cooing “Bellsie, Bellsie,” as he exploded inside of her and he suddenly and violently wanted to be sick. Jesus, he thought, surely Ana could do better than this.

  “Okeydokey,” said Hugh, “Ed Tewkesbury Productions‌—here we are.” Hugh hit a button on a side panel, and a list of productions came up. “Hmm,” sneered Hugh, “classy.”

  Ed’s company, it seemed, made a specialty of producing programs about drunken English people embarrassing the nation in various corners of the globe, and programs about people with really boring jobs being followed around all day by cameras, and programs about stag nights and hen nights and people with bizarre sexual preferences living in Berkhamsted.

  “That must be it,” said Ana, pointing excitedly at a section entitled High Cedars. High Cedars, it went on to say, “was first broadcast on BBC1 in the summer of 1997. This seminal documentary, filmed over twelve weeks at High Cedars Residential Home for Children in Ashford, Kent, kept the nation emotionally gripped for the entire season with daily viewing figures averaging 3.3 million and set the standard for every human-interest docu-soap to follow.”

  “Well,” said Hugh with a ring of self-satisfaction in his voice, “that’s that, then. You’ve got your children’s home. Let’s run a search for it, shall we?”

  He tapped the name of the home into a box and then clicked on a site on a list. A crested logo came up and a heading saying “High Cedars.”

  “There it is,” he said smugly, “it’s all yours.”

  The site gave a phone number.

  “So,” said Ana, turning to look at Flint.

  He shrugged and looked over at the phone.

  “What am I going to say?”

  Flint puffed. “Ask to speak to Zander, I guess.”

  Ana made a cute little face at him, turning her mouth downward and widening her eyes nervously.

  “I don’t mind doing it,” he said.

  “No,” she said, and he saw her take a deep breath, “no. I’ll do it. OK. And what if he’s not there? I mean, what if I can’t talk to him? What shall I say?”

  Flint saw Hugh open his mouth to say something and quickly cut in. “Make an appointment,” he said, “or something.” He set his jaw defiantly and out of the corner of his eye saw Hugh raisin
g an eyebrow.

  “OK,” said Ana, “OK.” She walked over to the phone, and the room became completely silent as the two men watched her dialing the number. Flint held his breath. This could be it. Ana might be about to talk to Zander.

  “Oh,” she began, “hi. I wondered if I could talk to Zander Roper. Please.” She turned and hit Flint with a big grin that instantly warmed his heart.

  “Um‌—yes, that’s the one. Yes. Who’s calling?” She turned and made a panicked face at Flint. “Oh it’s, er”‌—she gestured madly at Flint for him to come up with an identity for her‌—“it’s er . . .”

  “Aunt,” he mouthed at her.

  “Aunt,” she said, “I’m Zander’s aunt. Yes. Mrs. Wills. That’s right. I’m Mrs. Wills.” She threw an oh-my-God-I’m-freewheeling-like-a-motherfucker-somebody-please-help-me face at Flint and he smiled at her and gave her the thumbs-up. “Oh,” he heard her say, “right. I see. OK. And why is that, exactly? I see. I understand. No. No. That’s fine. OK. And thank you so much for your help. Yeah. Bye.”

  “What?” said Flint, unable to control his curiosity. “What did she say?”

  Ana flopped down on the sofa and fanned her blazing cheeks. “He’s not taking phone calls from Mrs. Wills.”

  “What?”

  Ana shrugged. “I dunno. That’s all she said. Zander has requested that phone calls from Mrs. Wills not be put through to him.”

  “So he doesn’t know that she’s . . . dead. Jeez.” Flint ran his fingers through his hair and exhaled heavily.

  “D’you think I should have told the receptionist? About Bee?”

  “No.” Flint shook his head. “No. If we’re going to talk to Zander, we need to take him as we find him. You know. And I think news like that would be best coming from you rather than a nurse.”

  “So? Now what?” said Ana.

  “Well,” began Hugh, “we should probably‌—”

  Flint cut in. “Did she say anything about visitors?”

  Ana shook her head.

  “I think we should pay a little visit. What d’you think?”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow‌—I’m not working during the day. Is that OK with you?”